Firstly, the game is way too easy. I can easily win races with a large lead on the hardest difficulty. I’m not sure what this says about the game or me but it is disappointing as a player when after only playing the game for a few hours you can already win in the hardest setting. Compare this to Untamed where I had a hard time winning races on Pro and in most cases, Pro-Am. Secondly, the tracks are terribly designed. The supercross tracks especially are way too complicated for even me (And I watch it every week!) and the rhythm sections are hard to decipher at times. The nationals tracks are also unrealistic compared to real life – in the game it’s all about technicality but in the real world it is about endurance. Yes, you can’t expect a player to throw down a 20 lap moto (Imagine the lead I’d have!) but the low amount of laps means a bad start usually (especially on “All-Time”) means there is little hope for a first place spot.

While on the topic of laps, the races are way too short. A 3 lap moto is rather pointless even in the game. 5 or 7 laps would be more appropriate to test the player and let the field spread out a little and not get clumped riders which seems to be the case usually, which results in over taking 5 players at once in some cases. Another one of my gripes is the so called “qualifying” before the national races (pops up later in the game). You essentially ride another race rather than qualifying because the qualifying race is also 3 laps (Like moto 1 and 2). Compare this to real life where qualifying is a time trial based deal and lap times aren’t affected by the random rider flying sideways into you because of the horrible physics.

In MX vs ATV Reflex there is no concept of weight. I have done frontflips and backflips by nudging people… and landing it! Almost always you will crash if your front wheel even comes close to another ride but on the other hand if you come up short there is a good chance you’ll ride away. There has been numerous times where a bot has flipped me around in the other direction by simply nudging me which ruins my race. The game has no grasp of reality – banging bars and being aggressive is part of racing. On the same note, the AI is completely stupid. I can recall seeing the leader fly off the track for seemingly no reason, or other bots just fly off the track, again, for no reason. The game becomes more of a joke when even the bots have a hard time staying on the track let alone the player. And on this note, the rules about going off track are retarded. Normally if riders go off track and re-enter the track without gaining any positions or cut the track it is fine however accidentally going wide results in 3 second penalties. I guess it doesn’t matter because you’ll most likely end up with a 10 second lead!

The controls are vastly different to previous games and once you get used to them, they’re alright however they’re poorly designed. For example, leaning weight off a jump doesn’t always mean I intend to do a whip, especially if I’m 2 feet off the ground – and this will always result in a crash. With that said, at least the game acknowledges what a whip is. The way tricks are performed, especially flips, has kind of improved but become worse at the same time. Finally the throttle does something to help a flip which is good but the normal tricks are annoying to pull off because of the hard-to-memorize trick list. They also got names of common tricks wrong, such as the Electric Doom – it’s not like it’s copyrighted or anything. I’ve also been able to pull off a 360 doing a “whip” which actually looks more like a 360 than what the game considers a 360, which is more of an off-axis backflip.

The general experience of the game is ruined by the poorly created “time line” so to speak or “event series”. In previous games, real life riders such as Carmichael would only appear on “All-time” difficulty which seems appropriate considering his skill in real life. In Reflex I saw James Stewart come last in a rookie race! The fastest man on the planet never comes last unless he crashes. It is also disappointing to see Supercross and Motocross racer in FMX competitions which makes no sense at all as most don’t even know a handful of tricks let alone enough to win competitions! The arrangement of competitions is also confusing and seems lazy. The event series for each race type in the game are also short at first but then become relatively long. It would only seem reasonable that the different classes of bikes would race all the tracks in one series. Instead the game designers tacked on random events to the end of another series; truck races in a nationals event series for example.

The addition of truck racing is poorly implemented and the courses seem ridiculous. Even more irritating is when trucks are up against motorcycles; as the winner is obvious as trucks can easily run over bikes if need be and are much faster.

I’m clearly comparing the game to real life for the most part but it’s a racing game that looks real, I can only assume it should be similar at least. Even cartoon racing games have the concept of weight in them! I wouldn’t recommend this game at all; let’s hope the next one is decent.

