Friday 20 November 2015

FALLOUT 4 X-01 ARMOUR VIDEO

This is me managing to acquire the Brotherhood Of Steel X-01 armour in Fallout 4.

You have to be a high enough level for it to appear, or spawn, apparently and I was at Level 28 when I did this.

It seems to be a matter of luck getting this armour, which I think should not come into a video game.

I completed dozens of missions for the ungrateful Brotherhood Of Steel of Danse's group and wondered why I was not being offered promotion or armour? I then realised I was being sent to places they had previously sent me to?!

Other than caps and XP there was not much reason to persevere for so long with that one, still it was not boring. Lol.

I also do not remember having this X-01 armour in the previous Fallout titles, do not know if it was available or not? I amm sure I remember seeing it somewhere?

Not played the game using it yet and interesting to see if I can change to a human companion and get them to enter the old T-51 Armour? I will find out tonight to see if I can get Piper in it?

Ooh not much space is there Piper? Lol.

I am beginning to appreciate, however, the sheer amount of buildings within the game making things look bigger than they are and there seems to be a myriad of places to find.

I would have still liked the map bigger, mind you.

One thing I liked about New Vegas was the absolute desolated wasteland combined with a desert and sheer open spaces along with the mutated wildlife. Not many additions to the wildlife in Fallout 4 and still no Iguanas! BOO!

Anyway the armour was found in a building called Court 35 and not marked on any map and west of Clock Towers, I think it was called. Or west of that building you get sent to by the Brotherhood Of Steel with the funny french sounding name, Fenuil Hall, or something similar, lol.

Here is a video at any rate ...

I am publishing this before it has uploaded so if your here really early you might want to come back in a couple of hours?! Lol. I have to head out of the house as ususal ...

It will post automatically on YouTube ..


Monday 16 November 2015

FALLOUT 4 & 2016 GAMING & FILMS

Well I simply do not believe it but I am playing Fallout 4! Video links to my YouTube channel are provided at the bottom.

This is for a number of reasons but one is the obvious one that it has finally come out after 5 ... umm or actually 7 years of waiting!

Another reason I did not think I would be playing this is the same reason I thought I would not be around for the very first episode in the new Doctor Who series, 29th September 2015, in that I was not supposed to be here!

In fact ever since April a little legal case regarding corruption I was indirectly involved in was ending in a few weeks. Then this got delayed several times from a week or two or a couple of months at a time. It ended, successfully of course. But not successfully for me.

I have been left high and dry and without a single scrap to vindicate myself to everything I said ... well about the case at any rate. Everything else has the necessary data ... except this one, the biggest one of all! In an unexpected way I was left high and dry. Well ... almost unexpected. Still ... gaming ..

Does not like like 7 years of work in Fallout 4 if I am honest ... but hell it is Fallout 4 and the only way it will get knocked down to an average game score for me and that is if it only lasts half as long as Elder Scrolls Skyrim did, and without the inclusion of DLC!

Hmm come to think of it though I played all the DLC for Fallout New Vegas I have not gotten around to playing the Skyrim DLCs?! Damn it!

Anyway the map looks smaller than that of Skyrim, disappointingly, and that is without any large myriads of mountains or the fact that a third of the Fallout 4 map look to be water!! Must be a hell of a lot of underground sections? Maybe a hidden city of skyscrapers? I have never been to Boston, or anywhere in the USA unfortunately, but I do not think it has them .. or many of them?

Also despite its familiarity there are no returning characters once again, though the ones they do have are good I must say. Also there lacks the ... eeriness that you got in New Vegas, like the roaring and cold sounding wind you hear in the upper floors of the Lucky 38. Or that you got in that fabulous The Divide DLC. Or the strange feeling you get on the Burning Man DLC, The Long Roads was it?

The yellowed out storms with odd coloured lightning is the closest I have gotten to a very eerie post apocalyptic feeling like those I mentioned.

Hmm cannot think of any in Fallout 3 come to think of it? Ummm OBSIDIAN?! A New New York or New Seattle please?! LMAO! Or some other location that would make a good and fitting game to the Fallout series. Oh ... that will be 3 years wait! Damn it!

Diamond city is cool and looks cool but not very big. Started to think there were no scorpions in this one but despite them turning up no lizards like the Golden Geckos as yet.

Too many of the makeshift and crappy weapons, though it makes sense in a world like this one. No sub-machine guns but repeater pistols with huge clips that empty in no time at all, meaning you kill quickly but die between clips, lol.

Power armour appears far too early for me but it does look like an inferior type so maybe there are several types to find? Never thought of this when I came across no less than four power armour suits with the first few days. It was weeks before I could get a suit in New Vegas. Do not think I got one in Fallout 3 as I was a newbie ... well a newbie to Fallout and not played PC games for over 5 years! Did not realise you could wear a suit, lol.

I have just had a thought.

Despite the map feeling small everyone says there is a lot to do, just hope i is not retreading everywhere 3 or 4 times over, which looks unlikely but just remembered the S.P.E.C.I.A.L.S wall. Now that gives the impression the game has a very long shelf life on my ... umm shelf! Desktop, lame-brain! Yes thinking about that list makes me think I have months ahead of me and should take me up to early 2016.

Maybe up until my most anticipated title of Deus Ex Mankind Divided?

As long as I am finding new places into 2016 I will be happy, at least until a DLC comes out or better still Deus Ex Mankind Divided comes out, lol.

Then hopefully Deus Ex will keep me going until Dishonoured 2 comes out and that until Homefront The Revolution comes out or vice versa?

Then hopefully Star Citizen will be finished and that will keep me going until Elder Scrolls 6 comes out? Lol.

Also there may be some brand new titles that take the world ... or just me, by storm that come out during this time period?

Oh and Mass Effect Andromeda!

Hopefully Need For Speed will be good? Fingers crossed!

A Tom Clancy game like Splinter Cell, or other single player title, with the old issues gone?

Then there is the shrinking lithography next year, 2016, and the movies like Batman V Superman Dawn Of Justice, X Men Apocalypse that looks to be the first real X-Men movie since they started and then Deadpool, Gambit, Civil War, The Suicide Squad and Doctor Strange and that is without any other big films or sequels!

The mind boggles at the thought that once they are all done things like Guardians Of The Galaxy 2, Shazam, Thor Ragnarok, Captain Marvel, Justice League and the sequels to Blade Runner, Avatar, Prometheus and Interstellar could be well on their way too?!

My head spins at the thought of all this and when you look harder it is exciting to realise that we have several years like this!

Now I am well aware that the consoles hold back PC games and that this will likely now happen for a few years ... except that there have been rumours about a new Nintendo console?! Everyone refers to it as the 'NX' but if they have decided to bring something out based on the new lithography chips next year then this might not be a problem?! WOOHOO!

Instead of the PC being a third wheel to the other two big names consoles you might have anotehr pair of more powerful beats to code for ... so the incentive is there to up the graphics, map sizes, physics and artificial intelligence!

Imagine that? Nintendo becoming the PC gamer's best friend? Lol!

You see there will be two lesser machines with the PS4 and XBox One and then the PC and the NX meaning fewer letters is definitely better.

The idea of the 'NX' sounded like a crazy one until I realised this and maybe it is what Nintendo realised?

There is no time span I have read about or release date for the NX but the new lithography AMD CPUs, APUs and GPUs is mere months away. So are the nVidia GPUs.

As a matter of fact I could not help thinking that Fallout 4 was rushed out quickly when I play it and it kind of was when you think about the five months since it was announced.

Think about it ... had this arrived looking like this after Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Wildlands, The Division, Homefront The Revolution, Mass Effect Andromeda even and Star Citizen it just might have been lambasted? Maybe Bethesda realised this? Which is why it looks unfinished to me and nowhere near as big as I thought it would be? Graphics not quite where I thought they would be?

So it is still good but we might now have to wait until Elder Scrolls 6 or another Obsidian Fallout before we see the big leap many thought they would get with this one?

Only problem is even if they knew about this leap a year ago it is likely no less than 18 months and if not then as much as 3 years to wait?! Bah-humbug!

Roll on Deus Ex!

Helping some farmers ...



Brotherhood Of Steel Early Missions Part One ...




Brotherhood Of Steel Early  Missions Part Two ...


