Those Rise of Nations Just Keep on Rising

Through the power of Amazon Prime my RoN disc arrived far sooner than I expected. It’s a single disc with both Rise of Nations and Thrones and Patriots on it. I wasn’t too hopeful this was going to work on a Windows 7 machine with multiple cores, multiple monitors and larger hard drives than this game had ever seen. But to my surprise, it installed fine. A quick reboot and the game launched without a hitch. It loaded up fullscreen and my cursor movement were contained to the correct monitor. And then the wave of nostalgia hit me! It may be a decade later, but Rise of Nations still looks really good! The colors are bright, the landscape has contours, the oceans waves still look impressive and the fish still swim in the sea. I skipped the tutorial and blazed into a game. After just a couple of minutes I was reminded just how complex RoN really is. The skill […]

CCleaner – The Basics of System Maintenance – System Optimization Series

When it comes to system maintenance you may not need to look any further than CCleaner. This free tool should be the very first step in recovering space and cleaning the registry after deleting a slew of unused programs. The cleaning tools take care of the typical browser cleaning functions as well as cleaning up history from dozens of applications. You can easily remove the document history from Word and Media Player. Once that’s done you can check the registry for orphaned entries. Under the Tools option you get quick access to all your installed Apps so you can remove old progams. You can also see everything in the Startup group where you can either delete the entries or simply disable them. Don’t need a particular app for a little while? You can put in on pause instead of removing so you can go back later. You can also check out what Scheduled Tasks you have on your machine such […]

Utter Chaos for Cavendish, Sagan and Greipel on Stage 1 of the 100th Tour de France

It was a crazy finish as the actual finish line was blocked by the Orica GreenEdge team bus, the finish line was moved to 3km out, the bus was moved, the finish line was moved back to the original position, then there was a crash that took out Mark Cavendish and Peter Sagan. Andre Greipel managed to avoid the carnage, but feel victim to a flat tire that took him out of the finish as well. The three leading men all taken out for their chance to win the Yellow Jersey. All that gave the big win to Marcel Kittel who walked away with the Yellow, Green and White jerseys. What was supposed to be a flat out sprint by the fastest men turned into a battle to simply survive and get to the end. What a completely unexpected finished to the first stage of the race. Just think, 20 more stages to go. Photo from Orica GreenEdge

File Case Event with Political Dossier–Crime City

Three events at once is the name of the game. The File Case Event has also kicked off. So right now you should have the Tell No Tales event (for a few more hours anyway), the Street Brawl Event and now the File Case Event. There is looting and pillaging at every turn! This is a 20 case event with the ultimate prize of the Political Backstabber coming in at 1300 Attack and 937 Defense. It really doesn’t compare to the Street Incinerator of the Street Brawl Event, but every bit helps! My luck has been horrible for this event. I’ve tried multiple times and only have 1 successful open. The odds are not in my favor so far. Hopefully I can turn that around and at least get to number 15. That seems to be where I end up in these events and I at least want to make a good showing of it. There is a lot to […]

Street Brawl Tournament Event and Prize List–Crime City

We have a new game out tonight, the Street Brawl Tournament. The previous events have been Energy based, but since there is already an Energy event going on, this one is Stamina based. Yes indeed, you can use Energy for the Tell No Tales Event and Stamina for the Street Brawl Tournament. It’s both. It’s all of them. For this event you get a new prize for each level of players you defeat in PvP. The first round is 10, then 25, then 50, then 75, etc. One thing you will notice about this event is that it’s backwards! You get the Uber prize on completing the first level, the Street Incinerator – Explosive 3932/2500 From there the prizes actually go down, but hey, you still get a ton of excellent weapons. Gree admitted they made a mistake, but also says they won’t make changes or roll back the items. What you win is what you keep. So jump in […]