Performance Ratio Search Results

How To: The Social Engineer's Guide to Buying an Expensive Laptop

Laptops are almost a necessity in today's society. It doesn't help that a laptop that can actually increase your work productivity will put at least a $1,500 dent in your wallet. I'm sure you have searched around to try to find factory direct deals, or (shiver) even looked at used laptops, but that isn't the way to go. You need something that actually has a warranty, and good performance, but at the same time, doesn't require you to sell a kidney. This can cause quite a dilemma, as it can tak...

News: The Brilliant Work of Zeboyd Games Highlights Some Hideous Flaws in XBLIG

Games like Minecraft and Braid have proven that there is money to be made in the indie game marketplace, which means more and more designers are following suit, one being Zeboyd Games. The two-man indie design team released two excellent JRPG spoofs on the Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) Marketplace in 2010: Breath of Death VII ($1) and Cthulhu Saves the World ($3). Both have been well-reviewed and spent time near the top of the XBLIG sales charts, but its success couldn't be rivaled by what wa...

News: Goodbye Takahashi Meijin, World's Fastest Button-Presser

Pressing the button on a video game controller quickly is like running the 100 meter dash. Both require dedication and a precise exercise regime. There is also an odd quality about both in which the range between the very best and complete neophyte is tiny. Sprinter Usain Bolt holds the record in the 100 meter run at 9.58 seconds, only three seconds faster than I ran in freshmen high school track. And yet there are thousands of sprinters from a hundred years of Olympic competition in between ...

The Witcher 2: First Impressions

Do you have an awesome rig that is able to run anything you throw at it at 60 fps with maximum settings? Prepare to be humbled. The Witcher 2 is the first game in quite some time to tax your system the same way Crysis did when it first came out.

AudioSurf vs. Polynomial: The Battle Between Psychedelic MP3 Games

In 2008, Audiosurf came out on Steam, creating the psychedelic music game genre. If you haven't played it in the intervening three years, you're missing out on one of the coolest things in video games. The player selects any MP3 on their computer, then the game builds a unique level based on that song, which the player must then navigate whilst playing a block-matching, Tetris-like puzzle game. It's an incredibly compelling audiovisual experience, one with immense replay value and surprisingl...

News: What is Belly Dance?

Good Question. Belly Dance is an American term that encompasses MANY different styles of Middle Eastern, Eastern European, and North African dances both traditional and modern, and also Fusion styles that have pieces that resemble these dances form the "old country" but are distinctly American. Also, Belly Dance is somewhat of a misnomer since the dance has much more to do with the hips than the belly. There are also many different terms for the different Belly Dance styles depending on the r...

News: Levon Helm Bustin' Out the Nitty-Gritty Mud Beats

Levon Helm... The longtime drummer for The Band , Levon Helm wore many musical hats throughout his long career, including multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, singer, impressario, studio owner, studio engineer and producer. He grew up working on a farm in Arkansas; his first instrument was guitar, which he began playing at ag eight, but after seeing the F.S. Walcott Rabbits Foot Minstrels, he decided to ...

How To: Make Crop Circles or Are Aliens Among Us?

Does this video prove that otherworldly intelligent life has visited Earth? No. It does not prove anything other than there are designs ‘etched’ onto the surface of a field. Does the video immediately above prove that otherworldly intelligent life hasn’t visited Earth? Yeah, you saw it coming; no, it proves nothing more than humans are able to ‘etch’ designs in a field of grain.

How To: Safely Overclock Your GPU, CPU & RAM for Better Speed & Performance

Overclocking is quite an awesome thing. When computer components are designed, they are made to run at a certain speed, otherwise known as their clock and bus speeds. These limits are not actually limits. You can overclock components, which essentially makes them go faster than their set limitations. This can save you a lot of cash when newer components come out and you don't have enough money to upgrade. However, when you overclock components, you must be careful and make sure that the machi...

