Ryzen 5000 Series Selling Out In Minutes

If you were hoping that AMD would be able to meet the crazy demand for tech parts that NVIDIA, Sony, and Microsoft have all gone through lately with their newest processor release you were sorely mistaken. It’s not a huge surprise given the previous 3000 series launch similarly sold through extremely quickly, but the extremely high demand caused by more and more people in the custom PC space, along with potential scalpers, and compounded by supply issues caused by both the coronavirus and the United States government’s tariffs on Chinese imported goods adds up to zero stock in within minutes on many popular online retailers, and some brick and mortar stores being “sold out” before even opening.

I personally hoped to order a 5800x to upgrade my personal rig. By the time I got to Newegg however at 8:10 am CDT, (the CPUs officially went on sale 6:00am pacific or 8:00 my time I was met by the following images.

All sold out within minutes, with the top of the line 5950x being out within a matter of seconds. You’re best bet, if you want to pick up a new Ryzen processor on launch day is a brick and mortar location, but if you’re hoping to do that you had better already be in line as according to the reddit post people have already been in line for days at various Microcenter locations. And even if you are lucky enough to already be in line, if you’re hoping for a 5950x, AMD’s overkill top of the line processor that is just below their rumored next-gen Threadripper chip the stock is extremely limited and not all locations have one. At the time of writing (8:30 am CDT) the local Microcenter which opens at 10:00 am is already listing the 5950 x as sold out.

Again, this location doesn’t open for another hour and half, which means either they were somehow doing sneaky pre-orders (which I haven’t been able to find an option to pre-order the 5800x but maybe I’m just an idiot), or they had no stock to begin with at this location. As with NVIDIA’s Ampere GPUs, supply for all the above listed reasons is just not able to keep up with demand right now. I would urge everyone to avoid paying scummy Scalpers the over double costs for these parts that I’m sure we’ll see on Ebay by the end of the day and remain patient. Availability should get better over time, and the amount of time that takes could theoretically shift depending on political pressures which I guess makes the U.S. Presidential Election relevant even here, but ultimately if you want, or need an upgrade you’ll get one, just not on day one. Also, if this is any indication on what we can expect from AMD’s upcoming Big Navi gpus, if you’re hoping to get one on launch day you had best get in line soon as the 6800 and 6800xt release on November 18th, less than two weeks away.

-Tim

5 Cancelled Games That We Wish Were Made

Games are cancelled every day. Most of them you’ve never, and will never hear about. Most of the time they are cancelled with good reason, whether that be a bad concept, troubled developement, etc. Here are 5 times that we wish these games had lived to see the light of day.

Fallout 3 (Project Van Buren)

But wait, Bethesda made an published Fallout 3, which was for many fans their introduction to the franchise and one of the most well received games of that generation right? Yes. Yes they did, but before Bethesda purchased the franchise a version of Fallout 3 was already in the works from Black Isle Games studio, and was set to be published by the now defunct Interplay Entertainment. The game was set to be a more traditional turn-based RPG more like Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics, and much like the previous installments took place in the same timeline but was not a direct sequel to those games. Some leaked images and gameplay footage can be found with a quick google search of the projects code name, Project Van Buren. The game shares many similar theme and story elements with the eventual classic Fallout: New Vegas, which makes a ton of sense because while Interplay was in the process of closing up shop and selling off all of it’s IPs several members of Black Isle left to found Obsidian Entertainment. While I don’t think most fans would trade what Van Buren could have been for what we eventually got in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, I do think it would have been interesting to see that game fully developed and released.

Starcraft: Ghost

StarCraft is one of the most successful RTS franchise’s ever, so much so that despite StarCraft 2 launching in 2010 it’s still one of the most popular e-sports titles out there. So naturally StarCraft: Ghost must have been an expansion or standalone RTS spinoff right? Wrong. StarCraft: Ghost was a third person stealth-shooter starring everyone’s favorite sniper Nova Terra. Originally slated to release on the original Xbox, Nintendo, and PS2 in 2003 the game was delay-ridden in it’s development including several shifts in whether it would be more action or stealth oriented. A new studio, Swinging Ape Studios, took over for the previous development team Nihilistic Software in 2004. The game continued to struggle, being changed and reshaped before ultimately being suspended in 2005 due to the release of the new generation of consoles in Xbox 360 and PS3. Updating the game to the newest hardware was never really an option at that point, however the game was never officially announced as cancelled until 2014. There are leaked versions for the Xbox 360 that can be found online, and are a few YouTube videos including leaked gameplay online. Maybe someday they’ll make the game, until then your best bet at experiencing this games story would be to read the book released in 2006 StarCraft Ghost: Nova.

