Crossing The Line

Grief can do funny things to you, even let you open up portals to the land of the dead. Or so things are in Crossing The Line, a hugely ambitious independent shooter that's reaching further and deeper than a two-developer team might be expected to reach. Taking the premise of a downtrodden and grieving chief police detective and giving him the ability to cross between worlds as he investigates his wife's death may not seem immediately challenging, but this is a CryEngine FPS title that is starting to feel like The Darkness with all the comic book trappings stripped out.

What Will Google's New Mission Statement Be?

Sarah Dobbs looks at Google's upcoming projects to see how it might have grown past its initial intentions.

Way back when, in the days when Google was a young company and not yet a verb, its founders were trying to figure out what kind of company they wanted to be. Someone - exactly who it was has become muddied over the years, with a few different candidates named in different sources - came up with the simple phrase 'Don't be evil', and that's been at the core of Google's values ever since. Another part of the mission statement says that Google's aim is "to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Looking at what Google has done since it was founded in 1998, even the harshest Google sceptic would be hard pushed to say it hasn't achieved that second part, but what about the first?

10 Years of World of Warcaft

Blizzard’s game director on WOW, Том Chilton, reflects on a decsde of MMO dominance and how Blizzard's experiment created a pop culture icon.

How many game developers can say they created something that impacted the world to the point of being a major plot point in not one, but two different comedic shows in the US? That could help inspire an entire web series (that in turn helped launch and popularise the concept of web TV shows), change the way other game developers think about rewarding players and become so synonymous with its genre that it’s basically interchangeable with it.

Make no mistake, World Of Warcraft has been one of the most extraordinary gaming stories of its decadelong life span and as its latest expansion, Warlords Of Draenor, lands we thought we would sit down with its game director Tom Chilton to reflect on the last ten years and what it has all meant to him.

StarTech 3 Port Portable USB 3.0 Hub With Gigabit Ethernet Adapter

StarTech brings back what Ultrabook makers left out.

For those that can afford Ultrabooks they're great, right up till you realise to make a system that thin and powerful, some parts were intentionally left out. Optical disks were annexed a while back, and these days' even USB and LAN ports are being banished in an attempt to be ever thinner and lighter.

The ST3300GU3B by StarTech aims to add back both a selection of USB 3.0 ports and a LAN port back, all packaged in a neat aluminium cased accessory. All this is done with portability in mind, I presume, as the adapter is just 87mm long, 40mm wide and 12mm high (excluding the short integrated USB cable). Alongside this in the packaging are a driver CD, multi-regional power supply, and some basic instructions.

Ashampoo HDD Control 3

Keep your hard drives in good condition with this set of utilities from Ashampoo.

I think it's fair to say that very few computer users give much thought to their hard drives. They just sit there passing data back and forth and last forever... right? No... wrong! They have a life expectancy like everything else, and have a habit of failing at the most inopportune moment. This means that investing in some software that can keep them in tip top condition, while possibly warning you of impending disaster, seems sensible. This latest product from Ashampoo will do all that, and a whole lot more as well.