Category: Xbox One

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Shmee Takes On A Clustertruck!

Remember when you were a kid and you were on a road trip with your family, and when you were daydreaming looking out the window you envisioned yourself jumping from the top of one semitruck to the next? If not, I did all the time.  Well apparently the guys over at Landfall Games did the same thing when they were kids, and they made a game about it, Clustertruck.

In Clustertruck you just jump from one truck to the next, but these trucks are not just driving down the freeway.  They are falling off cliffs, exploding, being pushed in to the air, being sucked in to vortexes, and all sorts of random things, and you have to do your best to jump your way out of danger and get to the end of the level.  To help you do this, the more levels you complete, the more style points you get, and you can cash in those points for abilities like stopping/slowing time, double jumping or dashing, and bunch of others, so while the levels get harder, you become a much better jumper.

It is a simple fun idea that was executed well.  While there is not a lot to the game, it is also very cheap, so it makes for a perfect quick diversion if you don’t want to get in to something deeper.  If you have Game Pass or a couple extra bucks burning a hole in your pocket, there are worse things to spend them on.  The worst thing I can say about Clustertruck is that it isn’t very robust, but it was never supposed to be.  It was always supposed to be a game where trucks were going crazy and you just had to get from one to the next.

So that is another one of my childhood backseat daydreams turned in to a game, and it was not one I was expecting.  My other major window gazing daydream was using my feet to grind on everything, but Sunset Overdrive and Jet Set Radio delivered on that one in spades.  Who knows, maybe we will get a game about punting brothers out windows for crossing invisible lines next.

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I Am Not Sure How I Played Morrowind On The Original Xbox

Yesterday I started playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind again thanks to it coming to backwards compatibility on Xbox One, and the first thing that struck me while playing was how much smoother it was.  Sure the bump in resolution up to 1920p (on the X) made it seem like I was wiping a thick layer of Vaseline off of my TV screen, but on the original Xbox the framerate would take massive dives, so that it seemed your character was trudging through molasses.

I was shocked to find out that the Xbox version of Morrowind was targeting 60FPS, even though it almost never hit that mark, sometimes dipping down in to the teens, but the Xbox One does a better job keeping things above 30FPS, and the Xbox One X almost manages to keep things at 60FPS despite pushing out more than 16x the pixels and adding 16x anisotropic filtering.

The game still looks dated, and it makes me want to find a way to push out the draw distance because everything is popping up like ten feet in front of my face, but game is still fun, and I find myself getting lost in it again.  There is something about playing Morrowind on a console that just makes me happy.  Below is a video comparing the Xbox One X, the Xbox One, and the original Xbox.  It is pretty impressive to see what Microsoft has done by just tweaking their emulation.

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Shmee Plays Some Bro Recon: Brolands!

Thanks to heavy discounting I decided to pick up Ghost Recon: Wildlands, and for the most part it has been a good decision.  The shooting is solid, the graphics are amazing, and there are a variety of things to do.  The problem is that it should not be called Ghost Recon.  Wildlands has more in common with Far Cry than Tom Clancy; it is just you and a group of bros assassinating a bunch of dudes down in Bolivia.

With the older Ghost Recon titles, the games were always about finding the best way to tactically take down your targets.  To make sure that you were never taking fire because that meant instant death.  In Wildlands, you get out your drone, mark all the targets, and then make sure to get them all as you do what needs to be done.  If you want to go in guns-a-blazin’ that is fine, just don’t stand out in the open too long.  Even better, why not jump out of a helicopter, or crash a car through the front gate.  Again, you don’t quite have the god-like powers you do in Far Cry, and you have to kind of make sure to scout the place first, but it definitely doesn’t take the skill and planning of the older Ghost Recon games.

To add to this, all the secondary audio seems like it was added from an ‘R’ rated military cartoon.  The bad guys brag about murdering people on the radio, and your squad says pretty offensive things at times.  Meanwhile the main story cutscenes and media are dead serious.  Tonally this game is all over the place.  It seems like they didn’t want to make another Far Cry game, so they slapped the Ghost Recon brand on it, and to justify that they gave you a squad of bros, made you slow down, and kind of think about what you are doing.  A little.

Listen, Ghost Recon: Wildlands is around $20 these days, and it has enough positives that make that a worthy investment.  It is just a shame they couldn’t commit to a playstyle for this game.  Because an actual open world Ghost Recon game would have been pretty sweet, but this is just Far Cry’s slightly more grown up bro.  Waiting for you to come murder sicarios with him.

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Xbox One Finally Gets Morrowind!

The Backwards Compatibility program for Xbox One has brought a lot of value to its customers, and the Xbox One is finally getting one of the best original Xbox games ever, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.  Morrowind was the game that sold me on western RPGs on console.  It was the first open world game that really allowed me to do whatever I wanted.  I could be the good guy or the bad guy, there were deep dialog trees for main quests, so I always felt like I was saying what I wanted to say.  In other words, it was the first console game where I felt like I was truly role playing.

Even better, on the Xbox One X it is going to run at sixteen times the resolution with sixteen times anisotropic filtering.  Meaning outside some PC mods, this is going to be the best looking version of the game.  To have all three of the modern Elder Scrolls games on one console, in high resolution, is pretty sweet, and honestly, at this point Bethesda should just release Arena and Daggerfall as a classics pack, so that people can see how far the games have come.  They could even throw in Battlespire if they felt like it.

The are very few games left that I want to see come to Xbox Backwards Compatibility, and it is nice to see that Microsoft is protecting my purchases.  I guess they want to make sure I always have an Xbox under my TV, and with the way things are going, there always will be.  While I wait for April 17th to install Morrowind, I may just have to start up Red Dead Redemption now that it runs in near 4K thanks to Microsoft’s technical wizardry.

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My Take On All This Far Cry 5 Nonsense!

The game that has been all over the media these days has been Far Cry 5, and it seems that people either think it is the best game in the series, or the worst one.  What seems to be swaying people one way or the other is how they respond to the main story.  The marketing made it seem like it would tackle America’s hot button issues, but the actual game goes out of its way not to say anything about anything, and since this is a Far Cry game, this shouldn’t have surprised anyone.  Top brass isn’t going to take a chance offending anyone’s political or religious beliefs with a game this big.  They need Far Cry 5 to move a lot of copies to keep the company in the black.

However, I do understand that this can be disappointing.  Especially to players from United States.  To use our problems as marketing, and then not say anything about them is a tough pill to swallow.  It would have been nice to have a major game have an actual point of view.  Any point of view.  Even one a lot of people disagree with, but apparently Far Cry 5 goes out its way to not have one.

Does the Seed family’s religious symbology look a lot like that used by white nationalist extremists? Yes, but the Seeds have multiple African Americans in their ranks, so it is just a coincidence the imagery looks similar I guess?  Do they Seeds seem to worship guns? Yep, but they are being taken down by a bunch of gun loving rednecks all around them.  It almost makes people wonder how the Seeds took over in the first place.  Oh, they are drugging people.  Sure, that is fine.  So it is cool if I, as the player, murder a bunch of drugged up people?  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯   There doesn’t seem to be an alternative.

Here is the rub.  All Far Cry games are zany and crazy, but this time the craziness has hit our shores, and the story is just an excuse to let loose in Montana with a rocket launcher and a weaponized bear.  If you are okay with that, apparently Far Cry 5 is great.  If the use of current political goings-on for cool posters makes you a little teed off, maybe skip this one, but at least now we know how Bolivia felt when Ghost Recon: Wildlands hypothesized what it would be like if their country was run by a Mexican drug cartel (they threated legal action).