Windows 10

Halo 5 is coming to Windows… kinda

by

Yep, not the entirety of Halo 5 but it’s forge.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re bringing this same spirit of creation and collaboration to the PC later this year with Forge – Halo 5: Guardians Edition for Windows 10. Best of all? It will be absolutely free. In addition to the evolutions already present in the mode on Xbox One, Forge – Halo 5: Guardians Edition for Windows 10 will include some exciting new features designed specifically with PC users in mind, including:

  • Keyboard & Mouse Support – For the first time ever, Forgers will have the option of using a keyboard & mouse allowing for more precision control than ever before.
  • Increased Resolution – Support for multiple resolutions including 4k.
  • Test and Play with Friends – Enlist the help of Friends to help build, test, and play your Forge creations on Windows 10.

  • Build on Windows 10 and Publish to Xbox One – Experiences built on Windows 10 can be published to and played on Xbox One, opening the doors for countless new experiences to be enjoyed by players all over the world.

Wow! You mean a keyboard and mouse have more precision than a controller? Wow, congrats Microsoft… It only took you guys over a decade and a half to figure that one out but, better late than never right?

It’s a good thing I’m not really interested in the Halo series, because once again they’re making Halo an exclusive to the Windows 10 platform. Much like when Halo was released during the Vista era in an attempt to convince users to upgrade from XP. Sorry, but El Dewrito kinda already beat you guys. Plus it’s not limited by what version of Windows you run. 😛 Watch, Microsoft will probably come along and find some way to remove them from the face of the earth…

Farewell to Project Spark

by
The Grim Clipper
The Grim Clipper eagerly waiting to touch Microsoft’s next product.

I remember when a former co-worker of mine tried to get me to check out Project Spark. It was a Windows 8/XBone exclusive, and it didn’t strike me as a good reason to ditch Windows 7 (like most OS exclusives being released today). Looks like I’m not really missing out on it either since Microsoft and the studio responsible for this game will be pulling the plug on it.

“This was an extremely difficult decision for our team that we do not take lightly,” Team Dakota community manager Thomas Gratz said in a statement. “When Project Spark transitioned away from active development last fall, many of our team members moved to other projects within Microsoft Studios. While this means there have been no layoffs at Microsoft, it also means it’s simply no longer feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping Project Spark up and running with meaningful updates and bug fixes, so we have come to this hard decision.”

I’m not sure about the logic behind this. There are games on other platforms that haven’t been touched in years by developers… so why does Project Spark have to be taken off the market? Seems rather short sided to me, and good reasoning not to back anything heavily backed by Microsoft especially going by their track record. Giving up on their smartphone, giving up on Win 8 and going straight to 10, giving up on shipping a Kinect with the XBone because of the creepy requirements, closing the studio responsible for Fable after basically telling them to completely rewrite the new fable, oh… and of course:

ss-grim-reaper

Of course this doesn’t bother me at all. I learned a long time ago not to invest too heavily into Microsoft’s products, it’s much more painless that way.

I’m not sure this is how Microsoft wanted to advertise their latest OS

by

One of the many reasons I’ve held off from upgrading to Windows 10 is the fact that I don’t have control over when updates occur. Some say that it isn’t so bad, but clearly they haven’t been in the middle of something when it decides that it wants to restart. Some strange occurrences have been taking place recently, from upgrade prompts showing up on local weather reports to PC Gaming streamers getting hit with updates, Microsoft is getting more of the wrong publicity.

Windows-10-Flom-compressor

This guy (who already runs Windows 10) had his game session interrupted by an update even after changing the settings. I would be seriously pissed if that happened to me, especially if I was working on a project or Streaming for my friends. Of course, we all know Microsoft’s love for PC at this point, otherwise this would have been fixed before or not long after release.

Today’s weather forecast: UPGRADE BITCH!!!!

As I’ve said before, I’m not upgrading until they get rid of that problem, and a bunch of other problems… Until then Windows 7 and CentOS work swimmingly.

Tomb Raider: Linux vs Windows

by

Gaming On Linux did a benchmark comparison between Linux and Windows 10 showing off framerate differences.

It’s kind of depressing. Great that people on Linux have access to these titles, but sad that the OpenGL optimization can be flat out sucky. I have noticed this with most games on Linux. And it’s one of the reasons why I still keep Win 7 on my system, especially since I like to record my gameplays for video projects, and the better the framerate the better the video output… those numbers aren’t good. We need games to move over to Vulkan… badly. We don’t want Microsoft to control our PC gaming realm, and Linux needs to fight the good fight.

Running Ubuntu on Windows 10 will be a thing

by

Winbuntu

I thought it was already a thing if you bothered with VM’s and were curious to see what Ubuntu was like, but apparently Canonical and Microsoft are partnering together to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10, no VM required.

With this new addition, Ubuntu users will be able to run Ubuntu simultaneously with Windows. This will not be in a virtual machine, but as an integrated part of Windows 10.

Ok, so why exactly are they doing this?

