In between sessions with Bioshock Infinite I've been tweaking the living heck out of Fallout 3, this also marks the first time playing the game since it's release about 4-5 years ago. The game hasn't really aged much thanks to New Vegas releasing since then and having used so much of the same assets along with the engine itself.

Reasons that I haven't fallen completely into Bioshock Infinite and just finished it is the very small, but persistent bumps in the road such as the engine stuttering during the loads (a UE3 issue exacerbated by this specific games characteristics) and the fact that I started the game on and refuse to change off of Hard mode. Granted it's not tough, it's just a lot of running into a screen full of dudes plus 1 or 2 of the larger enemies, and noticing that they can kill me instantly (within half a second of seeing them). Same goes for snipers and other such enemies, it's just unforgiving and doesn't let me think of a way to even start to attack them before I'm forced to run away. Running out of ammo frequently during these battles doesn't help.

The game is beautiful and it's a shame that I can run it so well, the stuttering happens regardless of the settings set (again, it's an engine issue/oddity) and that's the main reason it's so frustrating. Playing a game that is more buttery smooth at 60fps that any other in recent memory, while sustaining visuals that blow away most other games I've been running on my machine... only to have this unavoidable issue that brings all of that crashing down to 15-20fps for a few seconds while it loads in between areas or sometimes even when I turn the camera in an area, and it doesn't go away. Just a real big bummer, and probably one of the larger reasons PC gaming sucks. You can invest thousands only to run games in a mediocre fashion, and to be tempted to spent thousands more every single month because you're never good enough.

I can't wait to be making the single choice of which console I wanna throw roughly $700 at and just have games that work 100% of the time for the next ~5-6 odd years. So much ram in those things :S

Someone ignorant of how games work might think 8gigs of ram in the consoles is not impressive at all, since most PC gamers have had access to very cheap ram for a long time and most already have that amount in their machines. If only they would take a look at what amount of ram the current games on pc actually use they'd see that most are still built around how much current consoles have. All these really amazing looking games, running at most of the time just 800mbs on my PC, all because they were built from the ground up for consoles with 256-512mb of system ram, it's really insane the level of optimization that the limited specs of the consoles have allowed games to get to... the jump from sub 1gb to 8gb is going to be super interesting.

Fallout 3 uses just over 700MBs of system ram. Chrome can often use 100MBs per fuckin tab...

That is all before realising the ps4 supposedly will be using DDR5, which is frankly unheard of and kinda crazy. That stuff is not only very very expensive but not really available to even PC consumers besides in GPUs directly, and even then it's usually limited to gpus with only 1-2gbs of the stuff... so to meet parity of 'amount' with the theoretically fastest version available in 'any' form is... well let's hope the dang system doesn't cost a grand, and honestly that it actually happens. The Xbox will most likely not have DDR5, it's supposedly from the ground up been developed with 8GB 'normal' DDR3 I believe though, and I heard some quick comments that they may take the opportunity to up that to something higher to flat out beat the ps4 on a bullet point style game, most people will just see a number higher than 8 and think it's better, without knowing what the heck DDR this and DDR that even mean. Hey, whatever this all ends up being it's definitely interesting.

The only bummer of this console talk is that they are actually coming at the end of the year, and that means almost no awesome games are releasing between now and then. Bioshock Infinite was basically the end of these games for now. Maybe that is a good thing since I have lots of games to spend my time with in the meanwhile.

I've been spending my money on games lately, more of it than usual, buying up things left and right via deals and promos. Bioshock and Tomb Raider through GreenmanGaming both for very very cheap, and the rest mostly through Steam.

I finally got a copy of Dishonored for which I'd played before but never finished (or really even got halfway through). Still haven't got far in that game, less so than my first time playing it, but hey now I own it...

I didn't actually do the images above from bioshock or fallout 3, but I did do these: