That's right, I built a PC and it works very well. I'm typing this up on it as we speak. Potentially I will now be able to play all the shiny new PC games that are released over the next few years. I'll tell you all about my build experience and what I got.
I did play a few games as well. I was trying to save money this month, so I ended up selling my tablet and used that money to buy the PS4 remaster of Odin Sphere. I also played Mighty No. 9. I backed the Kickstarter years ago and now it's finally out. Whether or not that's a good thing I don't really know yet.
It was an exciting month, so let's get right into it. It's game time!
I Built a Real PC
I've been saying for years that I was going to build a PC, but a few things were holding me back. The first, and most important was the money aspect. While you can build a relatively affordable desktop that's got a lot of power now $1,000 is still a lot of money. I set out with the goal of building everything I wanted on a budget of under $1,000. I ended up doing just that. All of my parts and the operating system cost me around $930. So far I've been very pleased with the results. I don't want to just sit here and list the parts, but the important pieces are that I got a 3.3 Ghz quad core I5, a GTX 970, and 8GB of ram. It's a solid build.
So, I've been putting money aside for this PC for a long time. The other reason I didn't end up building it until now is that I was scared to build it. That sounds dumb, but I've never built a PC before. Normally I'd be totally up for a learning experience, but if I somehow blew up a $350 video card I'd be totally screwed. Despite that crippling fear I decided to buckle down and build the thing anyways. I ordered the parts and they arrived within three days, which is insane. With all my parts gathered I watched no less than six build tutorials to make sure I didn't screw anything up.
In the end it wasn't really that bad. You just need to make sure you're not statically charged. You can get anti-static bracelets for super cheap. Overall it's just knowing where to plug everything into. It's kind of like super complicated Legos that you can totally destroy if you're not careful. I had a laptop handy so I could look stuff up any time I had a question or didn't really understand what I was doing.
After being stressed for like an hour I now have a fully functional desktop that can totally play video games. Well, I guess it didn't all go so well. One of the USB ports doesn't work. I am going to look into that at some point. Still, it's the first gaming ready PC I've had since around 2008! That's eight whole years without a proper PC. So obviously I'll be able to play all the hot new games, but it will also help out immensely with streaming. My streams will be able to look a bit better, and I can actually have chat open on the PC and not have it run my CPU off the charts. Praise be!
Now to close it out I've got some hot pictures. Note: I didn't really do any cable management.
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| Front view. |
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| Side view, with my reflection in the glass. |
Mighty No. 9
When the kickstarter for Mighty No. 9 showed up in 2013 I was excited. I was so young and naive then. Only now in 2016, has this game finally been delivered. It was delayed multiple times due to quality concerns. At first the delays were frustrating, but they eventually became comical. To make matters even worse every trailer put out for the game somehow made it look worse. Everything culminated in the trailer Deep Silver put out for the game a few months ago. There was an over the top announcer that would make anyone cringe, but on top of that the game looked bad.
Before I go any deeper into this I want to say that the game isn't awful. It's been getting railed on in reviews, and the beatings it has been taking are well deserved. Even I joined in to beat on it a little bit as I streamed my entire playthrough. I don't think it's a good game, but I can see what it was going for. It's disappointing that it turned out the way it did, but sometimes things go wrong in development. You'd think that a spiritual successor to Mega Man made by series creator Keiji Inafune himself would be a slam dunk, but it isn't.
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| "Hey, it's me. Not Mega Man!" |
That's what Mighty No. 9 is. It's an unabashed Mega Man wannabe. You play as Beck, who is Mighty No. 9. Instead of fighting robot masters you fight the other mighty numbers, who are robots. They used to be good, but have been infected by some kind of virus. It's your job as Beck to purify them. In doing so he gains their power, just like in Mega Man! Normally I wouldn't make this big a deal out of it, but the similarities are endless. Here, I'll list a few.
