Whatever happened to the damn good guy? I liked the damn good guy, the damn good guy was a…Damn. Good. Guy.

You’re probably wondering what I mean by “the damn good guy”. What I mean is pieces of entertainment that aren’t huge, massive, world changing, innovative behemoths that somehow seem to fail living up to the expectations of the creator. The damn good guy refers to pieces of media that are just enjoyable because they’re well put together, well written and don’t try to cast a net so wide and cast that they can’t possibly hope to be considered a success.

Example, Tomb Raider 2013. That was a good game, really good in fact. Solid gameplay/mechanics, great voice acting, very good atmosphere and was a nice long length. Square Enix however deemed the game a failure despite it selling a whopping 3.4 million units worldwide. Seriously Square? How big were your expectations of the game that you needed to re-release it for Playstation 4 and Xbox One just to beef up the sales? How much was the budget for this endeavour?

According to an article from Eurogamer.net the budget for Tomb Raider was $60 Million…HO-LY FUCK!!

I think we can all agree that’s pretty tall order to fill, a really tall order to fill. And there’s my point, set the bar too high and the chances of you hauling your arse over it decreases, don’t get me wrong I really enjoyed Tom Raider, but to have it deemed a failure due to unreasonable expectations just seems rude (for the lack of a better word), I’m no game designer but even I can see effort when it’s right in front of me.

Square sadly seemed to act like EA is constantly acting with their Battlefield franchise which ends up with a game that makes a huge amount of money and sells an insane amount of copies but is deems a failure anyway. Instead EA just end up aping Call of Duty in order to try and win over their audience, which they seem to keep failing at. These developers can clearly dominate in their fields of work but they’re tunnel-visioning so hard that they forget that they’ve still made a metric fuckton anyway. There’s nothing wrong with 2nd place is what I’m saying and there’s also nothing wrong with not releasing a game every fucking year, yeah I’m looking at you Assassin’s Creed, I love you but slow the hell down, you make tons of money with what you have maybe you should take the time to enjoy it? You know make some use of that company yacht you undoubtedly have, maybe take it for a sail and unwind?

See, this is why I love the damn good guy. The damn good guy gets their budget and knows exactly what to do with it, the damn good guy thought process I imagine would be something akin to this:

“Ok, I’ve been given $25,000,000 to make a piece of entertainment”

“My piece of entertainment will be about this”

“I will spend the money accordingly in all the necessary areas in order to make this piece of entertainment as appealing to its target audience as possible”

“The product has been released, sales figures are strong and we’ve made the budget back plus a little extra, even the reviews are positive I’m going to spend some time with my kids as I’ve been coming home late recently” 

The damn good guy thought process probably does not resemble,

“OHDEARGOD, WE’VE BEEN GIVEN $70,000,000 TO MAKE A PIECE OF ENTERTAINMENT, WE MUST BE BETTER THEN EVERYONE ELSE IN ORDER TO BECOME ANY KIND OF SUCCESS”

“But sir we’re making a ton of money anyway…”

“DAMMIT HENDERSON NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR YOUR INSANE RAMBLINGS ABOUT THIS MYTHICAL MONEY NONSENSE, WE MUST BEAT THE COMPETITION OR BE BRANDED AS FAILURES AND BE CAST OUT FOR ALL ETERNITY BY THE HUMAN RACE”

“Sir we’ve been getting ratings up in the 90% range…”

“WE NEED TO TRY AGAIN AT BEATING THEM, WE’VE ONLY GOT A FEW MINUTES”

At this point Henderson has defected to a Studio that isn’t staffed by impatient tunnel-visioning weirdos who scream a lot.

This is why we need to support the damn good guy, the damn good guy takes their time, evaluates their options and sets themselves a reasonable goal and when all is said and done, the result is damn good. The result is

• Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
• Solomon Kane
• Dishonoured
• Darkman
• Hellboy
• Dredd
• The A-Team (2010)
• The Grey,

Do you see what I’m driving at? Not to say that giant bits of game changing innovation are a bad thing, they can just get out of hand fast and end up bloated, fat and always hungry for more.

