Ok, so recently a majority of the posts I have had dealt with the subject of malware and viruses. So I figured that it was time to change up the pace a bit and talk about some gaming a bit. Everyone loves games… from the little simple games such as checkers or bubble breaker all the way up to the highly intense games such as Call of Duty or Left 4 Dead. But no everyone has the cash to pay for some of these games that while being very fun, just aren’t worth the money in some people’s eyes.

So that led me to look around and actually stumble upon an article over at pc.ign.com which talks about the top 10 FREE to play Shooter games. Shooter games have been very popular as of late and more and more of the “Free to Play” games have been popping up left and right with some being worth it and some… well just don’t have any appeal and only make the others look that much better. Without wasting anymore time, lets go straight into the list!

• Alliance of Valiant Arms
• America’s Army 3
• Battlefield Heroes
• Combat Arms
• Quake Live
• Savage 2: A Tortured Soul
• Tremulous
• Urban Terror
• Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
• World of Padman

So I won’t go into any details other than the fact that I personally have played a few of these games and can confirm that the list is indeed a good one. If you would like to check out these games or read up on what IGN has to say about them in the article, you can do so here.

The next time you are bored out of your mind, and do not feel like dropping $50.00 or more on a new game, check out one of these games from the list, you should be very pleased and entertained by any of the games on this list. So check them out and get to shooting!

The day dreaded by many commercial antivirus vendors is here: Microsoft today made its free antivirus software available.

Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE), which Microsoft had code-named “Morro,” basically replaces Microsoft’s subscription-based OneCare product, but focuses solely on anti-malware — detecting and removing viruses, spyware, rootkits, and Trojans. It doesn’t come with security “suite” functions, like a firewall, computer maintenance tasks, or backup.

Interestingly, Microsoft is neither pushing the product via Windows updates nor bundling it with the operating system. “You have to proactively go to the Microsoft site to download it,” says Alex Eckelberry, CEO of Sunbelt Technologies, which sells enterprise AV, email, and other security tools for Windows. Eckelberry says Microsoft’s freebie software is ultimately “good for the consumer.”

What about commercial AV vendors? Eckelberry says he doesn’t expect the software to hurt them as much as AV vendors, like AVG, that also offer free anti-malware software. While it’s mainly a consumer product, he says it will also attract small mom-and-pop shops. “It won’t affect enterprise SMBs because it’s not manageable, so they won’t touch it,” he says.

Overall, Eckelberry says, MSE is good for consumer security.

Siobhan MacDermott, head of public policy, corporate communications, and investor relations for AVG Technologies, says while free AV sounds good at first glance, it could actually hurt consumers in the end.

“On the surface, a free offering from the company with a dominant market share would appear be a good thing. We believe, however, broad adoption could, in fact, put consumers at greater risk,” MacDermott says. “The strength of the security community rests in its diversity of products and the innovation delivered by companies like AVG, whose entire focus is keeping our users’ personal data and computers safe. It is our core business and one in which we simply cannot fail.”

Because Microsoft’s OS base is so large, a large community of MSE users will attract more attackers, according to MacDermott. “It is a law of numbers; large communities create large pools of opportunities for thieves,” she says. “If Microsoft leverages the power of its OS market to rapidly create a large community of MSE users, we believe those customers will be doubly vulnerable.”

Microsoft provided a peek at Security Essentials in June when it released a public beta version of the software.

The company says the software alerts users only when they need to take action due to a threat that’s detected, for instance, and it limits CPU and memory usage.

“Consumers have told us that they want the protection of real-time security software, but we know that too many are either unwilling or unable to pay for it, and so end up unprotected,” says Amy Barzdukas, general manager for consumer security at Microsoft. “With Microsoft Security Essentials, consumers can get high-quality protection that is easy to get and easy to use — and it won’t get in their way.”

MSE doesn’t require any registration or renewals, and is available for download here. For those interested, check out the review that is already up from arstechnica.com!

So this morning I woke up not really able to sleep and was looking around on the internet for something to do. I just so happened to stumble across a little 2D Flash game which was in a way DOOM! Being a oldschool DOOM fan I thought the best thing to do would be to test it out and see what its made of and if it is worthy of having the DOOM name attached to it.

I was pretty impressed that it was able to load up the entire game in about 15 seconds and was able to start playing. It even let me pick my difficulty and had a large portion of the music from the game (everything from the sounds to the level music playing).

The game itself looked and felt a lot better than I was expecting when I entered the first level. While I was only able to go to the left or right (and jump of course), the details and he models of the guns, bad guys, and myself were so crisp it felt like they had been taken right out of the original game and stuck into what I was playing.

I would also like to mention that while the little levels didn’t look like they were similar to the original game (I don’t really see how they could be in 2D)… I was very pleased at how your objective was the almost the exact same. You simply need to get to the exit button killing anything that gets in your way and if you are lucky stumbling across a secret or two in the process.

Even though this post won’t be as long as they usually are, being a big DOOM fan I just couldn’t resist taking some time out of my morning to talk about this nifty little game I just so happen to find. I am sure some of you are wondering where you can try out this as well so fear not… I do have the link for you to go play it! If you wanna try it out for yourself, just make sure you have the latest version of Adobe Flash installed and CLICK HERE to go enjoy this little game.

Recently I was lucky enough to get in on the Battlefield Heroes Beta through a beta key giveaway that GameSpot.com was hosting for a time frame of around 3 days. While they gave out thousands of keys to just about everyone who signed up for it, I know there were some people who were unable to get a key during that time or just simply didn’t know about the little giveaway they were hosting.

