Download Final Fantasy VII now for £7.99! It's blubbering time again....S-E-P-H-I-R-O-T-H!

The first game that made you and a generation cry ( intentionally). It is the only Final Fantasy worth playing through 60 hours of random battles , cgi and has you singing along to the Sephiroth song after the credits role..I speak of course of the PC version of Final Fantasy VII .Which I have been trying to buy all day but cannot because you lot are overloading the site , or Square Enix have messed up... Regardless get to the official download page and spend your £7.99 ,me I would have charged £7.77 but then I'm cool, I wonder if the old Sephiroth in your party mod still works...

There are some awesome Square experimental classics that I would love to see them release on PC , Internal Section , Front Mission Alternative and Einhander to name but 3 and if you know those three you know your games...

It is great to see Square Enix start to turn things round, Sleeping Dogs looks like it is going to do a Just Cause 2 later this week too.

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Did Gabe Newel just buy onlive for a $1 ? Is Steam about to hit the cloud?

I have often commented on my hopes that Steam and onlive would merge , specifically that our hero Gabe N would buy onlive. And so it has come to pass that a mystery investor has bought onlive rescuing it from Steve Pearlman..errh I mean administration.

The web and usual suspects are spreading rumour and speculation to earn their daily bread so I thought I would hop on the rumour cloud and ask did Valve and Steam head and general all round industry visionary Gabe Newel just buy onlive and if not why not ? Just imagine the power of onlive and Steam combined , knowing my luck though it was probably Julian Assange who has plenty of his own servers and not being able to get out much at this time has much need for the stress relief instant cloud gaming through onlive can provide.

More rumours when I can think of them...

Meanwhile onlive fans remember you can get two free games this weekend SpaceChem and Space Pirates and Zombies.

There is no way onlive can go down , unless Gabe or Julian now mothball it to kill the competition..


And this just in Sony HQ reports raging executives running through the building screaming why did we why did we spend 384 million on gaikai when onlive was going for a $1?Hats off to Mr Perry who's from over here but doing rather nicely over there......

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Combat Mission : Touch a PC strategy classic done justice on iOS

If like me you were totally phased by the lack of game and strategy in  Total War Battles - SEGA iOS app , and hanker for a real PC RTS classic that has been  enhanced by and not diminished by being released on a tablet then look no further than Combat Mission : Touch : 

This is from Battlefront.com themselves and is a simply spiffing display of how you can pack a real turn based WW2 strategy game with detail, vast battlefields and intense game play that has you caring for your band of Private Ryans or Shultzes ( Shultzen?) and an OUTSTANDING Full Metal Jacket Sergeant Hartman toned tutorial ... complete with requisite expletives ....and references to your ...

I love the replays, after the tense turn based placement of your units a real time battle ensues and you get to replay this from every angle , just like all those classic Ace Combat or Ridge Racer replays .... errh I mean just like Spielberg and Kaminski you are whizzing round the battlefield framing combat and replaying the action remaking your own version of  all those classic WW2 that influenced those two ... 

the retina display of the new iPad gives you a great sense of scale , you are are after all playing this game at a far higher res on a tablet than you first will have played the original PC release :On a a 2048 by 1536 display there is far more of the battlefield on display . 

before ........

and

after....

You are going to feel that artillery hitting your troops, then you are going to rewind and replay it from different angles before you brain kicks back in to gear and you order your troops to run ... or they start to run ...   troops are a hardy sort  lining up for battle and posing extremely well for my War game correspondent snaps ...( hit the power and home button) ...

 so a little of this is fine :

but too much and your troops start to loose morale and run.... away .. well it's not like Ripley is going to turn up and bust a co axle rescuing them now is it ....?

did I mention the tanks ....  

he shoots he scores....!

and now we bend it like Beckham ....

Talking about a game like this in such a trivial manner is doing it an injustice , for Combat Mission games are renowned for attention to detail and authenticity. That's what makes Combat Mission Touch such a departure from all the other RTS apps most of which are parodies, this is on the other hand is very real strategy as deep as the PC versions and with the added Retina resolution and touch features enhanced in many ways. 

It all comes together extremely well an example of an old classic enhanced by the developer using the tech we have now. There is also a great on line component  to the game, turn based on line RTS rocks as players of the old Xcom email game can tell you ( ask grand dad). 

On PC the Combat Mission series commands as much respect in the realm of strategy gaming as the Arma or Op Flashpoint series does in the military FPS genre. If you are a fan of WW2 strategy , check out the PC and iOS versions now.

And it is totally great to see a developer deliver a serious grown up version of their franchise as opposed to what Sega did with the Total War ios app , but give Creative Assembly a chance it usually takes them about a year to finally get code working so maybe .. we might have some real Total War some time soon ..maybe...

