General Gaming Article

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• Velocity Micro Raptor MultiPlex XL Review
• Road to Redemption? EA Eliminates Unpopular Online Pass Program
• MiniX Neo X5 Review
• David Gerrold Tries Kickstarting "Star Wolf" Novels to Television
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Still Headed for a May 23 Release
• Newegg Daily Deals: Casing the Best Bargains
• Lenovo, Best Buy Now Accepting Pre-orders for IdeaPad Yoga 11s Convertible
• Steam Trading Cards Reward Gamers with DLC and Game Coupons

Velocity Micro Raptor MultiPlex XL Review Posted: 16 May 2013 02:30 PM PDT Is there still room for big a HTCP? It's hard to talk about the Velocity Micro MultiPlex machine without thinking back more than 15 years ago, to the earliest days of "PC-TVs" and "PC Theaters." Back in the late 1990s, vendors such as Compaq and Gateway were pushing Pentium II–based PCs capable of watching DVDs, displaying electronic programming guides, and browsing the Internet, along with other futuristic capabilities, on gigantic 36-inch CRT televisions (we say that both literally and sarcastically). The MultiPlex is a traditional HTPC, but fully capable of playing Big Picture Steam games, too. In comparison to those early pioneers of living room PCs, the Velocity Micro MultiPlex is like a starship dropping out of warp speed while you look on from a covered wagon trying to get over Donner Pass without having to eat your fellow travelers. The MultiPlex chassis harkens back to those early PC-TVs, but rather than sporting a 266MHz Pentium II, a whopping 2GB hard drive, 32MB of RAM, and an analog TV tuner, the MultiPlex is pretty much state-of-the-art: liquid-cooled Core i7-3770K clocked up to 4.3GHz, 16GB of DDR3/2000, a GeForce GTX 680, 240GB SSD, and 3.6TB of RAID 5 storage. Besides Gigabit and 802.11n, and the Blu-ray drive, Velocity Micro opted for a Ceton quad-channel CableCARD tuner to help fill that massive RAID 5 array. That RAID array, for the record, is made up of three 2TB WD Caviar Black drives. If one drive fails, you won't lose it all—we're just not so sure we'd care if we lost it, though. Since the MultiPlex is intended to quietly sit in the living room sucking up television through the Ceton card, a drive failure wiping out, say, every episode of Glee or The Walking Dead, wouldn't be as bad as losing 2TB of your family videos and pics. Frankly, we think that a straight 6TB JBOD array would be just fine on a PVR box, but if you do intend to store your memories on the machine, the RAID 5 is warranted. Performance of the box was in line with our expectations. Obviously, up against our zero-point system's hexa-core and dual-GPU setup, it's no contest. But against HTPC/gaming boxes like Digital Storm's Bolt and Falcon Northwest's Tiki, it's pretty much a tie, as all three feature overclocked 3770K parts and GeForce GTX 680 cards. Of course, you might wonder if it's fair to compare the MultiPlex against those much smaller HTPC machines. That's a good question. Both the Tiki and Bolt are more likely to be used as simple SFF gaming boxes in your office, or in your living room as "Steam Boxes" running Big Picture mode. Recording terabytes of TV isn't likely to be high on the list of their usage scenarios. That's actually where the MultiPlex comes in. It's far more traditional-HTPC shaped and sized for the PVR chores, yet has plenty of firepower to run games at 1080p resolutions. Our one complaint might be that it's a tad loud for pure PVR duties. If you're watching, say, a Michael Bay flick, you'd never hear the fan and drive noise, but if you're trying to catch the nuanced acting in, um, Jane Eyre on Blu-ray, you could find those sounds distracting. This won't be an issue in gaming, of course, but it's worth noting. Pricing for the rig is fair. At $3,200 it's a full grand cheaper than the Falcon Tiki we reviewed last September. The Tiki did, however, pack a pair of 512GB SSDs, which adds up, but then the MultiPlex has three drives plus a CableCARD tuner. Overall, the MultiPlex brings a lot to the table if you're still living in a cable world—we're just not sure how many of us there are in today's post-cable environment. $3,200, www.velocitymicro.com

Road to Redemption? EA Eliminates Unpopular Online Pass Program Posted: 16 May 2013 12:55 PM PDT You can almost hear a golf clap erupting from GameStop stores. It's no secret game publishers loathe the second-hand sales market, prompting many of them to have a love-hate relationship with GameStop, the world's most popular used games retailer. But is GameStop really the frenemy that some publishers view it as? Perhaps not. Electronic Arts (EA) has come to the conclusion that its Online Pass program isn't worth pissing off its customers and has decided to reverse course, a move that's perhaps indicative that EA wasn't losing as much money to used game sales as it thought it was. Battlefield 3, Madden NFL, and a few other titles used the Online Pass system. The way it worked is that gamers would input a code included with new games to unlock online gameplay. The single-use code wouldn't transfer to a second owner, so if you bought a game used from GameStop or anywhere else and the code was already used, you'd have to purchase another one from EA. Well, not anymore. "Yes, we're discontinuing Online Pass," EA senior director of corporate communications, John Reseburg, told GamesBeat in an email. "None of our new EA titles will include that feature." Reseburg went to say that "many players didn't respond to the format," which is the primary reason why EA decided to abandon the program. It was an unpopular program among gamers to begin with, but given EA's sometimes stubborn nature and willingness to put up with criticism, it seemed unlikely the publisher would reverse course. It looks like Kevin Garnett was right, after all. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

