Category: Games

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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!

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Soul Forge Is At It Again! This Time We Will Turn On The Mic!

So last time our crew decided to run an online D&D campaign it failed for the first forty-five minutes because we forgot to turn the mic on!  This time we will remember for sure!  Mostly since I will be GM-ing, and I am super detail oriented, so come with us as we try and take something shiny away from a dragon.  Which always goes well.  That’s right there may indeed be Dungeons and Dragons (probably just one dragon…)!  If you would like to see a recap of what happened last time check out the video below, hosted on fellow player Plumpy Thimble’s YouTube page.  Otherwise watch tonight’s game on my Mixer page at 7:30 PM Pacific Time! If that link doesn’t work it is at: https://mixer.com/shmee-

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Shmee Takes A Listen To The Thrustmaster Ghost Recon Wildlands Y-350x Headset!

Thanks to the one and only Major Nelson, I got a new headset at PAX West 2017.  The Ghost Recon Wildlands Y-350x Headset for Xbox One and PC.  Over all it has been a nice upgrade from my Microsoft Stereo headset.  Thanks to their deep base from the 60mm over ear drivers and 7.1 virtual surround sound.  Though so far the best part is the memory foam padding keeping my ears from hurting during those long play times.  While all this sounds great, there are some drawbacks.

First up, to keep these headphones from draining the controller’s battery too quickly, Thrustmaster attached an inline power pack that you can charge separately.

The problem is now you always have this floppy thing attached to your controller, and it is always pulling your headset down.  I am not sure why they couldn’t have just made the control pad for the headset bigger, and hid the battery in that, since you can’t detach the two from each other anyway.  Speaking of the control pad, here is a look at it:

It is pretty easy to control once you get used to it, and the back lights are nice, but the problem is the back light doesn’t stay on for very long, so sometimes you have to push something real quick to turn on the back light before you can find the right setting.

The last annoyance is probably the biggest.  When you first turn on the Thrustmaster Y-350x’s there is audible hum/buzzing.  It is supper irritating.  Though once you give the headphones a slight workout the buzzing stops.  It is like they need to get a range of sound pushed through them to calibrate themselves.  Then they sound great.

All in all I like the sound and the bass these headphones are able to provided, but they are not perfect.  However, for the money they probably perform much better than other $150 headsets, and you can get them for as little as $100 if you look around.  With The Ghost Recon Wildlands Y-350x Headset you just got to learn to live with their little flaws.  Which is a shame because with a few design tweaks they could have been truly great, but since I got mine for free, who am I to complain?