Random Thoughts & Topics

[vivisectvi]

So I think I am going to unload my Alienware laptop on Kijiji and pick up something from iBuyPower instead. Anyone have any experience with any of their rigs? The Valkyre CZ-17 looks pretty sweet.

 

[Smues]

Tales of Xillia is confirmed to get an American (and Europe and Australian) release. Score!

 

[AntiLeaf33]

Activision is making a Walking Dead FPS where you play as Daryl.

http://ca.ign.com/articles/2012/07/06/activision-reveals-walking-dead-first-person-shooter

 

[vivisectvi]

Also, Telltale will apparently be making more TWD games after this first "season" finishes.

 

[Haws Bah Gawd]

Well, fuck me running. A new Dreamcast game, called "Gunlord", has apparently been released. It's a port of a Neo-Geo game, but it's a new game nonetheless.


http://www.joystiq.com/2012/06/25/gunlord-now-available-for-dreamcast/

 

[Smues]

MANOS: The Hands of Fate for iOS - OUT JULY 26TH 2012 - Gameplay Trailer

 

[AnonymousBroccoli]

Real Canadian Superstore is scaling down their video game sales in several locations, and they started clearing out a lot of games yesterday. The locations in town here (London, ON) removed their entire electronics sections, and moved their games to one half of one side of one aisle. Though the location in a nearby town hasn't done anything of the kind, and is just operating as usual, with their old setup.

This is what I managed to get:

Mass Effect 3 - $15
Dark Souls - $12
Child of Eden - $7
Rocksmith w/ USB guitar dongle - $15
Assassin's Creed Revelations - $15
Rayman Origins - $10
Punch-Out!! (Wii) - $7

There were a few things I didn't find, like Arkham City GOTY or LittleBigPlanet 2 for $15, or the Uncharted 1 & 2 pack for $12. There's a whole thread on RedFlagDeals with more extensive lists to check out. The thread creator there is from Edmonton, and posted some pictures from last night. (Just noticed ICO & Shadow of the Colossus Collection for $12, though I got it for $20 from EB last week, and didn't see it anywhere anyhow.)

 

[treble]

Our local Superstore has had a bargain bin for the past few months with a bunch of games under $10. Nothing great, but I have found a few good deals.

Going to have to check this out tomorrow.

 

[AnonymousBroccoli]

There's usually an $18.xx bargain rack, and maybe a bin here too. The past while they've had two-packs of games like Slaughterhouse, Enslaved, Green Lantern... Though Walmart's had those particular titles for $10 individually.

 

[Kageho]

You know, I was kinda hoping that NHL 13 would have a handheld release, because I wanted to play the game while not at home. Like say on the bus or that. This isn't happening. Dammit EA.

 

[treble]

Checking the last 2 days, our Superstore still doesn't have anything on clearance. Yesterday would have been perfect, too, since there was no sales tax on anything in the store.

 

[KingPK]

You know, I keep thinking that spending 3 hours in one sitting on NBA 2K12 is way too much and then I see Fazzle on Raptr having played Arkham Asylum for 6 hours yesterday. I think I'm ok.

 

[fazzle]

Of those 6 hours, probably 4 of them were idling.

Although I've definitely done sessions of 2k12 way longer than your 3 hours.

 

[vivisectvi]

So my new gaming laptop looks like this:

http://www.msimobile.com/level3_productpage.aspx?cid=6&id=367

1 x MSI GT70 0NE-276US - ETA: July 27
Operating System Windows 7 Professional - 64-Bit
Wireless Network Bigfoot Networks Killer™ Wireless-N 1103 (3x3) (Includes 3rd Antenna) (Dual Band)(SKU - X8R053)
Optical Drive Bay 6X Blu-Ray Writer/Reader + 8X DVDRW/CDRW Super Multi Combo Drive (SKU - X7R551)
Raid Raid 0 Stripe Enabled (Requires 2 or 3 Hard Drives. Combines Hard Drives for performance)
Second Hard Drive 750GB 7200RPM 16MB Cache Buffer (Serial-ATA II 3GB/s) (SKU - X5R303)
mSATA SSD Drive ( Slot 2 ) 128GB Solid State Drive (Super RAID) mSATA - [ In Primary Hard Drive Bay ]
mSATA SSD Drive ( Slot 1 ) 128GB Solid State Drive (Super RAID) mSATA - [ In Primary Hard Drive Bay ]
Ram 16GB DDR3 1600MHz Dual Channel Memory (4x4GB SODIMMS) – Default (SKU – X4N211)
Graphics Video Card nVidia GeForce GTX 680M 4,096MB PCI-Express GDDR5 DX11 w/ Optimus™ Technology (SKU - X3R708)
Processor 3rd Generation Intel® Ivy Bridge Core™ i7-3610QM (2.3GHz - 3.3GHz, 6MB Intel® Smart Cache, 45W Max TDP) (SKU – X2N300)
Display 17.3" FHD 16:9 "Matte Type" Super Clear Ultra Bright LED Matte Screen (1920x1080) (SKU - X1R553)

I put in an order through xoticpc.com last night. This is the newest MSI model that drops tomorrow and includes the insanely powerful NVIDIA 680M Kepler graphics card. Factoring in the cash I got for my Alienware M17X, I've only had to pay about $1500 USD for this rig.

