New GPUs for the Holidays, Insight into next year's PC Hardware

Sorry I missed last week, had too much going on to write an article. Hope you guys understand.

It's been a pretty good week for PC Hardware, as a new card was just released by AMD in time for the holidays and some insight into what Nvidia's been working on with HBM 2.0 to release next year. It's been a good ride this week, so without further ado let's get into some of this.

AMD just released a 'new' card into their r9 300 series family, the r9 380x. As you would expect from the name, it's a little better than the r9 380, and not as good as the r9 390. That's to be expected with the starting price of the card at $230. Very solid pricing, as every one of these 380x cards comes with a 4gb GDDR5 memory standard, whereas with the previous r9 380s and GTX 960s we saw a lot of 2gb variants floating around.

Checking out this graph (thank you Anandtech), we can see that the new r9 380x is definitely a refresh of the r9 280x, with the 380x boasting the same amount of texture units as the 280x. However, it features an extra gig of GDDR5 memory standard over the 280x and a much smaller power draw over the 280x.

If you're interested in purchasing the r9 380x, perhaps for the holidays or that you need a mid-range upgrade, at the moment there are a couple different options. You got two XFX versions of the card to choose from, the standard Double-Dissipation edition for $230 and a Black Edition factory overclocked (40mhz higher than stock XFX card) version for $250. You have a Gigabyte Windforce version at the standard $230, a Sapphire Nitro Dual X version for $230, a Powercolor version for $230, and two ASUS Strix versions priced at $240 and $260 (no MSI Twin Frozr?). Definitely not a bad selection.

In Team Green news, Nvidia unveiled plans for their next generation of cards. Their Pascal series, set to succeed their Maxwell power-saving series (the 900 cards) is featuring HBM 2.0. HBM stands for High-Bandwidth Memory and is a faster, lightweight, and much more efficient memory solution than the standard GDDR5 memory we've been using for a while now in most GPUs. HBM is not only faster, but it's able to support a higher bandwidth than GDDR5 and takes up much less space on the PCB board, allowing for smaller versions of cards to card out. You can definitely see the advantage of taking up smaller space when you look at AMD's HBM 1.0 r9 Fury Nano, which is only 6" long and can fit in smaller form factor cases.

Bunch of information I'm too lazy to look up the definitions of

HBM 2.0 overcomes the 4gb memory limitation of HBM 1.0, and Nvidia plans to take full advantage of this because they unveiled plans for 16gb of HBM targetting 1 tb/s bandwidth. Now, I'm pretty certain that we'll never fully utilize THAT much VRAM for gaming, and it's a pretty good possibility that that kind of high-end card might not even be available at launch with the other mid-range series cards, but as an enthusiast card and a card for 3d rendering and modelling, it's pretty dank.

Even though there's only really been two things going on in PC Hardware this week, that's still pretty good considering we sometimes go weeks and weeks without official information regarding PC Hardware/Software. With Thanksgiving coming up (or should I say Black Friday/Cyber Monday), the holidays are fast approaching. Getting something for yourself? Buying some hardware for someone you know? Leave a comment or tweet at me, I'd love to know. Have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Minecraft Story Mode Review

I usually don't do this, but for this week's blog I'm going to actually be critically analyzing and reviewing a game for the first time ever. From gameplay, to "story", to action, to overall replayability, etc. I'm going all out for this one, hope you guys enjoy this.

What happens when a huge corporation makes a deal with a good company to forcefully push out a game no one wanted? Minecraft Story Mode.

Minecraft Story Mode is essentially a cash-grab by both Microsoft and famed Telltale Games masked as an attempt to add story to a pre-existing Minecraft franchise. It's a strange idea to begin with, as Minecraft never had a need for a story, it's just a sandbox game about building things with no (real) goal to it. But you would assume that Telltale, a company known for it's story elements in gameplay, would be able to save this game, right? Right?

Superb Recreation of Minecraft on a new, optimized engine.

So right off the bat let me get this out of the way, Telltale Games did an amazing, superb job of replicating the Minecraft feel of the game even though the game runs off a different engine. The attention to detail is superb as almost every single thing about this game, from actions, building, hell even the redstone engineered mechanisms in the background all look and stay 100% true to Minecraft, and that's something I have to give credit for. But that's pretty much it for the pros of the game.

The story is... fucking weird. It's actually pretty cringy. You as the player take control of either a male or female Jessie. You and your two friends Axel and Olivia are (I guess?) the laughingstock underdogs of the town. You start the game heading out to a building competition where you and your two friends plan to build a structure to win this competition to have their structure shown at Endercon.

Right off the bat in the first 5 minutes of the game you can tell something is off. You may be asking yourself: 'Why the hell would I care about a building competition? Is this the best you could come up with Telltale? A minecraft town and a building competition?' All of which are completely legitimate questions, but to no answers, I'm afraid.

Well anyways, you get to the competition, and there's a bunch of stereotypical bullies who call your crew "losers" like 20 times in a 2-minute time span making you feel like you're back in the 1990s. You build and win the competition, get lost in the woods, get saved by an average character named Petra. Later she makes a deal with a shady guy who looks like a rapist and ends up getting had, so you hunt him down to get her item back only to find the guy does some other shady shit with wizardry and potions and shit. Then you meet this guy who's in some elite order, then you find out the shady wizard guy was originally part of that order but isn't anymore, he sets loose this ender thing, then you get away from it by running through a nether portal, then start an "epic" quest to save the world.

Like I said, it's fucking weird. The story literally feels as if you set down a whopping 4 interns in a conference room, locked them in, and told them they needed a full-fledged story in one hour or they would be fired.

"What does Minecraft have, QUICK!"

"It has potions and enchanting"

"We'll put in a wizard!"

"There's an Ender Dragon"

"Put in an Order of Knights! They slay dragons!"

"There's a Nether Realm boss!"

"Put in a creature that kinda comes from there!"

Seriously this is a terribly written story, and I didn't even mention Episode 2 for the sake of keeping the review short, but let's just say it's just as, if not more underwhelming than Episode 1.

Mash Q or A if you're using a controller to win.

As for gameplay, it's even worse than something like Walking Dead. The walking around portions are extremely pointless, half the time you're just mashing the A button to get through the crappy building montage of whatever the characters are doing, and the choices pretty much don't impact anything, except for a few minute details. Now to be fair, that's true for all Telltale games, but at least in the Walking Dead, there were memorable characters, a dynamic relationship between the protagonists (Lee and Clementine), and subplots brewing between characters along with the regular plot going which made it feel like an actual story even if there wasn't that much to the gameplay. None of which is present in Minecraft Story Mode.

There's nothing enjoyable about this game, besides mashing the A button to continue through the game, making mundane dialog choices to characters you don't like, then seeing those characters forcefully fight for no reason at all. In the off chance you even got through the story once it isn't like Walking Dead where the story's so good you can ride along again. There's no real replayability to this game, because, again, the choices don't matter at all, even more than in previous Telltale titles.

Let me give you an example of such a thing. At the end of Episode 1, you're asked to either find the engineer person in the Order or go find the demolitions expert. But, no matter what choice you choose, you find them and bring them back only to realize the other character brought back the other choice in Episode 2! So it literally doesn't matter who you choose because they both end up meeting up anyways. Pointless!

And that's all I really gotta say about it, there's nothing really more to say than that this game is corporate bullshit aimed to make money first rather than create a decent, coherent piece of art that stands with the other games of this year. If I had to rate this game, I'd give it a 2/10, mostly because every character made me cringe in some way, shape, or form. I wouldn't wish this game on my worse enemy. Definitely stay away at all costs.