- For those of you who are losing sleep because of the system requirements of games, the good people at Tom's Hardware provide some tips on how to build a $500 gaming rig. "(...) as we've reported many times over, benchmarks don't lie - and they show that you're often not going to notice much difference with games when investing in cutting edge technology. (...) Cutting edge is sexy. Getting the best performance for your money is not, but this purchase philosophy gets you a lot for the money."
- The Oracle League has implemented new features, acquired a new domain name and reached an important milestone: 100 reported games (113 by the time I write this, only 7 of which are for Heroes IV) since the reopening a few months ago.
- Age of Heroes has relaunched with a completely new design. Valeriy's site is being updated once again and now includes over 300 pages of information about the five Heroes games. Of particular interest is their extensive section about the Heroes IV collectible card game. It has been linked.
- Fabrice has posted a second report about the Starforce copy protection system, saying it will be his last post on the subject. He reveals statistics about other Starforce-protected Ubisoft titles and claims the number of reported problems accounts for 0.3% of the number of copies sold. Most of these problems were related to "users trying to start an ISO image of [Splinter Cell 3] with an emulator," which is exactly something that the software is meant to block. He also said that uninstalling Heroes V will uninstall Starforce as well. Check out the post for more information. Fabrice has to be commended for providing additional information on Starforce even though the debate had died out. However, I doubt it will be his last post on the topic.
- There is another contest, from Ubisoft this time, where you could win one of five Heroes V beta seats. The contest is only available to residents of France. Check out the French version of the official site for details.
That's all for now. Enjoy the week-end.