Game On!

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.