 

   

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Preorder Assassin's Creed III PlayStation 3 & PlayStation Vita Gold Edition :ACIII+Liberation+Season Pass +DLC for £109.99

Assassin's Creed III PlayStation 3 & PlayStation Vita Gold Edition : pre order includes AC III , AC III Liberation AC Season Pass and single player mission a dangerous secret for PS3 all yours for £109.99 releasing on 31/10/2012 .. Is this too much for too much or manna for fans? Check the PlayStation Store for this offer now...

That's not a bad deal considering physical limited editions will cost almost as much for just AC III  on consoles, but this is going to be one hefty Hannah of a download. Plus PSN has a 5 time download limit if I remember so I may just go for the Steam version.

The patient amongst you may wait for Steam's sales and get the PC version cheap, darn it I am going to end up buying all the versions any way... 

Ubisoft and other developers would be wise to push PC releases to coincide with Windows 8 release , you see console fans are bored, they may not have PS4s or 720s to play with but they are going to have pretty fine gaming laptops and PCs all rocking Windows 8 this Autumn. Tablets and phones too...

We are in unique place in the evolution of gaming culture , Pc tech is several magnitudes ahead of console tech, even next years next gen consoles , Android and iOS devices are ahead of traditional hand helds . There is a great brave new gaming world out there and in these difficult times Ubisoft and other developers should ensure that PC fans get their games asap, relying just on PS3 and 360 , or Nintendwho? will not cut it any more. 

This Autumn I look forward to playing Assassins Creed in ghost free 3D using the ST1080 running connected to a Windows 8 rig or surface or two ...streaming it through Android on my Nexus 7 , or iPad and will tend to power on the old PS3 , 360 or Wii far less mostly because I don't cope well with console death... 

One major reason for lack of game sales profits for big developers is they focused solely on Xbox 360 , PS3 and Wii ... when the greatest growth of gaming has occurred in the PC , Android and iOS arena ..

The PS Vita companion version of ACIII: AC Liberation could be an excellent adjunct to the PS3 version. But there is nothing stopping Ubisoft a fiercely multi platform publisher from releasing this as DLC or standalone on PC or Xbox  through Uplay at a later date.... 

All in all £109.99 for this amount of content is not too bad .. just not the 75% off we get for PC versions on Steam come Christmas sales.... And the 5 download limit seriously worries me , especially as ageing consoles are prone to sudden console death syndrome .. 

hmmh ... £14.95 for the PC version in a Steam sale , and £20 for the PS Vita version in Christmas sales , £20 for a season pass ... now all I have to do is not give in to temptation... like watching the new trailer for instance .... 

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Prepare to Enter the Sandbox with Sleeping Dogs ... a Shenmue sequel to make Yu Suzuki proud..or wake up...

Sleeping Dogs is the latest sandbox to take on and differentiate itself from Grand Theft Auto. Where the True Crime games were also rans, like Volition with Saints Row the Third , United Front Games have managed to differentiate and free their sandbox franchise from the shadow of Rockstars genre defining series. 

You need the PC version because.... because the Ltd Edition is a steal at £22.74 from Get Games and registers on Steam. The PC version comes with high res textures and 3D support ,the latter which I am testing on the Lenovo X220T with ST1080 HMD.

This is a raw game on PC, looking gorgeous even on low detail settings but the way it has been patched the last 2 days it seems the coders have yet to optimise it for every PC config out there. At launch I could not get the game to scale to full screen , but now patch 1.4 ( a 2nd since release) has fixed that and other foibles. 

Lets move onto the game, this is the finest depiction of Hong Kong since Shenmue 2,  which Sleeping Dogs reminds me of in many ways with styling of the character ,even his leather jacket and blue jeans all nudging memories of the legendary Shenmue series. All that is missing is the character losing his bag to a thief as he arrives in Hong Kong.  As we all know Shenmue transmorphed into the Yakuza series . Don't worry though the coders of Sleeping Dogs keep their influences to Shenmue and not the later longer running largely linear Sega series.

So you  may expect the in game  fighting to be arcadey like Yakuza , the exploration limited like Yakuza and you would be wrong. We all wanted Yakuza to develop into Shenmue 3, but instead Sega turned it into a Zombie cash in... The fighting in Sleeping Dogs is free flowing, more reminiscent of the PPK Tora Tora Tora fests of Virtua Fighter than the Final Fight Yakuza clashes . Where combat feels gimmicky in the Yakuza series and even comical , the combat in Sleeping Dogs is  free flowing, brutal ,tactical a little bit of Assassins Creed mixed with some Batman Arkham only far less one button pushing on rails heavy.. You can develop your own style use the environment to exact various gruesome ends for your foes. And it never feels like one button mashing as AC and Batman Arkham can at times and unlike Assasin's Creed or Arkham or even Enter the Dragon , you stand a fair chance of losing some of those fights which makes a nice change from knowing Ezio , Bruces Wayne or Lee are certain to despatch their foes as soon as they set their sights on them.  

