My interest in Far Cry 3 started as a simmering curiosity and went, inexplicably, to a boiling enthusiasm to play the game.  Even before Blood Dragon was released, this weird itch came over me, a voice in my head whispered tales of grand adventure, blowing stuff up, and an open world experience with decent story telling.  I wish-listed it, not so subtly dropped hints of wanting it to friends on Steam and decided Ive had enough of waiting, this Friday, May 24th, I will pick up Far Cry 3!

            What could I possibly expect out of it, though?  Maybe Im hoping this will make me better at FPS and enjoy the single player ride, as opposed to the oft-infuriating multi-player modes out there.  Thinking back to how much I enjoyed Uncharted 3 and how it seemed to improve my gaming skills (for lack of a better term), thats what I want to accomplish in playing Far Cry 3.  I feel like exploring, blowing s**t up, driving off cliffs and learning more about gaming in general would just be the bees knees!

            Of course, theres some speculation that the game could end up at least a little disappointing.  I am sure that Ill have a blast with it all the same.  So, for now, Rexs adventure goes on the backburner as I anxiously wait to hungrily devour the sights and experiences of Rook Island and learn more about what Im capable of.

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"The 4A Engine is a graphics middleware engine developed by 4A Games for use in their video game Metro 2033, published by THQ. It supports Direct3D APIs 9, 10, and 11, along with NVidia's PhysX, and also NVidia's 3D Vision."

"The engine was developed in Ukraine by a set of people who split off from GSC Game World a year before the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, notably Oles Shishkovtsov and Aleksandr Maksimchuk, the programmers who worked on the development of X-Ray engine used in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game series."

"The game is multi-threaded in such that only PhysX had a dedicated thread,and uses a task-model without any pre-conditioning or pre/post-synchronising, allowing tasks to be done in parallel. When the Xbox 360 iteration had been measured during development, they were running it at "approximately 3,000 tasks per 30ms frame on Xbox 360 on CPU-intensive scenes with all hardware threads at 100 per cent load". Shishkovtsov also said that the NV40 architecture of the RSX in the PlayStation 3 proved to be very useful during development noted that there were many "wasted cycles". The engine can utilise a deferred shading pipeline, and uses tesselation for greater performance, and also has HDR (complete with blue shift), real-time reflections, colour correction, film grain and noise, and the engine also supports multi-core rendering."

"The 4A Engine implementation of Metro 2033 features volumetric fog, double PhysX precision, object blur, sub-surface scattering for skin shaders, parallax mapping on all surfaces and greater geometric detail with a less aggressive LOD(s)."

(Sorce: Wikipedia - engl. version)

Rendering:

• The gamma-correct, linear colour space renderer
• High dynamic range rendering (HDR) Using floating-point buffers, allowing for tone mapping, exposure adaption, and blue shift, for camera/eye perceptual rendering
• Advanced deferred shading - allows hundreds of lights in frame, in huge, complex scenes
• All lighting is fully dynamic (including sun and skies), ability to use light-shaders, with dozens of special effects
• Umbra and penumbra - Correct soft shadows, including shadows correctly curved on bumped surface. Shadows from semi-transparent objects like particles.
• Weather and day/night model, including light scattering model and god-rays
• Volumetric fogging and lighting, even in animated, non-constant density media
• Global illumination effects and real-time reflective lights
• Parallax occlusion maps and real (geometric) displacement mapping
• Hierarchical per-pixel occlusion culling
• Real-time colour correction, film grain and noise, correct depth of field
• Velocity preserving motion-blur on a scene with millions of polygons and complex shading detail (including object blur)
• Deferred reflections - allows a lot of planar real time reflections in a single frame, like water, glass, etc.
• Ambient occlusion calculated on both the global scale (pre-calculated) and in real-time in screen space (SSAO)
• In addition to standard MSAA, the engine features analytical anti-aliasing (AAA) and "deferred super-sampling" modes which have much lower impact on frame-rate, while correctly ant-ialiasing all surfaces and not just edges
• Renderer is highly multi-threaded for multiple CPU cores.
• Plus: per-pixel lighting, bumpy reflections and refractions, animated and detail textures, shiny surfaces, cosmetic damage using albedo and bump blending, soft particles, etc.

