Review: Angry Birds

I'm going to be openly honest.The reason for lack of activity here for the past while is partly due to social obligations, but mostly...

..due...

...to this:

Grrr!

Angry Birds is one of the most addictive and fiendishly simple games ever.
It is frustrating and rewarding in equal measures and is guaranteed to feast monstrously on your time and energy.


The premise behind the game is as absurd as the concept of birds being angry and requiring a slingshot to fly.
In the game, you try to judge the correct angle to sling birds into structures housing green pigs who have stolen eggs. The idea is to crush or knock the piggies out of existence and eventually lead the troop of birds to their precious eggs. However, those devious pigs have an assortment of ever difficult buildings and underhanded tricks to keep the angry birds at bay.

Each round can be completed in usually under a minute, but some will require tens of attempts to work out the optimal strike points to best collapse structures. This is the essence of the addictive nature of the game... always getting that bit closer with each attempt, and each attempt lasting about half a minute.

The graphics are friendly and cartoony, and the audio is quite funny between the comedic squawks and giggle-inducing grunts, which, even in the direst of frustration keeps the player quite amused.

But bottom line: is Angry Birds any use?

As a deterrent to anything else and a frustrating tool of procrastination, most certainly.
If you're looking to be in any way actually productive with your life, definitely not!

Angry Birds is available for PC, i-phone and other devices at game developers Rovio, here for a very affordable few dollars.

Review: Perfect Optimizer

I recently had a major headache with my PC.
It was freezing badly so I decided to give it a healthy, long overdue reboot.

Not sure what had happened the poor old thing, but it refused to boot up, instead informing me the system32 files were missing or corrupt.

Ouch.

Using another machine, I found a fix and proceeded to jump the necessary hoops.
DOS prompts and safe-mode boots and so on...
Eventually I was able to log in to my familiar cluttered desktop and began normal proceedings.

Alas, there was something or another yet awry. Software was acting strangely and installs weren't completing.
An error code search led me to download and try (and then register) Perfect Optimizer.

It promises to clean, tidy and generally improve the running of your PC.
Certainly as it scans and reveals information about how borked your machine is, it seems to know what it's doing.

It counts into the hundreds, if not thousands of registry anomalies and claims gigs of data as 'clutter' among other signs of digital disease in the bowels of the OS.

The trial version will fix a very limited amount of problems.
Only after registering the product will the registry be even touched.

Having registered (almost $40) and gratefully clicking 'fix all', Perfect Optimizer does its thing and proudly claims your computer as '100 healthy'. 100 what, we can't be sure, but PO seems confident.

One issue I had before running the package was that my Anti-virus wouldn't update.
That was fixed after running Perfect Optimizer, but the issue has since returned, which leads me to dread that certain issues remain (and that things could get far worse without an updated anti-virus).

So, my verdict this time can't be very conclusive...

Is 'Perfect Optimizer' any use?
Verdict: Seems to be on the surface, but I'm too scared to risk a reboot!