The lows
Tim Clark: Balls up
Last season I got so annoyed by what I perceived to be the failings with how Arsenal are run (they actually finished second in the league somehow , but I didn’t let that dilute my rage) that I couldn’t face playing football games. This year, Arsenal having actually spent some f-ing money in the transfer market, I could feel my enthusiasm rising. Or at least it was until I sampled both of the big two football games this week. The FIFA 17 demo feels like, well, more FIFA. And although that’s mostly fine—the game is after all rock solid at this point—it was hard to detect much thrill of the new.
More frustrating, though, was my time with Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer 2017. By all accounts it’s bloody brilliant on PS4 this year, but for reasons best known to the developer the PC version is still based largely on the last-gen consoles. I mean, c’mon Konami. I get that resources are finite and that PC is hardly the priority when it comes to sports sims. But, as your game notes, this is 2017. A time when, for most multiformat games, the PC version is the best-looking, best-performing one. (Assuming we’re willing to ignore the Arkham Knight debacle. And, erm, the last Assassin’s Creed.) Anyway, this won’t wash. Even seeing Ozil in the correct kit isn’t enough to defuse my anger. Ugh. Why is everything Arsenal-related annoying.
Samuel Roberts: No Man’s accountability
Who’s to blame for No Man’s Sky not being quite as good as we wanted it to be? The developers? The press? Sony? Poseidon? In a Eurogamer interview with PlayStation’s president of worldwide studios, Shuhei Yoshida, talked about the negative reaction to the game (which he also says he really enjoyed). "I understand some of the criticisms especially Sean Murray is getting, because he sounded like he was promising more features in the game from day one … It wasn't a great PR strategy, because he didn't have a PR person helping him, and in the end he is an indie developer. But he says their plan is to continue to develop No Man's Sky features and such, and I'm looking forward to continuing to play the game."
Considering Sony decided to put No Man’s Sky in two of its massively high-profile E3 conferences, I don’t think this is fair on Hello Games or Sean Murray—and I say that as someone who played the game for two hours and didn’t really enjoy it, apart from the feeling of my spaceship taking off (and even then, I could only do that four times before I had to find some bloody crystals and refuel). Surely two E3 conferences count as part of a ‘PR strategy’?
James Davenport: Call of Brooding
Kit Harrington, best known for his role as Jon Snow in HBO’s Game of Thrones, plays the villain in Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, as evidenced in this recently released story trailer. I know, it’s Call of Duty and performances aren’t really its central strength, but after watching I strained to come up with a good Game of Thrones joke about how silly and unenthusiastic he looks as a bad guy. I can’t. I just can’t.
The squinty eyes and pensive ‘tude of Jon Snow is present in every corner of the new baddie’s numerous polygons, and I can’t see anything else. And his dialogue sounds like it was recorded in a cupboard. He yells in a monotonous, thin voice about ‘eradicating the authority of the earth’ head tilting down to really sell that furrow. And it looks particularly furrowed beneath a space helmet. Look how mean and angry this man is! When it comes to revolution, I suppose that’s an important quality in a leader. But they should also be good at acting.
Jarred Walton: Spec-tacular
Pascal just arrived, but we’re already looking forward to the Next Big Thing™, and there might be some creative liberties being taken with some of the speculation. This week there was another ‘leak’ for the supposed GTX 1080 Ti specs, which was basically a rehash of a prior leak. Whilst we don’t want to miss out on the fun, if you want a more pragmatic view of things, here’s what I expect from the GTX 1080 Ti.
But why stop there? I just heard from a source close to Nvidia detailing the specs for their GTX 1280 Ti. Slated to launch in 2020, the 1280 Ti uses the latest 7nm InGaAs (Indium gallium arsenide) process technology, and in something of a surprise move Nvidia has decided to put their machine-learning GE101 (that’s the latest ‘Einstein’ architecture, if you’re wondering) into the card. With 11,520 cores clocked at up to 3072MHz boost, architectural enhancements allow the GPU to sustain over 140 GFLOPS FP16 and 70 GFLOPS FP32. Nvidia is going all-in with 64GB of HBM4 memory, which uses a 4096-bit bus with 6Gbps per pin, yielding 3TB/s of bandwidth.
This is the same GPU used in the Tesla E600 that powers Skynet (aka Google), and thanks to the distributed nature of the machine learning algorithms, it will become ten times faster once the GTX 1280 Ti starts shipping. In related news, no one cares because we’re all plugged into a Skynet-controlled VR simulation of the Matrix, only without Keanu Reeves.
Chris Livingston: Male carrier
So, Poland has a postage stamp celebrating Geralt from The Witcher series. That's great except it's totally not great because rather than using the iconic image of Geralt naked in a tub with his giant slippery feet sticking out, he's in some sort of weird armor drawing a sword. What the hell, Poland? You want to celebrate a game, you use an image from the game's most famous scene, not some weird outlier art that no one will even recognize.
I should mention here that I've not really played much of The Witcher series, but my understanding from spending time on PC Gamer is that it's mostly about a man sitting in a tub. Maybe there's armor and weapons in the game: I don't know for sure. I don't want to know! All I know is, Poland really dropped the balls on this one.
Tom Senior: The pre-post-apocalypse
My low this week was the moment I came to know exactly how doomed I’ll be when the apocalypse comes. This week Chris considered how difficult it would be to continue playing PC games in a wasteland with no power, beset by bandits/zombies/friends-turned-cannibal. Turns out you can build a PC that could theoretically take a shotgun blast, but probably can’t produce enough power to turn it on.
Nonetheless, I will be able to take some solace (as I bleed to death in the shadow of circling vultures) in the pragmatic advice offered in the comments section. “One major problem is that it being the post-apocalypse, the Internet would very likely be gone, “observes gbrading, “so no places left to download games from. This is why you should download copies of every game you own now and save them into a magnetic tape vault. It'll only take up a room in your house and will save a lot of hassle in the long run.” Good thinking. Meanwhile drdvdplayerhandbook bravely suggests that “the best way to game in the postapocalypse are Nintendo portable consoles.” In fairness, I’ve seen a Gameboy go through the wash and come out working, but not even Nintendo can compete with some bulletproof steel.
