I have gotten really bored with the PC gaming titles I have on my computer and am really waiting around for Homefront The Revolution, if the reviews are good, and mainly Deus Ex Mankind Divided.
Every now and then I kept wading through Origin, Steam and UPlay and the odd visit to my Game Store for something to turn up but could not find anything that peaked my interest. Or at least anything that took me longer to play than it does to take a piss?!
Sorry but things like Call of Duty are OK but simply do not last anywhere near long enough for the money they charge and even at cut down prices I ... hesitate and then decide, no.
Outside of Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare that is and with the bad reviews they get. I simply do not understand how they sell as well as they do? I mean always the top seller when all they have had since that title is really crap scores?
Do not get me wrong...I can lay claim to buying and playing the very first two titles when they came out, unlike most people and I remember them well, and with fondness. Since then I have only ever read about them via other that have played the titles. So very short games with very bad scores.
I onlly purchased Call of Duty 4 because it got very good scores.
Still way to short.
So I ended up seeing Sniper 2 Zombie Army on a special offer and just a couple of pounds and thought that would keep me busy for a few weeks.
Well in the evenings that is as I have a new fandangled Nikon camera to keep me very busy during daylight hours, if the weather is good.
Anyway here is a video of my first hour or two of playing the title and getting to grips with its very ... differentness! Lol.
After a long, long wait and my Sony Cybershot being technically broken for about 6 months I have finally gotten around to replacing it!
My Sony has a 50x zoom, which I cannot use anything close to any longer and has now been relegated to being permanently attached to a tripod for filming in the house. As short range it can still manage to do.
After an arduous journey and battle with London's public transport, some stupid mistakes and several times where I had to stop and hand near my pocket to grab my phone and call for an ambulance, I managed to somehow struggle through it and find the camera!
Rather oddly I had left the address behind of the Camera World store I was aiming for and though I knew its rough location I was a bit worried about ending up in hospital so headed for faithful old Jessops!
Before even exiting the station at Russell Square on the way there I was slumped against a wall on a staircase!
Only when I got to where Jessops was the last time I was in there ... it was not there!
That is the other problem with Fibromyalgia ... memory problems! I had forgotten to take the address to Camera World with me and never thought of checking to see if Jessops was still at the location it was when I was last in the in New Oxford Street! Dumb-arse!
I do not know if the slumping against the wall ore the burning, tingling feelings I had for thirty minutes afterwards was anything to do with Fibromyalgia, lack of blood pressure pills or something else? Or just an unfit bastard? Was a bit rough though, which means a lot of i say that.
Walking up Oxford Street instead of heading back into Tottenham Court Road, where some loom directed me, I walked past some scaffolding and there was a PC World! I know, I know I have had a refurbished item from them and it could have happened again. But I just wandered in just to see if they had a display one. They did. It was huge!
I saw an older gentleman who looked Indian standing looking miserable. I got the impression he might not be happy as all the younger sales people probably intercepted any sales and I asked "Well you look like your not doing much?"
After initial shock someone asked him something and walking him tot he camera I asked if they had any in stock. They did. He got the box out, I checked for any seals over the lid of the box, dead give-away to refurbished items, and there were none.
Often there are these little seals that are clear but when pulled off say the word 'void' in gold that magically appear.
I had these on three Nikon cameras I bought a few years back from Argos. Nikon do not put any seals on their box and Argos swore blind they did not do it and stated it was Nikon. Wrong.
I also had an Olympus camera that went wrong in a line of consecutively received and amounting to four cameras from Argos.
I had one professional Corsair Vengeance Keyboard with a large dent in the aluminium base plate from PC World, just in case you were wondering. Oddly the Roccas Ryos keyboard I exhhanged that one for and around 8 months down the line started missing keystroke now and then and also adding one, or even bloody two extra keystrokes! So I guess we can safely take a stab in the dark about where that came from?
To be fair the Sony Cybershot came from PC World and that was new. It ias also the only thing that I have bought that has worked flawlessly for well over two years until it got dropped on its head and it still works to a degree!
