Tech Olive

This is a three part review by Tim, Craig, and Steve. Each have their input on the glasses separately.

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It has happened. After years of waiting, Rockstar Games has confirmed the existence of Max Payne 3, although Max seems to have aged quite a bit since his original adventures. His physical appearance has finally caught up to his emotional state.

“We’re starting a new chapter of Max’s life with this game. This is Max as we’ve never seen him before, a few years older, more world-weary and cynical than ever. We experience the downward spiral of his life after the events of Max Payne 2 and witness his last chance for salvation.” – Sam Houser, Rockstar Games’ Founder (via WP)

The game is confirmed for release on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. No release date has been announced yet.

After Internet Explorer 8 was officially released by Microsoft at MIX09 last week, the new update for the Microsoft browser had a minimal market share increase. IE8′s average market share increased from 1.34% to 1.45% . It did manage to peak at 1.86% and now stands at 1.7%.

To compare, Google Chrome 1.0 gained about 0.1 percentage points next to IE8′s 0.52% gain on day of release. Firefox 3 gained 0.66 percentage points on the first day and 3.51 points over a two-day period.

There have been several claims about IE still being slow even with the new update. What do you think?

Merchants of Brooklyn is a very unique shooter. With a detailed futuristic world and a comic book art style not often seen in games, it caught my eye early on in its development. I was very excited to see a new game built on the amazing CryEngine, although the game had quite a rock start. With the accidental release of an alpha build instead of the final build on Steam, a slew of issues and bugs could be found throughout MoB. I was afraid this would ruin the review experience for me. Luckily, Paleo Entertainment (developer) quickly fixed the issue and the game became playable once again.

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Treyarch has finally released the first map pack for CoD: World at War. The pack adds three new multiplayer maps and one new zombie mode map which features a new ‘Perks-a-Cola’ machine. Costing 800 MS points on Xbox Live and $9.99 in the Playstation store, the map pack has not yet been released for PC, but we have been told it is coming. Treyarch is no doubt waiting for the next patch to give the maps to PC players. If that is the case, then PC gamers will once again get the maps for free.

Mozilla’s Fennec (aka Firefox Mobile) went into its early stages of beta this week.

Currently, Fennec supports only the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet (running OS2008), Windows, Mac OS X ( as long as you have an Intel processor) and Linux. Sadly, no versions are out yet for the iPhone and Blackberry.

According to Fennec’s release notes, “The initial focus of Fennec development was on building a new user experience that reflects Firefox’s design principles, adding touch screen support and other interactions appropriate for mobile phones and other handheld devices, while preserving leading features like the Smart URL Bar (‘awesome bar’) and support for add-ons.”

Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch announced the final release of Internet Explorer 8 today during his keynote at MIX09 in Las Vegas.

IE8 is available for Windows XP SP2 and SP3, Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Vista (RTM), SP1 and SP2.

Download it HERE.

After playing the demo of Tom Clancy’s HAWX, I found it hard to imagine that Ubisoft could manage an entire game of flight missions without it becoming boring or repetitive in any way. The demo was fantastic and incredibly fun, but could the retail game be as good through the entire campaign? I knew it would be possible, but I was afraid that it would lose the fun or excitement in combat after several missions.

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With the release of Merchants of Brooklyn on the 17th, many gamers who had been looking forward to its release (myself included) bought it through Steam on launch day. As with many other gamers, I noticed quite a few bugs and small annoyances in the game. Well, it seems that all the problems in MoB can be traced back to a single mistake. According to the developer’s forum, rather than releasing the final retail build of the game through Steam, they accidentally released an early Alpha build instead.

Unfortunately, the incorrect version went up on Steam. The Alpha version was released initially, this has been corrected. Please log in/log out of Steam to receive the correct version of M.O.B.

We will be patching this game periodically to correct any issues that arise, as well as new and exciting features and multiplayer modes! – Paleo Entertainment forum admin.

After restarting my Steam client, it did fix many of the issues I was having.

It’s not very often that we talk about the events surrounding Apple, but this piece of news is being heavily covered more than your average Apple news story and we felt we had to jump on the bandwagon.

Apple unveiled the 3.0 version of the iPhone’s software. New features include copy/cut/paste (thank god), Multimedia Messaging Service, new apps, a new 32GB iPhone model, the Premium App Store, and so much more.

The new 3.0 is not available just yet, but when it is, the iPhone OS 3.0 will be a free upgrade to all iPhone users, but iPod touch users will have to pay $9.95 USD for the upgrade.