McPhee

http://www.mcvuk.com/features/808/OPINION-Retail-vs-Steam That makes for an interesting read. I've started to use Amazon for trade-ins. They give pretty good prices, plus Amazon credit is genuinely useful (especially as a Prime member). If the devs really do get considerably more cash from download sales then I'll move towards that though, as long as pricing is competitive. Gonna thrip this when I get home (on the iPad at the moment), think the discussion is worthy of it's own topic.

Blame Game. Over the past year they've decided that downloads are the devil and will kill their business off if they aren't controlled. They've started to demand that publishers price digital versions of all games at (or near) RRP, threatening publishers with everything from lower chart positions to not stocking the title on any format if any download is priced too low. They've even been demanding that developers drop support for Steamworks, with the promise that if they don't then Game will not stock any titles using it. It's put me off buying from them TBH.

Don't knock it 'til you've tried it Fucks with the eyes something awful though (I hear that eases with time, hope so or the 3D glasses will be going back). Had my 3D gear arrive this morning and so far... Metro 2033 is still 'meh' despite what I've heard. Napoleon: Total War doesn't work in 3D (well, it does, but not everything is 3D so it looks weird). Arkham Asylum looks the shit in 3D though. Bad Company 2 next.

Hasn't this been done to death already?

I'd buy an old-school Nokia phone over the new Symbian handsets TBH. They're well built, but the software (especially the keyboard) is a bit poor. They're a half step up from the likes of Samsung's Tocco and LG's Cookie handsets.

Haven't we always? It's just since the Wii that it's become "cool" to shrug off the value of stunning visuals.

Not that you're shamelessly gloating or anything... :p

Same here. Need to give this monitor a run through it's paces. 24" is HUUUUGE (obligatory "that's what she said" before someone else does).

All hinges on battery life for me. As a portable gaming device 3 or 4 hours of play is perfectly fine, but for browsing the web and using simple apps I'd expect a lot more. That's why I'm happy with the iPad. It lasts freaking ages! Sure, the games aren't that flashy (somewhere between a DS and a PSP at best) but they keep me entertained and I know the battery will last. If Sony want me to buy a PSP2 then they need it to have excellent battery life. It needs to replace the iPad (or the smartphone, but I can't see that), not complement it, because I won't carry a third device with me. I'm already suitably entertained, there's no way I want another device just for some flashy graphics (same goes for the 3DS).

TBH it's not Duke Nukem that it reminds me of. Playing through the demo it feels more like Unreal Tournament does Geometry Wars. I love it. A breath of fresh air after so many serious shooters. The FPS I enjoyed this much was Borderlands, for similar reasons. I just wish I knew how people were getting those 18,000 scores! I keep getting close to 3 stars (8,500 points) but I'm not sure what I'm missing that could get me that far, let alone hit those numbers!

It's up now along with the Crysis 2 demo. Nearly 3GB between the two! Should take me until some time this evening to download... Pre-ordered. It's amazing. I mean, the trailers made the game look a little dodgy, but in motion it all comes together. It's the points system that makes the game, trying to eek every possible point out of each enemy/group in order to place that little bit higher on the scoreboard. Played the demo through 4 times so far and will no doubt go back to it as more people get the game and there's more high scores to beat.

Just bought one of these; http://www.anandtech.com/show/3842/asus-vg236h-review-our-first-look-at-120hz/1 Got fed up with my old 19" monitor, it's got a crack in the screen, the colours are wank and the black level is far too grey. Figured my recent upgrades are kinda pointless if my monitor sucks. Not looking forward to seeing my frame rate plunge through the floor though. I can max out every game on the market at the moment, even get 40fps on Metro. Going from 1440x900 to 1920x1080 3D will put and end to that (and make me want a new GPU...).

Hmm... 3G? Could be interesting if it has calling/texting support (maybe with a bluetooth headset?) and would certainly go some way to diluting a high price.

