Tekken 6 – An honest review

Tekken has maintained its popularity since its advent without the need to reinvent itself.Tekken 6 – An honest reviewIts a game that speaks for itself.Well..The wait is over..Tekken 6 was released yesterday with all pomp and show and soon all the gaming press will flock on to review it.In the mean time I got my hands on a PS3 import and I decided to get my hands dirty and write an honest review about it...

Graphics - 8/10
If Tekken has one thing,its style which gives the game a distinct look and feel that forces the series to move to its roots without the need of reinventing itself.The game efficiently makes us gawk at the motion comic recaps in the story mode and  impressively rendered CGI sequences in the opening and ending movies..Tekken sports next-gen graphics engine under its hood and the game ran smoothly with no frame drops at all.

The CGI are excellent

The visuals are amazing and aesthetic,however I felt cheated when I felt that the character animations are recycled a bit which nevertheless are animated very well..The scenario campaign mode looks dated and I felt if I was duking out Godhand with a bit of updated graphics. Also some background sported stupid background scrolling which made me think if the stage was really moving..Overall its a huge upgrade of Tekken 5 on graphics front but there are some things which need to be reconsidered.Perhaps an expansion might sort it out.

Sound – 9/10

The music in Tekken 6 sets the overall mood for the fighting.The middle eastern,western,jazz and electronic;all are mingled very well to produce an awesome aural experience. the opening track and the CGI music is very well done.There is a certain series staple ‘thump’ sound associated with the hits which gives hitting someone in face an experience worthwhile.The tunes are catchy and I was forced to stop the match and to listen to the background music at times.Over all its well done.

Design - 8.5/10

Tekken 6 sets fan expectations quite high with the long development time and all the hype its associated with.The sequel boasts 40 characters to choose from and the ability to play online,the series has done its bit to remain competitive.In the standard offline mode,the game offers staple Practice Mode,the Story Mode in which you will battle and overtly powerful final boss Azazel,the ghost mashups that lets you battle AI opponents which simulate real world characters quite well and provide you a decent competition,the Time Attack and the Survival which will test your efficiency and record your personal best.With a second human player on side (as it happened with me) you can get into some serious vs battles.

Tekken 6 Character select

The Online play at the time of launch was quite poor with serious lag affecting the gameplay,as the strict timing needed for competitive gameplay is severely compromised and in some cases lag makes the game completely unplayable.The online mode also lets you download ghost data for your personal use and for your ranked and unranked matches.

Tekken 6

The game includes a scenario campaign mode that's an entirely a different game altogether,like the Tekken Force mode in the original Tekken 3 but the incompetent camera and the bad implementation of moveset in the campaign can make your experience sour.

Gameplay – 9/10

Tekken embraces both the newcomers and the series veterans with open arms and you will have plenty of fun all together as long as you will be matching up against opponents of your level.The 4 button fighting scheme may seem deceptively intuitive to the players,but it needs skill and the right timing to keep the attacks flowing and be in the groove.Mixing up the throws,the high and low attacks,sidestepping all gives you a tactical advantage against the opponent,but simply mashing up buttons and hoping for the best is fun too. The game heavily emphasizes combos for massive damage and puts emphasis on bounding moves,which means to slam opponents on the ground and then attack using appropriate moves at specific time to keep the low juggle going on.

Tekken 6 juggle

The matches move on too quickly and the game features a rage system which means the game gives player a last boost of attack power when his health is low to change the face of match.The game has a 3d fighting experience of its own and overall its just another Tekken at heart.

 

Last word

Like MGS4,Tekken 6 is a love it or hate it type of game.When you will fire it up,you will probably already know how it

Tekken 6

will strike you and the series has already maintained a good following for good reasons.In the end,even if the extras provided are not worth in gold,they still add a good value to the overall package.Tekken 6 is just Tekken 6 nothing more,nothing less.

Final Score – 34.5/40

 

 

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Google Spanner – A better Google

A recent presentation confirmed the existence of the proprietary distributed technology that will automatically move untitledand replicate the load between Google’s mega data centers when traffic and hardware issues arise. Perhaps this was  done to counter the issues of lagtime when Gmail was down..who knows? The platform is known as Spanner.

