Displaying items by tag: Gaming

Eight days… that is all you have to wait if you want to get Kinect for your Windows PC. At least that is the word out of Redmond today. Despite the fact that many gamers do not see the need for, or even want the Kinect Microsoft is pushing their plans to launch this motion sensing device for the PC anyway. The reasons behind this are probably simple, they were too far ahead to back out..

While a nice layout, cool colors and a good feature set listed on the box might be nice performance is what most people are looking for in a motherboard. A good feature set does not matter so much if the board is not able to perform to the level you want it to. For the most part Asus has done a good job in balancing out their features and performance. This balance has extended even down to their entry level boards as they trickle down what they learn from their Republic of Gamer’s Boards. So where does the Z97-A fit into all of this? Let’s find out.

The term “free to play” has often been parodied as “free to pay” by gamers that feel this new system of timers and locks is something that is just not a good business model. Fortunately it is not a model that has managed to spread through the entire market, but is one that is certainly entrenched in the mobile one. A recent ruling in the UK over EA’s advertisement of the Dungeon Keeper game for iOS and Android might be the start of a new look at this often misleading label.

Have you ever been in one of those situations where nothing you say will make things better? You know what we are talking about, you made the initial comment and now… well you just can’t fix it. This is about where Ubisoft is at the moment. After a developer and an art director made the claim that adding in playable female characters into Assassin’s Creed Unity, they have been trying to make things better and only making them worse.

Back when I first started writing about the computer industry the term photorealistic was thrown around a lot whenever a new game was about to hit the market. Bear in mind that this was back when 800x600 was considered a pretty good resolution and 1600x1200 was what everyone dreamed of. Still that term was out there despite the simple truth that it was not really obtainable with the hardware and software that existed for the consumer market.

It looks like Razer’s attempt to push into the PC market is not going exactly as planned. After showing off Project Christine at CES 2014 they are now admitting that they did not anticipate some of the complications they have run into. One of these comes from the fact that Christine is nowhere near ready to hit the streets. Razer is blaming OEMs for this issue, but in reality it is probably not completely their fault.

Facebook bought the startup company Oculus VR for reasons that they have not quite made public, but it has been assumed that it was to help them get into the gaming industry as well as expand Facebook in a new way. So far we have heard a few rumors about what this goal might be including a vast virtual world that takes online social interaction to a new level.

Titanfall developer, Respawn is apparently looking into the world of mobile gaming and… *Gasp* Free to Play. This new information was dropped on us during an interview with Respawn COO Dusty Welch shortly after they announced Stig Asmussen was coming onboard. According to Welch Asmussen will not only be working on the future of Titanfall, but also working on where the company will be heading.

Although the concept of Virtual Reality (VR) is nothing new, there has always been something of a roadblock for this technology. That roadblock is money, if you do not have the money for the hardware and the programing APIs you are not going to develop for it. This is pretty much the fate of any technology that is stuck in the hands of a few large companies. Just look at 3D, we do not see 3D as more prevalent in gaming and movies because of cost.

In development it has always been a given that if you can code for a specific build of materials or specific hardware platform you can usually get more out of the application you are developing. Nowhere was this more evident than when RISC CPUS were on the market. At the time that DEC Alpha was king we saw a 667MHz CPU slamming 1GHz processors from both AMD and Intel. The reason for this was that the software was specifically coded to take advantage of that platform.