Rise & Fall: Civilizations At War

You must be remembering that I had posted about a free games bundle sponsored by the US Air Force. But, the thing is that the server speeds were terrible. So, terrible that I got a measly 5 KBps on my broad band line!!!! And that too after retrying to get a slot for 5 times!

But after a helpful search and tip I got this link for a Direct Download link for just this game. I'm using FlashGet, and am getting around 200 KBps on this. It's also supporting resuming on this download.

As for the game, the game's been given off free as an ad supported game, sponsored by the US Air Force. I'm downloading now, and will give you all a heads-up as soon as I'm done downloading and playing a little.

The main features of this game are:

Choose from four of the ancient world's mightiest empires: Persia, Greece, Egypt, or Rome plus four minor civilizations: Carthaginians, Babylonians, Gaul-Barbarians & Assyrians.

Enlist over 80 unique units to your cause, including footmen, archers, cavalry, siege and massive triremes,

Use realistically-scaled siege towers, ladders, and battering rams to annihilate city defenses and clear the way for the player's ground forces Fight for control of the seas by boarding and ramming enemy naval vessels using massive, accurately-scaled warships. Outfit warships with infantry, archers, ballistae, or catapults, depending on the player's strategic objectives,

Engage in awe-inspiring feats of heroism by personally joining your troops during climactic battles (from a third-person perspective),

Control one of eight unique Heroes including Julius Caesar, Germanicus Caesar, Cleopatra, Ramses the Great, Achilles and Alexander the Great, each with special abilities and weapons. This unique feature places the player on the battlefield as a fully controlled super weapon.

It allows you go into battle along side your troops as you take control of your hero unit, like a third person action game 

             

The Download links are below. It's a bit too large for people with slower internet connection. But, hey! It's a free game and the servers are supporting resume, so why not give it a go?

Download (2.43 GB) 

Mirror (2.43 GB) 

BSNL Usage Monitor

This nifty little software is for all those people on BSNL connection, or in oher words, specifically for Indian users.

Given the common scenario, how many times is it that you had to worry of an overblown bill, just because you couldn't check your usage? Or perhaps, you've been saving the bandwidth for the entire month, and just on the last you go overboard with your bandwidth and get handed a huge bill?

Well, if you've been facing this kind of problems and would give anything for a solution, you're in good hands. For I present you... *drum rolls* DataOne Quick Usage Finder !!!!!!

It not only helps you check you your usage, but also, gives you an approximation about how much bandwidth  you should be spending everyday to keep within the borders. You can configure it to start with windows. It sits unobtrusively in the system and tray and on doublue-clicking the icon checks with the BSNL Servers and gives you informations like, how much left, days to go, balance bandwidth, and avg usage and the bill so far, in a pop-up balloon.

On installing, you just need to feed-in your username and password, and then the program automatically checks with the servers and autodetects you plan. But the real treat is for night unlimited users. The program gives the ability to schedule the connection and disconnection times. So, you could now keep your PC running and go to sleep, while it connects at 2 am and then disconnects at 8am, giving you full download with no overblowing! It can also connect through different dialers, so, if you have multiple dialers, you can configure it to use any one to automatically connect and disconnect. Also, it has the address (the numbers thingy) for all of the BSNL portals, so that you check with the other ones, if ever one goes down.

Now, for the paranoids, that this software might use our password or something like that, I've been using it for over a year now along with my friends and haven't noticed any anamolous usage. So, you can rest assured!

And the best part is that you get all of this feature for free !!!

You can read and download about it here.

Google Chrome gets a Final Release

Finally, the face of Google in the Browser scene has gone up to it's Final release and is finally out of Beta.

According to officials, Chrome Beta has gathered up an user-base of about 10 million users, across all the continents, within 3 months. That's going to the Final release within a 100 days of it's release!

Chief improvements are even better rendering time, specially for resource hungry pages like the GMail page or other Java based web-pages, and also flash based webs, as well as videos. Then there are the obvious improvements to the security and the sand-box browsing features. Along with these, the bookmark management has been tweaked and improved, along with other overall improvements based on the user feed-backs.

According to the officials, the main reason to remove the Beta label is because Chrome has reached the targetted stability and performance milestone. But still, there's plan and rooms for future innovations and additions, most notably the Auto Form Fill feature and also an RSS reader.

You can get the download here.

You can also read more on the topic here.

Opera goes 10 (Alpha)

For all those people who've been waiting on Opera, to throw an answer to the newly released FireFox 3, like me, it's great news. So rejoice my friends: Opera is going 10.

Opera 10 will be using the new Presto 2.2 as the rendering engine, and promises to imporve it's performance on resource intensive pages like GMail and FaceBook.

Also, Opera 10 alpha is also able to score a perfect 100/100 on the Acid 3 test, the only browser to be able to do so till now.

                                           

Other features include:

• In-Line Spell Check- Opera will flag mis-spelt words
• Auto-Update- Configure it to update and install without notifying
• Full HTML Format supporting Opera Mail- Customize your E-Mails

The Alpha build is up for grabs here. You can also get the overview of the new things in this.

You can read more about Opera 10 here.

This one's an alpha build and it showcases the Presto 2.2 rendering engine. The new features will be available in the Beta Build.

I, for one, am waiting eagerly for the Final release. It's such a wonderful browser. Once I got used to it, I couldn't switch over to any other browser.