It’s Monday again BOO! But it’s also time for a Geekly Review YAY!
Friday was a pretty excited day for me, and one that I’d been anticipating for a long while because I was finally getting my new PC delivered. I’d arranged to work from home in order to make sure I was there for it to be delivered. When it turned up, I was like a kid at Christmas, eagerly unwrapping my present to myself as quickly as I could.
So, a few of it’s vitals!
Intel® Core™i5 Quad Core Processor i5-4690 (3.5GHz)
16GB KINGSTON DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz (2 x 8GB)
4GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 970
120GB KINGSTON V300 SSD
2TB 3.5″ SATA-III 6GB/s HDD 7200RPM
I know what you’re probably thinking now, “I bet you just stayed in all weekend and played on it” No, not quite. But I did manage to get Steam installed and a few of my most played games like DayZ, This War of Mine, Heroes & Generals and Football Manager.
Obviously I wanted to test out how they ran on my new machine. So I fired up DayZ, well first things first the game loads so much quicker, good start! Now to get in game. Woah. Such smooth, so graphics, WOW! I’m now easily getting 70FPS whereas before I’d be lucky to get 27. Needless to say the difference left me with a smile on my face. Now that I can play it to a decent level again, I might have to start the DayZ Diaries up again.
A quick play on Heroes & Generals told me I was getting 120-150FPS. I’m in dream land.
I started a new game on Football Manager 2015 too. I didn’t really play it much on my old laptop mainly because it was a little slow. I decided to start life unemployed and see what clubs came up in the first few months. I loaded up around 6-7 nations to give me loads of options, and eventually around late September the axe started to drop for managers across Europe.
After a couple of weeks of checking the job centre, a little club in the Spanish Segunda Division (Second Division) took my fancy, and after a quick interview I was offered the job as the manager of Agrupación Deportiva Alcorcón, or just Alcoron for short. They were languishing in 19th position when I took over, and I have been tasked with finishing in the top half of the league, but I’m going to be pushing for promotion, and after a 12 game unbeaten run right from the off, promotion is looking like a possibility.
Inevitably the run had to end though, and I’m now sitting on back to back defeats and starting to slip back down the table. I’m currently in 9th position which I’m pretty happy with to be honest. But I’d like to be a little higher and more firmly in the playoff places, it’s all a little too close at the moment.
Friday also saw the release of the first game in our One to Watch series – Stranded Deep, and for £10.99 I thought it was a good price so picked it up.
Now, the game is in early access so it’s a little buggy – including one that launched me in the air over and over, and a little bare bones at the moment. But it’s also got some great ideas, and is actually a lot of fun to play.
There is a very short intro/tutorial of sorts where it sets up the game for you by involving you in a plane crash. From then on, you are kind of on your own.
You start life in your raft, surrounded by ocean and the odd island here and there. I paddled over and started my new life on my very own desert island.
First things first, I thought I’d see about making some shelter, so, how do I do that? It took me a little while but I eventually figured out that you need sticks, which you get from chopping down trees and then chopping the logs up, rocks, which are just scattered around, and lashing/bindings which you get from small plants. You then have to pile all your materials up close to each other and a build menu/option will appear. This premise applies to building all types of things, but I won’t spoil any for you, as you might want to find it out on your own.
After an hour or so, I’d built some tools, and made a small shelter. It was time to explore some of the ocean. From the shore line you can often see sharks swimming about in the distance. This terrifies me. So I very reluctantly made my way in to the shallows keeping a very watchful eye out the whole time. Not five seconds later, and I notice a shark about 10 feet from me. I immediately back up on to dry land. The shark? He just circles around waiting for me to get back in, and follows me along the shore. SCREW YOU SHARK! GET LOST!
After a couple of minutes I pluck up the courage to wade in and try to take him on with my knife, I jabbed at it a few times, and eventually it swam off. I quickly made my way to another small island and found some flippers.
On the other side of my island about 20 feet off shore was a ship wreck, I made my way over to it, opened the hatch and headed inside. I searched around finding a lantern, a lighter, and some engine part, I decided to head back to shore. But wait… I can’t get back out of the hatch. I can’t climb up, I’m stuck… Rubbish. But hey that’s early access, and apparently this is a pretty well known bug now, and they are quickly looking to sort it out.
I would like to start some kind of survival series with it. But I think I will wait until there is a little more to do in game first.
This was mainly my weekend, in-between going out for sweet Pizza at Beerd, and then lunch on Saturday at Chomp. I like food OK!
– Will
I have failed to continue with my game completed a week ratio. In fact since the last Geekly Review, I’ve only played Thief a little while, and not touched Knack which is a shame. I have watched another film though to go onto the list in American Sniper.
The film is pretty incredible. It’s very gripping and a rather harsh look at the Iraq war and a close look at just how soldiers can suffer from PTSD after events of war. Bradley Cooper does a stellar job in the role and delivers on the numerous tense moments the film produces. The film does progress rather quickly though with not much character building of Chris Kyle. We see his initial early life pre 9/11 and the life of a cowboy, but it’s over quickly and the next thing we see Kyle as a true American patriot enrolling to the marines in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The four tours are of course spread out over the years, but we see little of Kyle at home during the tours. His no family building parts really, just the tours. Not a massive problem, just a little bit odd.
Anyway as for Thief I’ve got over the halfway point now and am playing missions I’d yet to do on my first play through and have to say the game has got my attention now. There is one particular mission where you have to break into a mansion to find blueprints for a tower which I enjoyed. Especially in the tower later on. Again perhaps I was too quick to judge this game.
My weekend itself was a very social one filled with sports. I enjoyed company Friday night to watch Manchester United. Spent Saturday trying on suits for a wedding that I’ll be an usher for. Oh yeah in fact I’ll be in Prague this weekend for the stag do for that wedding!
Sunday was another sport one watching Bristol City fall out of the FA Cup followed by watching the 2015 WWE Royal Rumble with some hours of Mario Kart 8 and WWE network prior in the buildup. Royal Rumble results will be up shortly.
All in all another excellent weekend with some geek, some sport and friends.
– Murr
