Emasher

I just don't understand who a hybrid console/handheld would appeal to, or even what that would mean. What would make it not strictly a handheld? Size? If you make it too big, nobody's going to want to carry one around, especially if it's a dedicated game device. It being able to connect to an external display? That's hardly revolutionary. A few pages back, someone suggested it might plug into a base station when you're at home with additional hardware inside. The research and development required to make something like that work would be very expensive and time consuming, for very little benefit. Being able to synchronize data like save games and purchases between handheld and console is certainly something Nintendo needs to get better at, but it's not something you need a physical connection to implement. What you're essentially describing is having two sets of hardware with a shared data storage device on the mobile part. It would be much cheaper just to synchronize data between two platforms using a cloud service. With Nintendo blaming the commercial disappointment of the Wii U on the game pad, I really doubt they're going to go further in the tablet direction. The last time I remember Nintendo talking about a 3rd platform, what we got was the DS, which while it was of course a successor to the Gameboy Advance, and obviously planned to be just that all along, Nintendo probably didn't want to commit to it being that until they knew it would be successful. I suspect they're doing the same thing with the NX, and that it will end up being the successor to the Wii U (I suppose it could be a handheld, but with the New 3DS, it looks like they plan to move to a system of incremental updates, similar to what happens with mobile phones). If that's the case here, it's possible the reason is simply that they wanted to announce something, but didn't want to come across as if they're abandoning the Wii U. It's also possible, they're doing something a bit different again with it. If I had to guess, I would say that something is a VR headset. Although the Wii motion controls came out of nowhere, a lot of the other 'different' things they've included in previous devices have either been fads or new developments that were becoming popular outside of Nintendo at the time. The DS's touch screen, the 3DS's 3D effects, and the Wii U game pad are all examples of this. VR is very much that upcoming technology right now. Of course, it would require much more powerful hardware than the Wii U to run it. With VR headsets, high frame rates (even more than 60 FPS to be comfortable), are not optional (you'll get physically sick otherwise). This is all of course, simply speculation. It's fun to talk about, but for now, I think I'm just going to enjoy the games that are out now. Mainly on my PC. If you really don't want to read the whole thing, skip the next five paragraphs. Now, as for what I think they should do? I think we can all accept at this point that the Wii U has been a commercial failure, or at least a major disappointment for Nintendo. I'm fairly confident that isn't going to change. So what can they do with their next console? The main factors that have to be considered are: what is the benefit of buying it, do the people that would benefit from it know about it, and of course, how much does it cost? The benefit is obviously being able to play games. A better question is which games can you play on it? Well, the consumer wants to be able to play as many games as possible on it, and they also want the best versions possible (or at least come close), and they want to be able to play with their friends. As many games as possible isn't as difficult now as it used to be. Most of the big name games these days are multi-platform. They might have some exclusive, or timed exclusive features, but everything comes out on everything now, except on the Wii U. So why is that? The Wii U isn't powerful enough. At first, when multi-platform games were still getting released for the PS3 and Xbox 360, it was fairly easy to port them over to the Wii U. But when the adoption of the PS4 and Xbox One was great enough that they no longer had to support the older consoles, there weren't enough Wii Us out there to justify developing games with the Wii U in mind. You can't just magically release a game for another platform, especially one that's very different from other platforms. It takes time, and that means money, and if you aren't going to make enough money off of doing it, or worse, loose money, they you don't do it. Even if the console is selling, and as a result, developers are porting games to it, people aren't going to buy your console over another so they can play an uglier version of a game. Gaining a large user base early on is also important as it means people will buy your console specifically because it's what their friends have and they want to play games with their friends. But overall, power, you do need it. The Wii was successful despite a lack of power, and it was foolish to think that this would be the case for the Wii U. Perhaps though, Nintendo just thought that the PS4 and Xbox one were further off than they ended up being while the Wii U was in development. I don't think I really need to say much about marketing. The Wii was a very different case as it was marketed towards a different crowd, and it was promoted a lot by word of mouth. Nintendo needs to learn how to market their products to the average gamer again. That's probably not all that difficult to do, but they also need to do a bit of re-branding. I'm sure you've heard someone say something like, "Nintendo? That's for kids." If Joe Call of Duty has the choice between something he (and probably his friends) perceive as "For kids", and something else that's pretty much on par with it, he's going to go for the later. The name is probably a pretty good place to start. A name like "Wii U" probably hasn't benefited the console much at all in terms of sales, it's probably hurt it. Then there's price. The Wii U is cheaper than the PS4 and Xbox One, but it's not an equivalent product. The PS4 has gained its lead primarily because it was initially significantly cheaper than the Xbox One. When Microsoft started selling the Xbox One without Kinect and made the package cheaper, sales picked up a lot, and are now apparently fairly close to that of the PS4. So cheaper wins, obviously, but you still need to provide the product people want. Putting the right analog stick the right place and having a more sane policy regarding downloadable games would help too. Overall, I think a Nintendo console that's competitive in terms of power and price with the consoles it's competing with, has a cool name, and fixes some of the more minor issues the Wii U currently has, could do quite well. The Wii was successful despite not being competitive in this way with the other consoles of its time because Nintendo was able to exploit a new market, but one that doesn't really exist anymore (all those people just play mobile games now, if they play games at all, they don't care about consoles). It didn't happen with the Wii U, it might happen again, but it also may (and will probably) not happen. That isn't to say they shouldn't innovate, but they still need to sell units, and the entire console doesn't need to be based around the innovation. 3rd party support really is key though. In a world where exclusive games are becoming increasingly rare, Nintendo actually has a pretty big advantage in that they have the ability to produce a lot of high quality exclusive games in house. If they could get the rest right, that might just push them over the edge. Now personally, I'm quite happy with my Wii U. There are a few complaints I have regarding the controller, and the way their store works, but I'm just going to play the multiplatform games on my PC anyway, so I don't care if they end up on Nintendo consoles. I'd be happy to pay a few hundred dollars again in a few years for a new console to play the latest Nintendo games as they've always been my favorites. Not everyone can afford multiple consoles though, and not everyone likes Nintendo games enough to justify it, even if they can afford it.

