I’ve come across a great little game called Splat a Rat, which is easy and fun to play, and a great stress reliever.

The game comes with 4 variations but each one involves splatting rats, imagine your finger is a giant hammer and you have to hit the on-screen rats, to often gory effect.

There are several different types of rat to splat, from rats with dynamite on their back that causes large explosions to rats strapped to jet packs which when hit fly off around the screen and kill any other rat that they touch, and watch out for Zombie Rats.

There are 4 different variations of the game to play:

Kill Kill Kill – where you have to kill as many rats as possible in 60 seconds

Save the cheese – where you have to save  cheese segments from the rats for as long as possible.

Population attack – where you have to keep the number of Rats on screen below 60 for as long as possible.

Zombie Attack – where you have to protect the non-effected rats from the zombie rats for as long a s possible.

Having 4 versions of the game add important variety and helps add fresh challenges to the game. Splat a Rat is a fun game and the key to it’s fun is its simplicity, if you see a rat –  SPLAT IT

To download Splat a Rat search for splatarat through the app store or click here.

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WGT golf has a different approach to bringing golf to your computer screen, through your Internet Browser.

Perhaps unusually for browser games WGT golf looks fantastic, and it achieves this by placing computer generated images over real photographs of the golf courses and the effect is impressive.

The control system is simple but does depend on skill, you move the mouse forward to set the power of the stroke and then have to click to stop a moving bar at the right time to set the accuracy of the shot.

You can play 2 different types of game, closest to the hole where you have 1 shot to get as close to the pin as you can, and traditional stroke play, although stroke play isn’t available on all courses so you need to select the right course for the game you want to play.

There are several multiplayer options available through WGT so you don’t have to play alone and WGT organise tournaments for you to take  part in.

To play WGT Golf click here

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Recently a video has appeared on the Internet showing th first 10 mins of gameplay, check out the size of the bosses.

For example check out the Blog of Alice and Kev. The author Robin Burkinshaw has used Sims 3 to create the life of 2 homeless sims called Alice and Kev, Alice is nice but clumsy and Kev is a grumpy nutter of a man who hates children, which is a shame as Kev is Alice’s father.

Rather then creating a home for Alice and Kev, Robin has done a good job of creating a run down park with a couple of benches to sleep on and left his sims pennyless.

Robin runs an excellent Blog which tells the story of the struggle which is Alice and Kev’s life through fantastic pictures, and the blog provides the opportunity to donate money to a homes charity. You can also download the characters for use in your own game from the site.

If you have an interest in The Sims or in virtual life….or even if you just enjoy a moving story then check out Robin’s Blog.

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It also provides the facility to allow users to build their own worlds and tracks, and the creation tools are that powerful that it’s possible to create near perfect simulations of rail routes.

A great example of how the tool kit can be used for a serious project, is the East Coast Main Line Trainz Project.

5 years in the making and 1000s of man hours building a virtual railway that captures the essence of the last years of the Deltic’s engines running from London to York and on to Edinburgh on the East Coast Main Line.

The project has created a world based around the year of 1975 just before the introduction of the High Speed Train and the removal of the famous Deltics from the top ranking London – Edinburgh services.

During this time period:

• The 3rd tunnel at Kings Cross was abandoned as was the underground service to Moorgate.
• The first electric services on the new route from Moorgate, Finsbury Park and Royston started as did massive the engineering work on upgrading the whole route of the ECML.

The East Coast Main Line Trainz team is a small group whose aim is to build the 393 mile ECML from Edinburgh to London, Kings Cross and the surrounding routes.

Many famous locomotives over the years have enhanced the ECML from the old days of the Stirling Single to the modern steam locomotives of Mallard and Flying Scotsman. The group mainly grew up with the most famous British diesel locomotive ever built. The 2 stroke opposed piston Deltic’s that operated from 1960 – 1982.

The ECML Trainz team supports the continuing restoration and operation of these locomotives by helping the Deltic Preservation Society with the Deltic simulator cab, and more recently the Koyli group, whose locomotive 55002 The Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry is owned by the National Railway Museum which requires external help.

To see an example of the finished results of the project watch the video below.

An online version of FreeCiv has been released which runs in a web browser.

Just point your browser at http://freeciv.net/ Register for a free account and click on play now.

As I enjoyed Civ when I was younger I thought I would see how easy it was to installed and how well it performed under Windows Vista on the Panasonic CF-F8

To install FreeCiv:

1. Download the application from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/freeciv/Freeciv-2.1.8-win32-gtk2-setup.exe?download
2. Run the set up application



3. Agree to the license agreement and keep clicking Next until the option to choose the installation location.
4. Select where you want to install FreeCiv and start the install.

FreeCiv is now installed.

When run you get the option of which game type you want to play (single player, Network game Etc) and there are various gameplay options to tweek (eg your nation & the number of AI players).
The game plays in a very similar way to the original Civilisation, and plays very well on the Panasonic F8. The graphics are functional rather then beautiful do they do look very clear on the nice screen of the F8.

There are several different versions of MAME but I’m going to be using a version of MAME32 which has a Windows front end….traditionally MAME is a command line application.

I’m downloading MAME32 from Here.

After it’s downloaded run the file and it will extract to a folder of your choice.

MAME needs Roms to use and a number have been made legally available from here.

Download a rom and put it into the roms directory, you don’t need to unzip it.

Run Mame32 and the application will load.

In this test I thought I would see how well Counter Strike Source operates on the machine. Counter Strike source is distributed over Steam one of the most popular PC first Person shooters of all time, with millions of fans building on line communities in support of the machine.

Counter Strike Source would push a lot of laptops to the limit especially a laptop aimed at the business market, so I thought it a good test. Counter Strike Source come with a built in stress test to test how well your PC will cope with the game.

Performing the stress test gives a result of an average of 43.63 frames per second, which is actually quite respectable and indicates that the game will perform will. Occasionally the video update on sections of the screen is a little delayed, I believe that this is down to the graphics card rather the processing power.

For a laptop aimed at business users – pretty good going