This week return with another look at the games we’re currently playing. We’re ignoring assassins in favour of being a pirate, wondering why Doctor Who would ever need to match three or more gems in a row and marvelling at the number of bugs in X Rebirth.

This week we’re taking a look at a classic FPS: AvP 2.

Developed by Monolith and released in 2001, it continued the model of the first that let you play through three separate campaigns as the Colonial Marines, Aliens and Predators. The game also had a rather fun multiplayer mode.

Just don’t mention the 2010 version.

This week we’ve been playing games again. I know, big shock.

• inFamous
• Lord of the Rings Online
• Age of Conan
• Guild Wars 2
• Everquest 2
• Star Trek Online
• Planetside 2
• Fastwer than Light
• Guns of Icarus Online
• Assassin’s Creed 2
• Grid 2
• Puzzles and Dragons
• Tiny Death Star
• Proteus
  This may not be a healthy number of gamers for two people to play in a fortnight.

This week we’re discussing what the future holds for games hardware.

What do the next generation of games consoles mean, and will they be a success? Is PC a better bet this time around, and what is Valve playing at with the Steam Box? Does anybody even want a PC under their TV?

This week we’ve talking about what we’ve been playing for the last couple of weeks:Batman: Arkham Origins

• The Stanley Parable
• Batman: Arkham Origins
• Kerbal Space Program Career Mode
• Planetside 2
• Path of Exile
• Guns of Icarus Online
• Assassin’s Creed: Revelations
• inFamous
   

This week we’re looking back at the current console generation and trying to work out if the exclusives alone justified buying one console or the other based on personal experiences playing these games. How good does a game have to be to justify a whole platform, and what have been the highlights of this generation?

This week we’re talking about more games.

Games we cover this week:

• Beyond: Two Souls and delivering babies,
• Guns of Icarus Online,
• GTA V,
• Assassin’s Creed Revelations,
• F1 2013,
• Planetside 2,
• Thomas was Alone.

I’m not a massive fan of the press, games or otherwise, being told they can’t report on something and it’s happened twice this week so far.

Last night at Midnight the BBC announced that two recovered Patrick Troughton Doctor Who stories were being released at that moment on iTunes. Everybody was happy, especially as it includes both The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear (one episode still missing but reconstructed), which sees first appearance of then Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart fight Yetis on the London Underground. They just don’t make TV like that anymore.

The dumb part of this story is that the press were told in the early afternoon and everybody was sworn to secrecy so that, presumably, the official announcement could be the second that they went up on iTunes. This of course didn’t work as expected as throughout the afternoon and evening leak after leak happened, some deliberately and some accidentally. Newspapers published stories early and pulled them, front pages were released on line and towards the end iTunes had the shows available early anyway. In the end we’re all happy that we have the episodes but was that wait really needed? Did it actually add anything to the level of anticipation?

Earlier on in the week Beyond: Two Souls released in the US (out today in the UK) and there was a review embargo until the day of release. Now my general rule is that if there is an embargo it means one of two things: The publisher doesn’t think the reviews will have any real affect no matter what they say (e.g. GTAV) or that they are worried that they will (Beyond). Now I get why in theory an embargo is good for games as otherwise there’s a race to get reviews up for that all important first published review for an anticipated game that will bring in a lot more clicks than otherwise, but release day embargos for games that are reviewing badly just stand as almost colluding with the publisher to not tell the public that maybe the game sucks, especially if they’ve purchased the game online because of the hype and it gets shipped out the day before anyway.

Now while pre-ordering games, especially one that was always going to have the same problems as the other David Cage games (bad writing, lack on interactivity) is always a bad idea, but the idea of the press agreeing to self-censorship in a way that is without a doubt at the detriment of their readers who have pre-ordered seems just wrong to me.

The press have little choice. You publish that review early and you’ve pissed off Sony, which means you might not receive early review copies of any other Sony games. This is a bad time to be risking that so it’s just not worth the risk. That isn’t to say that the reviews haven’t all been fair; it seems as if there has been no pressure at all to nudge the scores of the game upwards, but only to ensure that it came out on the day of release.

This happens all the time, and there’s no way to stop it. The best advice I can give is don’t pre-order based on hype if you haven’t liked the previous games by the developer.

This week we’re back with more of what we’ve been playing:

• Planetside 2
• Minecraft
• Grand Theft Auto 5
• Godus 1.3
• Defiance
• F1 2013
• Dishonored
  There was also a meet up in London around Eurogamer that meant that more beer was drunk than episodes recorded so we took last week off. I’d say sorry, but I had a brilliant steak in the other pub that didn’t throw us out for hogging the whole dinning area for the entire day. I’m shallow like that.

November is going to be an exciting month for new things. Will we see some Time War closure? No, Ecclestone wasn’t the Doctor then, which was made very clear all the way back in Rose. What does that mean?

There are also new consoles being released. They are exciting too I guess, even if they don’t ever have good Doctor Who games. Why are they trying to ride the Doctor Who hype with their suspiciously timed launches anyway? Which gets me thinking as to why haven’t they hidden a police box in Assassin’s Creed somewhere? I would.

Oh yeah, consoles. Fancy new processors that are as powerful as some PCs today! 5gb of RAM available to games! It’s such a massive improvement on the dinosaurs that are the 360 and PS3 that we can’t help but have better games as a result. Well, we will when they stop designing them to be cross platform with the last generation at least.

The thing is that my gaming PC is faster than these consoles, and has more memory. The PC is the obvious winner next generation, there’s nothing to hold it back.

Only it’s not that simple. Let’s check the Steam HW survey.

Let’s start with some facts before we get into rampant dodgy speculation. In order to support 5gb of memory being available to games you need a 64bit operating system. A quick look at the survey for September 2013 reveals the following:

Limiting my data to OSs that are greater than 1% of the sample size we find that 12.83% are on 32bit Windows 7. 6.96% are still on 32bit Windows XP (and due to become a 100% zombie Trojan platform in a few months) while 2.07% are still on Vista 32bit. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that makes 21.86% of PCs that use Steam can’t access more than a couple of gig of memory. Don’t they know that they are wasting so much of their PCs power? We can check that by looking at how much memory is reported on the survey:

If we total up those numbers for 4gb of RAM and below we get a staggering 53.67% of PCs sampled by Steam don’t have the memory available for a fully maxed out next generation console game. These numbers make the 64bit OS stat make sense, there’s no need for these users to upgrade their OS to 64bit. It also means that a lot of users are running a 64bit OS with no real benefit.

The thing that got me thinking about this was the beta for Battlefield 4, which is 64bit only. The released game will have a 32bit version as well, but assuming that the next generation console version uses all of the RAM it physically can then the 32bit PC version has to be lower quality. The 64bit version can beat the consoles on memory no problem, nearly half of PCs have more memory than them.

This gives developers an interesting quandary. Do they strive to make the PC the best version possible, or do they aim at a full half of the market that can’t fit all of those lovely high res textures into memory? Will they come up with a scaling solution that works out what they can do automatically? Or will we just see better versions of the last gen versions of the games for a while and perhaps less PC ports after that?

There is a serious point to this mindless speculation, which is that PCs have stagnated somewhat recently. There’s been no real drive to push PCs beyond the 32bit barrier as most people really don’t need 4gb or more of memory in their everyday usage and most people don’t need a quad core monster processor to use IE and run Word. Gamers are different, but 50% of gamers aren’t waiting to upgrade their PCs when the next gen consoles come out.

The assumption that the PC is going to be the best version of games still this generation is not exactly guaranteed to be true. Some games will be better, but I think some will be worse as publishers won’t want to throw away half of the potential market.