Saturday 14 November 2015

THE WINDOWS FALLOUT

OK I have ten minutes to kill so that my anti-nausea drugs, Metoclopramide Hydrochloride, kick in and allow me to play Fallout 4!

I was going to go straight into it but it wont let me and this has happened a couple of times along with some other weird things, like my Roccat keyboard remaining lit when the computer is off.

In fact before I write a bit about Fallout 4 and my initial impressions I started this because I wanted to point out that Windows 10 has started to play up with some very odd things.

First off is that Steam does not always start up when Windows does and refuses to run when I try to run it?! Only happened last 24 hours and only runs if I restart Windows.

As for starting or restarting Windows 10 there is another couple of odd things it has started doing and I am wondering whether they have all been pissed down at Microsoft? Or have all contracted some virus that makes them delirious or hallucinate? Because sometimes when it starts up the 'Number Lock' is on and sometimes it is off.

The other odd thing it has started doing is making the old Windows start up sound on occasion and the Windows 10 start up sound the rest of the time?!

What the FUCK?!

Oh and my typing has gone to pot on my computer too, which now makes one Android phone, one Windows phone and now my PC whereby letters get addedd … THERE! I am leaving that in and it just added an extra 'd' on the end of 'added' and I actually watched it do thi! Oh and it missed an 's' now! LOL!

I find it impossible to be a coincidence that two devices I have typed things out without issue for years with one and twenty years for another are both now doing odd things when using them to type! This was already beyond coincidence before throwing in another Android phone and a Windows Phone too!

But then I have upset a great deal of powerful people and organisations with my blogs on corruption so having someone interfering with my stuff is not some weird and crazy conspiracy theory idea but a highly likely one.

Evidence has gone missing in the post about a court case and that evidence is still faling to arrive in any shape or form! I have some elves and minions now to help out so I am leaving that for others to chase up.

Now for Fallout 4 …

It is good and when it runs, a Windows 10 and/or Steam problem, and has not acted up at all with no crashes or anything else thus far. In fact it has run better than New Vegas and I bought the Game Of The Year Edition so should have had everything ironed out by then. New Vegas would crash sometimes on a loading screen.

As for the game itself, yes it is good but I have noted some annoying things and some disappointing ones.

Sorry but to me the map does seem small and this for me was a major disappointment. Added to that the collision detection is off, Molotov Cocktails want to explode whenever anything is nearby! While on the subject of Molotov Cocktails many groups want to just keep hurling them at you, Super Mutants for sure, and can throw them a bloody long way whereas you throw them like a ten year old schoolgirl!

The Brotherhood of Steel Power Armour now needs a nuclear battery and I did not realise and ran out of power in the middle of nowhere. Oddly this was while trying to figure out how I had managed to get the armour so bloody early in the game and use it without any training?

Admittedly the other games you got it real late in the game, which was far too late to enjoy it, while this one you get it too early.

The graphics are better than the previous Fallouts by some margin, however that do not look like more than a couple of steps beyond that of Skyrim. Considering the period of time between these two games that is something of a disappointment.

AT least the weapons and use of them have improved!

I heard some reviewers on YouTube claim that there is a hell of a load to do in the game, trying to talk it up due to the small map. Really? There must be a city or two in ruins somewhere with a myriad of bog buildings to roam around in and a huge underground section or two I have not come across yet?

Also the draw distance looks like that of the old games, nowhere near far enough!

Other than that I am enjoying it so far and maybe it will pick up a great deal in time? Maybe I will be playing it in a couple of months time like I did with Skyrim but looking at the map I have doubts I will be playing this in a months time?

The loading sections are also very Skyrim looking, which reminds me of a guy who text in to PC Gamer stating he or she hoped it was “...not a Skyrim v2.0 Boogaloo remix!”. That remark made me laugh and raised an eyebrow as 'Boogaloo' sounded like a track that could dhave been missing from Jean Michel Jarre's Zoolook album.

I did like Nick Valentine as a companion, thought it was James Woods doing the voice at first and then got annoyed at how many times he was telling me that my dog, Dogmeat, has a good nose on him! Yeah … repeatedly told by a bloody Android that dogs have good senses of smell? Really?!

LOL!

I am not sure if there has been a huge amount of disappointed fans over things like the map size and graphics but had this been released in 6 to 12 months there could well have been mass disappointment. I cannot work out why the map is actually smaller than Skyrim's?!

The other game I am very seriously looking forward to and probably more than or at least the same amount of anticipation of that of Fallout 4 is Deus Ex Mankind Divided.

Now Deus Ex Human Revolution was only several things away from being the greatest game ever made for me!

  • Graphics
  • Map Sizes and lack of Open World as such
  • Length … and stupid BOSS sections
  • Lack of Animal Life
  • Carry Amounts
  • Not many Weapons

Now the follow up to Human Revolution, Mankind Divided, may have a crap sub-title like its predecessor but the footage and pictures look out of this world!

If they correct the shortcomings of Human Revolution as I have listed above then my blood God this could be deliriously awesome!!

I played one or more of the early Deus Ex's, despite morons on YouTube popping at me and calling me a newbie, and even have a copy of Invisible War here. Hmm yes, I played both now I think about it. But what they did with the reboot, HR, was damned awesome and because …

It had …

  • Style
  • Main Title
  • Characters
  • Story and Twists
  • Awesome Augments
  • Atmosphere and …
  • Fantastically atmospheric Music

Never looked into whether it got awards for any of the above but music and style it should have won awards for, that is for certain! If it didn't the awards are fixed! Err … are there awards for these things?! Lol!

Had Deus Ex Mankind Divided been launched in a few weeks of December I could easily see Fallout 4 being ditched for some time while playing the next Deus Ex.

SIGH maybe the next Fallout 5 might be the perfect Fallout? Oddly enough that because it does like like Skyrim v2.0 and due to the fact that next year, 2016, is going to be flooded with new faster CPUs and GPUs that will be revolutionary I think that the next game will be the one that blows everyone away.

The lithography, or size of transistors in chips, shrinks by a fair amount, Intel does not figure in this at all. Intel already shrunk theirs but despite tech journalists paid to crow about there stuff the last three versions of their Core i3 to Core i7 have not been big leaps. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Oh I am sure that when the AMD CPU, APU and Graphics Cards come out on the new lithography you will suddenly see Intel stuff they have been holding back while they rip you off for their underwhelming crap? That is Intel from start to present day I am afraid.

That next game with the graphics to blow us away is, of course, will be Bethesda's other title, Elder Scrolls 6.

For me these two Bethesda properties of Fallout and Elder Scrolls are the games that all others need to beat with Deus Ex being the only exception.

I think its the open world and concentration on single player that wins them over. The Dead Islands were OK, apart from big trucks on a single short bloody road, as were the Borderlands but its so co-op focused it ruins them a little bit.

Dying Light was better but though the interest did last it started to get boring a little over half way through. The weapon crafting and may melee and using swords in it was second to none.

I certainly hope that the map of Elder Scrolls 6 will be a fair bit bigger than Fallout 4? Maybe the map of the latter wont be a problem as I play the game. But there is just something about exploring open worlds, if done right, that is so addictive.

I feel a little guilty I did not mention Dragon Age Inquisition and FarCry but the former got the looting all wrong and the latter had annoying and linear missions. Both these titles got ignored for weeks on end or months on end and not because there was something else I wanted to play either.

With Dragon Age Inquisition I absolutely loved it but I ended up with the best sword around half way through the game, looting them became boring. I felt like I was bending over most of the time and felt like a gardening game. It was also too short, despite the boring looting.

With FarCry this was ignored for completely different reasons and was out of rage, lol. Yup I will be honest it drove me nuts to the point of expletives many, many times. I then ignored it for months.

The day before I bought Fallout 4, the 10th November 2015, I completed FarCry 3 finally and the day before that I completed Dragon Age Inquisition which included some romantics and sexy romps with Cassandra.

Now why can't I find a woman like that?! LMAO!

Oooh I forgot?! Bethesda's other title, Dishonoured!

A third classic but not quite up there with the other two but it has a sequel on the way! Ooh boy do I hope that one leaps forwards on the last two have open worlds like the other three I love?! Oooh boy, do I dream of that happening, or what?! Lol!

