It's Been a While

Hello Internet! I figured I'd write up a post, seeing how I haven't talked to you guys in quite the long time. Life's been in a rough patch, both personally and professionally for me as of late and I haven't had much of a chance to do much gaming in the last year.

Some things to note that have happened/are happening:

I started a Dungeons and Dragons group with some friends. We meet (roughly) weekly in a world that was created by myself and one of the players. We're playing under a slightly modified 3.5 edition ruleset. If you're interested, I can post some summaries of how that goes. I'm actually thinking of doing that here anyway.

Next, my wife bought me an Xbox One back in May. I currently have Call of Duty: Ghosts, Watch Dogs, Dead Rising 3, Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition, Forza 5, and, Peggle 2. I'll give you brief impressions of all of them here:

Call of Duty: Ghosts - Standard COD fare here. Nothing overly special to write home about. Campaign is mind numbingly average, multiplayer is the same old moderately ok run and gun we've come to know and expect from COD. Graphics are kinda bad, and sound is fairly solid. I'd write more, but there really isn't anymore to write.

Watch Dogs - I really wanted to like this game. Sadly, I don't. There are some quirks with it that I can't get past. If you're driving, the cops are FREAKING RELENTLESS and I can not outrun them. However, I ducked into a train tunnel with a level three wanted level and waited for like 10 minutes and they were gone. Also, the cops CANNOT GO OVER WATER. I will repeat that. Cops cannot travel over water. Unless in a helicopter. Then, you shoot them out from your impenetrable island fortress, and they forget you exist. The graphics were kinda muddy for my liking, the driving was...something, also, you can't free fire. You have to aim down the sights to shoot. Unless you're aiming with the left trigger, pulling the right trigger to fire your weapon will cause you to sprint. However, I did enjoy the hacking mechanic, the world, and some of the minigames. Overall though, I was moderately disappointed with Watch Dogs.

Dead Rising 3 - I haven't played enough of this game to really know about it. Seems like it's going to be fun though.

Diablo 3: UEE - Similar situation to Dead Rising, except I've played a bit more Diablo. The wife and I are both having a good time with Diablo 3. I've got a Demon Hunter for my solo run, and I'm running a Wizard for our co-op run. She's running a Barbarian for both her solo and co-op. I'm at level 8ish on my solo, she's at 16 on her solo, and our co-op is like 5ish.

Forza 5 - Pretty great racing game. It's quite deep, and the real world cars are fantastic. Also, you can damage them a bit, which is fun for me. I don't get into the tuning and mechanical stuff in these types of games really. The racing is tight, responsive, and looks freaking beautiful. The Drivatar mechanic where it takes other drivers stats and ports them into your game based on difficulty choice is great. It allows you to race against friends and strangers without officially racing them online.

Peggle 2 - I am not happy with this purchase. You get the absolutely solid and fantastic gameplay of Peggle, with all of the bullcrap that comes with an EA game. This time around, instead of 10 masters and 110 levels, you get 5 masters, 50 levels, plus 10 challenge levels for each master. You can buy (at time of writing) 2 more masters, unlocking 20 more levels and challenge levels, but they cost $5 each. NOT COOL EA!

Enough about the games there. We've got to talk about the system! Xbox One is a system that's designed to take control of your living room and be the go-to device for everything you need. Ir might do that, I haven't figured out how yet. The interface is fairly frustrating to navigate through. Things are not easy to find, and it uses the Windows 8 and Windows Mobile setup. I don't like that, I never have, and I doubt I ever will. The system works great. I run my cable box through it. Netflix, Hulu, WWE Network, YouTube, Amazon Prime Instant Video, all work great through the system. I like what it does, just not quite how it does it. I can't seem to figure out how to actually turn off apps and such, other than cycling through a bunch of other apps until it has to close a previous one. I had an issue where YouTube had frozen, but I couldn't figure out how to reset it until I had left it off for a while and used several other things to cycle through.

