Shmee.Me

June 24, 2014June 24, 2014

Shmee Puts His Dirty Hands On Battlefield: Hardline!

One of EA’s big E3 announcements this year was Battlefield: Hardline. It is the large open-world combat that you have come to know and love from Battlefield, but now you are playing as Cops and Robbers. It is like someone at EA saw how well the Payday franchise was doing and decided to modify Battlefield 4 to corner that part of the market. Besides just announcing Hardline, they also allowed people with PCs and PS4s to download it and try it out. Since I don’t have a PS4, I had to go with the PC option (poor me I know).

It is pretty much Battlefield 4. Which means it is fun, and the combat is intense, but it didn’t wow me with how new and original it is. It feels like a really well done expansion pack from the good ol’ days before monthly DLC, or even a good looking total conversion mod from a talented group of individuals, but even though it looks different it still plays the same.

The modes are kind of new. One is called Blood Money, where both sides run to central location and grab cash to bring back to their vaults. It is like center capture the flag except you can attack the other side’s base. Heist is a game-type where the criminals need to steal money out of the Police’s armored cars, so it is pretty much assault.

Like I have said throughout this, whatever it is, Battlefield: Hardline is fun. It plays well, and it is well balanced, but it just doesn’t differentiate itself enough for me to get really excited about it. Especially since I already own Battlefield 4 (which is a great game). This is just the beta though, so maybe they can sell me on it more in the months to come. It comes out this year on October 21st.

June 19, 2014June 19, 2014

Cool Down With The Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo!

Mrs. Shmee decided to help out my ongoing computer upgrade for Father’s Day, so she got me a new CPU fan. It is the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo. This fan fits a lot of chipsets, and it is reasonably priced, usually under $35, but is it any good? Well for my purposes it was well worth the price.

It is pretty much a large light weight aluminum heat-sync with four copper pipes running through it. It comes with one 120mm fan, but it has the brackets for one more if you decide that you need to move the air over your processor a little faster. The mounting brackets are adjustable so that you can put it on just about any CPU made, and it was perfect for my AMD FX-8320.

It is a little tall and the fan makes it kind of fat, but my Lian-Li PC-9F case was wide enough to fit it, and my low rise G.SKILL Ares RAM didn’t bump in to it. Though if you are going to buy one of these you definitely need to check out the dimensions of your case, and how your motherboard is laid out.

The 212 Evo is way quieter than the fan that came with the processor, and I was able to overclock the chip from 3.5GHz to 4GHz without increasing the voltage. Even with the overclock, my CPU is running cooler than with the stock fan. I could go probably go faster if I had a higher end motherboard, but 500MHz is nothing to sneeze at. I torture tested the CPU and fan using Prime95 for several hours to confirm that my overclock was stable, and it passed with flying colors. It was fun to see my chip run all eight cores flat out.

If your stock fan is not cutting it for your processer, the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo is a great upgrade. It doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, but it will run quiet and even let you overclock your chip a little. I am quite happy with mine, and I think you will like it too.

June 11, 2014

Shmee’s Thoughts On Crysis 2!

Since I have been upgrading my computer, I have been playing a few computer games I have had kicking around, and one of those games is Crysis 2 by Cytek and published by EA. I got it during a Steam sale awhile ago, and I just never got around to playing it. It came out three years ago, so you have probably either played it or decided to skip it, but I thought I would my thoughts on it anyway. That is kind of what I do on this site after all.

The plot in Crysis 2 is that you are wearing a super suit that allows you to try and save humanity from aliens, and a group of crazy people are trying cover up the alien invasion, or something like that. Honestly I am not totally sure why I am killing a bunch of humans during an alien invasion, but they are bad, and this is a first person shooter, so they must die.

My problem with this game is that at first you really don’t feel that super. You have to keep finding alien DNA to upgrade your abilities. Which fine, but I want to feel awesome from the get go, and I don’t want to have to hunt down a bunch of aliens to get better. Plus in the first game it was wide open, and I could complete my objectives in any way that I wanted, but in this game I am kind of stuck just moving forward and shooting.

On the plus side the shooting is good, and you can customize your weapons. The graphics also hold up well, and I am sure they would look better if I wasn’t playing the game with a Radeon HD5770. When I get my new graphics card I will have to fire it up again and compare the visuals.

The first Crysis blew me away with its crazy graphics, and cool abilities. It had a wide open world to explore, and it let me choose my path. This game feels like a step back in every department. It is still fun, but I find it lacking anything great that makes me want to keep playing.

June 10, 2014

So It Is E3…

All the big companies kicked off E3 yesterday, and while there were a few cool announcements, for me there was nothing ground breaking. Let me run down what happened: Every major game that sells well got a sequel; If there was a new game announced it looked a lot like games we have played before; Microsoft and Sony are willing to pay a lot of money for timed exclusives, and they both (Sony in particular) announced a few remakes.

