Review: Pilot a fighter spaceship and flying robot in Strike Suit Zero sim

Strike Suit Zero $20.00 Strike Suit Zero breathes new life into an old genre, and introduces an engaging innovation in space combat: A space fighter that transforms into a mech.

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FreeSpace 2 and other space combat classics kept the genre alive, albeit on the back burner, for years Then indie game studio Born Ready Games came along and decided to create a modern space combat simulator: Strike Suit Zero ($20).

Strike Suit Zero's simple interface delivers a fluid gameplay experience.

Developing the game was not without its difficulties: When funding ran out midway through the project, Born Ready Games turned to Kickstarter for extra funding. The crowdsourcing website doesn't always work out, but in this case it did: Born Ready raised almost double their original $100,000 goal, and carried on to release the game as planned.

The end result is a game with thoroughly modern, gorgeous looks, and simple, intuitive controls that puts you in the cockpit of a space fighter. While the game's controls and HUD are simpler than those of FreeSpace 2, it innovates in the spacecraft department in a big way: You get to fly a giant robot.

When lighting the afterburner in Strike Suit Zero, everything blurs out of sight. You're moving that fast.

Most of the time, Strike Suit Zero looks and maneuvers like a typical space fighter. But hit a button on your controller, and it instantly transforms into a hulking mech, armed to the teeth and capable of hairpin turns and aerobatics that just don't make sense in a fighter.

Transforming into a robot makes the game feel almost like a first-person shooter...in space. It's a throwback to the old Descent series, the same one FreeSpace 2 eventually evolved from. For example, in one of the early missions you have to destroy a series of storage platforms containing enemy supplies. You can fly at a platform at breakneck speeds, afterburners ablaze, only to transform at the very last moment and find yourself hovering in front of the platform as a fully armored mech, ready to obliterate everything in sight. This makes for a very engaging, cinematic gameplay.

As a mech, you have immense firepower and excellent maneuverability.

Strike Suit Zero is an unforgiving game. Although each mission has a number of checkpoints, they are often spaced quite far apart. To make progress, I had to keep going through missions again and again. Dying often means replaying a 10-minute sequence, trying to do better than the last time. It does get frustrating, but it's also fun to see your skill improving from one run to the next.

Acquiring targets is easy and fast in Strike Suit Zero.

Strike Suit Zero keeps things simple: there is no multiplayer mode, no radar on your HUD, and no complicated key mappings to remember. It is easy to pick up, beautiful to play, and challenging to master.

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F-Secure Internet Security 2012 Review: A Slow but Decent Malware Fighter

If you can tolerate some sluggishness, F-Secure Internet Security 2012 ($60 for one year and three PCs as of January 25, 2012), which placed eighth in our 2012 roundup of security suites, will protect your PC pretty well.

F-Secure's suite put up decent all-around scores for malware detection, though it fell somewhat short of the top contenders. With a 96.2 percent blocking rate in our real-world tests (which indicate how well a suite can stop brand-new, as-yet-unknown malware), it’s generally on a par with its competition. Its 99.91 percent detection rate for known malware is also very good. The F-Secure package found and removed all test infections on our system, and it cleaned all malware traces 60 percent of the time (which is just about average compared with the other products we tested).

It did report four false positives; that’s a tiny percentage given our sample size, but several of its rivals had one or zero false positives.

The F-Secure software’s impact on PC performance was fairly low for the most part, though it wasn't the fastest suite we've seen. The 15 seconds it added to PC shutdown times (as compared to our test PC with no antivirus software installed) was among the worst results we saw on that test; it also faired poorly in our app-installation test, completing the task in 3 minutes, 12 seconds. That outcome was a good 22 seconds slower than the average time for the suites we evaluated, and only 3 of the 14 suites we looked at had a larger impact on performance in this test.

Scan speeds were pedestrian: In our on-demand scan test (which indicates how quickly a suite will run a manually initiated scan of 4.5GB of data), the F-Secure software took 2 minutes, 43 seconds, the second-worst result on this measure. In our testing of the on-access scanner--which runs when you open or save a file to disk--it required 4 minutes, 21 seconds to plow through the same 4.5GB of files, landing at the middle of the pack.

Overall I appreciated F-Secure’s basically easy-to-use interface. The installer was fairly straightforward, though it did require me to click through more screens than I would have liked. F-Secure's main interface is based on the Launch Pad, a small window that you use to access the Internet-security and PC-security settings windows--the two feature sets are organized separately from each other. I wasn't crazy about this arrangement, since it merely added another screen that I had to pass through to get where I was going; I don't see why F-Secure can't combine the two categories into a single control panel.

Although the panels for the Internet-security and PC-security sections are laid out nicely, they're almost identical, so it's easy to get them crossed up. When you delve into the settings, you'll find that the interface is clean, but some features could use better descriptions. For example, you must go into the help system to learn what DeepGuard is (it monitors how programs behave, as well as the contents of files, to identify malware).

All things considered, F-Secure Internet Security 2012 is a good product. It'll do an effective job. This year's competition is stiff, however, and F-Secure doesn't quite keep up with the leaders of the pack.

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