Physics System
Powered by nVidia PhysX technology, can utilise multiple CPU cores, AGEIA PhysX hardware, or nVidia GPU hardware.

• Tightly integrated into the content pipeline and the game itself, including physical materials on all surfaces, physically driven sound, physically driven animations
• Rigid body and multi-jointed constructions. Breakable fences, walls , sheds and other objects. Thousands of different physical entities simulated per frame.
• Cloth simulation, water physics (including cross-interactions)
• Destruction and fracturing, physically based puzzles
• Soft body physics on selected special game entities
• On hardware-accelerated PhysX platforms engine implements full physically correct behaviour of particles such as smoke, debris, etc.

Audio
Multi-threaded high dynamic range Audio system with constant memory usage and data-driven design

• 3D sound positioning, spatialisation and attenuation
• Sound path tracing and transfer approximation for correct occlusion and obstruction perceiving.
• Reverb, low-pass/high-pass filtering, pitch shifting - all auto-calculated based on sound-path and adjustable by multi-layer environment zones, scripting or programmatically
• Dynamically reconstructing audio graphs
• OGG-vorbis compressed with adjustable quality, multi-threaded decompression

(Source: Eurogamer.net article)

I would say, the 4A Games Engine can hold its own against DICE's Frostbite 2 Engine or the Crytek Engine, in its state. Wouldn't you agree?

The Metro 2033 game is still used around the world by video game and tech-magazines for benchmarking graphic cards. The latest version of their renderer, featured in Metro: Last Light feels more polished (I can only speak to the DirectX 11 version) and it already proved how their engine can run in parallel and concurrency, utilizing the most out of your CPUs and GPUs. Running at nearly 100% on all cores. The emphasis is on "ALL" cores. Unlike in the past, when a game engine - especially rendering frames - ate up all your CPU/GPU cycles was a bad thing, because it almost froze your Personal Computer (sound stuttering, not responsive input/controls, etc), the modern day, multicore world, is one, in which the problem is upside down: "how can we make the game run on every core available, balancing the load?"

Only in the recent few years the game developers made the jump from "somewhat" parallel to truly parallel programming. Something that is especially hard to accomplish, if you are making video games and video game engines. Developers had to adopt to the "new ways" and avoiding the "old tricks" from the past, which often included shortcuts and optimizations, based on someone's genius, having to juggle dozens of "game systems" and "spaghetti code" and other forms of highly delicate code pasta, which could break at any moment, if somebody in the office caughed, or looked at it in a funny way.

Their state-of-the-art engine does a fine job in Metro: Last Light. Deferred Shading, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, Sub Surface Scattering can compete with Battlefield 3 or Crysis 3. If you have quadcores, the engine will use them all. If you have 6-cores, it will adjust and scale. The engine in the game still has some room for optimization, though. If you switch from Analytical-AA ("Very High" Settings) to 4x SSAA (Supersampling Anti-Aliasing), you can see a significant performance hit, reducing the framerate. Even on high-end GPU's.

Though, this is a minor point. In comparison Crysis 3, still does a lot of CPU (geometry) computation, that could have been shovelled over to the GPU. Every game engine has its ups and downs. It's weak and strong points.

As always, a game or just rendering engine has to serve their pragmatic purposes - it has to provide a robust system, to run all (games) systems. Most of all, it has to scale, it has to be flexible, turning features on and off without creating blue-screens or red-rings-of-death. I personally do not see the importance, nor do I know anyone, being able to see the difference between 3x or 4x SSAA. But, depending on your hardware and TV/Monitors (the latter, mostly size, but not only), you can see at least minor differences, while you are playing. It is a curse for people, who professionally have to deal with these things, since once you start paying attention to those tiny details, you cannot turn your eyes off. You start actively looking for certain "effects" and starting to read the tea-leaves. Terms like "ugly" enter your vocabulary more often, yet there really is nothing "ugly" - it is just not optimized beyond a certain, pragmatic(!) degree. Especially consistency between platforms (Consoles/PC) becomes a factor. On PC, 4x SSAA is not automatically "better" than MSAA vs TXAA or FXAA - it is different.

