Tech Olive

If you enjoyed Exor Studio’s top-down zombie mayhem title Zombie Driver, then you’ll be pleased to hear that the dev has announced an absolutely free expansion to the game called Blood Race. It basically adds a racing element to the game. You race against other vehicles while zombies try to get in the way of you finishing the race. Unfortunately, no word on when the expansion will be available, but there is a trailer! Watch it after the break.

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The newest installment in the Fallout series developed by Obsidian — while being a sequel to Fallout 3 — brings all new characters, as well as new features built upon it’s previous title. How does the game stack up? Is it worth your time and money? We’ve scrounged up some reviews across the interwebs and it seems Fallout: New Vegas is a big favorite amongst RPGers, but includes some minor issues. However, that doesn’t affect the bulk of the game. Read up after the break.

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After we heard about the slimming down of Seagate’s 1TB GoFlex drives, we were anxious to get our hands on one and experience what it felt like to carry around a terabyte in the back of our jeans pocket. Needless to say, it felt pretty good. The drive comes standard with USB 3.0, which is great, and if you don’t have USB 3.0 yet, no worries. The drive is backwards-compatible with USB 2.0. The only thing that turned us off was the super-reflective, glossy finish, which as anyone knows is a magnet for fingerprints, as well as any dust flying around. However, we did like the matte finish on the bottom.

Look out for our review of this bad boy in the coming days, but for now enjoy a couple of photos.

Apple pulled the “one more thing” trick yet again at their “Back to the Mac” event. That one more thing was none other than a new MacBook Air. This thing is amazingly thin, 0.68-inches at its thickest to be exact, and it weights just 2.9 lbs. It’s also a Unibody construction (as expected) and comes in either 13.3-inch or 11.6-inch flavors. As for hardware specs, it’s got a Core 2 Duo, Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics, the usual multitouch trackpad, a FaceTime camera, 802.11n, and no optical drive or hard drive. That’s right, it’s using flash storage just like the iPad.

As far as battery life, Apple claims it gets 7 hours (5 hours for 11.6-inch model) and 30 hours of standby time.

Prices will start at $999 for the cheapest model, which is an 11.6-incher with a 1.4GHz CPU and 64GB of storage. The 11.6-incher with a 1.4GHz CPU and 128GB of storage will be $1,199, while a 13.3-incher with a 1.86GHz CPU and 128GB of storage will run you $1,299. The most expensive model will cost $1,599 and comes with a 13.3-inch display, a 1.86GHz CPU and 256GB of storage. All models will come with 2GB of RAM, as well as the Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics and they’re available today.

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As expected, Apple has announced the next version of OS X, which will be known as Lion. This is where Apple explains the whole “Back to the Mac” meaning. They’re essentially going to bring many of the features of iOS over to OS X. For starters, there will be a Mac App Store, which will have many of the features that the iOS App Store has such as one-click downloads, auto-installation, and auto-updates. The Mac App Store interface looks pretty much identical to iTunes.

There’s also a new feature called Launchpad, which basically brings up a grid of Mac Apps on your desktop, just like how an iPad would display apps.

OS X will also have something called Mission Control, which brings together any open windows, as well as any open apps and pops them up all at once on the desktop.

OS X Lion is planned to release sometime next Summer, but the Mac App Store will be available for Snow Leopard users within the next 90 days. They’ll begin to accept Mac apps from devs in November.

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With 19 million people using FaceTime, Apple’s mobile video-calling feature, many users expressed great interest for a Mac version. Luckily, Apple announced that today and will release the free beta for it today as well.

[Product Page]

We’re keeping up (trying to) with Apple’s “Back to the Mac” event and the first thing they announced today was a big update to their iLife suite, iLife ’11. iPhoto will include new full screen modes, better Facebook integration, creating “books” (essentially photo albums), the ability to easily email photos, as well as pull in photos from Flickr. The new iPhoto looks a lot like an iPad app, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I think it brings together the desktop and mobile experience nicely.

The new iMovie brings better and easier audio editing capabilities (including audio effects), one step effects (let’s you create a macro of a number of effects and apply them all at once), movie trailers (where you can make neat homemade trailers from your own videos using templates), the ability to adjust FPS, and face recognition in videos!

GarageBand will include a new feature called Flex Time, which will allow to more accurately fix timing issues with your music. So instead of just easily becoming a better musician yourself, GarageBand will do all that for you! Makes sense, right? The new piece of software will also include more guitar amps and effects, as well as new guitar and piano lessons. Again, a lot of it looks like an iPad app.

iLife will come free of charge with every new Mac. If you already own a Mac and want iLife, it’s only $49 and available today.

Epic Vid of the Week is a weekly series that showcases an awesome video that we or our readers discover. Some you may have seen before and others you may have not. If you’ve discovered any videos that are worthy of an Epic Vid of the Week title, let us know!

This is Lexus’ state-of-the-art driving simulator located in Japan. They say it’s the most realistic driving simulator in the entire world. After watching the video, we’ll believe them…

Just reminder for those slackers that are tailing behind. EA has given us three Sims 3 Barnacle Bay DLC codes to give away to three lucky Tech Olive readers! How does it work? All you have to do is retweet this tweet, as well as follow us (if you’re not already) and you’ll be entered. That’s it! Just be sure to get your retweet in before 11:59PM EST on Wednesday, October 20th.

Some Basic Rules

- Anyone is eligible to enter. All you need is a Twitter account. If you don’t have one, sign up here.
- You can retweet all you want, but only one retweet will be counted per account.
- Please don’t use multiple accounts. We have evil robots that check.
- The winner will be randomly selected and then immediately notified via Twitter DM (which means you’ll have to follow our Twitter account) for further action.

View the official rules here.

In an extensive and detailed post on the Black Ops official forums, Treyarch gives a little insight as to what the PC version of the game has in store and what features are confirmed and unconfirmed. First and foremost, Black Ops will utilize Steam and its features such as Steamworks, Steam Cloud, and Valve’s Anti-Cheat system. For those worried, dedicated servers are still a go.

There’s a lot that they discuss, so head on over to the thread and read up!

via [Big Download]