NamelessTed

The idea that the g400s has such a perfect sensor that making the mouse wireless is complete horse shit. And Logitech just simply doesn't have "absolutely everything" in their mouse lineup. The only wireless mice they have are catered towards use with laptops, or they have way too many buttons. This new G602 is just macro button overload. I almost got the G700s, I could overlook the 3 macro buttons along the left mouse button, but the 4 thumb buttons kill me and they just muddle up the whole area. The whole laser vs optical sensor isn't necessarily an issue to me. My G5 used a laser and it still works great. I am much more concerned with form factor, and button configuration. As a wired device, I actually prefer my new EC1 from Zowie. They are very similar mice but the EC1 feels just slightly better in my hand and all the buttons click nicely. My biggest complaint is the color of the scroll wheel, which I might mod with a white LED. It just seems crazy that Logitech hasn't figured out that taking their best selling line of mice through the years and making it wireless without adding any other stupid shit.

Why can't Logitech just make a wireless version of the G400s? Seriously, these companies suck ass at bringing useful products to market. I was in the market for a new mouse for a while to replace my Logitech G5 and I looked at everything to find a wireless mouse that had a nice shape, and just a few simple buttons. The only things that exist are stupid shit like this with 10 more buttons than I would every want to have on a mouse, or some tiny piece of crap "laptop" mouse. Seriously, there are absolutely no mice in between. The mouse I ended up buying is a Zowie EC1, which I actually really really like. I just wish I could get a "gaming" grade optical sensor with the standard 5-7 buttons and have it be wireless. If a good wireless mouse came out tomorrow I would buy it despite having just bought a new mouse. That is how much I want a proper good wireless mouse.

The mess that Bethesda is making with ESO is going to be catastrophic. I am totally fine with having an MMO on a console. I think it is worth trying again in hopes that they might "get it right" or at least gain a decent audience. The big issue here is that it is 2013 and Bethesda wants to charge $15/month for ESO as well as having an additional cash shop in the game. My prediction is that we will see ESO go free-to-play in 6 months to a year. I know that they have said that the game simply isn't balanced around F2P but it is going to be there only option when the game doesn't sell as well as they expected in the first 3 months with no increase in subscribers in sight. The delay we see with them going F2P will depend on how long it actually takes them to change all the game elements to match, or how stubborn the higher-ups at Bethesda are. I think it is going to be hard enough for Bethesda to get a lot of people to pay the $15/month on PC where that has been the standard for a long time, though it is going away rapidly. The console market isn't used to the idea of paying $15/month to play a game. Yes, they have PS+ or Xbox LIVE, but that is a much smaller fee per month to play ALL their games online. The closest thing would be something like CoD Elite which is an optional fee that gives extra bonuses in the game and DLC for "free". I have been an Elder Scrolls fan for years now, but I don't play MMOs. I am still interested in ESO but I know I probably won't be buying it when it first comes out. If the game was $60 with no monthly fee I would be there in a heartbeat but I just don't like the idea of being forced to pay every month because that isn't the type of player that I am. I hope everything works out well for Bethesda, but I won't be surprised when we see ESO go F2P in a year.

While I can sympathize that the developers of this game probably put a lot of effort into making this game, this news doesn't came as a surprise to me at all. It also seems a bit crazy that nobody along the way figured out that there weren't going to make money from a game like this with the current state of the mobile market. If there is one piece of advice that a potential independent game developer should take, don't get into mobile right now. It was a great market 3 or 4 years ago. A game like Canabalt come to mind. It was early in the iPhone days, there weren't many games available and it was much easier to get featured in the store. Today, the market is FLOODED. Take a look at Android Police gaming section and you will see articles like "26 Best New Android Games from the Last 2 Weeks". If somebody managed to make a list of the best 26 games, imagine how many games total came out in those 2 weeks? And if I were a betting man I would wage that a majority of those 26 best are probably far below average in terms of overall quality and that most of them aren't worth a minute of anybody's time. Can you imagine if IGN came out with a list of the 26 best game for Xbox 360 in the last two weeks? The mobile market is in a phase that the console market went through years ago. The Atari 2600 went through a phase where everybody and their dog made games for it. It literally destroyed the entire market for video games for sever years in the US. Companies went bankrupt and people thought that videogames were dead forever. Thankfully the NES saved the day and Nintendo implemented this thing called the "Nintendo Seal of Approval". The idea was that Nintendo had to approve any game being published for the NES. While the system had flaws, and the NES eventually had too many games releasing for it, it was a big step in the right direction. Right now, the mobile market is young and vulnerable. There are entire companies devoted to developing and releasing games constantly with literally no regard for quality. Their entire focus is to gain as much profit for as little investment as possible. The majority of these shitty little companies will go bankrupt, or get acquired by a larger company, but a couple of them will weather teh storm and stick around. A company like Zynga will probably still be around in 10 years, but they could go belly up just as easily. The big thing we are seeing now is established publishers like Ubisoft and EA really getting into mobile, so it will be interesting to see what effect that has. There are a lot of people playing games on phones and tablets, and there is plenty of money to be made making games for those devices. But, it is not the place for a indie dev right now. You probably have a better chance winning in Las Vegas than making it big in the mobile world.

Fractal Design, either the Define R4 or the Arc Midi. Their retail price is usually around $100 but they go on sale down to $80 from time to time. I picked one up a windows Define R4 for $80 a few months back and absolutely love it.

Things like this happen. It isn't a big deal. You have to realize that there are hundreds of millions of cell phones in the world. The current rate of android phone activations is somewhere around 1.5 million a day. So even when one phone here or there starts on fire it isn't noteworthy in any way to me.

I totally agree that it is good to know for somebody on a tight budget on how to spend their money properly. If you only have $400-500 to spend, you want to make sure you are getting the most bang for your buck. But if the budget is higher for the build, I wouldn't recommend going with a cheap CPU. For me, the GTX 780 benchmark results are the most important. Yes, I realize that the card is way outside the budget of the type of computer we are talking about. But I am thinking long term here. The GPU upgrade is the easiest way to increase gamign performance in a PC. Next generation we will see 780 performance at about $400 with a "880" card. We will then see the sam performance with a "960" at the $300 price point. The pattern continues. So if you buy a cheap CPU today you are going to hit that wall of the CPU being the bottleneck in about 2 years when you upgrade you GPU. At that point you need to buy a new CPU, which means you might need to buy a new motherboard, depending on what AMD is doing with their sockets. Spending the extra money upfront on an i5 will give you a CPU that is going to last long in terms of keeping up with upgrading a GPU. I have seen this for myself in the real world. I currently have an i5-3570k with a 660Ti. My brother has a rig that I built for him almost 5 years ago has an i7-920. I don't even remember what the original GPU he had in there was but he is currently using a 660Ti. His computer against mine in gaming, very very close. I remember seeing his rig destroy Skyrim and being super jealous back when I was still using an AMD 965 BE. So, can a CPU that costs half that of the Intel i5-unlocked chip compete in game performance today with a mid-range GPU? Absolutely. Will it be able to do so in 3-5 years? Not a chance in hell. Oh jesus. People really really need to stop posting this image. It is seriously starting to piss me off. If anybody seeing this hasn't actually read the article yet, I recommend checking it out over on LegitReviews. If you go through the article you will see that the i7-4770k is a MASSIVE upgrade from the Q6600 in everything outside of games. Then there is the fact that he only tested two games. Metro, as you can see if you actually read the article, shows the strength of the new i7 over the q6600. As far as BF3 is concerned, it has been highly documented that the game/engine is basically completely dependent on GPU. I literally can't think of another game that scales so directly with the GPU with very little difference in performance across a wide variety of CPUs.

I totally understand the idea behind the mod with using an AIO cooler on a GPU. It is better performance than stock air, and it is considerably cheaper than going custom water. And part of the fun is the doing something that you aren't "supposed" to do. But, I cringe a bit when I see this. I get wanting to have the best performance, but you have to admit that buying a Titan wasn't the best use of money. I guess I just see that Titan as the card you buy when you have everything else. For me, personally, if I had the money to buy a Titan it would be a complete no-brainer to buy the next lower-tier card and put that extra money into something else that is needed. Looking at your pics the first thing I would throw away and kill with fire is that case. I also can't tell in pictures but please tell me that you have an SSD in that system already. I don't want to rain on your parade, and it already sounds like you don't care that some other people think your system is a bit bonkers. If it makes you happy, hurray for you. I would just recommend looking at a better case as your next upgrade. If you enjoy modding and DIY a proper case is going to make those things much more enjoyable to do.

I don't understand why google would want that domain name anyways. Do people actually just type "search" in the address bar? That and doesn't every modern browser just automatically search for what you type in the bar now anyways? I might just be giving internet users too much credit and that there could still be a significant amount of people that don't know what the hell they are doing.

Dude, what the hell are you talking about? The crossover between PC and Console software sales would be extremely small. A huge percentage of people buying GTA on consoles do so because they don't play games on PC. Similarly, a huge percentage of people that would buy the game on PC wouldn't get the console version because they want it on PC. The number of people that would ever buy the game on both console and PC is extremely tiny. The biggest factor in determining whether a PC version of the game would ship at the same time as the console is whether the game is actually done or not. The console versions are clearly the most important, and PC is secondary. It is likely that they haven't officially announced anything because they don't want to commit to a release date if they aren't 100% sure they can have the game ready by then.

http://www.amazon.com/Fractal-Design-Midi-Case-FDCAARCR2BLW/dp/B00ATX9Y3C/ref=sr_1_1?rps=1&ie=UTF8&qid=1376438359&sr=8-1&keywords=Arc+Midi+R2 Is it just me or is it available right now? That is the Arc Midi R2, $70, Prime, currently 2 in stock.

Currently using Fractal Design Define R4. Love the thing. My Corsair 300R was decent before but I sold it to a friend.

Like others have suggested, anything from Fractal Design. The Define R4 is a case that I can't recommend enough. Love the thing.

There is a HUGE market of people that would buy a game and not run one on an emulator for a whole slew of reasons. I understand that emulators are fairly easy to use, but a lot of people don't. What is easier? Downloading an emulator on the phone, going online and downloading a ROM, copying that ROM into the correct folder on the phone, and then running the game through the emulator? Or clicking "install" in the play store and having it work? They don't just have to release old games either. I just think that would be a really great starting point because something like Pokemon would take minimal effort to get running on basically every smart phone in the world because it isn't demanding and the controls are super simple. Even better though, would be to see Nintendo actually remake/update games for phones, and then eventually make new games for the platform. People talk about how great Pokemon Snap would be on the Wii U. How cool would it be if it was on your phone and it had a mode that could take advantage of augmented reality? The way I see it is that there is a HUGE market in smartphones and tablets and right now the market is flooded with really shitty low budget games from studios that are being formed explicitly to take advantage. EA and Ubisoft are both working in the mobile space but they haven't really done much. The whole mobile market needs to mature a lot right now. It feels like we are in the era of Atari 2600 where everybody and their cow made a game for the system, which was a huge factor in the video game crash back then. Somebody like Nintendo could come in and take a HUGE market share in that mobile space.

Nintendo wouldn't sell off their IPs, their software is what makes them so valuable. What Nintendo could do, if they were smart, would be to release Pokemon Red/Blue/Green for iOS and Android for $10-15. I totally understand that Nintendo releases their own hardware, and they want their systems to have value. But with the market the way it is going, the hardware era of Nintendo is dead. If they manage to release another console and a handheld they are going to implode and just bleed money. On the other hand, they can cut costs by not doing any R&D on hardware, and still have access to the biggest install base in the mobile world with smart phones. If they do continue with hardware their best bet might either be to actually release a Nintendo Phone that has all the standard functions in addition to having a physical d-pad and buttons. The Playstation Phone was a good concept, they just way undercut the specs for it to be worth a shit. Within the next year there will be phones on the market that will be as/more powerful than the Xbox 360/PS3. For Nintendo, this would be much more than sufficient. So people could get their Nintendo Phone and play all teh games, or they could just get the Nintendo games on the phone they already have. Just a thought.

Dude, you are such a snob. You ever think that people that play any of the games you mentioned play them simply because they really enjoy them and not because somebody told them that they should? Different people like different types of games. Your view of "gamer" is so fucking narrow-minded it is sad. You have basically decided that there are games that you just don't like, and anybody who plays those games isn't a real gamer. You have fallen into the classic "no true Scotsman" fallacy and your assertion on what makes a "gamer" is completely invalid. Isn't it better that more and more people are playing video games more often? Sure, maybe they start with Facebook games or the Sims or some other game you wouldn't approve of. But once they start playing video games they might find something else that they enjoy even more. Or maybe they don't, maybe they just play every new Sims games that comes out, but if they have fun and enjoy playing the Sims, then why should they play anything else? Playing video games is primarily about having fun, right? So why not just accept that people enjoy playing a wide variety of video games of varying genres?

Are we reading the same article? The publication from the ESA is strictly about computer and video games. There is a statistic showing that people are playing physical board games LESS than they used to because they are spending more time playing video games. Just because you are playing a puzzle game on your computer doesn't mean you aren't playing a video game. Or do we no longer count games like Tetris, Professor Layton, or Bejeweled as video games?

Yeah, being a critic of something is totally different that just being a consumer of some product. Just because you are a "gamer" doesn't mean you are a game critic either. I do understand there is a difference between somebody who just watched movies and somebody who is a "film buff". Same thing can be said for audiophile, gearhead, a foodie or whatever else. There are a bunch of people who do action X, and there is a smaller % of those people who are enthusiasts. By and large, the word "gamer" is simply a word to describe someone that plays games. In regards to whether we need a new word, maybe. "gamer" seems a bit too generic of a term to apply but I don't have a better alternative.