I also love that it has a matte HD screen. The glare from the glossy screen on my Alienware is unbearable at times (especially when dungeon crawling in Skyrim).

 

[Kageho]

You know, I keep thinking that spending 3 hours in one sitting on NBA 2K12 is way too much and then I see Fazzle on Raptr having played Arkham Asylum for 6 hours yesterday. I think I'm ok.

Hm... So I guess if you could see me playing for 16 hours on one game during one of my days off, you might have a problem?

 

[KingPK]

I guess it's just I haven't played any sports games in a while aside from NHL and forgot how long a single game takes. I could knock out a game of hockey in like 25 minutes with my settings but a game of NBA or MLB takes at least 45 minutes. At least with a game like Arkham Asylum, you feel like you've made more progress in an hour than a single game in your sports season.

 

[Thoth]

So my new gaming laptop looks like this:

NUTSO SPECS

I would tell you to give us some benchmarks, but it seems pointless. You can run everything at 60 FPS min on 1920 x 1080 with everything all the way up, right?

 

[Broward83]

http://fiber.google.com/about/

Fuck you Kansas City... the both of ya!

 

[Kageho]

I guess it's just I haven't played any sports games in a while aside from NHL and forgot how long a single game takes. I could knock out a game of hockey in like 25 minutes with my settings but a game of NBA or MLB takes at least 45 minutes. At least with a game like Arkham Asylum, you feel like you've made more progress in an hour than a single game in your sports season.

That's the biggest problem I have with sports games and why I'm going to avoid NBA and MLB from now on. At least with NHL and FIFA I can get a game done in 20 minutes (I try my best not to cause any stoppages in play).

Yeah, I play the other games more action, fantasy, sci-fi, simply because I do feel like I make more progress. Unless I gotta grind. Then I wanna kill myself in those situations.

And Saikyo... I f'n hate your laptop. Its a beauty.

Kansas City gets Fiber-optics of 1TB? Seriously? Stupid Telus is taking years to get Edmonton to that point. Fuck you Google. Come up here and show Telus how to do it.

 

[AnonymousBroccoli]

Kansas City gets Fiber-optics of 1TB? Seriously? Stupid Telus is taking years to get Edmonton to that point. Fuck you Google. Come up here and show Telus how to do it.

It's gigabit (Gb/s or Gbps), not terabyte. Which is roughly 125 megabytes per second (MB/s), not including overhead, or other practical issues.

Here in London, Ontario, we've got the fastest DSL available to us, and it tops out at about 4.3 Mbps, or 232 times slower than 1 Gbps. Thanks Bell! And your Olympic site sucks too!

 

[vivisectvi]

So my new gaming laptop looks like this:

NUTSO SPECS

I would tell you to give us some benchmarks, but it seems pointless. You can run everything at 60 FPS min on 1920 x 1080 with everything all the way up, right?

Pretty much. I made sure I went for the latest/greatest video card this time out. The worst part about my Alienware was the driver thing. The lifespan of the card decreases considerably when Dell won't even put out new "certified" drivers for use with their machine (ie: you couldn't even go to the MFG's website and download new drivers as they'd return an incompatible error).

The 680M, though, apparently runs upwards of 50% better than the card for the previous generation.

 

[cobainwasmurdered]

The new (not sure how "new" it is but I just changed to it so it's new to me!) hotmail or Outlook as it's called is shockingly nice. I changed over after reading an article somewhere praising it as maybe the best option but also saying that after all this time it's probably too little too late. I wouldn't know where it ranks but it's fine by me and you'll still get all your old emails even with your new outlook address which was the reason I never changed to a different service for more than 12 years. That and lazyness.

 

[Smues]

Square accidentally put up the FFVII PC re-release for purchase for a short time this weekend before taking it down. Some people bought it and downloaded it but can't play it because they can't activate it, you can imagine how happy those people are. The good news is that this would appear to mean the release is near, and the price was $12.70 which is fairly reasonable. The bad news is the game has SecuRom, which is pretty awful DRM.

 

[Master Thrasher]

Why bother putting DRM on a game that's like 15 years old and selling less than $20. I'll also state the obvious that I wish they did a full HD remake but it would take as long building the game from scratch.

 

[Broward83]

They aren't doing an HD remake because it's put FF out of business. The head of FF said until they can make a game better than FF7, they won't make a remake because they know no one would buy a new FF game which would kill the franchise dead.

 

[Master Thrasher]

Well that's sad and not true. If they a HD remake of FF IX, then they would go out of business.

 

[Sabre]

I would buy another final fantasy even if VII got HD'D... when its at a discount price and worth playing.

 

[vivisectvi]

They aren't doing an HD remake because it's put FF out of business. The head of FF said until they can make a game better than FF7, they won't make a remake because they know no one would buy a new FF game which would kill the franchise dead.

This makes absolutely no sense.

 

[Sabre]

I think that the head dude of FF is worried as most people whom buy FF games rate them as "not FFVII" so if they release a HD remake, no one will bother to buy them as they have their next gen FFVII.

Stupid really since FFVII is already playable on multi formats. (PC, PSP, PS3)

 

[Smues]

A full HD remake of FFVII would cost as much to make as a new game, and many people wouldn't want to pay the full $60 for a remake of a 15 year old game. I'd love
a remake but I completely understand why we aren't getting one.