You know when you are playing games to much when in real life......

1. You look at the ground and think great textures there

2. Seeing a lamp post and think the lighting effects are good

3. See a shadowed area and think "stealth"

4. See the corner of a building and think cover and peeking around the corner

5. Watching boxing/UFC and when they land series of punches your mind pops up COMBO

6. Temptation to break a vase or a box as you think LOOT

Does always online for games affect you ?

I have been a gamer for many years and till about  early 2005 i was still stuck in the 56k era with the joys of trying to install half life 2 (which took many hours to download from steam) but then praise be i finally got broadband it was not perfect but i could play games like world of warcraft and play other games online.

But in the past few years i have noticed a trend with games having to be online even for single player. Now my problem is while  having to have a reliable stable constant connection which mine is not so some games are unplayable for a period of time but also you have to rely on another company's servers being reliable and often you will get downtime

I will always say single player games should be given the offline option even if meant perhaps just logging in once a week as "drm" but you will get people who do not have the broadband connection so games they can never play.

Will retro gaming die out ?

So i can pick up a snes or a megadrive and any game and play it . Now though not only do you have physical but also digital release and even in the previous gen it had caused problems for example on xbox live doom was removed (though added later on) but the game outrun was permanently removed due to licensing. And it got me thinking some games may never become retro servers will eventually be switched off and games will be removed.

But it is not only digital only games but physical media as well  let us for example say in 10 years i fancy playing skyrim on the xbox 360 i can put in the disc and play the game but it had a lot of major bugs but if the servers are down i cannot patch it so while i can play it is not the best it could be
.
With games becoming more and more reliant on being online (such as diablo 3) even for single player there is a danger that in many years some of the games i play now i would not be able to play then.

i really hope they come up with ways so i can always play the games i love and at there best

Galaxy 4 review

Thought i would keep this short

First the good

+Excellent screen very good for watching movies my other half even commented looks better then watching stuff on her monitor on the pc
+Hardware performance is pretty good
+Excellent camera great quality and does good HD video
+Little touches like the finger hovering to preview and using the forward camera to see if you are looking at the screen so the screen does not switch off and it has loads of stuff like this .
+The look of the device is pretty cool
+Voice quality is good

Now the bad

-Battery life now don't get me wrong its not that bad (and certainly better then my old phone) but i think they could have put in a 3000 mh+ battery in like the note 2
-Performance is good for the most part but can get a stuttering
-Back cover a cheap plastic considering the amount you have to pay for it would have expected a bit more
-16gb of storage supposedly but can only access around 9gb of it
-Heat when using the phone for games and video it can get quite hot

So overall a good phone not worth upgrading a s3 for though but my old phone was only a galaxy ace so it was a massive step up

One thing that does puzzle me there are two version of it one with a quad core and the other with a octocore .Now from what i can gather its not really a octocore its more two quad cores one lot does the intensive work and when your just surfing the web then the second lot take other as its lower power>But surely a intelligent quad core would be better instead that perhaps turns off cores or reduces clock speed if needed ?

my take on windows 8

well to be honest windows 8 i like ...sure the tiles thing is not good for desktop but a few apps like the start 8 which has given me a start menu like windows 7 and now i really do not notice a huge different i am really using it the same as windows 7 running the same games and applications.

Would like to try the tiles with a tablet but dont have access to one yet one thing i will say about the tiles is there is a lot of wasted screen space

Diablo 3

Diablo 3 is one of those games that frustrate me ....so many things annoy me about the game yet i cannot stop playing

First the things that bug me

1.Always online connection needed the lag has got my character killed many many times
2.Not being able to have hot keys for more of the skills  (sorry 6 buttons is just not enough)
3.Not being able to use potions quick enough there is a huge recharge time before potions can be used again got my character killed
4.The skill system you dont upgrade get skills you get a base skill then when you level up you get a variation of the skill which sounds ok but some of the early skills i want to make them better but that cannot happen
5.Short levels and really only one even remotely epic boss (and spoiler alert its not the final)  i completed it very very quickly and was really disapointed there were hardly any major moments
6.Story and characters not that great ok granted previous games were not that story based but here just got very predictable and at one moment they introduced a new NPC who you save have about one exchange with and never hear from again.
7.Graphics ok there not to bad i have to say but i get alot of frame rate stutters which i dont think is to do with the graphics engine but the lag caused by having to have a always on connection

now for the good

1.The combat is pretty good fun
2.Loot collecting will never get old


Ok so the things that bug me far outway the things i like.However playing the game is pretty good and knowing blizzard i am sure the game will change a fair bit over the next few years (and the inevitable expansion pack) i really really hope blizzard do listen to the feedback as i feel they have tried to oversimplify the game and yet it was diablo 2 skill tree that enabled more customization

Oh not going to spoil it but there is something that happened in the game story that i just knew they were going to do before even playing the game wonder if people can guess what it is

something i find amusing

When i see graphics card reviews and it has stuff like CU’s scalar unit four texture units tied to a 16 KB read/write L1 cache 2048 total ALUs The L1 cache offers about 2 TB/s of bandwidth at this card’s clock rate, backed by a larger 768 KB L2 cache The L1 cache offers about 2 TB/s of bandwidth at this card’s clock rate, backed by a larger 768 KB L2 cache.GK104 SMXs features two times as many warp schedulers (from two up to four), dispatch units (from four up to eight), and texture units (from eight up to 16) per Shader Multiprocessor, along with a register file that’s twice as large. It also sports four times as many CUDA cores. GF104 included 48 shaders per SM; GK104 ups that to 192 shaders in each SMX.

All copied from graphics card reviews and in the end all that techno babble just means a extra 10-15fps from the previous gen