Thrik

You ought to be able to pick one up for negligible money nowadays, brkl. I'm fairly sure even my GeForce 6600GT supported 3.0 when I got it back in 2004, so presumably most cards (including the budget/mid-end ones) since then have supported it. That said, unless your PC is considered 'righteous' it might be better going with the 360 version as a general rule since even though a PC can easily match its power, at the moment it takes quite a bit of cash to so. I don't think the divide will be affordably closed for between six months and a year. And yes, clearly I am an unashamed advocate of pwetty gwafix in games.

Excellent. While I still have no idea where I'll put it, clearly missing out on a Big Daddy statue is something I can't be doing.

Thinking about it, are there any US game sites that do reasonable exports to the UK? I remember getting bumholed by postage/tax when I got Psychonauts, although it didn't sting much as the overall price actually still ended up less than it'd have cost me to get it when it finally hit Europe a million years later. It might be an opportunity for UK players to get the US collector's edition thanks to a complete absence of region locking on the PC (although not much help to Wrestlevania ).

Yeah, it's a shame as that model Big Daddy is pretty cool. Although saying that, there's nowhere I could really put it. I do like tins though; I have limited editions of Company of Heroes and various other crap and they come in big card boxes that end up scuffed as fuck. :tdown: In fact, even my US import Psychonauts box is all scuffed. Do you have DVD cases as standard for games over there yet? What I meant to point out but for some reason forgot to is that the same package on the 360 on Amazon costs £10 more, which seems a bit mental. I suppose the PC overheads are generally lower, though. On a different note, I go on holiday a few days after BioShock comes out and thus won't really be able to get into it until afterwards. God damn!!!!!

Ah yes, this is what you want. Clearly PC game prices are for the win. :tup:

I'm very much aware of the marketing strategy that DirectX 10 is part of. I've even spoken to Crysis developers who've explicitly told me that they could easily have gotten the same graphics level seen in the DirectX 10 version in the DirectX 9 version if they had to, but didn't because of higher-level influences; perhaps not exactly the same, but certainly not as inferior as the DirectX 9 version currently is. The new API is largely just a case of unblocking certain bottlenecks (ie: disproportionate performance loss at certain points) as elmuerte just exampled. The existence of OpenGL (used by iD's upcoming engine) kind of highlights that the whole DirectX 10 thing is way overblown, though. But regardless of whether or not the API actually allows it or the developers only choose to implement it, if the game looks better on DirectX 10 then that's a hard fact. And since Irrational have explicitly stated in a past interview that it will look better on DirectX 10, why exactly that is doesn't really have much relevance. Texture artists generally design their textures at a higher resolution than is actually in the final game, so it wouldn't be too much of a hurdle for them to simply put higher resolution versions into the PC version. And since the game is built on an engine that was originally PC-specific anyway, and that they've known since the beginning it'll be a PC game, I can't see them not doing this.

Clearly Schafer is just bluffing your face off.

Did Escapist abandon its magazine-like format and go for your more typical website format? From a quick look I can't find anything resembling the old Escapist. Not saying it's necessarily a bad thing. Just wondering.

I'd go with the PC discs myself, as even though Steam has evolved into a very nice delivery system, I think I'd get a bit fed up waiting for the entire game (which is presumably gigantic) to download, and then do it all again if I ever need to reinstall or something. As for the PC/360 argument, again, I reckon PC would be my choice. First-person games invariably feel better to me on the PC, thanks to the mouse intuitiveness and fine control. It's also going to be prettier on the PC if you have a DirectX 10 graphics card (which you do), as opposed to the 360 which can only run DirectX 9. In fact, even if you don't use Vista and thus are restricted to DirectX 9, I'm guessing the PC version has higher-resolution textures and is generally that bit shinier. The games that actually make it out on both have almost always been capable of looking better on the PC as far as I'm aware, the most recent example I've had personal experience with being Command & Conquer 3.

Heh, man. Thumbs and Mojo are even named in GameSpot's article. :~

It's a pretty crazy problem. I've always seen consoles as being very durable, and Nintendo's case this is usually true to the extreme. With the 360, pretty much everyone is likely to know at least one person whose 360 has bummed itself in the gob.

When I saw that trailer, I saw a game involving a guy shooting up a load of frenzied zombies. At no point did any kind of racist connotations occur to me. When the writer saw the trailer, she saw a game involving a racist guy indiscriminately shooting up a load of blacks because they're black. At every point racist connotations occurred to her. Clearly the writer and anybody supporting her is the racist here, and is responsible for the continuing struggles of equality.

Well, I just meant buying it regardless of the quality, feeling obligated to do so, and being excited about it even though it's almost certainly just a cheap card game. If fans of licenses weren't so accepting of mediocrity, perhaps there'd be more than a select few film/tv-to-game licenses that aren't absolute shit. I mean, just look at the state of all these CGI films that have shoddy games released alongside them. Absolute shite! This is really another discussion I'm venturing into, though.