Further reading:

4A Engine (engl. Wikipedia)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4A_Engine

Older article (from 2010) on the orig. Engine & Metro 2033

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/metro-2033-4a-engine-impresses-blog-entry

Performance comparison btw 360, PS3 and PC on Eurogamer.net (incl. some technical analysis)

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-metro-last-light-face-off

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Boobs

This sorceress has giant boobs. She's going to be in a video game. This is a problem.

Kotaku and Gearbox have pinned Vanillaware's lead artist and president with being everything from a teenage boy to a sex-offending criminal. There's no shortage of slurs and swears in what is no longer a discussion as it is a schoolyard name-calling match. I'd say Gearbox is winning, by the way. I guess stones thrown from glass houses pick up momentum.

Why is it that we've reached a point where breast size is equal to controversy? Gaming characters have a long line of big breasts, ranging from fighting games, to actions games, RPGs, and so forth. It wasn't an issue then, but it certainly is one, now.

Most of this rage comes from an industry that wants to shed the days when the industry was a boy's-only (if it ever was) clubhouse and allow admittance for females. Any girls who want to play in the house shouldn't have to play with GI Joes, sure. But should they only be able to play with Barbies that have their clothes sewed on and breasts hacked off? That doesn't sound right.

Any videogame character with large breasts is automatically sexist. This is a scientific fact. Any sexualized female is a part of a male-centric power fantasy. This is what we're supposed to believe.

But does this fit every fantasy? 

The Fantasy

There is this concept that videogames since the 80s have been developed for straight white male boys. Anything that doesn't go out of its way to show how progressive it is is clumped here.

The concept is that the boy plays as a big, strong, muscle-glimmering alpha male who roams around, beating things up with his alpha man fists and saving the super sexual woman. Imagine something along the lines of Golden Axe--but forget that you could play as a woman. Something like Mario--except neither of those leads are sexualized. Maybe Mega Man--but he's an adorable robot and doesn't save a woman. Maybe, ahm--you know just smash those three games together and you'll see what games supposedly have always been.

Gamers have argued that men in videogames are just as sexualized as women, but the counter-argument here is that the men are a part of the male fantasy as well. The male plays the big strong man saving the sexual woman. Easy enough.

Here's the problem in pushing this idea into Dragon's Crown: You are the female. You don't have to save her; you don't have to win her over. You play as her kicking ass and saving the day. She's her own power fantasy. So then, who is this power fantasy for?

To say that it's for straight males again leaves little room for women to have fantasies at all. This isn't even to mention the fantasies of gay or bisexual people, let alone transsexuals. Figuring out what fantasy is for whom is tricky and pretty well impossible.

One thing I do know is that my girlfriend always prefers to make a character for herself who has big breasts and wears provocative outfits. She's a straight white female. She should hate this, but she genuinely enjoys being a badass and sexy woman who saves the day. She says she likes to play as "pretty" women. And why wouldn't she, if the concept of the male power fantasy is that we like to play as rugged, handsome men? Women should find escape in pretending to be those stereotypical caricatures of themselves, too, right?

Why would women only want to play as rugged, flat-chested she-hulks 

All-Inclusive

The gaming industry wants to include women now more than ever. With sexist slander, employment issues, and violence agaisnt digital women causing controversy, it's easy to understand why.

So the industry reacts. They react by lashing out, screaming slander, and fighting against people's creative expressions, because they don't agree with those expression. That's not how inclusion works. 

Not only that, but it's an impossible way to include women in games. You can't tell the rain to stop raining, and you can't tell an artist not to draw breasts. The idea isn't to make less games that feature super sexualized women, it's to make more games that have what would be considered the standard archetype for women. The industry sees where women are being under-served in their escapist fantasies, and they need to fill those gaps. They don't need to lash out at those who are not.

