Tech Olive

Due to a bug in the game (which has now been fixed), an updated version of this review will be posted up in about a week.

Today is a look at a new MMO that has quietly slipped onto the scene known as Fallen Earth. There hasn’t been much hype over this game and it’s been under the radar, but with an intuitive-looking genre mix and combat mechanic, it’ll be interesting to see how this fairs up against today’s other MMO giants.

Continue Reading »

An interesting project has just come across my desk. It seems that a team of dedicated modders are remaking Monkey Island 2 inside CryEngine 2. Now, if you are sitting there thinking “Huh?”, “So?” or “What?” than stop reading now. If you just went “Woah!” than, yes, I’m serious. The team has seen the remake from LucasArts and feel that they should remake MI2 in their own way. Their progress so far is pretty impressive, follow the break for some videos.

Continue Reading »

Activision has just announced their decision to delay the release of Blur until next year to give the development team more time to work on the multilayer aspects of the game. It’s a noble reason, but it doesn’t ease the pain caused to those that are eagerly awaiting the release of this game.

[Press Release]

Hey readers! To celebrate Tech Olive’s upcoming first birthday, we’re going to be giving away a few things. KontrolFreek and J!NX have graciously donated some gear to have us give away to some lucky Twitterers!

All you have to do is follow us on Twitter (@TechOlive). If you’re already following us, you’re already entered! You can also receive an extra chance at winning by retweeting this. And while you’re at it, you should also follow our sponsors for this giveaway, J!NX (@JINX) and KontrolFreek (@KontrolFreek)!

One lucky grand prize winner will receive a $25 giftcard to JINX.com. We’ll then select two other winners, which will each receive a set of KontrolFreek’s FPSFreek and SpeedFreek Xbox 360/PS3 controller attachments.

We’ll pick winners by random selection and announce them via Twitter and this site on our birthday, which is September 29th.

Some Basic Rules

- Any U.S. resident is eligible to enter. Sorry, U.S. residents only.
- Only one retweet will be counted for each user.
- Please don’t make up different accounts. We have evil robots that check.
- Staff members and contributing writers of Tech Olive are ineligible to enter.
- The winner will be randomly selected and then immediately notified through Twitter for further action.

View the official rules here.

Seagate just announced the world’s first 2TB hard drive that uses the 6Gbps SATA interface, making it also the world’s fastest hard drive, according to Seagate. The Barracuda XT uses 4x 500GB platters that spin at 7200RPM with a 64MB cache. The cool thing is, it’s backward compatible with today’s 1.5Gbps and 3Gbps SATA controllers, You can grab one these bad boys now for a reasonable price of $299.

[Press Release]

Based upon the roadmap of upcoming ASUS netbooks that was leaked a few weeks ago, we’d say that the 1201N is one more step closer to a release this Fall, as the 12-inch Ion-equipped netbook has shown up on a retailer website in Asia. It would be ASUS’ first netbook sporting the Nvidia Ion platform. Granted, this is only a simple listing on a foreign e-tailer website, but it does give us insight on the inside workings of the upcoming netbook.

From the specs, the 1201N will be running Intel’s N270 Atom processor along with 2GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive. On top of that, it’ll have the higher resolution (1366×768), 9400M G graphics, wireless-N and to top it all off, Windows 7 Home Premium.

If you’re currently in the market for a 12-inch Eee netbook and the suspected mid-October release date of the 1201N is deemed true, it would probably be best for you to put your upcoming Eee purchase on the back-burner for now.

via [Engadget]

The Xbox 360 wireless-N adapter recently made its debut appearance on a flyer located in a Gears of War 2: Game of the Year box in Italy. While there was an FCC appearance earlier this week, nothing seals the deal quite like hearing it straight from the horses mouth and the horse I am referring to is Microsoft. While most of us had no problem with playing games over wireless-G, the problems came when you wanted to stream media content from your PC via Windows Media Center, which was never a good time. Hopefully this new speed will correct this problem and send smiles to the faces of media enthusiasts everywhere. The flyer also shows the original adapter, which leads me to believe Microsoft will continue to sell the original, hopefully at a way lower price.

via [Joystiq]

Image Credit: mondoxbox.com

It’s no secret that Australia has an overly strict video game rating system that does not have anything for adults. Instead, they ask for an edited version of the game, but if that’s not feasible, then they issue an outright ban on the game. This has been much the case for Left 4 Dead 2. As if the massive boycott wasn’t enough to hurt Valve’s potential sales, they now have an entire country pretty much boycotting their upcoming game.

When this news hit Valve’s VP of marketing, Doug Lombardi said, “we were surprised to hear of this news yesterday,” and “obviously, everyone at Valve is pretty bummed.” Clearly, Valve has no intentions to censor the game to meet Australia’s requirements; “It would be a shame if folks in Australia, or anywhere else, are unable to purchase Left 4 Dead 2 because of a ratings issue.”

via [ShackNews]

To celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day, we thought you might benefit from this little trick. You can change your Facebook language into pirate talk. The feature has been around for some time now, but it’s very noteworthy on these kinds of days.

To change the language to pirate speak, just scroll down all the way to the bottom of the home page and click on English (US) (or whatever language you currently use) on the left side. Then select English (Pirate). This only works for the English language though. Sorry foreigners.

[Thanks, Lucas]

It seems that Microsoft’s newest PMP is selling well. Amazon.com has the Zune HD on a 1-2 month wait for the 16GB and 1-3 weeks for the 32GB model. Best Buy has it marked as “backordered” and Newegg currently has them sold out. Despite this, Microsoft’s store doesn’t seem to be low on Zune HDs.

via [Engadget]