News: Indie Games Hit the Red Carpet at the IndieCade Awards

Last Thursday, on October 7th, indie game developers from around the world walked down a red carpet in Santa Monica, California in the hopes of winning an IndieCade award. We previously discussed the IndieCade festival and conference, but the award show is a smaller, more inclusive event that provides finalists the opportunity to see their project on stage with rewards by sponsors such as LG, who presented this year’s ceremony.

LA Noire: First Impressions

L.A. Noire is the newest Rockstar (GTA4, Red Dead Redemption) game created by Team Bondi ( The Getaway). The game is set in the late 1940’s in Los Angeles. The main character, Phelps, is a war veteran rising through the ranks from police officer to detective. The game is presented in mini episodes (one case per episode) and flashbacks. Once you finish a case, you go straight to the next one. Having played four cases where the character moves from police officer to detective, here are my initi...

News: Is the Metascore Algorithm for Rating Video Games B.S.?

Guiding internet users to useful content is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world. This process is called aggregation. Google and other search engines form the top of the food chain, aggregating all of the content on the web in response to queries. There are all sorts of other important aggregators though, and you probably use at least one every day: Fark and Reddit for web content, Rotten Tomatoes for movie reviews, and Metacritic for a variety of media, but most importantly, vid...

GENRE JAM: West Side Story (1961)

There's gonna be a rumble.... For this week's GJ article, I thought I would jump right into talking about a mortal-lock favourite of mine: West Side Story. If you haven't seen it (and a lot of folks havent - dudes especially) and you want a lesson in filmmaking craft from a bonafide master then you kind of owe it to yourself to rent this undisputed gem.

How To: Sprint HTC Evo 4G Impressions

Spent the weekend with Sprint's new phone, the HTC Evo G4. Specification wise, it's better than Verizon's Incredible and T-Mobile's HD2. Apple will be announcing the new version of their phone this week. If it's comparable to leaked phone shown over at Gizmodo, then to say which phone is better is debatable. The iphone might have a better battery life but the Evo has an unlimited data plan, unlike AT&T's new tier pricing structure.

How To: Keep your battery in good condition

If there's one thing in life you should know, it's how to take care of your car. Getting around town is one of this hardest things to do unless you have a car. Automobiles transport us to work, to school, to shopping centers and they even take us to our impossible in-laws, but they can't and they won't if they aren't maintained properly. So, if you think you need a little help to keep your vehicle in tiptop shape, who better to teach than the team at NASCAR? These NASCAR racing experts will h...

How To: Maintain the rubber hoses in your car's engine

If there's one thing in life you should know, it's how to take care of your car. Getting around town is one of this hardest things to do unless you have a car. Automobiles transport us to work, to school, to shopping centers and they even take us to our impossible in-laws, but they can't and they won't if they aren't maintained properly. So, if you think you need a little help to keep your vehicle in tiptop shape, who better to teach than the team at NASCAR? These NASCAR racing experts will h...

How To: Rebuild your car engine

If there's one thing in life you should know, it's how to take care of your car. Getting around town is one of this hardest things to do unless you have a car. Automobiles transport us to work, to school, to shopping centers and they even take us to our impossible in-laws, but they can't and they won't if they aren't maintained properly. So, if you think you need a little help to keep your vehicle in tiptop shape, who better to teach than the team at NASCAR? These NASCAR racing experts will h...

How To: Prevent connecting rod failure in your car

If there's one thing in life you should know, it's how to take care of your car. Getting around town is one of this hardest things to do unless you have a car. Automobiles transport us to work, to school, to shopping centers and they even take us to our impossible in-laws, but they can't and they won't if they aren't maintained properly. So, if you think you need a little help to keep your vehicle in tiptop shape, who better to teach than the team at NASCAR? These NASCAR racing experts will h...

How To: Convert Protected M4P Files to MP3 Songs with iMovie and iTunes

I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but it's awesome that you can now download music from the iTunes Store that's free of DRM (digital rights management) limitations. That was always my biggest problem with buying music from iTunes. Paying a buck for a song that I can only play on Apple devices? Really? That's what finally led me away to other legal music downloading services like eMusic and Amazon.