Well once again Adobe have come to the rescue with Adobe BrowserLab a.k.a Meer Meer. My first impressions are that it is unbelievably fast compared to other similar services. It also renders multiple browser images (yes, images, I thought it was straight HTML at first) at one time, so you can “onion skin” your selected browsers and see where objects are skewed. For example I found out IE7 renders the video page incorrectly on this site.

This free service by Adobe is still in beta so I suggest you get in quick. It was only by luck that I got in; I decided to see if it was usable after trying to find a multi-browser preview solution. You can find BrowerLab here and you need an Adobe ID (also free).

Included Browers/OS:

• Firefox 3/XP
• Firefox 2/XP
• Firefox3/OSX
• Firefox 2/OSX
• Internet Explorer 7/XP
• Internet Explorer 6/XP
• Safari 3.0/OSX

As you can see there is no support for Linux or Chrome (yet?). I’d expect Firefox on Linux to display similar to other operating systems. Firefox2 and Firefox3 usually display identical pages, same for IE6 and 7. Also, Chrome uses Webkit and so does Safari! Perhaps Adobe is still sorting out a deal with Google or still porting it over as everything is presented through Adobe Flash Player.

Also note, you need to comment out or remove any conditional statements that prompt the user with a JavaScript alert box. I just PHP-commented it out or you could add letters in some places to make it invalid.

Remember, sign up while you still can!

Well just last week my mum’s (yes, I am Australian so we spell it “mum” not “mom”) monitor started acting funny. Her entire computer is a mixed bag of brands and the monitor just happened to be an Acer, as the computer prior to that was an Acer but as expected it died after 2 years. I was ammused when I found out the actual LCD was made by LG/Phillips and the power supply board was made by TDK so I thought maybe I could fix it.

The symptoms were the monitor turns off after roughly one second. After about 5 minutes of Googling and forum stalking I was sure it was the power supply and a capactior was the issue. I took it apart and in my case, the power supply board and the board for the display adapter (excuse my lack of terminology) were two separate boards which made it a little easier. I ripped apart the monitor.

I had to wait 7 days however until I had enough time to run down to Jaycar and get some capactiors. I thought I’d take the board with me and show the person and to make sure I wouldn’t forget the rating of the capacitors I needed. The guy was rather helpful and set me up with 4 capacitors, a soldering iron and some solder. He suggested I replace all 4 of them, although he said 1 of them looked alright.

Now this was my first time using a soldering iron and it was quite the experience. I had an old motherboard (the one from that Acer computer I mentioned earlier) and decided to do some practise on that before I try it for real. After about 20 seconds I went straight into the deep end. I started trying to melt the old solder; a process that took longer than expected but I eventually got there.

I am pretty sure the existing solder had a layer of some metal hence why it took a while nevertheless I eventually got the first capactior out. I initially took care with the capactiors (the old ones that is) but I was doing this ghetto style and I didn’t have a vice on my desk so I just ripped them out after weakening the solder.

I almost gave it away though, I accidentally let my soldering iron touch the power cable of the same device… lets just say I was lucky and I was very cautious from there on. I replaced the capacitors, taking note of the correct polarity and soldered them in. I must say my soldering work was quite good for being self taught, and doing it for the first time. Moving forward I thought i would test it after replacing on capacitor. There was an improvement: The monitor stays on for more than one second but flickers so another capacitor is the issue.

I tested it after 2 more replacements and it was alright however there was a slight noise, a high pitched ringing noise. I thought why not replace the last one, surely the new ones would have no issues. To my surprise the last capactior was fine, one of the new ones wasn’t yet the monitor worked. I was really happy at this point.

I basically replaced 4 blown capactiors and it worked! It only cost $25 for the equipment I used. I bought a Soldering Iron ($15) and 4 capactiors (25V, 470 micro farad) and solder which totaled another ten dollars. I also used some pliers to pull the capactiors out and the screw driver inbuilt into it (it was one of those multi-swiss-army-knife-wannabe tools).

However if you are doing this I would suggest to you this: Get a vice, get a work place with heaps of space and wear safety glasses. I sort of walked into the dark and got kind of lost with this one but it is very satisfying to fix something as complicated as an LCD screen. It only took 3 hours or so as well but I had something to eat during that time.

P.S. Also make sure your capacitors discharge, I waited for the LED to go out.