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I was not expecting that at all. Amazing.

And it got a lot worse than that while I was fiddling with settings. So regularly bad that I feared I'd have to go back to my old 60HZ monitor just to play Skyrim - I'd start the game and immediately my character would fall through the floor of the cart and die while every physics object in the game spiralled off into space. Really bizarre...

It finally hit home that I needed to reboot the PC after making a change to Nvidia Inspector - The game's fine now locked at 60.

These super-powered GPUs aren't without their problems, it seems, and I've decided to wait a week before selling my old card. The reason? Whining.

Apparently a common fault with cards carrying a lot of capacitors (which I think are those little metal cylinder things what do magic - my electrical knowledge is now at its limit) is a whine coming from them at high framerates. Noticed it for the first time yesterday when booting up The Witcher, an old-ish game not designed to run on 120HZ monitors and cards which can achieve that framerate.

In the menus I was getting 3000+fps and the PC started to make a strange noise. At first I thought it was interference through the speakers but it persisted when I turned them off. Opened the case and the sound was coming from the GPU.

In game, it was locked to 120fps but I could still hear a slight whine but fortunately not one which could be heard above the game sound. Any games which run at 60fps are silent.

I'm keeping an eye on it though - I've had faulty cards before and have sent off an email enquiry to the vendor.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

I'm still not sure why I plow so much time into making daft maps in Minecraft. It's creatively interesting and that, but takes up every spare hour, and even nice vid/dl numbers don't really equate to cash

Tis definitely fun to see people react well to a set piece tho...

[Skip to 2.35-ish to see this Aussie fella teleported to a strange sheepy world...]



*Edit* Oh yeah, just after that a set-piece totally doesn't go to plan . But hey, it's a free game

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

So, we're four cases into Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, and it really looks like it's becoming what I'd hoped it would.

We played the fourth case on Wednesday, and it was the best yet. We'd had some people over to play with us for the second case, and solved the majority of it. That case felt pretty straightforward, though, so it was hard to tell whether or not it was the way it unfolded or the presence of more minds that did it.

This time, though, there was no doubt that it helped to have more people in the room. At one point someone read from one of the scenes and another took note of a specific detail that I, frankly, would have failed to take sufficient note of. Shortly after, I remembered something from a previous case that linked up to the detail they noticed, and that blew the case wide open just as we were beginning to give up. It was genuinely exhilarating.

This is where the game really shines: the cases are chronological, so you're allowed to access all the materials from previous cases; old interviews, crime scene details, and newspapers. Scouring through these for some half-remembered detail, finding it, and having it actually matter is pretty great. It's the same feeling you get when you poke into some hidden corner of a video game and find that the developers actually left something for you to find there.

So now I'm thinking/hoping that the best is yet to come, given the way the world expands as we amass more information from previous cases, and get little hints about some background mysteries that might come to the fore later.

Just a quick heads-up if anyone's interested - Batman Arkham Origins is a fiver on the Humble store for a limited time. Steam key.

https://www.humblebundle.com/store

Didn't hear great reports about the game and it's supposedly easily the weakest of the three Arkham games - It's by a different dev while Rocksteady have been working on the new Arkham Knight game so this looks like a bit of a cash-in by Warners. Even so, this is the cheapest I've seen it by a long way.

EDIT - Warlock Master of the Arcane is free in the Humble sale too. It's a decent Civ-style Fantasy themed 4X strategy title. Worth a download.

Traded in some games to pre-order for Alien Isolation and only had to pay $.30.

Anyone remember Ben Heck? He's the guy who made (amongst other things) an Xbox 360 laptop.

Not content with re-imagining that old rubbish, he's turned his attention to a proper computer:



I'd buy one.

You'd think with all the billions Star Citizen has raised they'd have got the real Clarkson for this (or better still ... CyberClarkson!) but this'll have to do:



Elite's still my pick.

Soooo.... Microsoft is now buying Minecraft for several *billion* dollars...

http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/201...8a097472d.html

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Yoda, what platform is this on? My search in all video games on Amazon turns up stuff with this title that is only either for Mac or in DOS -- older stuff (volumes 1-3, apparently).

Also, can't find "The Swapper" anywhere either when searching for it on Amazon. Boo.

It's a board game. My first post about it (along with the video review which sold me on it, which I highly recommend watching) is here.

I understand there is an old PC game for it, too, that even uses the same basic cases (not sure how many), but I haven't played it and wasn't planning to.

Yeah, the overwhelming majority of smaller/indie games we talk about are on Steam. You can find tons of cheap games and lots of great sales there. Well worth installing. The only games I don't access and organize through Steam are the ones that deliberately aren't on it, but those are few and far between.

Thanks for the info. I do remember you mentioning it as a board game, now that you refresh my memory. (It's the title of this thread that threw me off, plus, of course, both of us owning a ton of Sherlock Holmes games for the PC.)

There's a new Sherlock Holmes PC game coming out this month (Sept. 30). I'll wait till the price creeps down a bit, though:

http://www.amazon.com/Crimes-Punishm...herlock+holmes

I'll be biting on that for full price, I think.

The last one was disappointing, so Courtney and I decided we'd only buy the next one if it looked like they were overhauling the interface/mechanics...and it looks like they absolutely have. More than would have been necessary to get me to try it, even. It looks like a totally different game. Interesting deduction mechanics and a handful of visual cues clearly meant to invoke the hit BBC series. Very promising stuff.

I'm going to be recuperating at the end of the month, and the only game I'm hoping to play during the down-time is going to be Ethan Carter, already preordered and ready to go!

So I can wait for the new Holmes game to come down in price. Does that cover graphic look like it's set in modern times, though? His clothing looks ... current.

Based on the clips (here's one below) it's still the usual time period. I guess it looks modern because people wear the same kind of clothes, but intentionally disheveled now.


One thing I particularly love is that this seems like a series of shorter cases, rather than one long one. I imagine they'll tie together, but I really dig the idea to make it at least somewhat episodic.

It's almost funny how much each of the apparent shifts aligns with what I've wanted to see. If they'd actually allowed me to make all the broad decisions about what direction to take the series in, I don't know if it would look any different.

Yeah, I just heard that and the guy who created it is leaving. He wrote a goodbye letter.

The guy who rails against Oculus 'selling out' to Facebook has sold his company to Microsoft?

If you read the letter, do you have any idea what he's referring to in regard to that Phil Fish video?

Not seen it but would imagine that he's referring to the bone-headed recent trend of faceless Twitter users making certain high profile Indie devs lives hell. Fish doesn't help himself by his actions on social media but I've never heard a bad word said about the Minecraft guy.

It must be hard being a 'face' in the midst of an often toxic community of fans and followers and certainly harder than a salary man for EA or Ubisoft.

The recent Zoe Quinn (Google it, it's as saddning as it is frightening and bizarre) business seems to have brought this to a head ... and prompted Fish's latest retirement.

He means this: