Author: Shmee

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Shmee Revisits Morrowind!

Thanks to The Elder Scrolls Online announcing the new Morrowind expansion, I got a little nostalgic, and I decided to fire up The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and relive one of my all time favorite games.  It was not an easy process.  The first problem was that Morrowind was not designed for 64-bit computers with more than 4GB of RAM, so I had to get a mod to get it working.  Then due to the high resolution of my monitor (according to Morrowind), I had to download a new font pack, and since I was doing all that anyway, I decided to download a few mods that tweak the game’s gameplay balance, fix bugs, and improve the game’s visuals and sound.  Two hours later Morrowind was up and running on my PC.

I was ready to dive in.  All I had to do was open the trap door to the prison boat I was on…  It took about me about 30 minutes to figure out that the the ‘use’ button and the ‘activate’ button are different (The first time I played Morrowind was on the Original Xbox).  It turns out you ‘activate’ people and doors with spacebar.  The game did not tell me this, and who in their right mind uses spacebar for anything other than jumping.  All the default controls were wonky.  I mean right click brought up the menus instead of switching to magic, so after another 30 minutes of remapping my controls I was able to complete character creation and start playing the game.

Of course all the mods I had installed were not optimized, so my frame rate was swinging between 200FPS and 15FPS, so I had to do some tweaking to get everything to stay above 30FPS.  I have never had a game that looks so bad, run so poorly, but after looking in to the forums I found out the frame rate is just a problem with Morrowind on PC in general, and not my mods.  It turns out 15 years ago developers couldn’t imagine a world with 100% draw distance.

Four hours in to my quest to play Morrowind something happened, I got lost in it all over again.  I just want to go home and play it now.  The combat mechanics are sketchy, the graphics didn’t hold up, and the story is still trash, but the world of Morrowind is still one of the best ever made.  Skyrim and Oblivion have normal generic fantasy worlds (Oblivion did have its gates I guess *shudder*) , but Morrowind with its mushroom forests, boggy swamps and gray deserts are so unique and imaginative that I want to see every nook and cranny.  It is so delightfully weird, and no game will ever match the shear amount of loot you can find and use.  SO MANY EQUIPMENT SLOTS!

Most of Morrowind has not held up well, but the world is still amazing, and the loot hound in me wants to make sure I have every slot of my character filled up with something magical.  I would pay sooooo much money for a new special edition of Morrowind, but I don’t think it is ever going to happen.  Morrowind is a game for the ages, and the game that turned me in to an RPG player for life.  If you have never played it, I doubt you would be able to look past its flaws, but for those of us who have 15 years of nostalgia built up, this is still one of the best RPGs ever made.

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Shmee Ponders Silence

It is not often that you sit through a movie and do not enjoy it but still consider it a good movie.  However, that is the case with Martin Scorsese’s Silence.  It is a film that you endure for its almost three hour running time, but it is time well spent.  In the hands of less talented filmmakers Silence could have been a disaster, but Scorsese kept this movie on course.

Silence follows two Jesuit Priests (Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield) as they look for their mentor (Liam Neeson) in 17th century Japan.  During this time period Christianity was strictly forbidden, and those found out to be Christians were tortured and killed.  So it should come as no surprise that their journey does not go well.

Usually the name of a movie is chosen for marketing purposes.  Something catchy that looks good on a poster.  That is not the case with Silence.  Silence is the what this movie is about.  Not just that the film is quiet, which it is, but more so about the question, “How can God stay silent in the face of all this horror?”  This question is why I said in the leading paragraph that in the hands of a less talented director that this movie could have been a disaster.  It is a strong and powerful question, and one the audience needs to think about.  Lesser filmmakers just would have said that there is no God and move on with it.  Not so with Scorsese.  He reminds us that God is with us in the Silence, and that even if God did give us the answers we were looking for, we may not understand them.