So ... I went back to The Witcher 3 ... forgotten all the controls it had been so long and forgot about this!
Then I remembered why I had stopped playing it last time!
I clearly am not levelled up enough to beat this large Insectoid or crab like creature ... but ... I am bloody stubborn and would have given it fifty attempts and then exited the game with no interest go go back and try again. Well on the last fifty attempts that is, lol.
I think now I remember I quite the game to keep the upload small to show I am back in this game and will have to go to an earlier save before we go off to kill this thing.
The problem is I am thinking this was a mission I started and at the same time pointing out another problem, along with the tiny effects I have had on this creature, did get its life energy down to 50% at my best attempt, that ... wizard, or whatever he is, stands their attacking it for ages and has no effect on the creature whatsoever.
That's a bit pants to be honest, lol. Might as well not even be there!
Still, I will go to an earlier save, which I really hate having to do, and try and get back into this and remember where I am, what missions I had to do, where in the story I was and recall the controls, lol.
Well it has been longer than 6 months since I played it last, I did not even expect to be at home, or in the same home, about now.
And remember ... I have memory problems ... and do not take that as me being STUPID as that is not what it means.
As you can see from my other videos or my fourteen blogs ... I have a degree in applied computing and am expert in herpetology, batrachology, ichthyology, orhidaceae, astronomy, astrophysics and I even know Wing Chun.
Lol, too many people, trolls and fanboys are far too quick to make immediate assumptions about people on the Internet and I would rather just try and avoid all that up front. LMAO!
I completed Deus Ex Human Revolution again, hoping it would last me up until Mankind Divided in August, or close. But I whizzed through it far quicker than I expected too and wish I had upped the difficulty on it?!
I think I uploaded some Deus Ex stuff?
Darn it!!
I notice now my earlier prediction of the Nintendo NX is having unconfirmed leaks appearing that it is to use AMD's Polaris. Hearing this about the PS4.5 thing and the XBOne.5 too.
Well if I recall they did state when they designed the PS4 and XBOne that they did so with the idea of upgrading being easier. I did think of them improving it but thought it more likely they were talking about backwards compatibility with the PS5 and XBTwo with the previous generations for the older games.
But I also did state that in my opinion they sounded well under powered too.
All this has to do with the fact that the previous generations had been out a very long time and the chip lithography shrinkage, node shrink/chip shrink, from 28 nanometres to 16 and 14 nanometres was way, way later than previous in arriving. Unless you went solely to Intel for CPUs, way over priced, and GPUs, way underpowered, for your chips.
Yeah right, lol, no one in their right minds would do that, especially wanting to sell the machines/consoles for well under £500. You can pay double that just for a decent, not half decent but decent, Intel CPU. For me that is an 8 core, Core i7. A four core and eight thread CPU would be a half decent one in my book. But the prices! OK to begin with bit pricey but they have stayed high ...
..or at least will until AMD's Zen 6, 8 and 16 core CPUs arrive and then it will go mad for about 6 months to two years!
Surprised that the AM4 motherboards have not appeared on retail listings as they were meant to arrive in March and it is now mid April.
I could regurgitate everything that is said or leaked on here but I am not going to do that. I absolutely hate it when people and websites do that and I am always seeing the same crap over and over. If I hate it then I simply will not do this myself.
The latest seems to suggest that the Polaris chips will arrive around June or July time and Zen around October to November time?
I fully expect that these chips will be faster than the 390's by some margin. I also expect that Vega with HBM2 will arrive around December to February at the latest and will be so fast that we will have to pick up our chins?!
I fully expect a big improvement from nVidia but reading between the lines it seems likely that they will be a step behind AMD this time around? Likely not far behind but behind is what I expect them to be.
As totally natural for nVidia's Pascal to be fairly swifter than their old cards, plus rumour of them ceasing Maxwell production, along with AMD's confidence and string of design wins, companies all lining up to use Polaris and Vega, is why I am expecting old 390's to be eating the dust of Polaris 10 and 11.
I still want to wait for Vega though to pair with a 16 or 8 core Zen, whichever the larger core count turns out to be.
Though I wont be using an APU this time around I am also very interested to see an APU using Zen along with what graphics they use on the chip, how it pairs up with a graphics card on Crossfire along with all the heterogenous compute stuff, which is improved over previous APU's and I would like to see this fully exploited to see what it can do?
Imagine an AMD APU with 8 Zen cores and also able to use the cores from the integrated GPU for normal computing tasks?! I wonder if we will ever see 16 Zen cores and an integrated GPU?!
Ooh would you look at that? I have dribbled all over my keyb ... *
Well that is if you don't count the announcement that AMD AM4 motherboards were going on sale in March, umm last month, which every single computer tech site religiously copied.
Then there was the site claiming to have benchmarks for an engineering sample of AMD's next generation, in everything way, CPU called Zen. I then couldn't help but check the date and she enough it was the 1st April!
The aforementioned websites of course then copied said website and everyone was reporting it.
Supposed to be tech journalists? What tossers.
What's hilarious is that they all copy each other and then can't help themselves blowing their I own bugles when the copied report turns out to be correct. Don't mention when they got it wrong though, funny that.
What makes the April fools joke a pain is that for at least a week the pages reporting this keep coming up in the first few pages of search results. Morons keep commenting on it so many keep coming up for weeks! Great!
Annoyingly they also don't take the effing pages down either, click baiting much?
But it's getting ever closer to many early presents appearing what with Deus Ex Mankind Divided with AMD's GPU Polaris arriving just prior or about the same time. Then shortly after AMD's Zen should appear finally and by that time the new m.2 and NVMe drives should be hitting a good place and price?
Hopefully by this time some more games should have been announced, maybe even some being coded with the next generation graphics cards in mind?
Oh course there is nVidia's Pascal GPU and HBM should be getting somewhere by then. Perhaps AMD's Vega GPU won't be too far behind all of these things?
They seem to be starting off late that it will be Vega that will have HBM 2.0 and be the replacement to AMD's Fiji graphics cards?
I'm hoping for some serious competition between AMD and nVidia on the graphics card front and AMD and Intel on the CPU front?
That would be cool! Very, very cool!
Also mouth watering from Intel, for once in a blue moon, was that new Xeon CPU with 22 cores and 44 threads, I think it was. I think the price was in the region of $4,000 though?!
Cor blimey! Nice though!
Now if I can just pick out the six winning numbers on the lottery one week!
I can remember drooling over single core chips and Intel having dual CPU socket motherboards! Now you can get 22 cores on a single chip!
Now with the die and node shrink shook we need for done very good time I'd for AMD to push the envelope beyond 8 cores on the consumer front and ... well, oh boy what good times will roll.
Probably won't happen immediately but it won't take much or very long for a rush between the two of them to outdo reach other on the consumers front.
Wasn't interested in any Intel chips, I don't believe what they report as it's shite, but that Xeon ... ooooh boy, lol.
Now just counting down the months until some engineering sample benchmarks start appearing.
Funny as we have not had much in the easy of excitement but now we are looking at 4 or 5 chips, at least, over the next 6 to 8 months. Polaris, Vega, Zen, Pascal and whatever Intel will introduce as a knee jerk to Zen? They, Intel, have to do it, you just know they will.
Well after an eight month hiatus, give or take a month or two, I got back to the Alien Isolation game and getting past an annoying part early on suddenly I found myself progressing a great deal better than I was before.
Except in a few places, lmao!
But I had the determination of getting past these parts thanks to the realisation it was not going to be like that first part every step of the way.
Well it has been awhile since I typed anything out about the up and coming CPUs and GPUs.
But then I really do not like to use every excuse to publish something, like many like to do, and then harp on for the first couple of paragraphs explaining how I had previously stated this with a series of dates that go back a year or two, YAWN!
I always check though and have a read around once or twice a week, though sometimes I leave it a couple of weeks so that news and rumours can build up.
