Bioshock Infinite : Burial at Sea - Episode 1

BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea - Episode 1 is the first part of the story-driven downloadable content of BioShock Infinite, which was released on November 12th for $15.00 USD on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Windows PC and OSX[1]. It is also included with the BioShock Infinite Season Pass and BioShock Infinite: The Complete Edition. This campaign puts the player in the perspective of Booker DeWitt in a new story, taking place in the city of Rapture right before its fall.

Gameplay

This new campaign features the city of Rapture rebuilt from scratch with game mechanics and the Unreal Engine 3 used for BioShock Infinite. It includes new weapons, new Plasmids (similar to Vigors), new Gears, and Tears. The first half of this first episode focuses mostly on the exploration of business streets of Rapture and its story, while the second half focuses on combat mechanics close to that of the first BioShock game, with scarce resources and tighter spaces as opposed to the larger, open areas of the main game.

In comparison to BioShock Infinite, Burial at Sea - Episode 1 also features stealth execution to instantly kill (or in two strikes depending on the difficulty) an unaware enemy at full health. Also in a way similar to the original game, locations feature more optional and explorable areas, containing loot, ammunition and even new weapons and plasmids. Some new puzzle mechanics requiring Plasmids are also introduced, such as casting Shock Jockey on short-circuited switches to unlock doors or create ice bridges with Old Man Winter to enter new areas.

This downloadable content utilizes a weapon wheel similar to the one used for Plasmids/Vigors, allowing the player to carry all weapons instead of replacing them.

Plot

In the city of Rapture, a different place and time that shares similarities to Columbia, Booker DeWitt is a well-known private investigator, usually handling his clients' dirty work when not drinking and gambling. On the eve of 1959, a mysterious woman by the name of Elizabeth asks him to investigate the disappearance of a young girl named Sally. Elizabeth's intentions are vague and she is unwilling to reveal any vital information, only that Sally is alive and elite artist Sander Cohen may have the information regarding her whereabouts. The duo journey to Cohen's at High Street, but are denied entrance to the club. Needing the masks specifically crafted for the club's exclusive party guests, Booker and Elizabeth search the nearby shops. With Elizabeth acting as flirtatious decoy, Booker is able to retrieve the required mask and the two are welcomed into Cohen's party.

As they enter the Garden of the Muses, Cohen is working on his latest piece of "performance art." However, it falls short of the obsessive artist's high demands and he disposes of the models. After the "light show," Booker and Elizabeth confront Cohen about Sally. He expresses suspicion of malevolence in Elizabeth, but agrees to reveal Sally's location if Booker and Elizabeth dance to inspire his muse. Faced with no other options, the two waltz. It is only moments before Cohen once again finds error and knocks them unconscious. However, he does keep up his end of the bargain: he drags them to a Bathysphere, claiming it will take them to Sally.

When Booker and Elizabeth awake, they notice the Bathysphere is headed away from the city and down to the seafloor where Andrew Ryan had recently sunk Fontaine's Department Store. Via shortwave radio, Cohen reveals that Sally is residing in the Housewares section, but Booker and Elizabeth must get to the tram to reach it. When the two arrive at the main building, they are immediately attacked by the Splicers Ryan imprisoned in the now buried department store. After defeating numerous enemies, Sally is discovered lurking in the ventilation system. The two close up all but one vent to trap Sally when they increase the temperature to force her out. Sally starts screaming due to the heat and flees to that one vent exit.

