Direct2Drive $5 Sale

Better late than never. It’s Direct2Drive’s 5th year anniversary. And to commemorate the occassion, they are selling some of their titles for $5 for 5 weeks. Every week, they’re lining up a different set of games to sell for $5. It started last week featuring lineups of Ubisoft games and strategy games. This week, it’s Action/FPS week and the likes of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Bioshock, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. are up for $5. On the following weeks D2D is lining up MMOs and RPGs, indie games, and war games on the last week. If you’re interested in buying, visit the website and shell out some of those spare moolah you have.

Game Booster

Having a 5-year old PC is a real pain in the neck specially when I’m playing online games. For single-player games, the slightly choppy gameplay is still forgivable but when it comes to fragging someone in an online game, things get really frustrating when the game slows down every once in a while. I asked a few of my friends for PC tweaking advice and one of them recommended to me a software called Game Booster.

Game Booster

Game Booster supposedly optimizes the PC for gaming by temporarily shutting down background processes not needed for playing games. It also cleans RAM, and intensifies processor performance – whatever that means and how Game Booster does it, I don’t really know. My friend who recommended it has been using it for a while on his old rig and claims to have gotten a 20-30% performance boost out of his machine. I guess there’s no harm in trying so I decided to give it a go. After the first playthrough, I already saw results. The already (rare) smooth parts of the game, as far as I can remember, became smoother and the occasional slow-down wasn’t as frequent as before (but they’re still there nonetheless).

Overall, I think it helped my current dilemma a bit – though it didn’t really solve my PC’s real problem. Like I said, the slow-downs were still there so I’m thinking the slow-downs are already hardware-related. I wouldn’t really expect anything much from a 5-year old PC anyway. But anyway, yeah, the Game Booster did help so if you guys are looking to “extend” your aging PC’s gaming life expectancy, you might want to try this software. Head on to the download area, it’s just a 1mb file.

Resident Evil 5 Benchmark Tool Now Available

First came street fighter 4 for the PC. Now here comes Resident Evil 5, soon to be released on the PC. But before you set your budget on buying the game, will it work on your hardware? Do you need to upgrade your videocard? Add memory or even get a new PC to make it work?

Fear not as Capcom and Nvidia recently released a benchmarking program for Resident Evil 5. Just like what they did with Street Fighter 4, you can now test yor PC if the game will work fine while at the same time, adjust your settings to ensure a satisfying experience on the PC.

You can download the benchmark tool here.

Be warned however that the file is around 500mb.

FFXIII Demo Out Now

Today, the world ( Japan specifically ) will officially see the first playable demo of one of the most anticipated title in this gen’s console. But someone generously video taped an early leaked copy of the game. It’s still actually in debug mode (as windows menu sometimes pops out of the screen) so I assume that this is still a beta build and not something that should be compared to the final build. 

First Impression. Contrary to everyone’s expectation, I really love how they went back to the roots and incorporated the world to battle transition. I just hope they do the same to the world map because IMO that’s a quarter of the fun in an RPG. Art wise, I’m disappointed with the environment. Textures are not that clean and there is no normal map even when it’s so near the camera already. Contrary to my first statement, the character art were impressive. The previous trailer’s in game shots were nowhere near as impressive as the demo’s. New shaders were incorporated to the demo. Battle system is very old school. Menu based battle similar to Grandia but instead of just one action, they incorporated a Xenogears/Xenosaga battle system. I’m definitely buying this game.

Crysis Wars Limited Free Multiplayer Experience

About late last week, Crytek announced that they would be offering another chance for everybody to download and experience the full version of the multiplayer shooter Crysis Wars online for a week. As of this moment, their  MyCrysis web site has already revealed details on the said trial period. It will begin on Thursday, April 9 and end on Friday, April 17.

Crysis Wars

For some of you who have already downloaded the full game and have kept you CD Keys from the previous free trials will prompt you for your keys reactivated for the new event. To those newcomers, you can receive a CD Key by becoming a member of MyCrysis.net.. The day the free trial starts, MyCrysis.net members should be able to get their CD Key to play the game online.

You can go ahead and download the full game and the most recent 1.4 patch to play the shooter in LAN mode for free.

Register on MyCrysis by clicking here.
Download the game by clicking here. It’s a hefty 2 Gig in file size.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. PC Demo Now Available

Want to sample the latest game offering of Tom Clancy for the PC? Well, you are in luck. A few days ago, H.A.W.X. (High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron) is an action flight simulation that takes place in between previous Tom Clancy games released (which is Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 and Endwar) Yes, These three games are somewhat linked to each other in the Clancy universe.

The demo packs in at a whopping 1.24 gigabytes. It features a tutorial and some levels of the game. H.A.W.X. for the PS3 and XBOX360 is now available while the PC version will hit stores on March 10.

H.A.W.X.

System requirements for the retail version of the game are as follows:

Minimum Configuration :

• CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz/ AMD Athlon XP 2000+ or higher
• Operating System: Windows XP (with Service Pack 3) or Windows Vista (with Service Pack 1)
• RAM: 1 GB Windows XP / 2 GB Windows Vista
• DVD-ROM: DVD-ROM speed 4x, dual-layer drive
• Drive Space: 1.5 GB
• Graphics Card: 128 MB DirectX compliant, Shader 2.0 enabled video card
• Sound Card: DirectX 9.0 compliant sound card
• DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0 or 10.0 libraries (included on disc)

Recommended & Preferred Configuration:

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 6320 / AMD Athlon X2 4000+ or higher
• Operating System: Windows XP (with Service Pack 3) or Windows Vista (with Service Pack 1)
• RAM: 2 GB
• DVD-ROM: DVD-ROM speed 4x, dual-layer drive
• Drive Space: 1.5 GB
• Graphics Card: 256 MB DirectX 10.0 compliant video card or DirectX 9.0 compliant card with Shader Model 3.0 or higher (see supported list)
• Sound Card: DirectX 9.0 compliant sound card
• DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0 or 10.0 libraries (included on disc)
• Peripherals: Xbox 360 Controller for Windows

You can download the demo here.