AP-Everything Games: August 2013

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Up Coming PC Game Watch Dog

Watch Dogs - Release Date: November 19, 2013

About This Game

In Watch Dogs you play as Aiden Pearce, a brilliant hacker and former thug, whose criminal past led to a violent family tragedy. Now on the hunt for those who hurt your family, you'll be able to monitor and hack all who surround you by manipulating everything connected to the city’s network. Use the city of Chicago as your ultimate weapon and exact your own style of revenge.

Watch Dogs is a ground-breaking open-world action-adventure game called designed by a team comprised of industry veterans from blockbuster franchises like Assassin’s Creed, Rainbow 6 and Far Cry. Watch Dogs blends cutting-edge technologies and sophisticated game design into a realistic and living open world where players must use any means at their disposal to take down a corrupt system.

Watch Dogs PC System Requirements

Alright gentlemen, it has not been officially confirmed (or even hinted at) but am I the only one 100.01% convinced that Watch Dogs on PC will NOT release alongside the PS3/360/WII U/PS4/XB1 versions ?

I know it hurts but let's not kind ourselves, Ubisoft has the habbit of delaying its PC versions and I can't see Watch Dogs being an exception, for your information Assassin's Creed IV will release "a few weeks later" on our platform, surprised ? Of course not.

I'd venture a guess and claim that Watch Dogs on PC will release on the 17th of December.

That issue aside, I would like to discuss the possible system requirements of the game.

Watch Dogs has the PC as its lead platform, it's one of the very first glimpse of next-gen and as such it's interesting to speculate on what kind of PC will be required to make the most out of the game.

A couple of facts first : Watch Dogs has spent quite a bit of time in the current-gen pipeline in spite of its next-gen flavor and has to be scaled down to the Wii U/PS3/360. With that in mind I suppose the minimum system requirements will be identical to Ubisoft's current-gen games. What is likely to undergo a significant boost are the recommended/optimal requirements of the game (if Ubisoft release them as they did for Far Cry 3).

I repeat, this is pure speculation on my part :

Minimal system requirements :

-2.66 GHz Intel Core2 Duo E6700 or 3.00 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+

-2gb of RAM

-512 MB DirectX 10 GC (8800GT)

DirectX : DX10.

Recommended system requirements :

- 3.4 quad core processor (I7/Bulldozer)

-8gb of RAM

-GTX 680/Radeon 7970

Optimal requirements (for resolutions above 1080p and 60fps with MSAA/TXAA ):

-AMD FX8360/I7 3960

-GTX Titan/Radeon 8970

-12gb of RAM

I think I'm being very reasonable here, I must not be very far off.

Don't expect the official system requirements before mid November at the earliest.

Thank You..

Friday, August 16, 2013

Crysis 2 (PC)

Crysis 2 : Review

If Crysis was known for one thing, it was amazing graphics. That was with good reason, as the game didn't offer much else. While it boasted a few interesting ideas, the game felt imbalanced, had bizarre difficulty spikes, and felt more like a tech demo than an actual game. With Crysis 2, Crytek has scaled back its focus on pure visual overkill with a game that still looks thoroughly gorgeous while providing something a little meatier than surface-level eye candy. It may surprise you, but there are a lot more than pretty textures to talk about.

Crysis 2 swaps the lush jungle for the war-torn streets of New York, where a killer virus is destroying civilization and a gooey race of alien invaders known as the Ceph are wrecking everything in sight. As US Marine Alcatraz, your job is to step into a superpowered Nanosuit and wipe out not only the Ceph, but the CELL private army that wants to take you down. It is a story. You likely won't remember it. Now let's blow some stuff up. Almost as soon as the player gets a gun, the improvements over the original Crysis are clear. The game's four main superpowers -- enhanced strength, extra armor, stealth and super speed -- have been altered considerably, leading to a more intuitive and balanced experience. Strength and Speed are now passive abilities -- they'll automatically kick in if you charge melee attacks or start to sprint. Armor used to be the passive default option for the Suit, but is now an activated ability, along with stealth. Unlike last time, taking advantage of the Nanosuit's powers feels rewarding rather than punishing. Activing Stealth and Armor won't drain your suit's energy within milliseconds, allowing you enough time to navigate to an advantageous position or absorb heavy fire. Balancing your offensive power against your defensive ability is a careful game, and one that provides a consistent challenge without becoming overbearing.

The levels feel smaller than Crysis', but they are better designed and the action is far tighter, with consistent pacing and a natural flow from battle to battle. Before each fight, you can scope into the territory to mark enemies, ammo crates, and tactical options. The tactical options offer cool ways to approach a battle, pointing out prime sneaking areas, useful flanking positions, and turrets that can be controlled. While none of the tactical options will dramatically alter the way a fight progresses, they are nonetheless useful little pieces of Intel that may come in handy. Crysis 2 offers players a chance to actually feel like a badass, which is something Crysis sorely lacked. With the improvements made to stealth, you can engage in serious cat-and-mouse games with your opponents, stalking your prey and stealthily murdering them, or sneaking into position, switching to max armor and spraying a confused crowd with bullets. Enemies will react to your shenanigans, crying out to allies if they see you switch abilities and homing in on your last known position. Their paranoid chatter of enemies and your ability to toy with them evokes memories of Batman: Arkham Asylum and I'd say the predatory stealth in Crysis 2 can be just as satisfying here as it was in Rocksteady's classic action title. The only thing that lets the stealth down is the randomly spotty AI, which will see enemies get stuck on scenery or sometimes kill themselves. I saw a group of about four soldiers aim a grenade at a wall and stand right in place for the explosion to take them all out. I suppose you can pretend it's the enemies freaking out and making mistakes if you don't want to break the illusion.

This is made worse by the fact that there are a few levels that have fantastic pacing and seem to be building to a crescendo that ... never happens. The game is great at building momentum, but fails to deliver in certain areas, such as one level where you fight your way through a warzone and hop into the back of an armored car, taking hold of the gun turret. Just as you're expecting to get into a huge, adrenaline-pumping shooting gallery, the game simply fades to black and you're in the next level, on foot. These issues sometimes threaten to drag down the game, but the speed and relentlessness of the combat remains a significant driving force. Crytek did an incredible job of making Crysis 2 feel like more of a shooter than it actually is, to the point where only the truly pedantic would have cause to be unsatisfied. It does a lot of things you've seen before, but it does them so much cooler than the average game that it feels like you're playing something far more original. Much has been made of the game's multiplayer and I have to say that, while I was initially unconvinced, the online content is far more engrossing than one might think. At its core -- it has to be said -- the game has been utterly, shamelessly lifted from Call of Duty. It has everything you've come to expect from a post-COD shooter -- persistent levels, kill streak rewards, perks -- and it even has the same fast paced kill/die/kill/die meat-grinder gameplay that Modern Warfarepopularized. The thing is -- though Crysis 2 is ostensibly Modern Warfare with sci-fi gadgets, it's a pretty damn good Modern Warfare with sci-fi gadgets.

Crysis 2 Official System Requirements

Minimum System Requirements:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2 Ghz, AMD Athlon 64 x2 2 Ghz or better

RAM: 2 GB of RAM

VGA: Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB of memory or higher; ATI/AMD Radeon 3850HD 512Mb RAM or higher

DX: DirectX 9.0c

OS: Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7, with the latest Service Pack http://gamesystemrequirements.com/ HDD: 9 GB

Sound: DirectX9c compatible

ODD: DVD-ROM with 8x speed

Network: Internet connection required for activation Recommended peripheral: Keyboard, mouse or Xbox 360 controller for Windows