The Midagedgamer Report for 3-29-2013
The Battlefield 4 hype machine's been started with the
release of a 17 minute video showing single player gameplay as well as details
about platforms and special editions.
The video also highlights the new Frostbite 3.0 game engine which promises
a better lighting and weather system as well as new animations and of course
what every father wishes for his son, "Improved,efficient destruction"
If you're dumb
enough, I mean interested in pre-orders you can get a special
"Premium" expansion pack and if you do it through Origin you'll get
additional exclusive content from their
"Digital Deluxe edition" .
Release is scheduled for the fall on PC and current generation
consoles. That begs the question of how
console sales of the game will be affected by a refresh of both major console
platforms in the same time period.
I chafe at the word "Premium" almost as badly as I
do with the word "Pre-Order"
Ask anyone who bought SimCity or Diablo 3 on Pre-order if they got their
money's worth. Fool me once shame on
you, Fool me twice EA? Don't think so. I'm happy to wait for a sale six months later
or better yet just skip it altogether. In
case you're still interested, pre-order price is set at 59.99 across all three
platforms (Xbox, PS3 and PC) with
Gamefly offering a 20%off coupon. Hmm, discounts on a pre-order this far out? I'm suspicious.
BioShock Infinite has launched and if you buy a physical
copy of the game from Irrational games they'll get it to you for 1.99
shipping. Amazon's got free shipping by
the way and Steam will download it to your hard drive today. If you want it it's going to set you back $60
no matter who you buy it from. So far
reviews have been decent with a 94/100 reviewer score on Metacritic and an 8.9
user score although some reviewers have been a little disappointed in the pace
of the game.
If you've always wanted to "play a movie" it seems
2013 is your year. It started with the
Walking dead Game in 2012 which was
designed to be a companion to the popular television series on AMC. Released by Telltale it follows an episodic
formula similar to their recent "Back to the Future" series.
Now we have two new titles trying to cash in on the
trend. Defiance is a game based on the upcoming television series on SyFy
channel of the same name. Star Trek: The Video Game launches April
23rd just weeks ahead of StarTrek: Into
Darkness set to hit theaters May 17th.
While not a direct adaptation characters, voice acting and design are
all consistent with the movie. Defiance will be available April 2nd at
$60 and Star Trek: The Video game
will set you back $50.
If you happen to be taking in a ball game at Coca-Cola park
in Allentown PA. you may want to check out the men's room. They're installing video games at the men's
urinals that activate when you approach them.
Don't ask about the controller. I
bet they're going to sell a lot more large sodas from now on.
Are you one of the lucky few who already has your OUYA
console? They started shipping to the
kickstarter backers but the rest of us will have to wait till June 4th to pick
ours up for $99. Early adopters of the
Tegra 3 powered android console will find a library of 104 games so far from a
deep bench of 8000 developers. The
console will also run apps like XBMC and Flixster. The games are all free to try out but
nothing's free forever so have some plastic money at the ready once you run
into that free-to-play paywall.
I hesitated to include this last bit of news in this week's
report. That's primarily due to my distaste
for gaming benchmarks and the subjective analysis that comes from them. Weeks' worth of fanboy articles have been
written based on nothing more than a bias toward a particular brand and 1 Frame
per second.
So here comes Ryan Shrout of PCPer who's been racking his
brains out trying to come up with a different way of quantifying graphics card
performance. In the process it's also
showed up how weak AMD's crossfire multi-card GPU performance really is. You have to give it to the guys at PCPer,
AMD's been a major sponsor but that didn't stop them from calling it like they
saw it. In fact it's because of that
candor that I had any interest at all.
Without trying to summarize 16000 words of what Ryan's been
up to I'd direct you to his article
for the specifics of his new process of evaluating graphics performance. As I understand it, instead of basing ratings on data that hasn't made it to your
monitor yet like FRAPS this method is based on what you actually see. It's called Frame Rating and uses an
external capture card to collect the data then process it and display the results graphically on-screen without interfering with the system being tested.
For a primer on what Frame Rating is see this article.
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