• 20Feb 09

  Leaving Gamespot

  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.

  • Posted Feb 20, 2009 4:28 pm GMT
  • Category: Opinion
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• 22Sep 08

  3 Interesting Things

  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
  • Posted Sep 22, 2008 5:21 am GMT
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• 10Aug 08

  Folding@Home

  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.

  • Posted Aug 10, 2008 6:06 pm GMT
  • Category: Science
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