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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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Will Anime Strike Work For Amazon?

Netflix recently went on record saying they were going to be putting a lot of money towards licensing and creating anime.  They also followed that up by raising rates for all but their most basic service, so it seems that more content requires more money.  Amazon is also aware of this, but instead of raising rates for all customers, they charge you an extra $4.99 a month for their ‘channel’, Anime Strike.

While on the surface $4.99 doesn’t seem like a lot for a streaming service that supposedly has more than 1000 series on it service, but you can only get Anime Strike if you have a Prime account.  Which is $99 a year, so $8.25 a month, but that includes a lot more than just streaming TV.  Anyway, Anime Strike plus Prime works out to $13.24 a month plus tax.  Which makes it a pretty expensive compared to other services.  Though to be far, most people already have a Prime subscription, and unlike the base Prime membership you can add and drop Strike at will, so if there is a series you want to see that you can watch it in a month you can cancel Anime Strike after you are done.

While it makes sense on the surface to charge people who want to watch niche programing more than people who don’t, I am just not sure it will pay off.  With all the services people are having to pay for now, I just don’t see that many people excited to spend another $5 on top of something they are already paying for.  In the end it will come down to content.

Amazon got me to try Anime Strike with their free trial because they were the only place that had ‘Sword Oratoria: Is it Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? On the Side’, but they didn’t have enough to keep me past the seven day trail.  This will be a problem for Amazon.  If they can’t get people to pay for its anime channel, than they will not have enough money to get more anime to keep up with Netflix, Hulu and Crunchy Roll.

It is just interesting to see Amazon going about this differently than everyone else, and I am not sure it is the right path to take.  We will see, I may end up spending an extra $4.99 month if they end up with the only place to get the content I want, so far that is not the case.

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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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Dynamite Wants Red Sonja To Get Some Of That Wonder Woman Money!

Dynamite Entertainment, the current publisher of Red Sonja comics, has optioned their fiery red headed barbarian to Millennium Media to be turned in to a feature film … again.  Last time it didn’t go so well making only $6 Million on a $17 Million budget, but they think with the success of Wonder Woman that now is the time to try again.  I am not so sure.  While her currant comic book run has been successful, Red Sonja is not the women’s power icon that Wonder Woman is.  She is more of a pin-up, and kind of always has been, but they have tried to change that recently.  All that being said, it has been a while since someone has made a good sword and sandals epic, so here is hoping they do Hyrcania’s fiercest warrior justice!