Midaged Gamer report Memorial Day edition!

Hey guys, happy memorial day!

For those of you who plan to fill every minute with some quality time in front of your monitor You may want to take a break from the Demon hordes of Diablo 3 or practicing with your shiny new sniper rifle in Battlefield 3.

Speaking of which....

Ok, I admit it, I'm a hypocrite.  EA had a weekend sale last week and slashed the prices of the shortcut kits.  I got the ultimate shortcut kit for 24.99 which is usually 39.99.  I guess I should have waited because the memorial day sale has it for 19.99 now along with 50% price cuts on BF3, Mass Effect 3 and a few other titles. 

At some point I came to the realization that between the shortcut kits and the aim bots I wasn't going to get my upgrades before being eligible for social security.  The nice thing is that I was far enough along in the game to not have it affect my game play too much. 

For one thing, in BF3 if you don't have rockets on your Jet you may as well not fly one.  I didn't spend enough time early on in Jets so I didn't get the perks and never got the opportunity as the more hardcore players used me as target practice with little opportunity for me to retaliate. 

So I still feel kind of dirty doing it but ultimately this is the direction BF3 is going and unless you have 40 hours a week to devote to the game this is the only way to keep enjoying the multiplayer unless you like being cannon fodder.,

There was also some buzz this week about a few screenshots showing off EPIC's Unreal 4 engine.  Thing is, I remember an announcement few months back  from EPIC that they were not really developing for Unreal anymore and focused on Gears of War.  So the engine is nice.  The Aliens thing is interesting but I really don't care unless a new Unreal game comes out with the new engine.

unreal 4 engine

http://www.shacknews.com/article/73881/unreal-engine-4-and-epics-responsibility-to-push-next-gen

no unreal...

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/09/21/unreal-not-one-of-epics-new-games/

Not much that interesting going on this week.  We've already seen what the hardware guys have in store for us over the next 6 months so no big surprises there.  Your new ultimate gaming rig will probably have the new Intel Ivy Bridge I7 3770K processor in it. 

http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/23/intel-core-i7-3770k-cpu-review-roundup/

Funny thing is, Mine wouldn't.  For all the marketing hype I'm not all that excited about Ivy Bridge.

Yes, it's got great clock speeds, multiple cores and improved on chip graphics but let's not forget that with dual channel memory controllers  and limited PCI-E lanes compared to Sandy Bridge E it's still not an enthusiast processor it's a very efficient, very powerful, MAINSTREAM part.  Right now I'd either wait for Haswell or if I had to build a rig right now get a nice Sandy Bridge E setup going.

Then again, who cares what I'd do..

On a final note I have a suggestion.  Since it's Memorial Day weekend I'd like to suggest that you pull out

your favorite historically based fps and try to appreciate just for a moment what the real participants had to endure as you play it.  I remember back when I was playing Call of Duty World at War how one day for some reason I suddenly had a new appreciation for the guys who had to endure the real thing. 

I'm out