Mega Man - Rock and Roll
Mega Man - Dr Light and Dr, Wily
Mighty No. 9. - Beck and Call
Mega Man. - Dr. White and Dr. Blackwell
I mean seriously, he might has well have just named them the exact same thing. I'm not going to get into the fact that the DLC character Ray looks exactly like Zero to the point where it might as well be copyright infringement. The point is that Mighty No. 9 is like Mega Man. There is one major differentiating factor though. Beck has a dash ability, which is the core of the gameplay. If you shoot enemies enough they will glow and Beck can dash through them to absorb them. Doing this will proper timing will net you a high score, and give you a bit of a power boost. You want to do this to every enemy and not get hit so that you can "combo". The higher your combo the more points you get, and the longer you keep your power-ups. It sounds cool, and sometimes can even look cool in practice. It falls short when you mess up. The fast paced action immediately stops and you're slowed down to a glacial pace. I bet speed runs will be really fun to watch though.
To make matters even worse I don't think that the level design is very good at all. I often found myself dying because I had to make blind jumps, or enemies started shooting me before I could even see them. Mega Man had instant deaths as well, but at least I felt like I could have prevented them. The difficulty in Mighty No. 9 is all over the place. Sometimes I'd struggle to complete the level only to annihilate the boss on the first or second try. The best part is that if you die, then you get to hear all of the cringe worthy dialogue again! Boy is all of the dialogue terrible!
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| This is a game that came out in 2016! Look at these graphics! |
What's even more baffling is that the game looks like a 360 launch title. It's running on Unreal Engine 3, which is one of the most highly optimized video game engines at this point, yet somehow it still manages to run like garbage. This game should run at 60 frames per second at all times, but it doesn't! It sometimes slows down to 40 or below for seemingly no reason. However, what I think Mighty No. 9's biggest crime is that it isn't really trying to be its own thing. It's one thing to pay homage to Mega Man, it's a completely different thing to try and BE Mega Man. Mighty No. 9 has a solid foundation, but its execution falls short on almost every level. If they do end up making a sequel I hope they try to make it its own thing other than a soulless Mega Man clones. I also hope it looks and runs a whole lot better...
Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir
Odin Sphere originally came out on the PS2 in 2007. Back then I really wanted to try it out, but never got around to it. A few years ago they re-released it as a PS2 classic on PS3. I picked it up, but couldn't get into it. While the game looked beautiful and handles like a dream the frame rate just couldn't keep itself together. In many fights the game would slow to a crawl, and I just couldn't take it. That's why I was super excited to see that Atlus decided to remaster the game completely and bring it out again as Odin Sphere Liefthrasir. Thanks to this new release I was able to experience the game without and hitching whatsoever, and the combat was even made to be a little bit more user friendly.
Developer Vanillaware is known for making beautiful hand drawn games. Odin Sphere is probably their most well known work to date and for good reason. The art is incredible. It looks like a story book that has come to life. It helps that Odin Sphere is just that, a fairy tale. The plot relies heavily on Norse mythology.
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| No game about Norse mythology is complete without Odin. |
Initially I thought I was going to have a lot to say about Odin Sphere, but now that I'm here I'm kind of drawing a blank. It's an action RPG that takes place on a 2D plane. You use your weapon and skills in order to hit enemies. Skills and hits chain together for more damage, and everything flows together very nicely. You play through the game as five different characters and the events of their stories all overlap. At first it's novel, but by the third person I was already tired of retreading the same story over and over. The voice acting is all excellent, and the visuals never stopped being a pleasure to look at.
It's a well put together package, but I don't think that the combat ever really evolves enough to hold itself up for the 30-40 hours it takes to complete the game. Each character controls differently and learns quite a few skills. However, I ended up finding a few skills that worked well for me in order to shred through enemies as quickly as possible.
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| The visuals in Odin Sphere are quite spectacular. |
I had a lot of fun playing through Odin Sphere, but I definitely think it went on for a bit too long.
Monster Hunter Returns....
Normally the summer is a bit barren when it comes to video game releases. July doesn't have a whole lot to offer in terms of things I want to purchase except for Monster Hunter Generations...
Now that Monster Hunter seems to have gained a bit more popularity in the West I feel like we'll end up getting every new release that Japan gets, which may be devastating for my social life.
Next month you can expect me to talk about Monster Hunter, and maybe Overwatch? I don't know. We'll see when we get there.
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