TOM CLANCY'S TOSS WARE

I cannot quite believe I am going to type out this post!

I also cannot quite believe some of the things I am going to type about and am shaking my head right at this minute while wanting to remove my teeth from my head one by one with the use of a set of pliers?!

Today I ended up with something I did not expect. Something I had been considering for a while but did not expect. I bought something on a whim and it is extremely likely that I will return it and ... oooh boy do I have some things to say to them when I do!

I bought a game... a Tom Clancy title I have been familar with for years but it was many years ago I last played a title. I had been wondering for a while now what they are like these days, only have been put off by them as despite the number of titles they get slated, read ripped to shreds, a fair deal by gamers.

Now before I explain what has happened ... or rather NOT happened I will explain that in my Amazon wishlist of PC Games is the Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Trilogy. Remember that!

I wandered into my local Game store today. This store has become annoying as a year ago they always had several titles, often budget priced too, that I wanted to purchase but could not. Due to the lack of graphical grunt in my laptop. But this year and now I have a PC capable of playing all titles, regardless of what Custom PC (ooh that reminds me) and now err PC Gamer say which is completely wrong, see last paragraph. I spotted a chunky black box on the PC Games shelf which has been devoid of a while list of titles I would have purchased all year! My Bethesda games, 3 of them, all came from Game. When I looked at the chunky black box it was Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon special edition. It was £15.99 and took iit to the counter. I asked, to be certain, if this was a single player game and not an online only game.

Now this bit you need to realise as they said "No its single player and they normally state clearly on the box if its online only and it says nothing" after checking it over.

Now follow the following points very carefully...

1 It IS an online only game!

2 It is ALSO a FREE GAME, yes you read that correctly this is a free game!!

3 The special part of this box is a single useless hardback book of just pictures of the outfits?!?!

4 Not a single line of code to the game is on the DVD disc and I am afraid it gets worse, a lot worse as ...

5 After two hours of downloading the bar had not moved and it still stated that there was 59 minutes left which is what it did when I ran the fecking game!!!

6 After investigation on the internet there is feck all on the UBI Soft forums, they are always useless anyway, and where I discovered that the game was a free title I also discover that not only is there no code to the game on the DVD, so why a fucking DVD yuou bloody morons, but that it is not on their fucking severs either and your downloading it from ... errr OTHER PLAYERS!!!

7 Almost last but not least is that there are a humungous number of gamers that have the exact same issues and cannot download the game let alone installing it! Not much in the way of answers and the only smart one used the word "Torrents". Jesus Christ!!

8 Best of all is that it turns out that this is an AAA title of game belonging to that which I not only absolutely detest with every fibrte of my being and believe the creators and publishers should be locked up in a burning prison cell for all eternity because it is a PAY TO WIN TITLE!! SPECIAL FUCKING EDITION?! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!

Phew! Got that lot out of the way!

To add insuklt to injury my connection is bloody crap tonight. Or so I thought but then realised that it is being doggedly slow since I attempted to download and install this Tom Clancy Ghost Recon title and I just realised I forgot a point above...

9 The graphics are dated and for gamers to say that we cannot be talking 2 years old, ergo Skyrim, or even three. In fact some stated that this was first generation consoles?! They were likely being over the top sarcastic but even so...second generation consoles?!

I would NOT, repeat NOT buy a title regardless of how little it costs if it was released before 2007, that is my absolute limit and even then only if gamers absolutely rave about a title. Like Dragon Age of Kingdoms of Amulur.

So there you go...I simply cannot believe the absolutely dreadful experience I have had with a UBISOFT game of one of the Tom Clancy titles!

I have noticed that the box has the Steam logo on it as well as the UPlay logo? I am currently lookiung to see if I can download it off Steam instead?

I cannot believe not just how utterly abysmal this was handled by all involved but also that this atrocity was a free to play title placed in a box and put on a shelf to look like it was something special?! Bugger me even if it was in a standard DVD case it would have been taking the piss!

Oh now will you look at that?! Immediately the title is downloading on Steam and at around 200k/s or more! God knows what it was on UPlay but it was not even a quarter of that if it downloaded anything at all.

Now the question is I am supposed to get something for free with this specia edition, oh in a free play but pay to win title to get you into it of course there is free stuff!! LMAO!!

