I don't think this is a serious foray by nVidia into that particular market. They are showcasing Tegra4 to the masses. Which, as you have pointed out, hopefully compells Asus to pick it up for the next gen Transformer series.
Tegra4 can show a different screen on the tablet than it does via HDMI. My Prime already is a nice business/gaming/allrounder and I'm just waiting for a proper justification to ditch it for a new shiny. Which hopefully doesn't crawl to a shameful halt while it does any kind of meaningful IO.
Dungeon Keeper 1 is too sluggish in DosBox:( ...also whatever it takes for more Android apps to support a bluetooth controller is fine by me.
This is a cloud of one.
It is connected to a Geforce650 or better via HDMI. So that aspect is pretty gimmicky.
And IMHO for your portable gaming needs you'd be better served by a full tablet + a PS2 controller.
This is a tech demo and I do not expect it to go into production anytime soon. nVidia are trying to get more OEMs to buy their Tegra4 SoC. And honestly an Asus Transformer with this baby makes me actually pretty happy in the pants.
Tegra4's party piece is that it can display different stuff via HDMI on a telly than what you see on the tablet. Add some basic controllers to the tablet and what you get is a Wii U. Only portable. And good. And pretty much open. Question is, when will Android actually support this.
Tegra3's party piece was that it could do that proprietary nVidia 3D thing. Only a couple of games support it. Tried it with Riptide attached to my monitor and it was pretty neat.
My great hope is that Tegra4 is as good as current gen game consoles(but proper high-res). Propably not since they haven't changed the GPU a lot. But quad core A15 is pretty beefy. Tegra3 tablets typically also have more RAM than a PS3 or XBOX360.
The grapevine has it that nVidia had been snubbed by both Sony and Microsoft over ATI for the next gen consoles. So it stands to reason that nVidia will show much more interest in Android based game consoles with their Tegra3 SoC. If I were them I'd get in bed with the Ouya folks and design an Ouya2 based on Tegra4. Pronto.
They are not streaming over the internet. They stream video/audio over HDMI. Which is why that thing is tethered to your gaming PC by an HDMI cable. Which is why they only support one of their own newer graphics cards because presumably they also send controller input via HDMI. This is technologically pretty sound.
Nvidia has solved the old problem of not wanting to sit at your PC to play games on a 27" screen but on a 10" screen while sitting on the couch. Wait what? The HDMI streaming thing is indeed bit gimicky. And I wouldn't be too surprised if it wasn't dropped entirely.
That thing is a prototype, so hopefully it will be looking less daft when it is released. An Android portable gaming device makes actually a lot of sense. As much as a Gameboy, PSP and so on. Question is, is it good enough to replace gaming on a Smartphone, which the target group propably already has. this thing will float like a lead zeppelin. And I really doubt if this is much more than a tech demo for their Tegra4 SoC and a big fat snub to Sony and Microsoft for passing them over in their next gen consoles.
They built it because they can and to frighten the natives.
On the upside hopefully a lot more Android game devs will support controllers. PS2 controller + Android tablet(+ TV) is actually a very nice thing for those of us who spend a substantial time on the road.
Well, I am management. And I prefer to actually deal with stuff.
If the timeframe is borked, then I need to know so I can talk to the client about cutting features, postponing release, release in stages, etc. There is a lot you can do. But shoving out stuff that doesn't work or is unrelyable is something that will never be properly resolved.
If you desperately try to meet the release date and you actually somewhat succeed, then the books are closed on that release. But if you spend a lot of time after the release on bug fixing then eyebrows will be raised and your competence as a developer will be questioned. It's not your job to make management happy. It's management's job to make your job possible.
On unrelated news: Overtime is a clear indicator of management failure. Also massive overtime to meet deadlines never work and is never worth the effort. Been doing this for 15 years and I yet have to encounter one instance where this actually proved to do more good than harm.
Deprecation hardly if ever works. Once you deprecate something then you will have to get in touch with all of the clients of that function and make sure you won't break anything. And then you delete it. Marking that bit of code as deprecated does exactly nothing and can be safely skipped.
If you are rewriting a function due to old cludgyness with asimple, elegant solution, then unit tests are your friend.
If you are changing the behaviour of a function due to a change request then you still need to notify the maintainers of the clients of that function. It may very well be that they need to change their unit tests. Otherwise when theirs fail due to your changes they will want to know WTF is going on.