Afterwards, when Booker attempts to pull her out, he discovers she is now a Little Sister (as he feared). Booker is shocked and when he aggressively tries pulling her out again, she calls for her Bouncer Big Daddy, who then attacks Booker. Booker and Elizabeth engage the Big Daddy and manage to defeat him, allowing Booker to attempt to reason with Sally, but to no avail. Booker, struggling to recover her, recalls his previous memories that were "hazy" to him before. In a flashback, Booker is revealed to actually have been a regretful Zachary Hale Comstock, who bargained with Robert and Rosalind Lutece to steal Booker's child, Anna, but (in a universe alternate to those of the Infinite story) ended up killing her by accidentally having her head instead of her pinkie finger cut off when the portal closed in his fight to take her. Booker (Comstock) comes to, remembering he had the Lutece twins move him to Rapture through their Tear device so he could forget and get away from his troubles. The Lutece twins, themselves, appear and criticize Comstock, saying he could never accept the consequences of his actions. As a side effect of going to Rapture through the device, he lost his memories of being Comstock and failing to steal Anna and resumed his life of being a Private Investigator as Booker Dewitt. This Comstock has no knowledge of the Infinite Universe. He could not know her origin or suddenly realize it. He is a different Comstock entirely. [3] Elizabeth, infuriated by Comstock's attempt at kidnapping her when she wasn't his true child, doesn't accept Comstock's apology and instead says to him he will be sorry. The player can hear the Big Daddy getting up, having apparently survived the earlier ordeal, which then impales Comstock with its drill from behind. In his last moments, Comstock looks over at Elizabeth who glares at him mercilessly, covered in his blood. The screen cuts to black, thus concluding Episode One.

Main Characters

Main article: Burial at Sea - Episode 1 Characters
Booker DeWitt / Zachary Hale Comstock
Elizabeth
Robert Lutece
Rosalind Lutece
Sander Cohen
Sally

Locations

Market Street: The first area of Rapture Booker roams to assist Elizabeth to find and question Cohen.
High Street: An upper class area located above Market Street and the location of Cohen's Club.
Fontaine's Department Store: The recently sunken building that imprisons Frank Fontaine's Splicer army.
Housewares: A section of Fontaine's where Sally is hiding.

Enemies

Thuggish Splicer
Leadhead Splicer
Frosty Splicer
Bouncer

Behind the Scenes

The inspiration for the cover art comes from the French poster of the 1942 film noir, This Gun for Hire
The scene where Comstock is impaled by a Bouncer from behind is a homage to a Splicer being impaled by a similar Big Daddy in the first trailer of BioShock.
Some of the heads used for the Splicer models were updated models of the Waders Splicer from the original BioShock.
All weapons in Rapture are identical to those in Columbia, with the exception of the Carbine (which functions more like the Burst gun), Tommy Gun, and Radar Range.
Even though Burial at Sea - Episode 1 uses BioShock Infinite's engine, some content from the previous games in the series are also reused, such as various posters and Rapture public address announcements, sound effects and even models such as television sets or jukeboxes.

Audio Diaries 

Burial at Sea - Episode 1 Audio Diaries

Reference

http://bioshock.wikia.com/wiki/Burial_at_Sea_-_Episode_1

MSI Afterburner

Yeah.......well, I was having an amazing gameplay with shooting people and losing my reputation in watch dogs when it crashed suddenly. At the very next second, a message popped up saying that my display driver has stopped working and that it has recovered. After several more crashes, I searched for a solution online and found this very cool and easy-to-use overclocking software that could fix the problem. And guess what?-it DID!! So now I am blogging about this software useful for gamers like me who has faced similar problems. It also doubles like a troubleshooting software.

MSI Afterburner

MSI Afterburner is the world’s most recognized and widely used graphics card overclocking utility which gives you full control of your graphics cards. It also provides an incredibly detailed overview of your hardware and comes with some additional features such as customizing fan profiles, benchmarking and video recording. MSI Afterburner is available completely free of charge and can be used with graphics cards from all brands.

OVERCLOCKING TOOLS

Exploring and exceeding the limits of your graphics card might sound scary, but it’s actually easier than you think. MSI Afterburner Overclocking tools provide easy and precise access to your video card settings.

When increasing your GPU’s clock frequency and voltage, using fan speed control will enable you to find the perfect balance between performance and temperature. It’s time to unleash the true potential of your graphics card and show your rig who’s boss!

