The Midaged Gamer Report Wrap-up for May 2013
This week....who cares
Unless you really care about the change of voice actors in the next Batman or Splinter Cell or are in a lather over
somebody possibly spoiling the upcoming "The Last of Us" (Hint: they didn't) This week's news was pretty light.
I know the high point of my week was taking advantage of a
Steam midweek madness sale on Dungeon Siege 3 for $4.
Hey, the cutscenes should be worth at least that, right? It was so cheap I gifted a copy to a
friend. Share the fun or the misery I
say!
We have a little better idea of what the world of console gaming as envisioned by Microsoft
is after the Xbox 1 launches. Microsoft
is taking a hands off approach to dealing with the secondary market and instead
deferring to the whims of game publishers.
The cliff notes
version is this:
- You have to have an Internet connection but you can play offline for up to 24 hours ( 1 hour if you're on someone else's console). In related cheery news, Redmondville says you're out of luck till you get your Internet connection back up but at least you're free to watch TV or Blu-Ray discs.
- You can't loan disc based games but you can give them away, once. The other catch is that the recipient has to be on your friends list for at least 30 days.
- Microsoft is leaving it up to game publishers on how to deal with the secondary market.
- At least at launch, the rental game market for Xbox 1 is pretty much dead.
Hmm, Seems kind of passive -aggressive with just a dash of "because
we can" thrown in for good measure.
If Microsoft would have taken this attitude with Windows operating
systems maybe Windows 8 wouldn't have been such a flop.
Still, It all pales
in comparison to what's about to happen next week at E3. We're promised some actual meat on the bones
when it comes to the PS4 and Xbox 1 with hardware and game demos galore. We shall see on June 11th.
Now that that's out of the way lets take a quick look back
at the high points of last month...
....crickets...
....crickets...
....crickets...
...ok so that's over...
But seriously, The
biggest news of the month was the Xbox1 reveal. Where we saw games but no
hardware back in the February PS4 announcement.
The Xbox 1 event showed us one game and a whole lot of silly marketing
people getting excited over watching TV.
I asked the question of whether this was the console to rule them
all. If you're more than a casual gamer
I think you're more interested in the PS4.
If you're looking for a cheap HTPC, this is probably your box.
May also saw the launch of Grid 2 and having spent more time with
the online portion of it I can say this.
I like the driving but the multiplayer interface sucks. I still don't see why it's so hard for
publishers to understand that I'd rather play a game with my friends over a gigabit Ethernet connection than on my cable connection! Especially when I'm in the same room.
Here's a hint, if you want to set up a private game, make
sure to turn off public visibility. Sorry
Codemasters, I may have a social media account but that doesn't mean I want to
race against all my Facebook friends.
The game is almost as good as the original save the online
component. I give it an 8/10.
Nvidia also dropped a bomb that surprised a lot of people in May
announcing that the Shield wasn't just an engineering exercise. The Shield dropped and nobody really cared.
I'm still thinking this is a solution in search of a problem. It's a neat concept but like most of my ADD
afflicted generation it'll undoubtedly end up in my closet on top of some old Atari
Lynx games.
AMD announced their new Volcanic Islands GPU's which appear to borrow heavily from their APU
designs with both serial and parallel processing units onboard. More than just a graphics card, there's some
actual computing horsepower here for something other than rendering sexy
mascots in a demo. Why you should care
as a gamer has little to do with that stuff, however. AMD's pushing the 20nm process which means
everyone else (meaning Nvidia) will be soon to follow. Better performance, more processing power and
lower power consumption are a step in the right direction.
That's it for the wrap-up.
See ya next month!
Links to related posts..
http://midagedgamer.blogspot.com/2013/05/monthly-gaming-news-wrap-up-april-2013.html
Links to related posts..
http://midagedgamer.blogspot.com/2013/05/monthly-gaming-news-wrap-up-april-2013.html
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