So then the gaming industry is doing that, right?

Of course not. In fact they're completely against it.

With Epic expressing that a Gears game starring a female would never sell, and the developer of Remember Me describing their trials and tribulations with publishers demanding the protagonist of their game be a male, it seems like the game industry doesn't actually want games that appeal to women. They want manly masculine games for men, because girls don't buy games.

But then they yell at people who make what they consider manly masculine games for not trying to appeal more to girls?

The industry is in an inclusive conundrum right now where it knows that it needs to make games for women, but no one wants to take the first step and actually do it.

In the West, anyway.

Japan is Better

The country responsible for the jiggling woman that has burned a fire of controversy is actually the country doing inclusion right. They make dating sims, dress-up games, RPGs, and plenty more solely crafted for a female audience. Not to mention Capcom was the only publisher willing to pick up Remember Me. They actually have a system in place where boys and girls can play with their Barbies and GI Joes, big breasts and no, together in harmony.

The Western gaming industry makes a lot of fuss about the Japanese industry, where they are and how they have to catch up to where we are, but this is a case of not recognizing when something is actually ahead of its time. They're in the future we're too afraid to reach. They should be the model, not the issue.

We're also yelling at a completely different culture to be more like us, so that's a problem, too.

So, What Do We Do?

If the gaming industry wants to be more inclusive to women, then it needs to be more inclusive. They need to make games with strong female leads, make the games they think girl gamers want. But they can't try to force games featuring sexualized females out the door. It's not only the opposite of inclusion, but it's also impossible. Everyone has different fantasies; there's no way to know who wants what. They just need to make a little bit of everything.

Games for Western girls are coming, and they will come soon--

As soon as the industry has the balls (or breasts) to be more like the country they point fingers at and say is so far behind them.

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DMC: Devil May Cry
Dead Space 3 
Metal Gear Rising 

Tomb Raider was the latest game I've been playing. I was enjoying the game a lot and I do mean A LOT! I haven't enjoyed a third person action game like this in a long time...then all of a sudden bam! I was hit with a f*cking game breaking glitch almost to the end of the game. The glitch hit me at the Chasm Stronghold, where the enemies refused to spawn and I cannot progress. I did quite a bit of searching for a solution and nothing is possible (unless a patch is released). It seemed to affect all console and PC versions of the game. After cursing very loud today and getting in a rage. I am calmly going to toss this game aside and start Crysis 3!...shame this game could have been a firm contender for GOTY 2013 for me

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Sony gave a sneak-peek at its next-generation PlayStation 4 (PS4) game console coming later this year and, here at AMD, we couldnt be more excited. Bringing a supercharged PC architecture that combines next-gen hardware, software, and the fastest game network in the world. Oh, and this is all powered by a semi-custom designed AMD accelerated processing unit(APU) jointly developed in coordination with Sony!

In fact, the PS4 is the first announced design win based on semi-custom AMD APUs. This further demonstrates our commitment to take AMD technology into adjacent high growth markets as we diversify beyond the PC.

What exactly is a semi-custom APU? Let me elaborate:

At the most basic level, an APU is a single chip that combines general-purpose x86 central processing unit (CPU) cores with a graphics processing unit (GPU) and a variety of system elements, including memory controllers, specialized video decoders, display outputs, etc. Our semi-custom solutions take the same treasure trove of graphics; compute and multi-media IP found in our APUs, and customize them for customers who have a very specific high-volume product that could benefit from AMDs leading-edge technologies.

In the case of the PS4, we leveraged the building blocks of our 2013 product roadmap the same technologies you find in the latest AMD APUs powering PCs, ultrathin notebooks and tablets to create a solution that incorporates our upcoming, low-power AMD Jaguar CPU cores with next-generation AMD Radeon graphics delivering nearly 2 TFLOPS of compute performance! This unique APU architecture enables game developers to easily harness the power of parallel processing to fundamentally change the console gaming experience. Not only creating the opportunity for new possibilities in software design, but also faster and more fluid graphics.