There is of course the title that Dishonoured sort of feels like, Thief. That reboot could get a sequel though I have not seen or heard anything of one just yet. I loved Deadly Shadows so much. The reboot looked great but need bigger maps, greater longevity and a few tweaks here and there.

Now my drugs have had a chance to kick in and I am off to reboot my PC to play Fallout 4!


Ooh yeah and I must get umm … the AMD Raptr thing to work again so I can record my playing for YouTube! Bloody Raptr and bloody Windows 10! Lol!

Thursday 29 October 2015

BIZARRE BEHAVIOURS

I have bought several magazines of late to read about things that were of great interest to me.

One of these was just two days ago.

There have been several times ... actually something of an understatement but let's say with game previews, when afterwards I felt I was given nothing despite the magazine cover and article looking rather large and in depth.

I recall Fallout 4 and now Deus Ex Mankind Divided.

The articles went on and on and much of it was empty waffle. An average article I would end up reading a second time. A particularly good one and it might get read three or four times.

After each of these I felt ... indifferent and wondered why I had bothered to read it at all, let alone pay £6.00 for the magazine?!

I have found it strange to watch the magazines and their content get worse over the years and clearly very biased. The biased nature stepped being ludicrous when journalists were clearly talking so much bollocks that it could be very easy to prove it. Not the odd statement every few issues but several times each issue.

I often stand at the magazine rack in Sainsburys or WH Smiths wanting something to read that is of interest to me. I scan the various computing magazines, camera magazines, mobile magazines and even watches and then say "Martin, you know what will happen, you'll read it and realise you have paid £6.00 to be bullshitted to and they have received money or perks to lead you on!".

There was a time when I would go home with two or three magazines at once. Now I'm lucky if I buy one each month. Hmm, not sure 'lucky' is the right word.

The situation is ridiculous. Beyond ridiculous.

I often see people sifting magazines like me but then put them back. I wonder if they do what I do, speed read sections of interest, spot the bias and put it back.

Tech journalists think they are so clever. They think no one is about to smell the bullshit at all. I can from five miles out. Sometimes it's bull and someone's it's empty waffle. Talk crap about a big name game coming out over 4 out 5 pages and it will sell because of the name on the cover. In these instances you can always be guaranteed that in the reviews section of games there is nothing much of interest either. So a preview game takes the entire cover misleading buyers about what they are getting.

I also spotted a review, lol a tiny piece, on a PC racing wheel, the Logitech G29. Now I happen to own the G27, the G29's predecessor, which I bought not knowing the G29 was imminent. When I read about it I first thought 'his bloody typical', it also happened with my Corsair Vengeance headset both from PC World oddly enough. However I did not feel so bad when it turned out the G29 was reported to be only a facelifted G27 being the exact same underneath! This was a shock. Also several buyers were not only complaining at how the new model was a lot more expensive than the old ones new price but that the drivers to the old one were not being updated. So trying to force people to payout over £300 for the exact same thing! Nice!

Imagine my confusion when the right article failed to mention any of this and gave it a good score?

The magazine also had a group test on several new motherboards for the new Intel Skylake CPU and claimed that you needed these for gaming. Motherboards that cost between £175 to £275!!

Umm no you don't need these for gaming!!

You might need them to see very high numbers in a benchmark you will not notice with the human eye. You might need them for gaming in 18 months to two years time?

So the article claims you need to go out and pay £175 for the motherboard. The CPU will be around the same or a little more. £350 and you have not bought a case yet, bought decent RAM for another £100 plus or a graphics card for £300 to £800!

That's £800.

Then it's over £100 for a good gaming keyboard and almost as much again for a mouse. A grand then!

Oh but wait, we have not bought the two hard drives, one SSD and one HDD. Another £200. So we are at £1,200.

Then there are your DVD writer drives and your Blu-Ray drive.

A internal memory card reader.

So you can see your heading towards £1,500 here but wait ... we are forgetting something ... you have not bought your surround sound speakers nor a bloody monitor yet!

Now here are two points to be made about this article ...

If you can't play the latest games then you must have built your system bloody years ago, or bought it. If you both it under 3 years ago you'll not notice the difference much, unless it wasn't for gaming in the first place?!

Secondly and most importantly and tech halfwit knows that these aren't much different from the old stuff but more importantly next year everything leaps forward a bit!!

This could be anywhere from February to October next year but even with the later date that's now less than a year away. This is because the lithography, size of transistors, in one other CPU that's always cheaper and an all new design, and both graphics cards all get shrunk. Being shrunk means more cores, so better at handling many things at once. It also means higher clock rates, so faster too. Also energy efficiency improves too.

That's without any improvements an all new design makes.

Now for those that do not know ... were any of these very expensive boards for the new CPU out next year? No.

If I were wanting to build a new PC and only a beginner I would be bloody pissed off if I paid all that money then found out a year later I could build something for a third of the price that is twice the power!

Some fanboys would laugh at that. But no matter how much you have read and become familiar with your branch predictions, cores, modules, floating point register widths and anything else you simply cannot predict at all how a future CPU or GPU is going to perform. NO you can't. You can get a fifty, fifty guess correct but that's just crap. Unless of course you can not only predict it's speed but side give the exact reasons why.

I've been following technology for over thirty years and no one had ever done it. Rather strangely the Internet forums are full of people that claim to be able to do so. In fact year after year many things are claimed, don't of them never materialise but this never stops them arguing the toss about what the next thing will do.

I built a gaming computer will over 6 months ago, probably getting on for a year ago, and my combined APU and motherboard cost a little more than the motherboards in the group test. Oh well except for the expensive one which was £275 or more! My combined motherboard and APU was £75 cheaper than this board alone. Anyone learnt yet that things in computing go out of date quickly and therefore drop their prices quickly? Ah well then if you bought my board and APU today you would probably get them for at least £30 cheaper than I did. So that's £100 cheaper than that motherboard alone.

Can't think of any game I don't play on the highest settings and no slowdowns occur.

So why would I replace my APU and motherboard they claim you can't play the latest games on for something double the price that's going to be out of date, less than half the price, only 12 months from now?!

You might want to ask the very suspect journalists this?

As I said I've noticed this of behaviour becoming ever more odd for quite a few years now.

Still, I was shocked when I read this report in the BBC about an event that was going to take place, that's been getting abusive threats, where one of the topics was going to be 'gaming journalism integrity'?!

Bloody hell?!

After all these years of setting this go on and as fashionable late as ever some ... umm, journalist ... lol, reports on this behaviour?!

Wonders never cease ... apart from the tardiness which I'm bite completely used to. Unless of course it's off my corruption blog, lol. I'm used to my stories on there appearing in the media must six months or do after I cover our expose something!

Still ... it's bringing things to the fore and making people aware of the truth that's the important thing here.

Well that's if they fucking give a crap of course?

Sometimes I do wonder?

Will not be long before I know for sure I think? Then it may be a case of the bad people being given approval for being corrupt and dishonest because everyone is amoral anyway?!

Lmao!

Hey, it's not down to me, yah know. I don't make the rules!

Lol!

SXSW 'considers rethink' over GamerGate-linked events - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34649047

Friday 7 August 2015

TESTING THE BROKEN PIECES PART 2

Oh dear!

Well you can see from the screenshots I have provided below that as I predicted, despite being totally confused because it should NOT have happened, the missing driver message appears once again!

On checking device manager, see second screenshot, the exclamation mark has returned once again.

This was one of those fancy HP Pavilions, or so it looked, with the aluminium casing. So much so that many thought it was an Apple laptop.

Unfortunately that is where the quality for these Pavilions both starts and finishes.

Also bizarrely both this HP Pavilion and my last HP Pavilion both lost the lettering on the keys. Only the last Pavilion lost them after about two years or so and this one had lost a couple within two months!!

This leads me onto something else about laptops which along with other problems I have with manufacturers to these mobile devices and charge so effing much for them.

They fail to understand the concept of being mobile!

OK so a few years ago a waterproof laptop would have been expecting too much ... but today I read about some motherboards that had a coating on them that stopped water being able to short anything out. But let us forget this while I momentarily point out that all mobile phones, for the stupid over the top prices they charge now, should be able to withstand one of the most common things you encounter when you get outside your door. RAIN!

