Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s always fun to take a nose at where PC gaming in general is at these days, and Valve’s regular Hardware survey can give a pretty good picture of that. From the latest results, it’s pretty much as you’d expect: the vast majority of gamers are running Core i7 (and not even the Extreme Editions) systems with just 12Gb of RAM and only three SLIed GeForce GTX 295s. Which is a dispiritingly low-end spec for the average system, suggesting the recession is hitting gamers much harder than has been anticipated. PC gaming is indeed doomed
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Idle hardware browing leads me to Techradar’s coverage of Microsoft’s concept mouse project. Usually, attempts to redesign one of the most fundamental features of the PC is something I greet with a sneer – how can you be so stupid as to waste so much money on trying to replace the irreplaceable? When it’s Microsoft, though, for all their flaws it’s worth paying attention to.
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I don’t need this. But by God I want it. ATI’s upcoming Eyefinity (ouch) tech allows rich, mad men to run six monitors from one graphics card, all of which combine to display one game. Six monitors! Where in Dolly Parton’s name do I get that many? Still, exciting stuff: ULTRO-SCREEN LIVES. It requires, inevitably, a brand new graphics card – the titular Eyefinity range, ATI’s next generation of 3D chips – but that the one card can share a real-time 3D image across up to six screens is incredimagic. It’s refreshing to have a card upgrade that isn’t simply about nebulous performance boosts, too.
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Clearly horribly impractical for most fancy-doodle modern games, but god it’s lovely:

What would you play with this, lovely readers?

(Via Blues)

You know what’s wrong with mice? They’re not enough like guns. An object designed to be moved across a flat surface isn’t much like an object designed to be waved in the air and fired at a man. Imagine!

Sporadically, well-intentioned (or money-intentioned) hardware designers attempt to correct this shocking disparity. A couple of years back, we had the Monster Gecko PistolMouse FPS, which was basically a toy gun glued to the top of a mouse. Well done, Gecko. Using it – for I have had the pleasure – proved even less like wielding a gun than did a normal mouse, as the placement of the sensor in the base meant the direction you moved the cursor in had essentially no bearing on where the gun muzzle was pointing. Aiming a gun and moving a mouse = completely different. Today though, I’ve been playing with another take on the concept, Zalman’s FPSGUN.

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Some potentially promising news from the hardware side of PC gaming. Gamesindustry.biz has been chatting to NVIDIA’s Roy Taylor, who’s admitted that the graphics card company’s dreadful naming conventions (should we buy a GeForce 8800 GS, GT, GTS, GTX or Ultra? And with 320, 512 or 640Mb of memory?) are a little on the bewildering side, and proferred vague promises to simplify them. Somewhat ironically, Taylor is “VP of Content Business Development”, a title which does absolutely nothing to explain what his job actually involves – but hey, he sounds important.

Imagine, though, a world where choosing your next graphics card didn’t involve an hour of head-scratching research. Does a bright future await us? Mild venting beneath the cut.

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The gaming hardware market is always a rich source of people who just don’t get it. All those keyboard and mouse replacements, made from the mistaken presumption that PC gamers at large have some sort of problem with keyboard and mouse. Then there’s the occasional chair-with-a-subwoofer-in, like the Buttkicker, which thinks bombarding your guts with violent tremors until you need to stop playing and go have a poo adds something to gaming. The pistol-shaped mouse still makes me giggle, designed seemingly oblivious to the fact that the nature of mouse usage means there’s no way the barrel of the gun would ever be pointed at your on-screen target, and that having a second, different weapon alongside the one already visible in the game only screws with the sense of immersion.

And now this… Read the rest of this entry »

Bristol-based peripheral boffins Saitek have announced that they’ve launched the latest in their range of moulded-plastic control devices. Now we don’t usually cover hardware here on RPS, but Saitek have a special place in hearts – not least because we once had a drink with one of their designers, who told us wild tales of all their weird prototypes that lay in their basements, rejected and dust-laden. Oh how we lamented the lack loss of those unloved experiments. Some made it through however, such as the optimistically-named CYBORG CONTROLLER.

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