Category: Computer

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Shmee Takes A Stroll With The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter!

I have been wanting to try The Vanishing of Ethan Carter since it was announced, but because it has been described as a ‘walking simulator’ I was always hesitant to spend my hard earned cash on it.  Luckily it was included in a pay what you want bundle on Humble Bundle, and it came with the Unreal 4 version, Redux, for free!  Let me tell you it was well worth the $1 I spent.

In The Vanishing of Ethan Carter you take the role of paranormal investigator Paul Prospero looking for the titular Ethan Carter in the derelict town of Red Creek Valley, Wisconsin.  You use your skills of walking around and touching stuff to find out what has happened in this dead town and its inhabitants.  Hopefully you can stop whatever happened here from spreading.

Uncovering what happened in Red Creek Valley is a lot of fun, and for a game that is called a ‘walking simulator’, the puzzles are great.  They are just right for me.  They don’t hold my hand and tell me exactly what to do, but they also aren’t so complicated that I give up trying to solve them myself.  The problem is that a lot of these puzzles are optional, so you have to walk around to find them.  Worse the walking speed is super slow, so looking in every nook and cranny of this game for optional puzzles or puzzle pieces happens at an agonizing pace.

I understand that they don’t want people to run past their puzzles, and having a slow movement speed allows people to enjoy the amazing visuals this game has to offer.  I mean the game can be breathtaking, but you just move so freaking slowly.  Once you solve a puzzle cool things happen, and I love to see cool stuff, so that keeps my slow feet churning, but I just wish that there was a sprint button that activated when there were no more puzzles in the area or something.

I enjoyed The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.  It is a great adventure game, but it moves a little too slowly for its own good.  If you can put up with its sluggish protagonist, I think you should give The Vanishing of Ethan Carter a play through.  You can probably finish the game in one to two sittings, and it is a memorable experience.  It is out now on Steam and PS4.

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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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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.

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Nintendo Switch Controllers Cost How Much!!!!

Some people have been griping about the price of the Nintendo Switch.  It will cost $300 with both the left and the right Joy-Con controllers and the dock.  That doesn’t bug me too much.  If it is $300 now it won’t be long until you can find a sale where they are probably $25-$50 less than that.  The Dock costs $90, again not a big deal.  How many people are going to need more than one Dock?  Since I work in the IT industry I can tell you that $90 for an HDMI dock isn’t that bad.

What is bad is the controller price.  You would think that when you buy a new Switch controller that it would include both the left and the right Joy-Cons, you know so you could play any game with it, but that is not the case.  Each left and right costs $49 each.  You do save $20 buying them together for $79, but still, $79 for a new non-premium/special edition controller is a lot to swallow.  It makes it hard to justify for families.  I know that like the console itself the price will drop on those pretty quick.  However, that means they will be $60ish on sale.  The price of a full price game.

The Switch still looks really cool, and I can’t wait to try one myself, but those controller prices are ridiculous, and that is coming from a guy who spent $150 on an Xbox One Elite controller (I still love it by the way).