The PC version of Unity is pretty playable now, provided you're willing to turn down the graphics settings or have a pretty powerful machine to start with. On my 970, at 1080p, I get about 45-55 frames per second (the lower frame rate occurs at ground level in crowded areas). This is with the game pretty much maxed out if I remember correctly, except I'm using MFAA. The game is very good looking for an open world game if you can turn the settings up. There's still some LOD pop-in, and the odd visual bug, but I've never had the game crash, or break in some other way. There have actually been some pretty welcome game play improvements, including indoor areas being much more significant (including some control improvements to make that possible), as well as the ability to free run down by holding a different button. There are also some interesting new missions types (such as murder mysteries where you have to examine evidence and ultimately accuse someone), and the combat has been made much more difficult (multiple enemies can attack you at the same time, for instance). I wouldn't recommend it at the full price, but next time it's on sale, if you still enjoy the series, it is worth picking up in my opinion. Black Flag is an excellent game, and in my opinion, the best in the series. It takes the naval combat of 3, and focuses the entire game around that. You'll spend some time in cities, but much more sailing around to various islands and sinking ships on your way. Aside from the shifted focus, the core mechanics are pretty much the same as 3. The protagonist is much more interesting than Connor was in 3. Much more like Etzio was, but he has his own style. I haven't played Rogue yet.

Never do that on a first date. I've been on a lot of dates like this recently. I thought I was a pretty boring person. Then I started meeting women like this that have no interests beyond gossip, and can't participate in a conversation that goes beyond the most shallow of topics. Her leaving early was probably a good thing though, if nothing else, it saved you some time. Anyway, I've got a date Monday night with a girl I met on POF. She was the one who first messaged me, and was pretty blunt about the fact that she wanted to go on a date, which is giving me mixed feelings. I'll see how it goes I guess. Hopefully she at least knows how many world wars there were.

Gears of War Ultimate Eddition and Tales of Zestiria are also coming to the PC. Anyway, Tales of Zestiria, Battlefront, and Fallout 4 are probably all day one purchases for me. With Just Cause 3, I'll wait to find out what the PC port is like, and with Assassin's Creed 2015, I'll probably wait for the first sale. I'm also looking forward to the Beyond Earth expansion.

And it really would be a good thing for the modding community. A large number of amazing mods have simply been abandoned because the authors didn't have the time or motivation to port the mod to a new version. 1.3 (client server merger), 1.7 (removal of block ids), and 1.8 (major changes to how blocks work under the hood) were all really bad for this. I still haven't ported my mod to 1.8 (which is the case for a lot of "tech" mods). Even if Microsoft eventually releases an official SDK for the new version, while it might split the community initially, it would be good in the long run to have a stable API.

I didn't even see that. I may actually pre-order this now.