This is going to be a very exciting year for gamers, especially for those with AMD hardware in their PCs and consoles, as we have even more game-changing (pun intended) announcements still to come.

Look for some more exciting things happening at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in March when we will provide even more info on how we are working with game developers to make AMD the hardware of choice for running the best games!

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there is the link to the Action arena facebook page go check it out and like it for me

^^^^^^^

my next review

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1.A cow produces 200 times more gas a day than a person.

2.A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.

3.A hippo can open its mouth wide enough to fit a 4 foot tall child inside. dont try this with kids

4.You're more likely to get stung by a bee on a windy day than in any other weather.

5.The sound of E.T. walking was made by someone squishing her hands in Jello.

6.The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched."

7.Most Americans' car horns beep in the key of F.

8.A 41-gun salute is the traditional salute to a royal birth in Great Britain.

9.Mushroom clouds can be created by any huge explosion; they aren't specific to atomic blasts.

10.G-rated family films earn more money than any other rated films; however, only 4% of Hollywood's output is G-rated.

11.a foosball table has 11 players on each team.

12.Most Dominoes Toppled in 30 Seconds 52

13highest score in game freeway fury 572,862

14.logest home run in wii sports 649

15.highest score on game curveball 34,445 points

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10. Wanted

9. Kick- Ass

8.Blade Series

7.The Avengers

6.Hellboy Series

5.X-Men Series

4.Superman(Christopher Reeve Series)

3.The Dark Knight Series

2.The Crow

1.Spider-Man(Sam Raimi Trilogy EXCEPT FOR SPIDER-MAN 3 i loved the first Two)

And Also this entirely Opinon based so..

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Anyway, here it is

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So this is going to be a pretty long blog entry. I was inspired to do this based on boogie2988's video and how are stories about gaming are remarkably similar. Boogie I don't know if you will ever see this, but if you do a huge shout out to you, I love your videos, keep on making them and best of luck in everything you do.

One lovely monday morning I was sitting in math class. I was quite tired-I had stayed up late the previous night in World of Warcraft doing some raiding and dungeoneering and was just tired. I finished all my math work early and was getting started on my homework (luckily I managed to do the classwork well despite my tiredness, I don't let gaming interfere with acedemic success). Whilst doing my homework in class, I had baout 10 minutes or so, I yawned and closed my eyes for just a minute to collect my thoughts.

While I was doing this, the wench across from me, who I have really not gotten along with in the past (think popular, wears-way-too-much-makeup-drama-addicted type) looks at me and goes "Xandoom, why the hell are you so tired?". I open my eyes and look up to see who was talking, see who it is, mumble something about playing WoW late at night, then return to bed. She says "you were playing video games?" I look up and say "yes, that's what I do every day, leave me alone)". Unfortunately, this wench decided that this was a topic that she needed to pursue.

I mumble answers to her questions-eventually I get her to leave me alone. But to her- she just couldn't fathom how I could spend my nights hunched in front of my computer in my room-it just didn't compute. I shrugged off the incident as some idiot who was bored in math class being forced to talk to me.

However, to my dismay, incidents like these started occuring more frequently with different people. I was quite bored of it all-after all, I don't really like many of the people asking the questions, I generally keep to myself and a small group of friends.

I've never been to a school dance. Out of my 14 years of living, I have never once been to a school dance or a school party (that wasn't mandatory, even then I would sometimes feign illness). I just don't like the people, I don't act how they act like idiots, how they spread germs by touching and kissing, how they are just crazy and emotional. I would generally just schedule WoW raids to be that night and make an excuse.

But I think people started to realize just how much time I spent gaming-hence the reason for the awkward social interactions concerning my habits. And the fact that I had to bring my alienware to school to take notes on didn't help. I was bombarded with questions, and eventually came to be pitied-here I was, a socially awkward gaming addict who had very little friends, no wench to call his girlfriend, and spent most of his time wholed up in his room gaming.