The other issues I have with laptops is the lack of illuminated keys unless you spend upwards of £750 minimum. This does not guarantee you illuminated keys ... just that the ones that are are upwards of this price.

If your knowledgeable in this stuff you will be surprised at how many times I have had people buy laptops for £300 to £500 that think they are getting top of the range and the fastest processors and largest hard drives for this money. No ... you are not.

Oddly enough I have been looking at laptops ... albeit smaller and bloody cooler than this one. I expect to be doing a lot of ... travelling. A lot more often that I previously did and to a great variety of places too. This will continue for several years.

The cheapest one I like was £750 and once again was a HP, only a much higher model than a Pavilion which I would not touch again with a barge pole. It also had an SSD drive which was good ... only it was only 128GB. As I purchased a Crucial MX100 256GB for £75 I find the capacity somewhat ... disappointing for a laptop of this price. Had it been able to have a second drive added it would not have been so bad but with its svelt and slim size I simply think this option impossible.

So buying laptops with illuminated keys then assures me that the letters do not rub off ... even after two years? Well, yes. but that is not all though.

So back to the mobile aspect once again. What is it that you can encounter while out of your house that is far more common than rain? Well ... most of the time. Something that becomes far more common at a certain time of the year too! Especially in winter and more so the closer you are to either the north or south pole?

Well that would be night then.

Yes ... they must all design and manufacture these things on the equator?

Further into the northern or southern hemisphere the earlier in the day it is when night time arrives. So much so that you can have darkness, or indeed daylight, for months at a time! So you had better not take your mobile computer out then? Yup, unless you take a bloody lantern with you or are going somewhere else where their is light.

I did see a couple of others and one was closer to £1000 and the other a little over £1,100.

It cost me £800 to build my main desktop to use for typing and gaming along with many other things and that cost me around £800 which included two 256GB SSD drives, 16GB of 2400MHz RAM, fast and dearer than average, 2TB Hard disk, 24 inch monitor, Corsair case and a Roccat Ryos professional keyboard wth illuminated and with Cherry black switches which was £150 when new. Also it had a built in graphics chip and I later spent £130 odd putting a Radeon R9-280 graphics card in it to speed up my games. These expensive laptops I mentioned do not have one of these dedicated graphics chips that are upwards of £100 retail.

So you see where I am going?

But then it is only because of Apple they get away with it. Nice as their laptops are they are even more ridiculous amounts of money for what you get. But then if the things last you several, not one or two but several, years and are still going strong then the price is not ... quite so bad.

So if your working on the move what do you do? My answer ...

Do not, I repeat do not decide upon a tablet.

Everyone thought that tablet sales would just keep getting higher and higher. I did not. They tailed off.

I tried a tablet and a powerful one at that. Except it is still more powerful than most tablets sold today but is somehow ... slower?! A lot slower!

Also as well as wondering whether Google takes money from manufacturers to force these effing updates on you that you have no clue that have done anything instead actually slow your device down? Well so you go and buy another one of course. A newer and faster version.

I would bet that something along these lines gets found out by someone at some stage and ends up all over the news? I will wager big on that! I mean to say that this is for these types of computers and so this includes phones too. Do not say i did not warn you, lol.

No, if you just have to have a mobile computer to work on, because phones are useless at many things, go laptop. But spend upwards of £700 if you want something that wont be failing or not doing its job anytime soon.

Windows can slow down ... but only if its overburdened with lots and lots of programs. especially if they are constantly running, which you can look at at the bottom right of your screen in the system tray. In Windows 10 its is the arrow, caret, that points up. Press that and you will see ... most of the programs constantly running and it is where your anti-virus will appear.

This slowing down also comes down to power too and of your CPU, be it Core i3 or Core i5 and i7. I will point out that these are multiple chips in one. What the numbers do not tell you is how many there are.

I chip today can have two, four, six or eight cores.

Some of these can do two threads, though this is deliberately put across as having double the threads and so double the power and speed this is not true in many cases. In those that I names here.

Then there is the speed, or the frequency measured in GHz. Gigahertz.

So amount of cores and the speed they go.

So if you buy a laptop that has six or eight cores, I do not even know if they make one but I do see laptops with Core i7 CPUs, it os not going to have an issue with many programs running at once in the background. See? Simple when you now how.

Only ...

Every so often the chips and the pipes and transistors inside them go through a shrinkage, known as a die shrink with a die meaning chip. This has not happened in awhile but is about to in a big way. There is talk and rumours of more than ten cores. Processors, or CPUs (Central Processing Units), are likely to have 16 cores in them. I would wager 20 or 24 would likely appear. There is talk about 32 cores but I think that is pushing it somewhat on the sizes they will be manufactured. This sizing is known as lithography.

Sounds great? Yeah except it will not be until 2016 and no one, well everyone is doing their usual guessing, predicting and arguing but as I was about to say no one, really knows for sure.

Oh wait. We are talking about laptops here and working while being mobile? Well provided you do not run anything intensively 3D like games coming out next year or even right now you will be fine. Ooh ... I should also mention something most of you will not be working with. 3D animation programs like that they use for cinematic films like Jurassic Park and others. These could be demanding and slow down but only if your models are extensive, highly detailed and especially if animation is being worked on.

There are several of these programs and if your not familiar with them and now thinking of getting one for your shiny new laptop ... STOP! You may be in for a bit of a shock.

There are several programs and I worked with one years ago and knew of two others. there may be more today but ..

3D Studio Max I worked with and was £7,500 a pop at the time around 1999.

Ready for this next bit? That was the cheapest of the three!

Soft Image (latter pronounced 'im-arge')  was a lot more, could have been over three times the price?

Maya was another. You can, or could, buy magazines regarding these things and I have seen them in WHSmith in the past. Not looked in recent times. There was a rumour that one cost around £30,000?!

Remember this is 'per licence'. Got a group of buddies wanting to all work on animation with these things? You had better have very deep pockets.

Mind you this might have changed and maybe they are more affordable? If others came along with cheaper products it is possible a price war might have gone on?

Yoinks! I seem to have gone on a bit ...

Well if any of it helps then it is worth while. If I end up with a laptop and what type of laptop and why will of course appear on here when the time comes.

I can also tell you that it will be the start of a flurry of things to appear and many quite exciting. Not just for this blog either and each one will get many different ... subjects and endeavours appearing in quick succession and for a fair old while too.

All in good time. Not very long now, that I can assure you.

Ooh ...those screenshots ...



TESTING THE BROKEN PIECES

I finally got Windows 10 on the laptop!

In a few weeks time your going to find out some things and ask why in the world I bothered to do that and spend all that time doing it...

Well see what I did on my corruption blogs and everything I got against the biggest names in the land and you will realise I do not like being beaten?! Well in some instances. A few instances. Gaming for instance ... under some circumstances ... OH YOU BLOODY WELL GET MY POINT! LMAO!

It installed under Windows Update. After four failures via Microsoft's installation tool you can download which already worked and quickly on my main desktop computer. First time too.

I have not used the laptop in a long time. It sits around doing nothing. Partly because it gets too damned hot and I do not know why. Or at least I did not know why ... I think?

I will explain.

It threw up a dialogue box in Windows 7 about not having graphics drivers installed. I remembered it had been doing this previously. Now I am not sure how or why but I was surprised after I purchased this laptop from PC World, I got royally ripped off for, and discovered two graphics chips inside it.

A 4200 series and a 5000 series.

Before they placed graphics on the CPU die that is, so why I was confused.

Anyway the issue was that the graphics driver it was having issues with was the 5000 series and not the 4200 series.

Now I thought that the installation of Windows 10 might cure this. I had remembered that I had tried to correct the problem previously but gave up ... likely because the laptop kept overheating and shutting down. There is a genuine reason, well could be two, that it overheats. Due to bad design by HP combined with PC World's DON'TKNOWHOW team who claimed they fixed it and did not.

The screen hinge on the left had seized and when you forced the lid open it opened up the left hand side of the case, prising it apart in other words, right where the fan is and the exit port for air.

So what was happening is the channel for the air to blow out quickly was being opened up so the air was going all over the place and not being channelled out.

Now ask me if I would advise you to buy a laptop from PC World? Lol!

There was one other little thing too...

I tried Unity and Ubuntu on my laptop for a period.

