Friday, October 12, 2012

The Midaged Gamer Report 10-12-2012

The Midaged Gamer Report for 10-12-2012

This Week...

The Father of Wing Commander has a new MMO, AMD gives away RAMDISKs, YourGTX690 will work in Windows 8 and The most boring release of Kepler ever is here!

Wing Commander is trying to make a comeback! Well not exactly but father of the franchise Chris Roberts is pitching a new MMO called Star Citizen based on the Crytek 3 engine which promises to be one of the best looking game experiences on the PC in a long time.  In a video Roberts pitched the idea Kickstarter style to drum up the 2 Million needed to bring the Space Combat simulator to life.  Along with the MMO gameplay is a single player mode as well which is a departure from the competitors like Star Trek Online and Diablo 3.  If you've got a spare 100K or so you may want to visit the game's site.


In a move that's raised the ire of Battlefield 3 fans especially those who shelled out the extra $50 for premium membership; it's been revealed that the final two DLC packs (Aftermath and End Game) has removed content originally promised.  Apparently new weapons have been removed and the premium content store page updated to reflect the change.  Just like the promised 5 vehicle unlocks that never happened with Armored kill it seems more and more that what EA and Dice giveth, they can taketh away regardless of whether you paid for the game twice. 


In a related story there's been some rumbling in the BF3 forums over Armored Kill Servers.  It appears that players who purchased the DLC pack separately are finding it hard to find servers to play on since many are premium only which effectively blocks access to all others.  Apparently membership has its privileges.  I'll exercise my privilege to not spend any more money on BF3...

A link to one of the posts..


Nothing's worse than paying the better part of a grand on a vdeo card and finding out it doesn't work with your shiny new OS.  Amidst fearful rumors that the Top end Nvidia GTX 690 wouldn't work on Windows 8 Nvidia released a Windows Hardware certified driver (305.97) that puts them to rest. 


Like the Thermaltake Level 10 case but wish it was a little less flashy...and green?  Saying Level 10 and less flashy is an oxymoron.  At launch these cases were touted as being designed by BMW with a $1000 price tag to match.  Succeeding versions have been in the $250 to $300 range and the newest arrival is sporting USB 3.0 ports, hot swap drive bays and an olive drab paint scheme to match your FPS fatigues and a $300 price tag. 


Want to use the new Windows Store to pick up a copy of Mass Effect 3 or Modern Warfare 3?  If you happen to live in a country that uses the PEGI 18 rating system (ESRB=Mature) look elsewhere for your purchase because it's not going to happen.  So far the U.S. is unaffected by the restriction although games produced in countries (mostly Europe) that use the rating may not be available to anyone using the Windows Store.


Ever wish you could run Battlefield 3 4000 times faster? Ok, not really, everything would be a blur...AMD has made a free version of their RAMDISK software that can create a 6GB ramdisk on AMD certified memory everyone else only gets 4GB.  There's also an unlocked paid version for 18.99 that allows you to create a ramdisk of any size on any platform.  In case you're too young to remember, ramdisks enjoyed some popularity n the DOS days when most people used them to load resident programs and games they wanted to speed up. 

Ramdisks use your system memory as a virtual hard disk and offer read and write speeds up to 4000 times that of even the fastest SSD's.  The downside is that since they live in RAM they have to have their contents loaded at every boot which increases startup times.  Check it out if you're interested.



Borderlands 2 gets its first expansion DLC October 16th.  Called Captain Scarlet the DLC is a pirate themed affair with appropriately styled NPC's, Bosses and perks.  So far availability appears limited to the $29.99 season pass. 


Looking for the entry level Nvidia Kepler GPU, wait no more.  The $150 GTX 650 TI is available now and comes with a free copy of Assassins Creed 3.  This is definitely the low end of Kepler with 1GB of VRAM, 128Bit memory interface, 925Mhz clock, 768 CUDA cores, 64 texture units and 16ROP's.  Don't expect CPU boost or SLI either, it's not there.  It's likely it will go below $100 in a few months.


The release of Grand Theft Auto 5 is reportedly going to launch in March of 2013 according to a listing on Gamestop's website recently.  Checks of both the UK and US retailer sites currently show a status of TBC, however.


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