 Overall, I like mine, and would recommend a buy if you are looking for more of a multimedia box than a strictly gaming box. Otherwise, go with a PS4 or Wii-U.

I won't go into much detail as I'm trying to avoid a political battle here, but I'd like to go on the record and say that we do NOT support the actions of Zoe Quinn or anything relating to that business. We are an independent gaming blog worked on by a husband, a wife, and their friend. We do not have any kind of Patreon accounts to games, we don't have any donations to Kickstarter or IndieGoGo. If anyone here does anything like that, they will not be allowed to post anything relating to that project. Plain as that. It's pretty sad that things like this mess have happened.

That's all for now. I'll try and be back more regularly! Thanks for reading, and as always, see you online!

Another Battlefield 4 Update

So here we stand, another update has hit Battlefield 4 on PC. This time, I was actually able to play through two rounds before I quit for the night. I was able to hit the exit button on my own, I wasn't booted due to a crash. That said, I'm only running about 20 frames a second while I play. Sometimes it jumps up to anywhere from 60 to 90, but as soon as I round a corner or something moves, my framerate drops down to the low 20's. So, we're getting better!

I'm looking to upgrade my old video card too. After I sell my laptop to pay bills, the remaining cash will be used to buy some much needed upgrades to my poor machine. I'm running an AMD Phenom II X4 955 processor that's overclocked to 3.5ghz. There's also an ATI Radeon HD 5770 1gb video card that' been mildly overclocked as well. Follow that with 4gb of 1600mhz DDR 3 RAM and you've got a system that's starting to show its age. For those interested I'm upgrading to 8gb of RAM and I'm going between an AMD R9 280X and an AMD R9 290X. There's a significant price difference and I've got to do some creative manuvering to get either card to fit into my case, which surprised me, but it should be fun. I'll update when I decide on what I'm going with and when I buy it.

Finally, the Steam Holiday Sale has begun, so, prepare your wallets. Nothing seemed to spectacular today, but that's just my opinion. I'm hoping to maybe pick up CoD: Ghosts(not on sale) or Assassin's Creed 4(also not on sale, maybe not even on Steam) if I manage to get that new video card, but we'll see. Also, there's a website - gog.com that's got some pretty nice deals for more indie and classic games. If you haven't heard of them, I say check 'em out. Their games are all DRM free and a lot of them work on both Windows and Mac.

Take it easy internet, Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah. Whatever your particular celebration of choice, Happy Whatever and play some games!

Battlefield 4 (PC) Update

After jumping through many hoops and with the help of digging through the Reddit Battlefield community I found a list of potential fixes. I tried about 90% of them and my game actually worked! However, I went from running fairly smoothly in the test range to getting 25-32 fps while playing. It's semi-playable at best, and at worst I can't hit anything. However, it did finally work and it worked for several rounds before I got too frustrated to keep playing. So, that's that. I'm going to try and upgrade my video card at some point in the nearish future. I'm looking at an AMD R9 280X. It seems like a nice little piece of hardware and should work with my current setup. *fingers crossed*

On another note, My wife bought us matching copies of Animal Crossing: New Leaf for our 3ds systems. I've gotta say, we both love the game. I've spent nearly 30 hours in my town and causing various levels of chaos in her town. I would recommend that anyone with a 3ds check this one out.

Battlefield 4 (PC) Major problems. Also, good sales.

Valued internet, I have purchased and played* Battlefield 4. I have thoroughly not enjoyed my experience with the game thus far. I should note, that the "*" next to "Played" means that I have launched the game about a dozen times and failed to complete a match or level or anything. I played in the test range for a while, things went very smoothly and I even bumped the game up to Ultra just to see how amazing it looked. It was freaking beautiful. So, I bumped it back down to low/medium and tried to launch into campaign. Here's where the problems started. I played about a minute and a half and the game locked up and crashed to the desktop. There was some kind of message about bad arguments being sent to my video card. This problem persisted no matter what resolution or quality I put the game on. I managed no more than about eight minutes into the campaign. I gave up and tried to load into multiplayer thinking that maybe there was just some slight issues in the manor of Medal of Honor. Lo and behold, upon loading into a match of multiplayer I was met with the same issues. Plus several other major problems including but not limited to, major lag, framerate crashes, and occasional moments of total brokenness. All of these things happened during my play time before my game crashed and sent me back to the desktop with the "Bad arguments" error.

