Visit us at Gamedrone.net!

You might have noticed a slight lack of new content for the past week... that is because I've been moving The Game Drone to it's own .net domain, and onto the Wordpress platform. None of the old content has moved over, so this blog will remain online for the time being, but there won't be any new content anymore.

So, update your bookmarks to http://www.gamedrone.net and check out the new blog! You'll have to resubscribe to the new blog if you had subscribed to this one, but I'm sure you'll prefer the cleaner look and faster loading of the new Game Drone! So go on, check it out. The first bits and pieces of content have already made their way to the blog....

We've had some good times here on Blogger, but it's time to move on.
See you on Gamedrone.net!

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GW:EN Sneak Peek Screenies!

It's been two weeks since the last biweekly screenshot entry, and this time I've got a massive collection of great shots from the Guild Wars: Eye of the North sneak peek weekend for you! As you probably know, this sneak peek weekend was a short preview for people who had already pre-ordered this upcoming expansion pack, and provided a small section of the new game world. You can read more about all that here, but basically these are in-game screenshots of a game scheduled to be released this friday. If you've been wondering what the new areas look like and how much better the game looks, without having to rely on ArenaNet's sparse pictures, then you've come to the right place!

The following is a batch of shots I made myself, so they're completely untouched. These are slightly larger than usual, so that you can actually see something, and they're a bit darker than the game itself, because my monitor's brightness settings suck. I've added some commentary to put the pictures in context, but if you still have any questions don't hesitate to ask! And for the ones who are sick of Guild Wars pictures for nearly 2 months in a row: don't worry, the next one won't feature Guild Wars. Of course if you do want pictures of the retail version's extended areas as well, those will be available in my review next week ;)

The new water effects are amazing!

The explorable zones now feature a lot more open space

Gwen in her new mesmer outfit, inside the Hall of Monuments

Yes, that's a giant snowball trap! They're all over the place!

Light the braziers and the bridge comes down, one of the nice 'puzzle' elements to dungeons

The entrance to my first dungeon :)

There's plenty more weird architecture below ground...

Dungeons don't really feel like dungeons when they're huge like this

There are cool gimmicks like this all over GW:EN

At the end of a dungeon awaits your rightful reward!

Even the minotaurs love Jora... who can blame them?

Drunken questing!! Those Norn love to drink!

That is one big Bison :| (and a whole lot of dead ones)

New fire effects: perhaps not quite realistic, but very cool looking

I could spend hours just admiring the view in the Far Shiverpeaks

Actually, this isn't GW:EN, but it looked so good I couldn't help myself and posted it anyway :p

Related Entries:

• GW:EN Screenshot Galore 2!
  
• Eye of the North Screenshot Festival
  
• The Guild Wars head north!
  

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My new rig has arrived!

Ok, so it's actually been here since thursday last week, but I didn't really have time to post this weekend in between testing all there was to Guild Wars: Eye of the North and properly reinstalling and reconfiguring everything on this new system. That black, Antec P182, case you see to the left is how my new monster PC looks. This is the rig I'll be using to provide you with the latest on PC gaming for the coming years, and I'm happy to report that thus far it's been performing really well.

But first things first. Let's get to a quick recap of the new hardware in my system so you know what the heck it is I'm talking about:

• Antec P182 case
• Antec TruePower Trio 550 Watt PSU
  
• ASUS P5KC motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 processor
• Kingston PC6400 2x1GB RAM
• Seagate Barracuda 320GB HDD
  
• Sparkle Geforce 8800 GTX video card
• My old 160GB Western Digital HDD and ASUS DVD player

I set it all up that day and after a fresh Windows XP (no Vista here! ... yet) install it was all ready to go. Rather than bore you with all the technical details, which I'll save for a later entry, I'll just give you a quick look at exactly how much faster this rig is than my old system. A quick 3DMark 2006 basic edition test gave my new PC a score of 10198 3DMarks.... that's right, 10198! In comparison: my old system only reached a measly 1578 3DMarks, that's less than the 2415 3DMarks my new C2D E6750 hit in CPU testing! So performance is excellent, to say the least...

One last thing I just have to mention, before getting back to testing my new hardware with the most demanding of games, is the image quality. Strangely enough this was by far the most impressive improvement over my old system; yes, even more impressive than that sixfold 3DMark increase! Literally everything looks better, with more varied and crisp colors filling the exact same pictures, videos and games. Playing Unreal Tournament 2004 on maximum settings with my old system looked nothing like it does on this rig, and the same rings true for watching videos, looking at pictures or simply navigating Windows. The image quality is noticeably better all around.

Now that I've gotten that off my chest it's back to gaming and testing for me. I'll post up an entry on my building adventures sometime soon, as well as the obligatory performance benchmarks of course. Now, if you will excuse me... I have some BioShocking to do!

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