Regardless of the select game type, only play money games are supported by PokerTH. When it comes to local poker games against the computer, users can select the total number of players for the poker table, the starting cash, blind progression settings and a game speed.

There is no difficulty setting available, at least none that is configurable on the front end. Network games use the same configuration settings with the difference that timeouts for player actions and delays between hands can be configured as well.

There is no option to create a tournament online or change the game mode from Texas Holdem to another poker variant. A click on Internet game opens a log in screen where users can log in with their account or as guests.

The lobby displays all players and games. A click on Join any game joins one of the available games. It is possible to create games, even as a guest. Games can be protected with a password which is nice if you only want to play with your friends. The remaining settings are exactly the same as the local area network poker game settings. Game Type is listed but not selectable, at least not as a guest.

One of the issues in play money games are users who go all in all the time. This makes some games unplayable. It is usually a better idea to play against the computer or friends who take poker seriously.

Registered users are automatically added to an online leaderboard where scores, win and loss, percentages, trends and other stats are displayed.

A couple hundred players are usually online at any time of the day. That’s a small number compared to the big poker rooms with tens of thousands of players.

Still, poker players who prefer to play offline or in a lan may find that PokerTH is a very suitable program for that purpose. The latest version of the program and its source code can be downloaded at the developer website.

Lets take a closer look at Stealth Bastard. The game is a portable game for Windows. You need to create an account on first start which you can do by entering a username and password. That’s it. No email verification or other nonsense. When you select to play the original levels of the game, you will notice that the first are designed as a tutorial to explain the basic game concepts.

It is always the player’s task to reach the level exit. You can move the player with the cursor keys and z jumps. You can crouch by holding down, and interact with objects by holding up (for instance to hack computer systems). It is also possible to jump and hold on to a ledge (and jump again from that position).

Since it is a stealth game, stealth plays a big role in it. You can hide in shadows which helps to avoid detectors and enemies searching for you. The game puts an indicator on the screen so that you see on a glance whether you are hidden or not. And if you are not, you usually die pretty soon thereafter.

The challenge of the game is to reach the exit in one piece. For that you have to avoid traps and robots in each map. When you look at the traps you see some variety there, from laser beams over crushing blocks and moving platforms. You will also encounter stationary detectors and robots patrolling the area. Considering that you do not have a weapon, your best bet is to stay low and try to sneak through a maps defenses to reach the level exit.

The developers of Stealth Bastard have added puzzle elements to the game. This may include something profane as moving an object over a switch to open a door in the level.

The game has more to offer than just a single campaign. First of all, you compete with your score against all other players of the game. The score is always the time it takes you to reach the level exit. You can replay levels at any time to score better.

The second thing that sets the game apart is the level editor that comes with it. The standard maps are not difficulty enough? Create your own or play maps created by other Stealth Bastard players.

Stealth Bastard Video

Verdict

What I really like about Stealth Bastard, apart from it being free and bloody awesome, is that it is easy to learn but hard to master. That, and the fact that it concentrating on stealth and not weapons and fighting. That’s very refreshing The visuals are very nice, as are the music and animations.

This game could have easily sold for $5 to $10 on Steam or Xbox Live Arcade. My bet is that it would be highly popular on those channels.

I highly suggest you give Stealth Bastard a try. You can download the game from the developer website directly. The editor and everything else you need to play is included in that download.

Not all games that are installed on the system will be added to Game Explorer. The majority of Steam games for instance will not appear there, as won’t portable games and many other games that the service does not support.

To make matters worse, it is not as easy as it could be to add new games to Game Explorer, or remove some of the games from the listing. If you ever tried to dragg a Steam game shortcut to Game Explorer you know what I mean.

When you start Game Explorer Builder you will notice that it populates all existing game of Game Explorer automatically.

You can delete game entries right away or double-click them to launch them on the system. Adding games is a somewhat complicated process, as you need to add multiple file links for each game before the game is added to Game Explorer. Here is a short guide on how to add the game Team Fortress 2 to Game Explorer.

Team Fortress 2 is a Steam game and your efforts to add it to Game Explorer may have fallen short because of this.

Right-click in Game Explorer Builder and select Add Game > Create Resource.

Click on Resource Output and select a directory for the GFDResource.dll file. Enter a name and description for the game under General. You can fill out Details, Developers, Publishers and Genres if you like, but do not need to as they are optional. Switch to the Images tab and click the Icon path afterwards. Navigate to your Team Fortress 2 > TF > Resource directory and select the game.ico as the icon. If you do not have an icon you may want to search on the Internet for it.

