This week...
Nvidia's new midrange Kepler entry,
An alternative to Diablo 3, What multiplayer would be like if Borderlands 2 had
it and more!
So I'm searching for my first story
of relevance and I run into this...http://www.computerandvideogames.com/369285/blog/shagagamercom-videos-offer-virgin-gamers-dating-tips/
It's a UK website called
ShagAGamer.com that offers dating and "performance" tips to gamers
inexperienced with the intimate arts.
AKA virgins. Apparently, a recent
poll found a full third of the site's community admitted to being so
afflicted. Considering I keep running
into 8 year olds on Battlefield servers the numbers don't seem that
surprising...
Guess what? We have yet another
browser based exploit to worry about now but Microsoft promises a fix today
(9/21). Ars Technica reports that a as
of yet unpatched exploit in Internet Explorer 7 through 9 can allow malware
installation and turn your pc into a zombie.
The advisory applies to IE on all windows versions up to 7. You lucky Windows 8 Eval users dodged a
bullet this time as IE 10 is unaffected.
As it stands now users are being advised not to use Internet Explorer or
anything that relies on its facilities like web applets. Hopefully you're using Chrome to watch this week's
video report...
If you're like me and don't think
$60 for a video game is reasonable then you probably haven't seen much gameplay
action for the new Borderlands 2 release.
Luckily, viewers of Wednesday's PC Perspective podcast who stuck around
for the impromptu gaming afterward were treated to live gameplay. The lesson here, watch more live
podcasts! You might learn something.
And speaking of Borderlands 2...
Borderlands 2 released this week on
the 18th to the joy of salivating fans everywhere. I'm one of them but I felt the water bill was
more important since I appreciate having the ability to flush my toilets.
Nvidia has released the newest
Kepler family member aimed squarely at the midrange market in the guise of the
GTX660 graphics card. Note the lack of a
"Ti" moniker. This isn't just
a gimped version of the 660Ti it's a different graphics core called the
GK106. With Fewer streaming processors
and texture units compared to the 660Ti the card is aimed squarely at the ATI
7870 with a price point about $20 cheaper at $229 MSRP. It's been suggested that this is a good
upgrade for those still hanging on to old GTX 460 or GASP! 9800 GT's.
GTX 660 Ti
|
GTX 660
|
|
Stream Processors
|
1344
|
960
|
Texture Units
|
112
|
80
|
ROPs
|
24
|
24
|
Core Clock
|
915MHz
|
980MHz
|
Shader Clock
|
N/A
|
N/A
|
Boost Clock
|
980MHz
|
1033MHz
|
Memory Clock
|
6.008GHz GDDR5
|
6.008GHz GDDR5
|
Memory Bus Width
|
192-bit
|
192-bit
|
VRAM
|
2GB
|
2GB
|
FP64
|
1/24 FP32
|
1/24 FP32
|
TDP
|
150W
|
140W
|
GPU
|
GK104
|
GK106
|
Transistor Count
|
3.5B
|
2.54B
|
Manufacturing
Process
|
TSMC 28nm
|
TSMC 28nm
|
Launch Price
|
$299
|
$229
|
As seen from the chart (from the referenced article) the primary
difference between the 660 and the 660Ti besides the die shrink and lower power
consumption are the number of streaming processors, texture units and about 1
billion less transistors.
The new card retains the same perks
as it's more powerful cousins so you still get the same memory clocks, boost
features and display output options. For
a budget gaming build this would probably be the perfect choice especially if
the street price went below $200.
For those of you that might want to
give a little love to the indie gaming community there's a reasonably priced
pre-order on Steam that may peak your interest.
The game is called Ravaged from developer 2Dawn games.
It's a multiplayer shooter set in a post-apocalyptic Earth with equal
emphasis on vehicular as well as on foot battles. The development team consists of alumni from
the Desert Combat mod for Battlefield:1942 which infers some contact with the
original Dice team that went on to mold the Battlefield series.
From the gameplay videos it seems to be a
cross between the look and vehicular combat of the original Borderlands and the
multiplayer dynamics of a Call of Duty or Battlefield. For 24.99 pre-order it's probably worth a
shot if you're looking for an alternative to $60 launch prices.
And in game portal client thing
news...
Origin released yet another update
this week to fix download issues.
Specifics are:
- Fixed an issue that interfered with some users' ability to download
games.
- Fixed an issue that prevented some users from launching or quitting certain games.
- Fixed an issue that was blocking some users from logging in.
- Fixed an issue that prevented some users from launching or quitting certain games.
- Fixed an issue that was blocking some users from logging in.
A short aside here. I know I complain a lot about high prices for
supposed "triple-A" titles but I have to give credit where it's
due. I was looking over my collection
and found that many of my fondest gaming memories came from Electronic Arts. Surprisingly enough, they weren't always the
giant evil empire we know today.
I'm old enough to remember the
battle chess game, Archon for the Atari and Apple PC's back in the 80's. That means I remember when EA was nothing
more than a few geeks in a Menlo park office hoping to make it big. EA's always known how to pick a winner no
matter if they produced or just published a game. With
picks like Battlefield, Need for Speed, Madden and dozens of others their
success is no mystery. They usually produce
a good product but for the past decade they haven't missed an opportunity to
milk a franchise like a skinny tick on a hound dog.
It's the typical American success
story which unfortunately ends with doing what you do best to the point of losing your soul.
A torch without a Blizzard...
So if you're like me and didn't want
to mortgage the house only to be disappointed by the money machine that is
Diablo 3 just to play a decent RPG, I may have good news for you. Torchlight 2 has been released and offers a
similar experience with some nice extras D3 could care less about. It's basically an RPG like D3 and that's no
accident considering there's some cross pollination between the development
teams at Runic and Blizzard. Reviews are
positive so far and it's definitely less of a risk at $20 than the $60 buy in
for D3.
Finally, A friend mentioned an
annoying trend that seems to be becoming more popular in triple-A titles lately.
Namely the huge update to support DLC.
For Example; to support the recent Battlefield 3 DLC, EA shoved a 2 Gigabyte patch onto my game rigs that took
the better part of an hour to download and install.
Two things come to mind.
The first one I have to credit my
friend for thinking of it. If we're not
buying the DLC why do I need to download it?
There's a better than even chance that I now have Armored Kill and Close
Quarters files on my pc even though I didn't buy them. That's just laziness. I don't believe for a minute that a game that
was at most a 6GB install needs 2GB in patches every 3 months to continue
working properly.
The second is that Origin needs to
offer an option to download an offline copy of their patches and upgrades so
that we don't have to waste time downloading the same files to multiple
computers. I mean c'mon, if you're a Netflix
subscriber with an ISP that has a bandwidth cap, just two PC's getting the latest BF3 download could prevent
you from seeing an entire movie for that month!
Valve's Steam meets us part way with
this with the option to backup game files but the issue there is that they
don't include any patches, just the original game files. So you get to download potentially years
worth of patches all over again.
Cloud storage apparently has a ways
to go.
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