Ah, the joys of distributed teams. Personaly I like the other guys well within punching distance.
I do hope that this "some degree" includes unit tests?
Every time I see one of my devs click through 20 stages of an application to test stuff they have just written and it fails due to some obvious SNAFU I rip them a new one. That is what unit testing is for. Life is too short for anything else. I even only trust my own code after I've run a couple of unit tests against it. Only after that do I even bother to test it within the application. I'm far, far too lazy to do it differently.
The old code isn't even useful anymore. Typically it isn't on the same screen where you write your new stuff but a couple of pages above it. Easy reference it ain't.
What that guy described was refactoring. Refactoring without unit tests causes all kinds of unforseen breakage. QA types rightfully become throughly pissed when they find devs haven't done their homework.
That's what I tell my team time and again. Do NOT simply use the IDE to comment code out. Delete it!
If the code was replaced due to a change then the old one wouldn't work anymore anyway. If the old code was too clever(mostly too kludgy and not comprehensible) then do away with it. If the replacement causes any issues then use diff to find out what was changed.
I'm quite brutal when it comes to purging stuff like that. And I have been known to be rather sarcastic when I find stuff that isn't covered via unit tests. But that is an entirely different matter.
Maintaining code is hardly rocket surgery but normal housekeeping. There comes a time when the old pizza boxes have to go. Ideally before the roaches move in.
I've actually tried resizing the font on the tablet I gave my mum to find out if she could use it without reading glasses.
Forget it. They'll continue to need their glasses. Anybody who can still read a newspaper can use a tablet.
Grandmothers really do love their pictures.
Just today I found out that my dear old mum likes to watch her pictures on her TV screen rather than on the desktop upstairs. Which is why she moves all pictures on her cheapass Kodak photo camera. Which is jury-rigged to connect to her 20 year old TV via SCART and SVideo.
I've just given her my old Motorola Xoom and she will get my Transformer Prime once I move on. Which in turn means I will also need to get her a new TV despite "mine works and has been fine for the last 20 years".
Given the state I found her PC being in I think she will be much happier with the Prime. She's been embarassed into using a tablet by her grandchildren. If a toddler can figure out a tablet so can she.
Long story short: For grandmothers all you need to do is show them how to work Picasa and upload stuff to Youtube and they are happy. Just make sure you have all the passwords and check in on their accounts once a week. Sure as hell beats remote desktop to the ifested abomination they call their PC.
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (March 13, 1911 – January 24, 1986); BSc, SSc
He has received numerous awards over the long years of his service:
5 years long service medal
10 years long service
He didn't know about the gazpacho soup, so he founded a religion based on it.
He was indeed a great man, that man.
If you're in trouble he will save the day
He's brave and he's fearless come what may
Without him the mission would go astray
He's L Ron, L Ron, L Ron Hubbard
Without him Cruise would still be in the cupboard
Mother wasn't actually Mother Hubbard
And nothing else rhymes with his name
So this song will actually remain rather tame
Propably. But there's also the cautionary tale here.
The gist is: nothing that is hosted on some server you don't have access to is yours or permanent. If it isn't on your HD and backed up by you(hopefully) then consider it lost. Anything you put on a foreign server is ultimately lost to you.
That cloud thing, always-on DRM, web-based stuff...not yours. You will lose everything. So this is why as geeks we should use this trivial, yellow-press sob story stuff here and hammer it as a fundamental truth into the minds of technically challenged.
Grandma, storing your family pictures on a Google server is a bad idea. Remember those black and white pictures we found in the attic? They were there because we owned the house. How much care do you expect Google to take with that stuff? In the long run? For the next century like those old family pictures? Remember how Zynga killed your pet? Same thing.
Yep. If you are sane then you will pick up games a year after they were released with all DLC at half the price and most of the bugs ironed out.
In that respect I was severely bitten by HOMMVI, Bats: ACity and Diablo3. Preordered those. Should have known better since all 3 franchises have had a troubled history. And Diablo3 his the worst offender since it has fallen into the hands of people who thought that Diablo was about competitive gameplay. Which it never was. Design bugs never get ironed out. HOMM6 just crashed on me and will propably join HOMM4 in never being played through by me. And I got bored with Arkham City despite being a Batman nutter.
funny thing is all of those are on sale now. Apart from Diablo3 which will never go on sale. Ever. There'll be the odd battle chest but that's it. Blizzard exists in a different universe. Our rules don't apply to them.
