The Vista-capable lawsuit is finally yielding some facts about Nvidia’s record of horrendous driver support for Microsoft’s latest OS. This is of particular interest to me as last year I switched over to ATI after many months of problems with my Nvidia card under Vista (which worked flawlessly in XP). This caused me a lot of wasted time and my wallet was significantly lighter by the end of it. According to the newly released documents they were responsible for 479,000 crashes making up 29% of the total logged!
17.9% are Microsoft’s fault, those are the crashes that made me switch back to XP even after shelling out for the OS and new hardware for it.
If you are not already excited about the imminent release of GTA 4 I highly recommend you checkout Edge’s in depth interview with Sam Houser that covers the development of the entire series and where Rockstar are headed in the future.
The one thing that hasn’t been covered to date by the official PR channels are the multiplayer portions of the game. Aside from magazine leaks much of the detail is going to be discovered when the game ships and gets into people’s hands. Make no mistake about it, 16 players in Liberty City is a huge deal
Thinking back to first 2D GTA games which had network multiplayer on PC I remember how fun it was due to the variety of ways you could take the fight to your enemies. Shoot a rocket at their car, car jack them and back over the splayed out body and so much more. Then the GTA 3 trilogy came about sans multiplayer but that didn’t stop enterprising modders from trying to get some kind of network play going. Through all the bugs and glitches I played Multi Theft Auto with many a university house mate and everytime it was clear - this could be a gem of an experience if done properly by Rockstar.
I am more intrigued by this than the main game in a lot of ways. Crackdown, while a great co-op experience, was unfortunately limited to 2 players leaving me a few times having to pick between friends. The technical challenge involved in getting 16 players synced up in an open word environment must have been hard to overcome and I will be blown away if the online experience is smooth.
The secondary issue is the split player base. My friends who know a lot about games own Xbox 360s. My friends who are less well informed own PS3s (or intend to). From everything published the 360 version is looking to be the best in terms of performance, online play and exclusive downloadable content. Those three facts won’t make a damn bit of difference in the UK as GTA is associated with Playstation very strongly over here. As such I won’t be able to play with everyone I know.
Hopefully some fresh information will come out in the next few weeks. Hard to believe it’s only a month away. This time things will be different!
I’ve had some time this week to check out the 5 disc edition of Blade Runner: Final Cut. It’s worthy of mention here as it’s packed with more high quality special features than I have ever seen in a DVD before. Every conceivable version of the movie is here, the documentary Dangerous Days is outstanding and the features disc goes into even more detail. The “Final Cut” of the movie is fantastic and feels like the Blade Runner that Scott had always intended to make.
I thought Lord of the Rings had milked as much as possible with their 4 disc release per film but this just blows that away.
I was discussing the potential of the Star Wars live action TV show the other day and wondered where George Lucas would be drawing his inspiration for how it should be structured and presented. I’d hoped Battlestar obviously but was pleasantly surprised to see this on Slashfilm this morning,
“Some of the characters from the features find their way in there, so it’s not completely divorced. It’s as if we just went down the street and told a different story. You know, we were doing, I don’t know, 24, and now we’re going to move down the street here and do The Wire. Same thing, it’s just different people doing the same thing in the same city.”
Yes he said THE WIRE, everybody’s favourite Baltimore based drug busting masterpiece. My expectations have significantly increased in the hopes they can pull off a character driven tightly nit story. I’m just glad he is aware of some of the best contemporary TV out there, we don’t need another Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
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