The last time I attempted to run this game with SoftTH it didn't display as planned.
After a bit of reading I found Widescreen Fixer that fixes the field of view (FOV) of the game to suit the resolution being used in this case 5040x1050.
I used SoftTH 1.09a which worked a treat, grab my config file here remember to modify to your desired resolution, and change the extension to ".cfg".

Here's the video of the game in action played on regular on the first level since it was the easiest to fit into the 10 min limit on Youtube, eye candy was set to high with x2 AA.
Surprisingly Call of Duty scales very well.

So I finally bothered to put my far left monitor to its horizontal position to give Left 4 Dead 2 a spin in triple screen mode.
I used the same settings I used in my previous experiment with the original Left 4 Dead.
I've noticed that the game does not keep the screen size settings when you close it so you must set the resolution and screen mode to "Fullscreen" each time.

This is either because the game isn't writing the config or I did something wrong but it seems to work okay, I don't guarantee that my settings will work 100% with your own setups so a bit of tweaking on your part might be necessary.
First HD youtube upload so enjoy!
I might still be still processing as of this post but should be all good in a few hours time.

Welcome to Pandora

I digress, Borderlands is not Gearbox's first foray into the world of PC games with the release of Gears of War for PC being their debut title.
What does Borderlands promise us? Apparently it promises a compelling storyline, co-operative play and lots of guns all set on a far away planet called Pandora.

You're placed in the shoes of a treasure hunter who arrives on Pandora to look for a legendary 'Vault' which apparently contains riches from a long lost alien world but only opens every few millenia.

The Vault: it's more likely than you think

From the get go the game opens up with a slick opening like something out of a Tarentino movie, you get the choice of four class types: Brick a close combat character that relies on brute force and raw power your general RPG Tank. Lilith a Siren apparently gifted with the ability to enter another dimension for a limited amount of time before re-emerging otherwise known as 'Phasewalk'; she is a mage/assassin hybrid type of character.

Phasewalk: The only way to travel

Mordecai your typical hunter archetype blessed with the ability to kill stuff from really far away and able to summon a pet Bloodbird that can attack and help scavenge supplies, finally you have Roland a former mercenary who specialises in close range weapons, is able to deploy turrets and later on is able to regenerate ammo for weapons.
The characters are introduced by the bus driver who you find out later is the owner of a chain of weapons/ammo vending machines.

Personalities (Left to Right): Roland, Mordecai, Brick & Lilith

After you select your character you're kicked off the bus by the seemingly friendly bus driver and are welcomed to the world of Pandora by a robot with an attitude called a Claptrap, you're run through a quick tutorial, and starter missions that outline basic controls, skills, combat and questing in general.
Then from there you are then left to your own devices to complete quests that allow you to collect various special guns or artefacts that can be combined with your skills (In my case I played as the Siren and was able to make a fiery exit out of Phasewalk) think of it like the artefacts that modify your stats in S.T.A.L.K.E.R unfortunately the variety of artefacts on offer from missions is rather limited at least in the case of the Siren...

The questing in-game is in the form of a bounty board that allows you to access missions be they side missions or important storyline missions of course it's highly advisable to do the side quests as sometimes the swag you receive is worth it; missions vary from simple scavenging for particular items to going to 'dungeons' to fight giant beasts or defeat warlords/barbarians.

Werk, Werk, Werk (Top to Bottom): Bounty Board & Quest Log

The gameplay is still very much standard FPS fair but with an elements of RPG showing through such as headshots not always being an instant kill specially if the weapon you're using is weak or the enemy is at a higher level than you of course there are skills that allow you to do more critical damage to score instant kills.
As previously mentioned skills can be be trained up each time you level and you're freely able to put the skill points into whatever character development branch you want, these points can be freely redistributed by paying a small fee to reset all your points.
Weapons can be buffed with the aforementioned skills and Proficiencies - meaning the more you use a weapon the more proficient your character becomes which results in better damage, higher fire rates and faster reload times.

Leet Skills (Left to Right): Character Skill Branches & Weapon Proficiencies Menues.

On the subject of weapons the developers claim that there are over 17 million weapons in game with 750 thousand variations as of release, the weapons in game are indeed plentiful and for those of us who are pack rats will end up with full backpacks after missions of course all the common weapons are not worth keeping and are usually sold at the next vending machine.