The only games I bought at full price without regret were Kingdoms of Amalur and XCom. Even bought the DLC at full price with little regret.
Buy Skyrim and mod it accordingly if you need fornicating polygons. They got lizard people on cat action, too. And dead people doing the nasty.
On the first day there was the Dragonborn. And Bethesda saw that it was good.
On the second day there was The Construction kit. And Bethesda was pleased.
On the third day there were hordes of naked people shouting at dragons and clubbing them to death with giant purple dildos. And Bethesda recieved all Game of the Year awards known to man.
I'm torn about that. I'm not entirely convinced that David Braben is to be trusted with something as precious as the Elite series. Davids are not to be trusted with games. It has been proven time and again that smart Dereks are better suited to the task of tackling starships. In space!
All snark aside I have been suckered out of my money the very instance Braben popped up next to Elite on Kickstarter. If anything then the drama value alone is worth the price of admittance.
Isn't that the SEGA which has caused some fraudulent DMCA takedown bruhaha a couple of weeks ago? They haven't done anything to personally endear them of late and made them selves at home with the likes of UBI, EA and Activision.
Anybody who trebuchets lawyers at their own fanbois must have gone off the deep end. I wouldn't trust them with my time and my money.
The PC resurge is due to cheap and easy distribution with no cash barrier to get your stuff on services. AAA quality stuff gets released for 20 bucks. Steam shovels games by the metric crap ton. Then march over to GOG and marvel at their prices for the newish stuff they have. 3 bucks for the original Witcher? Yes, please. Then return to Steam and grab a couple of Jensens and Batmen for the price of a nice evening at the movies. Or read RPS for whatever tickles your fancy and swing over right to the developers homepage and grab the game for the cost of a packet of cigarettes. I've just finished LA Noire picked up at a bargain price and enjoyed every bit of it(except the driving sequences, skipped those).
Gabe "The Gabe" Newell said that game piracy was a service problem and boy did he show them. Next thing will be free money hats in TF2. For everybody.
"PC gaming is dead", by Simon Cowell's codpiece, nothing could be wronger.
Here's a real cracker: Digital sales still aren't included in all game sales statistics. So by applying Hollywood logic, all non-boxed instances of played games flow nicely into the piracy statistic. And therefore piracy is rampant on PC, so we need more DRM. Except most indies don't have that. Which is why the indie devs must have starved yonks ago. And it must be their dessicated corpses who made the also massively pirated sequels to their massively pirated first installments. Zombie indies want your brains! Fight the Zombie indies! Buy Activision, EA, UBI! For the children!
2012 wasn't too shabby if you stayed clear of the AAA titles.
On the indie side of things you got the likes of Torchlight, Yet another Orks must Die, The Walking Dead, lots of puzzle plattformers...
On the AAA side of the equation only Dishonored and XCom spring to mind.
Oh, and Diablo 3 also started releasing its first betas this year.
With the current sales going on I find that I am still catching up with 2010. If you are on PC then you'd need to be stark raving mad to buy a game right after release. Just go to Steam, GOG or whatever and browse at best sellers at or below 5 bucks. That should keep you occupied for a decade or two. Pick up the newer stuff when it is dirt cheap.
The only AAA game I bought at full price without any buyers remorse was XCom. And only because I loved the first two games. Funnily I wasn't dissapointed one bit having just replayed the original to get rid of the rose-tinted beer goggles.
...that rather sounds like Skyrim with every nude mod installed. With the naughty-boy-needs-chastizing animation pack. The dildos are pinker and bigger than in Saint's Row.
Writing dirty Elder Scrolls fanfic is like farting next to a cow. Utterly pointless since you have already been outdone even before you started.
Warhammer was huge fun at lower levels. I only leveled via PvP which was actually quite nice both in the closed battlegrounds and the open PvP lakes.
The PvE content simply didn't captivate me even tho I am a Warhammer junkie.
The MMO that was most like WoW but not WoW was actually Rift. It did a couple of things correctly and a couple of things like WoW. I had huge fun with it for about half a year.
