The
Football
Manager 2008 Website now offers a variety of demos for this football/soccer
simulation in two flavors. There is a "Vanilla" demo with English & Scottish
quick starts, no assets, no histories, and no "facegen," and a group of
"Strawberry" demos with support for more teams and more languages for both PC
and Mac. Selected downloads are also mirrored on
ComputerGames.Ro,
Gamer's Hell, and
PixelRage.
The
Unofficial
World of Warcraft Forums have word on a couple of bugs that fell through the
cracks with the version 2.2 patch that was just released for World of Warcraft,
Blizzard's MMORPG (thanks
Ant). Just a handful of issues are listed, most of
them related to the user interface. On a related note, the
Creative Labs Forums have word on an issue with the new WoW patch for owners
of Creative's sound cards (thanks
World of Warcraft News),
which don't offer the same audio experience after the new patch introduced a new
software mixer. Creative seems a little ticked at Blizzard, and is hoping their
users will be ticked too:
As many Creative soundcard owners are
discovering, Blizzard recently made changes to the WoW client that have impacted
the audio experience significantly. Our developer relations group were given
minimal advance warning that these changes were about to occur, and our
subsequent requests to Blizzard for clarification as to why the changes were
made have gone unanswered.
The new audio implementation in WoW uses a 3rd party audio middleware system
which offers a generic software mixer with some reverb effects. Creative has
worked with the middleware company in question and already implemented a
hardware audio path that enables 3D audio mixing and DSP based effects
processing on Audigy and X-Fi cards. "Bioshock" uses this system to great
effect, and it is relatively straight forward for developers to support. We have
offered to help Blizzard enable this hardware audio path but they haven't taken
us up on it.
Many Creative soundcard owners are pointing out that their audio experience is
nowhere near as compelling as it used to be, which is a great shame. We will
continue to seek a better resolution to the current situation with Blizzard. In
the interim, we would encourage Creative soundcard owners to let Blizzard know
that they would very much like to have their audio experience restored to its
former glory.
The
Ask ES Thread on the Age of Empires III Heaven Forum asks some
reader-submitted questions of Ensemble Studios about Age of Empires III: The
Asian Dynasties, the now-gold RTS expansion. A wide variety of topics are
covered in the rapid-fire Q&A.
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