Cryostasis, Sleep of reason is an upcoming First Person Shooter (FPS game) coming from Russian 1C Company. The most unusual thing here comes certainly from the fact that the game is set aorund the North Pole (it seems that Global Warming is opening new navigation routes and new opportunities for a lot of things – including new games from Lost Planet to Crysis).
To play that game, you will need a good PC. And I don’t mean that this will be the solution to heat your character (a big PC heats the room, but the player will have to manage body heat in the game, too).
Minimal configuration
CPU: AMD 3000+ or Intel equivalent
DRAM: 1GB
Graphics card: AMD/ATI Radeon 9800 pro or nVidia 6800GT
HDD space: unknown
Sound card: DirectX 9 compatible
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 2000
Recommended configuration
CPU: AMD x2 5600+ or Intel CoreDuo 6400
DRAM: 2GB
Graphics card: AMD/ATI Radeon 2900 HD or nVidia 8880 GTS
HDD space: unknown
Sound card: DirectX 9 or 10 compatible
Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP or Vista
Some initial comments from the April 2007 presentation:
When the young citizens of the United Kingdom leave their country, they see no limit! They want innovation in their sexual relations. According to Science Blog, one out of five of the young Great Britons take advantage of their travel to foreign countries to sexually experiment with new partners.
English physicians start worrying about the influence of air travel on the health of the British/English sex.
When you have one computer under GNU/Linux, it is common to have it as a second machine to run experimentations or dedicated to one single task (run one program like BitTorrent, a backup server or a web server, for example). In this case, it is quite pleasant to be able to control it without leaving your main keyboard and screen (staying in front of your main machine). This is the problem that some bloggers tried to solve and I want to cite them here:
The famous photographer of “Earth seen from the Sky” now has a page on Flickr. What is happening here? While he is still very attentive to the management of his photographer’s rights and of his fame, Yann Arthus Bertrand would have fallen into a liberated open publishing media?
Of course, not. This is just an April’s fool idea that stayed a little longer.
I am fascinated that the page was kept on Flickr, but the experience is quite funny. I just hope it won’t become a Flickr trend. But feel free to point at other similar pages…
Game Trailers, on top of providing a good source for video material distributed by the designers and distributors of video games, has sometimes a good video review of games. Here comes one: TimeShift from Sierra, one of the few First Person Shooters being handed out before Christmas.
Definitely an interesting game. A traditional FPS game with a few twists like the ability to play with time: You can go back in time, you can freeze time, and use these in your combat tactics leading to pretty much anything that was completely inaccessible in other games. What makes it nice is that despite being ported from a console to the PC, TimeShift still looks good and very playable (usually, console games turn being plain crap when ported to the PC).
Or so it seems from the more recent news I received through different channels these days. First, BluRay BD+ copy protection and DRM system appears to have been cracked. In the latest revision of AnyDVD (a quite well known DVD copying software), there is now an option to handle BD+. It means that even the slight advantage of BluRay against the other competing High Def DVD formats (mostly HD-DVD) is disappearing and you can expect that all BluRay discs will be found in the black market since they are now easy to copy.
Then, we learned that Paramount started selling DVDs at a bargain price (3 US$) in China in an attempt to reduce the impact of rampant piracy in this country. Cheap discs mean that consumers may buy more (you have to admit that pricing the discs at the same level as the bootleg copies easily available makes a good selling point).
It could be a marketers’ last attempt, but there is a near simultaneous announcement that has shed a significant light onto this issue: UK-based music store 7 Digital tells us that DRM-free MP3 tracks outsell their DRMed counterparts by a factor of four to one. This should help music producers understand that the market is requesting DRM-free products. But will they hear?
After months of expectation organised by marketing and advertisment, the FPS video game most awaited of the year, Crysis, will be available tomorrow (you can already download it on Steam and the Electronic Arts online shop/store -on-line electronic payment and validation- but not use it yet).
Graphic card providers are already dreaming of the rising sales of their top products. But they also have to prepare their software programs. For example, nVidia drivers have just been upgraded again to a last minute revision (version 169.09 beta) to correct a final bug detected in the management of some water reflections of Crysis. Furthermore, beyond those last refinements from manufacturers, Crytek polished the chrome plates and it appears that the final version of the game also got a small improvement in performance and fluidity (compared to the Crysis demo available for a few days already).
Now, the amateurs only have a short time left to prep up their PC to the arrival of Crysis. Here come the nice links to two little articles you’d like:
Crysis – Very High Settings in DX9 tells us all about how to get the “high performance” settings normally accessible only to Vista-powered machines running DirectX 10, but while only using an XP PC under DirectX 9 (you may not be welcoming the idea of buying a shiny new expensive OS to improve Crysis looks). It’s only a matter of adding a system.cfg file with the right data in the game installation directory.
Tweak Guide gives all the details about Crysis optimisation, configuration and a few tweaks.
Advice to those willing to pay Crysis online, the exchange rate does not seem very favorable to Euros. If you pay 49.95 dollars, the bank should short your account with something like 35 euros. It’s up to you to see if this exchange rate compares favorably to what EA wants to charge in Euros!
According to NewScientist, despite the difficulty in counting the big cats, experts estimated that there were more than 3500 tigers in India in 2001 and 2002. Unfortunately, the latest figures are pointing at a figure nearer to 1300-1500.
The size of the populations in large parks seems to be still enough to ensure the survival of the species, but things are looking grimmer and grimmer for the tiger.
For those who do not know it, the calendar 2008 for Aubade is now available. It maintains the already-long tradition of tasteful advertisement used by this totally-French feminine underwear company.
Think Camera has a new review of the EOS 40D. Nothing fancy, but the reliable analysis expected from TC. They love the camera, and I can understand from what I could peek at a couple of models recently.
Interestingly, the review of the Canon 40D at The-Digital-Picture.com shows that they are currently shipping a frimware revision 1.0.4. They seems to think that there is something weird with Adobe CameraRaw when using this firmware. I could not test it by myself. But, be warned.
Additonally, you can find the latest Canon EOS 40D sales guide on the same The-Digital-Picture.com web site. It’s big 11MB PDF, but well worth reading if you don’t have the sales pitch from your Internet e-commerce web site.
Last but not least, Tom’s Guide publishes a review of the Canon EOS 40D in French, more for the consumer than the photogrpaher, but interesting nevertheless.
A library is not only a marvelous location to read books, but it may also be -simply- a marvelous location. This is the case with the collection of cultural culmination points that are offered to our eyes at Curious Expeditions.
Handelingenkamer Tweede Kamer Der Staten-Generaal Den Haag, the Hague, Netherlands
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When you have one computer under GNU/Linux, it is common to have it as a second machine to run experimentations or dedicated to one single task (run one program like BitTorrent, a backup server or a web server, for example). In this case, it is quite pleasant to be able to control it without leaving your main keyboard and screen (staying in front of your main machine). This is the problem that some bloggers tried to solve and I want to cite them here:
According to 
