AwesomeOcelot

I backed it as soon as I heard they may be cancelling the campaign, but I probably would have backed it by the end, so the spike in pledges that day might not mean much. Looking at kicktraq I didn't really see much of a problem with the level of pledges, it was always going to be close and still is. Many projects make more in the last 3 days than the first 3 days, and even without the spike I think it was likely to make its total. Even if it hits 1.1m I think GPG would have had to have had lay offs. It's strange how GPG got into this situation, Dungeon Siege got way more mileage than it should have, 3 games and a movie from that franchise is a bit ridiculous. Supreme Commander 1 & 2 did not do well on Xbox 360, PC sales figures are hard to come by, but Supreme Commander was top of the sales charts on release and its still selling now. At that point you'd have to say that GPG was a great success. They did move from a game + expansion release every 2 years, to a game release every year, that had to involve expanding the team, 3 out of the 4 releases after that required major work in a patch to fix large issues with the games.

Gas Powered Games has layoffs, Chris Taylor asks backers whether to continue the campaign. I think it's pretty much over, it's sad to see the developer go. There's not that much love for Gas Powered Games, I think what happened with Supreme Commander 2 probably soured the relationship PC gamers had with GPG. Apart from Supreme Commander I don't think there was ever much appreciation for the other games GPG has developed. Action RPG fans aren't going to get excited by the company that made Dungeon Siege and Space Siege, impressive engine (way before and better than the competition), great interlace and control, but very shallow and generic in other respects. There's competition in Action RPG, they're still getting publisher funding, and there's a few on Kickstarter, some running now. "Caveman" theme, I wonder how popular it is, didn't seem like a strong new IP, which has been a problem with all GPG games.

The people who made Fahrenheit should not be talking about acting, dialogue, or story telling. If you got rid of the terrible gameplay, you're left with something that is a lot worse than most of the TV movies you see in the day time, or most action movies. Games offer different opportunities to tell stories, better opportunities, but they can't and don't do well at things that movies and books do well at. A movie is a different experience to a book but neither is better, and that's the same for games. These people at Quantic Dream have no respect for the medium.

No, still meh. I like playing games, all I can see is this being worse for that. Can they give me an experience that's as good as a monitor? Not with a 30ms refresh rate. Are they giving me useful features for gaming? Head tilting and turning if anything will be detrimental to my gaming experience. This is the next Wiimote or Sixaxis. It scares me that people are claiming this is going to revolutionize PC gaming or is going to be the future of a gaming. When it can replace monitors it will be, but it obviously can't now. I can see it being cool for games specifically made for it, but I would wait until a later generation. VR sets have advantages, but there's still issues with it that I can't see getting solved for a while at an affordable price. They making some claims I doubt they can back up, like having a high fps with vsync on the consumer version with stereoscopic 1080p. The kit they're using is 1280×800. I think head (but not necessarily tilt) and eye tracking, also more touch support, will be coming to PC gaming with monitors.

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines is my second favourite game. Why are the lip syncing and gestures so good? What's with the silly walking, especially in the intro sequence? Which characters have been your favourites to work on?

I thought you were being sarcastic. Were you being hyperbolic?

Yeah Lady Gaga or Rihanna would fit much better... Look how far you have to go for something worse.

Not the music, it's the lyrics and the voice, it's so bad it's offensive.

Until this year I hadn't seen that many SSD that were beyond 256GB, and even then, they were using SLC, a way more expensive type of memory that all these consumer drives do not use. So that companies had problems scaling beyond 256GB isn't that surprising. The write performance of bigger drives does reach a plateau in terms of capacity to performance, the plateau is different in different ranges, in some the different between write performance between 128GB and 256GB is nothing or negligible, in others the plateau is between 250GB and 500GB like the Samsung drive. Many ranges have a situation where a twice as large SSD (e.g. 32GB to 64GB, or 64GB to 128GB) can be twice as fast in terms of write performance. This is to do with smaller drives having to use the same chip to write multiple operations because in the same range the chips correspond directly to capacity.

Probably a fragmentation issue. Yes, you can't perform a defrag without space so that's an speed issue that will keep getting worse but also I am informed that parts of the disc are slower than others, and this was a bigger problem in the past when discs were less dense, but it still applies. They didn't bite it soon after a year old like my Samsung F3 and Seagate 7200.12, so in my experience they're infinitely faster. My F3 was very fast for a HDD, but it was very loud. Interesting, I hadn't heard this. On that note larger drives are almost universally, if they're released the same year and around the same $ per GB, faster at writes by quite a bit.

