Titanfall is free to play for 48 hours!

Yes, it’s a huge game. Said 50GB in the download page, but people say it is actually 23GB or so. But of course I downloaded it. It’s not as if I have any bandwidth issues with my internet connection.

You can get it from here. After the 48hrs expire, you can either buy the game to continue playing the game with the progress that you made so far, or simply stop it. I don’t know if you can buy it at a later day and continue from the point that you stopped though.

I got a massive download speed when I got it. The game was downloaded and installed within 40 minutes. That’s pretty quick for a game of this size. This is the fastest that I’ve managed to download a large game.

[Rant] Finally got Titanfall Beta to show up in Origin

If you don’t know what Titanfall is, you should watch the following YouTube channel.

TitanFallGame

Titanfall is the hottest up coming game, which is on track for March 2014 release. The developer, Respawn Entertainment has just released the beta version to a closed set of people. Well, that’s what the original plan was. But now the news is that they are actually releasing it to the general public after all. (You should see it show up in your Origin games list in the next day or two.)

But I was in a hurry and wanted to check it ASAP.

I found out – through a friend – that we could contact Origin customer support and ask them to add it to our games list. It seemed like a sure thing as well.

This is the link you need to use.

http://help.ea.com/uk/contact-us/new/?product=origin

Then click PC, and select “Redeem Your Serial Code in Origin” and hit next. In the next screen, choose Demo/Betas for “Select a topic” and simply tell them that you are waiting for Titanfall Beta to show up in my games, in the next text box. Press next, and you will be taken to a page where you can chat with a support personnel. It will take some time though. I had to wait for an hour. Everyone must be looking to play Titanfall.

After an hour’s wait, the chat session started. This is how it went on.

(click the above image for a high quality image)

[Rant] Blistering fast downloads via OCN Flets Hikari connection with EA Origin

The public beta of the most anticipated game of the year, Battlefield 4, came out yesterday. However, they let us preload the game the previous day and be ready as soon as the game went online. I also had the Battlefield 4 Beta automatically added to my games list, and even though I am not much of a Battlefield fan, I started downloading it.

This is not the first time, but the download finished in about 5 minutes. The download size is 5.5GB. That’s about 18MBps (not Mbps) average. I hit over 23MBps towards the last quarter actually.

Few times before, I have been managed to fully exhaust the connection, which is supposed to be 200Mbps (or 25MBps at max efficiency). The funny thing is that OCN sales personnel said that in reality you won’t get more than 100Mbps. Hey, 100Mbps is nothing to be sad about. It’s 200 times faster than the connection I have at home!!!

Of course I didn’t play the game fore more than a few minutes. The game wouldn’t play full screen, Hitting ALT + Enter didn’t fix it. Sabreen said it could be because of TeamViewer and I still couldn’t check it out. He could be right. I had the same issue with BF3 as well, when I checked it a few days ago. I had been using TeamViewer to monitor the PC remotely when I was stress testing it to see if the overclock was stable. I don’t really need it anymore, but I’ll keep it there in case I need to access the PC remotely. Of course, I have to have the PC turned ON in the first place.

Got my self-gifted birthday present 3 weeks later - Crysis 3

I loved every Crysis title ever released but it was Crysis 2 that really made the difference. That's when I started playing multiplayer mode. Me and my buddy Suresh used to play the game a lot back in the day. I managed to get into the top 200 ranked players back then but then I stopped. It was time to move to another game: namely Battlefield 3. I wasn't that good in BF3 but I enjoyed the game a lot. It was completely the opposite kind of game play for me. Crysis 2 was a about carrying a shotgun and blasting someone's head open and most of the action was head-to-head. It was a lot more adrenaline boosting than playing BF3. Most of the times I played BF3 as a sniper. Nothing left to say.

I bought (actually preordered) Crysis 2 when I was visiting back home in December 2010 I think. So I managed to grab it dirt cheap because prices in the Indian EA Store are usually much cheaper than USA and especially Japan. Japanese prices are too much. And they come dubbed in Japanese I think (not completely sure though). Just imagine playing Crysis 3 dubbed in Japanese!!

Anyways, I went back to Sri Lanka last December and the top item in my to-do list was to preorder Crysis 3. But unfortunately EA have decided not to let us preorder AAA titles (Crysis 3 is definitely one of them) from that store. In fact, it doesn't even come up in search results. This is because people were exploiting the fact that the games are cheaper in the Indian EA store (or Origin Store), hence they don't want to show the price that they are going to sell beforehand. People will use proxies to connect to Indian store and get the game cheaply. In addition to not allowing preordering, they are also delaying the game a few days compared to the North American release date. People who really want to get the game ASAP will then buy from their respective store, paying the correct amount of money. I wonder why Japanese version is delayed then. The darn thing costs about $85 here. It is coming out almost 3 weeks after the North American release.

Crysis 3 pre-order not available on Indian Origin?

Shame. Pre-ordering Crysis 3 was one of the goals of my Sri Lanka visit. When you access Electronic Art's Origin store, it connects to the Indian store. But the Indian store not only doesn't carry the Pre-order, but the title itself is not listed there. 

I can pre-order from Japan, but there are two problems with it. 

First one is that you can only get the Japanese version. You cannot get the international version from Origin - or so I believe. I haven't really bought anything on Origin from Japan, so I cannot say for sure, but that's what I could understand from the description.

The second one is that the price in the Japanese Origin store is way too high. They must be still thinking that we are in the last decade where the US$ was about JPY100, when in fact it has dropped quite a lot in the last couple of years. (Of course with the change of the government in December, that value of Japanese Yen has dropped a bit, but it will rise up in a few months.) For example, for a $79.95 title, they were asking about JPY7,995. Insane! 

If you can grab them from the Indian Origin Store, you can get it for like JPY2,000 or even less than that. That's how I got Crysis 2 and Battlefield 3, both costing only INR 999 which translated to about JPY1,400. 

It's a shame that I could not get Crysis 3 in that manner.

I probably will have to ask my dad to buy it from me when the pre-order becomes available. Perhaps I should setup TeamViewer in the home PC so that I can do it on my own. But I don't know how 512k ADSL internet connection would like that. That's pretty much the only game that I am looking forward to playing in 2013. Surely there will be another Need for Speed title as they have been releasing new titles annually.