Now I am going to play Alien Isolation for an hour and then see what the percentage of the download is? I can tell you that in just a couple of minutes it has downloaded 60MB and yet using their own launcher it downloaded 130MB but took two hours to do that?!

Oh..MY...GOD! I will make doubley sure in future that if ANY GAME so much as hints at downloading it all from them or worse still other players you will not see my arse for DUST!!

I certainly wont feel guilty anymore when I am checking out details of something on the Internet on my smartphone!

I AM NOT ALONE

The title for this piece hit me immediately due to the realisation that there are many out there with a similar view or opinions to me.

In many of my subjects this happens a lot.

Yet one particular and very miserable but necessary blog subject I am not so sure, despite it being the most popular subject by several country miles.

But I am expecting this to change this year by quite some margin too?!

But I spotted this link of someone speaking about gaming and the different platforms and controllers available. He is covering a preview of Valve's Steam OS for PCs. Valve were the people behind the Half Life games originally and I say that because it has been ten years I think now since I played Half Life 2 and quite disappointingly finished it within 48 hours or so!

Now for me at the time this here highlighted the absolute largest and primary problem for games. It took an absolute age for them to surface, sometimes with a lengthy and frustrating series of false starts, and then after the wow period had barely did down they were over in a little bit longer than the blink of an eye.

For the most part this was largely why it was not THAT disappointing to be without a gaming computer for some of the periods that I have.

Things have improved albeit extremely slowly and very little. But improved they have.

Well except there is no Half Life 3!

In these last ten years Valve have instead been concentrating on their Steam platform. Essentially a short of browser but only their channels and fit downloading their offerings... or rather other people's offerings. For a small percentage of course. It was supposed to change everything... in reality it had changed very little except Valve's bank balance.

It arrived at the same time that Half Life 2 did. When I discovered that the box I just paid for did not have Half Life 2 in it I was furious. When I got my next bill from the phone company for the download data charges I had a coronary! It was hailed as the future of gaming while I thought it was a big streaming pike of dogs poo and saw an example of yet another lazy fat bastard wanting to earn shit loads while sitting on their arses playing games and surfing their pie hole with.... PIES, coffees and doughnuts?!

As it turns out I never downloaded anything else on Steam for over ten years!! Weird, huh?

What never occurred to me despite the fact I knew that it's existence continued was that I could still walk into a Game store and see PC Titles on a rack?! After more than ten years to?!

So what happened?!

Will quite obviously the majority felt as I did. I still prefer to walk into a store and then buy a case of my beloved title, especially if it's a special edition with bigger box, maps, bumper size manual and the like. Nothing can compare to that feeling of opening the box and seeing the extra bumpf inside. NOTHING!

My other problem was with prior that stated that the consoles would eventually kill the PC of and this was so deluded for so many reasons and on so many levels. As far as I was concerned any tech journalist who stated this should be whether if themselves and fired?!?!

Well ten years have passed since it's inception and yet it had not taken over the world. Not had the PC been confirmed to history just yet. Still the statements are made though, only this time around the landscape is somewhat markedly different to what it was teen years ago!

Back then there was no Windows 8... sorry I meant Windows H8! Or Windows 80 to 83, lol.

Steam has not taken over the world but after some noises emanating from their direction and everyone and his brother thinking it would be Half Life 3 it turned out to be a Steam Operating System!!

Still I thought this had more potential than Steaming piles of... downloads, lol.

Immediately there was talk of the double touchpad controller and I thought that these controllers must be better then even I thought as they are still sticking with a gamepad?!

But today I find this report by someone with both a brain and and a good memory?!

Lmao!

Opinion: What is the point of SteamOS? I can't think of a single one - http://pulse.me/s/KZiSN

AMD KAVERI & THE ONSLUGHT OF TROLLS AND FANBOYS

Been awhile since I posted on here, sorry about that. Had several things going on.

Today I was looking around to see if there had been any engineering samples of the next generation APU in the form of AMD's Kaveri, due for release on January 14th 2014.

