The first sign that Kingdom Elemental is a little strange is during the tutorial where the narrator starts out in a booming voice typical of the fantasy genre. Then he coughs and in his regular speaking voice says, “this isn’t one of those games”. The tutorial takes you through moving and rotating the map and zooming with either the mouse or the keyboard. Also, you cover buying and placing units, and selecting them for battle. The whole tutorial takes around 5 to 10 minutes at most, so you can imagine how simple it is to control all of the game’s mechanics. Throughout the tutorial, the narrator is lighthearted and many of the jokes make fun of the game or you. Even the map to show your progression throughout the game is filled with some interesting humor. Another example is from a loading screen that says, “There was a skill that ended up being cut from Kingdom Elemental called “nag”. The sound clip for the skill was to be the developer’s girlfriend asking him to pick up some things from the store on the way home. The skill would kill all enemies on the board.”

You begin with three possible classes to unlock and each one has three skills/spells to unlock. You can only unlock a character once you get a key for completing a set of waves. Obviously the first class, the swordsman, is unlocked for you. Once you buy classes with a predetermined amount of gold, you place them one by one on the battlefield within your designated area. Once you are ready, the first wave attacks you. After a set amount of time another wave comes, so you benefit from quickly dispatching the previous wave of enemies as soon as possible as not to become overwhelmed. Most sets have five waves and when you beat the last wave you move on to the next part of the level. Sometimes you will meet up with a boss, where the boss is the only wave, and honestly that is enough. Watching my characters get stomped to death by the infamous Flaming Bear is both hilarious and painful.

As you can see from the screenshots above, the game isn’t going to win any beauty awards. The character models remind me slightly of Final Fantasy VII and other Playstation games, but given the games indie status and the emphasis on strategy I think the graphics are very appropriate. Each class has their own voice and have a small handful of different dialogue they spout out as you give commands. The funniest line that I found so far is the Archer’s comment as she dies that lets you know of her disappointment in her complete lack of armor.

The only part of the game that really irks me is the fact that the characters seem to move kind of slow, but the levels aren’t that large so it isn’t a real big deal. While playing you can pause the action to compose yourself and to issue orders to your small army. Unfortunately, you cannot queue up commands like other strategy games. You can only issue one command per character at a time. I did notice that this limitation made me care a little more about individual characters and in what order they were going to execute their skills. If you do not issue any command they will either attack freely (default) or hold their ground, but they will not unleash their special skills, such as the Archer’s Flame Arrow, unless commanded by you. The best tactic I have found is use the swordsmen to taunt like many MMOs, and let your support crew like the Necromancer pick the enemies off from a safe distance as they tend to have the least hitpoints.

I will admit that I am not a huge strategy or RTS gamer. I have been known to play some Rome: Total War and Supreme Commander, but I have to admit that even on “Normal” mode (the easiest mode) Kingdom Elemental is quite difficult for me. This game will definitely challenge you, but it is quite refreshing compared to many games where I have to crank the difficulty up just to have a real challenge. With all the combinations available with the classes and the difficulty of the game you will feel a great sense of accomplishment if you can even finish the game on the Normal difficulty setting. I couldn’t even keep track of the number of times I tried the dungeon over and over with various lineups only to get completely destroyed on the last wave of enemies.

I thoroughly enjoyed Kingdom Elemental and will continue to play it as a casual game since it is possible to play it in small spurts or for long periods of time in either the campaign or the skirmish mode. I would suggest that if you hate RTS or strategy games then stay away from this as it will definitely not be your “cup of tea”. If you like strategy games at all then this game is worth picking up for the reasonable price of $20 as it will challenge you and provide some decent entertainment. People that really like strategy games will find this game to be a steal as they will get the full benefit of trying out numerous class combinations until they find a set that truly compliments their play style. Unlocking classes and skills offers a little variety to the replayability. For more info go check out Liberation Games (especially the hilarious FAQ) and go here to purchase the game from Chronic Logic.

Pros:

• Very easy game mechanics
• Tactics are as complicated as you want them to be
• Great humor
• Ten different classes to unlock
• Giant Flaming Bear

Cons:

• Fairly difficult even on easiest mode
• Addictive
• No multiplayer

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Now think about comparing to similar tech products by competing companies. Let’s pretend that both of those products are compared by the same publication within a week of each other. Company A gets a 9/10 for their product and Company B gets a 7/10. Now many people, when shopping for that particular product are going to have to choose between A or B. The consumer that doesn’t want to think about it, or doesn’t know a lot about that type of product may just look at the ratings and choose the product that got the higher score. Is this the right choice? Many would say “no”, but nonetheless it effects our purchases more than we would like to admit.