Google fellow Jeff Dean hinted about Spanner in the classic Google manner during a conference this summer and has now confirmed its existence in a presentation (PDF) delivered at a symposium earlier this month. .Dean’s presentation calls it a “storage and computation system that spans all our data centers [and that] automatically moves and adds replicas of data and computation based on constraints and usage patterns.” This includes issues and constraints related to bandwidth, packet loss, power, resources, and “failure modes”.

Google Spanner

Google is intent on scaling Spanner to between one million and 10 million servers, encompassing 10 trillion (1013) directories and a quintillion (1018) bytes of storage. And all this would be spread across “100s to 1000s” of locations around the world.

Thats a hell lot of data and power granted to a single corporation which will be housing an exabyte of the world's data across thousands of custom-built data centers.

Lets see how this unfolds..

 

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Microsoft addon blocked by Firefox

Last Friday Mozilla blocked one of Microsoft’s sneaky addons that put end user security at stake.The addon,dubbed as the usual suspect...".NET Framework Assistant" and a plug-in named "Windows Presentation Foundation" -- have been blocked by Mozilla  as a precautionary measure, said Mike Shaver, the company's head of engineering.These addons installed without any permission and may be manipulated by malicious users to code their way into the browser and infiltrate the system(Who knows a botnet may be well under a way..anyway?),even their Internet Explorer 8 had the same built in flaw.The addon was notable for its annoying removal and had been infiltrating firefox since Microsoft pushed them out with the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1) update in February this year.Until or unless some registry hacking was employed,this addon was impossible to remove entirely.As the folks at Mozilla cant fix the software,the safest way they can go on with was to block it,which they already did on Friday.

Later Microsoft released a patch which will counter the vulnerability,you can download it here.

Mozilla have been aggressive for the security for their users and have been making sure that 3rd party addons are secure and will enforce it more effectively with the release of Firefox 3.6 (Beta slated to be released on wednesday) which will actively notify user when they will visit a site which relies on vulnerable and outdated addons.

 

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Diwali Celebrations and Home coming

Happy DiwaliFriends..The festival of light is knocking as usual and its time for some grand celebrations at home.I will be leaving today for Ambala, leaving my room and my beloved mean machine and all of techs to have some peace and to light some crackers :P . Diwali holds some of the most special moments for me in my life,and symbolises the victory of Good over Evil as in mythology,and some old grand reunions of friends at our favorite hangouts.Its been some time when since I have had a vacation..I will be getting back into old streets of Ambala,decorate my home till it shines the most (literally),light diya’s, feast on sweets and play pranks on my friends..
May this Diwali bring endless pleasure,happiness and peace to all of you and may it rejuvenate all of us to live life like it is meant to be.
A very Happy Diwali once again.
I will be back on Monday and will resume to my daily caricature of technology.


PROHACK wishes you a very Happy Diwali  !!!
I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do..
Cheers

Rishabh Dangwal

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Russia Blamed with Cyberattack on Poland

Leaked details by the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita indicate a large but unsuccessful attack on Polish Government systems which originated in Russia last month.The details indicate that the attack coincided with the 70th anniversaryCyber Crime news of the outbreak of World War Two and was coordinated at the same time when Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Poland.

The attack might have been referenced to the anniversary of infamous invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on September 1939 under the secret terms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop non-aggression pact,however its still unclear as actual reason have not surfaced..yet.

Russia has been in news as the disputes between Russia and its neighbors have made their way over the Internet in recent years. and For example, Russian Hackers have been quite nefarious over cyberattacks at Georgia last year and security researchers subsequently blamed the attacks on civilians and Russian cyber-crime gangs.

The Internet infrastructure of Estonia was ripped apart in April 2007, following a dispute over the relocation of Soviet-era war memorials and graves.

