Computeractive! Latest software

Wallace and Gromit: Grand Adventures - The Last Resort

Tim Smith — 2009-07-11T09:15:00.000Z

Tim Smith, Computeractive, Saturday 11 July 2009 at 09:15:00

The dynamic plasticine duo take to the streets in a new adventure: The Last Resort

There’s something delightfully English about Wallace and Gromit and The Last Resort captures the spirit of the animations without missing the chance for some amusing jokes.

Wallace, the hapless cheese-loving inventor, decides to make the best of a typical English summer plagued by torrential rain by making his own beach resort in his cellar.

Naturally nothing goes to plan, with problems from finding enough sand to placating unhappy tourists. Everything comes to a head when one of the guests is hit on the head during dinner. Police Constable Dibbins decides that no-one can leave until the case is solved.

The graphics and music are good and the controls are easy to learn. Wallace and Gromit can be moved around the screen using the arrow keys and the mouse is used to select objects, either to discuss or take them to use later. The inventory system is designed so that the next step in each puzzle is clear.

The game feels a little short; none of the puzzles had us stuck for long so don’t expect to spend more than five hours or so playing it through. But this is just one episode of five, and it’s cheap at $9 (around £5.50), or you can buy all five episodes for $35 (£22).

PEGI age rating: N/A

Corel Videostudio X2 Pro Ultimate

Simon Williams — 2009-07-10T09:00:00.000Z

Simon Williams, Computeractive, Friday 10 July 2009 at 09:00:00

Corel’s video editor adds some fun features

Video Studio X2 Pro Ultimate is a video suite based around Corel’s latest incarnation of the video editor which started life as a Ulead product, often bundled with video capture cards.

Having got through to version 12 (called X2 in Corel’s numbering system), you can probably guess that most of the video-editing basics are covered. You can import video clips from camera, disc or hard disk in a variety for formats, edit them on a timeline with captions, overlays, picture-in-picture effects, narrations and soundtracks, and export to disc, media player or even Youtube.

The main new feature is Painting Creator which not only lets users add paint effects overlaid onto videos, but also to have any sequence of painting actions recorded as a macro so they can be added to the timeline themselves and played back automatically. This adds a lot of scope for customising the look and feel of finished videos.

Most of the other improvements are extensions rather than fundamentals, things like an increase in the number of tracks where you can overlay graphics and captions, from one to two. You can now also add transition effects to the overlay tracks as well as to the main track, making overlays more flexible.

There are three other programs in the X2 Pro Ultimate suite: WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray, DVD Copy 6 Plus and Steinberg WaveLab LE 6 Audio Editor.

WinDVD needs little explanation, as it’s already one of the best-known DVD players for Windows. As the name suggests, the latest version handles Blu-ray disc playback and reproduces HD movies with no noticeable artefacts. It can sca le up standard DVDs to somewhere near HD quality, too.

DVD Copy 6 Plus handles DVD and CD copying, as long as there’s no Digital Rights Management (DRM) on the files. It can handle HD content and can convert for iPod, iPhone, Zune and other players and consoles.

Often underrated, Steinberg’s WaveLab LE 6 audio editor can take audio tracks from many different sources and produce multi-channel audio. With a suitable input, such as a USB pre-amp for your sound source, it can be used to resurrect audio from cassette or vinyl disc, too.

Anno 1404

Jonathan Parkyn — 2009-07-04T09:00:00.000Z

Jonathan Parkyn, Computeractive, Saturday 4 July 2009 at 09:00:00

A strategy game full of eastern promise

Many historical strategy games take the historical part extremely seriously, trying their hardest to maintain a high level of accuracy at all times – occasionally to the detriment of the gameplay itself.

Not so Anno 1404 which, despite the very specific date in its title, doesn’t actually place the player in a real-life country or try to shoehorn a game around genuine historical facts or figures.

Instead, at the beginning of the game you’ll find yourself in the outer reaches of a generic medieval European-style empire.

To start with, you’re commissioned to construct a small settlement and carry out a few simple errands for a benevolent nobleman. Fairly early on, however, you’ll be encouraged to venture east to ‘the Orient’, whereupon you’ll be treated to an entirely new set of buildings, technologies, transports and challenges.

This is no command-and-conquer-type game, though. Anno 1404 belongs very much to the ‘build it and they will come’ end of the strategy spectrum.

Gameplay focuses on creating and growing cities, starting with a few basic hovels and turning your modest community into a sprawling metropolis with a thriving economy, busy trade routes and diplomatic relations with other cultures.

Whether you play the main campaign, the individual scenarios or the fully customisable Continuous Play option, Anno 1404 is a highly engrossing experience that will probably have you hunched in front of your PC for several hours at a time. It helps that the game’s production levels are very high.

