It seems like if I don’t give myself a challenge to finish a game, I just start a ton of games and then never finish them. So I’m giving myself a challenge to make my way through a couple of games this month!
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales Launch Trailer
I love Marvel’s Spider-Man. Along with the Batman: Arkham series, they seem to be games that really do superheroes correctly. Since I recently got a PS5, it’s time to experience Miles’ story. I also love that it’s a bit of a shorter game, so it should be easier to get through this month.
Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space
Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space Remastered Trailer
Season two of Telltale’s Sam & Max season, now dubbed “Beyond Time and Space,” was remastered last year, so it’s time to play through it again. I have played it before, but that was back when it originally came out. It’s been long enough that I expect this to fell very similar to a first playthrough.
The Zelda-sized hole in this list
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom comes out in just a couple weeks. There are a few good reasons I didn’t include it on this list. First, I expect it will be a long game and I highly doubt I would get through it by the end of the month. Second, I have a vacation coming up at the start of next month. It involves some very long flights, and with the extreme time zone differences between my home and destination I need to be awake for much of those flights as part of adjusting to those differences. I plan on Tears of the Kingdom being a big part of making those flights feel a lot shorter.
An annual tradition started by Mike Suszek while he was at the now-defunt Joystiq, Four in February is a challenge to just complete four video games during the month of February.
I’ve attempted it a couple of times before and came close. I’ve decided to try it again, because lately I’ve been starting a lot of games, but never finishing any. Check out my picks below! I also plan on streaming some of my attempt: I don’t know if I’ll be streaming on Twitch, YouTube, or Mixer (or even all three simultaneously), but you can follow me on those platforms to find out.
I picked up Marvel’s Spider-Man on Black Friday, but I just haven’t gotten more than a couple hours into it yet. It’s not that the game is un-enjoyable – it’s very good from what I’ve played so far! I just haven’t made the time for it yet, so that’s what I’m going to do – make the time to play it through in February. If I speed through it quickly enough, I might even try to do the DLCs as well!
Update (Feb 2): I was right about it being very good! So good, that I completed the main story over the weekend! One game down, three to go. My progress will likely slow during the week, due to work, but I hope to get an hour or so of Pokemon in each night.
In what is a recurring theme for my Four in February picks, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is another one I just haven’t gotten to. By all accounts, it’s a beautiful, important, and well-acted game. The Game Awards trailer for Hellblade II was disturbingly great too. I can’t wait to put on my headphones for this one.
I got The Outer Worlds free with my CPU when I built my new computer (I should write about that!), but I’ve only put an hour or so into it. I was worried about putting an Obsidian-developed RPG in my list, as they can take a while, but then I saw it’s actually a fairly short one – only about 12-15 hours or so! So it’s time to give this a proper go!
I bought Pokemon Sword on launch day, and I got Pokemon Shield for Christmas, but I’m only a couple gyms into Sword, and I haven’t even started Shield. I tend to start a new Pokemon game very excitedly, but then rarely actually complete it, so it’s time to change that. I don’t know if I’ll just continue my Sword save, or if I’ll start a new save file on Shield, but either way I want to get through it. This will be a good one to play in bed on my Switch, so I can just tackle it a little at a time.
I’ll try to stream as I play these games (except for Pokemon, since I don’t have a capture card), and Twitch will be the primary platform with the PS4’s integrated support!
Long story short, I’m impatient. I don’t like it when I have to wait a long time for my computer to do things. That’s why I set out to build a computer this past December. In this post, I’ll share:
What my goals in building this computer were.
How I selected the parts I used.
What parts I actually ended up using.
A few snags I ran into during the actual building process.
The Goals
I had three goals in mind while building this computer:
To be able to edit (and export) video pretty quickly using Adobe Premiere Pro CS6
Be able to play current video games at high graphics settings in 1080p
To not have to buy Adobe CS6 again.
That third one was what created the biggest problem: I owned CS6 for Mac. That meant one thing: I needed to build a Hackintosh.
Goals 1 and 2 work pretty well together: the venn diagram of things that make a good video editing machine and a good gaming rig has a pretty good cross section. That meant the starting point was to start with the hardest part (Hackintosh), and then get the others to work within the restraints presented by Hackintoshing.
