The
Subnautica website now offers "earliest
access" to
Subnautica, as the struggle to find the proper language for
the sale of work-in-progress games continues (thanks
Rock, Paper, Shotgun). This carries a $35.00 price tag, and as their
terminology implies, they are not touting this as a polished release at this
point:
Hold it right there! Do you like seeing games when they are broken,
buggy, and barely functional? Do you like seeing the gritty, gross guts of game
development laid bare? If the answer is no, bash that browser back button! If
the answer is yes, welcome: We’ve got a treat for you. Hold your breath, and
come for a dive…
AMD brags about the Mantle API support for
Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond
Earth in their
just-released beta
Catalyst drivers, touting a 0.5 FPS advantage running the strategy game at
3840x2160 on a Radeon R9 290X 8GB accelerator compared to a GeForce GTX 980,
claiming this minute advantage places them "over a year ahead of other graphics
companies in delivering high-throughput, high-efficiency graphics to gamers and
developers." Here's the justification for that claim:
In Sid Meier's
Civilization®: Beyond Earth™ internal benchmark test at 3840x2160, the AMD
Radeon™ R9 290X 8GB with Mantle outperforms the GeForce GTX 980 with DirectX®
11, NVIDIA's highest-performing single-GPU graphics card as of October 20, 2014,
by 45.38 average FPS to 44.89 average FPS using the Ultra in-game preset with
8xAA. Test system: Intel Core i7-4960X, 16GB DDR3-1866, Asus SABERTOOTH X79,
Windows 8.1 x64, AMD Catalyst™ 14.9.2 Beta and ForceWare 344.16 WHQL.
According to Valve, there are the 10 top-selling games on
Steam last week:
- Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth
- Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
- PAYDAY 2
- Football Manager 2015
- Arma III
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
- Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
- Saints Row Franchise Pack
- DayZ
- Metro Redux
It's the bye week for the Giants, which takes some of the drama out of the NFL
for me this week. Speaking of taking something out of the NFL, another crap game
is currently underway in London today (three of the last four games there were
won by at least 24 points). The second half may make for a better contest, but
pitting two of the league's most erratic teams against each other was an odd
choice for this game. I'm fascinated by how the league seems to think quantity
over quality will help it expand. Most Thursday night games suck, most London
games suck, so the solution has been to double the number of each over the past
few years.
R.I.P.:
Cream bassist Jack Bruce dies.
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