Click the Boxart path and select the game boxart for inclusion. you may need to download the boxart from the Internet. Click on Create afterwards.

This opens yet another configuration window. You need to add a shortcut to the game. Click the Add Record button under Shortcuts. Enter a name for the shortcut. A click on the Shortcut path opens the file browser. Navigate to the Steam folder and select Steam.exe. Activate Parameter afterwards and add -applaunch 440 to it. This launches Team Fortress 2. You can find out app numbers of Steam games by creating a desktop icon and looking at the shortcut afterwards.

Click Ok and the Install on the Install Game Resource screen. If everything worked out fine, you should now see the Team Fortress 2 game in Game Explorer Builder, and your Windows Game Explorer.

The original Game Explorer Builder website is not available anymore. I have uploaded the Windows program to Ghacks, you can download it here. The program requires the Microsoft .NET Framework.

The developers of Game Booster have now published a beta version of the upcoming Game Booster 2, and boy have they changed the application. The most obvious change becomes visible right after startup: A new and modern looking interface that displays an overview on the start page, and the available features in the left sidebar.

game booster 2

Game Booster 2 displays advice on that page as well, listing the services that can be stopped and drivers that need to be updated.

The program’s main feature, the ability to improve game performance, is largely achieved by turning off services in Windows that are not needed while gaming. The number of services that can be deactivated in gaming mode depend on the operating system’s configuration. Users who never tweaked their services may find that Game Booster suggests to stop 20 or more services.

A click on details next to an entry under Advice leads to a configuration page. A click on details next to services will display the services that can be stopped in gaming mode. It is important to take a good look at the suggestions, to prevent that services are stopped that need to run all the time.

A checkmark next to a service indicates that it will be stopped if the game mode is activated.

game booster 2 services

Game Booster 2 does not stop here. Running processes are displayed that can be stopped in game mode as well. The processes are limited, and system processes are automatically excluded from the list.

The program scans the system for installed drivers, and will suggest driver updates if newer drivers are found in its database.

The page lists the driver name, installed version, new version and release date in the Game drivers section. A click on Go to download page opens the manufacturer’s driver download page in the default web browser.

game driver download

It again pays of to check the scan results prior to downloading and installing the suggested drivers. Game Booster 2 detected an update for the installed Ati Radeon 4870 video card to Catalyst 10.8, even though that version was already installed on the system.

Game Booster 2 integrates several additional features:

• Game Essentials: Download links to software related to gaming, at the moment TeamSpeak 3 and Xfire.
• Game Defrag: Offers to defragment game files and game directories only.
• System Tweaks: One click tweaks for top performance, will make changes to some Registry settings.
• Game Tools: Links to Windows tools related to gaming.

The effectiveness of Game Booster 2 relies heavily on the initial state of the operating system. It will not be that effective, or effective at all, on systems that have already been optimized for gaming or performance. Users who run their system with the default settings on the other hand may see improvements in gaming mode.

Game Booster 2 can be downloaded by clicking on this link, the official website can be accessed here.

A major problem in Windows XP was the missing central location for all installed games. It was up to the user to place all game shortcuts in the start menu into one folder, to access the games without having to search for them first in the depths of the Windows start menu.

Microsoft tried to tackle the problem with the Games Explorer, which was introduced in Windows Vista (see Windows Vista Games for pointers). The Games Explorer acted as a central hub for games installed on the PC system.

Microsoft made the decision to include an updated version of the Games Explorer in Windows 7, which now included options to inform the user about software updates and game related news.

The Games Explorer in its current stage has several weaknesses. First, only supported games are added to it automatically, which means that portable and unsupported games are not added to it. This is for instance the case for most games that are offered via the popular Steam gaming platform.

Even worse is the fact that it is not that easy to add games to the Games Explorer if they are not supported.

The Games Explorer link is hidden deep in the Windows Start Menu. It is however possible to move it from the start menu to the desktop, or another location on the computer system to access the installed games faster.

To do this click on the start menu orb, the All Programs, Games, and drag and drop the Games Explorer program link to the new location.

Another option is to enable Game Explorer directly by creating a new folder in the location the games should appear, and renaming it to Games Explorer.{ED228FDF-9EA8-4870-83b1-96b02CFE0D52}.

The Games Explorer may not be the best option yet, considering that it may miss installed games. And Windows XP users have no access to it anyway. The solution is a custom folder that contains all game shortcuts. That’s easily done by creating a new folder in the location you want to access the games, e.g. the desktop. Right-click the desktop, select New > Folder and name it Games.