Graphics – particularly the water effects – were extremely pleasing on the eye and a lot of attention has clearly been paid to the finer details.

Anno 1404 also benefits from a simple interface and a pleasantly breezy pace, which made it very easy to pick up the game and keep playing.

Free from the shackles of historical realism, the creators of Anno 1404 have produced a highly addictive city-building strategy game with a sharp eye for detail. The only thing that’s missing is an online multiplayer element. It’s possible to upload achievements and screenshots to the web, but you can’t currently compete or co-operate with other players in any way.

Pegi age rating: 7+

Berlitz Mandarin and Japanese Premier

Tom Royal — 2009-06-30T17:22:00.000Z

Tom Royal, Computeractive, Tuesday 30 June 2009 at 17:22:00

Learn a new language - or two

Learning a language can be rewarding, but it also tends to be expensive.

Even if you don’t fork out for a tutor, the textbooks and software on offer are often costly, so we were surprised to see this Berlitz package, which claims to teach two languages, selling for less than £20 online.

There are several language versions available – we opted for the Japanese and Mandarin Chinese version.

The main program in the box, Berlitz Learning System, was disappointing. Its ‘immersion environments’ offered plenty of photos, audio and text, but the interface was confusing and despite knowing some Japanese already we were baffled as to where to start in the Survival Phrases for Japanese environment.

After some confused clicking we found that each includes some handy conversation practice lessons, but the Theater screen that appears first is so lacking in guidance that we can imagine many users giving up before they even work out how to use the software properly.

Fortunately, the rest of the contents was far more useful. Best of all is the Before You Know It flashcard program that allows learners to practice simple words and phrases using on-screen flashcards and spoken examples. It’s simple, effective and easy to use – everything, in fact, that the main program is not.

And there’s more, too. One of the discs includes flashcard software for Palm and Windows Mobile handheld computers so you can take the same flashcards and practice them on the move – smartphone versions would have been handier for some, but this is a nice extra nonetheless.

There’s also a short audio course that can be copied to a portable music player. This concentrates on teaching useful short phrases, and although some of the teaching methods are a little daft – picturing the state of Ohio at sunrise to remember the Japanese for ‘good morning’, ohayo gozaimasu – we did learn a few new phrases.

All in all, this package is a really mixed bag. We don’t like the main program at all, and it seems daft to pay for two languages at once, but at less than £20 it’s worth buying for the flashcard tool alone.

Anno: Create a New World Nintendo DS game

Tom Royal — 2009-06-27T10:00:00.000Z

Tom Royal, Computeractive, Saturday 27 June 2009 at 10:00:00

Create a colonial empire in this pocket strategy game

The Nintendo DS's touch screen is ideal for strategy games and, in particular, 'God games' in which the player uses a bird's-eye view to build a miniature civilisation.

The latest title in the Anno series allows you to rule over a fledgling empire in the 15th century.

The plot sees you, the son of an ageing king presiding over a kingdom in trouble, sent out to find new lands to supply hungry subjects back at home. After landing on a small island you must build houses for your small band of pioneers, and clear fields for them to work. They pay you taxes, allowing you to build new facilities: a chapel, for example, or a dairy farm.

Creating more municipal buildings will attract more wealthy citizens who, in turn, are able to pay more taxes. Over time your cluster of shacks with hardy owners that require only food can grow into a city of stone houses whose patrician inhabitants need food, milk, linen clothses, herbs, spices and much more, but who pay you a fortune in return.

One island alone can't provide all the raw materials for such a city, so you'll have to spread out, colonising other islands that are suitable for growing particular goods. To find enough islands you need to acquire maps, which can be gained by meeting certain requirements such as colonising a number of islands or building a city with so many hundred inhabitants.

Fail to provide any one type of goods and your citizens will stop paying taxes – fatal when you have a few plantations to support and you're trying to save up for a cathedral. Similarly, an island left undefended can be stormed and occupied by pirates. The game's combat system, which involves moving troops around between forts and ships, isn't as polished as the rest of the game, but it works.

The game includes a story mode, which serves to introduce the key concepts of the game at a decent pace, or you can go it alone and start building a colonial empire. It's not an action-packed rollercoaster of a game, and the combat sections are a little clumsy, but the rest is strangely absorbing: with your frontier empire always perched on a knife-edge, it's hard to save the game and step away.

Fuel game

Jonathan Parkyn — 2009-06-21T16:15:00.000Z

Jonathan Parkyn, Computeractive, Sunday 21 June 2009 at 16:15:00

Let’s off-road

The idea of an open-world racer is not a new one. Several recent games, including the excellent Burnout Paradise, have offered similar worlds with no set routes, in which players can drive around to find new places to race.

