That’s 3 sheets of $7 foundation insulation foam and about a roll of duct tape. It closes up with insulation across the top as well. The wooden coop sitting inside it:

I already had. It has 1 100 watt light which is on 24×7. There’s another 100 watt fixture out of sight under their roosting area which I flip on if its going to be under 40 degrees at night, which it has been a few times so far. So far the chickens seem to be doing fine and the wife is happy, so I’ll tentatively call this successful. Now to get the new, bigger coop built quick – I have a dozen guinea hens on the way in about a month.

(I should note that we compromised and kept the baby chicks in the house for their first two weeks, because it was especially cold this spring and we worried they wouldn’t survive. They’re almost 4 weeks old now and have been out for over a week, including 2 nights that got under 30 degrees.)

* disgusto chicken dust is made of about 2/3 wood chip dust pulverized by tiny chicken feet and 1/3 powdered chicken poop. It really is vile.

I’m still not sure if he will live. He was still alive when I left for work this morning. I took him out of the main coop and stuck him into the little brooder coop I have for when we get chicks. Tonight when I get home from work I need to go out and build something more substantial for him – the thing is too small for him, and I need it for the 4 new chicks we currently have inside.

Meantime I’m sick with the cold the family is fighting. When I came in last night from getting him setup in the brooder coop, I checked on the baby chickens, and one of them hopped out of the box we have them in. I had to chase it around our basement and grab it before Soolin chomped it, which she was definitely interested in doing. I went upstairs and told Susan I’m sending all the chickens off to the nackers

One last detail, a friend who lives down the road from us who also has chickens captured this video last night of a bear going after his birdfeeders. There was something in the air!

The good: Great graphics, imaginatively realized setting featuring grand sense of scale, workmanlike but serviceable plot, good voice acting. Strong combat and exploration gameplay systems. Game engine is impressive technically and the PC port is solid.

The bad: More Uncharted than Tomb Raider – didn’t bother me, might bother you. Puzzles are mostly trivial, in part thanks to lots of hand holding. Normal difficulty is pretty easy. Occasionally feels like you’re playing through beautiful cut scenes that require minimal player input.

Graphics and sound: The graphics and sound are both top notch. The graphics in particular shine here, especially the huge vistas. Audio and voicework are both good. Some nice weather/wind effects, good use of lighting and motion blur effects as well.

Everything else: Before I get started, a word about the controversy surrounding the game when it was released. Much was made of how many graphically depicted awful things happen to the game’s protagonist. Lara’s a woman, and there were allegations of misogyny. My take is that, first of all, awful things, truly awful things, have been happening to Lara since the first game (death by lion maw, bear paw, boulders the size of a compact car to the head, gunshots to parts various and sundry, spike traps to the legs,and falls from great heights onto granite floors all featured in the first game alone), and the only thing different in this game is how vividly they’re depicted thanks to a modern game engine. Second of all, videogames in general, not to mention popular cinema and television, all feature horrific violence, often quite graphic. Using the game’s release to have a conversation about the broader issue of depictions of violence in popular culture seems fair enough; calling out the game for somehow being outside the norm, or unfairly beating up on a woman, do not. Male protagonists, more common in games by many orders of magnitude, suffer all Lara does and worse, and videogame producers are frequently criticized for failing to offer up female protagonists. Then someone does, and they get beat up for…beating up on her the way they do on male protagonists. Most of the criticism I’ve seen wasn’t speaking to the broader cultural issues, it was criticizing Tomb Raider specifically. They created a game featuring a heroine who overcomes a bunch of horrific stuff, finding her inner strength whilst triumphing over evil and saving the day, and their reward is to be labeled misogynist bastards. Clearly they should stick to games with male protagonists, because daggers to the ear are ok, if it’s a guy’s ear.

[in other words, I call myopic hypocritical bullshit]

That said, about the game: I loved it and played through it in less than 2 weeks, which is almost unheard of for me. I can quibble with some of the design choices, and agree with critics who say there’s not as much player agency available here as one might want, but my complaints pale in comparison to the game’s virtues. This is an entertaining, well crafted game. I can most easily describe it as Tomb Raider meets Uncharted, with a side helping of rpg-lite. It’s a reboot of the long running series, and begins with a young Lara with friends and colleagues on an anthropological vessel searching for a lost culture. Things quickly go bad, and soon Lara finds herself in harms way, questing to save her friends and get to the bottom of why they find themselves unable to escape a quasi devil’s triangle scenario. Gameplay features a really well paced mix of plot exposition via cutscene, exploration and physical puzzle solving, cover-reliant gunplay, hand to hand combat, and light role playing mechanics.

The plot and exposition is the weakest part of the mix, but it’s better than the majority of videogame offerings. There’s a diverse collection of characters, a few of whom actually emerge as believable, and the plot itself is a decent hash of action adventure film tropes with a dash of the occult. Lara and friends end up shipwrecked on a mysterious island and soon discover something’s keeping them from leaving. Not only that, the island hosts several factions of previous shipwreck victims, some of whom may be up to cultish no-good, and most of whom end up chasing after or being chased by Lara. Plot exposition is conveyed via non-interactive game engine cutscenes. I usually hate this model, but found I enjoyed this more than most and rarely wanted to skip through them as I often do in lesser games.