Canonical and Microsoft are doing this because Ubuntu on Windows’ target audience is developers, not desktop users. In particular, as Microsoft and Canonical continue to work more closely together on cloud projects, I expect to find tools that will make it easy for programmers to use Ubuntu to write programs for Ubuntu on the Azure cloud.

So is this MS-Linux? No. Is it a major step forward in the integration of Windows and Linux on the developer desktop? Yes, yes it is.

BS. People have been saying for years that Ubuntu is the Windows of Linux, this just confirms it. 😛

It also seems unlikely that Ubuntu will be bringing its Unity interface with it. Instead the focus will be on Bash and other CLI tools, such as make, gawk and grep.

lol yes. Unity and Microsoft’s new definition of the desktop would go hand in hand actually In the sense that I hated Unity with a passion, and despise Microsoft’s hardon for tiles. ffs they still exist in Windows 10’s start menu. I think I know why they’re saying this will be the last Windows, they’re going to call their next OS Microsoft Tiles, and Ubuntu will be there to help make it shittier with Unity.

Oh look, another Microsoft post.

by

Microsoft

Well, it must be that time of the year again where Microsoft dusts off the Phil Spencer bot to talk about how totally involved Microsoft wants to be in the PC Gaming market. Or sorry… I mean how totally involved Microsoft wants everyone to move to Windows 10 to partake in GFWL 2.0

PC Gamer held an interview with ol Phil, the guy known for telling people about their focus on engaging PC Gamers since 2014 and not really doing much about it… UNTIL NOW!

I look at the work we’re doing on the platform as an enabler for us becoming relevant in PC gaming.

Oops, he misspoke. Let me correct that:

I look at the work we’re doing on the platform as an enabler for us becoming relevant in PC gaming… By trying to make Windows 10 and our App Store relevant.

Fixed for accuracy.

There are games I was talking about earlier, like Ashes of the Singularity, a fast-paced RTS game—probably not the best controller game, and I want to make sure those games are great.

Don’t worry Phil. I hear Ashes of the Singularity runs great with the Steam Controller, even if you have a nonsteam version! You just need the exe and…. oh right.

What I want to make sure is that gamers on our platforms, you feel like you have access to as many games as you can, and as a developer you feel like you have the tools and service to reach as many gamers as you can.

As usual Microsoft continues to be unfashionably late to the party. Steam kinda beat you to that… years ago. They even tried to get you guys on board and you pretty much laughed at them and went off doing your own thing. Hell, GOG’s store is becoming great enough to compete with Steam. Meaning even they can go to town bitchslapping your sorry excuse for a store.

I think there are a real two factors that today differentiate what I consider PC and console gaming. One is input. We’ve said we’re going to support keyboard and mouse on console, and clearly you can plug a controller into a PC, so that’s not a trump card, but PC games have to—PC games can support keyboard and mouse, console games today usually don’t and for the most part can’t. The other thing is the play space itself. I’m usually closer to my monitor, it’s a smaller screen. All these are ‘usually’s. And my TV experience on a console, I’m further away, it’s more of a communal play experience. If I take my PC and I HDMI it into my television, and I use my wireless dongle to play with controllers, is it now a console or a PC?

I gotta hand it to him. He really has a way of stating the obvious. He sounds like he could just empty his bowels in amazement if he also found out you could store more than 1 TB of games on the average PC Master Race gamers system.

I think you could kind of get into scenarios where the hardware specs kind of overlap, probably at the fundamental level, or the hardware capabilities overlap enough where the differentiation kind of blurs. But the console experience is a dedicated gaming hardware device that is very appliance-like, instant on, ability to basically do one thing, which is play games, very well.

Really? Fascinating. Lots of people have instant on gaming systems these days too thanks to SSD’s. They make great boot drives, and you can even have more than one mechanical hard drive for storage. Mindblowing amirite?

PC is a multi-purpose device. I love that people play games on their PC. You see a ton of people playing games, even on Windows 10 already.

Good job! Gotta shoehorn Windows 10 in there! After all you guys have been doing a bang up job trying to shoehorn it into peoples Windows 7/8 updates.

But it also can do Outlook and load Photoshop and browse the web. So there are some fundamental differences about the hardware between the two that I think will always mean there are differences between console and PC gaming, and I want to embrace those differences, not try to get rid of them.

YouDontSayBlackWithTextSS

Thanks for clarifying. I was worried you were going to take away the ability to use Photoshop and the internet etc etc etc. I cried for weeks mourning the possible loss and much like a shining beacon of wisdom you confirmed that you are going to let us do computer things on our computers. Thank you Microsoft, thank you…

We talked about Halo Wars, we’ve talked about things that… it’s not a, ‘hey, we’re gonna wait and see.’ We’re in, right. We are in, and we want to make sure that PC gamers are able to play PC games that we can go build. I love investing more in PC games. It would be nice to invest in some very tried-and-true PC genres when we think about that, of, ‘hey, let’s go and build some great PC games as part of our portfolio.’ But no, the Quantum Break thing is definitely not a, ‘hey, we’re gonna try this out and see how it does.’ From the top of the company on down, we’re committed to making sure gaming is great on Windows, and we think first-party content has a role to play there.