I've never encountered this error message before. I have no idea how to handle it. My system setup is as follows: AMD Phenom II X4 955 processor overclocked to 3.2 ghz, 4 gb DDR3 Ram at 1600 mhz, and an AMD Radeon HD 5770 1 gb Video Card, also overclocked. I've updated drivers and tried replacing and reinstalling the drivers. I've overclocked my CPU slightly, and I've overclocked my GPU a bit. My system meets the requirements for the game and a little bit more. I'm very disappointed in this game and unfortunately cannot review it at this time since I can't play the damn thing.

On an unrelated note, this week's Humble Bundle is pretty nice. As is the Indie Gala Codemasters Sale, so check those out. Humble Bundle is featuring Garry's Mod, Magicka + DLC, Orcs Must Die 2 complete collection, Natural Selection 2, Sanctum 2, and Serious Sam 3. It's promising to add more games on Tuesday so we'll see what else shows up. Indie Gala features Damnation, Clive Barker's Jericho, Overlord, Overlord 2, Overlord Raising Hell, Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising, and Operation Flashpoint Red River. Both bundles can be currently purchased for less than $11 to get all the content.

So that's that. Have fun internet, We'll talk again soon.

Silence. Also Broken Hardware.

Hello internet. We've been quiet as of late and that's due to our personal lives getting in the way of our love of gaming. I believe the last review we posted was back in August and it was for Saints Row 4 which was fairly disappointing. We're still here chugging along, and hoping to get things back up and running soon. Between the three of us that write reviews and articles here there is one PlayStation 4 and no Xbox One. Our sports writer picked up a PS4 on launch day and has loved every minute of playing FIFA 14 on it.

On a side note, there have been reports of hardware issues for both consoles at launch. I've heard mostly of HDMI port problems with the PS4 and some occasional update problems. I've heard that Xbox One has had problems with the disc drive, the day one update, and some overall system stability issues. All in all, I'm of a wait and see frame of mind with both systems and will probably be reverting to my PC and 3DS for a while. That said, the PS3 and 360 still have a bit of life left in them, but they're officially members of the previous generation now.

That's all for now, we'll have more as we have time to write. Keep an eye out for a holiday buying guide in the next few days!

Pokemon X and Y are out! Impressions (Part 1)

And wow are they awesome. I'm only about two hours into it at this point, but I've already encountered several changes that make the game fantastic. First off, the new 3D game engine is fantastic! Finally, fans have a (mostly) 3D world to explore and battle through. It's not completely 3D, there's some sections where the camera is still basically top down, but the battles are fully 3D and look great. Eight-way movement has been implemented! This seems like a small thing but it makes moving around so much easier. There are also new ways to train your Pokemon's base stats via Super Training and Core Training. Super Training has to be done in it's own event though it's launch-able at almost any time. Core Training is more of a background mini-game to be played while walking around and tapping on the touch screen.

One final note in this short post, the social features are vastly improved. When I fired up my game I received a notification in my PSS page that I had a couple friends nearby. The PSS system read my registered friends from my 3DS system and told me that they were playing nearby. I was able to offer them O-Powers and I received some in return for my gift. My wife and I then traded wirelessly to get some Pokedex data. All of this happened fairly smoothly other than my wife hitting the wrong connection buttons while we were trying to trade.

So far I'm impressed and I've only been at the game for a couple hours. I'm looking forward to what is still in store. Please stay with us as we'll be providing updates from time to time based on our gameplay experiences and will have a review ready as soon as we can.

