Tutorial Online

I remember the days when my iPad automatically loaded the full version of a website... then I upgraded to IOS6 and all of a sudden the whole internet thought my iPad was a mobile device... yikes!!!

Unfortunately, theres no magic setting to switch the iPad back to the way it was before the update, but there are lots of ways you can load the full version of a website on your iPad!


Heres the poll for those of you keeping track!  And, for those of you who havent been able to vote from your iPad/smartphone, do this tutorial now to load the poll so you can vote for next week! :)


There are three different options that you can use to load the full version of the site... and here they are!

Review:
Special Weapons and Tactics units are the high end of the badass scale when it comes to the police force. As the title of the group implies, theyre the special forces of the police, deployed in hostile situations where regular police tactics simply wont work. Theyre highly trained in close combat and non-lethal submission of armed subjects. They have the weapons to kill, but prefer less lethal tactics to avoid unnecessary death of suspects or civilians stuck in the middle. SWAT teams often enter unfamiliar territory without confirmation of enemy numbers or armament, making for extremely dangerous situations. Irrationals new addition to the venerable SWAT franchise does a brilliant job of picking up on all of the things that make SWAT work so exciting from the outside perspective. Theyve created some amazing levels that force team tactics along a super fun multiplayer experience for a few reasons. Friendly AI can be a problem from time to time in the single player game, but this is definitely one tactical shooter that I wont hesitate to recommend.

Graphically, SWAT 4 is very good. It can almost hold its own with nearly any of the big shooters out there at the moment, not because of any particularly great technical achievment (it doesnt have that), but because the art team and level designers put an excessive amount of detail into all of the environments. Irrational was going for realistic "lived in" spaces and they did that perfectly. These environments are filled with all sorts of odd items that you would expect to see in each of these locations. They didnt stop with the stacked crates or simple cubicles here; these areas were brought to life with extra bits of paper, trash, food, puddles, lamps, construction materials, furniture... you name it. It may seem like stuff youve seen before, but youve never seen it such a large variety of objects in such quantities.


There are some less than spectacular things like clipping, mirrors that look more like monitors showing a feed rather than a true reflection, enemy models really that arent brilliant (big frog hands as Tal says), and animations that miss their targets, but overall, this is a great visual look. Many of the environments are creepy and dark which help build tension as well. All these things not only massage the eyes with kindness but also help create more exciting gameplay. When you walk into a room that seems to have a real purpose (outside of providing an interesting game environment) things get really tense. Cans and chairs begin to look like heads and bodies, office cubicles are just tall enough so you cant see around them and create a ton of hidden nooks and corners, and doorways sprout in all directions. Extra care has to be taken to cover all vulnerable angles. Frankly, I cant imagine actually going into areas like this in real life with no more information than a map scrawled on a napkin and a "there are at least five heavily armed terrorists inside" without actually crapping myself. Read more

System requirements:
MINIMUM PC REQUIREMENTS
Windows 98SE/2000/XP
Intel Pentium III 1GHz or Intel Celeron 1.2GHz or AMD Athlon 1.2GHz Processor
256MB RAM
2GB Hard Disk Space
DirectX compatible Sound Card
nVidia GeForce 2 GTS or ATi Radeon 8500 Class Video Card
MULTIPLAYER SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

56Kbps 32-bit Internet Connection

Screen Shots: Click on the image to view large screen

Review:
The games career mode starts out with a hilarious bang. You take on the role of a nameless, faceless new racer attempting to hit the scene in the city of Rockport. An underground ranking known as the Blacklist governs who can race who, and when. You almost immediately run into a punk named Razor, whos definitely the sort of dude that lives his life a quarter-mile at a time. Hes at the bottom of the list, but a few races later, hes sabotaged your ride and has won it from you in a race. Meanwhile, youre carted off to jail. Left with nothing but some mysterious help from a stranger named Mia, your task is to get back in the race game to work your way to the top of the Blacklist, which is now topped by Razor, whos using your old car to wipe out the competition.

The game actually has a great story hook at the beginning that makes you want to see the career mode through to completion. The early story segments are told through some sort of unholy mixture of computer-generated cars and full-motion video actors. The acting in these early segments is awful...awful good, that is. Youll scratch your head and wonder if these segments are intentionally bad and meant to be played for laughs or if theyre just unintentionally funny. Either way, theyre great. Unfortunately, after a brief prologue, you stop seeing video sequences, and the story is conveyed via voicemails from various characters. Are you a cop? Will you get to utter the magic street racing words, "Mia, I am a cop"? Or is the plot twist even more painfully obvious than that? Youll have to see the story through to find out where everyones allegiances lie.

Working your way up the Blacklist is a multistep progress. Before you can challenge the next Blacklist racer, you have to satisfy a list of requirements. Youll have to win a set number of race events. And youll have to reach a set number of pursuit milestones and earn enough bounty by riling up the police. The cops hate street racers and will give chase when they see you rolling around the open city. You can also just jump right into a pursuit from a menu, too.


Running from the cops is the best action the game has to offer. Chases usually start with just one car on your tail. But as you resist, you might find 20 cars giving chase, in addition to a chopper flying overhead. Losing the cops gets tougher as your heat level rises. Level one heat results in the appearance of just your standard squad cars. But by the time you get up to level five, youll be dealing with roadblocks, spike strips, helicopters, and federal-driven Corvettes. A meter at the bottom of the screen indicates how close you are to losing the cops or getting busted. Stopping your car--or having it stopped for you by spike strips or getting completely boxed in by cops--is how youll get busted. To actually get away, youll need to get out of visual range...and stay there. The initial evasion changes the meter over to a cooldown meter. Youll have to lie low and wait for that meter to fill up to end the chase. This is probably the tensest part of the entire chase, since you never know when two cops might blow around the corner and spot you, starting the whole process over again. It all sort of works like some sort of strange, wonderful cross between Grand Theft Autos open city and Metal Gear Solids stealth mechanic. All the while, youll be acquiring heat on your car. This means that youll have to keep a couple of cars around, because acquiring heat on one car lowers the heat on your other ones. Also, getting busted too many times can result in your car getting impounded, though you can avoid that by resetting the system whenever you get caught (if thats more your speed).
Theres also a lot of racing in Most Wanteds career mode--almost too much, in fact. Youll engage in multilap circuit races, point-A-to-point-B sprint races, drag racing, checkpoint-driven tollbooth races, and speed trap, where the winner is the player that accumulates the most speed while passing by a handful of radar cameras spread throughout the track. The races are solid but not spectacular. The artificial intelligence doesnt really help things along, because most of the game is rubber-banded like crazy. We actually set our controller down for 20 seconds--then picked it back up and caught our opponents on the final lap. And though the AI will occasionally crash and come to a complete halt, itll catch up very, very quickly. Later on in the game, you get a voicemail message informing you that things are going to get tougher. At this point, the computer drivers magically start taking every single shortcut, and the rubber banding only seems to work against you. As a result, catching up after a mistake is much tougher. If this difficulty had gradually sloped up, it wouldnt be a big deal. But flipping the switch from "drive like crap" to "drive like a genius" is really annoying. Fortunately, the racing action itself is entertaining enough to keep you going, and of course, youll be dying to find out what happens next in the story. Read more

System requirements:
Windows 2000/XP
1.4GHz Processor
256MB RAM
8X CD-ROM Drive
3GB Hard Disk Space
32MB ATi Radeon 7500 or nVidia GeForce2 MX Class Video Card
DirectX compatible Sound Card
DirectX 9.0c
Keyboard
Mouse

Screen Shots: Click on the image to view large screen