My guess is that this is a port of the Xbox One version to the PC. Windows 10 comes with DirectX 12, which has significant performance improvements over DirectX 11. The Xbox One currently uses a version of DirectX 11 which already has a number of the performance improvements of 12, so the port probably wouldn't be too difficult. I wouldn't be surprised if they also gave the game a graphical update to the point it looks something like this. Now of course, since the Xbox One version is written in C++ rather than Java, while the performance should be significantly better, unofficial mod support (Forge, etc.) simply won't be possible as you can't decompile machine code like you can with Java Bytecode. I suspect this is the main reason they'll be leaving the original version in place, to not kill off the modding community, but I doubt they'll be putting any development time into the original version now (which as someone who has written and maintains a fairly large Minecraft mod, I would actually view as a good thing as it means the platform would be more stable). I also wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft were to release an official sdk for both this and the Xbox One version, and launch a paid mod store. This is all of course, just speculation.

I'm not sure how long this has been up, but it looks like Tales of Zestiria is confirmed to be getting a PC release now. Really hoping they don't screw up the port. http://store.steampowered.com/app/351970/

Now you're getting it.

It's unlikely to be a BIOS issue if you're seeing anything Windows related. Does it only shut off during start up, or does it shut off under load sometimes as well? Are you booting from a hard drive or an SSD, and how old is whichever? What's the wattage of the power supply, and how old is it? What's on the screen at the time it shuts off? Does it always shut off the first time and always work fine the second time? Do you have to press the button to start it up again the second time?

Most of the people who worked on the original Prime trilogy don't work for Retro anymore. Anyway, this doesn't really surprise me. I still hold out hope for a new proper 2D Metroid game, but with Zelda coming out next year, I can't see them wanting to release another big adventure game around the same time.

That was a massive waste of time. Almost none of them had anything interesting to say. They should have cut half the games and just had a PR type person announce the higher profile stuff and play a few trailers. It didn't help that the host did an absolutely abysmal job either.

Looks great. My main concern is still that they get the controls right though.

I've met girls off of Tinder as well. My point isn't that people shouldn't use it, but rather to have realistic expectations. I'd say the best thing to do is to sign up for all the free ones that have a decent user base in whatever area you're in, and just not bother with the paid ones unless there's one with a really good user-base where you are.

In my experience, it depends a lot on the site. Where I live, Tinder has a lot of users. If I wanted to, I could go on it every couple hours and have a few new women to judge. I also tend to see a lot more women on Tinder though who are less serious about it than other dating services. I suspect a lot of them don't really view it as a dating service at all, but rather just something to do when bored, akin to Candy Crush Saga. I've seen tons and tons of profiles of women where they're with someone who is clearly their boyfriend in their pictures. Even one of a woman in a bridal dress. It's certainly not all the women on there. Some are genuinely looking for someone to meet up with (for various reasons mind you), but It's a pretty unlikely place to find 'the one'. The free sites like Okcupid and POF are a little bit better in that sense. They have much fewer users, especially since Tinder became popular, although it's important to keep in mind Tinder, Okcupid, and Match.com are all owned by the same parent company. They're by no means wastelands in terms of users though. I find being able to rely a bit on my wit, and not just looks gets me a lot more success on these sites. At least I've gotten more dates off of them. I mean, I did meet world war three girl on Okcupid, but she was the wors- okay, the second worst I've met up with off of one of those sites. The women I've encountered on Okcupid and POF have certainly taken the dating aspect more seriously than Tinder (It's difficult to pretend a site called Okcupid isn't a dating site), but I've also had women lead me on (for longer than I'd care to admit), and some like almost entirely about who they were. Definitely a step above Tinder though. Then you have the paid-only sites like Match. Very small number of users, but those who do tend to take things much more seriously. Unless there's one really popular in your area though, they're definitely not worth it. Perhaps it's different if you're older, but most of the women in my age range were either single mothers, or not even close to being attractive. I tried match for a year, and only got one date out of it. Although, I suppose I've also only ever actually met one girl off of Tinder, but that one ended in sex, whereas the girl from match ended in ignored texts.

Nah. It was pretty clear from the rest of the conversation she was just a complete moron.

Went on a date tonight and the subject of international relations came up: Her: "Yeah, I think there's going to be a world war four soon." Me: "Aren't you skipping one there?" Her: "Haven't there been three world wars?"

I was disappointed when I saw that you play from a first person perspective in the trailer. But the rest of it looked absolutely amazing. Then I read the rest. If it has a decent single player mode I might consider it, but multiplayer only survival sounds absolutely awful.