Scorsese also did a good job treating the torture scenes, which there are a lot of, responsibly.  He didn’t back down from showing any of the horrible ways that humans were treated, but he also didn’t glorify these terrible acts.  They were shown very matter-of-factly.  Silence shows what happened as it happened and that is all.  The torture is not in this film to titillate anyone.

Silence is a long and hard slog, but one worth watching.  It isn’t very often that a secular filmmaker makes a thoughtful and powerful movie about doubting one’s faith and still manages to work in a little hope.  This movie asks a lot of questions, but doesn’t give the audience a lot of answers, and I think that is for the best.  Silence can be a hard movie to watch, but I think you should watch it anyway.

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The Best Thing About Sherlock Is That It Is Short!

You know what I love about Sherlock?  Every season you can watch the whole thing in three days!  It is great.  You don’t need to devote a lot of time to it, so it is easy to keep up.  There is nothing better than being up to date on a hit show, and if you haven’t seen Sherlock at all, you can watch the entire series in a week or two.

Even better, it is a pretty good show.  Season four has some issues.  It relied more on twists than mystery, but considering I only had to invest four and half hours it is hard to be that mad.  If they had plodded those twists out over sixteen episodes The Walking Dead style, I may have been.

As it is there is no reason not to watch Sherlock.  It is short and sweet (in a murder-y kind of way).  The only agonizing part is that since the stars are so busy you never know when the next season is coming out.  They have committed to season five, but we probably will not see it until 2020, so lucky you, you have three years to catch up.

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Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Is Fine

Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a return to form for the Deus Ex franchise after the clunky yet still okay Invisible War, so I was supper excited for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.  It turns out that the Dues Ex franchise must be like Star Trek movies where only every other one is good.  That is not to say Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is bad.  It isn’t.  It is very competent in fact, but it lacks that hook that makes me want to play.

Mankind Divided takes place a couple of years after Human Revolution, and the world is still recovering from ‘The Incident’ where all augmented people went crazy and started attacking non-augmented people.  This has caused places like Prague, the game’s main location, to start segregating people based on whether they are augmented or not.  Of course all sorts of dangerous people are trying to use this situation to further their own goals, and it is up to Adam Jensen to stop them.

The story’s setup is pretty good, and it should provided a decent launching off point for this game, but they never really find a way to truly make anything matter.  I am almost all the way through the game, and I still don’t care about any of the characters.  ‘Augs’ are being treated poorly, and I should feel bad about that, but Mankind Divided must not be in my face enough with it or something because it all feels kind of shrug worthy.  Worse still this game bills itself as an RPG, but much like Fallout 4 they have taken most of the choice out of Mankind Divided.  You can choose to do side quests or not, and sometimes you can go left or right, but you are never having that big of an impact on the story, and that is a shame.

Another letdown is the loot.  If you are like me and playing this game sneakily, then you will need next to none of the stuff you can pick up.  You will never find a better taser pistol, or a better tranquilizer rifle.  You can pick up things like shotguns and load them with EMP rounds then a attach a silencer, but it will still make too much noise.  The same goes for the augmentations you can pick.  For me, all I will ever need are, the one that lets me talk to people better, jump high and turn invisible.  Hacking is nice, but not necessary.  Everything else is cool to play with, but not practical for the non-violent approach.

I will say the one place Deus Ex: Mankind Divided shines is its approach to combat and level design.  If you are trying to be stealthy there are all sorts of fun ways to get around guys and take them out without killing them, and based on all the gear and augs I am not using, if you want to be the human embodiment of death, you will have a wide variety of options too.  Honestly its varied levels and combat options are why I keep pushing forward with this game.

In the end, I always have fun when I play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, but I just don’t get that feeling that I ‘need’ to play it.  I have to get myself to start, but then once I do I enjoy myself due to the cool levels and combat.  I just wish the story, loot, and augmentation options were as good.  Since Deus Ex: Mankind Divided seems like it is endlessly on sale for $30 or less, I would say it is worthwhile, but I would have regretted paying full price for it.