I am quite interested to see the benefits of the HSA and HUMA. Despite really wanting to see and buy an 8 core Steamroller in an FX guise at 28nm I am trying to convince myself into the APU side based on something that many fail to realise, see next paragraph. That is that despite the AMD Kaveri having only four cores and no mention of a 6 or 8 core processor that in future that GPU side of the chip can also provide processing duties. So I am telling myself that with new software, who cares about how old software is coded anyway, the coding will take advantage of the GPU side when it comes to anything else other than games?! In effect this would make the GPU side faster than the CPU side and I say that regarding all cores, not just AMD's cores.

So technically half would be four cores and the other of a possibly higher grade, be it slightly faster than the four cores of more equal to an added 6 cores? AT the end of the day it is the benchmarks that count but ONLY if they are coded for this. Until such a time when this occurs no one can say nothing. Only this has not stopped many opening themselves up for a huge amount of crriticsm in the coming months.

This link below has an article regarding AMD's Kaveru being photographed in Engineering Sample form. But that is all it is and far more interesting are the comments at the bottom whereby trolls and fanboys get into such fistycuffs that even the nicknames used are intended to poke fun. Unfortunately the degrading aspect of the CPU as well as the GPU wars is both low, imooral and childish. Rather remeniscent of the Apple versus Samsung debarcle?

Now I see it thus...many people, whether employees, sccerpting gifts or just idiot fanboys, are becoming scared that it just may be that AMD might be on the up and up with this next APU and sounds like they are scared. The mere fact that these new generation APUs are the heart of the consoles and that there must be a good reason for this seems to be striking fear into the hearts of Intel fans, and there is one in particular I can think of. It seems there closer to getting ot right AMD get the louder and more confontational these people become.

I hate the fanboy flame war thing I really do. It is for this basis that I rarely entertain forums and someone even suggested me starting forums for the twelve subjects I cover but not interested dealing with people who refuse to budge no matter what when they either quite obviously wrong are throw around their beliefs as if they are proven fact without them being based on any data of any kind.

Now I for one had thought that precisely a year ago I could start thinking about building a new rig, computer, which would start early in 2013. Due to unforeseen circumstance, mostly covered on other blogs I have, this did not occur. Part of the reason is that I did not quite achieve many of my goals nor input as much as I thought I would into my blogs, thereby not quite garnering enough visitors to achive things in record times. Added to this there was an issue with the blogs and they were inundated with far too many adverts which I had not realised were there. SOme had around ten on or more when the total allowed for certain ads is three. Bizarrely it turned out that my pop up blocker was actualy hiding the blocks containing the ads in my set up layount screen. So I kept adding ads to ones already there which just krept upwards over many months. This did two things...

1. Firstly it stopped my revenue from Google in  its tracks and it refused to budge for the last four months and had likely been slowing down for a couple of months before that too.
2. Secondly it was putting people off returning to all my blogs as they looked an absolute mess and it is annoying that I had not realised this and has cost me. Not helped by the fact that Google refuse to even speak to you until you reach the minimum payments of £60 per month.
3. Meaning that I should have reached that months ago but did not due to a problem that was primarily Google's they refused to speak to me about.

So now that this has been discovered it has also been corrected... 

1. But this will take a little while for the people that were put off by the inundation of ads to realise and come back more often that they were.
2. The revenue which already leapt forward in a 24 hour period proving what I have said to be correct will move ever higher over the nect couple of months as new visitors come back more often and visitors I have had over the last 6 months also come back more often
3. Based in that last detail being correct then at the time of the launch of the AMD Kaveri chip I may be able to buy my first purchases to FINALLY build a budget PC, which I will of course film which will help promote my blogs as well as my YouTube account, lol.
4. It was always a long term plan that would take one or two years to get everything neatly networked together to work as a whole and achieve what I wanted. Yes I was wrongly cocky and over confident that I could do this in less than a year but it mattered not I was in this for the long haul no matter what.
5. Also remember I knew not that you could generate revenue from blogs when I started, I only wanted to help people and just doing what many said I should have done for the last ten years!

I had hinted of this before but I did not really want to put any details in unless I was sure and I only had that sudden LEAP in the first 24 hours of one set of figures. But I really needed a minimum of a month and more realistically TWO MONTHS to be absolutely sure. At this point, around the launch of AMD Kaveri on the 14th January 2014 strangely enough, I might able to make predictions on my blogs with an absolute certainty. Once it starts ot does not stop and just heads upwards.

