The Bard

Yeah, makes sense, but it's a bit of a departure for the series to allow you to play as Dracula. It's good though, the series needs a bit of a shake up. The settings from the first game were a little hit or miss, so I'm hoping they keep it more focused this time around; the original could have done with around 4 hours shaved off the play time.

Have they made it clear who you'll be playing? Gabriel is framed as the antagonist in that trailer, as far as Castlevania tradition goes. If they're going to have you play as Alucard, I'd love if they included certain aspects that were synonymous with Symphony of The Night; a more continuous and contiguous world and leveling.

I really enjoyed the first game, even though it had serious problems with collision and horrible attack telegraphing. It was still one of the better games I played in 2010 though. Really wouldn't mind more of the same, but with the problems I mentioned improved on, and for it to perhaps have more of a sense of its own identity rather than borrowing from classic games.

Sweet man, that's kick ass.

OH HELL YEAH.

I really don't feel that they can make any substantial improvement over Gears 3, which was pretty much perfect for what it was trying to achieve. Still play the multiplayer from time to time, although I haven't bought all the additional map packs so I'm saddled with being unable to play on decent servers.

...so yeah, I have a compulsive personality.

That picture is the ultimate punchline for so many things.

In whose world is a 2:1 a bad grade?

The game could do with a patch on PC too. The Steam edition has problems. ie. it won't run on anything above 600x800 resolution. It would be a welcome gesture for them to apply all the updates to Doom 3 on PC in the form of a patch, in the same way in which Valve added updated textures and models to Half Life 2 after the Orange Box version came out.

That's genuinely the most unacceptable news I've head all week.

Just tried to start FF12 again, and it's impossible to play at that resolution. Everything looks like it was inked on blotting paper, it's vile. The Vita would be the perfect platform to port that title onto, perhaps with an improved and more expedient save feature.

I want to eat everything. All of the things.

Don't like the font, but I do like the simplicity of it. It's still nothing on the amazing European Resi 4 cover art.

Yeah, so, being Scandinavian, is there actually any merit to or veracity in Marvel's version of Thor, or is it just a load of crap?

Any advice on what fans would be a good idea to give a look?

I've never read the comics, so I can't comment on that, but Asgard in the film didn't give you any real sense of place. It was poorly contextualized, and gave you little sense of where it was in relation to all the other locations in the film. It was mostly just a hall and a bridge shrouded in really diffused and cheesy lighting. It may be the most well developed location in comic history, but it was really very poorly communicated in the film. Also, you really think that Marvel are going to approach it from the mythological angle? The extent of that so far has basically been the characters gibbering on about their genealogical tree every time they introduce themselves. The frost giant's were the least menacing/ interesting antagonist imaginable, basically just spending the entire movie sitting around their home world threatening to do shit, but never really delivering on it, and seemingly not having any real, believable motivation either. The whole thing was just dumb, which makes me think it was the source material that was shit, rather than the cast or the director which were both great. Also, the sheer volume of work doesn't connote quality. I'm guessing the majority of it is pretty much garbage; those 50 year's worth of material serve a predominantly financial purpose above any artistic one.

I like idea 4; have Thor spend more time on Earth rather than some ill conceived ethereal realm. Asgard was fucking awful in the first film. Then again so were all the earthly locations.

Do you have a PC? Then you can fucking well play Torchlight.

Holy shit Tribes Ascend double XP weekend. Get it while it's hot. And nerdy.

Exactly. For emphasis on this point, my Facebook post on Dannyboy's wall: It was dumb as all hell, partly in ways you would expect such a movie to be, but that doesn't excuse poor storytelling. The whole thing was was peddled on the back of the knowledge that manbabies everywhere will lose their shit over it. When the seams cracked it made you realise how absolutely idiotic the whole thing was. How the hell is there supposed to be gravitas and menace with a villain who looks like he's wearing a decapitated rhino beetle for a headdress? Humour was injected at the most inopportune times, and set up so clumsily - oh, so you waltzed into the same room as a homicidal demigod with some sort of blaster looking device eh? Let's get you monologuing to see how many chuckles we can wring from this contrivance. It wasn't terrible, but it had nothing on the first Iron Man, or Captain America, both of which somehow managed to transcend the absurdity of the premise. Also, sticking all the prominent superheroes form the Marvel universe in the same film is a bafflingly idiotic proposition in the first place since it removes the most interesting thing about superheroes; the fact that they're unique and isolated and that they have to situate their identity within the context of all the other ordinary humans that they're forced to be around, as well as the decisions they make. Like, why the fuck has nobody made a film about the Preacher comics - about an ordinary man given the ability to make people unquestioningly do his bidding? The answer is probably because all the Call of Duty generation want is a retarded spectacle for an hour and a half.

Yeah they don't get that high at all with something like Battlefield 3 or Crysis 2 (stick to around 61-71 at highest), but when I run the Intel Burn Test, which puts a full 100% load on each of the four cores, the temperatures start getting to 80-85 degrees. I don't have ordinary vcore settings on my BIOS either, it's something called dynamic vcore, which I think (having done about half an hours worth of searching, and still finding nothing but vagaries) sets the upper maximum range of your voltage, while reducing it when there's less performance demand. If the system does the boot loop again, I think I'm going to set aside a day and do some proper research, but it's gotten to the point where I've left my case open for easier access to the CMOS reset. Oddly though, I kinda like this aspect of PC gaming...it's sort of a meta-game in itself; get the damn thing to function properly

Anyone go Dead Island? It's like £6 on Steam right now. May get it if anyone's up for some coop zombie slaying.

Yeah, my BIOS is the latest version, and I just did voltage and temperature checks while running a stress test. Cores 2 and 3 were running at around 81 degrees max on full load which isn't good. I assume that's the problem since Load Line Calibration's been enabled and that's probably what's telling the PC not to boot until I flash the BIOS. What kind of cooling equipment do you have for your CPU? Cause all I've got is a Thermaltake Frio cooling fan. Pretty hefty, but probably not enough considering the temperatures I'm getting.

Howdy peeps. I got a new PC about eight months ago with an i5 2500k, and overclocked it to 4.5ghz. Ran fine for a while, but somewhere along the line about a month ago, it reset itself to 3.3ghz. Now, every time I set it to a higher clock speed (which, believe me, is necessary to get the most out of my 7870), after a couple of days of it running just fine, I turn it on to a boot loop. Essentially what happens is it makes a sound as if its going to start up for a couple of seconds (nothing happens on screen) and then boots down again, and this repeats infinitely unless I unplug it from the back. I've had to reset the thing from CMOS a couple of times. So what's wrong with the damn thing? I'm thinking there might be something in the BIOS settings that I didn't quite get right when I OC'd it. Or maybe it's the PSU itself (a 700W Xigmatic). Any suggestions?