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The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

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Developer: The Astronauts | Released: 2014 | Genre: Adventure, First Person

This sure was a pretty game. I ran it with everything set to high on my new monster PC and still it ran fluently. Lots of details, high resolution textures, wind in the leafs, although some stuff in the distance far away seemed to be affected by an LOD algorithm in a somewhat aggressive manner. I also had a little bit of mouse lag when turning the view. Still, I quickly acknowledged that this kind of modern adventure game was much more up my sleeve than the previous point-and-click adventure game with its 2D retro graphics and pixelated characters. I’ve been spoiled by modern technology, as was probably inevitable.

The game starts with no difficulty selector and no direct save option other than its own autosaves. And boy, is the autosaving indeed rare. Often I had to go through a lot of exploration and solve a multi-step puzzle before I saw it saving my progress. I sure understand the gamers that are miffed about this. However, you can’t die or be caught up in a way that can’t be escaped, so if your system is stable and you can play relatively uninterrupted, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Except perhaps the open and unrestricted nature of the gameplay. It’s possible to completely bypass a puzzle section and later have to backtrack a long way to solve it, as it turns out that it was actually mandatory to complete the game. This could have been improved with some clever gating. For example, there’s a stone bridge across a dam that could have had an iron gate or something. Solve the local puzzle and the iron gate is suddenly opened up for you. This have worked well in other games with puzzles, so why not here?

NZXT Casing

New Monster PC + Windows 10

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I got myself a new monster PC two days ago. My previous PC was 6 years old and still running the same Windows Vista that it came with. Although it actually didn’t start rusting apart just yet, I still felt that it was time to upgrade. The hard disk probably wouldn’t keep on working for much longer, and I also wanted to try new technology. Especially a Solid-State Drive, as I had heard a lot of good things about it.

I bought a PC online at a Danish web shop called MM Vision and got it delivered, assembled and ready to go. The old days of assembling my own PC was not something I wanted to bother with again, as long as I could just select the components on a list. So I ended up with the following…