Game On! is a PC gaming
utility from Fogware that allows gamers easy access to their games while
providing the best experience possible. The Game On! package includes three
programs that will help your PC become an optimized gaming machine.
The programs featured in
Game On! are Speed Disc, Game PC Tuner, and Game Cheat.
I found Speed Disc to be
the most useful of all three utilities. Speed Disc allows you to set up virtual
disc drives on your PC. What this means is that your computer will think there
is a new disc drive installed in your computer, allowing you to put “virtual”
discs into your computer.
You may be wondering what
good this all does. Well, Speed Disc also has a game disc ripper, meaning you
can copy everything off of your game disc to a single file on your computer
called an image file. Now you can take this image file of your game disc and
insert, or “mount”, it into your virtual hard drive. Your computer thinks that
your game disc is in one of your disc drives, when really you have just mounted
an image file to your virtual drive. These image files can be very large, but if
you only play a few games on your PC, or have enough space, then having speed
disc is extremely useful. Your games load faster and you no longer have to
constantly swap CD’s or DVD’s to play a different game.
The second utility is
Game PC Tuner, which will change the settings and configuration of your PC to
fine tune it into an efficient gaming platform. I was a little apprehensive
about allowing it to mess with my system settings, but Game PC Tuner lets you
save your current configuration, and then reload it after you are done gaming. I
didn’t run into any problems using this, and I even noticed an improvement in
many areas.
When running Game PC
Tuner it lists General Settings, DirectX and video card, Display and effects,
Network and Internet, Drive and cache handling, and Windows services as the
components it affects. It’s somewhat vague in exactly what it’s doing, but my
games ran much smoother and after reloading my original settings I haven’t run
into any problems.
The final program in the
trio is called Artmoney, which Fogware has called Game Cheat for their bundle.
Artmoney runs in the background as you play a game and will identify processes
within the game that control different aspects, such as health, money, etc. With
your game running, you select the program you want to cheat, so you select the
game in the dropdown box of current running processes. Then you search for the
items you want to modify by searching for different values that relate to the
game. For example, if you want to change your health and it is currently 127,
you would search for 127 in the game’s values.
This sounds simple
enough, but once I started using it nothing came up in my searches. The help
files weren’t much help either since they seemed to be badly translated from a
different language. The idea is to narrow down your search by searching for the
value, then go back into the game and change the value, then come back to
Artmoney and filter your search with the new value. You’re supposed to end up
finding your value through this process of elimination, but I always came up
with zero results. I think the cheat program is a little too much trouble for
the average gamer, much too complicated for the casual gamer, and the hardcore
gamer most likely won’t even care about cheating.
This is a great package
for PC gamers, providing them with an easy way to streamline their PC right
before play and access to their games without the trouble of disc swapping. The
included cheat program is something I viewed as an extra, and if you want to
spend the time to learn it then it’s a great utility for cheating.
Pros:
Convenient method
of disc swapping, quicker load times on your games, smoother gameplay
Cons:
Complicated and
confusing cheat program, Game PC Tuner never really tells you what files it’s
affecting
Verdict: 8.3
After using Game
PC Tuner I saw a pretty big difference in the way my games performed, and Speed
Disc is a great way of storing and loading discs for all your games. The cheat
program is sort of an extra bonus, but a little too complicated and involved for
what it does. Game On! is a great package for PC gamers of all kinds that want
to get the maximum performance out of their computer.