The remake thing caught me off guard. I knew, as did the rest of the world, that Microsoft was going to release some sort of upgraded Halo, and they kind of needed to with Halo 5 not due out until next year, but Phantom Dust? That came out of nowhere. Sony went all in with remakes: an upgraded Last of Us, Ratchet and Clank, a timed exclusive of Grim Fandango, and a not at all exclusive GTA 5. GTA 5 came out after the new consoles did, so everyone knew it was going to happen; Grim Fandango makes sense since it is a cult classic that not a lot of people have played, so why not introduce it to a new generation, but The Last of Us seems odd since it just came out, and everyone played it. Oh well if you have a PS4 you are getting another game.

Both Microsoft and PlayStation tried to show that they are hip, and that they are down with the indie dev scene. Sony still seems to have the indie upper hand, but Microsoft is at least starting to get quite a bit of interest in its ID@Xbox platform, so lets see if they can keep it up. I am not sure that indie games are system sellers yet, but they are cheap and bring in fresh ideas to consoles.

The fact that Conker is going to be available for game makers in Project Spark kind of threw me off. Why just Conker? Why not a lot MS owned properties, so people can have Conker and Voodo Vince team up to save Master Chief from the Brute Force guys? Maybe they will in the future, but to make a point of saying that just Conker would be available was strange to me.

After the first day of announcements, some of the games I am interested in are: Tom Clancy’s The Division, Batman: Arkham Knight, Sunset Overdrive, Destiney, The Witcher 3, Bloodborne, Cuphead, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection (It has over 100 multiplayer maps!). Yes I know that list has a few of the sequels and remakes I was talking about earlier, but they do look very good. I just hope that some of the original games being made make it big, so we can get a little more variety in next year’s E3 press conferences.

Anything strike you about this year’s E3 kickoff? What games are getting you all hot and bothered?

June 9, 2014June 9, 2014

Computer Hardware Tripple Shot!

I am continuing to slowly upgrade my computer (well actually pretty much replacing it), so the next three components I got, were the motherboard, RAM, and CPU. First up lets talk about the foundation of it all the motherboard:

Asus M5A97 LE R2.0:

After a bad experience with other board makers, I pretty much now only use Asus boards. Their customer service is kind of lame if you ever do need to call them, but their parts are usually so good that you don’t have to anyway. This board had exactly what I wanted: gigabit Ethernet, USB3 ports, a decent sound card, it supported the CPU I wanted, and it was cheap. It ended up being even cheaper thanks to a rebate offer.

It has a great BIOS, which I updated as soon as it started up, that allows for complete control over all your components, and extremely easy overclocking tools. What I liked about this thing is that it just worked the way I wanted it to out of the box. I didn’t need to play with anything, or toggle a setting, it just got my PC up and running.

The only downer is that it didn’t have a USB3 expansion port for the front of my case, but that wasn’t a feature I wanted to spend $20 on. I installed this three weeks ago and it has been rock solid, so if you are looking for a good low-mid level gaming board for AMD processors, you should put this on your short list.

G.SKILL Ares Series 8GB SDRAM DDR3 1866:

I don’t have a lot to say here other then this is some pretty fast RAM. I got the Ares version of the G.SKILL RAM family due to the fact it has low rise heat syncs, so I can put whatever components I want in my computer, and I don’t have to worry about them running in to the giant RAM chips sticking out of my MoBo. Like all DDR3 RAM chips that function above 1333 MHz, I did have select the 1866 MHz speed in my BIOS, but other then that they have been completely trouble free. I have never had problems with G.SKILL RAM, and it looks like that is still the case.

AMD FX8320:

Everyone that builds a mid-range gaming computer these days uses the Intel i5 series processors because they are fast, and they don’t consume a lot of power. I however am an AMD fanboy from way back, so I will take the hit in power costs, and a little hit in single threaded processing power to use an AMD chip. If you don’t care who makes your chips you should probably use an Intel i5, but if you do get an FX-8320 you will still be very happy.

It is fast enough, it has eight cores, and it is unlocked so you can overclock it as much as you feel comfortable with. In just playing around, I got this chip to over 4.1 GHz without too much effort. I didn’t leave it at that speed because I still only have to stock cooler, and didn’t want to burn it up, but when I do get a better cooler I will have this chip clocked well over the 3.5 GHz stock clock speed.

And I will totally be getting a better cooler. The stock cooler is fine when the computer isn’t working hard, but once you start doing something fun it sounds like a hoover vacuum cleaner. I suppose they just throw in a cooler to make it a complete set, but they must know guys like me will not use them for long anyway, so why bother including something good. Still the chip is cheap at under $150, so even with the price of a decent cooler, you still haven’t spent $200 yet, and that is a pretty good deal.

There are my three computer hardware mini reviews, and I hope you found them somewhat useful. I still have a cooler, and a video card to go to finish this computer off, and I will let you all know how it goes!