The exploration and puzzle solving is engaging and looks fantastic. It’s a bit on the easy side though, particularly compared to the (admittedly fiddly) original Tomb Raider games. Lara quickly becomes more agile than a rhesus monkey, and it’s rare for her to fail as she clambers, slides, leaps and otherwise maneuvers through the game’s environments. And oh, those environments. There’s some really stunning stuff on offer, from asian temples dotted along steep, forested cliffs looking out over the sea, to smoky cavern systems populated with things that go boo in the night, to a you have to see it to believe it WWII-era shipyard suspended in the sky via steel cables. The environments are full of hidden areas and a variety of types of discoverable objects, many of which contribute experience points Lara can use to enhance her weapons and skills. Puzzles are really simple, often featuring physics challenges like ‘to get past this wooden door, I have to swing this metal bell that’s conveniently hanging right next to it till it bashes through’. To make it even easier, that bell will glow whenever you push the ‘environmental cues’ button, aka the ‘give me a hint button’, which you can use whenever you like. Did I mention the puzzles were easy? There are also innumerable ‘explore area, jumping, climbing, sliding, crawling, etc, poking nose into every nook and difficult to reach cranny in order to pull the lever/push switch/disable door lock to open access to the next area’ style puzzles which have been standard for this series since the beginning. These occasionally feature simple QTE (ie push the right button at the right time) challenges, but it’s always the same button with the same timer, so they become trivial after the first couple of them.

The combat is a mixed bag. It’s competent, moves quickly and fluidly, and looks great, but it’s also really easy and for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on feels a bit…dry. It’s a third person cover-based shooter at heart, much like Uncharted but with not as much emphasis on hand to hand combat. There are only a handful of weapons in the game, all of which can be upgraded using experience points Lara accumulates over the course of the game. By the end all of them are so powerful that only bosses stand a chance against them, and that’s because they’re mostly immune to them and use similar easy to time QTE challenges some of the exploration challenges feature. On balance, I enjoyed it but found it a bit lacking.

The rpg elements are pretty linear and trivial. As you explore the game’s environments you find and accumulate material which you can use to enhance Lara’s equipment. Periodically you also find blueprints which allow you to raise specific pieces of equipment to a new more powerful tier, so for example your simple bow made from a stick and some vine that you start with has become a sophisticated compound bow that can fire fire or explosive tipped arrows with great speed and accuracy. You can similarly upgrade Lara’s skills in a few areas, like mobility, speed of climbing, and the efficacy of her ‘environmental cues’ skill. I didn’t dislike this element but it didn’t feel fully fleshed out.

I should note there’s also a multiplayer component to the game. I haven’t even bothered to try it, mostly because I’m well stocked on excellent PC multiplayer games (Team Fortress 2 and Planetside 2 are both getting played by me a lot these days) and don’t need another one. I find I’m generally in the camp of gamers who don’t believe you have to tack a multiplayer mode onto every game you release – focus your resources on making one or the other really well. It’s easy to forgive here because the singleplayer is so fun.

I recognize I seem overly critical above, but the bottom line is despite all my quibbling, I had a great time playing through this game and look forward to new entries in the series.

Recommendation:

Tomb Raider is worth the full retail price, even if you don’t care about the multiplayer.

Media:

That was made by my lovely wife and was the best birthday present ever. Truth be told I’ve been teasing her about this for years – this year she did it

She also got my recumbent bike fixed, which was equally awesome. I just need to find a kid’s bike seat for it now so I can ride into work with Brady. I’m pretty sure he’ll love it.

My Mother-in-Law also got me some delicious chocolate and, more importantly, ‘Booger Card!’ which has a picture of a little tot picking his nose. It’s Brady’s new favorite thing, and we can’t go a half hour without him asking ‘Where’s the booger card, Dad?’

Also, sorry Canada that 30-something years later we’ve decided to claim most of the credit. Thanks for helping us with this, I promise some of us will remember

Intel Core i5-3570K
Asus P8Z77-V LK ATX LGA1155 Motherboard
Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory
Samsung 840 Pro Series 128GB 2.5″ Solid State Disk (this is the Operating System drive)
Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5″ 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (this is the apps drive)
Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB 3.5″ 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive (this is the drive backups are written to)
Gigabyte Radeon HD 7870 2GB Video Card
Asus Xonar DGX 24-bit 96 KHz Sound Card

This is the first time I’ve added a soundcard in years, maybe a decade even. I did it because I became frustrated with the driver situation for my previous build, where the mobo manufacture (Gigabyte) and the audio chipset manufacturer were not in sync on their drivers, and I had a number of compatibility problems with games. The Xonar stuff has been on my radar for a while – it was cheap enough so I figured I would give it a shot. So far it’s great, and having two independent audio devices is actually handy (voice comms on one, game audio on the other).

The build itself was uneventful – about as easy as they come, and so unremarkable that I have nothing to say about it beyond that. The machine’s been running well for a couple of weeks now, I definitely got a performance improvement in a number of games, which is great, even if truth be told I wasn’t feeling like I needed it before the old machine died. Plus, so far all my game saves have been successfully migrated to the new build, which was the thing I was most worried about. Now I can just cross my fingers I get 2+ years out of this build. Insofar as I can tell, the videocard will be the only likely weak link.

It is worth noting that it’s possible this will be the last time I do this. Intel is signalling that eventually you won’t be able to buy processors anymore – you’ll have to buy a motherboard/cpu combo or manufactured machines, and even the machine vendors like Dell and HP are signalling that they want to get out of the PC business (!!! – they can’t make money). I think what they’re trying to do is get PC’s to the point where they are consumer devices – no one picks which audio chip goes into their stereo, and Intel figures no one should think about PC’s, you just go to best buy and buy model a, b, or c. We’ll see if they succeed. In theory by the time I need another new machine, they’ll be close to or at that point, and Dell may be out of the consumer PC business.