The thing with MMOs is that 3-6 months is the max you can have fun with them. After that you will become ultimately bored with it. And you stay either because you want to raid all raids, collect all stuff and stick around your friends. But not because you like the game.
I raided heavily in vanilla WoW(cleared most of Naxxramas back then) and in WotLK. Problem was, the trash-boss-distribute loot-trash-ad nauseam will become boring after a time. And if you have a choice of being competitive but with a tightly run outfit or with friendly nice people but not competitive then you are between a rock and a hard place. If you want to be competitive then The Raid has to come first. And that means treating people in a way you propably wouldn't want to otherwise. The other alternative is to run with people you actually like and you look out for. But you will find that they may not be as competitive as you'd like which also leads to frustration. Did my fair share of raid leading and that has to be the single most frustrating experience you will ever come upon in computer gaming.
WoW-style MMOs are dying out because of that. Their endgame relies on you finding enough people of the right MMO-archetype role to cooperate. MMOs shine when they simply let you jump in and participate in some madness that's going on. The first time I saw that working to some extent was in Warhammer Online with the open quests or whatever they called it.I saw it with Rifts in Rift. You could have huge fun, but that too will become repetitive. But the pure MMO experience is you see a lot of people running into one directio. And out of curiosity you follow them just to find yourself in the thick of it for the next hour.
Here's my highly simplistic and inaccurate MMO rule number one double fine happy star.:
If you have to queue for something meaningful or prepare and coordinate for couple of days to get something done then you are playing a bad game.
We already have a steampunk game set on Mars. Had it for a long time, too. It's even free on GOG.
Tho I preferred the installment with those dinosaurs in that valley which was forgoten by time. That one is free on GOG, too.
The Ultima series sure took you places. It all went downhill when they focussed on online gameplay and the accessible to the masses(ie cashgrab).
Ranting aside, the thought of Agatha Heterodyne on Mars appeals to me. It could be a mixture of The Incredible Machine and Mass Effect. With nice hats.
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I don't think this is a serious foray by nVidia into that particular market. They are showcasing Tegra4 to the masses. Which, as you have pointed out, hopefully compells Asus to pick it up for the next gen Transformer series.
:(
...also whatever it takes for more Android apps to support a bluetooth controller is fine by me.
Tegra4 can show a different screen on the tablet than it does via HDMI. My Prime already is a nice business/gaming/allrounder and I'm just waiting for a proper justification to ditch it for a new shiny. Which hopefully doesn't crawl to a shameful halt while it does any kind of meaningful IO.
Dungeon Keeper 1 is too sluggish in DosBox
This is a cloud of one.
It is connected to a Geforce650 or better via HDMI. So that aspect is pretty gimmicky.
And IMHO for your portable gaming needs you'd be better served by a full tablet + a PS2 controller.
This is a tech demo and I do not expect it to go into production anytime soon. nVidia are trying to get more OEMs to buy their Tegra4 SoC. And honestly an Asus Transformer with this baby makes me actually pretty happy in the pants.
Tegra4's party piece is that it can display different stuff via HDMI on a telly than what you see on the tablet. Add some basic controllers to the tablet and what you get is a Wii U. Only portable. And good. And pretty much open. Question is, when will Android actually support this.
Tegra3's party piece was that it could do that proprietary nVidia 3D thing. Only a couple of games support it. Tried it with Riptide attached to my monitor and it was pretty neat.
My great hope is that Tegra4 is as good as current gen game consoles(but proper high-res). Propably not since they haven't changed the GPU a lot. But quad core A15 is pretty beefy. Tegra3 tablets typically also have more RAM than a PS3 or XBOX360.
The grapevine has it that nVidia had been snubbed by both Sony and Microsoft over ATI for the next gen consoles. So it stands to reason that nVidia will show much more interest in Android based game consoles with their Tegra3 SoC. If I were them I'd get in bed with the Ouya folks and design an Ouya2 based on Tegra4. Pronto.
They are not streaming over the internet. They stream video/audio over HDMI. Which is why that thing is tethered to your gaming PC by an HDMI cable. Which is why they only support one of their own newer graphics cards because presumably they also send controller input via HDMI. This is technologically pretty sound.
Nvidia has solved the old problem of not wanting to sit at your PC to play games on a 27" screen but on a 10" screen while sitting on the couch. Wait what?