The Linux was still crap...sorry any fanboys, cannot change that...crap is still crap. If it does what you want it to do then great ... I am all happy for yah. But it does not do many things I want it to do, did not like the graphics card and drivers ... yeah you can whine all you like but no one mentions this and nor did several magazines that said you can install it on anything without any issues....

Except maybe breaking your laptop?!

You see because one time I was out with the laptop showing others what Linux is and explaining it when the laptop shut down and gave a warning about heat.

It then did this several times, I was disappointed at how slow my version of Linux was, wondered what had gone wrong from the days of RedHat ... errr ... 4 I think? I decided after three or four shutdowns to take Ubuntu off the damn laptop.

I was remembering this after Windows 10 installed and I got the same damned message about no graphics drivers being installed when something suddenly occurred to me ...

Ubuntu fried my Radeon 5000 series graphics chip?!

I suddenly thought that the warning message was a lie, even if unintentional. It was telling me I had no graphics driver installed and did this no matter what version I installed. The 4200 series was fine but in device manager I always had the exclamation mark against the 5000 series no matter what I did.

Maybe ... Windows was not able to contact the graphics chip because it had been fried? Yes, I thought, that must be it!

Except that I was reinstalling the Catalyst drivers for the umpteenth time, except this time under Windows 10, and suddenly right before my eyes the exclamation mark for the 5000 series Radeon chip vanished. Just vanished ... just like that. The first effing time in over a year!

"HUH?!?!"

That was my thought as I reached the conclusion about the fried chip when the bloody thing disappeared!!

WTF!

Anyway it was late ... I powered down the laptop and started to wonder what the odds were that when I booted up the laptop again that, that little exclamation mark and message about no graphics driver being installed would return?

So no, I cannot go ranting on that, that little session with Linux via Ubuntu I had actually did physical damage to my laptop. I just can't, lol.

However ... if ... IF .. things go awry again then I can say that in 35 years of computing I had my very first instance of software destroying hardware.

I will find out next time I boot up the laptop and I am hoping that the darn thing goes back to how it was without the extreme heat and roaring fan.

Kirk Out!

PROJECT CARS & FEELING THE NEED ONCE AGAIN

Right then ... been a fair bit of time since I posted on here ... or any of my other dozen blogs for that matter ...

I could explain why this is ... but I do not want to put any information on the Internet ... not right now and something tells me that every single visitor of every single blog I have would have found out why somewhere between September, this year of 2015, and October.

LOL, call it a hunch?!

Anyhoo I have been messing around installing Windows 10 and testing games but before I did that I managed to get onto a track without that graphical glitch! Now sometimes i can manage this by altering something in the settings. I then get onto a track without the green lines. Sometimes. Once on a track they never appear, so I can restart as much as I like! However ... exit the track and go back into a different track, same track or even change the car and the green meanies return!

Since I installed Windows 10 they have been banished! Even updating the Catalyst drivers back to 15.7, or whatever it was, and running the game and no green blindness going on straight ahead of me. I did a video of these green meanies.

Anyway ... here are a few videos of me trying to better my own times before finding out that with only 7 hours playing I had gotten into the top 100 and at one point was placed at 42 somewhere. 

Now really annoyingly, and I am sure you will agree, I then did an even faster lap, exited to see how much higher I had got and was placed at 56 ... or was it 58? I dunno but the point was I knocked something like 1.2 seconds, or a little more, off my time and dropped fourteen places?!

Hooow ... thhhhhe ... ffff******?!

Anyway I am pleased the game is working again and I am at about 10 hours into it now.










Windows 10 playing Project Cars


Wednesday 5 August 2015

WINDOWS 10 BREAKING THINGS

Oh dear.

This is not good!

I upgraded to Windows 10 on my main PC without a hitch and pretty quick too. I have since played several games on it and posted them to my YouTube channel, see bottom for links.

However I suddenly remembered that a HP Pavilion Laptop I use also has Windows 7 and so should be able to be upgraded to Windows 10. Might make me use it a bit more and maybe Windows 10 might manage the power better and prevent my laptop from getting hot enough to fry some eggs?!

I really, really do not like laptops! Badly made shite with no idea about design, power management nor what it truly means to be a mobile product. Mobile phone manufacturers all suffer the same blindness. Probably blinded by the dollar and pound signs in their eyeballs? LMAO!

Or to put it another way as well as getting hot and shutting down the labels rub off the shitty keys and they also are not illuminated!

Little tip to design morons ...

It gets both DARK and WET outside!

Anyhoo back to this.

Attempted to upgrade Windows 10 4 times and failed each time. Bloody infuriatingly it took fucking ages to download, fucking ages to install and then between the 7th and 11th hour, I got a bit further each time, it fails, attempts to revert back to Windows 7 while giving me a lame code, no idea of what went wrong and overheats the laptop so that each time it shuts down before Windows 7 gets booted right after reverting back to it!

Never used Microsoft's tech agents previously but have spoke to them three times ... ooh sorry twice ... several minutes ago I got one up live, I typed in the details and the guy ceases the chat?!

Oddly enough the two previous times were both women and extremely helpful.

It also seems I got lucky with my main desktop upgrading easily as there are rafts of upgrade faults, driver conflicts and breakages, devices not working like multi monitor setups, of digital equipment.

I really thought at one point that the upgrade had literally broken this laptop I am now using to type this out! Lol!

Some issues are listed in a Forbes report ...

http://www.forbe0.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/06/17/windows-10-free-for-1-year-what-happens-next

Some of my gaming under Windows 10 ...




Monday 13 July 2015

PROJECT CARS CANNOT PROJECT CARS

I am having a serious graphical problem with Project Cars that is driving me around the ... ahem, bend! Sorry for the pun!

Since the Catalyst drivers updated to 15.7 Project Cars is broken! Well almost all of the time!

Once on track I get these green lines everywhere at eye level that blinds you. You simply cannot go at any decent speed as you cannot, I mean CANNOT, navigate bends.

Also I noticed some very iffy things with the physics of other cars in a race whereby I always got hit on the first bend and the other drivers were driving like idiots, so there to all those harping on about things like 'true race sim' and 'realistic physics and AI'. Your simply brain dead!

I saw one web page of one guy bitching about why others were complaining about it ... I mean, really?! Your really going to ask why people are unhappy with a game ... or any bloody product for that matter?! How very bizarre. On the site someone answers that its usually 'fanboys'?!

Umm, care to elaborate?

To state 'fanboys' means there is something else that they wont have anything negative said about ...well on the PC there is nothing else. Not since either the last Need For Speed or the little known Assetto Corsa. So ... HUH?! Lol!

There are some interesting, along with the confusing, things said here ...

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/799997-project-cars/71950871

Project Cars also got caned in another review here ... like 4/10!

http://axiostech.uk/gaming/project-cars-a-disappointment/

Make sure you watch the video on this page of some of the completely impossible and brain dead things the other cars do when the green light gets lit!

Now I was under the impression that the idea of going through these crowd funded sites was to create the games the coders wanted that the publishers would not let due to money and time constraints?

Well there have only been three of these crowd funded games that I have any interest in and that is, or indeed was with this one, Project Cars, Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen.

Those first two are not only as shallow as a paddling pool but missing many things upon release and that last one is always two years from being released!

I wonder how many feel as I do in that in the beginning I thought that this crowd-funding idea could give us some real classics in gaming but that little niggling doubt is now telling you it told you so and that it is all about to go wrong. Well I am sure that gamers will band together and cause a bloody riot if these people do not stop being greedy and taking money for broken and faulty goods?!

Ooh no, wait a minute? Almost all the electrical retailers in the UK have not only been doing this but been doing it for years and no one seems to say anything, do anything or give a damn about it and they just keep on selling you inferior rubbish.

Here is my graphical glitch ...


This stopped only one time in the last few days when I turned post processing on. But then it came back and before morons start spouting "Raptr ..." don't bother, no difference!

Considering my Logitech G27 is bolted to a stand and heavy and I have to do contortionist motions to get it in place you can imagine how effing annoying these sudden glitches are?


I have now had this something like 12 out of 13 starts when I am trying to beat this following time ... (err I already did but Raptr was not running! lol) ..


Wednesday 1 July 2015

GIVING IN TO PROJECT CARS

Well I did it. I gave in.

