Need for Speed
Most Wanted
NFS is the best in racing games and it's been out a while now. The underground versions were seriously cool but it lacked one important thing….cops. Now they are back with a lot of vengeance.
Great storyline
The game's career mode starts out with a hilarious bang. You take on the role of a nameless, faceless new racer attempting to hit the scene in the city of Rockport. An underground ranking known as the Blacklist governs who can race who, and when. You almost immediately run into a punk named Razor who is at the bottom of the list. As is typical human nature he sabotages your ride and has won it from you in a race. Meanwhile, you're carted off to jail. Left with nothing but some mysterious help from a hot stranger named Mia, your task is to get back in the race game to work your way to the top of the Blacklist, which is now topped by Razor, who's using your old car to wipe out the competition. Sad cause it could have been you.
Working your way up the Blacklist is a multistep progress. Before you can challenge the next Blacklist racer, you have to satisfy a list of requirements. You'll have to win a set number of race events. And you'll have to reach a set number of pursuit milestones and earn enough bounty by riling up the police. The cops hate street racers and will give chase when they see you rolling around the open city. You can also just jump right into a pursuit from a menu, too.
The best part is to run
Running from the cops is the best action the game has to offer. Chases usually start with just one car on your tail. But as you resist, you might find 20 cars giving chase, in addition to a chopper flying overhead. Now is that cool or what?
You have something called a heat level and losing the cops gets tougher as your heat level rises. Level one heat results in the appearance of just your standard squad cars. But by the 
time you get up to level five, you'll be dealing with roadblocks, spike strips, helicopters, and federal-driven Corvettes. Heck, everyone would want to be cops if they really cgave them Corvettes.
You get busted by stopping your car or having it stopped for you by spike strips or getting completely boxed in by cops. To actually get away, you'll need to get out of visual range...and stay there. You'll have to lie low and wait for that meter to fill up to end the chase. This is probably the tensest part of the entire chase, since you never know when two cops might blow around the corner and spot you, starting the whole process over again. Getting busted too many times can result in your car getting impounded, though you can avoid that by cheating. Simply reset the system whenever you get caught.
Too many races at times
There's also a lot of racing in Most Wanted's career mode--almost too much, in fact. The races are solid but not spectacular. The artificial intelligence doesn't really help things along, because most of the game is rubber-banded like crazy. Later on in the game, you get a voicemail message informing you that things are going to get tougher. At this point, the 
computer drivers magically start taking every single shortcut, and the rubber banding only seems to work against you. As a result, catching up after a mistake is much tougher. Fortunately, the racing action itself is entertaining enough to keep you going, and of course, you'll be dying to find out what happens next in the story
The cars
The game has more than 30 licensed cars that you'll be able to purchase or win from other racers. We started out with a pretty weak Chevy Cobalt, but eventually we picked up a much faster Supra, a new Covette C6, and so on. You can also find the Ford GT, a Ford Mustang GT, and other cars from BMW, Mitsubishi, Porsche, Lamborghini, Lotus, and more. You'll buy your first car, but as you move through the Blacklist, you'll get a shot at the pink slip of the other racer, letting you ease right into the driver's seat of a new, tuned vehicle.
Looks too hot to play
Graphically, the game looks great, overall. But when you break it down, some parts of it look better than others. For the most part, the game does the large city environment quite 
well. The different parts of the city give a nice sense of variety, and the car models look sharp, especially when you start painting them with crazy triple-colored paint. The game delivers a pretty good sense of speed and seems to scale reasonably well to fit different PCs.
It can go up to Xbox 360 level but then the computer has to be a real hot machine to handle the frame rate. Also the game doesn't have car damage at all except the rear window cracking up after a few good wrecks.
Verdict
While the actual racing in Need for Speed Most Wanted is probably the weak link in the chain, it's still solid enough to keep you interested as you move from racer to racer, working your way up the Blacklist as you go. But the real stars of the show are the police, who give the series a much-needed shot in the arm. You'll probably find yourself wishing that the game consisted solely of police chases.
