Reviews

I had the pleasure of playing through this whole game in coop mode with my wife. We both really enjoyed it and played all the way up to 100%. The graphics were quite nice and the humor was spot on. It certainly brought back memories of all the classic Indiana Jones movies and even encouraged us to watch them all over again. My main complaint is it's a tad too short. We blew through the stories in just a few hours, so we spent most of our time collecting treasures and mailboxes. It wasn't too hard to reach 100%, but it was a good time none-the-less. It's probably not worth $50, but easily worth $40 or less.

Testing's Eeepeep

This game is fun. The online play makes every race intelligent and challenging. While the traditional single player is a great challenge it's extremely difficult because the computers cheat. Of course they've always cheated since the original Mario Kart, but this time they cheat even worse.

Now the online play is what makes this game great. You can always get anywhere from 7 to 11 competitors at any time of the day or night. These people are tough, but it's always a blast ramming and slamming them as you race for the finish. Its so much more real when you get those pesky computers off thet track. You ram them and they feel it in their hands, it doesn't get better than that.

The way the online play is set up is very slick. Nintendo picks players from either your country or around the world. They introduce them to you as a Mii waving in their locality on the globe. Sometimes you might race the same people 10 times in a row so you've got that opportunity to make it personal.  more

This is the most fun controller I've ever used. When I first heard about it I thought the mouse pointer aspect would be clunky, but it's actually turned out to be the best part about it! I just love pointing my bow and arrow at monsters in Zelda and the clawshot is a ton of fun. The internal speaker really adds to the gameplay as it puts the weapons and items in your hand and not on the screen. For example when link puts his sword away you hear it on the remote rather than the screen. When you shoot an arrow you hear the bow string stretch in your hand.

There are two aspects to this device: the mouse cursor and the accelerometer. The mouse cursor utilizes the Wii sensor bar that you place above or below your TV. The sensor bar is nothing but a series of the same IR sensors you find in a typical TV remote. The Wii remote uses these to know which way is forward and to know where the cursor should be on screen. This aspect to the Wii remote is very fluid and responsive. There  more

This game is a blast to play. You can use just about anything to slice and dice some zombie butt. Shopping mall bench? Sure, shove it into a crowd of zombies. Maybe drive through a sea of zombies with a sports car. Just don't think you'll get anywhere slashing zombies with a toy sword or hitting them over the head with a teddy bear. Obviously knives, guns and bats are going to be effective, but you'll be happily surprised with the carnage brought about by everyday yard tools.

The story is very detailed and intense. You'll reach points where you absolutely cannot make a mistake. Just losing 5 minutes somewhere may mean game over, so be careful when you save. You've got quite a few timed goals and they come one after another. It's actually a bit of a relief when you've got some additional time to tour zombies around the underside of a lawnmower.

After completing the game you'll unlock some additional modes that give you the opportunity to slay zombies to your heart's content.  more

I love playing this game. It reminds me of Super Mario Bros. 3 crossed with Super Mario World. The gameplay is excellent and I'm very happy Nintendo decided to go back to the 2D platform style. The graphics are all in 3D, yet shown on a 2D plane. It really offers a unique and beautiful gaming experience.

The worlds are varied and lots of fun. The star coins offer quite a bit of replay value, but I was a little disappointed that finding them doesn't result in a special ending. I think the large mario is fun, but he's a little too large for many levels. You really have to know what level to use him on. The same can be said about the micro Mario. He's a bit tricky to control but is key to many secrets. I would have liked some suits like Mario 3 had, but that can be forgiven.

Overall, this is a great addition to the Mario family and is strongly recommended to anybody who's a fan of the franchise.

Xchat is a very simple script with very few unique features. You have some features that aren't included with a barebone mIRC like better channel op controls and an away system, but not too much more. The color scheme has changed slightly but there are no theme controls so you'll need to manually change it if you need to. The installation could have been smoother without needing to manually load the script files -- this had me confused until I read the readme file. Overall, Xchat Clone is a clean script that lacks a high production value.