Does this really matter? Do you think it is only valid if they report statistics on "hardcore gamers"? It is a completely meaningless metric, and one that nobody who plays games should ever care about. It is like saying "X"% of people watch movies. Does it really matter if some of those people only watch romantic comedies? And that some of them only watch Michael Bay movies? In the end, there is a HUGE population of people that watch movies. So what are games any different? Some people play Facebook games, some play games on the tablet/phone, and some play Call of Duty.

If you can afford a Fractal Design Core 3000 go with that. I haven't used that particular case but I have a Define R4 and it is amazing. The Core 3000 is going to be a much higher quality case than a lot of the other stuff on the market. The Corsair 200R is a cool case, but it will feel cheaper. My Define R4 replaced my Corsair 300R and they are night and day in terms of quality. Fractal just has much nicer/thicker steel. For a cheaper case, the NZXT Source 210 isn't bad. I just finished building in one for a friend of mine. He had a terrible old Thermaltake that was just literally falling apart and he just needed something cheap and simple to move into. Its not a great case, but I will say that it was better than I expected it to be. It has a whole bunch of cable tie downs behind the board but there isn't much space back there for thick cables. I could barely squeeze the 24-pin ATX cable back there, but it worked in the end.

I totally get this. MadCatz is also releasing an Android console, and Amazon won't be the last company to do so. I think one of the reasons we are going to see a handful of these devices is simply because it isn't a huge investment on behalf of the company. Developing a console like an Xbox or Playstation takes a huge amount of money and R&D and so on. It is very difficult to do. With Android hardware, most of the work is done for them. They can take a SoC like Tegra 4, or a chipset from Qualcomm or whoever and pop it in a box. A company like Amazon could base their console on their current tablet lineup, so the specs are basically the same but it obviously wouldn't have a screen or a camera or anything like that. And then you just add the HDMI output or whatever else might make sense for a console. They would also be very similar to what we see with set-top boxes like Roku or Vizio-Costar with a stronger focus on actually playing games.

This is just a completely horrible post from JJJarek. I am sorry dude, but your headline is completely sensational and you offer no input/opinion of your own and simply link to the news post. This clearly doesn't follow the guidelines of the forums. On the subject of the article itself, this doesn't seem all that surprising does it? Titan has been out for a while now. We all know that the Titan has always been a specialty card at an extremely high price point for those that want something extravagant. It is a peek into what will be actually affordable in the next year. It would be pretty normal for the most powerful card on the market to go back and forth between AMD and nVidia based on release schedules. By the time the new AMD card comes out the Titan will have been on the market for about 9 months. This is just how GPU performance works.

It sounds like you completely missed my point. Windows 8 is an operating system, strictly software. The Surface RT is a piece of hardware. In the article itself they quote Ballmer as saying that they "built a few more....than we could sell" and then later quote him saying "not selling as many Windows devices as we want to". Both of these quotes (the only two quotes from Ballmer in the entire article) are specifically about hardware sales. Yet the headline of the article reads "Ballmer reportedly admits Surface was a flop, says Windows 8 sales are disappointing". This makes is sound like Ballmer said that Windows 8 sales were poor when he did no such thing.

I think the best way to mount it would be at the top. Drilling mounting and airflow holes at the top would be much easier that cutting out the 5.25" drive bays and messing with the whole front fan mounting system.

I feel that the title is a bit misleading, at least in reporting what Ballmer actually said. He is specifically quoted as saying they are "not selling as many Windows devices as we want to". This statement has absolutely nothing to do with Windows 8 software sales and everything to do with hardware sales. When talking about Windows devices, this includes desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones. Given that he was talking about how the Surface sold like crap, it isn't surprising to say that they are selling less hardware than they expected. In fact, it was reported back in May that Windows 8 sales were at about 100 million licenses in the first 6 months. It seems unlikely that they will reach the 240 million license sales that Windows 7 had in its first year, but if we assume an equal rate of sales in the second six months as the first it should be around 200 million sales, which is close. You also have to understand that Windows 7 replaced the highly disliked Windows Vista so on top of the sales with new laptops/desktops there were a lot more people actually going out and buying the OS on its own to get rid of Vista. The laptop/desktop world isn't where Microsoft is really concerned right now. Their major issue is in the mobile space with phones and tablets where Android is clearly out in front, with Apple in second, and Microsoft far far behind. The biggest issue is that this isn't Microsoft's first attempt to get into mobile. They have failed sever times now, and that is only making it harder for them to break into that market as they fall further and further behind.