Bottom line, support the Damn Good Guy. Because he’s a damn good guy.

Windows 10 might have been provided free of charge to all who already had a licenced copy of Windows 7 or 8.1, but it seems that Microsoft might be looking at other ways to make money from the new OS.

The build 10565 of Windows 10 shows that Microsoft is beginning to experiment with placing advertisements for apps in the operation system. It’s somewhat discreet right now, being placed in the Start menu (even if in a prominent place under your most used apps list) and providing an option to turn it off but there’s no guarantee it will stay that way. To be fair, there’s also no guarantee that they won’t remove the adverts after a while either.

Given that Windows 10 tracks your data and interests as well, it’s probably likely that the suggestions will be somewhat related to what you already use. Although given past uses of ‘suggested’ content we’d be interested in… it could also just be a queue of things that we really are not interested in.

It remains to be seen whether or not this feature will stay in this form or if it will be expanded upon in some way. At least for now you can turn it off if you want to, but if you can stand it keep it on. After all, all companies need to make money somehow and one little ad won’t be too bad.

AMD have announced that their Q3 2015 period saw a $197 million net loss, and an operating loss of $158 million. The comparison of revenue loss between this time last year and now doesn’t look so good on paper either, it was $1.43 million at this point in 2014 while right now it’s $1.06 billion.

While this is the fourth straight quarterly loss for AMD, they do point out that the quarterly revenue has increased 13% between Q2 and Q3. There’s also a good reason for the figures being so low as well.

Recently the company lowered the prices of their older model GPUs to make room for all the new R5, R7 and R9 cards, which resulted in a write-down of around $65 million inventory. Thankfully the new cards are selling well enough that the graphics segment of the pie to be up 12% quarter-on-quarter.

Talking on the latest figures, Dr. Lisa Su (AMD president and chief executive) had this to say:

“AMD delivered double-digit percentage sequential revenue growth in both of our segments in the third quarter. We continue to take targeted actions to improve long-term financial performance, build great products and simplify our business model. The formation of a joint venture of our back-end manufacturing assets is a significant step towards achieving these goals and strengthening our balance sheet.”

Battleborn is soon going to enter a period of closed beta at the end of the month. Because of that registrations are now open so you can sign up to take part, if you get chosen.

Of course, being a closed beta you can expect it not to be fully bug-free quite yet. That is the purpose of alphas and betas after all, testing while giving a few a taste of the game in its almost-finished state so they can hopefully whip up some excitement and interest among their friends when they’re allowed to speak freely of their time in-game.

To register you first need a SHiFT account, and obviously you must also agree to the game’s NDA. This prevents players from capturing gameplay footage, livestreaming, posting images, or publicly discussing the tests online so you’ll need to keep certain things close to your chest until it expires. You also need to meet the minimum spec requirements:

OS: Windows 7 x64-Bit or Later

Processor: Intel Core2 Extreme CPU Q6850/ AMD A8-3870k (Quad Core CPU’s)

Memory: 6 GB

Hard Disk Space: 10 GB free

Video Memory: 2 GB

Video Card: AMD HD 7700/ NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 or better, PhysX support

Sound: DirectX 11 Compliant

If you’re up for it, head here to sign up for the Battleborn closed beta and keep your fingers crossed you get access.

Valve has removed the SteamOS icon from a batch of games compatible with Linux on Steam, meaning that Linux owners now cannot download those titles anymore.

Reportedly the reason behind the removal of the SteamOS icon from these games is because Valve had determined those games do not work properly with their new OS, and so ahead of the big launch of their new Steam Machine line have trimmed those games to avoid problems later on with games not working which could cause more work around a time they will be busy with the hardware launch.

Unfortunately because the Linux Tux was replaced earlier this year with the SteamOS icon, it does mean that regardless of whether or not a user is using SteamOS they cannot purchase and play these games any longer. However, games purchased before this removal can still apparently be downloaded and played as normal.

Steam Machines, Steam Link and Steam Controller all launch next month.