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So, soon the latest Far Cry game will be out. Far Cry Primal takes everything back to the beginnings of human society, with the emphasis put onto whatever you can craft with your hands, tribal decor and wild animal companions. And to promote the game which will release at the end of February, Ubisoft are running a contest for one lucky winner and a friend to… spend a night in a cave.
… No. Seriously. I’m not making this up.
The cave itself is located in France in the Pyrénées area and apparently staying in the cave isn’t cheap. Here’s the layout of the trip’s events:
Day 1 – Sunday January 30th 2016: travel from the airport nearby residency place to Lourdes-Tarbes Airport, France.
Night 1- Sunday January 30th 2016: stay in an hotel in Lourdes city.
Day 2 – Monday February 1st 2016: transportation by car to the cave and survival training (discovery of techniques and methods in the wildlife).
Night 2 – Monday February 1st 2016: night in the cave.
Day 3 – Tuesday February 2nd 2016: travel back (transportation from the cave to the airport/train station + flight/train).
So, a little bit more than just plonking two people in a cave for a night. All costs for accomodation, travel, transport and catering costs are being paid for by the sponsor and Ubisoft have estimated it’ll cost €2,800 which is a fair bit.
If this sounds like your cup of tea then you can enter their prize draw by tweeting the official Far Cry Primal Twitter with the #cavebnb tag and briefly saying why you should win the contest. Simple.
With all the VR hype that’s going around right now, it’s easy to forget that honestly this generation of VR headsets is only just beginning. No matter how excited we are for them, there are going to be things that they could do a lot better.
Case in point, a presentation delivered by Microsoft’s Bruce Harris from the Tel Aviv business event about their upcoming Hololens suggested that its battery life really isn’t going to be that long. It’s going to have one of just 5.5 hours, but that’s only if you’re doing things like reading e-mail or messing around with Word documents. With more “intensive use” the battery will only last an estimated 2.5 hours. That includes all the 3D demonstrations of the headset’s use that Microsoft has been using as their big wow factor at events.
There was a recording of the presentation up on Youtube earlier, but it’s already been taken down. Still, it’s interesting information to have because the HoloLens is not one of the headsets we’ve had a lot of details about so far. Harris also pointed out that the device has “no option for a wired connection” so it seems that you can’t even choose to charge it up while you use it.
Given that the HoloLens doesn’t have a wired connection option and again the fact that VR tech is only just taking off right now, its short battery life is not really an unexpected thing. It just feels a little bit limiting that the really cool stuff can only be played with for so long before you need to recharge it.
Fallout 4 was wildly popular when it launched, and it still is. Maybe the hype’s died down a little but it’s still a very well-played game right now. Bethesda knows how to hold an audience. However, the game is still prone to strange and amusing bugs from time to time because… well, it’s a Bethesda game.
If you’re opted into Steam’s beta updates feature though, you’ll be pleased to know that the next patch is being implemented to rid the game of more bugs as well as bringing in some new options such as a status menu for your settlers.
The full patch notes can be discovered over on the relevant topic at the Bethesda forums, but a number of things stand out for me because of how I play the game. As well as the afore-mentioned menu snapping for settlement building parts has been made a bit easier, and their handling with a gamepad smoother. There’s also been a fix for NPCs getting stuck in Power Armour which I’m hoping means I can recover the one set that I had a settler climb into who has so far refused to get out. The bug that causes settler numbers to display incorrectly has also been fixed, and while it doesn’t specifically mention the Pipboy that is the only place I can think of that the numbers ever displayed inaccurately.
Of course, I play around with Fallout 4’s settlement building a lot so maybe none of this means as much to you. If you’re the quest completer sort then this patch also comes with a long list of quest bug fixes, including some that stopped quests getting completed and some that would lose companion options or even in once case caused Dogmeat to get stuck in a location if he was your companion.
If you want to give it a go but aren’t opted into the beta updates then follow these steps:
Log into Steam
Right click on Fallout 4 in your Library
Select Settings
Select Betas
Select Beta Update from the drop down menu
Select OK.
Wait a few minutes and Fallout 4 should update.
Running the same process and opting out on the drop down should pull you back out if you want to reverse it.
Otherwise safe to say this patch will come out of beta soon enough and fix the bugs for those of us who don’t wish to opt into the beta update program.
Everyone likes freebies, and one of the things I most often hear when discussing the quality of games nowadays is that people wish the day of the demo would return. People like to try before they buy and that is fair enough.
One of the closest modern equivalents right now is the odd free weekend that some developers give on Steam for their games, and right now the developers of one game are not only letting people try their game for free – if you do try you get to keep it. Not bad.
Consortium is an immersive sim set on an airship in the near future, your choices matter and the game itself will react to the decisions and moves you make. Feedback is mostly positive as well, so this seems like a very good deal.
Of course, there is a reason for this free weekend and that comes in the form of the game’s sequel Consortium: The Tower, for which developer Interdimensional Games will be launching a Kickstarter campaign tomorrow.
Either way, free is free and this looks like a good one to pick up. If you’re interested, head on over to the Steam page for the game now.
Time was that Solid State Drives were a bit of a compromise. What you gained in speed and safety due to the lack of moving parts and general snappiness of a fully chip-based approach, you lost in capacity – Solid State Drives simply couldn't hold Terabytes of data like classic Hard Drives. Well, thanks to the latest offering from Fixstars, that may soon no longer be the case.
Introducing the new Fixstars SSD-13000M, a new 2.5-inch Solid State Drive capable of holding a whopping 13TB of capacity, making it the biggest SSD in the world at the time of writing. To give some perspective of just how much data that is, you could fit 2,800 full-size DVDs on just one of these monsters (finally, a drive big enough to hold all my video editing content! – Digmbot), though the company also offers a less-expensive model released at the same time with a slightly lower 10TB capacity.
Both drives offer read speeds of up to 540MB/s and sequential writes of up to 520MB/s, which means theoretically you could fill just one of those Terrabytes in just 33 minutes and 37 seconds if you've got huge amounts of data to store at once.
Of course, writing huge amounts of data to a drive at once can severely reduce it's lifespan. However, Satoshi Miki, CEO of Fixstars, commented: "The Fixstars SSD series has been highly regarded for their distinct reliability on steady read/write performance that lasts over time." To this end the drives are temperature-controlled to reduce the amount of heat typically generated when a drive is put under heavy load, preventing heat damage; while the drives offer an optional high durability mode that allows users to cut the storage in half in return for a claimed three times the longevity (so you end up with just 6.5TB usable space, but it will live far longer).
Naturally, a drive like this is going to be expensive; and the target market for this high-capacity SSD is more tailored towards the enterprise; and for tasks such as heavy-duty video processing. The SSD-13000M's expected retail price in America, where it launches by the end of Febuary 2016, is an eye-watering $13,000 – that's a grand a Terrabyte! This equates to about £9,000 for us British folk, although everything Hardware tends to command a higher premium when it reaches these shores, so take that estimate with a pinch of salt – especially as prices and availability outside the US are yet to be confirmed.
