Sights and Sounds of Multimedia
By George Harding
NiBiRu Age of Secrets …
This Adventure Company game has the promise of intrigue and excitement. Unfortunately, the promise falters.
The story line is that a tunnel is unearthed during the building of a new highway in Bohemia. It turns out to have been created in WW II. As the story unfolds, the Nazis and even the Mayan civilization are involved.
The graphics in the game are the usual visually stimulating beauty. I’m not sure what software is used to get such wonderful surroundings, but it produces top-notch results!
The movements of the characters in the game are less realistic. One reviewer said that the main character walked as if he had some sort of pathology! I don’t mean to say that realistic movement of people is an easy task, or even an important one. It’s just that as computer capabilities increase, you would expect that movement would tend more toward realism.
The sound is certainly very good. Music and background noise lead you to believe that you are in the locale of the moment. While walking through the forest, you hear the leaves rustling and the birds chirping. In an office, you hear the sounds of typing and paper shuffling. The voices are satisfactory, with accents consistent with the person’s nationality.
Movement within the game from one place to another is done by two methods. Large distances are covered invisibly by going through an exit and appearing in the destination. This is required for the software to load in another, quite different scene. Small, local distances are done by walking from one place to another. This is a rather mechanical process, achieved by robot-like steps in usually straight lines or right-angle turns.
When you need to talk to someone in order to get information or an object, the cursor changes to the talk symbol. If you are to give an object to someone, it shows up as a single item in your inventory. The inventory is normally only accessed by moving your cursor to the bottom of the screen, and your entire collection of inventory items is shown.
One of the critical parts of any game is the ability to save a game at any point. NiBiRu has this ability, although you may have to scroll through the previously saves to get to a blank one. It appears that you can make an indefinite number of saves.
The other critical ability is to load a previously saved game. As each game is saved, the date and time are recorded, so you can easily tell which is the most recent. Of course, you would normally save in order. The save/load screen has some kind of scary organ music playing in the background. This screen also lets you exit the game.
This game does not support the Alt-Tab sequence for switching from one Windows program to another. Thus, you must always exit the game when you want to do something else. I don’t know how complicated such a feature is, but since most games include it, I have to assume it’s not too difficult. Not being able to Alt-Tab is nothing more than an irritation, however.
Most games of this type require that a specific series of steps must be performed before proceeding to the next one. Sometimes, the steps must be done in order, though rarely so. In this game, some of the steps require you to make one or more long-distance moves, which are time consuming.
When you must make two or more of these moves, then repeat them, it gets a bit frustrating, particularly if there is to be conversation in between the moves. You can shortcut the conversation somewhat by pressing the space bar, but that only cuts that part of the conversation short.
I was not able to complete the game. I completed the series of steps I thought were required, and did it several times, but did not get the release to the next section of the game. I don’t know what else I could have done and there is a limit to how much time one spends on one game. I gave up in frustration!
This is one of the few games that doesn’t require the CD-ROM to be in the drive in order to play the game. I’m surprised at this, since I know there is a great deal of concern about piracy. Many companies are devoting considerable effort to preventing piracy. Sony’s recent CD difficulties show how problematic this is; it is always a compromise between customer convenience and corporate income.
The booklet that accompanies the game starts out with a page about epilepsy warning. All the games I’ve seen before include this warning, but it is located at the rear of the booklet. Here, the very first page talks about the possibility of seizures for those who may be susceptible. Nice work!
The plot of the game is interesting, but it takes a lot of effort to work your way through the sequence of scenes.
NiBiRu, Age of Secrets by The Adventure Company adventurecompanygames.com
Requires WIN 98 or better, 800 MHz P III or better, 128 MB RAM, 32 MB video card, 2.5 GB hard disk space.
Rated T (Teen) by ESRB with descriptors of alcohol, tobacco, blood, mild language and violence.
Price about $20
TC2000 …
Investor’s Business Daily states that more than half of the US adults own stocks, quite an amazing statement! Many of the discussions of federal tax policy assume that only the rich (whatever that means!) hold stock. I believe many people began owning stock when 401(k) plans began to be popular. One’s employer would encourage purchase of company stock in such a plan and upper level executives would receive grants of stock options. These provided an introduction to the world of stock ownership.
There are many services and tools for choosing stocks, so many, in fact that one wonders how any can possibly be useful! The Value Line service has been around for many years and has proven to be a viable tool for purchasing and holding stocks. There are few other services with the longevity of Value Line, a testament to its usefulness as well as proof that other services are good only for a short term.
There are two basic views of stock picking and holding: fundamental and technical. Using the fundamental approach (which is the Value Line choice) one looks at sales, earnings, management profit margin and other such measures of success. VL helps to analyze these factors for you and provides a grade card of success, making your job easier.
The technical approach looks at the price and volume action (and perhaps other indicators) to determine whether to buy, hold or sell. Various formations of prices are viewed as significant and indicative of future trends.
Investor’s Business Daily uses a combination of fundamental and technical analysis to come up with indicators of a stock’s worthiness. The CAN SLIM approach is a formula-driven use of the fundamental and technical approaches, which has proven to be quite successful over long terms.
For those who use charts to make decisions, a chart service is necessary. Most brokerage firms that provide online services offer charts of various types, but the capability of using them for technical analysis is very limited. At best, they provide a picture of the recent trend of a stock’s price action.
There are many services that provide detailed charts and allow quite varied analysis of them. One must always balance the quality of the chart service against the cost of it.
The service that I have been using for many years is TC2000. It provides chart data for every exchange-traded stock for many years. Price and volume are the primary data provided, but there are many more data items. Fundamental data, such as earnings, sales, PE and more, is also available, but the primary focus is the technical.
What makes this service so great, in my opinion, is that you get the data as many times per day as you want, without any difference in cost. If you want to check every hour, you can do so. I only download data once a day.
Once you have today’s (or this hour’s) data, you can analyze it in many ways. One of the tables shown in most newspapers is the Most Active. This is produced in TC2000 with one key press! But that’s not all. You can sort your data by largest percent gain, largest dollar gain, volume surge, percent increase in earnings last quarter, and many more.
In addition, you can screen the data for those stocks that meet certain combinations of criteria. For example, you might want to look at only those stocks which have capitalization over $100 million, have a price greater than $10 and less than $100, which have had earnings growth of 15% or more for three years and have a dividend yield of 5% or more. I didn’t try this, but such a scan would produce a list of stocks that you can then copy into a separate list for ease of viewing.
The chart display can be adjusted in several ways. You can show not only the price but also one or more moving averages. The same can be done for volume, if you wish. There are many indicators available for display if they are useful to you, such as MACD, linear regression, Bollinger bands, relative strength (plotted against any other stock or index), stochastics and so on. The price display can be arithmetic or logarithmic.
There is a facility, as well, for you to write personal notes for your information and to annotate the chart itself. You can draw trendlines and Fibonacci arcs. The capabilities are wide and, for me, at least, much more than I can productively use.
How much does this cost, you ask? Nothing! The software is free. However, the service to download data has a price which depends on how long a period you buy. One year costs about $300. a little over a dollar a day.
You can download the software for free and the first month’s service is free. There’s online training available for free, too. All in all, this is a very useful service for those who trade individual stocks – inexpensive, easy to use and fast!
TC2000 by Worden Corp. worden.com
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