Steam has started a new program that allows mod authors to sell mods through the Steam Workshop rather than just giving them away for free. http://steamcommunity.com/games/SteamWorkshop/announcements/detail/208632365237576574 http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/aboutpaidcontent A few key points: Mod authors can choose between free, paid, and pay what you want for their mod. Users can 'return' a mod for a full refund within 24 hours. The developer of a game must opt-in to allowing paid mods to be posted for their game. Mod authors receive 25% of the revenue generated from the sale of a mod. Skyrim is currently the only game that supports paid Workshop content. A lot of comunis-- err...people are really pissed off about this. Personally, I'm all for this. In the past, I've developed mods for Minecraft, which couldn't really be monetized in a significant way, which really put me off continuing development of the mods after a certain point. Good mods often take a lot of time to develop, and actually making money for the effort you put into creating a mod will likely lead to an increase in mod quality. It could also attract more talented individuals into mod development who previously couldn't justify spending the time on it.

If you want 4k resolutions with higher settings, you're going to want more than one 970. My single one can barely play most newer games on full at 1080p.

Playing around with the settings further, I turned off all of the "Advanced Graphics" options and switched back from MFAA to MSAA x2, which allowed me to maintain a pretty much constant 60 frames per second. I was even able to maintain that with TXAA turned on, but I don't really like TXAA because it makes textures look muddy in my opinion, so I turned it back off. I'm still getting the weird 30 FPS slowdown during sunrise and sunset sometimes though. I'd really like to figure that one out. I think the culprit may have been Nvidia PCSS, but I'm still not 100% sure. I haven't seen the issue since turning that off, but it's not always consistent.

I imagine it was originally intended to be part of Wii Fit Plus, but wasn't ready in time so they scrapped it.

Multiplayer is strictly part of GTA Online. The story mode is single player only. GTA Online has many different mission types besides heists (the heists are actually relatively new). Some of these are co-op, some are versus. As far as running it on your laptop goes, the game requires a 64-bit version of Windows (Vista or later), and a 2.4 GHz quad core CPU, 4GB RAM, and a 1GB graphics card (the 9800 GT and HD 4870 are listed as the weakest cards supported). You probably won't have a good time if your specs are only slightly above this, but a reasonably recent laptop with a 'proper' GPU should be able to run it on lower settings. Keep in mind that laptop GPUs are weaker than the desktop equivalents with the same name (and minimum specs are always based on the desktop GPUs).

I played for several more hours using the optimized (save anti aliasing and depth of field) settings, and didn't come across the sunset slowdown issue again. The frame rate was still pretty inconsistent ranging from about 40 to 60, but I never saw it drop below 35 for more than a fraction of a second. I'm almost wondering now if Steam stealthily installed a patch while I was finishing my last post.

So far the PC version is looking like a pretty decent port. The options menu is quite extensive and allows you to customize nearly everything. A few exceptions being you can't manually re-map the game-pad controls (although there are more presets than you see in most games, including one that maps the shooting controls properly for a dualshock), and as far as I can tell there's no option to disable god-rays. Switching between a controller and mouse and keyboard is seamless, and I've been doing everything in first person and using a controller for driving (for analog controls), and keyboard and mouse for on foot. It's a little tough to shoot while driving with a controller though, so I've been using the mouse and keyboard when I've had to do that. Now more importantly, performance. My setup is an i7 4790k with a super clocked GTX 970 and 8GB RAM. I've been playing the game so far at 1080p on maximum settings except I've disabled motion blur, depth of field and I've set my anti-aliasing settings to 2x MSAA, with TXAA and FXAA both off. I've tried to override that in the Nvidia control panel with MFAA, but I'm not sure it's working as there's no option to use MFAA directly in the game, and I haven't seen any noticeable performance improvements since turning it on. Reflection MFAA is also turned off. The frame rates I'm getting with these settings a pretty inconsistent. In the city, I tend to get 60 frames per second while on foot, but then it drops to about 50 when driving, and 45 when accelerating from stopping. If I look towards a setting or rising sun, the frame rate drops to about 30. Out in the rural areas, my frame rate drops to about 35-47, but during scenes with lots of action, I've seen it drop to 25, and once, even as low as 16. After writing that first part, I used Nvidia's utility to 'optimize' my settings (although, I did change it to use MFAA over FXAA, and I can definitely see the MFAA working now). Performance seems to have improved slightly, but it's very inconsistent. Once when looking at the sunset from a particular spot, my frame rate was dropping to a consistent 30, but then as I gradually turned around performance increased until I got a solid 60 when facing the sunset. I tried changing a number of different settings, but none of them seemed to fix the issue. When the sun finished setting, I loaded my save game from right before it, and the issue seemed to be gone (all of the settings I turned down I had turned back up at this point). Because it was always exactly 30 when facing the sunset, I'm wondering the issue was related to v-sync.