So, the consumer bought product A because it had a higher score, but when they get home they find out that this multifaceted item is great, but its a bit lacking in the main task that they will use it for. “Oh well”, they say as they still feel they have bought the right item. Then they realize that it doesn’t communicate well with the rest of their gadgets because of proprietary software or protocol. Again they say “Oh well”, except not quite as convinced this time. Wanting to do a little more research about the company who made the product they just bought they find out that the company is a very large corporation. Also, the company has poor reviews for their customer service and one device they made two years ago was faulty and caused instability in the company with an obnoxious amount of RMAs and repairs. Now the customer isn’t so sure of their product, but at least it had a higher score in the review by a company who is affiliated with them through a promotion.

Now, I understand this is a bit dramatic, but I’m just trying to prove a point. You can easily compare two items side by side and assume the one with the higher score is better, but in the end you may end up hurting yourself with a bad purchase. Reviewers should not feel that they have to score everything on a scale of 10, 100, or just a letter grade. They should just concentrate on giving the facts about the product and the company. It is human nature to sway a little towards a product if you think it is nice or like the company, but to have that effect on a system where people may make side-by-side comparisons based on a single score is wrong. Consumers should only see the pros and cons and make the decision for themselves based on their own personal wants and needs. Consumers should be inspired by reviews to get all the facts about a product that they are going to spend their hard earned money on.

I feel the biggest market effected by this is the laptop market. Even if two scores for two laptops were the same, those two laptops could be significantly different from each other and suit very different user needs. Anyways, the moral of the story is to shop smart and don’t be afraid to do some research of your own. Reviews are a great starting point, but your personal needs should definitely outweigh the fact that some guy on the internet thought the product was the next greatest thing since silicon wafers and gave it a perfect ten followed by a string of unnecessary exclamation points.

The main portion of the game consists of 19 levels. The first 14 proved fairly easy and really only exist to show you what you can accomplish at a gradual rate so your simple human mind can absorb it. The last 5 levels become agressively more difficult until the last level where it will take you longer to complete than most of the other puzzles combined. The “boss battle” and ending are among the best you will ever see as you will try your best not to break concentration from a fit of laughter.

The most fun I had in the game came in the form of perfect placement of the portals. I set both portals direcly in line with each other vertically on the ceiling and floor. When I fell through the floor portal, I continued falling and falling… and falling some more. If you are good at timing your shots, you can propel yourself incredible distances just by using your built up momentum to throw you out of the exit portal.

Even in the most tense moments of the game, the robot guide’s lack of any emotion is hilarious especially when congratulatory messages are filled with generic phrases that were obviously suppose to be customized for Chell. Some real surprises in the game are the somewhat hidden easter eggs where you can find little areas where past participants stayed and wrote on the walls. I don’t want to ruin the story for anyone, but let’s just say that all is not well at the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. Also, at the very end of the game make sure to look for the lonely board room. There you will see a slideshow playing that will tie Portal in to another game included in the Orange Box.

Here is a very short video I made to give you an overall feel for the game. I didn’t want to ruin all the jokes or the puzzles for you, so it’s just a taste. Hopefully, it will make you a little more curious.

Portal is a short game (2 to 3 hours of main content), but it also has advanced levels, challenges, achievements (Thanks XBox), and commentary. This all adds up for a decent amount of content that I could easily place at around $30. Since it comes in the Orange Box with a handful of other games for $50, this is really a steal. The game should be mind blowing to just about any gamer, and even if you find the puzzles bland, the voiced guidance and stellar ending should make you want to complete it just to know what everyone else will be talking about. Also, for another added surprise, the ending credits have a hilarious song that will probably be showing up on the web as a standalone download because it is just that well written and… “sung”.

Pros:

• Clean and Simple Graphics (“Mac-like”)
• Hilarious robot guide
• Mind-bending puzzles
• Easter eggs and plenty of extra content

Cons:

• Shorter than expected
• Might cause motion sickness
• Starts off a little too easy

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The case is almost exactly the same dimensions as my Ultra MicroFly and Aspire/Apevia X-QPack. The front button appears to have an LED behind it, but I don’t know what color it is yet. The pop down drive covers are pretty solid and would blend right in if they didn’t have the little screenprinted labels on them. The front has access to two optical drives, one 3.5” drive, and a little hub with two USB ports and front audio. All pretty standard stuff.

I have owned the original Aspire/Apevia X-QPack, the Antec Aria, and the Ultra MicroFly. This case blows them out of the water because it is designed so well. It accepts a standard size ATX PSU and might accept one of those gargantuan 1000KW extended PSUs if you remove the hard drive cage. It might have some issues with the modular PSUs that have the extremely long modular connectors, but fairly standard modular PSUs shouldn’t have any issues.

The coolest thing about this case that I did not know about is that the top does not come completely off. It resides on a hinge so it carefully tilts off to the side as shown below. The top is locked into place by two plastic “slides” that tighten it down. They are quite sturdy.

Once the top comes off, there is complete unrestricted access to the motherboard tray and components. Once the motherboard is in place there is just under 120mm height clearance for your heatsink which is more than enough for most. The one issue that a lot of you might wonder about is cable routing. Overall there is plenty of room to route your cables to the lower half, but I would suggest sticking with all SATA drives just to make it easier on yourself (my SATA DVD burner was only $35). Also, a modular PSU would make it a little easier as you could disconnect from the top when you wanted to fully open the case up.

For those of you who care about ventilation, this thing rocks the boat for the better there as well (especially for a smaller case). No fans are included, but I think most of us have a pretty decent collection of fans by now. Plus if you don’t have any fans you can tailor the fans to exactly what you want, high CFM for great cooling or low dB for quiet/silent operation. In the top half there is a 60mm right in front of the hard drive cage and an 80mm in the back. For some reason the 80mm has the grill fixed into place with plastic rivets. These can easily be removed. The bottom of the case has a 120mm in the front that blows directly back to the expansion cards. The back has a plastic bracket that holds two 80mm fans even thought the metal vent is really made for 60mm fans. With some decent low decibel fans you could have the wind tunnel in this thing. I was contemplating water cooling for those of us that must overclock. If you are very careful a small water cooling rig could fit in this with the right modding, but the hinged design will give you some more issues over traditional cases. Though I’m sure someone crafty with a dremel could figure something out. Since my video card exhausts heat and the power supply exhausts heat as well, I think I am only going to run an 80mm fan on the top to exhaust any other hot air in the case. I think that should be enough, but since there will be a lack of major airflow I may have to add an active Northbridge cooler to the mobo.

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Pros:

• Solid, solid, solid
• Great hinged feature that allows access to tray easily
• Ventilation is superb
• Would make a great gaming or HTPC build.

Cons:

• It is made out of steel (instead of aluminum)
• Cable routing may be tough for newbies
• The one-piece metal cover is a pain to remove and put back on
• The 80mm fan vent in the top has the fan grill held in place with plastic rivets

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Since I am using a mITX motherboard with a Core Duo, none of their S775 or AM2 coolers would fit my mounting brackets. Luckily, my northbridge chip has the standard Intel mounting loops. I ordered Noctua’s NC-U6 northbridge heatsink because its passive and looked much more stylish than the little gray heatsink that came with my motherboard.

With basic shipping it took approximately eight days to get to Seattle from Austria. Unfortunately, the trip was hard on the shipping box and it looked as though it had been used as a soccer ball for a couple matches. I think Noctua knew that a trip that far might be little rough as the heatsink came packed securely and displayed no sign of its long journey. Also, kudos to Noctua for using recyclable packing material.

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The NC-U6 comes in a simple plastic container with cardboard backing, so its quite a bit easier to open than most other packaging I have had to fight with in the past. The heatsink comes with brackets for mounting on regular mounting holes and the Intel loops. Also, it includes some basic thermal paste, instructions, a set of Noctua stickers, a metal case badge, and a pen. I am not sure if the case badge normally comes with orders, but it was a welcome surprise. It is nice to know that the company takes pride in the quality of everything it ships out the door.

The physical construction of the heatsink is solid and made to get rid of heat fast. The solid copper face has an almost mirror finish, much better than most. The aluminum fins look great and are very thin. When working inside the tight fit of my SFF case, I rammed my hand into the heatsink. I just slightly bent the corner of the top fin. Lucky I could bend it back in place, so it still looked new.

Mounting the NC-U6 was a breeze. You pick the bracket that is compatible with your motherboard and attach it to the heatsink with a small screw. Then you clip the bracket onto the motherboard just like any other heatsink. Although thermal paste was provided, I opted to use some Arctic Silver 3 for good measure. I assume that only enthusiasts will buy this product and will most likely use an aftermarket thermal interface material. I think every company knows this, but its still pretty standard to include some standard paste along with the product.

After everything was secure I fired up the TF2 Beta for an hour to see how it performed. With minimal airflow, the stock cooler kept the norhtbridge at a normal 49C under load. Not surprisingly, the NC-U6 kept the chip to a cool 37C. That’s a 12C difference! With ample airflow through the case I would suspect that load temps could drop to below 35C. There is potential for some decent overclocking.

If I were to sum up the NC-U6 I would choose stylish and silent. Granted it performs great, but I think that the simple visual appeal and the passive design puts it ahead of many of its competitors and that is going to be a major influence for anyone that purchases this.

In the near future I may acquire another NC-U6 and attempt mounting it on my Core Duo.

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Pros:

• Great performance
• Completely Silent
• Widely compatible

Cons:

• No out-of-box option for a fan
• Fins can bend if you’re not careful

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