The weapons that are worth collecting are the semi-rare weapons that drop off bosses and legendary weapons that can be either found or bought; these weapons tend to have a little red text related to the weapon's name and insanely good stats ranging from crazy damage percentages to ammo regeneration this applies to shields in-game as well with rarer shields being able to quickly regenerate both shields and health.

Sick Loot: Inventory System

Death is dealt in its own way; when your health hits zero you are given a small amount of time to quickly kill an enemy which immediately revives you with full shields giving you an opportunity to make an escape or take cover until your health recovers.
Otherwise if you are unable to kill anything in time you are revived at a 'New-U' station for a fee.

Row, Row, Fight the Power

Possibly the most fun aspect of Borderland's weapons are the Elemental weapons made by Maliwan they're typically weaker in terms of base damage compared to other weapons of the same type but offer the chance of doing one of the four elemental damages: Incendiary, Corrosive, Explosive and Shock.
All four damage types each carry a unique death animation when the elemental damage finishes your victim each of which are show in the image below.

Using the Elements (Left to Right): Bake 'em, Melt 'em, Explode 'em and Shock 'em.

How does the game look? Being developed on the Unreal 3 engine Borderlands looks gorgeous, the pseudo-cell shaded art direction looks great with [almost] endless wasteland to explore with a day/night cycle, effects like explosions from incendiary weapons look great and the character models are a detailed and gritty.

Although it would have been preferable that Borderlands had Anti-aliasing as the cell shaded nature of the game means 'jaggies' are more obvious which is a real let down as the game looks great on PC.
The game music is good and fits very well with what is happening on screen as you play, the sound effects are great especially the sound of various firearms such as the various shotguns and revolvers at your disposal all producing a meaty 'Bang!' sound (the epitome of this is probably the M3 Pump action in Counter-Strike).

Git off mah lawn!

Finally we get to the point were I post about what I find was bad about Borderlands.
First off is: The AI is a bit too easy most involve either charging mindlessly at you or hiding behind cover and occasionally popping up to shoot sporadicly at you both of which can easily be dealt with so it does get a bit old fighting the same enemies over and over again.
Second network play is horrible in its own way before the game was patched, the game was barely able to play co-op mode with various bugs preventing someone from hosting a private game and the only option was to host a public game, which brings me to the next point relating to network play.
The server browser is simply the worst server browser I've used in the years of online gaming under my belt, the server browser only displays what the server's name is, the characters in-game, what slots are left in the game and which part of the wastelands they are up to.
For those who play multiplayer online will notice is that I've failed to mention one of the most important things when choosing a server: The ping which alludes to where the server would be hosted which ends up with people having to name their server in which country their game is being hosted in otherwise you end up joining games in Russia which results in 9000 bajillion ping making the game unplayable.

Worst server browser ever

Although the implementation of co-op is a good idea on paper it doesn't work too well in practice as I've noticed while playing co-op that players don't seem to realise they have a voice chat button or the 'Talk To Team' button to at least communicate with their teammates so it ends up feeling like you're playing with bots; if I wanted bot teammates I would have played Call of Duty or a scripted shooter and in those games at least the bots communicate to you.
So my recommendation for co-op is round up some mates, all get the game and go forth to conquer the wastelands.

Next is a few niggles I had with the game relating to the interface although it's slick and great overall there are a few flaws that annoy me as hell the one of the worst being the weapons description box: you're probably asking yourself why a I'm being anal about it well it's annoying because when you see a rare/legendary (gold) weapon you can't see all its stats meaning you can't determine if the weapon is just rare because its got this giant rice scope on it or because it regenerates ammo. This links on to another problem relating to weapons is that some weapons have descriptions missing altogether such as a semi-rare shield drop called 'Wee Wee's Super Booster' has no description what-so-ever meaning you can't tell what it does (See video above).
My last complaint is that the game does not have an Anti-aliasing option meaning I can't enjoy my game without jaggies but otherwise I have no other quams with the visuals.

Your Guardian Angel or is she?

In conclusion Borderlands was a great game, even with its thin plot it was a great shooter to blast through, sound and music was great, excellent visuals, gorgeous game world, fun gameplay and interesting co-op mode so long as you have some mates to game with.
So if you're looking for a fun RPG/FPS hybrid game for Christmas then grab yourself a cheap copy during the Christmas sales, if you're looking for a fast pace co-op experience I suggest looking at games like Left 4 Dead: 1 and 2 (for L4D:2 those in Australia are advised to get gifted an overseas version to avoid getting the censored local version).