After watching the trailer I'm expecting this to suck. Still awesome though!

Surely it's a little soon to see any games? Or did you mean any good games to come out of any homebrew scene?

I might be up for a spot of gameage on Friday. Depends what time I get back from London. Eyefinity? Nowt wrong with 1680x1050 though, just means you'll be maxing out games for longer.

The terms usually state that you can only leave if the new T&Cs are of significan financial detriment. For example, if your network starts charging for calls to 0800 numbers you need to have a history of calling these numer to get out of the contract. Same goes for internet allowance, if you use sub-500MB/month it's difficult to argue that a move from 3GB down to 1GB is any justification for early termination.

Won't be on tonight, my brother has borrowed my PC to do some rendering for his Uni project.

Wicked! Will watch the trailer later. Knew Gearbox would get it out

You'd be right and wrong there. The manufacturing process is too efficient for all low-end chips to be broken high-end parts. The majority these days are just locked down. The larest example is the discovery that AMD's Athlon X2 5200+ (costs around £30) can be unlocked to use all 4 cores and the full amount of L3 cache. Intel have just done the sensible thing and decided to monetise these unlocks (their chips are more difficult to crack anyhow). Sounds like it will work much the same way as PC game DRM. It'll get cracked pretty quick, but will stop people with pirated copies playing online. Certainly makes piracy a lot less appealing for certain types of games.

It's quite normal. It's cheaper to manufacture one high-spec processor and then hardware/software lock it's capabilities to create lower models in the range than it is to manufacture all models seperately. The only thing new in that story is Intel are now providing a way to unlock these chips to a higher spec processor.

I'd watch how many games you pick up now TBH, this year is ridiculously packed for PC releases. Pretty good list here; http://www.techspot.com/guides/356-hot-pc-games-of-2011/ So many! lol They missed out Shogun II: Total War though. It's got to be Empire or Napoleon for me. I love them both, but so much missed potential. Empire is a tad broken and Napoleon is just too easy. Playing as small nations like the United Netherlands, the Italian Republic or Denmark is barely any harder than playing as Britain. I'm taking Paris of Napoleon when I should be struggling to survive!

If there are enough people wanting to play then I could probably borrow* a server off The O.C. *when I say 'borrow' what I actually mean is abuse admin privileges by burning, time bombing and freezing all the other players until they quit/I get bored and kick them...

Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. That's for some of America's best legal minds to decide. Trying to dissect the details on an internet forum with very little information to go on is a tad pointless. Time will tell if they are guilty of any of the above.

I think the damage to small developers thing is played up way too much TBH. Small developers loose comparatively small numbers of sales, but can gain high levels of circulation through piracy. Big developers loose large numbers of sales but gain nothing in return, circulation wouldn't have suffered much if piracy didn't exist. I'm going to use Alan Wake as an example. It was pirated over 1.14 Million times in 2010. Microsoft have sold 50 Million Xbox 360 consoles worldwide, a "small percentage" being modded. Lets take that "small percentage" to be 4%, or 2 Million consoles. In that case, 57% of users with modded consoles downloaded Alan Wake. This compares to 850,000 legitimate sales across the other 48 Million consoles (assuming nobody with a modded console bought the game), or 1.77% of users. The short of it; nobody wanted to buy Alan Wake. If piracy never existed and the game appealed evenly across all users then you'd expect another 35,400 sales. The real figure would probably be a few thousand units higher. Alan Wake would still have been a flop, unless there was some attribute of the game that appealed massively more to people who pirate than those who don't. I'm not condoning piracy, just arguing against the idea that "it hurts the small guys most". In the Alan Wake example, if piracy ceased to exist sales wouldn't have likely improved much anyway. Instead over a Million fewer copies of the game would be in circulation. At least some people played it There's quite a few examples like this. Piracy damages the industry, but nowhere near as much as some make out. Some vendors have even learned to turn it to their advantage (Microsoft).