JonCole

I toss myself in with the TF2 crowd, I'll go without playing that for months and months and then proceed to play for like 50 hours in the span of a week. Really addictive, continually fresh, solid mechanics. And then instead of pointing at just one game, I'll go ahead and say any of Bethesda's 'first-party' Fallout/Elder Scrolls games. I've played just about every one of them since Morrowind for upwards of 500 hours each through multiple playthroughs, leading to 100% achievement completion in Oblivion and Fallout 3 on 360. I'll eventually do the same with New Vegas, undoubtedly, and I still feel like there's a lot of juice behind Skyrim that simply isn't my jam at this very moment.

The Qwikster analogy is apt, because I feel like Microsoft is tossing out all the good with the bad as a means of "we told you so". I'm sure there is a way to have digital game sharing without 24 hour checks, the PS3 does it with a limited number of licenses (three) and Steam does it with longer periods between checks. Instead of trying to engineer a better system, they simply said "you got what you wanted, happy?" Whether or not Sony had their finger on the same trigger, they chose not to pull it. I think this whole thing is indicative of the general attitudes of the companies as they stand. Maybe that's just my perception, but it feels like Sony's interests align with my own much better. Plus, it doesn't hurt that the thing is $100 cheaper and doesn't have a weird spy camera looking at me forever.

Sean Vanaman interviews Peter Molyneux, via Game Informer -

Call of Duty is the Black Hawk Down of video games.

http://thecitizenkaneofvideo games.tumblr.com/

"In the first moments of the game, Tony Hawk whispers 'Rosebud' on his deathbed. We then follow him through his harrowing journey from beautifully constructed half-pipe to mindbogglingly rusty grind rail, from painfully authentic warehouse to the haunting setting of Roswell. What is 'Rosebud"? Is it a prototype skateboard designed by Leonardo DaVinci and finally constructed by Hawk's bloodied hands? Is it the ultimate skatepark where you can grind on priceless works of art and furniture collected from all corners of the Earth? Was it simply the name of Tony Hawk's first skateboard, symbolic of Hawk's only true moments of happiness in infanthood when he pulled his first 720º? Join me in the delight of deciphering this cryptic, stunning puzzle that opens the soul of Mr. Hawk in an unparalleled gaming experience never to be equaled ever again. 9.9/10" -IGN.com

Personal Computer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TsdgaKZv3lc

360 port of Titanfall is being farmed out to a third-party, I'd definitely take the PC version over 360.

The are plenty of substantive differences, but I'll point to one of the most obvious ones that will clearly make a big difference in performance vs equivalent PC parts. Namely, AMD's APU architecture hasn't done much for the gaming audience in PCs because the GPUs that they build onto the CPUs are piddly and are only really suited for 1080p video rendering. In the case of the PS4, Sony is basically taking the same video card I have in my PC (Radeon 7870) and builds it on the same die as the CPU. In PCs, the GPU has it's memory pool (2GB of GDDR5 in a Radeon 7870) separate from the memory pool that the CPU accesses for it's operations (probably 4 - 8GB of DDR3 in most gaming computers), additionally having to interface through memory buses that increase latency between the components. In the case of the PS4, there is a shared memory pool of 8GB of GDDR5 (GDDR5 memory has 2X the bandwidth of the fastest DDR3 memory, 4X the bandwidth of the slowest DDR3 momory) that both the CPU and GPU can access. Not only does the PS4 have more and faster memory than a PC, but the system uses less RAM to operate. Sony says that the system will only need 1GB of RAM maximum, whereas Windows 7/8 uses a minimum of 2GB to suitably operate. One more thing, since the 7870 and CPU are on the same die they don't have to transfer memory though bottleneck-prone memory buses. What does this mean? Well, it means that there really is a secret sauce. Add to that the fact that developers have a spec that's not a moving target and a number of familiar architectures in play this generation (as opposed to last, where the CELL processor really offered no advantage to the PS4 as you mentioned brkl) and you have a platform they will develop specifically for and PC's will have to manage through brute force.

Not to shit on RPS or their tech guy, but at this point it's really pure speculation as to the performance of these components. While the CPU is referred to as an "off the shelf" part, the Jaguar generation of AMD CPUs just isn't out right now. It's really just a guess (might be a good one) that half of the cores will be dedicated to background services and it's also a guess that this processor would even be clocked at the same frequency or powered at the same voltage as a consumer PC component. Beyond that, the components of gaming consoles are optimized in a way that simply can't be mimicked by a custom-built PC. All of that said, Jaguar is meant to be roughly equivalent to chips between Intel's Atom and Core i3 chips. It's a low power chipset that's designed on the PC side for tablets and convertible laptops. It's probably going to take much less time for PC to catch up to console performance simply because you can brute force through the optimization of consoles with bigger and better parts. But your Core i5-3750K and GeForce GTX 660 Ti are also a lot more likely to run much hotter, much louder, and much more inconsistently than a console. That's always been the advantage of that model.

I actually just started playing BF3 for the first time after a series of good deals got my the game + premium for about $15. jonac13 on Origin, plan on playing tonight around 8 or 9 EDT and probably a lot this weekend.

Haven't felt the need to 100% a game like this in quite a while, last one was probably Assassin's Creed 2. Very enjoyable, the story felt a lot more cohesive than I really expected. Definitely my GOTY thus far, but not by a huge margin over Bioshock Infinite.

