HP Announces New Gaming PC – Blackbird 002

Many people, including myself have been shouting loudly for a dedicated gaming PC from HP and just at the right time they’ve done it.

It’s known as the Blackbird 002. Awesome naming in my opinion, it’s surely chosen to make people think of this, one of the coolest and most beautiful aircraft ever designed.

But, I’m sure you want to see it as much as I did, here are some images of the HP Blackbird 002 (more here).

Now that hopefully your heart is beating a little faster, I’m sure there are a bunch of details you’d like to know.

As with all PC’s from HP and VoodooPC, it’s going to be a configurable purchase (from October 1st). This means that I can’t give you a precise answer of what the machine will cost. However in the press release it makes a promising comment:

“Hardcore and enthusiast gamers find consumer PCs underpowered for games performance and prefer stylish design. Boutique gaming PCs offer gamers power and style, but only at a premium price…the HP Blackbird 002 combines style, performance and upgradability at a price competitive with upper-end consumer desktops.”

The first version that will go on sale is the “dedicated edition”. In contrast to the standard version, this is a preconfigured box which will be limited to 518 units and is available on September 15th. It’s a formidable machine in anyone’s language with an Intel Core 2 Extreme 3.0Ghz CPU, dual 8800 GTX Ultra’s with liquid cooling on both CPU and each GPU, custom side panel, a game bundle (that sounds like a good idea) including the ‘Orange Box’ Half Life series, 3 month trial of GFW Live and Windows Vista Ultimate.

It’s hard to guess a price on this, but based on my previous analysis of HP models, I would expect this to be retailing at about $3499 without a monitor. What I would hope is that the standard edition could be configured to this level for $2999 (though this seems unlikely) and a cut down version with perhaps a single 8800 GTX and some other sacrifices could scrape in the under $2500 price point.

This seems like a possible outcome with HP saying that the configurable model will range from $2500 to $7100 (presumably huge hard drives and monitors).

We’ll know a lot more on September 15th when we see a price for the Blackbird 002 dedicated edition and even more when the standard edition goes on sale on October 1st.

This looks like a great product from HP, today I’m proud to be an employee and even happier that I have shares in the company. I might even buy one for myself, will you?

—

Full details of the Blackbird 002 can be found at www.hp.com/blackbird

Bioshock PC Demo – Amazing!

Ok, ok.  There’s a lot of hyperbole going around the web about this game.  But each person brings their own justification for their comments to the table, and ultimately their justification is more important than their one-liner.

As a side note, it’s pulling great reviews, currently averaging 9.49 (I’m assuming that means the same thing as 94.9%) on gamerankings.  That’significantly better than the New Super Mario Bros and marginally better than Gears of War.

But why did I think it was amazing?  Because of the hardware I have at home.  I’m running a nearly two year old PC with an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (overclocked) and an Asus 6600GT.

I figured I was wasting my time on the 1.8GB download after negative experiences with a bunch of new games including Dirt and World In Conflict which didn’t scale at all well.  I’m not a graphics junky but if the game performs so badly that it looks worse than Total Annihilation or some rally game from the nineties then I’m not going to pay any attention.

Bioshock was different.  I’m not going to give any spoilers, but after the initial cut scene, when you’re given control I sat staring at my screen for a full minute refusing to believe that those were in-game graphics.   Everything else that has been said about the demo is all true, the sound is great, the timing reveals just enough to keep you wanting more and the fighting scenes are intense.

I hope Bioshock for the PC sells millions of copies.  Companies need to learn that there are a lot of people out there with machines slightly less powerful than the Xbox 360 and significantly less powerful than today’s machines who still want to buy new games and be blown away.  It really is worth tweaking your game to get the most out of our machines, we’ll thank you with our wallets.

I’m not usually a horror fan and so I was just playing the demo to be ‘part of the crowd’ but now I’ve been converted.  I’m definitely going to be playing this game, and if you have a PC which was a good gaming PC within the last three years, I think you should download the demo and give it a go.

Bioshock PC Demo is Out…kind of

Update 21/8/07 – 07:15 GMT:

Well, many hours have gone past and the file still hasn’t appeared on fileplanet and my download from the site below has failed a couple of times. The torrent is still heavily oversubscribed but is beginning to shift towards a favorable position.

20/8 – 17:30 GMT: 348 Seeds vs 4541 Peers (13 to 1)
20/8 – 22:00 GMT: 490 vs 5787 (11.8 to 1)
21/8 – 07:15 GM: 1230 vs 5142 (4.2 to 1)

I’m at 31.1% completed but my uploads have been hammered at 222.1% of the file size. Hopefully I’ll be playing the demo by the time I get home tonight.

—

Well, the Bioshock PC demo is out, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at fileplanet.com which has been headlining the hosting of it.

Today any reference to the demo is mysteriously missing from the site, and even searching fails to bring any result (at least for me). This leads me to the conclusion that fileplanet is struggling to meet demand from their own paying users, so have closed off access to everyone else.

But don’t be too concerned, you can download it in the conventional way from here or do it via the torrent here.

I’ve got both running at the moment until I see which one is faster. The torrent is heavily loaded (348 seeds to 4541 peers (that’s 13-1)) but this could swing in the next few hours as more users finish the download. The direct download is heavily loaded too though. In the last few hours about 30,000 downloads have occured, that’s 54,000GB. Nice.

As we move into the US evening, the demand is going to get even higher, so I’d recommend you get in while you still can.

What I’ve Been Playing

Hotel Dusk: Room 215

This is a game I picked up purely on hype. When it came out in the states it came in under the radar and this piqued the interest of many game journalists. It seemed to polarise opinions, you loved it or hated it. But for the most part, it had more lovers than haters so I decided I wanted to give it a go.

In summary it’s a partially animated, story based adventure game for the Nintendo DS which involves wandering around a hotel, plodding your way through the story. You play as Kyle Hyde an ex-cop who is at the hotel to find some items for his boss and to further his own agenda of finding an old friend.

On the whole, I’m enjoying it. I’m quite a reader, and love immersing myself in a story. However, I have to say that I’d rather be reading this book than playing this game.

My biggest critisicm is how damn linear it is. At any point there is one, and only one, thing that you have to do to progress the story. For example you need to talk to a particular person or find a particular item. If you don’t know what you need to do, you find yourself wandering around trying to stumble on that trigger and it completely takes you out of the story. There’s even been a couple of times when I’ve had to look up a walkthrough in order to continue, the cardinal sin of game design.

On the positive side, I loved the art style and the animation. The characters were compelling and the localisation was outstanding, it’s hard to believe this game was originally Japanese.

This game is a perfect example of the fact that 6.5 – 7.5 is a good score. I’m glad this game exists, I’m glad I played it, and I would recommend it to someone who has similar interests, but it sure doesn’t deserve an 8 or 9.