Some might argue that gaming is bad for me. As I said, I am pretty anti-social to much of my grade, I spend FAR too much time gaming, and I don't go to parties or dances.

But to me, it's the opposite. I haven't made stupid decisions, I don't get drunk or high or spread germs, I don't talk like an idiot and pretend it's the end of the world when my silly 8th grade adolescent relationship ends. And because of this, I game. I enjoy gaming, it's what I like to do. I don't enjoy sports or dating. So if I cna go play football, or I can game, I'll game because I enjoy gaming.

I've also meant some of the greatest people I have met over gaming. I've been in many World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Rift, and TOR guilds where I get to know people over the years, where we genuinely care about each other and have fun adventuring in fantasy lands. I've met some of my best friends playing Dungeons and Dragons. I've met so many interesting people, people I care about, over gaming, and these people I would never have met if it weren't for gaming.

I have so many fond memories of playing with my World of Warcraft guild on Friday Nights-of playing with my DnD groups. These are all people who share my common interests, who love to explore fantasy lands and adventure with me-who want to fight monsters and demons and space pirates rather than sit around and play spin the bottle.

So when people ask me if I waste my life gaming-no I waste my life talking with people like you. I'm the happiest I've ever been adventuring in Azeroth, not partying. And this has allowed me to see the idiotic things my generation does and not partake in them. So all in all, gaming has saved me,and provided a good sourc eof friends and companionship. Gaming has helped me get through some tough times and has been there when I've been the happiest I've been.

When someone asks me why I game so much, I just shrug it off and say I'm an addict. I don't want to deal with them. But I always have been, and always will be- a gamer. I look forward to what the future holds both in the real world and fantasy lands.

Thanks for reading everyone,and may your blade never dull

-Xandoom

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Updates ? Read the change log latelly ? How is this good design ? In SC2 updates fine tune the experience, while in D3 they change important aspects like CRAFT COSTS, DROP RATES and GAME LOGIC!!! Released when it's ready ? It's still not ready, and it has already been realeased. Now we just have to lower all monster health and damage for acts 2,3,4 on Inferno, add more items and lower craft cost so people don't get too frustrated.

Another Issues is the "NOT REALLY DRM", DRM protection. They wanted "pay us money for stuff" functionality, and to ensure that people don't hack the game offline and make uber items, they moved items, location, drop rates, spawn locations and drop logic to the server. So because they wanted auction house they had to move most of the SINGLE PLAYER GAME to an ONLINE format. F**K YOU GAMERS AND GIVE US SOME CASH!

Then, there is Bioware. They also realeased the 3rd installment of a game, that was criticised, especially for day 1 DLC (which was an actuall add-on to the story and could be skipped/not bought). The game itself is a master piece, that has offline single player and online multyplayer, as it should. Then they realeased two free DLC's, then they listened to people's opinion and explained the ending. How is this possible ? Stuck under the umbrella of EA, the most despised publisher ever, they still gave free stuff and wanted fans to be happier about their purchase. So they invested some man hours/money for the satisfaction of their customers ? I can hardly believe it!

In conclusion I will always buy Bioware games. They might not be perfect, in fact they will probably have their flaws but considering the previous experiences they will be great games, with a great story, lenghty gameplay, a lot of details and (most of all) a dedicated developer that cares about fans. On the other hand Blizzard has fooled me for the last time with their nice cinematics. When they launch something I will wait for realease, review and critique then I will consider buying a Blizzard game when pricess go down.

PS: Six months of just watching, and the first thing I write is a rant...

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I still haven't decided between books from Stephen King like The Stand, It or The Dark Tower(novel). The series A Song of Ice and Fire, whose TV Show A Game of Thrones is based on. Or Tolkien books Lord of The Rings.

If you have any other suggestions I don't mind. Just try not to make me even more undecided

Thanks.

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I have been holding my tongue for so long about the crap that sony are doing, that I finally had to write something!

So I sent Sony customer Services this:

Not that I think a single thing will happen, or that I'll even get a reply

But you gotta try aint ya?

I'll update if I get anywhere!

Laters

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