My Favourite Firefox Addons

Posted at 11:01 by Antony Leather with 0 comments

I’m only a fairly recent convert to Firefox for the simple reason I didn’t need too many bells and whistles in a browser before now. It’s no surprise then that I used Google’s Chrome for a while after leaving my IE days firmly behind me, but having had to use Firefox because my online banking didn’t support Chrome at the time, I got hooked and have never looked back.

In particular I loved how customisable it was. Not just the interface but also the addons which both added functionality to the interface and other features besides. Here’s my top five Firefox addons - and don’t forget to let me know yours in the coments.

1. Speed Dial
One of the best things about Chrome is the home page with the speed dial links to your favourite websites. If you have the need for speed these are so much quicker and easier than bookmarks and shortcuts. Thankfully you can mod Firefox to look the same on your home page and even new tabs too using an addon called Speed Dial.

My Favourite Firefox Addons My favourite Firefox addons

It’s very configurable too and you can alter both the number of dial windows, add them to groups and even back them up and change how often their preview images are updated of the web page in question.

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Written on 9th February 2010
Tags chrome, cooliris, firefox, ie, ie8, lastpass, save folder

What Makes A Mature Game?

Posted at 13:57 by Joe Martin with 13 comments

Joe Martin
When I first joined bit-tech a few years ago I was fairly new to the journalism game and naïve in my responses to many things. Since then I’ve learned a lot more about the industry and one of the things I’ve been watching lately is the way that developers rush to label their games as ‘adult’ or ‘mature’ experiences.

“We really delved into the story with Game X,” you might hear a developer say. “We really wanted to explore the fiction and make it as mature as possible.”

It sounds good in theory and maybe I’m just being jaded and grumpy, but every time I hear someone label their title as having “a really mature story” or somesuch then alarm bells in my head start to ring. All too often the phrase is just a mask and the reality is that the game is, rather than being actually mature, tangibly immature.

When PRs and developers label a game as ‘mature’ what they really mean more often than not is that they’ve added swearing, boobs and gore beyond what the story and gameplay strictly require. Usually it’s part of an effort to appeal to a pubescent, sweaty-palmed audience too and the game is appealing more to adolescent lust rather than the wisdom that goes with maturity.

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Written on 8th February 2010
Tags adult games, bloodlines, dante's inferno, joe being grumpy, mass effect 2, mature games, maturity, rating, rpg, sex in games, tits, vampire

Gaming Podcast 10 - Mass Effect 2 and AvP

Posted at 15:59 by bit-tech Staff with 7 comments

bit-tech Staff
It's another Custom PC and bit-tech gaming podcast - and this time it is (hopefully) loud enough!

This week Richard, Harry and Joe sit down to talk about Mass Effect 2, Direct2Drive, Mass Effect 2, Aliens vs Predator and Mass Effect 2.

Also, we talk about Mass Effect 2 - but without any spoilers!

There's the usual competitions and giveaways and reader mail too, so tune in to the latest gaming podcast to hear what we have to say about the past fortnight in games!

Don't forget that you can drop us a line at Podcast [at] CustomPC.co.uk, as well as leaving comments below or following us on twitter.

...Mass Effect 2.

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Written on 4th February 2010
Tags alien, aliens vs predator, audio, avp, bioware, competition, download, ea, electronic arts, games, games podcast, gaming podcast, gaming podcast 10 - mass, harry, itunes, joe, mass effect 2, podcast, podcast 10, predator, reader mail, rebellion, richard, sega, ten, twitter

Why Software Companies Should Slash Their Prices

Posted at 11:09 by Antony Leather with 20 comments

Antony Leather
Value. It’s a funny word, and never more so when applied to the IT industry. In fact it’s so tricky to place in this fast-moving online world that it’s usually only spoken of as “perceived” value and that’s about as accurate as we can get. Saying a piece of software - be it a game or operating system - is good value is even more of a convoluted statement.

How do you compare one piece of software to another? Features? Price? The space it takes up on your hard drive? How would you predict how well a product might sell and factor that into the pricing?

For most of us it comes down to cold hard cash and whether we can find something that’s as good or better, for less, or even for free. However, only a handful of companies have grasped the fact that if you lower the price of software enough, sales will skyrocket so high, they’ll make many times more profit than if they priced it twice as much, however popular the software may be.

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Written on 4th February 2010
Tags left 4 dead, software, steam, valve, vista, windows 7, xp

Test Bench Roundup #2: Cooler Master and Homebrew Modded!

Posted at 11:00 by Richard Swinburne with 11 comments

Richard Swinburne
If you missed part one of our test bench roundup, catch it here.