You be the judge.

Australian Censored Version

Uncensored Version

They have basicly removed pretty much all traces of gibbing, blood splatter on the screen when you kill a zombie up close, the melee weapons don't get blood on them, they removed a riot police infected, and finally the bodies disappear before they even hit the ground (which if I'm not mistaken did not happen in the original Left 4 Dead).

Also for those interested it is possible for the gamers of South Australia to possibly vote Michael Atkinson out of office to which he issued a challenge several months back.

The high resolution wallpapers presented here for your enjoyment were supposedly leaked online.
It could be a genuine leak or a clever marketing scheme to capture the interest of Otaku everywhere, either way it's still win-win for us ain't it?

You heard it right Windows 7 is now available from your closest retailer in Australia.
For once Australia gets something early thanks to our position on the International Date Line.

Unfortunately the prices are fairly steep compared to the rest of the world.

The above table (source) shows that we pay a fair amount more for our software than our counterparts in other parts of the world, in some cases it is claimed that we pay five times more for our software.
Personally I think it's because our market in general is smaller than the likes of the US or the UK meaning overall less units will be shipped so retailers have to make up losses somehow, though having worked in the field of computer retailing I've seen my fair share of dodgy pricings.

Anyway, good to see Windows 7 being rolled out and thus far I'm pretty happy to part with my hard earned cash for this release of Windows.

Un-boxing the package

Shiny new K-7's box

K-7's manuals & software cd

Battery and extra bits the come with the K-7

Finally:

My brand new Pentax K-7 with Tamron SP 90mm lens in all its glory (lens not included)

Well that's all from me for now I'll stick photos taken with the camera later

All photos were taken with my old K100D Super.

First you need to download a copy of SoftTH from the creator's site here.

Download the latest release which is 1.08b during the time of writing.
After downloading you should end up with a zip file that resembles something like this.

Now place the files into the following directories:
In this case for Left 4 Dead.

Set 1:
SoftTH_hook.dll
SoftTH.cfg

Set 2:
d3d8.dll
d3d9.dll

The files from Set 1 go with the main game executable in:  steamapps > common > left 4 dead
While Set 2 files are to be placed into the 'bin' folder:  steamapps > common > left 4 dead > bin
The files if placed properly should look like the ones in the picture below.

Now grab a copy of my config file from here.
Copy, paste my configuration into the config file in your own directory.

You now need to set Left 4 Dead to actually run in your desired screen size.

1. Options > Video
2. Set Aspect Ration to: Widescreen 16:9 (the game does not recognise the custom aspect ratio so it just puts it there)
3. Set your desired resolution.
4. Set Display Mode to Full Screen (This is important as Windows 7 does not seem to like windowed games being spread across many monitors)

With your settings set, restart the game it might start up and look weird but wait until it has gotten to the menus.

'Alt-tab' out and back in, it should fix it.

Now enjoy Left 4 Dead in triple monitor glory.

Just make sure your computer is up to scratch to be able to support three monitors.

The same steps can be applied to Team Fortress 2 to produce the same results.

Edit: I should have put this note in a while back.

Note: I do not guarantee that my config will work 100% with every setup as everyone's hardware is different, so you may end up having to modify the config file so that it works with your setup.
This config file is designed to be compatible with three monitors that can display a native resolution of 1680x1050 only.
Anything else you must change the resolution settings in the config file to match your hardware otherwise this will not work.

Disclaimer: This information is provided as is and you may use it at your own risk.

Also don't rip my tutorial if you post this anywhere make sure you give credit.

Update 5/04/2010: I've changed the SoftTH config file's monitor detection to 'auto' this should alleviate the need to specify monitors as the hook will automatically detect them for you, though you will still need to run the main screen in the centre screen as per usual.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the ultimate showdown has begun...

The results surprised me as it ran on high settings with 2xAA and 2xAF very well.
All the UI elements didn't look messed up and everything rendered very nicely it was as if the game was made for multi-monitor setups.

The only thing that was messed up by the huge resolution was the main menu's background.
Otherwise everything was sweet.
Here's a test run jumped into a random game, in this case the finale of No Mercy.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzOAFXadRpE]

I used the same config as my Team Fortress 2 attempt, which can be grabbed from here.