I just powered through Sleeping dogs this week, and really enjoyed it. It's far from a perfect experience, but it does a lot for an open world game, has an excellent story, and looks pretty great on PC.

However, it has reminded me of one of those things that, as someone who loves to drive in real life, I hate in video games lately. The first time I really noticed such a pronounced under steer in virtual cars was probably Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. Everyone was caught up in the pretty cars and the well implemented social leaderboards, but I was stuck up on the handling of the cars. You see, the reason I love driving in real life is because, cars are actually pretty easy to maneuver once you get to know the car you're in. Sure, some cars under steer, some fish tail, but at the end of the day, they can all make a 90 degree turn. They can all turn on a dime if you go slow enough. And assuming they aren't a massive hunk of metal and payload, they can usually manage to weave in and out of traffic at 70+ miles an hour. I would know, my family constantly ragged on me for my driving habits (no accidents though, knock on wood!), and it's this feeling of making a pretty heavy, massive piece of machinery do exactly as I want it to that makes driving so fun. Whether it's taking a turn in a country road at 100 MPH or sneaking up the free way to get past traffic, I really enjoy it. It's one part thrill, one part meditation, and two parts of feeling in control.

Really, it's this last bit that is most important to me when I drive. I want to feel like I'm the one swerving around, not the car. I want to feel how responsive and quick the car is. And I'm the same way in games. As someone who's used a gun, and likes to run around my house with an 1:1 M16 replica BB gun just practicing stock weld and target acquisition, I know that making weapons feel "heavy" isn't about sluggish aiming, because especially with a close quarters stance and grip, you can dart that gun around like you set your mouse to 3200 dpi like a crazy person (and me!), and if you're good, it'll land on the target and you can squeeze off a shot.

So it's been kind of distressing to me how many games have opted for cars that handle like they have the inertia of a semi-truck and the brakes of a tricycle. If I turn my wheel all the way to the right at 60 miles an hour in a real car, I'm not going to slowly drift into the next lane, which is almost what pushing the analog stick all the way to it's stopping point does in Sleeping Dogs, unless you power slide, but that's only good for taking corners, not swerving. On top of that, if you go from a dead start, hit the gas for about 3 seconds, let off, and then immediately slam on the brakes, your car just kind of floats to a stop. It's infuriating when you need to actually STOP your car, but your car decides to just keep on going and ram into a truck that used to be 30-40 feet ahead of you.

I feel this is probably a result of every game with driving these days needing a "handbrake" to let you swing your car around turns, but the problem is that this ignores the fact that there is more than one type of maneuver a car can make. Swerving is also arguably the most important one on a roadway with other vehicles, because it, not just yanking the wheel and hoping for the best, is how you avoid collisions. And if you're a bad ass triad motherfucker, it's how you do anything in a car because why wouldn't he go as fast as he possibly can?

Another weird example of bizarre handling is ArmA 2. Now, to be fair, hold any direction but forward for a bit, and you'll lose traction, slide into a turn, etc. It's not realistic, but at least I can make a turn in less than 100 meters. But, as soon as you slow to a certain speed, if you even try to turn sharply, as if you were navigating a parking lot, your car just stops moving, period.

I want cars that, when going 5 miles an hour, can make a uturn without 5 lanes. Cars that can make maneuvers, especially in an open world driving game, when shitty AI is never more than 60 seconds away from suddenly not moving right in front of you, or deciding to change lane positions while you're in the lane position they want.

Cars are far from nimble compared to a human, but the way under steering has become so goddamn prevalent in games these days is so frustrating. Let me have fun, exagerate a bit. Take a leaf out of Saints Row's book and make it really fun and rewarding to drive through traffic, instead of forcing me to use your (completely digital, despite being on a freaking analog stick) gunked up, child protected steering. Cars can turn! Cars can stop! Don't make me depend on a fucking E brake that makes me slide 300 feet before making a turn.

As some of you might know, I am in the middle of a new PC build, which is going to kick some major ass. However, my current PC is basically a bunch of failing parts, and woefully short on pretty much everything (see: a single 2GB stick of RAM).