So how does  the game play on the Intel HD3000 ? Here is the first video I made with the game played with 3D on and at 1024 by 768.

In the first video my first play through I had 3D on and would expect the game to play well based on my experiences with games like Spec Ops and Max Payne 3 in 3D on the same machine : but we get some lag 

On day 1 the game was released without proper screen scaling or resolution setting options on PC so playing on a 1080p monitor produces a border when full screening the game at lower resolutions if you could get a lower resolution saved.. to counter this use your GPU settings to to scale the picture.

The 3D option does light up and you can alter depth, but considering 3D is the major reason I bought the game on Steam I am disappointed, if there is 3D the ST1080 is picking it up as frame packed and it is subtle at this stage . Myself I will wait for Tridef to have a plug in for this game, based on my experience with Max Payne 3 and other games it should be insane. 

so what is the cause of this lag ? 

To find out I played at all resolutions 3D and non 3D enabled and found that enabling that option halves or even worse than halves frame rates at every resolution , on the bright side disabling 3D also doubles or trebles your frame rate


Lets go look for that lag : note we are looking for playable game frame rates with the Intel HD3000 not high end 200 FPS scores that comes later with my desktop test!

00:00 to 09.43 the game is played at 768 by 480 59h Hz 16:10 with 3D enabled and low settings  : this is the sweet spot for playing with 3D enabled on the ST1080 using just an Intel HD3000

09:55 to 10:45 960 x 600 x 59Hz 16:10 3D enabled and the frame rate drops noticeably 

10:46 to 13:14 00:00 640 x 400 x 59Hz 4:3 3D enabled and there is a notable increase in FPS by an order of 10 additional FPS 

lets jump the res back up to see the difference again :

13:17 to 14:14 1024x768x59Hz 4:3 3D on and the lag is back

28:03 to 29:03 768 by 480 59h Hz 16:10 with 3D off and we get  a doubling or more in FPS

29:03 to 29:42 1920 by 1080 59h Hz 16:10 with 3D off the game will not play at this res on the X220T without great lag we are talking 1 fps ! so let us switch back to more optimal resolutions for this game on the Intel HD3000..

30:05 onwards   1366 by 768 59h Hz 16:9  1024 by 68 and 768 by 480 all produced marked speed improvements with 3D off , 768 by 480 is the sweetspot for playing in 3D or non 3D using the Intel HD3000 on the Lenovo X220T.


Games at 1024 by 768 or 1366 by 768 usually fly on Intel HD3000 2nd gen i7 powered Lenovo X220T , give United Front Games time and patches will arrive whatever your hardware , after all we waited 6 months for Battlefield 3 and Crysis 2 updates ...It has only been 2 days since release...

The finest sandbox games let you forget the mission altogether and just mess around , I have played every GTA game never finished one , but I venture I have played longer than most just because of the endless fun you can have playing in the sand box and with all of the toys it contains ..wow just like when we were three no?

This is chaotic freedom is where  GTA ,Just Cause 2 ,Saints Row The Third, Mercenaries (the first), the Saboteur, Prototype, Mafia ( the first),Crackdown ( the first) and of course any modern Bethesda RPG  get things right and what Yakuza and No More Heroes on the Wii got things wrong. 

Sleeping Dogs easily sits amongst the giants of sandbox gaming, no mean feat for a game that was once cancelled by Activision. I have no intention of finishing it any time soon or ever but I am going to have a fine time exploring Hong Kong and pushing the sandbox. 

Und so having sorted our hardware specs and settings out , it's time to Enter the Sandbox at speed with no lag and with our optimal resolutions for the Intel HD3000 of 1024 by 768 and 768 by 480 with 3d off ...

I will revisit this game with dekstop gpu resolution tests so come back .. when I am brave enough to refill the water/tec cooler on my desktop...

get to Steam now to download the Steam demo of Sleeping Dogs , if your hardware cannot handle it then go for the onlive version which will release soon ... lets hope they do a touch version as per LA Noire then it will a must buy for me.. Sleeping Dogs full spec on the Nexus 7 ... awesome..

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Darksiders 2: Death breathes life into onlive..again..

Darksiders 2 is yours instantly with the very alive onlive which contrary to to the rumour mill has very much a secure future in a post Windows 8, Jellybean and even iOS world. The tech and software delivers full pc games not the meagre demos you see from Gaikai.The servers are free from queues ,unlike Gaikai. And no other cloud service can compare . With onlive we  see full games like Darksiders 2 running on a Nexus 7 Android tablet and continue playing on a dual Screen Windows 8 tablet like the Acer 6120. 

