Developer/publisher Bethesda Softworks has had a lot of success with the three previous Elder Scrolls games and the third game in the series, Morrowind, really is one of earliest examples of a true open world style game. Beth Soft has learned from making the first three games for Oblivion and as a result the fourth Elder Scrolls series is by far the best in the line and in my view is the clear winner for the best PC game released in 2006. The fantasy world depicted in Oblivion is vast and it also happens to be one of the best looking games released this year. You immediately have the option to make your playable character in Oblivion pretty much however you want. While you can focus on the main storyline, Oblivion gives you the option to just go nuts after the first hour or so and explore and take on the entire game world of Tamriel if you want.
It helps that combat, both in melee and in magic modes, is fast and furious rather than the slow and tedious way most RPGs handle these aspects. Production values are high (getting Patrick Stewart among others to be voice actors for the game was quite a coup) and if you happen to play through the entire content of the shipped version of Oblivion you have the choice of downloading the paid extra content from BethSoft or download any of the free third party mods that people have made for Oblivion. I’m not normally an RPG fan but its hard to turn yourself away for just one more hour playing this game and that’s why I’m selecting it as my pick for best PC game of 2006.
Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon 4850 Dual Slot Review
The Sapphire Toxic 4850 is loaded with features. The card ships with an all-copper dual slot, dual heatpipe cooler from Zalman, the VF900-Cu. But that's not all, the board is also OC'ed to higher speeds than any other 4850 card on the market. In this article we officially review the Sapphire Toxic 4850 as well as its younger brother the 4850 Dual Slot. Both cards deliver cooling that's significantly improved over ATI's cooler. Find out how well these cards perform in today's review!
Soul Calibur IV Review
Are the additions of Darth Vader and Yoda enough to carry the Soul Calibur series? Yes and no. Brett finds the fighting enjoyable, but Namco Bandai's isn't perfect. Read the pros and cons in today's review!
FiringSquad Rumor Patrol: Apple, NVIDIA
FiringSquad's top secret division looks at technology rumors floating around the 'net. In this round: NVIDIA and Apple!
Palit GeForce 9800 GT Sonic Review
Rather than rely on NVIDIA's reference board design for the 9800 GT, Palit has incorporated a number of improvements into their 9800 GT Sonic, including a 3-phase board design, dual-slot cooling, and OC'ed clock speeds. How does the 9800 GT card perform in comparison to the popular GeForce 8800 GT and a host of other GPUs? Find out in this article!
Budget Gaming PC Roundup
In this article, Jakes takes a look at three different $1,000 gaming PCs from CyberPower, iBuyPower, and MainGear PC. Each company took a different approach to tackling the $1,000 budget, and one company really stood out with their extraordinary build quality. See how the various PCs fared in our Budget Gaming PC Roundup!
PhysX Performance Update: GPU vs. PPU vs. CPU
After posting our PhysX story last week, many of you wrote in asking for PPU benchmarks, so today we've delivered! Armed with our original BFG PhysX card, we booted up an X48 Core 2 QX9650 testbed and re-ran the benchmarks. See how the PPU fared against the CPU and GPU in this quick article!
ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Performance Preview
With 1600 shaders, 2.0GB of GDDR5 memory, and 2.4 TeraFLOPS of graphics horsepower, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is one impressive performer. See how the card stacks up running 8xAA against SLI GeForce GTX 280 and 260 in single card and 4-Way CrossFire. We've also thrown in 24xAA benchmarks as well. Is 2GB of memory really necessary? All the answers lie inside!
PhysX Performance with GeForce
Later this month NVIDIA will open up GeForce-based PhysX processing to their entire range of GeForce 8/9 and GTX 200 GPUs. In this article we take a look at their performance (as well as ATI's Radeon HD 4000 series), in four different PhysX applications. What kind of performance can you expect? Find out inside!
MSI R4850 512M Review
Looking for a Radeon 4850 card that runs significantly cooler than ATI's stock Radeon 4850 reference design? If so, you'll want to check out MSI's R4850 512M. The card features a dual-slot cooler with quad copper heatpipes. See how the card compares to the regular Radeon 450 in today's review!
![Top 5 Games of 2006 [ @ 1024 x 768 ] > View Full-Size in another window.](images/13-s.jpg)
![Top 5 Games of 2006 [ @ 1024 x 768 ] > View Full-Size in another window.](images/14-s.jpg)
![Top 5 Games of 2006 [ @ 1024 x 768 ] > View Full-Size in another window.](images/15-s.jpg)
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