Not plugging my shit, but a friend of mine's - Game Event Rewind - http://gerewind.com/ It's just basically a repository of press conferences including the ones from E3 this year. He watched through them and put some timestamps up so you can find what parts of it you want to see easily. Nothing too mind blowing, but it is handy.

I don't think there's anything stopping you from putting an SSD in a PS3 right now. I wonder if that's some wild upgrade, or if the likely SATAII connection in there won't benefit too much from it. Or if the PS3's OS simply doesn't play nice with an SSD due to excessive read/write operations/no optimization.

I'm fairly sure it'll also be coming to Xbox 360, unless I heard something wildly wrong.

XB1 may be a "Titanfall Box", but so is my PC.

$500 HAHAHAHA

How about that XBONE guys? Microsoft's E3 presser starts in about 5 hours, very excited to see them shit all over our rights and make us wave our economic dicks around in a shouting match.

You can also enable a mode where each person can change into any character on the fly. I like rolling around as a posse of 3 wizards. Definitely a different experience, though, as often puzzles/platforming is solvable with multiple character types and you'll often have one person left behind if you're not consciously cooperative (granted you're playing the mode where you're locked into a character).

I'm the biggest critic of the Wii U, so let's not blow what I'm saying out of proportion. Pragmatically, I know that I'm going to own every console at some point. I'm simply saying that in four or five months time, the Wii U will have a one year software head-start on these other consoles and has a first-party offering that almost by default outclasses everyone else. It doesn't solve any DRM problems or anything like that, it's just that the Xbox One has done enough at this point to deter me from buying it until I see exactly how it works in the real world and whether or not it has games I really want to play over the PC. Add to that the simple fact that the Wii U will be at most $300 this holiday season and the Xbox One and PS4 are likely to be floating around $400, and it's a little bit of a no-brainer what the budget-conscious, lower-to-middle class gamer that already owns a modern PC like myself should choose at the moment. Or to put it in your terms, I'll vote with my dollar. I should also say that I think it's entirely unlikely that the PS4 will have any specifically tailored benefits for first adopters like you mentioned. The first wave is full of people who are already going to buy it no matter what's in the box. It's the same reason why there are essentially no bundles at launch; bundling a game in is only useful if it demonstrates the function of the system (Wii Sports, NES w/ Zapper, etc), otherwise it's just a pro-consumer choice that might buy you brand-loyalty or pride in purchasing but not additional sales.

I'm actually on a similar tip regarding the Wii U. It will hopefully deliver the most varied offerings of the consoles as compared to the PC, so it's the next in line for my purchase above the XB1 and PS4. Those consoles have me excited about the future of gaming, but by the time they're coming out of the womb the Wii U will have some serious exclusive offerings and a much more appealing value proposition.

All of the games in that bundle register in Steam. You can tell which ones do because they'll say "Steam Client required for installation" or something to that effect in the product description. I should also say that all of those Amazon bundles come with three additional free indie games that are far less known than the ones on sale - The Curse of the Nordic Cove, Dynasty of Dusk, and Huntsman: The Orphanage. None of them register in Steam and only the first two of them are available right now (Huntsman is a free preorder). Huntsman looks very in the vein of Amnesia, so that might be of interest to some of you guys.

Amazon just launched a Downloadable Indie Games channel and are running a fair amount of sweet bundle sale - http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=nav_sap_dvg_Jun13?_encoding=UTF8&node=6923534011 Again, I had the same problem as many that I actually had a fair amount of bundled games but I did manage to grab this gem with only one duplicate: $10 for Galaxy on Fire 2 + Little Inferno + Stealth Bastard Deluxe + Strike Suit Zero + The Cave. Also notable is the Double Fine bundle with all of their PC games for $10 and FTL for $5.

Rooting would not affect those features, as it doesn't change the OS or the function of any working apps at all. Even if you wanted to install a custom ROM, most developers would simply copy-paste those elements of Sense into the ROM so that these kinds of functions work. For instance, when I had an HTC Rezound I had my choice of ROMs that either had none of HTC's extra features (or in other words, completely stock) or ones that integrated all of the features like Beats Audio Processing into the package of apps they so desire to bundle into the ROM.

Semantically, "installing a custom ROM isn't rooting" makes sense. However, "getting access to the bootloader" means that your bootloader is unlocked and therefore you have root access. The colloquial "rooting" is granting access to the root of a device by abusing software flaws, as you said. It's a semantic difference, but a meaningful one. For instance, HTC has recently exposed the HTCdev channel to the consumer as a means of "unlocking your phone". It gives you access to a very specific version of what HTC calls "hboot", which is essentially a form of the bootloader. That said, you can only install using a tethered fastboot process and you can't make any changes to the boot.img (meaning you can't install a custom kernel or radio). Without being able to change the kernel, you can't do things like modify voltage or frequency of the CPU/GPU. The upshot is that without achieving s-off (true access to the bootloader) and not HTC's 90% of the way there hboot, you'll have a lot harder time installing custom ROMs to a phone. I have personal experience with this process having dealt with my HTC Rezound. Without S-Off, I was stuck with installing ICS/JB ROMs that utilized the GB kernel and thus suffered from power efficiency issues as well as various bugs in components like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Even still, various HTC devices require a "wire trick" to achieve S-Off, which requires precise timing of connecting exposed contacts on the back of devices while software is interfacing with the phone via ADB. In short, a total pain in the ass that easily results in bricking a phone.