Well ,an interesting mix of news this week.
Of course the big bombshell was the official release date of
Windows 8. At a Sales meeting Steven Sinofsky (Microsoft President in charge of
Windows and Windows Live) announced the
general availability of Windows 8 will
be October 26th, 2012 on new PC's. No
word on availability of Retail versions, however.
Of course with a $40 upgrade price (download) for owners of windows back to XP it may not
matter as most will likely opt for the digital upgrade instead of the $69.99
DVD boxed version anyway. Even so,
Microsoft's aggressive pricing indicates they're hoping for a quicker adoption
than Windows 7. With PC and ARM based
tablets Microsoft is painfully aware it's playing catch-up with Apple even though
IOS and OSX are still disparate platforms.
In Steam news...
Orcs Must die 2 coming out on July 30th, Steam is currently offering
10% off pre-orders. It's also available
through Gamersgate and gamestop for 13.49.
Steam's offering a 2 pack for 22.49 that effectively makes each copy
roughly $11. So buy one for a friend,
you won't be disappointed.
The new game offers solo as well as co-op play plus a new
playable character, the sorceress. New
maps as well as play on classic maps is in the offering as well as new traps
and spells to dispatch those medieval baddies.
Borderlands is a game
I've spent more time in than any other and there's a sequel coming out
soon. Fueling the hype, a recent quote
from developer Gearbox's VP of Marketing Steve Gibson says Borderlands 2
campaign takes 58 hours to complete. Gibson
goes on to say, "."We want it to feel like you get more for your
money, we’re happy for people to pay their money once and feel that they get
ongoing value." If the sequel is as good as the
original it's going to be time well spent.
The game is scheduled for release September 12th 2012.
So while we all anxiously await the next two DLC packs for
Battlefield 3 we got broadsided by news of the Battlefield 4 beta. Due in the fall of 2013, according to the BF3
Reddit page maintained by a BF3 Community manager with EA.
Of course with any news on the next iteration of the
Battlefield series is bound to cause some discomfort amongst the faithful. EA is of course promising to continue support
of BF3 past the release of END GAME citing their continuing support for Bad
Company 2 as an example. I suppose this
answers the earlier question of whether or not END GAME was going to end the
franchise. Apparently this bovine's got
some milk left in her.
How to gain admission to the Beta isn't completely fleshed
out yet according to EA but apparently buying Medal of Honor Warfighter (
69.99) is guaranteed to get you a spot right now. As a side note this news showed up as a popup
when I opened Origin Wednesday.
Origin servers went offline at 10PM PT for 2 hours for what
EA calls "important updates" in preparation for their upcoming origin
9 client. I wonder if it will still say,
BETA.
In other EA news the new trailer for the upcoming DLC pack,
Armored Kill was released Thursday.
Instabuy for a tank jockey like me..MBT Service star, You Are Mine! Confirmed is the purported "largest map
ever in a Battlefield game, "Bandar Desert" as well as the first ever
arctic map "Aborz Mountain".
Both are shown in the trailer.
EA claims the next version of Origin (version 9) will be more
User Friendly...
I guess they have a bit of work to do since they came out
swinging against the "you're not as good as Steam" crowd. Reasons cited include high prices, lack of
indie games and draconian interface hostile to hardcore gamers.
In hardware news...
If you're interested in such things, rumor has it that the
next Sony Playstation will be called
Orbis and will be based on an AMD x64 CPU with an AMD Southern Islands GPU (think
7xxx AMD GPU)which can display up to 4096x2160 resolution or 4K. I guess Sony's going with the
"value" option for its hardware since it's unlikely a console will
receive a high end SKU.
Apparently release is set to be around holiday 2013. As is current trend (think Xbox 360) there
will be no backward compatibility with PS3 games and there will be measures to
prevent the use of used games. So get
your games as cheap as you can because the $10 bargain bin is going away for
all intents and purposes. I'm sure
someone will come up with a hack but of course you risk your PSN account with
that route and you know how seriously Sony protects its PSN accounts.
Sony's half-hearted compromise
offers buyers of used games limited functionality until they pay an additional
fee to fully unlock the used game.
In Graphics card news AMD has gotten aggressive with it's
pricing against the Nvidia 6xx series of cards announcing price drops that
shine a harsh light on Nvidia's lack of a new generation product in the mid to
low end graphics market.
AMD announced price drops late last week across the Tahiti
line of graphics cards with the top end 7970 GHZ edition at $499, the non over-
clocked 7970 down to $429 and the 7950
at $349. AMD's also offering a trio of
free games (3 for free promotion) with
the purchase of these cards as well.
Included in the price drop are the midrange of the Southern
Islands family. The Pitcairm GPUS are currently represented by the
7870GHZ edition priced at $299 and the
7850 priced at $249. Purchasers of a 78xx
series GPU get a free copy of Dirt:Showdown to sweeten the deal.
So it looks like Activision/Blizzard is looking to ditch
Vivendi's 61% ownership in the company.
Vivendi is said to be asking 8 Billion for its stake and has courted
heavy hitters such as Microsoft and Time Warner as potential suitors. Even so, they apparently have yet to find
someone willing to pony up the cash.
Vivendi says selling the shares back to Activision (who at
last report has 3 Billion in cash reserves) is a last ditch effort and is
looking at selling other of its assets first to correct a recent negative credit watch set
on it by ratings agency Standard and Poor's.
Perhaps with a sale to someone other than a huge media group, Activision
could finally keep a decent development group together and stop gouging their
customers.
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