HARDWARE MONITOR

Seeing is believing! In order to start mastering your system, you need to monitor and test it. Monitoring is the best way to ensure the best system stability while gaming and overclocking.

The Hardware Monitor shows you critical hardware information in real-time; temperature, usage, clock speed, and voltage. You can even display selected information on-screen while you game, so you can keep a close eye on key statistics.

 TRIPLE OVER VOLTAGE

We believe overclockers are always looking for the top, and we know that absolute control of the smallest details is vital to success. To reward our customers, we provide more extensive control over MSI graphics cards.

The Triple Overvoltage feature will give you an edge by providing precise control of the Core, Memory and PLL voltages.

CUSTOM FAN PROFILES

Heat dissipation is an essential factor for graphics card performance. Afterburner lets you fully customize a predefined fan speed curve, allowing you to determine cooling performance all the way!

AFTERBURNER MOBILE APP

There’s no need to switch out of your game to edit overclocking settings or monitor hardware information. The Afterburner mobile App allows you to control key performance settings and view information from your IOS or Android smartphone or tablet. Make sure you have MSI Afterburner Remote Server installed and running on your system.

Reference

http://gaming.msi.com/features/afterburner

Alienware Area - 51

Forget everything you know.

With unprecedented gaming power and iconic, innovative design, the new Alienware Area-51 is the next evolution of high-performance desktop gaming.

Starting at $1699.99

What We Liked…

• Spectacular gaming performance
• Attractive, innovative design
• Powerful Command Center software

What We Didn’t…

• Enormous, potentially unwieldy case
• Not the highest CPU and productivity scores in the universe

Introduction & Design

For years—long before it was acquired by Dell, even—Alienware has made its desktops as distinctive in how they looked as how they performed. Its bleeding-edge systems have often been the technological embodiments of the company's name, complete with fins, curvy panels and doors, the distinctive alien-head logo, and prices usually about high enough to finance a round-trip ticket to Jupiter.

If the latest, completely revamped edition of the company's flagship Area-51 gaming desktop is surprisingly conservative in one sense—no fins or swoopy cutouts, and practically subdued case lighting—it's downright radical in its overall shape. And under the hood, this PC is Alienware through and through. It's also, though far from cheap at $4,499, a competitor to boutique gaming rigs costing a grand or three more.

What you'll notice first about the Area-51 R2 is that it almost entirely abandons the square boxiness that even boundary-pushing systems—including many of Alienware's—have long embraced. The bottom sections of the company's new "triad" chassis' front and rear panels protrude considerably more than the top parts do, with the panels' long, sloping side edges defining a distinctive shape that, when viewed from the side, looks like a plump triangle. (Okay, the short panels or lopped-off points between the other three sides mean it's actually more hexagonal, but the contrast is stark enough that the overall impression is triangular.)

Though the case runs a bit deeper than a standard full-size tower (the dimensions are about 22.4 by 10.7 by 25.2 inches, HWD), Alienware took great pains to point out to us that you won't necessarily need more space to stash the computer—that the design ensures adequate airflow and cabling space with the system pushed back against a wall. The angle of the rear panel and the bottom-mounted power supply (for plugging in the power cable) mean that none of the cables will require the two or three inches of additional space between the system and the wall that most large-scale desktops do.

Pop open the case (two latches at the top rear let you remove the left- and right-side panels) and you'll discover that the interior of the Area-51 has been given no less consideration. Two intake fans (one mounted on the top front panel angled downward, one on the bottom front panel angled upward) aim their air at the CPU/memory area and the graphics cards. The wiring is impeccably tied, arranged, and routed to help maximize both neatness and airflow. Pull off the other side panel, and you'll discover bays for housing up to five drives (three 3.5-inch, two 2.5-inch).As is traditional for Alienware, there's a complex lighting scheme that's divided into nine separate areas (three lights on each of the side panels, two running down either side of the front panel, and the backlit, alien-head-shaped power button), which can be controlled individually or collectively. (More on this in a minute.)