One more thing: my goal was to stay right around the $1000 mark. The good news: I was buying the parts in November, which has some of the steepest discounts on computer parts all year.
Selecting the Parts
Knowing that I’d have to work within the constraints of building a Hackintosh, I set out to find parts that work best with that. One of the most trusted and comprehensive sources of information on Hackintoshing is TonyMacX86. The best part is that they publish guides to the most compatible parts every month. The great thing is that Hackintoshing has come a long way and there’s a wide variety of parts you can use. That would be enough, except that those same parts are the best ones for video editing!
Long story short, I just selected the best parts within my budget limitations from the Tonymac list.
The Actual Parts
I used PC Part Picker to price out and plan the parts.
Power Supply: Thermaltake Tough Power 750W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply
OSes: OS X Mavericks & Windows 8.1
The Snags
This was my first time building a computer, and it was a little scary. I was going very slowly when building it because I was so afraid of messing up. The number one thing I’d recommend to people building a computer for the first time is to prepare. Watch tutorials online. Read the manuals (seriously, they are necessary). Preparation is going to make your life much, much easier.
It’s time for an update on the short film I’m working on. I figure it’s time to share the premise.
“A student who hates his roommates must spend 6 hours trapped in a room with them during an emergency.”
I’ll elaborate a little.
Tim’s a college student who just wants to be left alone. He doesn’t really have a good reason to hate his roommates; he just really hates living with them. He’d rather be on his own. He doesn’t want to talk to them. I imagine in the kitchen he probably has a cabinet that the others aren’t even allowed to open up.
This post isn’t about that though. This is about the inspiration for the other part of that.
When I was 12, my family moved to Southeast Washington. Part of the TV market in that area was Umatilla, OR. Once in a while, there would be a little PSA on the local channels about what they should do in case of emergency. You see, Umatilla was home to one of the US’s stockpiles of chemical agents. There was a plan to incinerate them, but until that was completed just a few years ago, there was some serious danger.
If there was an incident, they would have had to shelter in place (quickly, I might add) and seal off the outside air coming in. So that was the inspiration for the premise. In fact, the characters largely follow the instructions given on Ready.gov for sheltering in place (though in reality they probably would have evacuated; sheltering in place like that is only good for a couple of hours).
Now I’m at college in Rexburg, Idaho. And wouldn’t you know it, I’m close to another place. Idaho National Laboratory in nearby Idaho Falls doesn’t pose the same kinds of danger (they mainly focus on energy research), but they’ve had incidents too. In fact, they were the site of a fatal nuclear accident in 1961 (the ones killed were personnel working on the reactor).
So put my college experience and the chemical accident premise together and you get this story!
That image above is a good summary of the hardest part of making a short film (which is just one of the things I’m doing in the next few months). Seeing a blinking cursor on screen is just so intimidating. Even though my ideas are always brewing in my head for a while before I actually start typing things out, that doesn’t make it much easier.
The weird thing is that once I start, things open up. The words just start flowing out of my fingertips when I actually start typing. But it takes a massive amount of effort to just get those first words onto the page. I’ve started though. I’ve got the draft of my short film’s script written, though there’s some stuff I’m not happy with yet about it.
Until I get it refined a little more, I’ll just leave the logline here:
A student who hates his roommates must spend 6 hours trapped in a room with them during an emergency.
Some people build computers. Other people fix them. We all use them.
I recently built my first computer and was inspired to share my experience and also see what it’s like to fix a laptop. I visited with Michael of The PC Penguin and watched as he fixed a broken power port on a laptop, and we talked about what it takes to keep up with the changing computer repair industry. In this short documentary, I also share a brief overview of what I went through to build my first computer. Looking back, I make it sound a little scarier than it was, but it’s really not that hard. If you’re interested, you should give it a shot sometime!
My original idea for this documentary fell through, so I only had about a week and a half to put this one together. I had just finished building my first computer a day or two before and it was such a great experience that I decided to make that the subject of this documentary! I emailed Michael and he was perfectly willing to participate and it was really interesting watching him work. I wish I had known I would be doing this before I built my computer so I could have recorded myself as I put it together. Instead, I had to go back after the fact and recreate a couple of shots. Also, since the inside of my case is painted black, it’s really hard to get good shots in there, but I did my best.