HDD will become slower when they don't have 10% of space free as well. I've gone to under 15% free space on my Crucial M4 and write speeds have remained faster than most consumer HDD, I had a Samsung F3, Seagate 7200.12, and 2xWD Cavier Green (SATA 2 and SATA 3), also Hitachi and Buffalo external drives. I have only used Crucial and Samsung SSD, I haven't been able to look at OCZ SSD. It's never been 3-5 times slower. I over prevision on the Samsung (for life more than speed) so it's never going to go close.

They have to start other projects before Wasteland 2 is released. They might be able to pay for pre-production by themselves, meaning that they can use that for the KickStarter campaign. By the Wasteland 2 beta we will know that they can deliver, at least deliver a game.

That's not actually true. Read speed is always going to be much much faster, and performance isn't greatly effected by free space. Some SSD had the same write speed as HDD when there was nothing on them , so performance varies much depending on what SSD you get, some models will never be slower than most HDD in write speed. Read performance is way more important when it comes to games. If you want to learn about this effect, google over provisioning SSD, something I did with my Samsung 830. My Crucial M4 SSD is never slower than my Western Digital Caviar Green HDD, however much is on it, write or read.

Steam Box looks like a standard small form factor PC. It's completely possible to have a powerful PC in such a form factor, especially if as Gabe says, they don't include an optical drive. The original Xbox was pretty much standard PC hardware, Pentium 3 CPU, similar to GeForce 3 GPU, DDR RAM. There's no reason why PC manufacturers couldn't make these. Valve obviously think that this is a software and peripheral problem. From what Gabe was saying it seems they're willing to allow other manufacturers to build Steam boxes but they will be making one themselves. It will be interesting to see how the PC philosophy does in the living room. I don't think it'll be as big as the other consoles, I think it'll be like HTPC. Microsoft and Sony will have to adapt, consoles like OUYA competing with XBLA and PSN less graphics orientated games, and Steam boxes competing with large productions, both open platforms with less restrictions and fees, also much shorter generation cycles.

Yes, your motherboard supports SATA II, and SATA III drives should work but with half the maximum bandwidth, but it will still be a heck of a lot faster than your HDD. If you read the top comment on Amazon it explains that the OCZ Vertex 4, Samsung 830, and the Crucial M4 are better drives than the 840. I have a Samsung 830 and Crucial M4, and can testify that these drives are great, so consider looking at those, if they're a similar price to the 840 then that's a good deal.

SATA III is backwards compatible with SATA II and I, get SATA III, it's hard to find SATA II SSD drives anyway. To find out what you have you'll have to look up the model of your motherboard. You can install games to different directories in Steam now, so for new games you can pick where to install them. You'll probably just want to move the Steam folder to the other drive and then run the Steam installer to the folder you've moved it to, then when you tell Steam to install the games you already have it should see that they're already there. There's plenty of guides for this, google backup and restore steam games.

I don't believe that for a second. They're just using the most vague marketing terms and boasting about performance without backing it up. CNET are reporting that the 7A comes with an AMD R-Series APU with Radeon HD 7660G which struggles to run Arkham City and Metro 2033 at low resolution, let alone Battlefield 3, Skyrim, or Crysis 2, considering this isn't even out yet, it doesn't really have a chance at games released after it's available. The 5A as a desktop solution for general use is great, although it's slow and expensive enough that a Chromebook or Chromebox is going to be more appealing for just web use, and a laptop is going to be the better deal, even with a SSD added to it (I'm hoping manufacturers just switch).

Dead State, turn based RPG from the lead designer of the one best RPGs Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, involves ex-Obsidian employees. The Age of Decadence, same engine as Dead State, turn based RPG set in a "post-apocalyptic world inspired by the fall of the Roman Empire". Shadowrun Returns, 2D tile turn based RPG set in the cyber punk Shadowrun universe, being led by its creator Jordan Weisman. Wasteland 2, squad based sequel to the game that inspired the creation of the greatest RPG ever made, with some of the original Wasteland team, and some of my favourite devs: Chris Avellone, Michael A. Stackpole, Brian Fargo, Jason Anderson, and Mark Morgan. Grim Dawn, action RPG by former Titan Quest devs. Path of Exile, action RPG very much in the style of Diablo 2, but with extensive skill trees and new mechanics. Forced, cooperative action RPG on the PC/Mac/Linux/Ouya/PS3/Xbox360. Legends Of Dawn, open world 3rd person action RPG. Barkley 2, action RPG, I don't even... what is this? Dark Souls 2, may function on PC! South Park: The Stick Of Truth, which has already been mentioned. KickStarter. RPGs! RPGs everywhere! Run for your lives!