So at the moment it is looking like AMD's Polaris is going to be with us in a couple of months time and thankfully their Zen processor in October, see? I ... SNIP!
This is great news and better still seems to be the buzz about them. The lower power draws for Polaris 10, as they are naming it, sound absolutely great as does that being predicted for Zen.
The latest seems to be projecting an 8 core Zen releasing in October of this year, 2016, but I am still expecting something with a larger core count than 8 and purely because of the 14nm Finfet lithography they are using. This is not merely just a shrink but, as I understand it to be, a stacking too.
So if you can make an 8 core processor on 28nm you can make a 16 on 14nm, theoretically though the size may have to alter slightly.
Now start to stack them?
I would imagine that in the first versions the stacking may only be usable if done once, but later on with some refinement may stack three layers high, with luck. So HBM memory could go on the third layer, which I would wager is what the Zen+ turns out to be? We will see.
The only thing I worry about is that the consoles will hold back many game developers from utilising this extra power ... unless ... the Nintendo NX, fingers crossed, uses these new Polaris GPUs or that the XBOne can be upgraded, via a plug in graphics card. Microsoft have alluded to as much and lets be honest, Sony had that Vaio Carbon laptop several years ago that had that separate GPU in a box ... umm, thingey! Lol.
As they are meant to be so similar it stands to reason that the Playstation 4 can probably be upgraded graphics chip wise too? Umm, it is Sony!
Of course I am simply going to have to build one!
My only worry is that I build an 8 core Zen PC build only to have them release a 12 or 16 core Zen chip two or three months later?! Grr! Maybe when Zen is finally released we would have found out whether or not a higher core count Zen will release in early 2017?
I also note that in the wake of Polaris things were at first quiet on the nVidia front but then a flurry of information started to surface.
It is times like this that puts credence in both the new info, nVidia, to that previously released, AMD, as one is seen as a knee-jerk reaction to the other releasing details. At least that's one of the techniques I have used to separate the wheat from the chaff, and I do so hate chaff.
It will be such an interesting time to see what Zen, Polaris and Pascal can do and of course added to this will be Intel's own knee-jerk reaction to AMD's releases. So if you think that the second half of 2016 is going to be both mad and exciting, well just wait until the first half of 2017!
For me the Intel chips have done bugger all in the way of progression and added to that they have remained artificially high, some VERY high, with the higher core count chips of 6 and 8 cores. This is so bloody typical of Intel of old and it seemed like forever back in the day to go from a 386 to a 486 CPU, the two chips that preceded the Pentium, which was in essence the 586.
Though I use an AMD A10-7850K right now I will be building with a solely Zen CPU core next time around. The highest core count they release or at least intend to release between October 2016 and probably March 2017, if my nerves can hold out that long.
Saying that I am still interested in what APUs they will be releasing using the Zen cores along with what they will do with the GPU side of the APU. I mean to think of something as could be as powerful as a R9-380 or a Maxwell in an APU? Maybe if it turned out to be better still these could have a dramatic effect on the Virtual Reality headsets also releasing over similar time frames to all these other chips.
I like the idea now, finally, of having a really small form factor PC that can do everything I ask of it and store everything I ask of it and do tasks in a fraction of the time they do now? Oooh.
Also about that time 4K might be becoming commonplace and in so doing mobile telecoms companies and other IP providers will have to up their speeds and stop screwing the public for simply looking at a few webpages and downloading a few small files.
Tech simply has to keep up with tech. But they are such lamentable human beings and completely greedy that I think it will take an uproar from customers and government then forcing them before they do this.
A 4GB download limit was utterly laughable when I first saw them set the figure several years ago, now beyond ridiculous and soon to be 'way out there' ridiculous.
I spent a very long time tonight reading an argument that went on forever in the comment section of a YouTube video that points out that gaming developers and publishers have been lying to the public for several years.
In this instance it is UBI Soft, oh surprise surprise, but they are all now doing it.
This chap points out that a game called The Division now looks a lot worse than the videos we were shown a year or two beforehand.