The HDMI streaming thing is indeed bit gimicky. And I wouldn't be too surprised if it wasn't dropped entirely.
That thing is a prototype, so hopefully it will be looking less daft when it is released. An Android portable gaming device makes actually a lot of sense. As much as a Gameboy, PSP and so on. Question is, is it good enough to replace gaming on a Smartphone, which the target group propably already has. this thing will float like a lead zeppelin. And I really doubt if this is much more than a tech demo for their Tegra4 SoC and a big fat snub to Sony and Microsoft for passing them over in their next gen consoles.
They built it because they can and to frighten the natives.
On the upside hopefully a lot more Android game devs will support controllers. PS2 controller + Android tablet(+ TV) is actually a very nice thing for those of us who spend a substantial time on the road.
Well, I am management. And I prefer to actually deal with stuff.
If the timeframe is borked, then I need to know so I can talk to the client about cutting features, postponing release, release in stages, etc. There is a lot you can do. But shoving out stuff that doesn't work or is unrelyable is something that will never be properly resolved.
If you desperately try to meet the release date and you actually somewhat succeed, then the books are closed on that release. But if you spend a lot of time after the release on bug fixing then eyebrows will be raised and your competence as a developer will be questioned. It's not your job to make management happy. It's management's job to make your job possible.
On unrelated news: Overtime is a clear indicator of management failure. Also massive overtime to meet deadlines never work and is never worth the effort. Been doing this for 15 years and I yet have to encounter one instance where this actually proved to do more good than harm.
Deprecation hardly if ever works. Once you deprecate something then you will have to get in touch with all of the clients of that function and make sure you won't break anything. And then you delete it. Marking that bit of code as deprecated does exactly nothing and can be safely skipped.
If you are rewriting a function due to old cludgyness with asimple, elegant solution, then unit tests are your friend.
If you are changing the behaviour of a function due to a change request then you still need to notify the maintainers of the clients of that function. It may very well be that they need to change their unit tests. Otherwise when theirs fail due to your changes they will want to know WTF is going on.
Ah, the joys of distributed teams. Personaly I like the other guys well within punching distance.
And "re-implementation that preserves interface" is a term you call elegant?
I do hope that this "some degree" includes unit tests?
Every time I see one of my devs click through 20 stages of an application to test stuff they have just written and it fails due to some obvious SNAFU I rip them a new one. That is what unit testing is for. Life is too short for anything else. I even only trust my own code after I've run a couple of unit tests against it. Only after that do I even bother to test it within the application. I'm far, far too lazy to do it differently.
The old code isn't even useful anymore. Typically it isn't on the same screen where you write your new stuff but a couple of pages above it. Easy reference it ain't.
You are being too polite.
What that guy described was refactoring. Refactoring without unit tests causes all kinds of unforseen breakage. QA types rightfully become throughly pissed when they find devs haven't done their homework.
That's what I tell my team time and again. Do NOT simply use the IDE to comment code out. Delete it!
If the code was replaced due to a change then the old one wouldn't work anymore anyway. If the old code was too clever(mostly too kludgy and not comprehensible) then do away with it. If the replacement causes any issues then use diff to find out what was changed.
I'm quite brutal when it comes to purging stuff like that. And I have been known to be rather sarcastic when I find stuff that isn't covered via unit tests. But that is an entirely different matter.
Maintaining code is hardly rocket surgery but normal housekeeping. There comes a time when the old pizza boxes have to go. Ideally before the roaches move in.
I've actually tried resizing the font on the tablet I gave my mum to find out if she could use it without reading glasses.
Forget it. They'll continue to need their glasses. Anybody who can still read a newspaper can use a tablet.
Grandmothers really do love their pictures.
Just today I found out that my dear old mum likes to watch her pictures on her TV screen rather than on the desktop upstairs. Which is why she moves all pictures on her cheapass Kodak photo camera. Which is jury-rigged to connect to her 20 year old TV via SCART and SVideo.
I've just given her my old Motorola Xoom and she will get my Transformer Prime once I move on. Which in turn means I will also need to get her a new TV despite "mine works and has been fine for the last 20 years".
Given the state I found her PC being in I think she will be much happier with the Prime. She's been embarassed into using a tablet by her grandchildren. If a toddler can figure out a tablet so can she.
