"Graphics"

Haha! You thought I was going to post this last Thursday, huh? Guess what? So did I! Whatever, it's always fun when something crosses your mind the day after the due date.

Anyway, I have mentioned many games that I have bought with my Christmas Cash. I have failed to mention, however, the first game that I bought. The Elder Scrolls VI: Skyrim. This game brings back feels man. I remember playing this forever, and only beating the story quest once. I would always get bored of my character and create a new one, doing the sequences over and over again. I have played all types of characters, including: Mage, Cleric (Sword and healing), Two-handed Fighter, Dual Wield swords, an Archer, and a sneaky cat dude. Oh. Did I say all? I meant to say all but one. I have never played the most generic combination, One-handed sword dude with a shield. I find that really weird. Anyhow, I bought this game so that I could try this out. I didn't know if my computer could really handle this game, so I bought it for the future when I upgrade my graphics card. I loaded up the launcher, and it said that my computer could run it at high graphics, boy was I excited. It took a very short time to load into the game, 'cause that's how PCs roll. It looked fine, until I tried to move the mouse. The disappointment settled in then. The frames were really freaking slow. I didn't have a counter, but they had to be as low as ten frames per second. It was disgusting. I tried putting the graphics all the way down. That seemed to help. Everything ran at what looked like a solid twenty five frames per second at that point. Life was good, that is, until I started traversing the landscape. There were no bandits or animals to fight! I had to get really close to the point at which they spawn for them to actually spawn. I thought that the game would be a cool dude about low graphics, only lowering the quality of the aesthetics. I had no idea how much the graphics were going to be lowered, considering the graphics of Skyrim are sooo good (Sarcasm).

Probably the best graphics I've ever seen
Image Courtesy of: The Game Effect

Those rocks though. Regardless, I never thought that lowering them would ruin gameplay. Now when you're an archer, you can't get those MLG snipes across the plain wide fields of Skyrim. You pretty much have to be a sword dude to have any fun. That ruined the idea of catching up on some two year nostalgia. I played for ten minutes before I realized the mobs were spawning right before my eyes. I will return to this game when I have installed the new graphics card and finally finish the main story more than once.

Ew, Convolution

With my Christmas Cash, I got myself another game that I thought I would like. It was an RPG game called Dragon Age: Origins, that gave you a decision. It was awesome at the beginning, your race and class decided what storyline that you would have. I chose a human mage because that's how I roll. When I got in the game I thought that it was going to be a third person fighting game. Boy was I wrong. You pretty much had a free camera and you moved with the mouse. I was like, "Whatever, maybe I just saw my friend play the game very closely and managed the camera very well." I started walking around in the tutorial, trying to get my bearings, and let me tell you, it was cray. I was in a place called The Harrowing, and there were faeries that were like balls of light. Along the way there were two demons that you could talk to, one you fight and obtain a weapon. The other one you had to figure out riddles that it told to you. It's hard to listen to a quiet ass bear telling riddles to you when you're in a Skype call with your friends and they're constantly calling each other "trash" and "bad". They know who they are. I'm just kidding, the words would appear at the top of the screen if you wait enough time, like, a minute. Anyway, I didn't know this on the first riddle, so I closed my eyes and clicked a random button. I don't know to this day if I got it right, but I can infer because my follower was able to turn into a bear. It went from weird to crazy with the snap of my fingers. After you get your bear follower and staff of awesome (That's not really what it is called), you fight a badass looking lava monster.

Badass lava monster
Image courtesy of: Dragon Age Wiki

After you beat this badass lava monster, your bear follower starts saying weird things, something a normal person wouldn't say. You have some dialogue, nothing special just small talk. I said something weird cause I wanted to see what would happen. The bear turned into a human, then turned into a tall, flying demon that told you that fear was the true enemy. After this episode, you go back to your mage's guild. This is where I was not able to follow the story very well. There was no clear path on where I was supposed to go, boy was it frustrating. I had no clue where to go, all I remembered was a quick blurb about a first enchanter or something like that. I wandered around aimlessly, looting random people's stuff from their dressers. I ended up getting a full outfit out of it. What a great game, convoluting the story so much that you can go around and get stuff. I played for, like, fifteen more minutes and then gave up, it was so annoying that I had to quit, I would not recommend this game. I give it three out of ten dragons.