Now before this happened with a title called Watchdogs and as it turns out has happened several times since then. I noted it with The Witcher 3 also.
Now this argument started because of a couple of console fanboys that sounded like children, though one tried to insist he was in his thirties or more, did not like what the guy was pointing out in his video. Except ... he was merely telling and showing the truth. A bit like what I do on my corruption blog.
A couple of PC gaming people tried to point out what they were saying to him and that these next gen consoles were not as powerful as they first made them out to be.
Now you may have to look back on here but I certainly thought the specifications published before release looked surprisingly underwhelming and now they are proving to be the case.
PC gamers are pissed because they have spent large amounts of money on vastly overpriced graphics cards that tech journalists and gaming journalists also surprisingly talk up. Added to this another subject I see mentioned a great deal, 60 frames per second and higher, also cropped up.
It went on for absolutely ages. At one point one person pointed out it had gone on for several weeks!
But one of the defenders of the consoles became completely stupid and was quite obviously not taking things on board and kept sinking down to name calling and insulting.
This got so bad and so obvious that another console gamer that realised the truth came on, pointed out he was a console gamer and that this other guy...sorry, kid making out he was a middle aged man should not e arguing, that it has been obvious for a time that the console gamers were lied to from day one and be quiet. Surprise, surprise he did not get reacted to because he could not throw words like 'PC gamer' in his face.
Then a bunch of people came on at the end and pointed out just how corrupt and greedy Sony and Microsoft were, surprise, surprise once again, at cheating people and misinforming them about their hardware and then getting developers to make videos of upcoming games that look better than they will in the end to get people to buy the consoles.
I had never even thought about it that way, but then I have never bought a console machine.
There was a point they had missed, though one lady came on to point out the financial crisis and said this was why the both, Sony/Microsoft, elected at a lower powered machine.
The point they missed is that outside of the extremely overpriced Intel, none of the other players had shrunk their chips down as was usually the case every couple of years. In fact it has been more than five years since this last happened.#
The two graphics chips makers of AMD, who Sony/Microsoft used, and nVidia were both stuck with the same size chips at 28 nanometres, where Intel had shrunk theirs to 16nm, I think it was, a few years ago and left prices artificially high because they could. Yet you get idiots defending Intel too?! Such naivety out there in the world, there really and truly is.
And that ios why they do it and that is why they get away with it. Because they have too many brainless morons without any thoughts that are their own that leap to their defence when someone says something they do not like. Or thinks for themselves.
I even had an argument with a family member over Xmas, though not computing related but music headphones, I have had three times before because they believe that everything that is stated in WhatHifi is gospel. Even though we had a mutual friend who was into cycling, as am I, tell him fifteen years ago that you cannot go by what the reviewers say because they are all paid to type their crap out. We both had several things that contradicted what magazines we both purchased said.
So much so that with the sky high prices of magazines now I cannot bring myself to buy one because I am actually paying them to be lied to!
However it is refreshing to see that with this video on YouTube and the comments made along with a whole bunch of videos being made about Star Wars The Force Awakens that the majority of people are now realising how far and to what extent this corruption and lies reaches. Even some comments like "is the corruption really that widespread" I have spotted on the Internet and on YouTube. This was when large numbers of people realised that the latest Star Wars was a really bad rip off of the very first film and were asking out loud, not in their heads, why every single reviewer, even nromally over critical Mark Kermode, raved about the Star Wars film and getting in the nineties out of a hundred and fours out of five on scoring. In the USA, the UK, Europe and even Ireland and someone replied "well they were quite obviously all PAID to say that!"
While worrying about expected plans not happening, Christmas coming and going and getting a real shock over the Star Wars movie I had totally missed the fact that several games publishers and developers houses had struck not once but several times with their games! #FACEPALM!
I am also starting to wonder if this is why they keep pushing games back now as is the recent fad? I think it may well be down to the fact that they do not want the backlash from gamers ... well the ones with brains and free thinking that is?
