It's been a while coming, but I have decided to finally pack my bags at Gamespot and take my reviews and opinions elsewhere.

There's nothing left at Gamespot now but sour old memories, raging fanboys and retarded reviews. After the disgraceful FEAR2 and Halo Wars reviews I have seen published on this website of late, nothing about the Games site seems credible any more. The moderation is terrible, you get moderated for trying to keep the peace, while raging/cussing loonies go around screaming at anyone who isn't in agreement with them. A lot of Gamespot's news articles are very poorly written, with bias written all over in the style.

It's a shame because Gamespot used to be one of the best Games sites around. Now it's just a cess pit of idiots.

So, i am never returning here ever again and I am migrating here: www.giantbomb.com

This website is headed by former Gamespot employees and favourites such as Jeff Gerstman and Brad Shoemaker. Just in case any of you were unaware, Jeff was fired in the Kane & Lynch debacle, where he reviewed the game poorly (because it truely is terrible), but was fired because the review score wasn't high enough. It was disgusting. Several GS people left voluntarily in his wake and formed this new games website.

Make it grow! Signing up is easy, and the reviews and gamers who visit seem pretty awesome, it's also well moderated.

Adios Gamespot, you were great once. Alas though, no more.

Interesting thing no.1: Intel buys Havok physics company.

Interesting thing no.2: Intel purchases Project Offset and it's development studio with it.

Interesting thing no.3: Intel announces new Larrabee "Ray Tracing" graphics technology which will be first used in computers/consoles in 2010.


Something is afoot here. There's no way these three interesting yet unique events are not interlinked in some fashion. I think we're about to see Intel, historically only a system hardware designer and manufacturer, enter the Games market. Not just enter it, innovate it fundamentally.

Ray Tracing is a graphical rendering technique, which can produce life-like lighting and reflective qualities to materials. Observe exhibit A:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Glasses_800_edit.png

Now, that kinda image takes an average current computer a couple of seconds to render. As such, it is impossible to achieve playable framerates in games, with that level of graphical detail. Currently... Intel are creating Larrabee, which will be a discrete graphics card which specialises in Ray Tracing, with a many-core processor at the center, powerful enough to render these beautiful scenes at game-playable framerates. It will of course be backwards compatible to older DirectX games. Possibly a new version of DirectX will incorperate Ray-Tracing support. Nvidia and ATI better take a look into this, it's got the potential to be big.

Project Offset is a huge-scale and visually impressive RPG currently in the works by a new studio with the brand-new Offset game engine. It's been below-the-radar for some time. Now Intel have control of it, will we see Intel Games Studios emerge as a new publisher soon? We shall see.

Certainly Intel's aquisition of Havok physics, although hands-off managed, would support the view that Intel are thinking of setting up a games studio sometime in the future. 2010 is certainly looking to be an interesting year.

Cheers all

Join the Folding@Home effort today! Sponsored by Stanford University in California, the Folding@home client is a downloadable piece of software which sits in your taskbar and runs quietly in the background. It utilises the spare CPU clocks your computer isn't using to do millions of calculations per minute working out how protein chains fold together. A fundamental part of medical science, yet something that needs either a super-computer of 40 years in the future, or millions of participant home users, to achieve breakthroughs in.

I joined this effort because I believe in the work put into finding cures for diseases, not just for humans but animals as well. If you think your computer sits around idle but turned on frequently enough, or see this project as important, then i'd really recommend looking it up on Google. You'll need the 6.2 version client for CPUs. There are some new GPU projects opening up, but i can't seem to find one that works on my systems, they i presume are betas still.

If you like, join the Group i'm part of: 60091

You enter that when the program first loads up. We are the FurAffinity team and we've currently got almost 200 members We'd welcome more ^^

Cheers all, just thought i'd share this with yeh.

Due to my position on a Currys.Digital locally, while i wait for my results and Uni replies, i was able to get the following system at a truely bargain price:

Packard Bell iMedia
Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 @ 2.2Ghz per core.
2Gb DDR2-533 memory
Geforce 8400GS 256Mb Graphics Card (with plans for an upgrade to a 9600GT in October)
250Gb Hard Drive
24bit Realtek HD 5.1 Surround Sound Card
DVD-RW X18 QuietDrive

All for £275, that's $500 for the Americans among you.

All in all, a good deal. Graphics Card is a little on the weak side, but nothing a simple and easy upgrade when my Birthday comes around won't fix.

It plays everything i currently own fine, the 9600GT will be in preparation for games such as Fallout 3 and Spore.

Right then. Since a certain member, no names given, of my contacts list deemed it necessary to savage my previous blog with spittle and "disapproval", let's try again shall we, I will not have arguements in my blog. I wouldn't want anyone wetting themselves again, so let's try something a little more...tactful perhaps.

Righty, well i'm in the planning stages of getting a new PC, so i guess i could talk about that a little. I've been stuck with an aging Laptop for a while now, it's no longer capable of playing new games because the graphics chip is outdated and only supports up to SM2.0 of DX9. Time for a DX10 spash out! My new base unit machine will be a Dell Inspiron 530 desktop model. Here's a link to some images and stuff: http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/inspndt_530?c=uk&cs=ukdhs1&l=en&s=dhs

I'm not overly fussed by snazzy cases, since they often sit under the table anyway, but this one looks stylish at least i think.

The specs of the machine I plan to get are as follows:

Intel Core 2 E4600 2.4Ghz X 2
2Gb DDR2 Memory
250+ GB Hard Drive, SATA 7200RPM
A seperate graphics card, either a 512Mb 8600GT, or a 512Mb 9600GT. Whichever will be the best deal at the time i get this together.

So i'll be back with the PC-Gaming crew soon enough XD

In other news, what exactly IS happening about a new Starfox game for the Wii? I keep hearing that it's rumoured to be coming up in this year's E3, is that right? If so, the prospects of me getting a Wii for myself increase quite a bit indeed.

I still intend to get up to scratch by picking up a Gamecube one of these days. I found one for £17 including a game in Gamestation the other day, i might think about that actually. I wish to play the Starfox games (especially Adventures) definitely. Any other recommendations? List them here please guys, since i'm not much of a Ninty gamer Haven't been since the height of the Pokemon GameBoy era XD

Here in Bournemouth, south coast of England, we're getting the UK's first "Gaming Lounge". It'll be a new building, decked out specifically for leasure and group enjoyment. There'll be annual membership fees, as well as hourly usage fees. Currently, it looks quite nice i think: http://www.bournemouthconferences.co.uk/Gaming_Lounge

My only problem with it is that it'll have PS3s only. But, despite all my dislike for the PS platform and the way Sony treats it's customers in Europe (appaulingly), i may give it a go one day, just because it's the first over here. Maybe if that does well, we'll get a similar place for 360 gamers? You never know ^^ There used to be a PC Gaming lounge in Bournemouth, but that got shut down because it just became a place for the employee's friends to hang out for free, meaning paying customers weren't getting in. It flopped. Shame really, annoying.

Well that just about raps up my blog then. I've been absolutely as neutral as i could be in this blog, it's all placid and my own opinion/situation. If anyone has a problem with that still, then they can go f*** themselves XD