Battlefield 4, Bioshock Infinite, a new way to rate your graphics card and more!

The Midagedgamer Report for 3-29-2013

This Week:  Battlefield 4, Bioshock Infinite, a new way to rate your graphics card and more!

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.

BF4info

BF4 Video

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.

Bioshock Infinite metacritic

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.

Defiance

Star Trek: The Video Game

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.

Gaming in the restroom

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.

OUYA shipping

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.

Top 10 - Why Multiplayer gaming sucks

Right up front I'll admit that I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know.  Just point your confused friends to this page when they're wondering why you're tearing up the furniture after your 150th round of Battlefield 3.

This list is ordered from what I feel is the most egregious to the annoying.  Your mileage may vary.   Too much of any of them puts the furniture in jeopardy.  

1. Cheats - This one's easy and we've all suffered them.  Aimbots, world hacks, stat boosters and the pond scum who love them.  Both Battlefield and Call of Duty are rife with these self-centered morons who ruin it for the rest of us.  There's just nothing like having hundreds of hours of experience in a game and getting pwned 50 times by some 12 year old with a $10 hack.  You can be sure that if the developer leaves an opening someone's going to exploit it.

2. Lag - You can't help this if say you're in North America and the server's in Germany.  Adding more

servers in a region can fix it but that rarely happens.  Which is probably why you're crossing an ocean to play in the first place. 

It can be almost imperceptible showing itself at those times when you know you should have hit what you were aiming at but didn't because it really wasn't there anymore.  Other times it can be more obvious with an annoyingly slow frame rate.  One of the worst cases you can suffer is the rubber banding  effect.  This is where your character keeps getting reset in the same spot as the server tries to compensate for excessive lag. 

Online games can be sensitive to player induced lag and many have instituted a maximum ping time to the client to combat it.  Most dedicated game servers will  try to tune the game performance to the slowest connected client.  Problem is,that can lead to the rubber banding effect so you're more likely to run into a maximum ping restriction.

3. Game Server Admins - Most online game servers are privately run with only a handful of "official"

developer controlled examples.  As such you have to deal with a game environment that doesn't necessarily follow the official template.  Ridiculously high ticket counts, weapon restrictions and draconian banning practices can ruin an otherwise good game. 

4. Player Matching - Call of Duty and Team Fortress 2 try to do it but never do it well, Battlefield 3 doesn't even try which means you could end up like a duck in a shooting gallery if you don't check out the leader boards before you join.

You'd think player matching would be a good thing but you usually end up with a bunch of players at a much higher level than you  anyway.  I prefer choosing my own servers but it would be nice if games like Battlefield 3 made it easier to figure out who you're playing against before you get in a game.  Something along the line of an average player level indicator or a color code in the server list would be helpful.  Are you Listening EA??

5. Who you have to play with - It'd be nice if everyone followed the rules and did what they were supposed to do but they don't.  Cheaters, noobs and people who just take the game too seriously can turn a game sour fast.  A few here or there can be safely ignored but in numbers you may as well give up.  It's why I prefer co-op.

6. Game tweaks - BF3 is the biggest offender.  Every patch contains "fixes" that change multiple game elements.  Weapon effectiveness , map elements or even the availability of equipment can be affected which makes every logon a roll of the dice.  Hmm, maybe that's why Battlefield's developer is named "Dice."  In their constant fiddling all they do is throw off the game balance and annoy players.  Worse it's usually done to support new DLC even if you don't buy it.

7. " Premium" - From reducing the amount of available servers for "normal" players to special "events" that give an unfair advantage.  This is the most blatant evidence of a software publisher's money machine in action.  From "double experience weekends" to early access to new maps this tactic will allow you to buy your way to the top of the leaderboards if you have the scratch.    

8. DLC - Make no mistake, this is nothing but a money machine for the publishers.  A few new maps and weapons may be nice to have but they end up skewing the whole game for everyone else.  DLC or downloadable content is meant to extend the life of an old game.  The more DLC available the weaker the core game is.  The mark of a great game is re-playability without a bunch of tacky add-ons.  If you have to keep adding content to keep things interesting you've either held something back at launch or your game is boring.  'Nuff said.

9. Huge Game updates -I realize that games have to be constantly fixed but there's no reason that a game that is 5 GB fully installed needs a 4GB patch every 3 months or EVER.  Publishers like to "preload" DLC and extra features whether you buy them or not.  So come patch day, everyone suffers.  Expect more of this as the new PS4 plans to "preload" full installations to your console based on what Sony "thinks" you'd like to buy.  Hope you're nowhere near your Internet Download cap!

10. Slow game joins - This could be lag but more likely it's just too much preload going on.  It wouldn't be such a big deal but sometimes the delay is so bad that the game ends before you get a chance to play.  You get tired of seeing "Loading" after a while.

Some of you may think I've missed one, namely "noobs."  Hey, like the say, we were all noobs once.  Instead of cursing them in the chat window just point them toward the unranked servers to practice on.  Otherwise let them learn the hard way...as practice targets.