Video Games Thread

[Late]

Haven't had much chance to game, lately, but when I have I've mainly been playing "How To Survive". It's okay. Not great, but definitely not awful. I'm about 60% through with one of my characters, but not sure I'll bother to finish it off. It's in danger of becoming a chore, and I've much better things to do with my time than play games that are becoming a chore. Like playing Fallout 4, which I picked up a week ago but haven't yet taken out of its cellophane.

Will also be getting Assassins Creed and Rock Band 4 on Friday.

[jman]

Still ploughing through Plague Inc... to be honest, I'm pretty much satisfied I'm done with the game (novelty is wearing off a bit).... but there are so many achievements.. and each one has a random luck element to it.. so its taking a bit of time to get them.. definitely not worth the price I paid.. but a good enough time waster.

Mixed in with playing a bit of Gears Of War Ultimate Edition.. really good to get back into the game.. I forgot how good the first game was and why I loved it so much... although I started on Insane mode, so its taking a bit of time to actually get anywhere in the game.. think I'm nearly half-way through.

[harv]

Fucking hell, just started playing Xenoblade Chronicles X and it's beautiful. The sense of scale is ridiculous, although not surprising for a game that's bigger than Fallout 3, Skyrim and the Witcher III combined. And the music, as with the first game, is outstanding. I'm only about 15 minutes or so in but I'm VERY impressed so far. I honestly don't know how MonolithSoft do it. Amazing given the Wii U's hardware.

[jman]

So I got Tomb Raider for Christmas which is what I wanted.. I did ask for Rainbow Six Siege but went off it when I realised that 99% of the game was to be played online..  so glad I didn't get that.

Anyway, I finished Tomb Raider the other day... it was great.. really enjoyed it.. very much like the last game, but this time, felt a lot like the Tomb Raiders of old as well which was great.. just a shame that part of the game has fucked up and left me in a state where two of the achievements are now impossible to get (unless I restart a new file).  Basically I started one of the many missions you can accept on my way through the game.. the mission is to track a crow and then shoot it... I didn't realise I had to shoot it... now when I've come back to the area to finish the mission, I cant restart it and the crow is gone and won't re-spawn.. looked online and it looks like a glitch that CD thought that had fixed with a patch... but looks like it didn't work 

Apart from that though - great game and there is plenty to do after the main story has finished aswell... I might even download the DLC for it too (if its reasonably priced).


Played Knight Squad over the xmas break too... that was surprisingly good, could see it having massive potential if you get loads of humans playing it... but as you can get all the achievements offline and in single player - I didn't bother playing anymore than I did - still enjoyed it though.

Still steadily working my way through Plague Inc's achievement list.. 86/127 done now..

[harv]

Oculus are going to start taking pre-orders for the Rift tomorrow, we'll have details on it all tomorrow at 4pm during their CES showing. We'll finally get a price and release date for it. Lucky's Tale gets packed in with every Rift and people that pre-order will also get EVE Valkyrie.

HTC will also be announcing their 'game changing breakthrough' this week. Hopefully it's going to be something that's going to keep the price down otherwise I think the Vive is going to be dead in the water when it releases after the Rift.

[harv]

Well pre-orders have now started. $599/£499/€699

If HTC match those prices then the Oculus Rift is going to flop harder than the Wii U. Remember, the Oculus Rift price comes with an Xbox One controller and they'll probably have the Touch controllers going for another $100. Having the HTC Vive going for the same price but including the wand controllers will have units flying off shelves.

Well I was limiting myself to £500 and that's what we've got but I'm going to watch what HTC do with interest.

[jman]

Good news for the PSVR.. although I see Sony didn't include a price yet... and a few people think its going to cost more than a PS4 alone 

If they price it between £100-£199 then I cant see how Oculus stands a chance... I would hazard a guess at £299 for PSVR.. which would still look miles better than the stupid Rift price point.

If it did come in at that price point... I'd rather buy a PS4 + PSVR than a Rift unit.

[Late]

Five hundred quid! Wahahaha.
Oh, Zuckerberg, you do crack me up.

[harv]

Yup, I'd put my money on PSVR being £299.99. I think that Facebook hasn't done PC VR any favours unless the HTC Vive gives better value. If HTC can release the Vive for £500-550 then it's going to be better value. Vive includes 2 wand controllers and the Touch controllers are probably going to set you back £100 give or take 20 quid.

We'll have to wait and see I guess. The Rift order price of £499 doesn't include shipping or Customs fees either. I'm going to wait and see what Amazon are going to be selling them for, they'll probably have them on their site to buy in April.

[jman]

New tech always comes in at ridiculously high price-points though.. mobile phones - remember how stupidly expensive they were.. I still remember our 2nd hand Spectrum 48k costing well over £100 although it did come with a lot of games.... in fact, if you take the retail value of £179.95 back in 1984 for a spectrum 48k - according to this website - that's £543.18 in today's money lol.. for a spectrum!!!

Cant see any of the VR hardware being cheap... but I would expect PSVR to be cheaper than the others.. quite simply because it will be a budget version, Sony will shift bucket-loads if they get the price point right.

[harv]

I bought my Speccy for 20 quid I think, but it was hot I reckon. Got it from a mate at school. He also had a ZX81 but I wasn't going anywhere near that lol

Apparently Palmer Luckey said in an interview yesterday that they had sold all of the Rifts that they had made. Probably 100,000 or so I reckon. Pretty good going considering the cost of the thing.

[harv]

Apparently Game have started taking pre-orders for the Oculus Rift. £500, so £28 cheaper than getting it from Oculus because you don't have to pay for delivery. I'm going to be getting it from Amazon myself, or rather Flubit. Should get at least 5% off I reckon, so 475 quid which isn't a bad price considering you get the HMD, a game (Lucky's Tale), a headset and an Xbox One controller.

I was setting myself a 500 quid limit and will pay less than that so I'm quite happy.

[jman]

Must be mad spending all that money.. especially when you consider you'll need to spend around £250 just to get the minimum spec GPU for it aswell..

There wont be space for two highly expensive VR units in the marketplace.. Vive or Rift will be the Betamax of the VR generation.. I'm not buying anything until it goes mainstream.. even then I think I'd stick to a console version.

[harv]

It doesn't matter which one sells more, thanks to SteamVR it's going to be VERY easy to port between PSVR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Unless developers get moneyhatted, or are owned by their respective platform holders, the vast majority of VR titles are going to be multiplatform.

And I'm not getting a minimum spec GPU either, I'll be getting either a Pascal or Arctic Islands GPU in the Summer, assuming that they'll be released by then. I've been saving up for this for 18 months, will be 2 years in November when I get my Rift. You should always have a GPU in your gaming PC being more than half the price of the rest of the components. Anything less than that will give you a CPU bottleneck.

Going to be interesting to see what happens on the 29th February when HTC announce the price of the Vive and open pre-orders. Despite the Nerd Rage after Oculus announced the price of the Rift they're now back-ordered until July

If the HTC Vive is $200+ more expensive than the Rift then I reckon demand for the Rift is going to increase even further...the only thing I can see changing that is having Half Life 3 or Portal 3 as an exclusive lol

Consoles are going to be dead for me next generation, I won't even be getting a Nintendo console for the first time in two generations unless it has VR. Apparently once you experience VR going back to a 2D telly or monitor screen is pretty much an empty experience.

[stupac]

They probably said the same about the Wii and motion controls.