I myself studied software engineering and the graphical elements to programming. I was well into all the modelling techniques years ago and so I watched this guy's video with a great deal of interest. He showed to a factual level that the dynamic lighting and destructible environments along with several other things they claimed their games had was nothing more than complete bullshit.
In fact I was aghast at how obvious it was and wondered how in the world these companies like Sony, Microsoft, UBI Soft and EA among others ever thought they would get away with it?
I also thinkk that they are a few months away from being dealt a sucker punch by Nintendo that neither Sony or Microsoft will ever forget!
How?
Umm Nintendo NX, codename, comes out later in the year right about the time that all of the shrunken CPUs and GPUs alll come available? You work it out. I have not read of one person that has seen this one coming! Really ... no one!
Maybe then PC gamers can stop blaming consoles for crap graphics? Though they do have a point but at the end of the day its down to the developers or just how powerful their £500 plus graphics cards really are or that they lapped up the bullshit in a gaming magazine along with ten other people and no developer is going to put time, money and effort because ten people were stupid enough to spend over £500 on a graphics card. Or worse still TWO at that price!
I play all games at full setting despite having a AMD A10-7850K APU that all magazines state clearly you cannot game on and an out of date Sapphire Radeon R9-280 graphics card.
Yes every single tech journalist and games journalist said that you cannot game on the machine I built, except I knew that each and every one of them was talking utter bullshit. Worst offender was CustomPC Magazine.
So a shed load of PC enthusiasts went out and spent thousands of pounds/dollars and console gamers spent hundreds of pounds to play games with a visual perfection that were never going to arrive.
Everyone and their brother who bought along their gran went to see Star Wars The Force Awakens went to see what was billed as the greatest Star Wars movie ever made and ended up watching Star Wars A New Hope and left the theatres going "Err ... what?! Did I go into the correct theatre? I am sure I remember Boba Fett in that movie!" Peter Griffin will NOT be pleased! Lol.
So ... something seem to be going around now and picking up speed in both the movie industry and the gaming industry? Just to the lengths these companies and everyone else involved will go to to get your money out of you.
They are also realising what the consequences are of having no accountability.
Funny as I have been watching the old X-Files episodes again for the first time in years and every time I hear the line "Law doesn't apply to these men!" or "You can't bring these men to justice!" I laugh at now those lines are becoming common place, while secretly worried about it.
Well it doesn't, does it?
If someone wanted to do something about any of the fiascos of recent years you would have to band together with dozens, if not hundreds of others that felt the same way. In the UK they have been eroding your legal rights here for years, be bit by bit removing parts of the legal aid system. Even if you did you would likely get hundreds of fanboy idiots standing outside the courts willing to kick your arses for free and risk prison to defend these multi billion dollar companies?
I just hope the situation changes before it gets out of hand.
But then I think ... 'Why should I think that?' Maybe it is what these morons in power deserve? Just maybe it is the only thing that will stop them from doing what they do, for things to get very much out of hand?
But then I think deep down we all know that the laws only exist to protect them and not us when we find out we have been lied to and manipulated?
I know I do, lol.
Oh and if you look there are plenty of interviews and stuff from all accused about denials, despitye being proven, and even JJ Arbahams, or Jar jar Abrams as they are calling him, on why episode 7 is similar but not the same as episode 4. Yes mate, all movie goers are bind of course! Oh wait ... to be fair I did accuse Mark Kermode of being that ... and he did say this film was good! LOL!
Here is the link to that video about games and the lying...
and a few of the Star Wars fans that were disappointed ...
A young girl ...
From the era of A New Hope ...
And an young kid, the target audience ... quite funny but you felt for him, lol ...
I could go on and on with these and you could argue they are just a few. But then I would first ask you to type 'Star Wars The Force Awakens Sucks' into YouTube and see what you get.
I would also point you to the number of likes and dislikes each of these gets and you will note that around 70 to 80 percent like them, lol.
Public organisations or private companies ... they all tell lies and therefore they all ...
SUCK!!
LMAO!!
I thought I had seen Disney sink as low as it could be charging such obviously forced premium prices on children's films ... but this?
