Not long to go.
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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.
- Watching the outstanding final season of The Wire. More thoughts on this when I have them, but it’s up there with the best TV ever.
- Reading the fine works of Chris Ware, most notably Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Creepy, disturbing, brilliant.
- Playing Company of Heroes and the Opposing Fronts expansion after they showed up on Steam in a gold pack. I have been meaning to go back and start some semblance of an online career, playing the campaign right now to get me ready. I had forgotten how much better this is than most games in the genre.
- Attending what will hopefully be Ken Shamrock’s second last fight (let them do the brother vs brother match). He got knocked out by Buzz Berry in the first round and all I could think sitting there in Wembley Arena was why didn’t you shoot Ken? Just shoot and take him down. Guess they didn’t have game plans back in the early days of MMA. British guys have horrible wrestling so there is no excuse.
- Catching up on some of the movies I tragically missed recently.
Checking out the new content released by Microsoft during GDC this week hamered home that the Xbox dashboard and Live in general is getting rather complicated to navigate. Looking at my games folder it has 92 games in there including Live Arcade, demos and XNA stuff. Getting to what you want can be tricky and it’s not always obvious in which area the thing you are after will be located. Added to this many similar functions yield different interface concepts, just compare purchasing and running a Live Arcade game versus an Xbox Original game - completely different and sends my HCI alarm bells ringing.
Of course while I’m thinking of this comes the news that MS are looking to double Live’s user base and completely redo the way the content is presented. Maybe they should take a page out of Apple’s handbook on this one? I do like the new Apple TV interface.
Managing the sheer amount of content is daunting and MS don’t exactly have the best track record in UI design. I’ll be impressed if they even go ahead and completely refresh what they have now, its gonna take some big balls because the backlash from some parts of the community will be enormous. Good luck!
After announcing it here over a year ago and having to endure a bit of crap about it from various people (including Bioware), Mass Effect has now been officially confirmed as coming to the PC in May. This year. Yes its a 6 month delay. Thanks for being honest from the start Bioware!?!
Small baby steps.
Charlie Brooker hits one of my little frustrations right on the head today,
I tend to assume other people share my obsessive need to examine the settings until everything is just so, and get genuinely enraged when I go to someone’s house and discover, say, that they’re watching programmes in the wrong aspect ratio. People over 50 are the worst offenders: they’ll blithely sit through a Dad’s Army repeat that is unnaturally stretched across the screen so that the entire cast look as if they had difficult births that left them with flattened skulls. Faced with this, I get acute back-seat-driver anxiety, and end up hectoring them like an exasperated pilot trying to teach a four-year-old how to fly a helicopter.
It’s not just the aspect ratio, when I go back home shows are being watched in standard def even when they are being broadcast in HD on the next channel and we are paying for the luxury of Sky HD. That’s not as bad as watching a whole nights TV with squashed or stretched heads but still makes me wonder why they pay for it.
The exception to the over 50 rule is my brother who couldn’t care less and is oblivious to picture quality. I’ve caught him watching analogue terrestrial with black bars (put on by the broadcaster for 4:3 correction) stretched across the 16:9 LCD. Ouch.
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