Directed @ OP - oh wow, a business didn't bother upgrading their existing software platform to Vista - that's not remotely suprising. It took years upon years until XP was standard in businesses, there are STILL many businesses that run on windows 2000. The company I work in still has to support various legacy platforms (old browsers and flash versions) for our software because our clients haven't bothered upgrading yet.

This has nothing to do with the average joe nonsensical bashing of how 'omg vista sux!1!!'. It's a case of the OS not offering anything in terms of increasing worker productivity.

It's a glitch in the cracks, for a game that's been on the scene for 2 days. I'm pretty sure they'll fix the crack....It took a LONG time to crack one of the splinter cell games, but somebody eventually got it after a number of months.

They don't just try once and give up. I'm still of the opinion that the Valve business model is the best thing you can do against pirates - offer something BETTER for those who pay.

To be fair the vast majority of people pay no attention to the custom map scene - and rightly so, since 99% of the stuff is tripe with little or no balance. As far as the bulk of players are concerned they'll never have seen anything like Goldrush before. As such, my point is still completely valid - people will flock to Goldrush servers the day it comes out.

The only custom maps being ran by leagues that I know of include Station and Science.

Dustbowl is easy to be one of the most popular maps at the moment - it's very very simple. Everybody does the right thing (well, unless you're on offence and half the team is engineer). The tactics behind maps like Granary/Gravelpit are more complex, generally the less experienced will be caught at the wrong end of the map. This is frustrating for the inexperienced AND the experienced players at the same time.

It's also flat out a great map, basically unchanged between TFC and TF2. It was massively popular in TFC public games too.

This is directed to the OP: Goldrush isn't out yet, there will be loads of servers running it when it comes since it's a new map style and sounds fun (unlike the CTF version of Well or something which nobody cares about). It's due out within the next week.

Lets not mention realism - there's no realistic way to recover from bullet wounds in a matter of seconds. You might get away with this in a sci-fi game but that makes up a niche and we're talking about general terms here.

It's worth noting that in games like Half Life 2 most of the health packs are not static. If you're running around on 80-90 health you're far less likely to find more health, however if you're low then you're increasingly likely.

One argument in favour of health packs is it gives the developers another way by which they can control the difficulty of a particular section.

Ultimately the inclusion of auto regenerating health in modern FPS is probably just down to new games copying Halo.

Probably does very little considering the 8800GT standard cooler has a shroud on it.

I use the standard cooler, it's fine for normal use - I guess if you got one of those early 8800GT's with the tiny fan then they're bad, but I can't see justice in buying a new cooler that costs 15% the card costed.

Full review up at Hexus No suprise here - it's just a renamed overclocked 8800GTS 512MB, hence it's launch price is actually lower than the 8800GTS launched at.

What you WILL see in the next coming month or so is the 8800GTS falling in price - it'll be the best card for its money by far. You will probably struggle to get a 2nd one in 8 months though if you're thinking about SLI in the future.