Yes lobotomy42, it's attitudes like that which make cheap franchising such an easy job companies; why bother with a more meaningful game when you can just slap the license on a virtual card game?! :tdown: If they introduced Doctor Who Shithead on the other hand...

I think the reason it's so popular right now is they have a million different versions of the game themed on all sorts of popular franchises. Clearly an ingenious move as kids are buying bunches of the same game in different presentations.

Just kiddie stuff by the looks of it, like most of the Doctor Who merchandise and such. I know from having multiple young siblings that Top Trumps (developer of the game) is some card game fad in schools at the moment, much like your Pogs, your crappy alien things, your Pokemons, your Yo-Yos, etc. I can't see this being anything more than a cheap opportunity to capitalise on both that fad and Doctor Who simultaneously.

I would assume he's talking about actual modern exclusives that aren't franchises that've been going for a million years. Even MGS1 came out on the PC and (later) the GameCube, and MGS2 came out on the PC and Xbox. Although MGS3 has remained exclusive thus far, it really isn't much of a stretch to imagine MGS4 appearing on other machines. Final Fantasy didn't even start with Sony in the first place (it was Nintendo), and Resident Evil has appeared on the Saturn, Nintendo 64 and GameCube (at least). I'll be very surprised if the PS3 doesn't enjoy some excellent new franchises, and it already has God of War as a modern classic. Moving on though, I had no idea Viva Pinata was coming to the PC. That's really great news, and that now makes zero games that were starting to tempting me to the 360 now that Gears of War is also PC bound, and my PC is good enough to handle BioShock with ease. I enjoy the way people who shell out for PCs get to enjoy a lot of the 360's wares, including the pads.

An excellent episode. Quality film scene at the end, too.

You people.

Yeah, Consolevania: TV became a superb reality. On the BBC, no less! Well, BBC Scotland. I don't think I heard about the confirmed third season, though. Most excellent news! :tup: VideoGaiden is basically the same thing, except a bit better produced and with less extreme humour (which you may prefer). The goodness is still there in every other way. You can probably find downloads of the episode knocking around somewhere; there was certainly a thread full o' links here at some point.

I've heard quite a few PC gamers say that Gears of War is totally over-hyped, and is little more than clichéd stuff we've seen on the PC a million times in FPS form but with prettier graphics and of course a different view. I've no idea if there's any weight to this, but it's worth bearing in mind Consolevania play the whole spectrum of machines including the PC. If you've not kept on top of PC games then the chances are they have a better of what they're talking about. Of course, any gamer who hasn't really kept on top of PC games is going to get a very skewed perspective of games as the majority of things that are big hits on consoles were played around with on the PC first. Xbox Live in its entirety is a very obvious example, here. It'll be interesting to see how Gears of War does fare with the PC crowd as a whole when the extended edition is released for it later on this year, who 'culturally' have very different tastes.

Man, there's been loads of great-looking stuff shown. From a gamer perspective this E3 hasn't been any worse than others at all. I'm really looking forward to the following PC games: • Crysis • Call of Duty 4 • Kane and Lynch • BioShock • Brothers in Arms: Whatever • Assassin's Creed Not that much has been shown of Kane & Lynch, but I suspect it's going to actually turn out to be really good. It has a lot more going for it than not seeing as it's from the Mr Hitmen. The original Brothers in Arms was good but flawed; the sequel was similarly so, unsurprising as it came out not even a year later and was more expansion pack than sequel. They've had plenty of time to sort the whole squad gameplay out, so hopefully they have. BioShock's already been discussed to death and is either going to be very good or very disappointing. I don't think it can hit much of a middle ground. Assassin's Creed looked quite buggy, but what's been accomplished looks fantastic and I think if they can fix up the issues it'll be bang on. At the very least it looks beautifully atmospheric. Crysis? Crysis. And Call of Duty 4 just looks amazing. The trailer left me completely indifferent, but that gameplay video shown was really good and hit every right note possible with me. I was also surprised to discover that some of the above actually are PC games, previously thinking they were console exclusives. Going to be a great Q3/Q4 2007 on the PC. Especially if you factor in stuff like Team Fortress 2. :tup:

lol wtf

I just thought the overall product was very similar to the Wiimote, which it clearly is. It's not in their 'slightly inspired' gaming line, but I'd imagine an interpretation of the same technology with a gaming slant will come before long. Could be the first step of all platforms using pointing/gesture control schemes! Or it could just be a random peripheral that'll never manage anything. Was just pointing it out, anyway.

BTW, anyone got any idea how long the game's meant to be, going off circulating info so far?