But fortunately, for those who were not able to get keys from them, I am happy to say I found another site that is still giving them out (for free of course) to whoever wants them while they last. So, before I talk about the game a bit I will go ahead and link those who are interested to the site. All you need to go is go here: http://tllg.net/rqnwd6.

For those interested in the game and what it is about… here is a quote from Wikipedia about the game!

Battlefield Heroes features a modified conquest mode providing each team 50 tickets and eventually one flag at the start of the round. Killing enemies and holding more flags than the opposing army will progressively reduce their number of tickets. The game also features matchmaking, to keep players of the same level together. Developers of the game have talked about levels going as high as 40 or 50. The two armies are called the National Army (possessing a red base color flag) and the Royal Army (possessing a blue base color flag). 

You can read the entire page on the game right here: http://tllg.net/5cxsba. So enjoy it and just maybe I will see you in-game!

**UPDATE** It seems that shortly after this article became available that they too ran out of keys. While this outage isn’t permanent, there is no set time on when more will become available… so it seems for those who weren’t able to grab one will just have to keep checking back and hope to get lucky!

**UPDATE #2** Well I have found another site that is still giving them out! Check it out and hurry over to http://tllg.net/6rfz32 and near the top right side of the page, there is a simple form (just enter your email) and poof, in your email is a key!

This week on Tuesday (February 24th) the beta for Quake Live opened up for all to try and test it out completely free of charge! Quake Live has been in closed beta for a long time now (almost a year I think) with the only way new people were getting in was if someone they knew had access and was able to invite them or they got lucky enough to get an invite to the beta through the website. At the beginning of February I was lucky enough to finally get invited to play in the closed beta and I can say that the game so far feels just like Quake 3 Arena.

For those of you who might not be familiar with what Quake 3 was exactly let me take a minute to explain it a bit. Quake 3 was probably and still is the most popular 1 vs 1 first person shooter (fps) game to ever be released and played competitively. It was orginially released in December of 1999 and is actually still being used in compeititions today for gaming tournaments around the world. Quake Live is a project that ID Software (the creators of the Quake series) started in 2007 to make Quake 3 playable from inside an internet browser and be completely free to play against other people or bots on the internet. The game is going to be completely free to everyone and in the website you have a profile which tracks ALL of your stats from when you are playing (everything from how many kills with each weapon to how many times you kill a certain person). It is giong to be funded from in-game advertising which will be used on a few billboards placed in spots around the maps.

At the current moment there are around 30 different maps in the beta, along with 4 different game types ranging from Free For Alls to Capture the Flag. Within the first 24 hours of the beta being open to the public, they reported having over 100,000 accounts registered and have and to place a queue on the site to keep it from being overloaded and un-usable. Overall with my experience so far in the beta I have been nothing but extremely impressed with everything as it feels like I am playing Quake 3 Arena all over again on my PC. It is shaping up to be an awesome game so I encourage everyone to check this out. Only downside right now I have found is that it only works in IE and Firefox running in Windows, but they have already announced they are working around the clock to get it up and running in more browser and as well as Linux and the Mac OS. So finally I will leave you with a video of some footage from in-game! Enjoy!

www.quakelive.com

Ok, so by now its probably safe to say that most people have heard of Open Office as probably the best replacement for Mircrosoft Office if you are tried of having to dish out $100+ for every new version they release. The great thing about Open Office is with every release they put out, it is becoming more and more just like Mircosoft Office and is able to do basically all the same functions and even manage to do some things that Mircosoft Office can not.

The guys over at PCMAG.com have put together a list of things that most people probably wouldn’t know about when using Open Office. These features go a long way in making some things a bunch easier while others are in there for just fun. So on to the point I shall go and give you the 7 things you probably didn’t know you could do with Open Office.

1. Edit two or more parts of a document at the same time.
2. Use Open Office to open legacy documents.
3. Play a vintage Space Invaders game.
4. Turn off the blinking light bulb.
5. Save files in Office formats by default.
6. Automate actions easily.
7. Fix those single quotes.

So there it is, the list which I think has some great features on there even I didn’t know were there. You can go HERE to read up on the article for each of the 7 features to learn how to actually do what it is talking about.

I would suggest anyone who is looking for a replacement for Microsoft Office to check out Open Office because with every release they are putting out it is getting better and better and at this point I would go as far to say that it is the best program to replace Microsoft Office (and the cheapest being it is free). You can find the free download of Open Office on there website which can be found at OpenOffice.org so go check it out and enjoy!

With the wide range of video formats out there, it can be quite a challenge to find a tool that can easily convert these to a format that is supported by your mobile device. The Pirate Bay, one of the greatest video libraries online, now has an application that does just this.

The ViO converter reduces AVI, MPEG, MP4, WMV and others videos to 20% of its original size without any reduction in image quality, and claims to do it faster than any other converter. The tool is completely free and comes with pre-configured settings for the most wisely used mobile devices, including the iPod, iPhone and BlackBerry.

The converter can be downloaded for free, but strangely enough a .torrent is not available. The ViO website is currently accessible at a subdomain of The Pirate Bay, complete with a nifty marketing pitch claiming that “ViO proprietary compression delivers better video quality, higher resolution and smaller file sizes, than anything else on the market today.”

When ViO is installed there is an optional toolbar that can be installed with it. The application itself is easy to use, and does indeed a good (and fast) job at converting different video files we’ve tried. If this takes off, it might even reduce the number of pirated downloads of some of the commercial alternatives. Some readers noted that ViO violates the GPL for at least 2 projects, The Pirate Bay will put the source online to resolve this issue.