BrickGamers 37 - Gaming Rewards

If you've been a loyal fan of BrickGamers by now you'll know the usual drill - click on the comic below to load the larger version where you can read it clearer. We had to shrink it like this to fit the width of the page as it was originally designed to appear in a print magazine called GameAxis, a South-East Asia (SEA) regional monthly gaming publication. This is the copy of it.

So let's hear it from the gamers out there for this month's topic - how many of you feel modern games is all about being vain in the game than actual rewards and accomplishments? :) Or worse - all about how many games you have played or how fast you played it? Is this what gaming is all about? Or has gaming lost it's allurement that it once had and it's now searching its own soul?

Video Games as Education

Seems like some smarter education officials finally learn to realize and utilize video games as a tool to educate young students. Read all about it here - Public School launches Curriculum Based on Playing Games. Well, seems like most of them will be playing video games anyway so learning while playing will only result in a win-win situation. Gee, why didn't we have these in our days? >:D

Imagine if students were thought to play SimCity - we'll have much better cities to live in!

XFX Radeon HD5800 Series Windows 7 Direct X 11 gaming cards

If you don't already know by now, the next standard in gaming graphics is DirectX 11. This is found in Microsoft's upcoming Windows operating system, Windows 6.1, or more popularly known as Windows 7 (not because 6+1=7 or because Windows Vista was Windows 6.0, but because Microsoft says this is the seventh release of Windows).

DX11 adds some new features and one of them is Direct Compute, which uses GPGPU technology, which basically uses your gaming card for processing instead of just your processor, thereby giving you extra performance. This can also be used in games for physics.

Anyway, unlike DirectX 10 (Unified Shader Model 4), which was found in Vista and required either AMD's ATI Radeon HD2000/3000/4000 series, or NVIDIA GeForce 8/9/200 series of DX10 gaming cards, DX11 can function on DX10 gaming cards as well, albeit not as fully as on DX11 gaming cards, which is the ATI Radeon HD5000 series, or NVIDIA GeForce 300 series (which isn't out yet).

As expected, this means DX11 can also work on Vista, and it can, when Microsoft releases the Vista Platform Update, but like the above DX11 and DX10 compatibility, you won't get the full features as compared to a pure DX11 platform, which is Windows 7 with DX11 gaming card, and in this case, only ATI's HD5000 is out.

XFX's Radeon HD5870 Windows 7 DirectX 11 gaming card - comes with DVI, DisplayPort, and HDMI ports

It needs dual 6-pin power from your PSU and supports ATI's CrossFire X

This is where XFX comes in. They have released their XFX Radeon HD5800 series of gaming cards - which is the XFX Radeon HD5870 and the XFX Radeon HD5850 gaming cards. With this, coupled with Windows 7, you'll get the full DX11 deal. To sweeten the deal even further, there's a Dirt 2 game bundle, and yes, Dirt 2 is DX11 to get the game ball rolling. See here for a list of other upcoming DX11 games.

XFX's Radeon HD5850 Windows 7 DirectX 11 gaming card - for budget gamers

Of course, with DX11 you can also play DX10 games, and you can see a list of DX10 games here - but remember to update your DX files! If you haven't done so, you can get it for free from Microsoft's site here (100MB). Even if you're using Windows XP with DirectX 9, it will update your files to the latest DX9. This might help if you're having problems running some games.

Batman - Arkham Asylum, Literally?

As chronicled in Kotaku's Deliberate Glitch Foils Arkham PC Pirates, none can't help but wonder if anyone ever tried The Settlers III (3) way back then, about a decade ago (circa 1998) when it was popular. If you had the pirated (bootlegged, warez, illegal) version, you'll notice your Iron Smelter will be producing pigs (hogs/boars) instead of iron - to screw up your economic production line!

Play Station 3 slim

One part Content Three part for Show

As inspired by a report in gamersdailynews.
While looks is always important but to know they spend 75% of their resources on it? What do the rest of you guys think?