tl;dr Good gameplay, bad graphics.
Intro:
If you have never heard of the Ys games, I do not blame you. The name is weird, the artistic style is “anime-like”, and the games are not (yet) mainstream. Wikipedia says that there are 7 or 8 Ys games, but only 3 of them are available on Steam. From those 3, we take a look at Ys Origin, the first game in the series (chronologically). In Ys Origin, you are part of a search party that is looking for a pair of goddesses who are missing/hiding in a tower.
nVidia’s big Maxwell launch of the GeForce GTX 980 and 970 has gone very well for the company, giving gamers great performance at reasonable prices. The release of those two graphics cards made AMD’s flagship cards (290 and 290X) overpriced, and so we removed those two cards from the Logical Increments hardware guides. (We also removed the GTX 770 and 780, since those cards had been replaced at their price points.)
Thanks to game streaming services, we can see people do amazing things with gaming. We can watch professionals from around the world battle it out for a million dollar prize pool in Dota 2. We can learn how to build a Miracle Rogue deck in Hearthstone. Or we can just watch people mess around in Watch_Dogs. No matter how it is consumed, the streaming of video games has become a huge (and in my opinion, brilliant) development in the gaming industry.
Last week we revealed the winners to our first ever Show Us Your PC contest. Our top 3 picks won Amazon gift cards and the honorable mentions got some sweet, sweet Steam games. And we got to ogle some awesome custom PCs, which happens to be our favorite thing to do.
Did you miss it? Do you want to relive the excitement in a more digestible format? This contest recap is for you!
Here’s a breakdown of the winners. Click on any winner to see more!
First Place: A FANtastic Build
We loved Skye’s superpowered PC and the way he tastefully added Noctua fans everywhere. Seriously, go look at all those fans.
And finally, the grand winner of our Show Us Your PC contest. (If you’re catching up, yesterday we revealed our Second Place winner, Wednesday featured our Third Place winner, and on Tuesday we showed off our two Honorable Mentions.)
Ladyfolk and mentlegen, our first place winner: A FANtastic Build
Skye recently built this beauty after 6 years with an Intel Core 2 Duo running Windows XP. We’d say it’s a heck of a successor!
We’d like to introduce the second of three winners in Logical Increments’ Show Us Your PC Contest! (If you’re catching up, yesterday we revealed our Third Place winner, and on Tuesday we showed off our two Honorable Mentions.)
Gentlemen and ladies, our second place winner: The Desk Monster
Two weeks ago, we announced a contest in which readers could submit photos of their PCs and the stories behind building them, the Show Us Your PC contest. We offered Amazon gift cards to the top 3.
But now the contest entry period is over! And we have winners! 3 of them!
But we’ll get to those winners later. First, we have some Honorable Mentions.
Note: the contest period has ended. Thank you to everyone who entered! We’ll be announcing the winners soon.
We want to see the glorious PCs you’ve built, so we’re holding a contest and asking you to show us! Our favorite submissions will win prizes in the form of Amazon gift cards and be featured on this blog.
Recently, a buddy of mine told me that his 4-year-old PC was getting outdated and that he wanted to get a new rig. The big electronics retailer down the street had some good deals, he said.
I gritted my teeth. He kept going on about how it was too bad every computer today has Windows 8 on it and how it costs so much money and time to build your own. Thankfully, he said, the store down the street has a gaming computer on sale.
That’s when I thew up my hands and told him that, as his friend, I could not support him buying a “gaming computer” (or any other PC) from a retailer. He asked me what the big deal was. I told him: the big deal is, if you use your computer for more than just light Internet browsing, if you want to get the most for your money, and especially if you plan to use it for gaming, you really, really should build your own.
He asked me for one good reason why building was so much better than buying. I gave him five, and now I’m giving you a dozen. Here are 12 reasons why you should build your own PC instead of buying it pre-built: