output

I tested it on an animation I made in flash years ago and it works fine. You can download my html file below.

Download Here

http://swiffy.googlelabs.com/

I was intending on giving FF XIII a miss but decided to pick it up on the off chance. I had already been put off after reading reviews on its linearity and lack of towns/outposts.

The linearity of this game would really bug me if the story was not compelling enough to make you want to constantly progress. I say this because so far the game usually consists of walking down path after path, with no real scenery in most cases and nothing to explore. The items you can find now are barely hidden so anyone can find them, and all appear as a giant bouncy sphere (they even emit an obvious noise).

It is obvious they were going for a bigger audience with this game at the expense of hardcore fans. Nearly everything has been dumbed down. There are save points ever 10 metres and you can pretty much get through the first 4 hours of the game by bashing X every time you get into a fight.  Shops are now attached to save points, of which are somewhat redundant because I tend to find every item before its in the shops stock.

All this simplicity is not entirely negative though because the battle overhaul is somewhat welcome, if only a one off instance. You now only control one character with AI controlling the others. This seems like a stupid decision at first but when you realise how streamlined and fast paced it makes the battles, its hard to dislike it. You give each party member a class which alters their skills and tactics. This makes preparation outside of battles just as important as the decisions you make during them. You can switch between classes you have defined whilst in a fight and the characters immediately adopt them.

The best thing about battles now however is that they are no longer random. You can see the enemies on the screen and run around and past them if you want to. This takes that tediousness out of trying to get somewhere and being struck by pointless battles out of the equation, and is a very welcome addition.

Well that is pretty much all I have to say about it at the moment. I have got the stage where battles are starting to get challenging and the story has remained strong. Despite its simplicity I am still enjoying the game, its just a good job the graphics and story are good enough to see you through the more dull game play moments.

I guess as it stands at the moment I would compare this to the Morrowind/Oblivion scenario, where the latter game has been dumbed down but still remains enjoyable.

This started when I found out you could get the eye toy working as a web camera on windows by downloading some drivers. It was pretty straight forward, just had to find what drivers went with your camera model and off you go.

With Windows 7 now it seems to be even easier as just about every piece of hardware I have connected has installed itself with no issues.

I got the Beatles Rock Band set last weekend, and thought the mic might be good for talking to people on Team Fortress 2 etc on PC. I plugged it in and it installed itself, and worked pretty well.

Even better at the weekend I got a bluetooth headset for my PS3. After playing Uncharted 2 for an evening with my friend I thought this is great (much better than the usual type of headsets) so I thought about setting it up on my old PC.

Luckily enough for one reason or another a few years ago I had brought a blue tooth receiver for my PC.

I plugged that into my PC and Windows 7 installed it right away (Was a relief because I remember having problems with it on XP). I then took my blue tooth headset set it to broadcast, and the PC picked it up and connected to it right away. After that without having to set anything up I fired up Team Fortress 2 and it was working great.

So it is always worth trying your console hardware first before going out and buying the same thing for your PC. As both my PC headsets are no longer working this saved me a bit of money and got me a more comfortable PC headset all in one.

Another thing I use on my PC is my 360 Street Fighter Arcade Stick, which is great for arcade games.

These points here are observations made from my daily use of my computer and how things have changed between systems.

First things first, booting is a bit faster, not massively as some may say but faster none the less (this could be due to windows applying updates as it starts up till things settle down a bit) . The thing that is quite a bit faster is shutting down, even when its applying updates its still pretty fast. The new taskbar is very nice, I like the way it lays out the windows for each program just above the icon, allowing you a preview of each windows as you hover over. The other neat thing you can do here is right click any running program on the taskbar and pin as a shortcut.

Im usually not one of shortcut gimmicks etc but I really like the new drag to the edge of the screen features. I now naturally find my self dragging windows to the top of the screen to full screen them, and even better dragging one to each side to compare two windows. The side by side  feature is really useful as its quick and really helps when your choosing files to upload somewhere or just looking at two different articles at once.

One thing that was amazingly simple to do is set up printer sharing. On vista I had to dig out the driver CD for the printer when setting it up across the network but windows 7 installed it on its own and in seconds too.

So how are things on the games front? Well for all the slack vista got it really wasnt to bad in the end, and I do not think there is much difference in terms of performance between vista SP2 and windows 7. There were a few games that vista did not get on too well with, one being Company of Heroes and these issues seem to have cleared up now. Of course if theres still problems windows 7 has theXP mode if your using professional or above. I do not know if these issues were to do with vista or direct x 10, but we will have to wait a few months to find out what direct x 11 will bring us.

Well thats all for now, I cant really think of any other features to comment on for the moment, I might try out some old games on XP mode at some point and see how that goes.

You can make your own here.

I should really mention I brought a PS3 last month, an 80GB fat as they are now called. Meh well at least I got yellow dog you thin power saving bastards!