Features

Alienware rarely skimps on the components, and such is the case here. The $1,699 base model comes with a six-core Intel Core i7-5820K CPU, though it has no SSD and a single AMD Radeon R9 270 graphics card. Bargain hunters should seek out the $2,549 step-up model, which boasts 16GB of RAM, pairs its 2TB hard drive with a 128GB SSD, and has an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 card.

Our $4,499 flagship test configuration is loaded with a 3.5GHz Intel Core i7-5930K processor, mildly overclocked to 3.9GHz instead of 3.7GHz in Turbo Boost mode, and 16GB of DDR4 RAM for all your basic processing duties. If you insist on eight cores instead of six, Intel's Core i7-5960X is a $600 option.

Your games will be driven by three(yes-THREE!!!) 4GB GeForce GTX 980 graphics cards, though because they consume most of the space on the custom Alienware X99 motherboard used in the Area-51, you shouldn't plan to have any space left over for adding other cards. (Sandwiched between the three PCI Express x16 Gen 3 slots are a PCIe x4 and a PCIe x1 slot, but they're blocked by the GTX 980 cards.) If this triple SLI setup isn't enough for you, you can get a quad SLI config by ordering two dual-GPU GeForce Titan Z cards instead for $1,050 more.

Three heavenly graphics cards

As for storage, there's a 256GB Samsung 850 Pro solid-state drive for installing games and apps and a 4TB Western Digital 7,200rpm hard drive for storing all your other files. Though optical drives are becoming increasingly rare these days, there is a slot-loading BD-ROM/DVD±RW drive on the front panel, in case you should need it.

These components receive plenty of support, too. A self-contained liquid cooling system keeps the CPU at safe operating temperatures. The video cards are held in place by a specially designed rear cage unit that makes them easy to release without use of a screwdriver.

The power supply is another custom Alienware model, rated up to 1,500 watts (a good thing, given all those video cards). Connectivity is rife, with built-in 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and Killer NIC e2200 game-optimized Gigabit Ethernet.

Despite all the hardcore hardware you'll find in the Area-51, however, it's remarkably quiet while operating at full-bore. You can hear it (especially with the side panel removed), but we never found its noise as distracting as is frequently the case with high-end gaming desktops.

On the front panel you'll find two USB 3.0 ports, headphone and microphone jacks, and an SD card slot. The rear panel sports eight additional USB ports (four 3.0, four 2.0) and the usual assortment of audio ports, plus three DVI, three HDMI, and nine DisplayPort outputs on the three graphics cards.

A one-year warranty covers the Area-51 and the preinstalled operating system is, of course, Windows 8.1. You won't find a ton of bloatware out of the gate, but you will find Alienware's useful Command Center software. This is where you'll go to explore crucial hardware status data such as CPU and GPU temperatures and fan speeds; configure power and game profiles; tinker with overclocking; and more.

While we recommend investigating all the options (particularly the overclocking settings) carefully before doing too much, the Command Center is simple to navigate and use, and a fair amount of help is provided. We found it incredibly easy, for example, to customize the system's lighting scheme by making selections from a color wheel and linking them to the nine LED lighting areas, even instructing them to pulse or morph from one color to another.

Conclusion

We can wholeheartedly recommend the Alienware Area-51 R2 for gaming desktop fans. How can you not love performance that meets—and in a few instances exceeds—that of desktops that cost nearly twice as much? But as our CPU and productivity benchmarks show, it's important that you remember why you're buying a computer like this. If you stray too far from the gaming chores at which it excels, you might find that it doesn't quite live up to its hefty promise, at least at its stock clock speed (which, of course, you can tweak using the Command Center software).

On the bright side, though: When you look at the Area-51's one-of-a-kind case, what in the Milky Way are you going to think of other than gaming? This is a bad ass fucking gaming machine for all you gamers out there like me. Its like a match made in heaven.

Reference

http://www.computershopper.com/desktops/reviews/alienware-area-51-r2/(page)/3#review-body