Was getting fed up with my Logitech G27 doing nothing, and just like my Corsair Vengeance headset the G27 has a new model replacement in the G29. However I have read some very bad and disturbing things about the Logitech G29 as many are saying its exactly the same as the G27,except cosmetically, but miraculously works with things the G27 does not?! Oh and it costs a lot more than the G27!

Not good Logitech, if true.

I watched a lot of videos of people playing Project Cars and heard many state that the cars were ... well, skittish and in the videos they certainly looked skittish. So I thought I might hold on for the new Need For Speed.

Then I saw Project Cars on Amazon for £19.95, though I have found out some annoying things about this that pisses me off with devs/publishers, and thought 'hell, I will order it". I had not viewed the entire roster of vehicles and tracks but it looked light on road cars and normal roads but thought these would come out in the form of downloadable content?

It arrived Monday evening, was supposed to be here Sunday evening typical Amazon. I spent a couple hours in the Lykan Hypersport doing around ten or twelve laps in the default Dubai track. Yup...spun out and hit the wall a few times in the first lap. Less on the second when I realised something...this actually does feel like driving a real car. Well except for one thing you cannot recreate and soon another couple of things. One they put in you cannot possibly see, undulating roads which you can see in a real car ... mostly, lol. The other is predicting how tight a oncoming bend or turn is going to be and this one I am not sure they can recreate.

My third or fourth lap I managed to do without coming off track! Cool.

I had been saving the replays but it turned out that for some bizarre reason the replays were in a stupid format you cannot upload to YouTube, sorry about that. Also my copy of Raptr, I normally use for recording gameplay, had not been logging in and when I corrected this I recorded five videos before I realised it was only recording in 720p?!

I have no idea how long it had been doing that! Lol!

Right now to the road cars and the tracks and the bloody idiots you get online spouting crap.

The road cars were abysmally few. So was the real world tracks ... well I say 'real world' but one website stated that the California Highway was not a real road? Anyhoo ...

I looked to see if there would be any downloadable road cars when a load of idiots in a forum ranted at others asking for road cars that it would not happen, be pointless and that road cars were boring?!

What?! Are you fecking idiots? One quipped in a patronizing way "its a motorsport game, of course there wont be any road cars, they are boring"?! Did you leave your brain in your bed that morning?

First off half the people in the forum wanted road cars...so not pointless and added to this sales are higher with more ... VARIETY! Dumb-arse!

Secondly ... well yeah its a motorsport game and not for road cars which is why there is a effing road car section!

Thirdly someone actually impressed me by piping up at these morons moaning they hope there are more motorsport cars and no road cars by stating they were selfish. Pointing out they were ranting about more motorsport cars when there were far, far more in this game, literally many dozens, than any other previous game and that half the people there wer asking for road cars and that they were throwing there toys out the pram because they want half the people ignored just to put even more race cars in! Lol! He or she even went on to point out that how in the 'bleep' could they state that road cars were boring! Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Aston Martins and many others are boring?!

I wonder what they thought about the fact that they have already announced Project Cars 2, huh, and that they will include Rally Cars?

I am not a fan of over the top race versions of road cars, don't ... just don't you wont like the response lol, with their over the top flaring and skirts and their horrid liveries.

My favourite cars are Aston Martin DBS and current Vanquish ... oh who am I kidding, all of them along with Lamborghinis, some Ferraris, Pagani Huayra, the Mclarens and several others.

Ooh yeah and how about that Lykan Hypersport being built in the middle east?! Stunning! Why can they not just all calm bloody down over there, stop killing everyone who is different or who does not agree with them out of fear and do more shit like this?!?!

If they can produce a car like that, albeit more skittish than a Mclaren F1, imagine what other things they can do?

Instead of loving all the tools that were invented and manufactured by the people they all state they want to wipe out. Who will make their guns then and who will they shoot?! I digress.

I can speak of the hadnling of cars within this game because I have a long history of ... well fast cars!

In fact it might please many to know, those already impressed with the amount of blogs I do and subjects I cover, that I also have a love of cars. Though I do not have a blog for them currently.

One of my first cars was a souped up road car called a Vauxhall Firenza 1971. Every single time I took it to a mechanic they would see the very wide tyres, roll cage, propped up rev counter and say 'boy racers car' in their heads. When I went back to pick it up and they had test driven it ... well with a smile as I expected it, everything changed. There was not a single mechanic who was stunned by the car. One car repair place run by an Indian family told me the car and the son had gone missing?! I waited half an hour before I heard my car from a kilometre away roaring up the street! The son came in with a big grin on his face and apologised as he had stayed out due to the immense fun it was to drive. "It just wantrs to go and go and just keeps on accelerating!" A different mechanic in Colliers Row said that the car would have no top end as it was so fast accelerating. So testing the car one day a mutual friend challenged him to put his theory to the test that it would not reach 100mph. So he went for it and the speedometer roared past 110mph when we ran out of road! The mechanic just looked at the two of us open mouthed.

These two men then spent months telling my father to convince me to get rid of the car as I would 'kill myself' in it. One night I proved to one of them I could handle the car by tearing through a deserted industrial estate in the dead of night. They never said anything more from that point on.

Moving on from that very early car in my driving days I have had many but most notable are three Alfa Romeos and an Audi A6 2.8 Quattro. These five cars have a whole host of amazing stories that men normally listen to open mouthed and ... dribbling like new born babies!

Another time, perhaps.

I point this out because if there is one thing I know its the handling of cars and have long dreamed of tearing around the Nurburgring. I used to watch, with now myself dribbling, whenever Top Gear were there for one reason or another. Some years ago I had been arranged to get me on a track by others who had seen me drive, however due to some ... difficulties, let us say, I never made it. Would have been Lotus Esprit Turbos if I remember correctly. Oooh Lotus ... another of my favourite brands I am waiting to see the revival of with those damn fine cars they teased years back!

Ooh and I like Porsches too of course. Oh and to the morons that claimed they were car lovers but then ran down all things Italian and praised Porsche like they were the only brand on Earth? Yeah ... not really car aficionados. Porsche aficionados maybe, but not cars! Lol!

Well would you look at that? Porsche is not even in my computers dictionary?! Lol! Oops sorry, no just not in Google's dictionary ...  well for blogger at any rate.

To me a good handling car ... talks, that is what I call it, to you. You really only understand this when your on the very edge of c cars capability, well provided your calm and not shitting your pants as you will miss it! Lol! You can feel the point when a car is near its edge. If your smart you will realise that staying at this edge is one thing but the undulations in the road become vitally important.

This is why rich kids put themselves in hospital or kill themselves when idiot parents but them Porsches and AMG Mercedes, Lamborghini Murcielagos and God knows what else!

I would actually make them do 100 hours of Project Cars and then 2 years in a normal car before letting my own child near a car of this power. The cars might be capable but then so does the driver need to be too!

Yup, I would suggest Project Cars. I had to slow down to the proper speed for bends and tight corners and even the damn braking seemed spot on, juddering in the steering under heavy braking with undulations in the road. Spot on, man!

So then ... how about a few videos?

I can tell you that at the time of writing I have only logged 5 hours on Project Cars and these videos are just me getting used to the games physics and cars. I caught on a hell of a lot earlier than I thought I would when two or three laps and I was getting it instead of the expected two or three days!

The videos are of the full California Highway and Nurburgring..both I was unfamiliar with and as stated my first dozen laps were on that Dubai track...


Mclaren P1 on the California Highway Full


Replay of above

Lykan Hypersport on the California Highway Full


Mclaren P1 Nurburgring
(Lap time under 10 minutes)

Thursday 25 June 2015

I'M ... THE FATMAN!

I had forgotten about this.

I had a text from one of my brother who games the other day who has played all the previous Batman games and was eagerly awaiting this one. He text me on the day of release and stated that he had read some really, really bad things about the PC version of Batman Arkham Knight. So much so that he decided not to buy it.

I also failed to remember that there was a reported day one patch of 3.5GB!

I only just remembered this and had a look and ... well, my word! What a shambles!

I've said it and said it over and over, this greed needs to stop!

However, with this there are some peculiar facts no one is picking up on when it comes to deliberate mistakes ...

The problem is with AMD graphics cards only but the game was ported from consoles that all use AMD graphics cards?!