Fuel promises 5,000 square miles of virtual environment to explore, making it by far the most expansive game of its type so far – something that works both for and against this ambitious racing title.

Set in an alternative near future, you and your initial vehicle are airlifted by chopper to the Wastelands area, where you can carry out a series of career races.

But once these dry up, it’s up to you to track down your next dose of high-octane racing excitement.

You’re free to cruise around the vast map looking for further career-advancing races. Exploration will also allow players to discover various challenges and secrets, such as liveries for their vehicles, fuel canisters (the game’s currency) and collectable backdrops.

Races vary from shorter on-and-off-road circuits to longer checkpoint-based rally-type events, over a remarkable variety of terrain and extreme driving conditions.

The number of available vehicles grows throughout the game, up to a maximum of 75 Mad Max-style motorbikes, dune buggies, trucks and quad bikes.

In total, there are more than 70 career races to discover and a further 190-plus challenges to take on, and that’s before we’ve even started with the multiplayer possibilities or the built-in race editor, which allows you to create your own custom tracks and races to share with your fellow petrol heads online.

The racing physics aren’t particularly realistic, but then Fuel is not intended to be an accurate driving simulation. The game’s emphasis is on arcade thrills rather than naturalism, although the pacing isn’t quite as enjoyably frenetic as with some similar titles, such as Pure.

In truth, the open-world aspect can be a bit frustrating at times, particu larly during the earlier portion of the game, when it’s easy to feel a little daunted by the huge expanse of game universe at your disposal.

But, while other similar games may do a better job of the racing itself, Fuel’s impressive, varied environments certainly make it stand out from the crowd.

Pegi age rating: 7+

Plants vs Zombies

Anthony Dhanendran — 2009-06-20T16:15:00.000Z

Anthony Dhanendran, Computeractive, Saturday 20 June 2009 at 16:15:00

Good games don’t have to be complex

Plants vs Zombies is a ‘casual game’ that bucks the trend towards ever-more-complex games with harder-to-fathom controls, featuring incredibly simple gameplay and lots of fun.

The premise is that you have to defend your house from marauding zombies, but being zombies they maraud very slowly. They can also be stopped by your plants, which fire deadly pellets, blow open or stop the creatures in other ways.

You can place a certain number of plants at any time, but sunlight is required to grow new ones, so you have to wait before putting down another. It’s also possible to plant sunflowers which generate more sunlight. All the while, the zombies approach.

It sounds easy, and it is for the first couple of levels, but there’s a good difficulty curve, with new plants becoming available each level. There are also different scenarios so things don’t get too repetitive. Graphics are good but unspectacular, and the sounds entertaining enough.

In addition to the 50 main levels there are also mini-games and puzzle modes, plus other sections that break up what might otherwise become monotonous. There are lots of different kinds of zombies, too, which helps to maintain interest levels.

This isn’t a game that requires a lot of thinking, and nor will it last those several-hour-stretches like more in-depth titles, but for the price and for regular short fun fixes, Plants vs Zombies is superb.

Avanquest Will Maker Deluxe 2009

Cliff Joseph — 2009-06-19T16:00:00.000Z

Cliff Joseph, Computeractive, Friday 19 June 2009 at 16:00:00

Create a will without resorting to a solicitor

It’s important to have a will but people are often deterred from making one by the cost of hiring a solicitor.

A low-cost piece of software that simplifies the process of drawing up a legally binding will sounds attractive, then.

But while Will Maker Deluxe 2009 from Avanquest does provide useful help in drawing up your will, we encountered a few flaws along the way.

Installing the program from its CD took just a few seconds, and once installed it displays a simple window that lists the three main steps in creating a will – selecting the correct type of will, planning its contents, and then actually filling it in.

The first two steps – Will Selection and Will Planning – simply present the user with documents to read, which explain the different types of will and how to estimate the value of your estate.

This is useful information of course, although it can be found for free on the Age Concern or the Citizen’s Advice Bureau's websites.

The third step is to Create Your Will. At this point the program uses one of its built-in will templates to ask a series of questions and uses that information to draw up the will, couched in all the appropriate legal jargon.

But although the earlier selection process refers to three different types of wills – basic, comprehensive and discretionary – the Will Maker program only includes templates for four variations on the ‘comprehensive’ format.

As a result of our feedback, the software publishers tell us that they will be adding new templates for ‘basic’ wills, and making those available as a free download soon.

Unfortunately, you will still have to pay an extra £65 to order templates for the ‘discretionary’ will online, but most of us will be able to get by with just the ‘basic’ or ‘comprehensive’ wills, so that’s not a major problem.

Will Maker does have the potential to save both time and money when making a will, but the without those additional ‘basic’ templates we can’t truly recommend it as a reliable alternative to using a solicitor.