Interesting, Nvidia is entering the handheld gaming market at the time Sony is struggling to compete with Nintendo. Making it a general controller shape is smart, although it is a bit too much like the original Xbox controller in terms of shape. It looks like Nvidia are aiming for the same niche as Sony with Vita, but maybe with much more of an emphasis on download and streaming, it's rumoured the Shield can stream from a PC (integrating well with Steam's Big Picture) or the net competing with Wii U and OnLive, it's also said to be an open platform, something Nintendo and Sony would never do. It was suggested that Nvidia would anger hardware partners by making this device but they're not competing with their partners in this space, the PS4 is strongly rumoured to be going AMD, and the Wii U has an AMD GPU. Being Android based allows these devices to tap into an already massive library of media and social applications that people want on their TV, while not having the problems of poor support that smart TVs have had in the past. It gives developers more incentive to develop games for Android based devices with GameClip, GameStick, OUYA, and now Shield. There's going to be more of these devices trying to find niches. Games are where these devices will succeed or fail, and games is where they can put the most pressure on the established entities, in terms of variety and pricing.

Non sequitur? That's like saying that because Ubuntu is a desktop OS if I put it on a netbook, tablet, phone, or server it makes those things desktops. It uses a controller not a touch screen, most smartphone games are made for touch screen and will not be ported. Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams is meant to be coming to OUYA, and that's a PC/XBLA/PSN game. It's obviously not as powerful as other consoles but that doesn't mean the games won't be as good. If just smartphone games get ported to the OUYA it will fail.

What..? Show me. I was mistaken, I meant ARM Cortex-A15, the CPU that Tegra 4 is based on.

That's Fallout 2, guns are hard to come by at the beginning. In Fallout, guns are really easy to come by, it's energy weapons and big guns that come later.

I don't understand the complaint that it's just a smartphone, I heard that a lot when the project was getting funded. ARM is used in a lot of devices, Tegra is one of a few graphics targeted implementations. The only thing smartphone about it is the OS, which is the most widely used and supported OS on ARM architecture. You will find that CPU and GPU solutions are used in a variety of devices. Why would the games be casual on the OUYA? Whether games are casual or not does not come from the hardware. It's more powerful than consoles before 2000, and in some ways it's more powerful than the PS2, GC, and Xbox. The hardware of the OUYA isn't going to be modifiable, nearly everything is integrated, there's no capacity for expansion, the modification ability is in the software. Which was one of the major features of the pitch, no license fees, cheap dev kits, completely open platform. There are challenges for OUYA. A console is successful based on the games it has, OUYA has an edge over Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo because it's cheap and open, there's less barrier to entry. They're going to have competition from other low power ARM based devices such as consoles, there's no reason why a software developer couldn't turn a smartphone into a console with an interface for TV and games designed for the gamepad, it's basically the same hardware. KickStarter is going to play a role in games being ported to the OUYA, so its up to OUYA backers to also push for games to be ported to it. ARM hardware has way shorter cycles than other consoles, it's more like PC GPU cycles, every 6 months, Tegra 4 devices are already out, so it's only a matter of time before a $100 Tegra 4 device will be available, that's going to be a problem for OUYA.

Independents like CDProjekt have always been like this, The Witcher 2 is an indie game as well. I'm talking about the publishers that have published more than 2 games (every 4 years). The Witcher was released in 2007, I can't remember when DRM started to get offensive, but for me it was probably around 2001/2002. DRM doesn't work, DRM never helped a game with sales unless it's part of the infrastructure like a MMO or Diablo 3.

Doesn't Sony charge a licensing fee? And how can someone say only 10% of ps3 game sales? Only 10% of all the fish in the sea. Which console are publishers more likely to support? They can also turn it off or selectively use it, so that they can use it as leverage over retail while it has limited value as leverage over themselves. They can also charge less for new releases if they know demand is going to rise sharply with a lack of a second hand market. People go on about markets and how they correct things and make things better, think about what happened in the PC market with DRM. When publishers all started using similar draconian DRM measures, did a publisher decide to be the good guy? No, they all acted in unison, collusion. edit: I just googled Michael Pachter and he seems to be the go to guy for idiotic comments about the game industry.