Author: Shmee

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Xbox Scorpio Is Beast!

It is clear that Microsoft doesn’t like being the less powerful than the PS4 Pro, so they went all out to beat it.  12GB of DDR5 memory, 4GB more than the PS4 Pro, and it bests PS4 Pro’s memory bandwidth by more than a 100GB/s at 326GB/s.  They boosted the core CPU clock speed by almost a full 1GHz.  Then on top of that they went up from 12 compute units on the standard Xbox One GPU to 40 on the Scorpio, so that is 28 more graphics threads, and 4 more than the PS4 Pro.  What does that mean to us?  It is pretty dang fast.  Fast enough to compete with the PC fanboys that is for sure.

Microsoft has also said that all games will get a boost, not just ones that program for it, so that will be interesting to see.  It will also be interesting to see if they can hit their native 4K resolution promise.  With this kind of power I am sure that they can, but will games’ FPS be able to keep up?  Now all we need know is how much all this power will cost?  I am guessing it will have to launch somewhere around $500, but any more than that and it could be DOA.  Especially since there are no Scorpio exclusive games.  All games should work on both the Scorpio and the Xbox One.  Microsoft should have an interesting E3.  I will be watching that is for sure.  Until then I am going to dream about compute units!

Watch the full reveal below!

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Hopefully The Walking Dead Season 7 Will Be Known As The Lost Season!

Hey do you like shows where things happen, people grow, and mysteries form?  Well then you shouldn’t watch The Walking Dead Season 7.  It was sooo booooring.  We all knew the whole season that Rick’s gang would get all the settlements together to battle the Saviors, but they managed to do it in the slowest and least interesting way possible.

It starts out with Rick lost and unsure.  Only knowing that if he gets stuff for Negan that his people will live.  It turns out his people hate that idea, so they keep getting killed anyway, or at the very least talked to by Negan for long amounts of time.  Which is like getting killed.  We did loose a few people we didn’t care about.  This goes on for the first half of the season.  It is slow and dumb.  Then the second half is about Rick finding guns and people to fight Negan.  This is also slow and dumb.

Finally in the last episode they fight Negan, kind of, but of course Negan gets away, so I am guessing they are going to build up for a full season again until the ‘war’ happens.  Sure the last episode was fun because something actually happened, and it showed what this series is capable of, but it was terrible that we had to wait through the entire season to get there.

I am hopping that the producers are listening to their fans and their dwindling viewer numbers and start doing something interesting.  That way we can all just forget that season seven ever happened.  It was bad, and worse still, bad in the most boring way possible.  Please get interesting again The Walking Dead!

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My Evening With Neil Gaiman!

When I bought a ticket for “An Evening with Neil Gaiman” in Seattle, I was unsure as to what I was buying.  Was he just going to read his stuff? Was he going to answer questions?  Was he going to talk about his current projects?  It turns out the answer was yes to the first two questions and briefly mention the third.

It was different experience because it was just him, alone, on stage in a large hall standing in front of a lectern.  While he was introduced by a local radio host and an accordion player, this was all about Neil Gaiman talking to his fans.  It was wonderful.  He has a warm English accent, and he brought his work to life as he spoke.  He read a story from his current book, Norse Mythology, and then several of his different short works.  My only complaints about the evening were that some of the questions asked of him were on the generic side, and that I wished he would have gone longer.  Apparently I was not the only person who thought that way because we clapped until he came out for an encore.

I am not sure how many authors sell out symphony halls and then get cheered on for just one last story, but believe me when I tell you that it all felt perfectly natural, and I had thought that it would have worked I would have cheered him on for a second encore.  It made me wish that we treated more of our authors like rock stars.  They fill this world with their creativity, but then we generally ignore them, or tell them they should get back to work because they are not writing fast enough.

If Neil Gaiman should come traipsing around your town, you should go see him.  I believe his next stop is Dallas.  It was a fun night, and not one that I am going to forget.  Now if only he would stop touring around the world and get back to writing.  There are novels I need to read that haven’t been written yet.

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Legion Is My Favorite Show So Far This Year!

I am kind of mad.  Because besides Archer I never had a reason to watch FX, but now I can’t wait for the next season of Legion.  It was finally an X-Men show/movie about that wasn’t about superheroes.  It was just about mutants trying to figure out how to live in a hostile world.  Sure there was some hero-y stuff, but that is mostly because they have cool powers and they need to use them from time to time because bad people want to hurt them.

Another great part of the show is that because of David’s mutation and his disease Legion is unendingly weird and trippy.  It is like they let Stanley Kubrick take a crack that the superhero genre.  Every episode had something cool to show us, and because it was only eight episodes long it was relatively light on filler.

While this is definitely Dan Stevens’/David’s show, Aubrey Plaza as Lenny stole every episode she was in.  She was incredibly watchable.  The rest of the cast was delightful as well.  Though I did feel that Rachel Keller as David’s love interest Sydney could have used more to do.  However, she did serve as a good fill in for the audience taking in all the crazy things happening around her.  A non-comedic straight-man if you will.  Because things really did get super nuts.

We have twelve long months before Legion is back on the air, and now I have to figure out how to keep FX as part of my cable package.  Whereas before I could have lived without it, and they are making another X-Men show to compliment this one!  Curse you good TV!!!!!!!!  Oh well, I might as well enjoy it.  Queue the X-Men theme!

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Mass Effect: Andromeda Probably Doesn’t Review Well…

I am quite a bit further in to Mass Effect: Andromeda, and I am still having a great time.  Much better than the reviews and people who played the early trial would have led me to believe, so what caused this discrepancy?  I think it is the way reviewers have to play games, and the part of the game the trial members were locked in too.

In order to review Mass Effect: Andromeda before the embargo lifted, reviewers would have had to play the game for like eight hours a day or more just to see most of the content, and then because they need to review everything, they would have had to play all the crappy filler missions too.  That means they would have had to sit through every poorly written dialog tree, and encounter every bug the game has to offer for a full work day.  That wouldn’t be great.  I am surprised under those circumstances the reviews are as good as they are.

Meanwhile the user reviews on Metacritic are even worse, but when you read them, they all pretty much come from people who only played the ten hour one planet trial.  Again, the trial forced players to play only the worst part of the game.  Eos doesn’t even get good until the second time you visit it.  EA should have just skipped the trial, or allowed people to get as far as they could in ten hours, so they could have gotten to the good parts.  Locking people in to the worst part of the game did not help sell the game.

Listen, Mass Effect: Andromeda is a flawed game, but still a very fun one provided you can play the good parts and skip everything else, and there are plenty of good parts.  The people that gave the game its review numbers were not allowed to do that.  We as gamers are, so while your results may very, I think Mass Effect: Andromeda is worth playing, but I am not saying the reviewers were wrong.  They were just forced to play the worst this game has to offer.