Playing God

I know that I haven't posted for about two weeks, and that's kinda bad, so I'm going to be posting today, Tuesday, and Thursday.

Anyway, for Christmas I got a gift card that I could buy games with. I ended up buying a game called Spore. Not going to lie, one of the funniest games I have ever played. At the beginning of the game you control a small cell. Driven by food, you make this cell either a carnivore, herbivore, or omnivore. This stage is a lot of fun, and it takes about five minutes to complete. The next stage is where the craziness comes in. The creature stage is where you grow legs and lungs and become a land animal. You have to befriend or vanquish many other creatures in order to advance to the next stage. That's not the funny part though. Each time you interact with the other creatures, you can gain parts. With these parts, you can modify your creature so that it is easier to interact with the other creatures. You can change your spinal cord so that you look like anything that you want. You can make yourself fatter or thinner, make yourself look like a dinosaur or a shark. The possibilities are endless. I usually try to make my creature look as ridiculous as possible. You can stretch the knees out really far, making the creature run with gigantic strides and just looking really dumb.

Weird ass limbs
Image courtesy of: Youtuber OGJF

This is definitely not all the game has to offer. After the creature stage, you enter the tribal stage, my least favorite stage. It's dumb and very stressful. You have a village where you gather food and erect buildings. While you're collecting, multiple other villages pop up all around the place. The ones that have no opinion of you are easy to deal with. The ones that hate you stress me out because they an come to your village and attack you, so you have to become friends with them quickly. After the worst stage ever comes the second worst stage. It's pretty much exactly the same, but you have to micromanage cities instead of villages. you build houses in these cities that have a specific effect when you place them next to each other. Basically you have to conquer the whole world. After you do, you advance to the space age. The space age is the best stage with many things that you can do. You can colonize different planets, you can terraform them to your liking, and you can establish trade routes with other species. I have yet to win this stage because it's so goddamn long. You have to obtain every single badge to win. There's over one hundred badges to collect, the most I've ever had was forty. With this giant stage, there are many easter eggs. One that I know of is that you can find Earth in the space stage. Over all, this game is a lot of fun and everyone should try to get it.

Into the Stars

I recently found a new game that I have had so much fun with. At the beginning, you can choose between six races: Human, Avian, Apex, Floran, Hylotl, and Glitch.

The six races
Image courtesy of: Starbound Explorer

 I have never picked Human so far because I want to experience all the other races first. You are put in a spaceship that has looks that correspond to your race. You start with only one tool in the ships locker, a matter manipulator. This tool can mine pretty much anything, but there's a catch. It's really freaking slow. The first ten minutes of the game are agonizing because it takes so long to acquire the basic materials to create the basic tools. Once you have the tools you start collecting the materials for cooler and cooler stuff. Coal is very important in this game, because it fuels your ship (So high tech right?). Once your ship is fueled up, you can travel to different planets. Each planet can have a different biome, ranging from snow to desert. Each planet has a tech chest, which contains upgrades that make you able to double jump, dash, etc. A planet has a chance to have a building that corresponds to each race, each one having loot in it. The loot is usually guarded by many people that do significant amounts of damage. When you vanquish those assholes you gain access to basic chest stuff. I said there was loot, but I never said what was in it. I'll tell you what's in it, garbage. It's like getting to the light at the end of the tunnel, except the light is super dim and about to die. You die three times just to clear it, and there's nothing to compensate. The great thing about this game is that it's in beta, and it's still multiplayer compatible. Me and my friend have been playing this pretty much every day since I got it. We play this game quite a lot as I have mentioned, and we still have not made very much progress in it because there is so much to explore. When it gets updated there will be so much more to explore, making it harder to progress. It has the potential to be a very exciting game, and it is already, with tiny updates that increase performance.