The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim Review

What's up guys? I recently finished the main story of Skyrim, killed Alduin etc. I wanted to write a bit of what I thought about the game.

I haven't played many RPG's before Skyrim, so I don't really have anything to compare it with, but I think Skyrim is pretty good. Not excellent, but it was still really fun. I have about 30 hours on the game and not one of those were wasted doing boring stuff.
My character is a Breton female who is an assassin/thief. I started doing The Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild quests to supplement my skills in those areas.
While the main story is pretty short (I was actually surprised at how short it was) it was fun and interesting. One thing is that it was a bit too easy. I did have some trouble killing Alduin, but after learning the Dragonrend shout, dragons are extremely easy.

But Skyrim's specialty is not the main story, it's the huge amount of side stories and quests the player can accomplish. As I said before, I am currently doing the Dark Brotherhood and Thieve's Guild stories, and many little quests here and there to fill my time.

One thing I don't like is adventuring. What I mean about that is like in GTA games, you can steal a car and travel through the world killing people and running from cops, never getting bored. However in Skyrim, taking your horse and galloping through the countryside is not very exciting unless you find a cave or a dragon, giant, etc. I guess this is the difference between GTA and Skyrim (besides the obvious, of course): GTA has more fun in the freedom of roaming around the world and shooting up some gangbangers, but less actual quests, and Skyrim is the opposite. But don't get me wrong, I still enjoy jumping on a horse and traveling through the world instead of fast traveling, but in GTA it is just so much better.

Some tips I learned

• Don't pick up useless items, I get overencumbered endlessly, because I pick up anything I think has value and I can sell
• Use the quick menu a lot, I put most of the stuff I use, all my weapons, shouts, in the quick menu and it saves a great deal of time, instead of going to the menu, then items, then finding what you want
• Pick up food, while potions are good, they are hard to make and expensive. I usually pick up steaks and meat and the like, and when I am out of potions, I eat all of my food to regain all of my health, then I repeat. While fighting Alduin I actually ate about 20 potatoes, and when I did kill him I was around 10% health, so those potatoes saved me
• If you use bows, pick up every type of arrows you see. They don't count as weight, and even though there are really strong arrows, you might not want to use them and you'd use a crappy Falmer arrow to kill a little wolf instead.

Overall, I give this game a 9/10

Best thing about this game is replayability, as I finished the main quest at around 20 hours and have played half of those hours and 10 more afterwards on side quests.

Here is a mammoth frozen into a glacier stuck with arrows... for your enjoyment

Why I love GTA: San Andreas

This game is just so unrealistic, but so fun.

Ryder is smoking a big blunt right in front of this police officer, no problem though, Ryder is too OG to get caught.

LG Flatron E2341 23" 1080p

What's up guys, I recently picked up this amazing monitor from Fry's for $170. It was a gigantic difference from the old crappy 17" HP monitor I used to have. Here is a comparison of the two

Yes that's a Breaking Bad wallpaper.
This monitor makes everything look spectacular, and the buttons on it are very strong and not flimsly like some buttons on other monitors. Though if you don't turn off the monitor and turn off your PC, it goes into sleep mode, where the On/Off button flashes Blue every few seconds, which becomes annoying if you have it in your bedroom. But that can easily be remedied with turning it off.

Well I've been playing Skyrim lately, and I did not get my Graphics Card yet, I was thinking maybe with some extra money on Christmas I could buy something even better than a 6850, which would be awesome.

AMD Phenom II x2 555 Unboxing Video

Here is another unboxing video, this time of my amazing CPU. This CPU is awesome if you are on a budget and you can survive with a dual core, unless you unlock it of course.

RAM unboxing video up!

I got these for really cheap at Newegg and they have been working wonders. I'll soon get another 4gb to have a total of 8gb.
Sorry for the crappy quality didn't think it would turn out this bad.
Enjoy!

PC Info

Ok guys, I've been playing Skyrim all day today, and even though I only get about 25 FPS on the lowest settings and 800x600, I've been having a blast. Now it's time to stop procrastinating and write a post about my long awaited computer.