Saints Row IV Review (PS3)

Saints Row IV is all about having as much fun as humanly possible. This is the final chapter in the story of the Third Street Saints as we've seen them develop over four three previous titles and this chapter delivers. Laughter, love, revenge, and closure are all present in Saints Row IV.

Graphically speaking, Saints Row IV looks dated to me. There is a brownish fog that covers the world, though draw distance is still pretty great, the fog is always present. Once I completed the main story the fog seemed to lift a bit and there was some sunlight and color to the world of Steelport. There is also a reddish-brown tint to the world and I never noticed a sunny or rainy day while spending my time in Steelport until I beat the main story. There was just an overcast brownish colored sky. Character models moved well, though also looked a tad on the dated side. One final note, the digitizing effect placed on the simulated version of Steelport can be incredibly distracting. This is very true when your character is just standing and admiring the scenery.

I did not have any issues with any of the sound design and was pleasantly surprised to see how many voice actors returned for the final chapter of the Saints story. The characters sounded great and there was some fun banter back and forth between the cast. There were numerous callbacks to past events and characters. Also scattered about Steelport are 39 audio logs from past and present characters to add more story to the Saints Row universe which was nice to listen to.

Saints Row IV played fairly well, though I did have a number of glitches. The super power mechanic replaces grenades and not being able to use your powers outside of the simulated world without having grenades to back myself up with was kind of a downer. That said, the super powers are a lot of fun to play around with. Combining them brought some pretty great outcomes and offered some creative ways to eliminate my enemies. Combat has been adjusted slightly as well. Health no longer regenerates quickly, it takes a while for it to start coming back. To offset this, there are now health drops that fall from dead enemies. This does make combat a bit more tough and I noticed myself dying a bit more than I did in Saints Row: The Third. Shooting feels relatively tight and control-wise the game is fairly responsive. I did have a few glitches pop up while playing. Framerate drops happened several times, usually while using the UFO or in heavy combat. I had several freezes during missions where I had to reboot my PS3 completely so I have two saves and usually save every 20ish minutes. I also ran into some issues while trying to jump and get in vehicles. Occasionally, and I'm not sure if this was by design or by glitch, character models in the environment would stretch out, or have some weird sort of ultra long legs or huge eyes. This happened a few times while I was wandering the streets not doing anything.

The same customization options that were available to your character and gang in Saints Row: The Third are available here. There are a few more options for clothing and outfits but it's largely the same character editor that we've seen and used before. The city of Steelport is pretty much unchanged from the last game as well. Minus removing any influences of the Saints gang from Saints Row: The Third. Many of the vehicles are the same from the previous game as well. There are still many customization options for your cars, but with the super sprint and flight super powers there really isn't a point in driving unless it's forced. Weapons are still fully upgradeable and now have customizable skins to add some fun touches to them. While outside of Steelport players can run around in the spaceship. There are no customization options for the ship. However there are options to talk to and romance every member of the crew, minus romancing Keith David because to quote him "I'm not into that sort of thing".

Going through the story of Saints Row IV is a decent experience. It was fairly predictable sci-fi story but it was a lot of fun and meshed with the game well. There were several times while playing that I was laughing to the point that it effected my playing ability. The story itself feels fairly short and including all side missions, finding a majority of the collectables, completing all of the activities, and a couple hours of random running around causing chaos I had the game beat in around 21 hours. I'm still hunting for a few collectables (There's close to 1300 total) and I'm considering a second playthrough with the "Nolan North" voice, but all in all, I was a little disappointed in the length of the game. There are some co-op only activities I have yet to play through, but 21 hours feels kinda short for an open world game like this.

Overall, I enjoyed Saints Row IV. I can overlook some of its flaws, and find the diamond shining beneath. The game is far from perfect, but if you'd prefer an alternative to Grand Theft Auto, and are looking for something that is just dumb fun, I suggest picking this one up. We're awarding Saints Row IV a 7/10.