Windows 8 loves to multitask , so we can run Windows 8 apps , Steam games and onlive games at the same time like so:

Try the Darksiders 2 demo now on onlive . 

There is method in onlive's present madness, the cloud is a major selling point for all post Windows 8 applications, Windows 8 truly shines when you are pulling or sending data to your office apps or social networks via the cloud.Increasing numbers of what were once called Metro Apps are going to leverage the cloud. But none of this comes close to the magic of onlive running a full game like Darksiders 2 on your Windows 8 Surface stopping and continuing on your Android Jellybean Nexus 7, so fear not future gaming fans it is here to stay. 

Two years ago people would laugh at the idea of streaming anything from the cloud especially games, well the cloud is every where now, so ubiquitous that we do not even notice we are using its services half the time. Amazon , Microsoft and others have built the baseball ground ... and people will come. 

And streaming full games today is just as easy as streaming a tv show or movie. Not long ago you would be downloading music, tv series and films, now you don't think twice about streaming them, as long as  your device loves Flash...  Do I care if I lose my iTunes collection ..no I got Grooveshark , do I need to download gigs of films , no I can just stream them from whatever site suits me. Likewise there is no need to install 30gigs of PC game content when onlive lets you play the same game instantly across all your machines.

It is a pretty awesome feeling when the game you have preordered on Steam is about to unlock or download , but that feeling gets blown away when the same game launches on onlive and all you have to do is hit play and you are in your game in the time it takes you to read this sentence...if it is a sentence...

Not only will onlive continue to serve games for other publishers, onlive is going to rival and threaten other so called app stores and ultimately end up publishing software. If you are a developer onlive is platform agnostic , you just make one version of your app or game , throw it onto the onlive cloud and you have users on tv, ouya, PC , Mac,Android and one day one day ios ... for the publisher there is no need to have separate teams coding separate versions ,  for the developer there is the advantage of no need to code individual versions , or cut down versions for phones or tablets or lesser consoles  as you get the same game across all platforms. For the customer there are no  duplicate purchases necessary, no installs on multiple machines and real effortless persistence of cloud based game saves and achievements with none of that arcane syncing of saves and trophies with Steam and consoles.

Convenience makes onlive a major threat to traditional publishers , it is no surprise that Sony has bought and mothballed Gaikai , the logical progression for which was to start offering full games . After the acquisition it never will . 

Traditional publishers and retailers see the threat of onlive and an opportunity to see it fail will not go uncelebrated in offices of execs already battered by iTunes , Google Play and soon the Windows 8 store too... After all if you have invested millions in Origin , Steam , Impulse and along comes some one who can offer a similar or superior hardware independent gaming experience you are not going to be looking for something like onlive to succeed...

Software and hardware as well as broadband speed and user expectancy are advancing so fast that very soon we will have open source dedicated server streaming games . Independent of services like Gaikai or onlive . 

We already stream music and films without being locked into iTunes or other App stores , it is a short matter of time before just like the torrent revolution , the masses will access to free cloud streaming of all forms of media including any game of their choice on any platform.

And then ...that is when piracy dies , torrents become obsolete , the likes of Pirate Bay disappear and the price of personal storage will plummet as we no longer need terabyte drives to store useless amounts of media we never use or play. 

Just like Steam took out PC gaming piracy in the last decade , cloud based gaming is set to eliminate download piracy , through convenience as with all your games just one click away why would you ever need to download anything any more?

And so it has come to pass the release of Darksiders 2, sees Death breathing life into onlive  

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FRACT OSC mind blowing 3D Rez inspired PC gaming in Tridef 3D on the ST1080 hmd and soon on Oculus Rift too

Thegameveda has a brand new favourite game and that is FRACT OSC , which you should seriously consider voting for the developers to receive an Oculus Rift dev kit . You know that virtual reality kit that you are kickstartering errh kickstarting?

However this being thegameveda, we do not wait for cool devs like Phosfiend Systems to be awarded their dues... no we can demonstrate what FRACT OSC plays like on a 3D hmd right now , namely the smd ST1080, what's more we can play the game in 3D using Tridef 3D ... so here is a youtube video of me messing with the beginning of the game . No I am not going to solve all the puzzles for you .. that you will have to do after downloading the Beta.  

So if you have a 3D hmd like the ST1080 or even a HMZT1 head crab pop it on set the 3D to side by side and enjoy , this also goes for any people still using those ancient 3D glasses and 120 hz large screen displays to view non ghost free 3D video... 

And even if you don't download the beta and enjoy .. 

Imagine this with a 4k res SMD hmd next year playing in 3D with head tracking , ahh it will come till then I will have to make do with 1080p 3D hmd gaming on the ST1080 ..quelle dommage as they say in Poshphiend Systems home town of Montreal ... 

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