Video Games Thread

[harv]

Depends how much you're into video games tbh. For geeks like me it's well known and very funny (no, we don't get out much lol)

Weird how I couldn't link to that page with my mobile

[harv]

Sitting further back from my telly and facing it makes quite a big difference. Think I might have a look at the manual and do something about the smoothing though because my hands shake a lot, making my lines dead wonky lol. Going to take me a while to get used to things but I should get there eventually.

[jman]

Been getting into Watch Dogs more recently.. the online hacking thing is a pile of shit.. over the course of the last few days, I've had people trying to hack me in the most annoying places. 

In one place, I was literally 1 second from unlocking a CTOS tower.. and of course the online hack starting up stopped me from doing that and I had to do the climb again after I'd sorted out the hacking thing.  Then yesterday, again I was in the middle of a CTOS tower climb and had to abandon... and then later on, I was just about to start a fixer contract and another one popped up.  Good mind to switch the fucking thing off.. its not even that much fun

[Late]

Forgot about that tbh. Never really got the hand of it in the tutorial, later got hacked by one outsider and didn't know what I was doing, then turned the feature off. Might've been fun if I'd known what I was doing but there must've been something else going on in rl when I did the tutorial, and I just had no idea what I was supposed to be doing.

[jman]

I'm turning it off tonight.. again last night.. I was playing the shell game.. about to start round 3 and I got hacked.. meaning I had to come out of the shell game and lose my current level's progress on that..


Just realised E3 is in a couple of weeks    Just saw a rumour about Shenmue 3 being announced for PS4/PC at E3.. (to be honest, I don't care what platform it comes out on)... but its probably a load of old bollocks.  Shenmue 3 / Half Life 3 get rumoured every year and you never see hide nor hair of them.

[Late]

Mario Kart Fury Road (parody)

https://youtu.be/NAxFjVCkpRY

 

[Late]

Arkham Knight next month.
I was planning on buying it on the xb1, but at £35ish for the base game and £35ish for the season pass (if you're that way inclined - and I don't usually buy dlc) I was interested in seeing the minimum spec for the pc version - which is £23.74 for the Premium version (includes season pass).

Ridiculous minimum spec, tbh. An i5 processor, six gig of ram and two gig vram? For MINIMUM? ffs.

Minimum:
OS: Win 7 SP1, Win 8.1 (64-bit Operating System Required)
Processor: Intel Core i5-750, 2.67 GHz | AMD Phenom II X4 965, 3.4 GHz
Memory: 6 GB RAM
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660
Graphics Memory: 2 GB
DirectX®: 11
Network: Broadband Internet Connection Required
Hard Drive Space: 45 GB


PCs are so confusing.
It seems my shiny new pc falls at the first hurdle - you need an i5 processor. Even though my i3 benchmarks higher than that i5. :|
cpubenchmark comparison.
(I guess the number of physical cores holds me back.)

According to
http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri
I can't run the game - it fails on cpu and passes everything else.

According to
http://www.game-debate.com/
I can run the game, the cpu is perfectly fine, and the gpu is the main thing holding me back from playing on the higher settings.

These things are soooo much simpler with consoles...


Anyways, I've decided to have a roll of the dice. If it doesn't work the wasted £23.74 is not the end of the world. If it does work I'm quids in.
Best guess, it'll probably work okay on low settings, and might crash from time to time. I'll take that, tbh.

[jman]

Wouldn't call it ridiculous min specs.. moderate maybe... but you should be fine mate.. i5-750 (Lynnfield) released way back in 2009.. whereas your i3-4160 (Haswell) is much newer... only a few years old.

The fact that all i3s are dual-core and don't have turbo boost is probably the reason its been flagged up... but according to that first link.. your processor looks more than capable of handling everything that i5 can.

So I imagine it'll be alright on the low settings...
...but of course, the console version will look and play much better.. and you'll be able to sell it on. 

[harv]

It should run it fine. You may have a few framerate drops here and there but nothing game breaking. My PC runs all sorts of stuff that it shouldn't be able to, although that's mainly due to my GPU, a Radeon HD 4870 that punches above its weight.

Going to upgrade my PC once VR starts happening though.

[Late]

...but of course, the console version will look and play much better.. and you'll be able to sell it on.

I don't usually sell games on. Shifting all of my xbox 360 games just before the One came out was an exception, and most of them had dropped to around £3-£5 value by that point. So I don't mind forgoing the option to sell a game - especially if it means getting the full game for £24ish instead of paying £30ish for half of the game.
Will be a shame if the graphics/performance suffer, of course, but hopefully they won't be noticeably behind the console version. That's the gamble I'm taking. Fingers crossed it pays off - because I'll save hundreds a year by switching allegiance to the pc.
Bearing in mind I've not played on the xb1 since 28/02/15 it looks like my allegiance may have already switched, tbh!

[Late]

ODST gets added to Halo MCC this Friday.

[harv]

You've also got the advantage of Steam, although if you're anything like anyone else you'll end up with much more games than you have time to play them lol

[Late]

Yeah, I'm loving steam at the moment. Have been on it pretty much every night for the last 3 months or so.
Haven't made much of a dent in my library (of over 400 games), and have mainly been replaying old games, but have had a lot of fun replaying the Portal series, the Bioshock series, the X-Universe games, and a load of others (Deus Ex Human Revolution and FTL have both seen some serious hours put into them).


I noted my Steam stats on another site two and a half months ago:
363 games
292.5 hours on record
Profile created about a year ago
(Probably around half of those 292.5 hours are me - the rest being the kids.)

Have just checked again now:
427 games
989.2 hours on record
Profile created about a year ago

I don't think the kids have been on steam in that time, so I've racked up 700 hours on steam in the last 11 weeks. That's over nine hours a day on average - and bear in mind I'm out of the house for ten hours a day (including commute) weekdays!
And I've acquired over sixty new games in that time. Even with me playing 9 hours a day I'll never get through my backlog if I'm buying five or six games every week! (That said, a LOT of the games I have are cheapo indie things that probably don't deserve more than a couple of hours before being "binned".)


Fingers crossed Microsoft will announce at E3 that we'll soon be able to stream games from pc to xbox One, so that I can play my steam games in the front room. They've already announced you'll be able to stream from xbox One to pc, but that's the wrong way round for me.
Failing that, I might buy a "Steam Link" around November - though I'm happy enough playing my steam games on the pc in the dining room (mainly using xbox 360 controller).

[jman]

I racked up 2304 hours on Football Manager 2010 alone -  the best FM there has been for a while.

Since then FM 2012 got around 500 hours whilst FM 2014 has only seen 55 hours.. I still haven't taken to the last one - they messed around with the training too much and it seems a few stupid things have crept in...

Get this, I took over a team that were predicted to finish rock bottom.. I finished one place outside the playoffs (7th) in the first season and was floating around the same place half way through the next season.  However the board sacked me because they told me to stop playing one of my players because they thought he was rubbish and I ignored them because his ratings weren't that bad and my only other left sided defender had a long term injury.  And this was in the Skrill leagues I hasten to add - how realistic is that 


I usually only play games designed for the PC on the PC... despite having a fairly decent setup.  Had my steam account for well over 5 years now - still only own 22 games lol.  Much prefer having the ease and comfort of console gaming personally.

[harv]

Haven't you got a DVI or HDMI connection on your GPU..? You can plug your PC straight into your telly these days. Just get a long HDMI cable and Bob is your Dad's brother. If they do enable streaming to the Xbox One there's bound to be lag.