Site Unseen
By, Niloy
PC applications that every gamer should have
doiop.com/mustPlay
Joystiq.com did an excellent feature all about software and resources that will help you improve your PC gaming experience. Check the heat it out. Although a lot of the stuff in the list are for multiplayer gaming only, there are also a couple of software that will surely be very useful for normal PC gaming.
FRAPS
fraps.com
From the list mentioned above, I give you FRAPS! There are three main things that this versatile application can do. As the guys over Joystiq.com puts it: “it can display the framerate of pretty much every DirectX and OpenGL game out there. It also features an excellent screen capture feature that's light years ahead of Window's awful “print screen” function. It'll automatically create a jpeg on your desktop - that's named and time-stamped. Finally, its best feature: real-time video capture! FRAPS is the application to use if you have machinima (movies or comics created using gameplay video or screenshots) aspirations.”
Powers of Ten
doiop.com/powers10
The “Powers of Ten” explores the relative size of things from the microscopic to the cosmic. The 1977 film travels from an aerial view of a man in a Chicago park to the outer limits of the universe directly above him and back down into the microscopic world contained in the man's hand. Originally made for the Chicago Museum of science and industry. Awesome.
Amazing pictures of coffee
doiop.com/latteArt
Who knew coffee could be used for art. Amazing stuff.
Grand Theft Lego
doiop.com/LegoGTA
The most ingenious use of stop motion animation ever. Check out what happens when Grand Theft Auto meets LEGO. Awesome video.
2005 SCUBA Photo Contest Winners
doiop.com/scubaPhotos
Some very cool photos...Macros, Wide-angles, Wrecks, and a bunch more. I especially like the huge! Stingray (2nd place wide-angle), the eel (or whatever it is) with a fish in its mouth, and the 3rd place wide-angle shot. There sure are some bizarre creatures underwater!
The worst movies of the year
doiop.com/shittyMovies
Rottentomatoes.com put together a list of the worst movies that came out this year. Doom is on the list, you know.
Meteor Impact Craters
Http://doiop.com/EarthCraters
Some of these craters in the Earth are massive, and many people don't even realize they're there.
Huge collection of old propaganda
doiop.com/OldPropoganda
This website has over 200 propaganda posters from the 20th century. Remember, "If you are giving it up, you are going steady with Hitler!"
Silent-Bob
silent-bob.de/en/
This free program named Silent-Bob records all incoming audio through the soundcard so that if you suddenly decide you want to record something; Silent-Bob is two steps ahead of you. It has already started the recording 2 minutes earlier. Neat. But it could slow down your PC a bit win when it is running.
List of free file hosts
doiop.com/freehost
Need some please place to post host some of your clients files? Check out these free file hosts. Big list, maybe 70 entries with details like max filesize, registration, bandwidth limits, space limits, file restrictions etc.
EvilLyrics
evillabs.sk/evillyrics
EvilLyrics is a free lyrics fetching program designed for use with most popular music players (iTunes, Winamp, WMP, etc.). In addition to displaying lyrics of the song currently playing (which it handles very well), the program also has a cool karaoke mode that highlights lyrics line-by-line. And if karaoke isn't available for your song, it's easy to create your own karaoke timings. The karaoke mode works well, and in all it's a nice addition to your digital music experience. It's not the slickest interface available, but it does the job very well. 600 KB, and needs to go online to search for the lyrics.
All the links are available at niloywrites.blogspot.com so that you can easily visit the sites just by clicking the links. You can also log on to my site BDcomics.blogspot.com if you're into downloading comics, or check out my (rather good) photography at flickr.com/photos/niloy/.
Sci Zone
By The Girl Next Door
Under the Sea
It's been a tough week of dodging people. Teachers breathing down my neck for presentations, Mom yelling at me to clean my room up, and Ronny sending his peeing dog to sniff me out and pee on me if I don't submit work. Man, I feel like a minnow tossed in the river at the mercy of bigger fish. Come to think of it, life underwater isn't quite different from what we face everyday.
A single female oyster produces more than 150 million eggs. The fertilized eggs start to swim, and keep moving for 21 days…maybe they keep getting nagged to clean up their rooms too.
Our RS editor (DBB) is one other person that's really hard to elude. No matter where I am, 
she has this uncanny ability to track me down…not unlike an electric ray. Did you know that these babies (the electric rays, silly, not DBB!) can detect each other's electrical auras? Male rays use it to find females. Now, if only our law-enforcers had that ability, they'd probably catch the suicide bombers faster.
Which reminds me, the Deep-sea Angler is commonly called the Black Devil because of its fearsome appearance. So that's why the RAB men are always dressed in black!
Most living corals show their true colours only at night, when they are less likely to attract predatory fishes. But don't let that fool you into thinking they're all timid, helpless creatures.
The simplest looking brain coral extends hundreds of stinging tentacles at night to catch their prey. So beware of innocent looking bearded mullahs…get too close, and you might have a blast.
Right, well those are all the fun fish facts I've got to share with you. I better make good my escape before yet another person tracks me down with something else to do.
Korean doctors published a report recently saying online games can kill gamers and why they can. This comes after yet another Korean gamer died for playing too long: this one played for ten days straight and collapsed. And unlike most of the crap that's thrown at videogames, this one has some actual facts and reasons backing it.
According to the report, the main cause of death amongst people playing computer games is pulmonary thrombo-embolism. Dr Song Hyeong-gon of the Samsung Seoul hospital said that the risk is higher for gamers due to the nature of their preferred activity. "People who 
haven't slept for a long time usually don't realise how exhausted or stressed they are," he said. "Because they are stressed by the obsession with winning the game, they consume a considerable amount of energy. In such a physically exhausted condition, exposure to bright colours or stimulating images on the screen is likely to irritate the cerebral cortex and can cause sudden death."
Apparently the Korean gamers are also at high risk because many of them play in Internet cafés, which are often dark, badly ventilated and full of cigarette smoke. And because some spend long periods of time sitting at their PC without moving, they're also at risk of deep vein thrombosis.
Course, it wasn't like this back in the good old days: "The games we played in the 1980s were winnable once you found out the programmed rules of the game, but when playing network games you have to compete with millions of players all around the world," he said. "You may be one of the top ranking players one moment but drop way down the next second. Because of the massive competition, people can't stop playing."
Which could have fatal consequences, Dr Song said. "Parents should pay attention to how much time their children spend playing games because young children and teenagers are more vulnerable and may grow into adults lacking social skills - or in the worst case, lose their lives."
This is not the only “game-induced” death, however. Several gamers died in the recent months, including a 12-year-old who died after a 49-hour long session. All of them seem to have no idea whatsoever of Planet Common-sense and have played for incredibly long times until they collapsed.
Obviously... just like anything really. Its not online gaming that kills you... it's the stress and exhaustion it can cause. Basically if you sit and play some game for 3 days flat with no sleep obviously you are probably going to die... but that's not because of the game suddenly pulls out a gun and shoots you in the head.
There are some online games that actually almost force a certain grind on people if they want to reach the top; for example, the best armour and rewards. In World of Warcraft players face a 20% decay each week which stops people from sitting at the top ranks. Because of this, each level you grind up to, you need to overcome that decay each week before you can actually progress. Add to that the fact you're competing against people who will play more if you play more, and it's an exceedingly tough grind. It's a once you pop you can't stop syndrome.
One gamer described it this way: you've found a chest of gold and the only place to spend it is at the top, so you begin to climb. As you get higher, it becomes steeper and thus harder to hold onto the laden chest. You've come so far though, that if you let yourself slip, you'll only have the whole mountain to climb again, so you have to keep dragging the chest up.
It's a sketchy comparison, but it's what it's like. Without something to break up your playtime in a game like World of Warcraft, it's easy to spend all day and every day in game. When you create a habit like this, it's hard to break. If you can't police yourself, or have people who to police you, you will get sucked in.
So, whilst this doctor is scare mongering to an extent, he's not terribly far from the truth. The blame however, shouldn't be on the game. It is set up to last for a while, if people rush and try to finish the content, they will spend hour and hours trying to win and be the best. I guess this is a flaw in the human nature, perhaps one that's thrived upon by the developers, but it's not really exclusive to any game.
