Category: Games

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ThePaladin is BATTLEBORN

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Gearbox Software is the maker of the wildly successful Borderlands series and they’ve just announced their newest game – BATTLEBORN!

You can watch the trailer for yourself. I personally am excited to play as a dapper robot with a gun cane. Details are sparse at the moment, although BATTLEBORN has been described as a Shooter/MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena; think League of Legends); which is a strange mix. However, Gearbox successfully combined RPG elements from Diablo with a shooter to give us Borderlands, so I’m willing to give them the chance to wow me. My one critique is that besides the Dapper Robot(TM) none of the other character models look that good, the elf ranger is especially unattractive. They have over a year to fine tune and maybe pull a Borderlands and completely change the style, so I’m not too worried.

Regardless, BATTLEBORN will be one more reason to checkout the Gearbox panel at PAX this year… besides the free stuff and Randy Pitchford giggling like a little kid while giving away secrets… and I guess Mikey.

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Shmee Is Playing The Witcher 2!

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The Steam sale is a wondrous thing.  Just when E3 got me all excited for The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, Steam went and put The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings on sale for four dollars!  I played the first Witcher quite a bit, but I never finished it because it was really hard, and my manly pride didn’t let me reduce the difficulty.  CD Projekt RED really amped everything up for this sequel.  The combat is better, the graphics are better, the story makes sense, and now that I have so little pride left, I don’t mind playing it on easy.

Honestly my only complaint this time around, is that while the areas look wide open they are actually a series of paths, and you can’t veer off those paths at all.  You want to walk through those shrubs?  To bad there is a leaf in the way you can’t walk past!  You need to walk all the way around.  You want to drop off that slight ledge?  Do dice!  Still this is a story based action RPG, so walking through shrubs and off ledges is more a nice-to-have instead of a need.

I have been having a lot of fun with this game, and it has made me glad that I upgraded my computer so I am able to run it.  Even though the Steam sale is over you can still get this game cheap, and it is well worth your hard earned money!

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Having Fun With Saints Row: The Third!

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This game came out three years ago, so I am not going to do a full review of it, but since it is one of the games I am playing right now (thanks to Microsoft giving it to me for free), I thought I would give you my impressions.

The people over at Volition software have done themselves proud.  They took all the fun parts of the GTA series and made them more fun.  The driving is faster and crazier, the shooting is hectic and over the top, the hand to hand combat is actually enjoyable, and the set-piece mission are bananas.  It is like they sat down with my thirteen year old self and asked him what he would want out of a game, and then they made it.

I guess the story picks up after the first two games (I only played the demo of the first one), and now The 3rd Street Saints have gone from street gang to media empire, but new gangs are trying to bring them down.  It is not that exciting, but it gives them a frame to design their wacky missions around.  Really it boils down to giving you new people to shoot, and a new city to explore.

Still as much fun as I have had playing this game there are some things I don’t like:  The city doesn’t feel alive.  It is big and open and lets you play around, but it doesn’t have that lived in feel.  Also the dialog and the jokes can get a little too puerile for me sometimes, and the game can get a bit repetitive between the big set-piece missions.

Even with those complaints the game accomplishes what every game should strive for, it is fun.  It makes me want to play more, so I can have a good time and laugh a little.  Sure if I was still thirteen I would probably enjoy it even more, but the difference between thirteen and thirty isn’t as big as the you would think.  I will be watching for a good deal on Saints Row IV.

 

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Shmee Puts His Dirty Hands On Battlefield: Hardline!

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One of EA’s big E3 announcements this year was Battlefield: Hardline.  It is the large open-world combat that you have come to know and love from Battlefield, but now you are playing as Cops and Robbers.  It is like someone at EA saw how well the Payday franchise was doing and decided to modify Battlefield 4 to corner that part of the market.  Besides just announcing Hardline, they also allowed people with PCs and PS4s to download it and try it out.  Since I don’t have a PS4, I had to go with the PC option (poor me I know).

It is pretty much Battlefield 4.  Which means it is fun, and the combat is intense, but it didn’t wow me with how new and original it is.  It feels like a really well done expansion pack from the good ol’ days before monthly DLC, or even a good looking total conversion mod from a talented group of individuals, but even though it looks different it still plays the same.

The modes are kind of new.  One is called Blood Money, where both sides run to central location and grab cash to bring back to their vaults.  It is like center capture the flag except you can attack the other side’s base.  Heist is a game-type where the criminals need to steal money out of the Police’s armored cars, so it is pretty much assault.

Like I have said throughout this, whatever it is, Battlefield: Hardline is fun.  It plays well, and it is well balanced, but it just doesn’t differentiate itself enough for me to get really excited about it.  Especially since I already own Battlefield 4 (which is a great game).  This is just the beta though, so maybe they can sell me on it more in the months to come.  It comes out this year on October 21st.

 

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Cool Down With The Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo!

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Mrs. Shmee decided to help out my ongoing computer upgrade for Father’s Day, so she got me a new CPU fan.  It is the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo.  This fan fits a lot of chipsets, and it is reasonably priced, usually under $35, but is it any good?  Well for my purposes it was well worth the price.

It is pretty much a large light weight aluminum heat-sync with four copper pipes running through it.  It comes with one 120mm fan, but it has the brackets for one more if you decide that you need to move the air over your processor a little faster.  The mounting brackets are adjustable so that you can put it on just about any CPU made, and it was perfect for my AMD FX-8320.

It is a little tall and the fan makes it kind of fat, but my Lian-Li PC-9F case was wide enough to fit it, and my low rise G.SKILL Ares RAM didn’t bump in to it.  Though if you are going to buy one of these you definitely need to check out the dimensions of your case, and how your motherboard is laid out.

The 212 Evo is way quieter than the fan that came with the processor, and I was able to overclock the chip from 3.5GHz to 4GHz without increasing the voltage.  Even with the overclock, my CPU is running cooler than with the stock fan.  I could go probably go faster if I had a higher end motherboard, but 500MHz is nothing to sneeze at.  I torture tested the CPU and fan using Prime95 for several hours to confirm that my overclock was stable, and it passed with flying colors.  It was fun to see my chip run all eight cores flat out.

If your stock fan is not cutting it for your processer, the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo is a great upgrade.  It doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, but it will run quiet and even let you overclock your chip a little.  I am quite happy with mine, and I think you will like it too.