MiniX Neo X5 Review Posted: 16 May 2013 12:14 PM PDT Meet the android on TV box We have some bad news for you and you're not going to like it, as few parents ever want to hear anything negative about their baby. Well, here it is: Your so-called Smart TV really isn't that smart. The Android on TV box idea may be the future, but probably not this one. Sure, the guy in the blue shirt said that your fab 60-inch plasma was top of its class and graduated cum laude, but the truth is, your TV spent most of its schooling playing beer pong and is a actually a class-A moron. The only reason it's called "Smart" is because it was pledged as a legacy. That's where the MiniX Neo X5 comes in. Running Android Ice Cream Sandwich, this inexpensive black box gives your TV an actual browser and access to applications that aren't coded in the language Ass++. The Neo X5 sports a dual-core Rockchip RK3066 ARM processor with a quad-core Mali 400 graphics chip, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage. For connectivity, it has 802.11n, Bluetooth, HDMI 1.4a, Fast Ethernet, and an optical S/PDIF out. For additional storage, the Neo X5 has an SD slot. MiniX even includes a short HDMI cable and USB OTG cable. For those of you who don't subscribe to Obscure Ports Quarterly, OTG lets you use the box's Micro USB port as a standard USB port, or—if we could figure it out—hook the Neo X5 to a PC's USB port to use as a storage device. Think of it as a USB port that swings both ways. As we said, we couldn't figure it out and that's perhaps one of the most vexing problems with the Neo X5. It's pretty much stock Ice Cream Sandwich, but a lot of things were simply not intuitive or not working. We couldn't, for example, figure out how to zoom in or out, and many apps that are intended for touch just didn't work correctly for us. Granted, we were using it with a wireless keyboard and mouse, but that's how the device would normally be used in a living room since the remote it ships with feels like it came out of a gumball machine. The performance of the Neo X5 didn't impress us, either. It felt sluggish in most instances, with a subpar user interface. Some benchmarks told us otherwise. We compared it to a Tegra 3–based Nexus 7 (admittedly not the most direct comparison, but a good measure of relative Android performance) and the X5 took most of the wins. The Nex7 certainly felt smoother but that's likely due to Jelly Bean and its Project Butter improvements. Overall, the Neo X5 feels underspec'd to us. Even the display at 1080p output looked so soft we had to double-check which mode it was in. Security is also an issue, as there is no way to secure the unit. Since you'd be logged into your Gmail account at all times on it, you're leaving your email fly down for anyone on the device. The Neo X5 is mainly marketed as a media player and it does fine there—to an extent. We could play various MP4 files, from GoPro cams to handycams to still images without hiccups, and there is an extensive set of codecs supported. Netflix was also fine but did exhibit more compression artifacts than we expected. YouTube videos were also pretty low-res despite being checked off as "HD." What we have here is essentially a work in progress. As is, it's still far more usable and much faster than 95 percent of the "Smart" televisions on the market, but there's much improvement to be had. MiniX is promising a Jelly Bean update at some point that may greatly change the experience—which it needs. $110, www.polywell.com

