Category: Xbox One

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Shmee Checks Out The Xbox One X Updates For Rise Of The Tomb Raider And The Elder Scrolls Online!

I loved Rise of the Tomb Raider when it came out a couple of years ago, but since I completed most of the game I felt little reason to go back.  However, since the game has been prominently used in Microsoft’s advertising for the Xbox One X I thought I should give it a try.  Because I don’t have a 4K TV the Native 4K mode looked okay, but it wasn’t mind blowing.  The Enriched Visuals mode on the other hand was a massive step up.  It looked great: a cleaner picture, better shadows and lighting, and better effects.  The High Framerate mode was also impressive.  It was much easier to control Lara, and it was silky smooth, but it was hard give up the visual fidelity of the Enriched Visuals mode.  I am not sure I am going to play much more Rise of the Tomb Raider, but it was quite the tech demo for what the Xbox One X can do, and hopefully more developers give us the type of graphical options that Nixxes did.

Next up The Elder Scrolls Online!

The Elder Scrolls online got new textures for Xbox One X and displays in Native 4K, so what that meant for me, the lowly 1080p TV user, is that it looks much crisper.  The textures are all crystal clear, and there are very few jagged lines.  As an MMO, this game was never pushing the boundaries of graphical fidelity, but this is a solid update for people who still play this game.  The ‘just one more quest’ hook almost had me trapped for a while.  It is not the showcase that Rise of the Tomb Raider is, but The Elder Scrolls Online still looks pretty good.

After playing these two games, I am hopeful that more games push out their Xbox One X patches soon because I am liking what I have been seeing!

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Shmee Takes The Turing Test!

Apparently I went broke buying my Xbox One X because all I have been playing lately are indie Games with Gold games.  Thankfully they have all been pretty good so far.  Including the game I am reviewing today, The Turing Test.  It is a first person puzzle game by Bulkhead Interactive which is made up of the studios behind the first person puzzle game Pneuma: Breath of Life.  I am sensing a pattern with their work.  Though their next game is a WWII multiplayer shooter called Battalion 1944, so I guess they are trying to branch out.

In The Turing Test you play as Ava Turing who has been woken up out of cryosleep to help the ground team on Jupiter’s moon Europa.  They apparently have gotten in to trouble, and they have locked the mission’s AI, TOM, out of the base, so to get in you have to solve a bunch of puzzles to prove that you are a human, AKA a Turing Test.

The puzzles start out pretty easy, but as they add more gameplay mechanics, the puzzles get more complicated and challenging, though never overly hard.  The ending puzzles seem to strike the right balance of making your brain work, but never making you so frustrated that you throw your controller at your TV.  At least for me, but I am definitely not a Mensa member, so your puzzling abilities may vary.

The Turing Test is much better than Pneuma: Breath of Life, so the folks at Bulkhead have been working hard to hone their craft, and I am interested to see if their games continue this upward trend.  I hope so because if they are releasing a WWII shooter in to a market that just got a new WWII Call of Duty game it had better be really good.  Anyway, The Turing Test is still free on Games with Gold, and it is well worth picking up.  Even if you miss out on getting it for free, it is a challenge worth paying for.

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A 1080p Gamer’s Day With An Xbox One X!

I got my Project Scorpio Edition Xbox One X in the mail yesterday ( a shout-out to the Blaine Washington Post Office for letting me call in and pick it up!), and I had a good time playing games one it.  If you have been following the news around the One X you will know that its primary focus is on delivering 4K games, but Microsoft has been adamant that people with lowly 1080p screens would also see a benefit.  Since I have yet to take the plunge on a 4K set, I figured I would let you know my thoughts.

So far out of the three enhanced games that I have played, Hitman, Titanfall 2 and Halo 5, the big difference is that everything just looks cleaner.  Hitman and Halo 5 got some new textures that look great.  Especially Hitman’s character models if you run in ‘Quality Mode’ instead of ‘FPS Mode’.  Halo 5 just swaps out some of the muddier environmental textures, which admittedly makes a big difference.  Titanfall 2 has no new textures, so it just runs the game at the highest resolution its dynamic scaling solution will let it, and then super-samples the image down to 1080p for a nice clean picture.  Of course I believe Hitman and Halo 5 are doing the same thing as well.

In gameplay terms, I actually saw an improvement to my play for the simple reason that I could more easily pick out enemies and opposing players.  I didn’t become a superstar or anything, but just cleaning up the picture let me see everything that much better, so the bad guys had no place to hide, even in busy environments.  I still don’t have the skill to top the leaderboard, but I was able to hold my own in all the games I played.

I also played the non-enhanced Turing Test (review forthcoming).  For non-enhanced games Microsoft is adding 16x anisotropic filtering and framerate locks to make the picture a little nicer, and while the results were not as good as enhanced games, there were fewer jagged lines and the loading times were much better, so not what you would spend $500 for, but it is still good to see that indeed all games do play a little better on the Xbox One X.

All in all, I am not sure $500 is worth it for everyone who doesn’t have a 4K TV, but for me, I like to see my games at their best, and the Xbox One X definitely does that.  Microsoft has stayed true to their word and created the most powerful gaming console of all time, and I am happy to be playing my games on one!

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Shmee Has Gone Home!

Much like Oxenfree, I had heard that Gone Home was a good game, but I guess I was just waiting for Microsoft to give me a copy as part of the Games with Gold program.  It turns out that I probably shouldn’t have waited so long.  It is a fantastic tale, and it only takes a couple of hours to play.

In Gone Home you play as Katie who has just come home to Portland from a European tour.  You would expect your parents and sister to be home to welcome you, but they are nowhere to be found, so you have to rummage through the creepy house they moved in to while you were away trying to find clues as to their whereabouts.

When Gone Home came out on PC four years ago it was one of the premiere ‘Walking Simulators’.  In fact it was Polygon’s game of the year.  It only came out on console last year after an engine upgrade so that it would play better with controllers, and it holds up very well.  The game is super atmospheric, and early part of the game is very creepy.  It will have you digging through every drawer and hidey-hole trying to find out what happened.  As with all Walking Sims they live and die by their story, and the story in Game Home is fantastic.  I obviously will not spoil it, but trust me it is worth experiencing.

I shouldn’t have waited four years to play this game, but I did, and it is still worth playing.  It should be pretty cheap at this point, so there should be no financial reason not play it, so do yourself a favor and crank the volume or put on some headphones and play Gone Home.  You will be glad you did.  I know I was.

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Conan Feels The Same Way About Assassin’s Creed We All Do At This Point!

While Assassin’s Creed did take a year off to find itself, it is still hard to get excited about yet another entry in to the series.  Origins is the 10th game in the main series.  That is right 10th, and the first one came out only 10 years ago.  Its mythology is so convoluted that no one can or should try to follow it.  Which is why it makes sense for Conan to spend much more time focusing on Aaron Rodgers’ injury than playing this game.  I bet he and everyone else wished they were playing Wolfenstein 2 instead!