Long story short: For grandmothers all you need to do is show them how to work Picasa and upload stuff to Youtube and they are happy. Just make sure you have all the passwords and check in on their accounts once a week. Sure as hell beats remote desktop to the ifested abomination they call their PC.
Red and yellow socks? That's awesome. Like a hotdog.
It's the dog's bollocks!
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (March 13, 1911 – January 24, 1986); BSc, SSc
He has received numerous awards over the long years of his service:
5 years long service medal
10 years long service
He didn't know about the gazpacho soup, so he founded a religion based on it.
He was indeed a great man, that man.
If you're in trouble he will save the day
He's brave and he's fearless come what may
Without him the mission would go astray
He's L Ron, L Ron, L Ron Hubbard
Without him Cruise would still be in the cupboard
Mother wasn't actually Mother Hubbard
And nothing else rhymes with his name
So this song will actually remain rather tame
What a guy!
*Bronze Swimming Certificate, Silver Swimming Certificate
Propably. But there's also the cautionary tale here.
The gist is: nothing that is hosted on some server you don't have access to is yours or permanent. If it isn't on your HD and backed up by you(hopefully) then consider it lost. Anything you put on a foreign server is ultimately lost to you.
That cloud thing, always-on DRM, web-based stuff...not yours. You will lose everything. So this is why as geeks we should use this trivial, yellow-press sob story stuff here and hammer it as a fundamental truth into the minds of technically challenged.
Grandma, storing your family pictures on a Google server is a bad idea. Remember those black and white pictures we found in the attic? They were there because we owned the house. How much care do you expect Google to take with that stuff? In the long run? For the next century like those old family pictures? Remember how Zynga killed your pet? Same thing.
Yep. If you are sane then you will pick up games a year after they were released with all DLC at half the price and most of the bugs ironed out.
In that respect I was severely bitten by HOMMVI, Bats: ACity and Diablo3. Preordered those. Should have known better since all 3 franchises have had a troubled history. And Diablo3 his the worst offender since it has fallen into the hands of people who thought that Diablo was about competitive gameplay. Which it never was. Design bugs never get ironed out. HOMM6 just crashed on me and will propably join HOMM4 in never being played through by me. And I got bored with Arkham City despite being a Batman nutter.
funny thing is all of those are on sale now. Apart from Diablo3 which will never go on sale. Ever. There'll be the odd battle chest but that's it. Blizzard exists in a different universe. Our rules don't apply to them.
The only games I bought at full price without regret were Kingdoms of Amalur and XCom. Even bought the DLC at full price with little regret.
They are not dead yet. 'Tis but a flesh wound.
Buy Skyrim and mod it accordingly if you need fornicating polygons. They got lizard people on cat action, too. And dead people doing the nasty.
On the first day there was the Dragonborn. And Bethesda saw that it was good.
On the second day there was The Construction kit. And Bethesda was pleased.
On the third day there were hordes of naked people shouting at dragons and clubbing them to death with giant purple dildos. And Bethesda recieved all Game of the Year awards known to man.
I'm torn about that. I'm not entirely convinced that David Braben is to be trusted with something as precious as the Elite series.
Davids are not to be trusted with games. It has been proven time and again that smart Dereks are better suited to the task of tackling starships. In space!
All snark aside I have been suckered out of my money the very instance Braben popped up next to Elite on Kickstarter. If anything then the drama value alone is worth the price of admittance.
Isn't that the SEGA which has caused some fraudulent DMCA takedown bruhaha a couple of weeks ago? They haven't done anything to personally endear them of late and made them selves at home with the likes of UBI, EA and Activision.
Anybody who trebuchets lawyers at their own fanbois must have gone off the deep end. I wouldn't trust them with my time and my money.
The PC resurge is due to cheap and easy distribution with no cash barrier to get your stuff on services. AAA quality stuff gets released for 20 bucks. Steam shovels games by the metric crap ton. Then march over to GOG and marvel at their prices for the newish stuff they have. 3 bucks for the original Witcher? Yes, please. Then return to Steam and grab a couple of Jensens and Batmen for the price of a nice evening at the movies. Or read RPS for whatever tickles your fancy and swing over right to the developers homepage and grab the game for the cost of a packet of cigarettes. I've just finished LA Noire picked up at a bargain price and enjoyed every bit of it(except the driving sequences, skipped those).