The new generation consoles are also very much like PC's so this sorry of thing was supposed to be a thing of the past?!

What happened? Did Warner Brothers send the code for the XBox 360 or PS3 over to the company porting it by mistake?

As daft as that sounds it's the only reason I can think of that would explain the mess surrounding... no, yet another mess surrounding a PC release.

As I have also stated before statements from devs and publishers dating this is the way things are ... well are bullshit too.

When the first copies of Ultima were sold to shops they were taken around in a carrier bag! No internet. Things just worked.

Today the internet is used to fuck people over. The End!

It's not just the gaming industry either ... quite unfortunately and this I cover in great detail on another blog. One that has a greater number of visitors by a greater amount than a factor of ten! In fact just this morning I heard of something been done that is either deliberate, disguised as a mistake, or incompetence that will be blamed on computers. Except computers don't make mistakes, the people that encode or just operate them do.

If Electronic Arts, UBI Soft (yuck) and the others cannot stop being greedy in this regard them they will go the way of the dinosaurs. Because you can bet that anyone coding games under a contract are looking at sites like Kickstarter with envious eyes.

Back into Ultima, Chris Roberts seems to be doing a good job of showing how much you can do! Thus far. Despite its scale and it's goals I bet Star Citizen won't get released broken?!

Lmao!

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/batman-arkham-knight-pc-problems-reported-update-5/1100-6428392/

Thursday 18 June 2015

DEUS EX MANKIND DIVIDED

Leaving Fallout and Elder Scrolls alone my next favourite IP simply had to be Deus Ex.

In fact it might be a surprise to read that despite me owning two each of the main two Bethesda titles I actually own two Deus Ex titles too. But the only one other than Human Revolution was some time ago and is Deus Ex Invisible War. I am sure I played the first installment too and whenever I see the cover to it I remember it.

Not sure what happened to that case and disk.

I loved Human Revolution despite its flaws. One of these flaws was, as others have stated, the boss battles. But these were only annoying due to the fact that you sometimes needed a particular ability to defeat the boss. If you had no praxxis available and did not have the ability required you simply would not get through it.

The other thing I hated about it was the small maps and the game being short. Not as short as done admittedly but when you get a title you really like playing you want it to last and last.

So I was excited to hear that a follow up to Hunan Revolution was on the way and called Mankind Divided. The demo looked good desire the fact it was not a gameplay demo. Another one popped up at E3 in the early days. No gameplay though.

Tonight I was playing Fallout New Vegas as I reinstalled it to me about with some mods and then realised there was a section I never completed. I was shocked I failed to spot this earlier!

While I was playing a Steam message popped up to state that Square Enix and Eidos had shown a gameplay demo. But I only caught it briefly and thought I had read wrong?

When I realised I had played Fallout to until midnight again I came out the game and looked at my tablet PC while lying on my bed.

Bloody hell! There was a gameplay demo and what a body demo it was?!

Below is a link to the demo I watched on YouTube that lastest around 25 minutes and I watched every second of it! Probably watch it again tomorrow on my main desktop machine.

The graphics and style looked amazing and it appears at first glance like the maps will be bigger. The previous maps looked and felt claustrophobic. It looked like a massive open world but it was not. This looked extremely cool. Uber-cool!

Oddly another tithe I like suffered the same and is also getting a sequel and for that we had back to Bethesda.

Dishonored.

I cannot believe a thought that went through my head as I watched the demo of the next Deus Ex. 'This might actually have a chance at surpassing Fallout 4 as my favourite game?!'

Both Deus Ex and Dishonored I found to be very stylish and with good story lines.

If these two along with Fallout 4 turned out to be bigger than The Witcher 3 the Wild Hunt I still think I've died and gone to heaven!

I also can't help but wonder, though I don't it, if a new IP might pop up between now and 2016 to equal any of these four titles?

To add to such a fantastic set of titles would be fantastic. I might actually doubt this but then I remind myself that three of these four are Bethesda titles. Imagine if each publisher could produce three titles to rival Fallout, Elder Scrolls and Dishonored?

Square Enix now look like they might have one.

Dragon Age was a bit but and miss, good ... even brilliant in places but it just lacked something. Well I think it lacked one thing to make it truly great and equal to Fallout and Elder Scrolls. The loot and weapons.

Will Mass Effect Andromeda rival the Bethesda titles? Could be, we will have to wait and see.

In the meantime this demo of Deus Ex Mankind Divided looks super cool!

https://youtu.be/jh-iX2bxOjI

Wednesday 17 June 2015

THE BLOWING OF MINDS - E3

Well that has been a mind blowing series of revelations ...

What do you mean it is not over yet? Cap'n ... I simply cannae take no more! Lol!

Stunning ...

Hmm now let me see ... wanted to type this out before I leave my house. Now ... notes.

I did not watch the PC Gaming show and I will at some stage, probably tonight or tomorrow, but I did read about it. Someone reported it was a bit slow but to be honest how much more could have actually been revealed that was not already?!

That is exactly what I am thinking about the remainder of the E3 spectacle.

Games

Fallout 4 ... obviously

Dishonoured 2 ... pleasingly surprisingly

Dishonoured Definitive Edition ... eyebrow raisingly

Need For Speed ... promisingly

Mass Effect Andromeda ... looking better than Dragon Age Inquisition surprisingly

Ghost Recon Wildlands ... shockingly double time as it did not really look like Ghost Recon, lol

Star Wars Battlefront ... gorgeously but with a few unsure bits (Tie Fighters and X-Wings)

Rise Of The Tomb Raider ... beautifully and assuming it has to come to PC at some stage

Deus Ex Mankind Divided ... What? Where? Who am I? What am I doing on the floor?!

Call Of Duty Black Ops 3 ... surprisingly

Uncharted 4 ... the most interesting of the console games you hope hits the PC but probably never will!

Assassins Creed Syndicate ... because they finally make a game based in a city that is not America ... err or Paris, Rome ... umm was it Rome? Probably Florence. OK, OK they finally make a games set in London!

Rainbow Six Seige ... looks great but I am turned off currently by on-line only games of battle arenas and co-ops

Hmm now I am sure I am forgetting some ... ahh but then I have a perfect excuse for that.

Now for the ones, the notable ones, that were missing, some of which I strongly suspect will appear at next years E3 ...

Elder Scrolls 6

Splinter Cell

Half Life 3 (I am only going on this repeatedly being mentioned by the gaming community I never expected a third after Steam got going!)

And the rest ...

AMD and their Radeon Fury graphics cards along with that shocking double Radeon Fury gaming system toted as being 'the thing' for 4K gaming?!

OK, this was a shock on a number of levels ...

Just the other day I had the only brother I have that is heavily into gaming. I do have another into gaming but he is more the casual shooter and last I checked was on the PS3, though admittedly that was a while ago and I never even thought about the last Christmas.

One of the topics that we covered was graphics cards and he has a nVidia 970 Strix currently and I explained everything I knew about the Radeon Fury and 300 series cards. I stated that yes the 300's were being panned as rebrands but at least the silcone, or I read this wrong, is improved.

I am assuming, and betting, that there is enough difference of a number to number card to make them quicker while more energy efficient at least.

Then we spoke about 4K gaming and I stated how bad things are reported. I basically said ...

"Look how the magazines and reviewers have raved about the R9-290's and now the nVidia 970 and 980 but then all of a sudden you mention 4K and 4K monitors and it all goes tits-up?! Suddenly these amazingly wonderful cards are not that powerful. Funny as I remember graphics cards generations jumping up a resolution each or every other release"

Back in the days when it was all letters referring to any given resolution. I can remember when gaming at 1600x1200 seemed like a distant or impossible dream.

Now we have had a series of generations all gaming at 1920x1080 and then 4K monitors arrive and it all falls apart.

To read that you need two Radeon Fury GPUs to game at 4K was a shock even for me. Surely not? GPUs that are as fast as most nVidia Titan cards and considerably more powerful that the R9-290s and R9-280s, I have the later as a stop gap, and one on its own cannot cut it?!

That was the biggest shock of the machine they announced, good God I cannot remember if they gave it a name?! Lol!

Still there are some plus points to take from all this ...

Firstly it might not seem to be there but it is almost there and you can bet that some refining of the latest GPUs will take place over the next 6 months to a year?