This addon lets you browse Google from mIRC. It doesn't require a web browser and offers all of the functionality you would expect. The settings allow you to change the color of the results to match your script and it's fairly simple to use. I guess if you don't want to load up IE or Firefox, this is a quick alternative.

This is a nifty 3D demo that has a cube move in and out towards your screen. There isn't too much to it beyond a short visual show. You can switch between a wire frame and a filled box by pressing your right mouse button. This is just another example that mIRC is not just a textual program.

Very cool animation using an mIRC picture window. This has lots of colors, animation and music. It's all included in a single .mrc file. This really has no practical use, but it's definitely worth looking at.

This addon allows you to interact with QuakeNet's Q Bot and L Bots. It's very easy to use and is smart enough to warn you if you haven't logged in or you don't have control over the bots. This is only for established users on QuakeNet so be prepared for a lot of warnings if you don't already have accounts with QuakeNet. It's very well documented and easy to use so this addon is strongly recommended for QuakeNet regulars.

This is a specialized script made specifically for Half-Life. You can use it to challenge servers by their IP address and report statistics back to IRC on the current scoreboard. It's focus is on functionality, so you won't find any fancy dialogs here. It would be nicer if I could manage a list of server IP's so I won't have to type them more than once. More emphasis on usabily is definitely in order.

InfoBloot is a helpful and playful bot that can be used to control a channel and information about the channel's users. You can feed it information about people in the format "nick is cool" and when asked about this person, the bot will respond that they are cool. This is very simple AI, but it does stem from some of the more popular AI techniques being used today. You can also op people, deop, kick, ban, etc. with administrator permissions. Included is an in-depth tutorial that I strongly recommend you read before using this bot. It may not have everything you need, but it's definitely worth trying.

[Best/Dexter] is one of the most unique mIRC games I've come across. It's a 2D side scrolling game with jumping, shooting and running. The play control is very smooth and it's quite easy to play. It includes a very easy to use map editor where you can modify existing maps and create your own. The only problem I found was the inability to save newly created maps, so you may need to edit the existing maps for now. This is definitely worth seeing and can hopefully help inspire new innovative mIRC games.

MySQL Interface is a very innovative mIRC script that gives you a basic interface with MySQL. You can set the MySQL connection parameters to access information locally and remotely. It uses a dialog interface for entering queries and changing connection information with HTML output for 'select' results. It isn't exactly practical, but it definitely shows that mIRC is capable of much more than just chatting.

Channel Limiter will make sure your channel's user limit is constantly buffered by a given amount. This is to prevent lots of joins at the same time. If you have a buffer of 3, only 3 people can come in at once. After a few seconds the channel limit will be adjusted for another 3. I guess this is to prevent any malicious attacks that might fall upon your channel by a large amount of joins.

Changermirc is a background manager for mIRC. It lets you maintain a list of background images to use in channels, msg windows and your main mIRC background. You can randomly select an image, set image rotation timers and change the display method. It's a little difficult to use at first, but it does work decently once you get the hang of it.

Awaycolor is very simple yet useful. It changes the color of nicks in your nicklist based on their status. Their nickname will be a light grey if they're away and there's also an indicator color for IRCops. You'll get a good idea of how dead a channel is when you join and find a lot of grey nicks, so I find this very helpful.

This is definitely a first for mIRC. Cookbook is a mIRC dialog for browsing user contributed recipies. It maintains categories of recipies with pictures in some cases. Unfortunately the pictures won't load if your mIRC is installed in a directory like "c:\Program Files" due to the space in the path. It has an update feature which is supposed to refresh your cookbook as users contribute recipies. You're also welcome to contribute a recipe yourself. I'm not sure how useful this can be, but it just goes to show that mIRC can do most anything.

I find this more as an example script than anything of practical use. You simply select a file and it will give you information about the file's path, date created, filename and size. The only other option is the ability to run the file and close the dialog. It's clean and easy to use with no clear problems.