Elite 430 Case

AMD Phenom II and GSkill Badges

No cable management whatsoever, I'll try to fix it when I get my GPU.

OK so that's pretty much how it looks, now let's take a look at the performance, which I value way over looks.

So the CPU came stock at a dual core 3.2GHz, but I easily unlocked the disabled cores and overclocked to 4.2 GHz. However temps were reaching 56C Idle, so I brought it down to 3.6GHz, for now. At the end of this month I'll be getting my Cooler Master Hyper 212+, so I will probably go around 4GHz at most, just to be safe. 

The voltage seemed a bit high, but everything is stable so far.

Why you should buy a Black Edition Phenom II

It is so easy to overclock! Just by changing the multiplier in AMD overdrive, increasing the voltage slightly and messing around a bit, I overclocked in a heartbeat.

That's it, I just increased that Multiplier Slider, and bam, 3600 MHz

Now, what I absolutely despised about building my computer.

1. Installing Windows 7 was hard to do, I had to connect the IDE cable from my old desktop and power them both on, and put the old one on top of my new one, because the IDE cable wa a bit short. I can't really blame that on anything besides my not wanting to buy a CD drive. 

2. The Windows 7 disk I burned, did not work, I had to change down the burn speed to 1x, reburn it, and it finally worked, although it took a while to burn it at that speed

3. Drivers

3a. Could not connect to internet at all; had to download LAN drivers from my motherboard's website from another computer and bring it to the desktop, but even then, only wired works, gotta figure that out before I move my computer away from the router.

3b. I had to install the AMD Graphics drivers 3 times before they finally worked. But they were easy to use, and I had no games to play while using it, Skyrim was downloading, so it didn't even really matter.

3c. The mouse suddenly stopped working, had to connect it to my laptop, and reinstall the drivers to get it functioning again, but not without 3 restarts

4. Headset didn't work, when I plugged it into the headphone jack, only the headphones worked, and only the microphone worked when I plugged it into the mic jack. Might be something wrong with the headset, but I have a spare webcam I used for a mic

Other than that, I'm loving my computer! I can play Team Fortress 2 without any lag, and on lowest settings I'm playing Skyrim at 20-30 FPS. Boot times are faster than what I would expect of a 5400RPM drive, but then I guess it will be dramatically improved when I get an SSD. 

One thing is that, it's sometimes loud. Just at random some of my fans start picking up more speed and get louder. There was one 10 second period where every fan was going faster than intended, and it sounded like a jet engine, but that never happened again, and these random speed increases seem to have stopped for now.

What's left to buy:

• GPU, 99% going to be Sapphire 6850
• Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus Heatsink/Fan
• Coby 2.1 Speakers
• 23" 1080p monitor
• Crucial M4 64GB SSD
• Either 500 or 1 TB 7200 RPM HDD once prices drop
• Another stick of 4GB GSkill RAM, if it seems like I need it
• Better Keyboard and Mouse, I can survive with the mouse, but this keyboard's going to give me carpal tunnel soon because of its shape
• More games!
• A Lamborghini

Alright hope you guys enjoyed this long post, gonna be writing a lot more long posts like this soon.

PC is working!

Well, I went to Fry's yesterday with my dad to buy my case, and when we went, he lent me $50 to buy a power supply. It was the same brand, Antec, so I was kind of reluctant at first, but it all worked out in the end. Well we got home, I plug in the power supply, nothing. Right before I suited up to go bomb Antec for their second defunct PSU, my dad, an electrician, wanted to try something. He said just flipping on the switch for the PSU won't open it, you need a motherboard connection to switch it on. Well that's exactly what we did, and it worked. My old one was probably not DOA either, I was just stupid enough to think that it would turn on completely just by flipping the switch. Well now after a good night's rest, we're installing Windows 7. I'll get some more pics and info later.
I also successfully unlocked the 2 dormant cores, so now I have a quad core CPU, but I didn't check if it's 100% stable yet, but once I get into my OS, that's the first thing I'll do.