The 10 biggest PC stories from E3 2009

Monday, June 8th, 2009

The annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, known as E3, attracts tens of thousands of hardcore gamers and industry figures to Los Angeles each June.

It’s the biggest show of the year, where Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo deliver keynote presentations, and, even though it’s easy to get caught up in Project Natal and the PSP Go, plenty of exciting PC news has emerged from E3.

Here, we’ve sifted through the dodgy RTS titles and lazy console ports to pick out the most important PC gaming stories to emerge from the three-day conference, so take a look at our top stories and let us know what you think.

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The fastest laptop on earth

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

UPDATE: Read the full review of the Asus W90.

Asus might be most famous for its low-cost netbooks, but its latest multimedia powerhouse is the kind of laptop that’ll give your average desktop PC an inferiority complex.

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In defence of patching, crashing and tinkering

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

PC gaming gets a bad rap, especially from the console crowd – whereas they rock up, slide a disk into their slot-loading optical drive and play away, enjoying the latest games on the PC is, well, a more frustrating, long-winded and drawn-out experience – and it’s all the better for it.

Ask any avid PC gamer and they’ll regale you with stories of the many hours spent getting their machine to work at all. Putting in a new graphics card sounds like a basic upgrade but can often deteriorate into a horrendous rigmarole of driver updates and seemingly random problems and crashes. And that’s a relatively simple upgrade.

I should know the pain of upgrading: I recently built a new PC from scratch. My old rig really wasn’t cut out for gaming any more – it ran on integrated graphics and had no PCI Express slot – so it was definitely time for a change.

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Why PC gaming should be celebrated

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

We’re an argumentative bunch at Pro. Finding two people who agree on anything, even the colour of the carpet, is something of a chore but put a new piece of hardware in front of us and it’s worth ducking for cover unless you’re a fan of vitriol showers. However, aside from the green issues (brilliantly covered in comrade Sparkes’ green gadgets feature this month), the one thing that’s brought us closest to laughably inept fisticuffs is the hideously expensive GeForce GTX 280.

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Why is PC gaming intent on killing itself?

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Today’s launch (and review) of Nvidia’s latest enthusiast cards staggered me. The GeForce GTX 280 is fast, blisteringly so; but it’s also mind-bendingly, incomprehensibly, ball-achingly expensive. It’s certainly not the first – every new launch seems to have such prices attached – and it won’t be the last. But £430 for a graphics card?

Let me set my stall out right from the outset: I once spent in excess of £300 on a Radeon 9800 Pro with a fancy blue cooler just to play Far Cry in all its glory. Being a student, I had no money and even less sense, but it just seemed like something I had to do – how else would I experience something so beautiful?

A launch like the GTX 280 should be like technological Viagra to me, then, shouldn’t it? (more…)

The Ultimate Monitor?

Friday, May 16th, 2008

The title of this post may be a tad overzealous, but the jDome is still a fantastic-looking piece of kit.

Essentially, it’s a screen for a projector, albeit one that wraps the image around you, immersing the eager gamer in a 180 degree world. The possibilities, surely, are endless: tramping through the lush jungles of Crysis will be even more immersive, and you really can be a Supreme Commander if the battlefield is stretched around you. World in Conflict, Unreal Tournament 3, Tabula Rasa: all will benefit.

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