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Top 20 PC Games Sold in July

1. World Of Warcraft—Blizzard
2. Cars Radiator Springs Adventures—THQ
3. The Sims 2 Family Fun Stuff—Electronic Arts
4. The Sims 2—Electronic Arts
5. The Sims 2 Open For Business—Electronic Arts
6. Guild Wars Factions—NCsoft
7. Titan Quest—THQ
8. Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion—2K Games
9. Half-Life 2: Episode 1—Electronic Arts
10. Zoo Tycoon: Complete Collection—Microsoft
11. Age Of Empires III—Microsoft
12. The Sims 2 Nightlife—Electronic Arts
13. Zoo Tycoon 2—Microsoft
14. Civilization IV—2K Games
15. Warcraft III Battle Chest—Blizzard
16. The Sims Complete Collection—Electronic Arts
17. Civilization IV: Warlord—2K Games
18. The Sims 2 University—Electronic Arts
19. Heroes Of Might & Magic V—Ubisoft
20. Lord of the Rings: Battle For Middle Earth II—Electronic Arts
Source: NPD

World of Warcraft continues to rule over all. I picked up Guild Wars Factions and Oblivion myself recently. Along with the free F.E.A.R. Combat, there is a LOT of gaming going on in this household.

 

FirstAdopter.com Discussion Forum

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Dell's Current Computer

According to this News.com interview, Michael Dell's current computer is a bit over the top to say the least, but when you're a billionaire I guess anything is game.

The one other thing I want to ask you is what you currently use, right now at home, as your home PC.
I am using a Dell Precision 690, which is our high-end workstation. It's a two-socket system and it's got two dual-core Woodcrest (Xeon 5100 processors) in there. It's got a port with 64 (gigabytes) of memory, but I have only got 32 (gigabytes) in there.

Come on.
And I have got two of our 30-inch monitors, so it's 8.2 million pixels of resolution, which is kind of nice. And I have managed to get a fiber connection to my house, so I kind of dig into that speed on the Internet.

 

F.E.A.R. Multiplayer is Going to be Free for All

Sierra announced that the multiplayer component of their shocking PC horror game, F.E.A.R., is going to be free for everyone to download on August 17th. Cool move.

08-08-2006 - Sierra Entertainment today announced that the multiplayer component from the award winning PC title F.E.A.R.™ (First Encounter Assault Recon), has been renamed F.E.A.R. Combat, and will be made available to the public as a free download on Thursday August 17th, 2006.

F.E.A.R. Combat is the complete multiplayer component of F.E.A.R. and includes all the updates, additional official maps and additional official game modes all in one downloadable file. F.E.A.R. Combat users will be able to play against the owners of the retail version of F.E.A.R. as well as the other F.E.A.R. Combat users.

F.E.A.R. Combat features:
- 10 Multiplayer Game modes.
- 19 Multiplayer Maps.
- 12 different weapons.
- Punkbuster support for anti cheat support.
- The capability to download user generated content.

To play F.E.A.R. Combat, consumers simply go to www.joinfear.com and register to obtain their free, Combat keycode. When the file is made available for download on Aug 17th 2006, consumers can install, enter their keycode, and get ready to join F.E.A.R. Combat!

 

First Computer History

What was your first computer?

Mine was an IBM PC XT in 1986 (I was ten, my parents bought it without really knowing what it was good for--they still don't):

8MHz proc (I think)
256 KILObytes of RAM
dual 5 1/4" floppy drives
NO hard drive
4 color CGA graphics

I think it cost them $2500. -Mathew

That's faster than my first computer. Commodore 64. 1mhz CPU and a whopping 64k of memory. I had a 5.25" floppy drive that was the size of like 3 bricks. I think it cost $250? Don't remember. - Share your First Computer Memories

 

Google to Pay at LEAST $900 million to News Corp.

Google announced today it will pay AT LEAST $900 million to News Corp. in the next 3 years for the right to be the search engine across News Corp.' internet sites, primarily MySpace. This is little over a year after News Corp. bought MySpace for around $600 million in July 2005. Rupert Murdoch will be now known as the "shrewd" internet investor indeed. He gets a 50% return and all he has to give up is search engine rights for a mere 3 years AND there is upside to the $900 million if MySpace growth continues. Not too shabby.

 

Mac Pro Launched

Steve Jobs announced the Mac Pro today. For a base configuration of $2499, you get 2 dual core 2.66ghz Xeon "Woodcrest" processors (basically Conroe for servers), 1 GB of RAM, and a Nvidia 7300GT graphics card. I'm sure glad I bought my Intel Conroe upgrade/ATI 1900XT combo for less than $1000. It doesn't look like gamers who want Conroe performance will be able to get a good price/performance combo deal under the Apple banner in the next 6 months at least.

Discuss USB EVDO Cards?

Sprint is ready to release a USB card to connect to it's EVDO network, without requiring a PCMCIA slot. Kinda neat. If I had Sprint I'd be tempted to try it. A guy at my work has a phone that can double as an EVDO modem. he had it hooked up to his laptop at work and did some speed tests and was getting around 700K/s downstream speeds. Not too shabby. If i had a laptop, I'd be interested in Verizon's wide area wireless, but it's kinda pricey, at around $70/month I think. Anyone else getting in on the cellular broadband thing? - Discuss with TheAngryIntern

 

Review: Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting for Xbox 360 by Arogan

-$10 over live arcade
- It's pillar boxed and even slightly letter boxed
- The single player is pretty much arcade perfect though either I'm getting slow in my age or the game plays a tad faster than I remember.
- I'm rusty, Really rusty. But after about an hour or two of playing I'm starting to get a bit better. I'm a little slow on my timing for the combos.
- Single match over live is pretty good. The quick match seems broken (or doesn't take into account ping) b/c it ALWAYS times out for me. If you do custom match you get a ping rating for everybody in the browser. Just pick somebody with 3 or 4 green bars and your off.
- I only had one REALLY laggy game (it even disconnected at the end). The rest only had minor lag. The whole game seems to play slower than single player. There seems to be minor lag during any game. Like the motion of the characters aren't perfectly smooth or even. You have to actually compensate for the slight lag in your timing (pulling off attacks earlier than you normally would in single player). At first it was quite annoying but you actually get use to it and compensate after a while. I can live with it and it's still a lot of fun but I can't help but be slightly disappointed. I expected better considering how long they delayed this game working on the network code. For some reason my memory of the original xbox sf2 anniversary edition which had live support seemed to play a bit smoother.
- The quarter mode works just fine. When you first enter you sit in a lobby where you can chat. After the next game starts you can start observing the current fight though even more heavily pillar/letterboxed. It works fine and plays pretty much just like single matches. That lag was about the same.
- I did have one hard lock while viewing a gamer card from the lobby. This reminds me of PGR3 before it was patched.

Overall well worth the $10 but I just wish the live play was just a tad smoother but overall not bad enough to be a deal breaker. - Arogan

Top 10 Favorite Games of All-Time

Here are my top 10 favorite games of all-time.

1. Legend of Zelda on NES
2. Streetfighter II on SNES
3. Super Mario Brothers on NES
4. Command and Conquer Red Alert on PC
5. Quake CTF mod on PC
6. DOOM on PC
7. Ms. Pac Man on C64
8. Speedball 2 on Amiga
9. TV Sports Football on Amiga
10.One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird on C64

Why don't you share your top 10 on our forum.