Gabe "The Gabe" Newell said that game piracy was a service problem and boy did he show them. Next thing will be free money hats in TF2. For everybody.
"PC gaming is dead", by Simon Cowell's codpiece, nothing could be wronger.
Here's a real cracker: Digital sales still aren't included in all game sales statistics. So by applying Hollywood logic, all non-boxed instances of played games flow nicely into the piracy statistic. And therefore piracy is rampant on PC, so we need more DRM. Except most indies don't have that. Which is why the indie devs must have starved yonks ago. And it must be their dessicated corpses who made the also massively pirated sequels to their massively pirated first installments. Zombie indies want your brains! Fight the Zombie indies! Buy Activision, EA, UBI! For the children!
2012 wasn't too shabby if you stayed clear of the AAA titles.
On the indie side of things you got the likes of Torchlight, Yet another Orks must Die, The Walking Dead, lots of puzzle plattformers...
On the AAA side of the equation only Dishonored and XCom spring to mind.
Oh, and Diablo 3 also started releasing its first betas this year.
With the current sales going on I find that I am still catching up with 2010. If you are on PC then you'd need to be stark raving mad to buy a game right after release. Just go to Steam, GOG or whatever and browse at best sellers at or below 5 bucks. That should keep you occupied for a decade or two. Pick up the newer stuff when it is dirt cheap.
The only AAA game I bought at full price without any buyers remorse was XCom. And only because I loved the first two games. Funnily I wasn't dissapointed one bit having just replayed the original to get rid of the rose-tinted beer goggles.
...that rather sounds like Skyrim with every nude mod installed. With the naughty-boy-needs-chastizing animation pack. The dildos are pinker and bigger than in Saint's Row.
Writing dirty Elder Scrolls fanfic is like farting next to a cow. Utterly pointless since you have already been outdone even before you started.
Or like Ultima tanked after they focussed on their wood-chopping simulator.
Warhammer was huge fun at lower levels. I only leveled via PvP which was actually quite nice both in the closed battlegrounds and the open PvP lakes.
The PvE content simply didn't captivate me even tho I am a Warhammer junkie.
The MMO that was most like WoW but not WoW was actually Rift. It did a couple of things correctly and a couple of things like WoW. I had huge fun with it for about half a year.
The thing with MMOs is that 3-6 months is the max you can have fun with them. After that you will become ultimately bored with it. And you stay either because you want to raid all raids, collect all stuff and stick around your friends. But not because you like the game.
I raided heavily in vanilla WoW(cleared most of Naxxramas back then) and in WotLK. Problem was, the trash-boss-distribute loot-trash-ad nauseam will become boring after a time. And if you have a choice of being competitive but with a tightly run outfit or with friendly nice people but not competitive then you are between a rock and a hard place. If you want to be competitive then The Raid has to come first. And that means treating people in a way you propably wouldn't want to otherwise. The other alternative is to run with people you actually like and you look out for. But you will find that they may not be as competitive as you'd like which also leads to frustration. Did my fair share of raid leading and that has to be the single most frustrating experience you will ever come upon in computer gaming.
WoW-style MMOs are dying out because of that. Their endgame relies on you finding enough people of the right MMO-archetype role to cooperate. MMOs shine when they simply let you jump in and participate in some madness that's going on. The first time I saw that working to some extent was in Warhammer Online with the open quests or whatever they called it.I saw it with Rifts in Rift. You could have huge fun, but that too will become repetitive. But the pure MMO experience is you see a lot of people running into one directio. And out of curiosity you follow them just to find yourself in the thick of it for the next hour.
Here's my highly simplistic and inaccurate MMO rule number one double fine happy star.:
If you have to queue for something meaningful or prepare and coordinate for couple of days to get something done then you are playing a bad game.
We already have a steampunk game set on Mars. Had it for a long time, too. It's even free on GOG.
Tho I preferred the installment with those dinosaurs in that valley which was forgoten by time. That one is free on GOG, too.
The Ultima series sure took you places. It all went downhill when they focussed on online gameplay and the accessible to the masses(ie cashgrab).
Ranting aside, the thought of Agatha Heterodyne on Mars appeals to me. It could be a mixture of The Incredible Machine and Mass Effect. With nice hats.