So I decided to do some benchmarks on the hardcore PC games I have installed right now. Stuff like Crysis 2 with all of the DX11 bells and wistles, ArmA 2 with it's HUGE maps, and Metro 2033 with all of it pertiness. And man, was it bad. I couldn't actually Benchmark Crysis 2, sadly, but that actually wasn't a total shit show. Well, it was, because it was pretty much unplayable and stuttered like fuck, and usually hard locked my computer on loads (my HDD is dying), but the framerate wasn't that bad when the game wasn't freezing up for 30 seconds.

Metro 2033 on the other hand benchmarked at an average framerate of 6 per second, with a max of 22, and a min of 1.3

ArmA gives very little data, but the average framerate was about 8, and the benchmark for AO doesn't seem super intense so I doubt that is really all that accurate. I also hopped into the little firing range map and man, it was impossible to play, so much latency and such a low framerate.

Gotta get dat new shit!

Seriously v,v

I'm going to be writing up a probably pretty hefty blog post about my experience as a fresh faced Dark Souls player. I'd basically played enough to get the feel of things on various visits with the gang and the like, but the PC version is the first time I've owned or really seriously played the game, and I feel like it's important to measure this game over time, because I am honestly a little sick of people insisting I'm wrong about this thing or that being a lot less "fair in it's difficulty" than a lot would say everything in Dark Souls is, just because they did it 30 times in a single night working on whatever 4chan joke build they were making.

But man, it's really getting it's hooks into me. I get really into it for a lengthy play session, and then something comes along that I just don't want to deal with that night and I move on to other things until the next day, work through my frustration (sometimes to the game's fault, sometimes just 'cause it's pretty hard), and get back into it. I'm not following any builds or anything, but I am getting occasional help from friend on Skype, when we're chatting in there.

I also can't get any phantoms into my world other than the NPCs, probably because ports are a thing that are awful, so that's been frustrating, especially seeing how easy something like the Gargoyles or Capra were with human help (very). It was fun to help out my buddy but it's a bummer that I don't seem to be able to get help in return.

Anyway, that'll be going up soon. Feel free to put any thing you'd like to get my opinion on or cover in the comments.

I was at PAX Prime this year, had a great time, and at the end of a long day me and a couple of the guys who were still at the show with me decided to check out the PC Free Play as a curiosity. Not to be a dick, but past years have been less than stelar, with aging and inconsistent machines and a very lacking selection of games (they were generally all the same every year for a good couple of years in a row). But this year came two very awesome things: firstly, the PCs were actually really damn solid. I played Rage at max settings. And I mean max, down to AA (which goes up to 16x in that game, although I'm not sure the method) and AF and all that juicy stuff. And it did it smooth as butter. It was awesome, as in past years, I had troubles playing Left 4 Dead on the machines they had. But the really cool thing was that a lot of games that were on the show floor were installed on the PCs. So a lot of the stuff that we had tried on the show floor and were interested in, we got to play in a much more relaxed environment. And on much better PCs (the Hawken booth for example had some pretty crummy machines).

Right now, I'm running something that struggles to hit 60 even at 720p on anything coming out these days. Although Alan Wake is weirdly smooth at 1280x800 and all the settings including AA cranked up (it also still looks fantastic thanks to a complete lack of jagged edges). My computer struggles on just about every game, even the not so pretty ones. Anything not running on Source will probably be a poor or at least not optimal experience for me. Frame rates are inconsistent, low, and lead to a lot of games feeling worse than they should.

But man, did it feel good to know that my PC would be a good bit better than the rigs they had at the free play area.

Guess what? I borked my PC! Well, sort of anyway. Pretty sure it'll be fine once the SATA DVD Drive I ordered gets here tomorrow/saturday.

So I hadn't really done anything about dust in... well.... Lets not go there. It'd been a while. So, I took my PC outside, brought my little compressed air can thingy, and went to town on my PC. Son of a bitch was filthy, it was pretty obvious why my noise levels were so high. It took a good long while to get it to the point were I was happy (it wasn't like, immaculate, but there wasn't any performance hindering dust any more and it was pretty clean in there. I took all the proper precautions to prevent static issues, didn't let any of the liquid spray out, etc. Made sure to keep a ground, all that.

But when I plugged the fucker in and tried to start it up again... it didn't boot. After some messing around, I finally figured out that my IDE stuff wasn't working, and that's a problem because in my laziness building this PC, the Boot files somehow ended up on the wrong drive, which is now my secondary and an IDE drive. My CD drive is ALSO IDE, which means the Windows 8 disc on my desk can't help me repair jack shit.