Star Wars Battlefront III

The Battlefront franchise has been through a lot. From the ever great initial two releases, to the EA published microtransaction filled reboots that started off terribly but are in really good places now, fans of the franchise finally got a glimpse of what could have been as leaked images and video were released post cancellation in 2009. Leading up to that point the game had been in development by a studio called Free Radicals, and was to be published by LucasArts. As Star Wars fans are all too aware of, LucasArts began it’s downward slide with decreases in the number of mainline titles and games in the late 2000’s before eventually being shutdown by Disney with the rights to Star Wars titles being sold to EA. Exclusively. EA is supposedly working on their own version of Battlefront 3… Hopefully by the time it releases they won’t be going so hard on loot boxes and micro transactions. This is, however, EA we’re talking about though.

Silent Hills

Death Stranding was not the first Hideo Kojima game that would feature The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus. In fact Silent Hills was not only being directed by Hideo Kojima, but he was reportedly working closely with Guillermo Del Toro on the project. A playable demo of the game known as PT was released, and eventually someone was able to hack their ps4 to explore the town seen at the end of the demo as it was all rendered in engine and existed in the game world. Ultimately cancelled in 2016 due to Kojima having a falling out with publisher Konami, Silent Hills is possibly the most anticipated horror game no one will ever get to play. Knowing what twists Kojima has given us in every game he’s every made only makes the imagination run wild with the possibilities of what could have been.

Star Wars 1313

As someone with a Boba Fett helmet in my office, and a huge fan of The Mandalorian, this one hurts. A game about the gloriously gritty Bounty Hunting underworld of the Star Wars universe, 1313 was to star a team of characters with reportedly the heart of the gang being none other than a young Mandalorian who would someday freeze everyone’s favorite smuggler in carbonite. Yes, Boba freaking Fett. After Disney shelved all LucasArts prodcutions and ultimately sold the licensing for all Star Wars games to EA the game was effectively dead. Eventually Disney even let the 1313 trademark lapse. While it’s not impossible the game could get a reboot in some form, maybe even as part of the story for the also cancelled LucasFilm live action project Star Wars Underworld, its best not to dream of such things. In the meantime, maybe I’ll finally play through Jedi Fallen Order, while dreaming about the possibilities 1313 could have brought.

-Tim

5 Games That Made Huge Comebacks

Some games are great right away. Some are awful and never get better, but every once in awhile you get the cardiac cat of games. The comebacks kids. Way back when I was blogging on my own free-never-used-much website I wrote an article about the 5 biggest dissapointments in gaming. This is, in some ways, a follow up to that. These are the five games that made huge recovories after shaky starts.

5. Tom Clancy’s The Division

The division was advertised as a tactical, mmo-lite, third person shooter with intense squad based combat when it was first being shown and marketed. What we really got was game that was a mess. The loot system was bad, there were a hilarious number of bugs, the PVP was totally broken, and the game suffered, but the core systems were solid enough that it was able to maintain a solid player base none the less. Over time bugs were patched, the loot system was overhauled eventually adding gear sets and an even wider variety of guns, and the game improved with new content releases including a battle-royale lite survival mode. The Division went from a broken looter shooter to one of the better examples of that genre to have ever been made. The PVP balance issues never really did get completely sorted, but I personally went from regretting ever buying the game to putting in around a hundred hours and getting to the late game grind while having a great time clearing the streets of NYC with my friends.

