Software

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is the latest descendant in a legendary multi-platform game series dating back to the 1980s. Does the newest heir live up to the Belmont legacy?

It seems that these days we here at DigitalReviews tend to review a lot of upgrades and new models of software and gadgets. That's great because we can mainly highlight the differences in the new package and refer to the background material in the previous reviews. (See here, for instance). Such is the case with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

We have done write-ups of DNS, more commonly known as Dragon, just about every year over the past four or five years and we have rated this speech recognition program very highly. I have always had a bit of a challenge with Dragon because of my somewhat Dutch accent and a just knew that a later version could make all the difference…. So how did we go this time around?

When we received our evaluation edition of Adobe CS5 we knew it could be a long time before we would be able to give our first impressions.  First up, the Master Collection is massive: some 15 (fifteen!) programs all tightly woven together.  Secondly, whilst familiar with Photoshop, most of the other programs we have not used before and some of them are best left to the professionals to evaluate.  These are the people that have need of these programs on a daily basis. Our task here at DigitalReviews is simply to give an overview of the total package by way of introduction.  That sounds simple enough but for the sheer enormity of the package.

Our recent review of Adobe’s Lightroom 3 edition was a lot simpler to write as I use this very focussed application on a daily basis but how will we fare with what has always been seen as a disparate and diverse bunch of applications thrown together fairly randomly? Or is that no longer the case? Is this a pizza with The Works that just tastes delicious no matter how you slice it? We’ll do the overview first to give you some flavour.

Then in Part II we’ll cover some highlights of the new Photoshop.
So let's have a quick look.

The biggest game to hit stores this summer is without a doubt Blizzard’s latest creation and sequel to the 1998 original hit, Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. I got a chance to play through each of the facets of this behemoth of a game and this is what I have to say about it.  

When Adobe released Lightroom 3 just recently, we knew pretty well what was going to be in this major release. No, we don’t have any prophetic gifts but having worked with the beta versions you get a good idea how it’s shaping up. So, no real surprises but it’s good to take an inventory of all the new features since we last wrote about Lightroom 2 here.

The concept of Lightroom is brilliant: it sort of imitates and duplicates the workflow of the old time professionals who used real darkrooms to develop their photos. Yes, it’s a pity that we still have brilliant mechanical and optical devices in perfect working order in our cupboards but no one would want to go back to the pre-digital age. Certainly not when they have tried the magic of Lightroom 3, the digital darkroom. To keep it brief: what are the main features that I particularly like?