David Gerrold Tries Kickstarting "Star Wolf" Novels to Television Posted: 16 May 2013 09:00 AM PDT Former Maximum PC columnist turns Kickstarter campaigner. There are several ways you might be familiar with David Gerrold. We've had the pleasure of working with him as a former columnist for Maximum PC magazine, in which he penned technology pieces under the "Future Tense" heading. He's also a screenwriter and novelist who wrote scripts for the original Star Trek episodes, and is the author of the Star Wolf series of books, which he's now trying to port over to television with the help of Kickstarter. Sure, this is off the beaten path of typical Maximum PC fodder, but hey, we like Gerrold, and we'd like to see him get a chance to bring his novels to television. To do that, he'll need to raise $650,000, which would fund the first episode. Every additional $500,000 beyond that would fund an additional episode, though with less than $47,000 in pledges with just 17 days to go, his Kickstarter campaign's going to need a serious kick in the pants. Why turn to Kickstarter in the first place? "Because the old way of doing things doesn't work any more -- and not at all for science fiction," Gerrold's Kickstarter page explains. "Star Trek, The Original Series got cancelled because NBC executives didn't understand what they had. Firefly got cancelled because Fox executives didn't understand what they had. Babylon 5 was cancelled because the network executives didn't understand what they had. Even a profitable series can be cancelled if the numbers don't work for the accountants. And anything less than three million viewers isn't considered enough." It seems like a long shot with the limited interest at this point, but check it out and if you like what you see, toss some green at an old friend of ours. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Still Headed for a May 23 Release Posted: 16 May 2013 08:33 AM PDT Rumors point to the GTX 780 launching next week. Near the beginning of the month, news and rumor site Fudzilla reported that Nvidia was planning to launch its GeForce GTX 780 graphics card on May 23 at 6:00 AM PDT. That date is now only a week away, and so far, things are looking good. Withing naming anyone, Fudzilla says it's now heard from "multiple sources" that the May 23 launch date is accurate, at which time Nvidia's hardware partners will debut reference clocked cards. As with most video cards these days, overclocked versions will inevitably pop up, though most of them will come out "several weeks" after the initial launch. Reference cards are said to be using a GeForce Titan cooler quality since it's a high quality design. You may even spot overclocked cards using the same cooler, though vendors typically like to slap on their own cooling solutions, which often do a better job than reference at whisking away heat and run quieter to boot. According to Fudzilla, the GTX 780 part based on reference specs should sell for around 500 Euros. That's about $645 USD, though PC component pricing doesn't always follow a straight currency conversion from one market to the next. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Newegg Daily Deals: Casing the Best Bargains Posted: 16 May 2013 08:11 AM PDT Top Deal: You probably put a lot of thought and research into picking out your home or apartment, so why not extend the same courtesy to your PC parts? We have plenty of deals on cases today, including our top deal for an NZXT Phantom Red White Finish ATX Full Tower Compuer Case for $108 with free shipping (normally $140 - use coupon code:[NZXT10M]; additional $20 mail-in-rebate). It has the looks and the ability to keep your PC parts chilly with 7 fan cooling options. Other Deals: Rosewill Blackhawk Gaming ATX Mid Tower Computer Case for $70 with free shipping (normally $100 - use coupon code:[EMCXRWS89])  Cooler Master Elite 431 Plus ATX Mid Tower Computer Case for $40 with free shipping (normally $60 - use coupon code:[EMCXRWS94]) Antec Three Hundred ATX Mid Tower Computer Case for $43 with free shipping (normally $70 - use coupon code:[EMCXRWS263]; additional $10 mail-in rebate) DIYPC Alpha-DB6 Acrylic Bench Computer Case for ATX/Micro ATX motherboards for $40 with shipping for $4 (normally $60)

Lenovo, Best Buy Now Accepting Pre-orders for IdeaPad Yoga 11s Convertible Posted: 16 May 2013 07:56 AM PDT Is Yoga in your summer plans? Lenovo first began showing off its IdeaPad Yoga 11S at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this past January, and now four months later, you can place your pre-order on Lenovo's website or through Best Buy, the latter of which will carry the hybrid laptop in stores starting June 23. Why is it called Yoga? Simply put, Lenovo's convertible bends in ways that makes our back ache just looking at it. The Yoga 11S is an 11.6-inch Ultrabook convertible that flips and folds all the way around to function as a tablet when desired. It has a touchscreen IPS display and is of course wielding Windows 8. "Consumers around the world loved our first Yoga for its unique flip and fold and multi-mode design," said Jay Parker, president, Lenovo, North America. "We're continuing to develop the Yoga franchise with the new Yoga 11S, and due to Yoga's popularity already, we've created a pre-sale program so customers can get their hands on one before it even hits the shelves." It's available in "Clementine Orange" and "Silver Gray," both of which start out at $800. For that, you get an Intel Core i3 3229Y processor (1.4GHz), 4GB of DDR3-1600 RAM, 128GB solid state drive, 4-cell battery, and Windows 8. Upgrades are available, including faster processor options, up to 8GB of RAM, and up to 256GB of solid state storage. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Steam Trading Cards Reward Gamers with DLC and Game Coupons Posted: 16 May 2013 07:47 AM PDT The feature is currently limited to only six games A mysterious database entry for something called the Steam Trading Card popped up in the Steam database late last week and all sorts of theories began doing the rounds on the Web. Some saw it as a harbinger of a trading game being developed by Valve, while others suspected it to be a new Steam service for facilitating the trade of in-game items. Valve on Wednesday finally put all that speculation to rest when it officially announced Steam Trading Cards,  a new service that rewards gamers for, well, gaming. In its press release, the company described the new service thus: "Released in beta today, Steam Trading Cards allows customers to earn Steam rewards for playing the games they love. Those who participate will receive game-specific trading cards that can be collected to earn rewards such as game badges, profile backgrounds, emoticons, coupons, and more." But  how does one go about collecting these cards? To begin with, you will need to join the Steam Trading Cards beta, which is currently limited to Don't Starve, Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Team Fortress 2, Portal 2 and Half-Life. You can then collect up to half the card set through the actual act of playing, while the other half has to be collected from other community member. Once you complete a card set for one of the above participating games, you can craft them into a game badge. Just like current badges, game badges are associated with your game account. According to the official Steam Trading Cards page, these badges bring with them "marketable" rewards like emoticons, profile backgrounds, and DLC/game coupons, What's more, they can be levelled up as many as five times, allowing you to earn more items. "All badges now have XP which contributes to your Steam Level, a summary of your badge collection," reads the Steam Trading Cards page. "You can view someone's Steam Level by hovering over their avatar. Leveling up earns you non-tradable items like profile showcases, extra friends list slots, and more" Follow Pulkit on Google+

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