July 1, 2013

Rise of Nations ended in a Hazy Shade of Nuclear Winter

My tutorial based, mano a mano, get to know Rise of Nations again game ended in a rather surprising way. As I wrote previously, I started a new game where I would be the Romans in the wilds of the Australian Outback. It took me a long time to get my bearings in this new land, but after a time I managed to research decent military units at the library, had enough universities to increase my knowledge and mined, farmed and found enough resources to build an army. With my ports building battleships and my barracks and stables building weapons I finally got to the point where I could defend myself against invaders – if they decided to show up. From there I built jet fighters, cruise missiles and stealth bombers. I thought I had a pretty badass nation going. So I sent my ships to scout the perimeter to destroy ports and oil fields. With a sea battle distraction […]

July 1, 2013

Removing Programs with Ashampoo Uninstaller – System Optimization Series

If only Windows had an Undo function when it came to programs. When you uninstall a program so much of it is left behind that it’s like you never got rid of it. You end up with orphaned files and folders all over the place. VirtualBox has an awesome Undo feature that lets you throw away any of the changes you make to a machine. Install apps with reckless abandon, change what you want, but then shut the machine down and check the option to discard changes and everything is back the way it was. Too bad you can’t get Windows to do that… Or can you? Installation Monitor tools have been around for a long time. I even remember Symantec putting out the Norton Uninstall Deluxe for Windows, which was actually a pretty decent tool for removing apps from your machine. It was also great for monitoring the changes made during an install. Yet another good tool from their […]

June 29, 2013

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 […]

June 29, 2013

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 […]

June 28, 2013

From Age of Empires to Rise of Nations

An article about Microsoft’s plans to make Age of Empires for the mobile platform, including the iPad had me longing for the days of what I consider to be one of the best series of games made – Age of Empires. I spent hours playing both Age of Empires and Age of Kings (including all the expansion packs). I feel this was a watershed series of games for Microsoft. At the time, Microsoft wanted to be a game publisher. They wanted that “Home” market and needed more than just Flight Simulator and Links. Along comes Ensemble Studios and hits their first game right out of the park. It wasn’t just a “decent” or “alright” title, it was fantastic. It had great graphics, awesome music and sounds, a complex and exciting skill tree and it was a great single player as well as multi-player network game. At the time, when it hit 6pm, the corporate network was alive with AoE. There […]

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