Displaying items by tag: Gaming

The PC Gaming market has not short supply of great gaming mice. There are so many these days that someone could get lost looking through them all. You can even go so far as to choose a mouse that works for the particular game type that you like. The problem is that once you get this great mouse home you might have to run it across a surface that is… less that optimal. Here in the mouse pad vertical there are a number of products, but not all are suited to gaming and not all fill fit every gaming style. Today we are looking at a pair of mouse pads that can offer you either precision or speed.  These are part of Kingston’s new dive into the peripheral market and are call HyperX Skyn. Let’s see what they have for us.

One sad thing about the gaming world is the far too many great development studios seem to fade away and be absorbed by the big companies. If you look at the past we can see this repeated over and over again. One of the most recent to be assimilated is Irrational Games. This dev house was, in many ways, the spiritual successor of Looking Glass Studios who was responsible for the original System Shock and Thief. These two games gave us entirely new ways to move through a game world and have been the inspiration for a number of games since then.

Hey remember the group that launched the DDoS attack on Steam? Well they are back and have decided to make a little bit bigger of a statement than just throwing packets at a group of servers. This time they appear to have managed to grab a large number of user information from companies like Blizzard, Ubisoft and many others. They have taken this information and (unsurprisingly) dumped it to paste bin. If you do not know who we are talking about it is the DerpTrolling “hacker” group and they have been on a mission to shame just about every game publishing/distribution company on the planet.

The idea of hardcoding a flaw into a game to identify pirate is a pretty old one and one that has been used on more than one occasion. Ubisoft has done this with their most recent game Far Cry 4 by removing a control from the game. The control is the field of view (FOV) in the game. Apparently when the game was put out this control was missing and it was not given out until a patch that you can only get with a legally purchased copy of the game.

There is a misconception in the industry as a whole that “pirates” are inherently evil people and bent on nothing less than the destruction of civilized society. The fact that this sounds like the plot from a bad movie/game is probably not a coincidence. In Hollywood at least the way they portray piracy is right out of fantasy land from their numbers to their claims on how they are about keeping jobs. In the gaming industry it is often not the developers that worry about piracy, but the big distribution/publishing groups. They are very worried about the money they make and also follow the same line as Hollywood when talking about the effects of piracy on their business.

It seems that Ubisoft is trying to get out from under the stigma the bad launch of Assassin’s Creed Unity. After pushing what many are calling a half-baked game, they have made a few excuses and have also promised different patches to remedy the bugs including a day one patch that really did not do much to make things better. So what is Ubisoft pointing at now to remove blame from themselves? Well some of the choices are entertaining to say the least.

Ubisoft is under a lot of pressure since the launch of the Assassin’s Creed Unity. The game had a large number of bugs along with some rather disappointing performance to boot (30fps). In the days leading up to the launch Ubisoft attempted to tell everyone know that 30fps was more than enough and that it was in line with a cinematic experience. The number of articles making fun of these rather poor excuses was quite large and while trying to pass off a poor performing game as something wonderful is not unexpected it is still in rather poor taste if circumstances make it look like you might have done it on purpose.

I do not know if it just me or if there is something else happening, but there seems to be a lot of “long awaited” games getting the axe because they are just not good enough. The latest in the recent string of titles is Prey 2. Although this one will come as no surprise considering the history of problems with the game and comments made from publishers and developers, it is still interesting considering some of the other projects that have been cut suddenly.

Social Media can be a great thing if used properly. However, lately people tend to use it for… well let’s call it ranting. I cannot count the number of rants and tantrums I have seen on Twitter, Facebook and even Google+. It seems that some people feel that social media sites are their own personal forums to share every thought they have no matter how positive or negative it is. When you point this out to the ranters, you are likely to be told that it is their page and you do not have to read it. Well… that is the problem, you never really know just who might be reading your rant and what they might do about it.

If you were to look back over the years and pick one seriously mismanaged tech company it would probably be AMD. Even going back into the K6 days we find that AMD just did not know what it wanted to do or what direction it intended to go. The marketing message was confused both internally and to the market as a whole. This confusion hit “Office Space” like proportions in the late 90’s when it was rumored that there were more managers and project leaders than they were actual people doing the work.