Left 4 Dead was Valve's big shooter title last fall. It's a cooperative 4-player shooter with a survival/horror theme. It introduced procedural monster and item spawning through an AI called the "Director", and also added true multi-threading support to the ever evolving Source engine. The gameplay is fun and intense, though at release time, there wasn't much content. I pre-ordered Left 4 Dead on Steam for $45 and burned out on it in about a week. However, Valve is now back with 2 new versus campaigns and a new game mode with 16 maps in this free downloadable content pack. The new mode pits your team against an infinite stream of monsters, with the goal of surviving for as long as possible. It's probably the most intense mode yet.

Sins of a Solar Empire is 2008's award winning 4xRTS title from Ironclad Games, with multiple game of the year awards in an assortment of categories. I bought it late last semester and started playing it online with a few friends. We were hooked. Sins of a Solar Empire blends traditional turn-based scale and complexity with real-time strategy gameplay. The game wraps all of this in a very presentable package with excellent graphics, sound, and interface design. It's easy to pick up and keeps everyone entertained for hours at a time. I also pre-ordered the expansion titled Entrenchment, which entered me into the beta. Entrenchment is available now only through Stardock's Impulse distribution network. Check the video below for an in-depth review.

It's well known that software RAID solutions are noticeably slower than hardware ones. Still, when I built my PC last year, I chose to use the onboard G-RAID anyway assuming that at least it was better than nothing. I wasn't expecting the performance to be so horrendous.

Most gamers don't think of their mouse pad as a key ingredient for success. Hardcore gamers know better, though. The Destructor is a firm pad with a hard, Building a better mousepad: The Destructor, Razer's latest model of mousepad.low-friction coating on the top and a soft rubber coating on the bottom. It is my third gaming mousepad, replacing my previous Razer eXactMat. This one even comes with its own carrying sleeve, which helps it give off that 'high-end' feel.

I asserted a year ago that I would return to writing about my iPod Touch (1G) to give my extended impressions of the device after more usage. The new Touch is already out, but the differences between it and mine are purely in hardware and are moot in this article. Over the past year, Apple opened their App Store, gave Touch owners the suite of apps that was initially missing and added new features and fixes to the Touch. All of that became accessible through a $10 update, which holds much more value than the $20 previously asked for just the app suite. I'm now running software v.2.1. Mail works beautifully, and the Chinese handwriting recognition keyboard is very well-implemented. What still bugs me though, is the

Over the summer, I had a chance to try the Badaboom Media Converter beta. Badaboom leads a new generation of video encoders that exploit a computer's 3-D graphics chip to speed up performance (in this case, approximately tenfold). It accomplishes this through use of nVidia's CUDA API, which allows particular types of routines to run on the graphics processing unit (GPU) instead of the central processing unit (CPU). Since GPU architectures are massively parallel, and so are video encoding algorithms, it makes perfect sense to do this.

Just yesterday, the public beta of Google's first web browser made it online . I've been using it as my default browser for a day now, and I love it. The download is less than 500KB. This browser is very lightweight, fast and efficient, but packs many new features (all detailed in the online comic). Chrome's interface is very clean and minimalistic, yielding a very high amount of screen real-estate to the actual page it's displaying. Google's new Chrome browser.There are no frames in the window, so pages actually extend side-to-side all the way to the last pixel. Tabs, which are now analogous to windows, are isolated from each other in process and memory.

This is a documentary of a nightmare come true. Back in mid-February, I decided to order the hardware needed to build my new desktop computer. Newegg shipped them to me very promptly, being a reputable e-tailer and all. You can imagine the excitement when I received the last package in the mail. The hours immediately following were spent putting all the pieces together. Then, the time finally came to push the power button. However, the situation suddenly became problematic and complicated. Something in my desktop was DOA. The hard part is, of course, figuring out what that something is.

You might have heard that Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista to all testers. I, hoping for an improved experience, went ahead and downloaded it.

What’s inside the Orange Box? The anticipated next episode of Half-Life 2 that falls short? Valve’s shiny little gem that won over our hearts? The decade-in-the-making highly worthy sequel to one of the greatest multiplayer games of all time? Yes. In addition to Half-Life 2 and Episode 1, just in case you missed out, you get Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2, as respectively mentioned. It has been a full month since the release of The Orange Box. Has it been worth it?