Hopefully tomorrow my new drive will arrive and I'll be able to get back onto my PC and get it working at least long enough to start fresh with the build I'm currently working on (although that's on hold for the moment as I'm in the middle of being busy with work, a camping trip with the guys, and PAX shortly after that camping trip. But once that whole thing ends, I'm getting back onto buying bits for my new rig and building it up. So far I've got the RAM though, which looks pretty sweet, I guess.

And I also really want to get my new PC so I can see how much more awesome blender is on a decent PC.

I also need to get a writing pad and get my new desk so I have a place to get all of my thoughts out!

Seriously I am so fucking sick of games on PC even having an OPTION for something as stupid as mouse acceleration (smoothing my ass). Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is almost unplayable with vsync enabled, Dead Space just IS unplayable with vsync enabled. Now, to be fair, AC should be played on a controller if you want the best experience. But I am so fucking sick and tired of the most well known, incredibly unanimously hated thing that console to PC ports have: Mouse fuckery. Just fucking make it 1:1 raw mouse data. That's all anyone needs. No one wants your shitty, unchangable mouse acceleration. No one wants your broken aiming. Just fucking wise up and listen to all of the millions of threads that have been created.

Big publishers like EA, Ubi, Activision, etc? Make it fucking company policy to ensure there is NO latency or curve on mouse data. If it's going to be an optional thing, don't fucking hide it in configs. Put it in the open, use your fucking brains. Now, maybe in the case of something like assassin's creed, it's a little tougher to implement, but when the fucking game lets you just go to the config file and turn it off, why the hell is it the default? Why the hell is it not in any of the in game menus?

I am so sick and tired of tiny mistakes (lets be honest, they aren't mistakes, it's just devs not giving a fuck about it) on the devs side having such an impact on the way I experience the game. Assassin's Creed feels like ass for me, and it would be fine if not for the fucking latency AND curve on the mouse. But hey, at least the menus use the mouse fine. Agh.

/rant.

Here's a little rant that I hope will let me vent enough to finish the game, try the other classes, and do a proper review of this game.

Man, fuck Dead Island. It's got good ideas but does them almost entirely wrong. Do you have any fucking idea how hard it is to make something like first person driving in a non-driving game piss me off? Very! I loved driving in Deadly Premonition, and the driving in that is awful! But I HATE the (few times you actually get a chance to do some) driving in Dead Island. Video games: when cars are moving slowly, they can turn around some pretty tight corners. Stop making me understeer like I'm a shitty porche going 200 miles an hour. Also, zombies being more capable of striking you with their fists than you are of hitting them with a weapon that extends your reach up to twice as much? Yeah that's awful. Oh and the spitty zombies, that have way too much health considering how little damage all ranged attacks do? Fuck em. Putting the thing behind a door you have to bash open that blows up in your face and kills you in one hit because when you started to spam the backwards dodge you hit the door jam and couldn't get out in time? Fuck that. I could have loved you. You could have been amazing. But so far the only thing I've really enjoyed, oddly, was shooting at live, human enemies, and even then only I fucking love shooting pistols in video games, and it feels pretty good and has a good sense of physicality.

I don't know how I can hate a game that does so many of the things I love: interesting first person melee combat, zombie apocalypse, first person driving, crafting, RPG elements, sweet raps (well, ok, this is about the only rap I enjoyed on any level, including ironically in about 20 years, so ya know), and juxtaposition of location tropes, especially for a zombie game. But you fail at it all. You put way too much of the game in the shitty city, you give too many enemies to deal with givin the amount of stamina, reach, and arch on your attacks, and include far too many shitty enemies types that take way too long to kill or are way too punishing when you deal with them improperly, you fuck the driving up so bad I'd rather drive around in Deadly Premonition long enough to become intimately familiar with Greenvale's roads than spend another 5 minutes trying to see where the fuck I'm going in Dead Island. Other than having to knock out the glass when it gets fucked up, its the worst driving I've ever experienced.

And man, that story is super awkward when you play alone, and often makes no sense at all, with very little context, if any, given for cutscenes.

Hopefully Day Z gives me a better experience when I try that out, but with the way the idiot who made it is treating it, I doubt by the time I get around to checking it out, it'll be remotely interesting.