4. Ark Survival Evolved

Ark is an interesting one. Much like other games you’ll see on this list it released feeling extremely buggy, and somewhat devoid of content. It also controversially was sold during it’s early access period at $25 and upon it’s full release jumped all the way up to $60. It also has a lot of content, maps, dinosaurs, weapons, buildings etc. that are paywalled behind DLC expansions and takes up a whopping 200 gigs of space with everything installed. All of that said… where else can you hunt Mammoths with a pack of sabretooth cats and also ride a T-Rex or playing on a totally different map use your Dragon to scout out an enemy tribes base before raiding them using a back of raptors? I mostly play this game single player because I just like taming dinosaurs and don’t want to deal with griefers, but it is so satisfying when you work as a team to take down a Spinosaurus. Ark always had that going for it, and has always had a high number of players but for a very long time it was rated as mixed on steam due to poor optimization and bugs. Fast forward five years from it’s early access debut, and it’s now rated at very positive over the last month at the time of writing, and 78% overall. It’s come a long way in five years.

3. The Star Wars Battlefront Series

Starwars Battlefront was a beloved series before EA got involved. Where else could you mow down rebel scum with your e-11 blaster while gloriously serving the empire, or play as Luke Skywalker and take on waves of storm troopers. EA managed to sully it’s reputation by not having a campaign (at first) and by introducing loot boxes to the franchise. Both games followed a similar trajectory having fun but shallow gameplay and feeling generally empty on launch, but both entries are now solid titles with fun gameplay and a distinct lack of loot boxes. EA would do well to learn from the community reaction they’ve had in this game by not putting loot boxes in what is likely an inevitable follow up. I’m not confident that in that though.

2. Destiny

Destiny didn’t follow the trend of live-service games releasing devoid of content and bland but with a solid enough core for people to cling on to. It practically invented it. On release destiny felt oddly quiet. The game had solid Halo-style gunplay thanks to being made by Bungie, but it didn’t really feel fully fleshed out. The AI were either just bullet sponges, or there were tons of them to account for the fact that they actual AI itself was very dumb (more like an artificial idiot! HA! Got eem!) and the loot system was not really exciting with reskinned and recolored guns without much variety. I could have easily just described a number of looter-shooters, but where Destiny separated itself was it had fun multiplayer modes and introduced a lot of content over time fixing the empty feeling with new weapons and armor as you played on. Thing is, it did so buy introducing all of the content it felt like they had cut out as paid DLC. It wasn’t really until The Taken King came out that Destiny truly lived up to it’s potential however. The expansion brought in new players, as well as brought back veterans as it had what was one of the series’ best story arcs and introduced a wide variety of new loot. This wasn’t without controversy though. The Taken King could be bought as a bundle with the base game and all DLC at $80. If you had paid the full sixty on release and bought each expansion individually you’d have paid $170. More than double the cost… yikes. Destiny 2 seems to have followed a similar path despite Bungie having shook free of Activision, so despite our hopes it seems maybe big daddy Activision wasn’t holding the series back as much as many had speculated.

1. No Man’s Sky

Oh, look. Tim’s writing an article and it talks about No Man’s Sky. Again. I sunk time into this game on release. I wrote articles about the game, and called it one of the biggest disappointments in gaming. I stand by those words. At the time No Man’s Sky had been a general let down. A procedurally generated universe filled with new places to explore, animals to discover, and alien’s to engage with and battle. Sounds great! And it was. And it wasn’t. See it did have alot of that in the game, but it was like a puddle the size of an ocean. Very broad, very shallow. Much of what had been promised in the lead up to the games release was lacking. Multi-player, large scale space battles, freighters, none of that was there and there were more features to boot. Sean Murray had built up our hopes and dashed them against the rocks… or had he?

At this point Murray and the Hello Games crew had three options. They could take the money and run, they could sell us the content that was missing, or they could put their heads down, stop talking about the game, and behind the scenes introduce features that were missing, and more. That last one is exactly what they did. The Foundations update brought in vehicles, Pathfinder brought in ground vehicles, Atlas Rises added around 30 hours of story content, and two years after Next added true multiplayer, bringing the game much more in line with what they had envisioned for the game. There are other updates that added even more features, and the game continues to grow. I only recently started getting back into the game despite some friends telling me I’ve needed to try it for almost literally two years. I’m so glad that I finally did, and I’m so excited to play the game that more closely resembles the trailer that left me in awe all the way back at E3 2014.

-Tim