12 MA XIMUMPC JANUARY 2006
quickstart THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL
Tom McDonald has been covering games for countless maga-
zines and newspapers for 11 years. He lives in the New Jersey
Pine Barrens.Shattering
a long-held
industry
belief that
16x is the
fastest speed
a burner can
write to record-
able DVD media, Plextor
has announced its
all-new PX-760A 18x double-layer burner. Like
other highly touted Plextor burners, the PX-760A
can achieve top speed on even slower-rated 16x
media. The drive will also burn double-layer +R
media at 10x and double-layer –R media at 6x.
Yummy.Plextor Drops the 18 x
Bomb!
LoJack for
Your Laptop
When Tony Serrano left his HP
laptop sitting in his car outside
his Miami home, for “just a
minute,” he became one of the
600,000 people who had their
laptops stolen last year. But
unlike most people, Serrano
had AbsoluteSoftware’s
LoJack software installed
on his Pavilion notebook.
Serrano called the police and
AbsoluteSoftware to report the
theft, but he didn’t hold out
much hope. “I thought they
would never fi nd it,” Serrano
told Maximum PC. When the
thief plugged the stolen com-
puter into a network, however,
the LoJack software began
secretly broadcasting its IP
address. Within two days,
police recovered the notebook
just as a university student was
in the process of reformatting it
and loading Windows XP.
Even if the student had
blown away the OS, LoJack
would have delivered the
goods, said Ben Haidri, an
executive with the company.
LoJack resides in a hidden
portion of the hard drive that
isn’t erased by an OS install
or normal format, Haidri said.
And newer notebooks even
support LoJack loading direct-
ly into the BIOS.
LoJack is sophisticated
enough to wait until there’s
no keyboard activity, at which
time it turns on the modem
and dials an 800 number that
instantly tells AbsoluteSoftware
its identity. Once the notebook
has pinged AbsoluteSoftware,
a recovery team contacts local
police and walks them through
the process of contacting the
ISP to fi nd out the location of
the stolen laptop.
Future versions of the
program will even let the con-
sumer secretly download valu-
able documents off a stolen
computer or delete sensitive
information on command.
LoJack costs $50 for one year,
$100 for three years.
http://www.lojackforlaptops.comFirefox Coming on Strong
The latest numbers show Mozilla’s Firefox browser
steadily gaining on Microsoft’s
ubiquitous Internet Explorer web
browser, but it’s still a long, long
way from achieving parity. As of
October 2005, reports show Firefox
with 8.65 percent worldwide market
share, which is signifi cant. At least it is until you
realize IE has more than 85 percent of the market.Introducing Microsoft
Defender
Microsoft’s still-in-beta AntiSpyware app will reportedly
be signifi cantly revamped—and renamed MS Defender—
before it’s integrated with the upcoming Vista operating
system. Microsoft is beefi ng up its free malware-detec-
tion utility to detect Trojans, rootkits, and keyloggers in
addition to run-of-the-mill spyware. Although Microsoft
Defender will
be included
with Windows
Vista, you’ll
still be able
to disable
it and run a
third-party
anti-malware
app of your
choice.F
EAR is a perfect example of diminishing
returns. The latest shooter from Monolith
begins like gangbusters, offering a heady fusion of
Japanese-style horror and straight-up American
run-n-gun gameplay. The opening is so strong, and
the atmosphere so creepy, that it carries the game
a fair distance before you notice its problems.
Unlike Doom 3, which reached the bottom
of its hackneyed bag o’ tricks after about an
hour of gameplay, FEAR holds you much longer.
The designers play their cards effectively.
You’re hit with a barrage of twisted imagery,
zapped into alternate visions, and given passing
glimpses of nightmarish things, most notably
the creepy-little-girl-with-long-dark-hair-in-her-
face (a staple image in Japanese horror, most
notably Ringu/The Ring).
Then they back off. The visions and
glimpses spread out a little further, supplanted
by remarkably effective and eerie sound design.
By this point, the game has done its work on you,
leaving you in a state of tense expectation as you
wait to see what’s around the next corner. This is
a tough thing to do in a movie. To sustain it in a
game as long as Monolith does is quite a feat.
But as with so many Monolith games (such as
Blood or Nobody Lives Forever), the whole thing
eventually runs aground on the sandbar of bad
level design. Although Monolith clearly takes a
few pages from the Valve playbook in an attempt
to create a vivid game world with an integral
narrative, the developer failed to learn a similarly
important lesson about creating believable
environments. FEAR is remarkably linear for
a shooter, funneling you through an endless
sequence of convoluted, maze-like locations. It’s
like being stuck in a rabbit warren. If an architect
created plans for an offi ce/factory/lab with layouts
like these, he’d be locked up.
The awkward layout design might be intended
to create plenty of blind corners and hiding spots
for enemies, but it only succeeds in making the
levels feel choppy and unappealing. Even with so
many twists and turns, enemy encounters soon fall
into a fairly rigid and predictable pattern of small
squad encounters. Lumping the bad guys in one
place and giving them a decent tactical AI works
for a while, but eventually becomes predictable
and then tedious. FEAR has plenty of atmosphere
and eerie moments, but a shooter stands or falls
on level design, something Monolith has never
done consistently well.Death in
the Rabbit
WarrensGAME THEORY
THOMAS
-#$ON!,$