Gaming was great on Windows. Anyone remember how often Microsoft released new versions of Direct X? From 1995 to 2003 we went from Direct X 1.0 to Direct X 9.0b. Then they kept using 9.0c for from 2004 to 2008 because gamers had better performance on 9c than 10 under Vista, which was maintained between 2006 to 2009. Then from 2009 to 2013 they developed Direct X 11. Then in 2015 they announced Direct X 12 because they needed something new to move people to a shitty operating system so that people could forget about Windows 8. Yeah, PC Gaming is important to Microsoft these days. We went from having a new version practically every year to having to run on the same API’s for over a decade. I feel your love Microsoft…

Phil: Yeah, well, we obviously have the same list, and maybe even a little longer than what the community has brought up around Rise of the Tomb Raider. Certain things will happen very quickly in terms of, like, mGPU support and stuff where there’s no policy, it’s just us working through the timeline of implementation. VSync lock, kind of the same thing. There’s specific reasons that it’s there, but it’s not something that’s kind of a religion on our side that this has to work. Modding, we’re focused on modding even on console with, like, Fallout. We obviously own Minecraft, we understand the importance of modding, and making sure that we support that in the PC ecosystem is critical to UWA success. Our goal is to make UWP [Universal Windows Platform] the best platform for game developers and gamers to support, but we know we’ve got room to grow.

Things would go better for Microsoft if they didn’t try to shove people into their own little world. Heck, even PlayStation is finally jumping on the Streaming bandwagon. Soon people will be able to stream their PlayStation games onto Windows and even Mac (No love for Linux though), and with Steam we already have the option of streaming from one system to another regardless of OS. Meanwhile you have to own Windows 10 if you want to stream your games from the XBone.

They are not Pro PC Gamer, they’re pro PC Gamer for Windows 10… and the fact that they’re using games like Gears Of War to lure people over to their new OS is absurd. They pulled this shit with Halo back in the Vista days and it failed miserably. Microsoft never learns.

Windows 10 will become a recommended update in 2016

by

Windows 10 Wallpaper HD

In an attempt for Microsoft to become the new Borg, next year Microsoft will be adding Windows 10 to the recommended list of updates for Windows 10. They have done this recently as a “fluke” but have since moved the goalpost until 2016.

Adding this upgrade to the recommended list will automatically download it to your system if it is capable of running Win 10. It’s a waste of space and bandwidth to do it this way, but Microsoft really wants people to flock into their Garden Of Eden Cortana.

My thoughts on Windows 10: Chapter One

by

I’ve been keeping up on the news regarding Windows 10 and so far I haven’t been really impressed. One of the things I dislike about it is the fact that you can’t turn off Windows Update unless you have the business version of the OS. This could get annoying if you’re writing a document, working on a project, chatting, playing a game etc as there seems to be no way to postpone the process.

Another problem is datacaps and internet connections in rural areas as people are finding out.

Consumer groups have slammed Microsoft for its policy of forced updates for Windows 10, which is hitting customers in remote locations with massive bill shocks by blowing out their data caps.

But they warn bill shock may affect many more customers, regardless of where they are located. And, with many customers yet to receive their monthly internet bills, the full extent of the problem may not yet be apparent.

Maureen Hilyard, an internet user in the Cook Islands, an autonomous region associated with New Zealand, claims she faces a bill as much as $NZ600 ($A532) for the month of August, thanks to Windows 10 automatic updates.

I’ve never even thought about this before. But because of the way Microsoft wants to roll out updates now, it’s pretty much mandatory to have an internet connection and a good one at that. Why? With Linux and older versions of Windows this wasn’t a requirement, and I don’t see how Microsoft can think this will be a good idea. I’ve been having customers ask me about Windows 10 and so far everything that I’ve told them about has made them either stick with older versions of Windows, or contemplate getting a tablet or switching to Mac, and in semi-rare cases consider Linux.

I remember when they rolled out the XBox One it was supposed to be an online 24/7 console, and if you lost the internet connection you wouldn’t be able to play any of your games. I also remember they got enough flak for that decision. Microsoft has to get it together and realize that yes we have the technology and the internet connections to pull this off, but people don’t always have the access or the money to make it work.

Let the butthurt begin: XBox Live will be free for PC gamers on Windows 10

by

Yep, that’s not a typo. Microsoft is making XBox Live a free thing for Windows 10 users.

Now, it may seem unfair that the XBox users have to pay and PC gamers don’t. However they did make the mistake choice of buying the console all ready and willing. Whereas on PC you have to pick and choose the best hardware for your gaming experience instead of just getting it all in one box. Hell even choosing between GPU’s, processors, ram etc takes more thought than choosing between the XBox One or the PS4. Microsoft also has to apologize for the horror that was Windows 8 by luring people to Windows 10 with Direct X 12 and “Hey! We’re finally thinking about you PC Gamers! So here’s some free XBox Live!”

Of course I have no intention of using XBox Live let alone jumping to Windows 10 on launch day. I’ll do what I’ve always done and let the others beat the hell out of it until I find a reason to upgrade. In the meantime Win 7 and Linux are the way to go for what I do.