Game Magazine Reviews

Boredom is powerful. It’s also very frustrating to deal with. How do you fight boredom? Do you go for a walk? Read a book? Twiddle your thumbs? Call friends? These might seem like logical ways to combat boredom, but they often don’t work. Even if they do work, they are only short-term solutions. If you want an excellent way to fight boredom, play puzzle games. There are hundreds of puzzle-oriented games out there, and almost all of them can be found online. That said, you’re not going to need access to hundreds of puzzle games. First of all, that would be too many games to choose from. By the time you were done reviewing each one, you would be exhausted. Second of all, everyone has their favorite puzzle game.

A puzzle game is different than any other type of game because a puzzle game is addictive. Action and arcade games are the types of games that you can play and then immediately move on to another game in the same genre. With a puzzle game, the mental challenge is so fierce that you become obsessed with conquering the challenge – regardless of how long it takes.

In recent years, one of the most popular puzzle games has been Sodoku. This is the perfect game for anyone who enjoys working with numbers. Just be prepared to spend a lot of time playing, because once you begin, you’re not going to want to stop. There are tons of puzzles at each level; therefore, the challenge seems to last forever. A more classic type of puzzle that can also be considered a game is a jigsaw puzzle. These also take up a lot of time, but this time is often spent between several hours and a few days. Once the puzzle is complete, you enjoy looking at it for a while before moving on to the next one. Completing a jigsaw puzzle comes with a great sense of accomplishment – even if you’re an astrophysicist. If you would like to play a fast-paced puzzle game, consider Tetris, which features falling blocks in different shapes. The object of the game is to get all the pieces to fit. But don’t become too proud if you find some success, because success means increased speed. This game is highly addictive, and for good reason. It’s a lot of fun. Read the rest of this entry »

The thrills of a well executed game far outweigh the occasional hitches but all online gamers agree that high latency is the most annoying issue affecting their performance. Latency or ping time, known technically as round trip time or RTT, goes by milliseconds and depends on the connection given by an online game server to its network clients thru a cable modem. Not only are these questionable RTT’s often way longer than what system commands such as ping or tracert return, but gamers also have to deal with more packet loss than what their system utilities show.

When you’re serious about your game, this could be a problem. But it’s fortunately a no brainer. Too high latency and packet loss often have to do with a cable modem having limited network traffic volume capacity, thus stalling network packets or losing them altogether. Sometimes, it’s simply that network clients are getting way too much traffic.

This happens when a game connected through ethernet or USB, for example, automatically configures itelf for a 10Mbps LAN connection which is created to handle heavy network traffic. The cable modem then tends to lag because it is forced to perform beyond its design and capacity. While this doesn’t harm TCP traffic, it does cause packet loss and high ping times for games running on UDP (unreliable datagram protocol).

In this case, you’ll have to skew your game configurations a little so they come easy on your slower-than-normal LAN connection. There are actually websites you can check for game setting variations and step-by-step procedures on how to get the most out of your gaming experience. While some games need you to use the cl_rate or rate commands on your gaming console to turn up your data rate to a max of 6000 – 10000 bytes per second for a cable connection, others require you to go right down to details such as maxpackets and snaps. Read the rest of this entry »