Secondly and as much as they like to harp on about 4K gaming ... and what it looks like ... sorry but nothing out there or likely to come out in the next 6 months is coded with 4K in mind.

The next step up in resolution allows for much finer detail to be displayed on-screen. The fact that all PC games are 1080p and that the PS4 has only been out a bit over a year, I think it is, and this is 1080p and the Xbox One arguably is then no, they wont be for awhile yet.

In fact it is highly likely that other than PC only titles ... err are there any ... other than Star Citizen that is not out, you would have to wait until the PS5 and XBox TWO before they were mainstream.

As  I think the previous generation consoles were on the market for 7 years before the next generation appeared ... well, that could be a hell of a wait?

Which leads me onto what I said to my brother...these days, quite why anyone would shell out a £1,000 for a graphics card that is way over the top, consumes an incredible amount of energy to give you little or no difference from a card half the price is beyond me.

I wonder if reviewers will continue to rave about each card up until one comes out capable of 4K gaming? LMAO!

Oh yes and I nearly forgot ... there was that remark about the double Fury machine handling the Virtual Reality Headsets?! I am assuming they were speaking about 4K VR Headsets?! LMAO!

Maybe I will wait for the next generation Google Cardboard ... hopefully it will be Google ... Carbon?! LMAO!

Still it is an exciting time and I still am of the belief that now that all three platforms are so similar to code for when it comes to gaming that this means that the PC versions will come out far better looking than there console counterparts? All the extra time coding ... umm porting from old machines can be cut by half and the other half adding graphical extras?

Well the excuses are gone, if nothing else.

It is a shame they did not add a port to the consoles where you could plug in a small graphics card to up the graphics power after a couple of years. After all Sony had a flagship laptop, ohh carbon again, that you plugged in a box to containing a more powerful graphics card into to play games. I seriously wanted that laptop! This feature would have certainly helped the XBox One and the resolution wars.

Still it will be very interesting to see what the next 18 months brings!

I was interested in the building aspect of Fallout 4. The game looks absolutely fine to me and I simply cannot wait! I was in my local game store yesterday when a member of staff asked if I needed help and I said only with the impatience to Fallout 4 coming out. He laughed and said he had ordered the special edition that comes with the Pip-Boy. Lucky bleeder! Lol!

I might look into doing that though it is something I do not normally do, I have to admit.

Nice to know the dog in Fallout 4 will not die every five minutes and I have to go back to a previous saved game to save his arse. Nice to know they are using the same game engine too! Not sure if using a different engine would change it too much so that it did not feel like Fallout any more?

If there are any naysayers left as regards Fallout 4 after E3 ... well ... I simply will not know what to say!

The thing is that what I think is if they are showing you actual gaming footage for something appearing on three separate platforms then your going to see the average look anyway. Now I would imagine that with most games, Fallout and Elder Scrolls especially, will look better than that which they showed when it comes to the PC version.

That is the drawback with being honest, you will have to show the look of the game to be expected across all three platforms...while we as PC gamers will likely get to knock the graphics up a notch or two. Hopefully but then I was OK with the graphics anyway but I would welcome more in the way of settings, sure enough.

So, yeah. I do not understand the naysayers.

Lol.

An interesting 12 months ahead, this is for sure and maybe now I wont have to skip copies of PC Gamer because there simply is not enough in their I want to read about?

Here's hoping.

Monday 15 June 2015

THE TIMES AMAZING

I am going to have a very good year.

In fact I am going to have a few very, very good years!

Not only an I mere weeks away from turning my scenery upside down and inside out for the foreseeable future but a number of cool things are going to happen within this first year of this happening?!

I cannot really go into detail about the humongous scenery change that is going to take place but it won't be too long now.

But what I want to mention that I am excited about are a couple of other things, one briefly and the other in more detail.

The brief thing, because it's not really the subject of this blog, is an upcoming film in the spring of 2016. This is of course the Batman V. Superman Dawn of Justice film.

I might not look like it in the flesh out sound like it but I am a bit of a nerd. Well that's what they seem to call people like me anyway, lol. I was a big comic reader of both Marvel and DC. Loved both Superman and Batman but was a huge collector of the Justice League comic.

The trailer to this film had to be about the best trailer I've ever seen fit a film! I don't say that lightly.

Yes I had a few issues with The Man Of Steel but on the whole I loved it.

Dawn of Justice is, for those I cannot imagine not knowing, leads onto the Justice League movie. I have had some issues with Aquaman ... well not looking like Aquaman in shots I've seen, but it's early days. They seem to have got it right with Ben Affleck as Bruce Wayne so anything is possible.

Very interested in the Marvel movies of Civil War, not big fan of Cap to be honest and still not bought Winter Soldier, but if Spider Man is in it with Iron Man and dive by Marvel then my soul is sold! Lol!

Unfortunately my other favourites have either been ruined consistently or not covered fully or ... merely rumoured. Respectively these are of course X-Men (ruined the greatest story in Marvel Comics), Silver Surfer (ruined by same studio that is ruining Fantastic Four presently but not big fan of FF) and Shazam (keep hearing people mention he is in Justice League).

Leaving the world of amazing movies I now lead into another big form of entertainment. One that like movies has seen spits and starts in recent years but I think now will follow the movie industry in stepping up a gear?

Video games.

I say 'step up a gear' because the rumours seem to have been confirmed after I did something I rarely do. Watch a showcase! I don't even normally see any E3 videos until way after the event ... if at all!

I bloody well did this time around and E3 had not even started officially!

I am speaking about Bethesda's E3 special.

Sorry to fanboys of other titles but nothing had ever grabbed me as much as Elder Scrolls and Fallout. They start the game in such a cool way and I had goosebumps in entering the world for the first time in both titles.

Not only did you get to see some amazing Fallout 4 stuff and gameplay but as I thought the title will be released this year. Added to this you had Doom, which looked amazing, and Dishonoured 2, which also looked amazing!

Not played Doom since the early days and the Quake titles too. But watching the gameplay it removed me of the old days but with better graphics! Cool!

I loved Dishonoured. I purchased the Game Of The Year edition and I only had two complaints with it. The maps were too small and the game was too short! Better graphics, larger open world and longer ... err much longer and I'm in heaven!

What's more is that come November, this year, I will be embroiled with Fallout 4 for months. Not long after will be the Batman V Superman and likely not long after that I would wager Elder Scrolls 6 well be announced, likely at the next E3?!

After all they always start the follow up of a title after finishing the current one. What seems quick to me was playing Fallout 3, Skyrim and New Vegas. The new generation engine is done in Fallout 4 so not a long shot to think a year to 18 months to Elder Scrolls?

How cool is that? How cool is all of that?!

I note think that we are entering a period of the next two to four years of some amazingly cool movies and games. Doctor Strange is another big favourite of mine, though I'm buggered off I can remember details of his stories. The things coming are already so cool it's staggering and then there are ask the little gems that will pop up, or get released even, we did not even hear about?

You just know this is going to happen ... several times over a year to 18 months.

There are other titles, of both recent and distant times, that could get the next gen graphics and open world scenarios of Fallouts/Elder Scrolls/The Witcher 3 that could send us all bonkers?!

Oh my bloody God! I almost forgot Deus Ex Mankind Divided?!

Oh man! Excuse me a moment while I composed myself?! Lmao! Hmm thinking of other titles I really like. Hmm ... ooh Need For Speed! Hour the new one is cool? So need a racer. Oh God ... Star Citizen?! How they come up with better title, lol. Sounds like a Goat Simulator in space! Lol! Still it's about the coolest endeavour out there only rivalled by Fallout 4 for me.

Yeah the driving games did not really do it for me, like Project Cars and umm ... the other one. Elite Dangerous surprisingly did not do it for me either. Oh yes and there is the lack of flight simulators outside of the Eagle Dynamics titles. I'm going way back again here by mentioning Falcon (Rowan), Total Air War (Digital Image Design) and Comanche. I miss titles like that and nothing out there really appeals. Flaming Cliffs 3 did but that took forever ... err probably still is?! Lol!

So yes a cool time and the fact that space sims have and are returning maybe flight sims week too?

This is skirting with the words 'Golden Age' for the next year and maybe ... just maybe it will dive right in?