 

Via The Registrar

 

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Ethical Hacking and Security Classes – Begin With Basics

Newspaper insert
The security scene at India is quite ugly,according to a survey,a whopping 97% of computer users are pretty ignorant when it comes to computer security Folks,last time I mentioned about the classes's on Ethical Hacking and Security which are going to be held at Rajpura as of now. The course Fee has been discounted to a mere 1500/- INR for Indian citizens (75 USD for foreign citizens) for the inauguration batch.The course will be covering from the ground zero of security and its basics.The course duration will be 16 hours and will be held at weekends 2 hours each to complete it in 1 month.
You can contact me using the contact form provided here

Keep learning

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7 Must Have Tools For Every Hacker

Its been a while since I have posted about some hacking tools and with increasing number of emails asking me to do an  7 Must Have Tools For Every Hackerarticle on it,I finally decided to cover it up.Hacking tools are developed by some really good coders out there to ease out many complex tasks which have to be done manually and took painstakingly great deal of time and effort.All these tools provided here are free of cost,are tried hands on and are being actively developed by community,and if not,their alternatives are provided.To summarize it up,these are the 7 must have tools for every hacker out there.
1. Nmap
I think everyone has heard of this one, it recently had a version 5 release.
Nmap (Network Mapper) is a free open source utility for network exploration or security auditing. It was designed to Nmap rapidly scan large networks, although it works fine against single hosts.Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use,and dozens of other characteristics. It may be used to discover computers and services on a computer network, thus creating a "map" of the network.Nmap runs on most types of computers and both console and graphical versions are available. Nmap is free and open source.Can be used by beginners (-sT) or by pros alike (packet_trace). A very versatile tool, once you fully understand the results.
Download Nmap
Also,You can learn how to perform a simple Nmap scan by reading this article.
2. Nessus Remote Security Scanner
Recently went closed source, but is still essentially free. Works with a client-server framework.Nessus is the worlds  Nessus Remote Security Scanner most popular vulnerability scanner used in over 75,000organizations world-wide. Many of the worlds largest organizations are realizing significant cost savings by using Nessus to audit business-critical enterprise devices and applications.
Download Nessus
3. Wireshark
If you have been reading my site,you might have read about it in a couple of articles.Wireshark is a GTK+-based  Wiresharknetwork protocol analyzer, or sniffer, that lets you capture and interactively browse the contents of network frames. The goal of the project is to create a commercial-quality analyzer for Unix and to give Wireshark features that are missing from closed-source sniffers. Works great on both Linux and Windows (with a GUI), easy to use and can reconstruct TCP/IP Streams! .
Download Wireshark
4. Cain and Abel
The swiss knife of hacking tools..Cain & Abel is a password recovery tool for Microsoft Operating Systems. It allows easy recovery of various kind of passwords by sniffing the network, cracking encrypted passwords using Dictionary, Brute-Force and Cryptanalysis attacks, recording VoIP conversations, decoding scrambled passwords, revealing password boxes, uncovering cached passwords and analyzing routing protocols.The program does not exploit any software vulnerabilities or bugs that could not be fixed with little effort.
Download Cain and Abel
5. Kismet
Kismet is an 802.11 layer2 wireless network detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system. Kismet will work with  Kismetany wireless card which supports raw monitoring (rfmon) mode, and can sniff 802.11b, 802.11a, and 802.11g traffic. A good wireless tool as long as your card supports rfmon
Download Kismet
6. NetStumbler
Yes a decent wireless tool for Windows! Sadly not as powerful as it’s Linux counterparts, but it’s easy to use and has a NetStumbler nice interface, good for the basics of war-driving. NetStumbler is a tool for Windows that allows you to detect Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) using 802.11b, 802.11a and 802.11g. It has many uses:
  1. Verify that your network is set up the way you intended.
  2. Find locations with poor coverage in your WLAN.
  3. Detect other networks that may be causing interference on your network.
  4. Detect unauthorized rogue access points in your workplace.
  5. Help aim directional antennas for long-haul WLAN links.
  6. Use it recreationally for WarDriving.
Download NetStumbler
7. SuperScan
Powerful TCP port scanner, pinger, resolver. SuperScan 4 is an update of the highly popular Windows port scanning tool, SuperScan.If you need an alternative for nmap on Windows with a decent interface, I suggest you check this out, it’s pretty nice.
Download Superscan
Alternatively,you can try Angry IP Scanner which is a pretty good replacement for it.

You might also want to read about -
5 hacking sites for budding Hackers
Top 10 Must read articles at Prohack
Top 10 linux Speed hacks
5 Myths about Safe Surfing


Stay Gold and keep learning.

PS : Like this article ? You can always support me by buying me a coffee or You can always try some of the cool merchandize from PROHACK.


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