Rolling straight on with part 2, the, uh, final part, in this two part extravaganza of open-top, naked PC goodness. We have a steel entry from Cooler Master that's built like a tank, and another homebrew mod I constructed way back in 2004. It's survived six years of abuse, and it has wheels. Possibly my greatest mod ever and certainly the cheapest.

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Written on 3rd February 2010
Tags cooler master, geforce, intel, lab, mod, modding, test bench

Games I Own: Freedom Force

Posted at 10:54 by Joe Martin with 4 comments

Joe Martin
I only bought the Freedom Force games – both the original and the sequel Freedom Force vs The Third Reich – fairly recently, though I annoyingly timed it just before the recent Steam £2 deal. It was a series I’d often heard lauded as a great tactical RPG to play if you like comics, but I’d never really gotten around to trying it until a few weeks ago.

I don’t totally regret the decision to buy the game, but the fact that I have to mention this up front probably hints clearly at how unsatisfied I am with the game.

What Freedom Force is, is an incredibly tongue-in-cheek game inspired mainly by 1930s comics, as oppose to the modern Marvel and DC conglomerates. It focuses on a series of characters who get exposed to an alien weapon called Energy X which accidentally rains down on the planet as part of an overly convoluted alien plan to take over Earth. The exposed humans subsequently manifest super powers, dividing fairly equally into heroes and villains. The heroes, championed by the ultra-American hero Minuteman, form into Freedom Force and go around fighting evil.

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Written on 2nd February 2010
Tags cheap, classic, comic, freedom force, freedom force vs the thir, games, games i own, gaming, irrational games, retro, rpg, sale, steam, steam sale, superhero, tactica rpg, third reich, value

My Experience With Jailbreaking So Far

Posted at 13:23 by Mark Mackay with 23 comments

Mark Mackay
A few weeks ago a friend and fellow hardware enthusiast rocked up at my flat with his new iPhone 3GS. He'd jailbroken it and was naturally keen to show off his new toy. Like most of the iPhone owners I know, I was smitten with my iPhone as it was and had absolutely no desire to fiddle with it. That's what I thought until I saw what he'd done with his…

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Written on 1st February 2010
Tags apple, blackra1n, cydia, dmca, eff, iphone, jailbreak, mobile, psx4iphone

Hardware 9 - iPad, eReaders, and who has the brighter future, Intel or AMD?

Posted at 16:57 by Podcast with 7 comments

Podcast
The hardware podcast kicks off 2010 belatedly, but with over 55 minutes of hardcore hardware chat. Alex, Clive and Antony discuss everything the major since our last hardware pod in November 2009.

Intel's cancelled Larrabee, but launched the first CPUs with integrated graphics, but are there clouds on the horizon for x86?

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Written on 29th January 2010
Tags amd, apple, arm, ebooks, ereader, hardware podcast, intel, ipad, larrabee

Thoughts from AMD's GPU Technology Conference

Posted at 11:08 by Richard Swinburne with 6 comments

Richard Swinburne
Last week in London, AMD gathered just over a dozen journalists from all over Europe at an event entitled its "GPU Technology Conference". We sat down with Richard Huddy, Worldwide Developer Relations, and Neal Robison, Global Director of Developer Relations from AMD, as well as Adrian Thompson Vice-President of Global Marketing from Sapphire, Gareth Thomas, Senior Programmer from CodeMasters and Chris Kingsley, CTO from Rebellion, in a round-table discussion about all things AMD GPU.

For the most part, we've covered AMD's position on a lot of topics in our interview with Richard Huddy, AMD Worldwide Developer Relations Manager, so we didn't feel the need to reiterate them again.

That's not the only reason why I've opted for this blog post, though; the second reason is that I feel AMD runs out of steam once it covers DirectX 11 and Eyefinity, and that its "open" attitude might appear noble but it's covering up for other inadequacies.

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Written on 29th January 2010
Tags amd, codemasters, developer, directx 11, gpgpu, gpu, open cl, rebellion, tecnology, tessellation

What will you put up with for a good storyline?

Posted at 11:57 by Mark Mackay with 33 comments

Mark Mackay
After finishing my new gaming rig recently, I installed a few games that I’ve been meaning to get through. Mass Effect and Fallout 3 were amongst those titles. I’d dabbled in both before but found that the slow pace and masses of dialogue weren't really what I was looking for at that time. This is a pair of games that focus heavily on storyline. However, I always had the nagging feeling that I was missing out on some great games and so, with my new rig purring away, wanted to give them another shot.

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Written on 28th January 2010
Tags combat, fallout 3, gameplay, mass effect, sloppy, wheetabix