If you’ve been on Steam recently, you may have noticed the huge hype of a Valve’s brand new, free game called Alien Swarm bundled with the Source SDK. Developed by former Black Cat Games employees, this 3rd-person shooter brings you in an “icy planet’s surface, to a subterranean lava-flooded mining facility” over run by aliens.

After the large amount of traffic on the Steam servers, I was successfully able to download and install Alien Swarm on my Macbook Pro’s bootcamp partition. Since the game is around a co-op campaign, I decided to go right into the online mode. Based on the loading times, you could tell that the servers were very packed. I was greeted by three other players. We all chose our classes (tech, medic, etc.) and started the game.

First thing I noticed was the weirdly-layed out HUD. Being more of a health at the top, weapons and players at the bottom-guy, it was difficult to adjust to this layout.

The gameplay is really unique compared to many other games and it FEELS like a console game for a variety of reasons. And the weapons make it all the better. Players get new, stronger weapons when they level up.

As for the campaign, the story line isn’t the best, and easily becomes confusing due to the plot.

In terms of the engine, the graphics look very nice but in terms of performance, it’s not living up to the Source engine name as far as expected. Example: at 1080p, David’s Mac Mini (bootcamp) gets about 15-25fps.

Overall this game deserves 4/5, especially for being free. If you have time to spare, check it out here.

Lev – Lead Writer

Apple’s Mac Mini has always been a great combination of affordability and performance in a small package. The newest model lives up to the Mac Mini name with a complete redesign, an HDMI port, and increased graphics performance. However, these changes do come at a price.

The price of the new Mini is $700, which is $100 more than the previous model.

The new Mac Mini features a design similar to the MacBook Pro. The body is made of one carved piece of aluminum, and I must say, it looks beautiful. The form factor has also changed a lot from the previous model. It is about half as thin, but has gained about an inch around. This makes it perfect if you want it to sit under your monitor or TV, but still want it to have breathing room. The power supply has also been put inside the computer, so the power cord no longer has a huge brick on it.

The internals have changed a lot from previous models. On the back, many inputs have been changed around. There is a FireWire 800 port, an Ethernet port, Audio In/Out, an HDMI port (Apple includes an HDMI-to-DVI adapter in the box), a Mini Display port, 4x USB ports ( down from 5 in the previous model), and an SD card reader (previous models did not have this). There of course, is a SuperDrive in the front on the regular model, not the server edition. Inside is also a 320GB HDD that clocks at 5400RPM. I do wish Apple gave us a choice to put in an SSD or at least a 7200RPM hard drive. The one in it currently seems a little slow for a desktop. The base model also only comes with 2GB RAM. This is completely unacceptable for the $700 price point. If you are going to be running Windows in a virtual machine, you’re going to need much more than that. Luckily, Apple finally made it easy to upgrade the RAM.

There is a door on the bottom of the machine and all you have to do is turn it and remove it, and you have easy access to the RAM. The memory itself however, isn’t cheap. a 2GB stick is going to cost you around $100. Apple are kind of ripping you off with the performance of the computer, going down from a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo to a 2.4GHz and Going down from 4GB of RAM to 2GB. This is all made up for though, with the new GPU, the NVIDIA Geforce 320M. Apple claims that it is twice as fast as the 9400M. I must say, I was impressed by the speed of the chip and if no one told me, I would never be able to tell that it’s integrated. I am able to watch YouTube videos at 1080p with no lag whatsoever and I now use this as my primary gaming computer, it’s that good. On Windows 7 with BootCamp, I am able to play games such as Guitar Hero III, Halo 2, and Modern Warfare 2 at 1920×1080 at med-high settings at around 40-70fps. It is capable at handling Crysis at High settings with ~20fps, but the computer seems to get very hot and loud. I was able to play some older games like Half-Life 2 at 1920×1080, all high, and 6xMSAA at 100+ fps. Seriously, this thing is powerful. If you are a casual gamer this computer is perfect for you.

As for normal business/web use, this probably isn’t going to be as good as the previous model because of the slower
processor and less RAM, but I haven’t been disappointed when it comes to speed. I really don’t think it’s worth buying this computer to use as a home theater PC, despite it’s HDMI port, simply because there are much better uses for it, it’s a very powerful machine. It’s a solid computer and a perfect choice for anyone who wants a Mac but doesn’t want to pay too much for one.

David – Senior Editor

I get asked this question by so many people that I’m tired of having to repeat myself all the time. It’s commonly phrased something like, “What’s the difference between Mac and PC?” or “How do you compare the two operating systems?” Well, the answer is quite simple.

You can’t.

Why can’t you compare the two? Well, because the Macintosh and Windows operating systems are fundamentally different, going deep down into the roots of Apple and Microsoft’s software practices. And what is this difference of which I speak? It’s the hardware-software relationship.

Basically, the hardware-software relationship dictates how software works with hardware, i.e. which hardware an operating system runs on. As we know, Macintosh is built to only run on Apple hardware, while Windows was developed to be able to run on as diverse environments as possible. Therefore, we simply cannot compare the two operating systems, because their overall environments are drastically different. You might disagree in that it is possible to compare UI elements – well, of course you can compare how certain parts of the interface are implemented and argue that one operating system is better than the other, and this will go on forever, but here, I wish to find the fundamental difference between the systems – what is the main underlying difference between the Macintosh and Windows operating systems? That’s why the hardware-software relationship is so important.

Now, let’s take the diversity we just identified and expand upon it a little bit to form a general view of the two sides. Let’s start with Mac, again. If we know that the OS was built to run on only Apple hardware, what does this mean? Well, it means that Apple put the kibosh on third-parties. By that, I mean that they aren’t willing to accept third-party technologies in the general development and function of their OS. Just as their hardware is limited, so are drivers – the number of devices manufactured by other companies that connect to computers through USB or other popular protocols is very small, in comparison to Windows. This just shows that Apple’s goal is not to create a system that others can contribute to, in the way that Windows runs. Really, how many times have you tried connecting a peripheral to a machine running Windows and drivers weren’t built in or available on an accompanying disk? My bet: very few.

Naturally, one could go on to assume that Apple is, in a way, monopolizing users of their operating system by creating such a bond between hardware and software. However, I do not want people to think that this article is biased – yes, I despise Mac (Windows & Linux FTW!), but I don’t want that to get in the way of our little analysis (I could write a lot about why I greatly prefer Windows over Mac, but that’s another story).

As you can see, Macintosh and Windows are very different, but the most important difference is their fundamental standpoint, expressed in the hardware-software relationship. Without these being equivalent, we just cannot compare one operating system to another.

This post was originally published on Absolutely2Nothing, the author’s blog.

Maxim – Editor, TechReevu.com

Image Credit: Engadget.com

Recently, Microsoft released the successor to their Zune, called the Zune HD. Looking through the original posts of the Zune HD on Engadget.com, I noticed people saying that the Zune HD will “pwn” the iPod Touch. With only several development copies available at the time, there was no knowing on which would be the best in the end. Epsecially since, those comments were posted before the release of the actual product and, before the recent Apple Event.