Month: April 2018

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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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Shmee Enters The Wild Wild Country!

It is always amazing how quickly things are forgotten.  It turns out that when I was very young there was a cult that tried to take over Wasco County, Oregon, and that they poisoned over a hundred people in The Dalles with salmonella.  They wore bright colors and meditated a lot, and they tired to assassinate the Attorney General of Oregon.  It seems like it would have been such a massive happening that people would still be talking about it, but until I watched Wild Wild Country on Netflix, I had never heard a thing about it, or if I had it must not have been talked about with any importance.

Wild Wild Country is a docuseries that interviews all parties involved with setup of Rajneeshpuram, the commune created for the followers of Rajneesh. Those who made it happen, and those that tried to make it go away.  It is an amazing tale, and all I could do is watch in disbelief as I heard of some of the things that went on out in the middle of nowhere Oregon.

The documentarians do a good job of leaving their voices out of this series, and letting all the people have their say, so it ends up being surprisingly nonjudgmental.  You can see both sides up to a point, and that point is obviously committing several Federal crimes.  Then you realize some terrible stuff was happing out on their ranch.

Wild Wild Country was fascinating to watch.  It is so crazy, I can’t believe this was the first time I really heard about all this.  If you are like me, and have never heard about any of this, it is must watch, or if you do remember it, but want all the info it is still worth your time.  Obviously due to the subject matter it is rated TV MA for a reason, so it is not a history lesson for young kids, but if you are of age, it is a mind trip worth taking.

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Season Two Of Jessica Jones Is Both Better And Worse Than Season One

Season One of Jessica Jones was pretty dang good, and it had one of the best villains in the MCU (which they keep insisting the Netflix Marvel shows are a part of).  While season one kind of explained why Jessica was a grumpy drunk, they really didn’t get in to it.  Season two takes a deep dive in to Jessica’s past.  Since her memory is sketchy at best, we figure out her origins with her as she investigates them.  It is not a happy trip down memory lane.

Had they just stuck to the Jessica stuff, things would have been excellent, but sadly season two has an irritating Trish Walker ‘B’ story that is aggravating to watch.  Every time she is on screen she is doing something dumb.  Which was true in season one as well, but they really amped up the annoying for her this season.  Additionally, Netflix has this strange need to make their Marvel shows thirteen episodes long, and this season would have been much better had they cut out at least three episodes.

Figuring out where Jessica is from makes Jessica Jones Season Two well worth watching, unfortunately the show takes a dive almost any time she is not on screen.  Good side characters are a requirement for a long running series, and so far almost all the Marvel Netflix shows have no one other than the main character we care about, and this is becoming a problem.  Maybe they can just clone Foggy or something.  Regardless, I still enjoyed season two quite a bit, and it had some of the series’ greatest moments, but it is bogged down by all side stories.  I hope they can figure this out for future seasons.

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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.