Content and news by Rob Williams

Most good gamers who use a mousepad, usually tend to swear by them. A good mousepad needs to be able to provide an amazing glide, for the best precision. Steelpad has sent us their 4D mousepad to review, which is two sided for different mice. Check it out in our review.

AUSTIN, Texas, May 5, 2005—NCsoft® Corporation (KSE: 036570.KS), the world’s leading developer and publisher of online computer games and Cryptic Studios™ announce the release of City of Heroes® Issue 4: Colosseum, the fourth expansion of the award-winning massively multiplayer online game. The release of Issue 4, free to all current subscribers via Comment (0) -->

Greetings from the Central Wastelands! Our beta started last week and we are stoked by the level of participation and reactions from our early testing community. This week we’ve sent out another batch of emails to applicants and will be doing so for months to come. It’s still not to late to Comment (0) -->

SAN DIEGO, May 4 /PRNewswire/ — Sony Online Entertainment Inc. (SOE), a worldwide leader in massively multiplayer online (MMO) gaming, today announced EverQuest®II Desert of Flames(TM) and EverQuest®II The Splitpaw Saga(TM), the first expansion pack and second adventure pack, respectively, for the critically acclaimed MMO EverQuest II. Scheduled for launch September 12th Comment (0) -->

“It looks like San Andreas, but there’s something funny about it. Electricity pylons are casting thick tramline shadows across CJ’s back. The sun-baked concrete looks dirtier and rougher. The broken fences outside the run-down houses look more rotten, more ghetto. And what’s that? Are those the towering skyscrapers of downtown Los Santos…..

“The last year has been interesting in computer graphics. NVIDIA released the NV4X architecture in April of last year. The GEFORCE 6xxx series was the first chipset to support Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Pixel and Vertex Shader 3.0. ATI released their R4xx architecture last year as well, supporting Pixel Shader 2.0b. One thing that the last year has also shown is that availability is king. If ATI or NVIDIA had produced more graphics chips, they would have sold them.”

The site doesn’t show up correctly in FireFox for me, but it’s a great review. Check it out at Gamepyre.

“It’s been a long, long time since we last saw a high-end All-In-Wonder card from ATI. In fact it’s been well over a year and a half since we’ve seen a high-end 3D card saddled with the All-In-Wonder moniker. There have been new releases in the All-In-Wonder line of course, but if you were looking for that card that really puts the “All” in All-In-Wonder, the best you could get was the All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro.”

Check out the full review of this amazing card at Rage 3D.

“I’m looking at a level from the next Unreal Tournament game, and it’s not pretty. In a darkened conference room at Epic Games’ North Carolina offices, lead designer Steve Polge, lead level designer Jim Brown, and producer Jeff Morris are walking me through a level that appears to be made of the equivalent of digital cement blocks — and gently explaining to me why this is a good thing.”

This is a great article, especially if you love UT. I haven’t seen any screens until now, and they look amazing. Check it out at 1UP.

Model search begins for flesh and blood look-alike for EverQuest II poster girl Antonia; winner will be named in Vegas pageant. EverQuest II Sony Online Entertainment, purveyors of online games such as PlanetSide and Star Wars Galaxies, today announced that it will be holding a contest to find a real-life version of…..

Prima has released four new eBooks for Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike (XBox), Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Day of Defeat.

All the game guides are $9.99US, except for the Half-Life 2 guide which is $12.99. By now though, you would think that the majority of people who have the game, beat it long ago. Check out the posting on the Steam Powered site.

“Apple Computer on Tuesday released 20 patches for its OS X operating system designed to fix flaws that could catch users off-guard.

The vulnerabilities apply to Mac OS X v10.3.9 and Mac OS X Server 10.3.9, according to Apple’s advisory. The announcement comes roughly a month after Apple issued nearly a dozen patches for its Mac OS.”

All these security risks are already taken care of in Tiger, so those users need not worry. Check out the full article here.

“In recent months, the researchers at security software company Websense detected a rise in schemes involving malicious programs known as keyloggers, according to the March phishing trends report released Wednesday by the Anti-Phishing Working Group.”

It’s no doubt that Keyloggers are becoming more and more popular. Read the full article at News.com.

“A new report confirms what a lot of people already suspected: the BlackBerry is the number one PDA. Gartner released a report on 1Q2005 PDA sales showing that the push e-mail device has recently jumped into the marketshare lead for handhelds. Specifically, BlackBerry holds a marketshare of 20.8%, up from 14.8% a year ago.”

Wow, 1/5th of the market is definitely something to be proud about. Read the full report here.

“Fresh from our review and presentation of the 3DXtreme Editor’s Choice Award, Aerocool is providing us another Turbine 550 Watt Power Supply (value $105 USD) to give away to one lucky winner.

“Fresh from our review and presentation of the 3DXtreme Editor’s The contest rules are as usual, one posted reply to this thread is allowed per day, multiple posts in one day will disqualify. Make sure you have 5 valid forum posts elsewhere in the 3DXtreme.net Forums. Contest open to residents of USA and Canada.

You can read the review here and check out the contest here.

“Heat is always a big issue these days in modern computers. Being able to obtain the temperatures of your components can help prevent costly heat damage to your expensive new components. Today we have a thermometer device from Jetart called ThermoEye.”

Very unique device, that’s for sure! Check it out at Phoronix.

“ABOUT ONE YEAR AGO, Intel went public with the first news of its near-religious conversion to the gospel of multicore processors. Prior to that fateful day, Intel had been talking optimistically about hitting 4GHz clock speeds by the end of 2004 and eventually reaching 10GHz with the Pentium 4 “Netburst” architecture. Such achievements were, in fact, business as usual at the world’s largest chipmaker before news of its conversion. But everything changed last May when the company ripped up its roadmaps and started over again, deemphasizing clock speed as a measure of performance and reworking its CPU development efforts top to bottom to favor multiple processor cores per chip.”

This is a great in-depth view of the new processor. Check it out at Tech Report.

“For us this is a vital item of software we use all the time to keep our computers running as efficiently as possible especially if you are using Windows XP software. We use System Mechanic once a week as we are using our computers all the time but you will only need to do it once a month probably. It all depends on what you do with your computer and how much you use it.”

They have reviewed an older version, a much older version but the heart of it is still the same. I have personally used this program in the past and loved it. Check it out at A1 Electronics.

“The aluminum trim isn’t purely aesthetic. It helps prevent scratches and the eventual deterioration of the mouse pad’s border, something that’s all too common these days. You’ll also find 4 rubber feet on each corner of the eXactMat to prevent slipping. Because of the pad’s shape, they don’t interfere with tracking and don’t look out of place either. Once you see it, you’ll come to the same conclusion I did: that this is a very well thought-out product.”

This is a great looking mouse pad, and dual sided at that! Read all about it at MikhailTech.

“Budget cases have come along ways in the last few years. A budget case used to be a white box that cut you to shreds. Now, budget cases have smooth rolled edges, windows, LED fans and some other kind of effect, like a temperature monitor. Crazy PC has a new budget case worth checking out, the Ninja.”

Can’t complain about the price when the case looks this good. Check the full review at A True Review.

“The TC6200Q is right in between the performance of the 915G and the PCX5750. It does beat the PCX5750 in our Splinter Cell tests, but in everything else it has a good margin in both directions. It is playable at 800*600 in both UT2004 and Half Life 2, but not really playable at any of the other resolutions/tests. With the actual game tests, this card can play the games we had at 1024*768 with medium to high quality settings.”

Definitely not a high end card by any means, but is it for you? Check out the full review at Viper Lair.