One other subject I am into is exotic animals and plants belong mostly to the Reptiles, Amphibians, Fish and Orchid areas and have acquired slowly some tools and now only need materials to start making custom design cages that have been knocking around in my head for over a decade. SO attempting to do some manufacturing and get nbetter and better at it to sell some here and there, a back up plan.

Of course and as I have long staed my plans were so multi-faceted that it would put the best diamonds to shame! Here alone I have described, technically, just six of a much larger numbers of goals set out to achieve. Each of the corrupt organizations being another list, helping people and groups of people is another list and so on and so forth.

Now hopefully I can discover in the coming weeks that the AMD Kaveri chip is pretty decent, especially for the price tag, and can purchase the one being called the AMD A10-7850K or here rumours of a faster one to come a little later with a slight wait. If this is tha case I can 'drop in' a AMD trinity or Richland into an FM2+, or whatever the latest motherboard is, until the quicker chip is released?!

Oh yes I forgot I need to keep an eye on the Steam Operating System too to see if that pans out? Hope it does as Windows 7 is the only OS from Microsoft worth having in my opinion. Likely might be the last one worth having which is not good so the Steam OS which is Linux based could work out to be fantastic with any luck. Unlike a particular Linus OS called Ubuntu, lol.

Here's a look at a Kaveri APU engineering sample:

'via Blog this'

UBUNTU, STEAM & AMD DRIVER ISSUES

Well I suppose not really Ubuntu's fault nor Canonical's but is AMD's fault this one.

It seems after spending an absolute age installing Steam...AGAIN and then an even longer age, or I should say several days thank to the NARROWBAND connection I then went to run...

COUNTER STRIKE SOURCE

Only it failed and told me my OpenGL driver was the wrong one or out of date or whatever.

So I fiddled about and was looking in the Catalyst Control Centre and looking for options and I noticed it was not on ...

MAXIMUM GRAPHICS PERFORMANCE and was instead on...

BATTERY SAVING PERFORMANCE

So I thought ooh it is using the HD4200 Graphics chip instead of the HD5470 Graphics chip?!

So I switched it over and it said it needed a rebooot...

REBOOT!

In the desktop I immediately notice my launcher icons are bigger and no longer transparent and I am like uh-oh 3D graphics is gone...AGAIN!!!

I then go into Catalyst Control Centre and it tells me it cannot run there IS a problem as there is no AMD/ATI Driver?!

I then discover that the laptop ONLY HAD the HD4200 driver installed anyway which was bloody weird because the Catalyst Control Centre gave me the option of high or low power?! On the HD4200???

No wait?! So is there to power options on the HD5470M then so you end u having to deal with FOUR SEPARATE POWER OPTIONS??

Surely not...so they let Chimpanzees create the Linux Drivers over at AMD then? Jesus bloody Christ AMD what are you playing at over there?!

SOOOO.... my DRIVER UPDATE program has now been listing no less than FOUR ATI DRIVERS for my system and they are...

FIRE GL - or in English Red Rag to a BULL!!!
PROPRIETARY DRIVER (POST UPDATES)
EXPERIMENTAL DRIVER
BINARY Xorg DRIVE
PROPRIETARY DRIVE (the HD4200 one that previously worked)

SOOOO.... lmao....

Post Updates        - FAIL
Binary ORG          - FAIL
EXPERIMENTAL - FAIL
FIRE GL                 - FAIL

Start thinking crap the oroginal HD4200 will now fail but no its OK.

Takes a bloody age to install each one too, like 20 to 30 minutes?!?!

LMAO...

Anyway a few screen shots now of the different sections and my desktop...

Hmm not NECESSARILY in the RIGHT ORDER?! LMAO!

STEAM ON UBUNTU 12.04 LTS

Well Steam now runs but a shame there is bugger all on there other than some indie stuff, platform stuff, rejigged old stuff and Half Life 2 which I think it wants me to pay for again?!

LMAO!

Ohh it needs more than just steam running on a Linux OS and needs some games, lol. I had a look around and only found about two even mildly interesting, which was Gratuitous Space Battle (err I think), Anomaly (probably until I play it) and The Clockwork Man!

Needs at least a Car racing game like Need for Speed equivalent. Space simulator and the Bethesda Games, lol.

Yes I know I am not asking for very much am I?! LOL!