Now drag and drop all game shortcuts from the start menu, desktop or Windows Explorer into that one folder. Et voila, all games are accessible from that folder directly. It may require more work initially but the benefit is that no game is left behind, if you know what I mean.

AssaultCube

AssaultCube is a quite simple 3D FPS available for Linux, OS X and Windows, which just reached version 1.0 about a week ago. The graphics are not very advanced, but a benefit of this is that it’s easier to run a server and that it can run on nearly any machine.

The best aspect of AssaultCube is the online play; there’s always a few busy servers available where one can play capture the flag, deathmatches or variations on those modes. AssaultCube is limited to seven weapons: sniper rifle, assault rifle, handgun, grenades, knives, shotgun and submachine guns.

Maps can be created for AssaultCube quite easily.

Sauerbraten

Sauerbraten is an FPS built on the same engine on which AssaultCube is built but has much more sophisticated graphics and is built in a fantasy world as opposed to a real one.

In Sauerbraten, weapons include crossbows, guns and rocketlaunchers. This is definitely a more interesting variety than AssaultCube! Once again, CTF and deathmatch are popular game modes.

The game notably lacks a crouch mechanism and struggles to run at higher resolutions on my MacBook Pro. However, it is an amazing open-source game with many fantastic maps.

Once again, Sauerbraten is orientated towards online pay but the CPU games are much better than AssaultCube’s.

Interestingly, the game can also be played as a 3rd person shooter!

Nexuiz

Nexuiz is an FPS with quite fictional weapons, like electricity guns etc. The game clearly belongs in the realms of fantasy, being set on a space station where one must shoot aliens.

I find the game difficult to play. Movement is far too fast compared to Cube engine games and it really does require quick reflexives.

The game isn’t smooth either. Before a game starts, there’s a text-only screen telling me what is loading etc. and the menu at the start looks terrible, especially at my screen resolution.

It’s still a fantastic game to play, however.

AssaultCube

Sauerbraten

Nexuiz

Needless to say there’s scores of other good games, these are just my favourite free (as in beer and freedom) shooters.

The Windows Game Explorer goes one step further by providing a control panel view of the installed Windows Vista games. At the first start of Windows Vista only the default games show up with big icons which makes identification easier. Microsoft added a few new games to Windows Vista and raised the design of them tremendously compared to previous operating systems. The biggest improvement over Windows XP however is the automatic addition of many games to the Windows Vista Game Explorer.

Not all games are compatible though. It’s fair to say that new games and popular old games are most likely compatible while lesser popular games are not. These can still be added but need to be moved to the Game Explorer by the user.

Several software developers have tried to port the functionality of the Vista Game Explorer to Windows XP to give XP users a similar experience. Users who are interested in playing Windows Vista Games on Windows XP can perform a Google search and will find ways to play them. It’s rather shady and I would not advise doing it unless you own Windows XP and Windows Vista. The search string Windows Vista Games should do the trick.

Microsoft made another decision that had lesser impact on Windows Vista sales than they hoped. DirectX 10 was made to run exclusively on Windows Vista. Windows XP gamers faced the decision to either stay on Windows XP and play the games with DirectX 9 or switch to Windows Vista to be able to play games in DirectX 10. The lack of high end video cards that were able to produce a constant playable framerate in DirectX 10 and the lack of games supporting that feature were probably the two biggest reasons why this strategy failed completely.

Microsoft lists only nine games on their DirectX 10 website. Good games but no critical mass to justify switching from Windows XP to Windows Vista just for gaming purposes.

There are not many exclusive Windows Vista games either which might make users change other than the newly created games that ship with the operating system and the games Halo2 and Shadowrun, both no prime examples of PC games though.

The Game Explorer will hopefully make its way into the next Microsoft operating system codenamed Windows 7. DirectX 10, or maybe 11 surely will and it remains to be seen if Windows Vista users will be left standing in the rain like the Windows XP users before.

I found some jewels that I did not know about and that I think are worth mentioning and trying out. Rumble Box looks unique. Beat objects that are located in a box, every time an object is defeated it stays right there and raises the ground level a little bit. You will have to defeat as many objects that it needs to get out of the box.

Another game that looks really promising is Blitz 1941 a tank massively multiplayer online game. Looks pretty unique and fun to me, takes some time to download the client. You can chose to play the Russian or the German site and use their tanks depending on your level and some other factors. All tanks look historical correct, you can play for instance in a Jadgpanther or Tiger 1 for the German site.