Review - DRAGON QUEST XI: Echoes Of An Elusive Age - The Best JRPG Ever Made Is Here.

 Eternal rival of Final Fantasy, which tries to renew itself every year, Dragon Quest has always made the safe and intelligent choice to remain true to itself over three decades, culminating in this new release called "Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age", improving on the perfectly refined old-school open-world turn-based RPG gameplay, which we already enjoyed immensely in Dragon Quest VIII.

 Get ready to play Square Enix's latest masterpiece, Dragon Quest XI, like a fine aging wine in a bottle made of gold with a diamond cork.

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Like A Book Made To Play: The Immersive Experience Of “Here They Lie”

Here They Lie is a Playstation 4 game signed by Tangentlemen and Santa Monica Studio. The game transports you to a terrifying parallel world from which you cannot escape. Inside this bizarre place, it's necessary to explore a nightmarish city inhabited by malevolent creatures. In this experience, the point of view is first-person and you can only use an old flashlight as a weapon.



In the whole gaming narrative you must wrestle with life or death moral choices to uncover the mystery of the woman in yellow (a kind of Ariadne that guides you through the city maze and corridors inside buildings). There are two ways to play Here They Lie: classic version or using VR glasses (which enhances the immersion in the story). Check the mysterious trailer below:



Despite the beautiful graphics and soundtrack, Here They Lie caught my attention through the perfect balance between narrative and gameplay. You only run from the monsters; inside this dark dimension, you are only a voyeur, observing a scenario of pain and blasphemous acts. The only thing you really do is walking around the huge city capturing hints to discover what is happening. Where's the fun in it? I think Here They Lie is the kind of experience that brings literature features to play.

For me, having played Here They Lie from the beginning to the end was like reading a book written with a Kafkanian and Lovecraftian touch. The situation is too absurd but, with the suspension of disbelief, you can accept that this strange world makes sense. The story grabs your attention and curiosity leads you to find the answer for some questions like: How did I get here? Who is the woman in the golden dress? What are the creatures with animal heads? Why did it happen to me?



Games like this one lead us to the multiple possibilities that we can experience today in the gaming market. We still have "triple A" first-person shooters with zombies but on the other hand, a huge universe to explore fantasy in a different way. We are leaving a privileged ambient of ludic possibilities. To play different games like this one is to create a richer repertoire for classes, gaming projects or gaming discussions.

Let's play!

#GoGamers

LAN-party House: Technical Design And FAQ

After I posted about my LAN-party optimized house, lots of people have asked for more details about the computer configuration that allows me to maintain all the machines as if they were only one. I also posted the back story to how I ended up with this house, but people don't really care about me, they want to know how it works! Well, here you go!

Let's start with some pictures...

Sorry that there are no "overview" shots, but the room is pretty small and without a fish-eye lens it is hard to capture.

Hardware

In the pictures above, Protoman is a 2U rackmount server machine with the following specs:

• CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230
• Motherboard: Intel S1200BTL
• RAM: 4GB (2x2GB DDR3-1333 ECC)
• OS hard drive: 60GB SSD
• Master image storage: 2x1TB HDD (RAID-1)
• Snapshot storage: 240GB SATA-3 SSD

I'll get into the meaning of all the storage in a bit.

The other machines on the rack are the gaming machines, each in a 3U case. The specs are:

• CPU: Intel Core i5-2500
• GPU: MSI N560GTX (nVidia GeForce 560)
• Motherboard: MSI P67A-C43 (Intel P67 chipset)
• RAM: 8GB (2x4GB DDR3-1333)
• Local storage: 60GB SSD

Megaman and Roll are the desktop machines used day-to-day by myself and Christina Kelly. These machines predate the house and aren't very interesting. (If you aren't intimately familiar with the story of Megaman, you are probably wondering about the name "Roll". Rock and Roll were robots created by Dr. Light to help him with lab work and housekeeping. When danger struck, Dr. Light converted Rock into a fighting machine, and renamed him "Megaman", thus ruining the pun before the first Megaman game even started. Roll was never converted, but she nevertheless holds the serial number 002.)

The gaming machines are connected to the fold-out gaming stations via 35-foot-long HDMI and USB cables that run through cable tubes built into the house's foundation. Megaman and Roll are connected to our desks via long USB and dual-link DVI cables. I purchased all cables from Monoprice, and I highly recommend them.

Network boot

Originally, I had the gaming machines running Ubuntu Linux, using WINE to support Windows games. More recently, I have switched to Windows 7. The two configurations are fairly different, but let me start by describing the parts that are the same. In both cases, the server runs Ubuntu Linux Server, and all server-side software that I used is free, open source software available from the standard Ubuntu package repository.

As described in the original post, the gaming machines do not actually store their operating system or games locally. Indeed, their tiny 60GB hard drives couldn't even store all the games. Instead, the machines boot directly over the network. All modern network adapters support a standard for this called PXE. You simply have to enable it in the bios, and configure your DHCP server to send back the necessary information to get the boot process started.

I have set things up so that the client machines can boot in one of two modes. The server decides what mode to use, and I have to log into the server and edit the configs to switch -- this ensures that guests don't "accidentally" end up in the wrong mode.

• Master mode: The machine reads from and writes to the master image directly.
• Replica mode: The machine uses a copy-on-write overlay on top of the master image. So, the machine starts out booting from a disk image that seems to be exactly the same as the master, but when it writes to that image, a copy is made of the modified blocks, and only the copy is modified. Thus, the writes are visible only to that one machine. Each machine gets its own overlay. I can trivially wipe any of the overlays at any time to revert the machine back to the master image.

The disk image is exported using a block-level protocol rather than a filesystem-level protocol. That is, the client sends requests to the server to read and write the raw disk image directly, rather than requests for particular files. Block protocols are massively simpler and more efficient, since they allow the client to treat the remote disk exactly like a local disk, employing all the same caching and performance tricks. The main down side is that most filesystems are not designed to allow multiple machines to manipulate them simultaneously, but this is not a problem due to the copy-on-write overlays -- the master image is read-only. Another down side is that access permissions can only be enforced on the image as a whole, not individual files, but this also doesn't matter for my use case since there is no private data on the machines and all modifications affect only that machine. In fact, I give all guests admin rights to their machines, because I will just wipe all their changes later anyway.

Amazingly, with twelve machines booting and loading games simultaneously off the same master over a gigabit network, there is no significant performance difference compared to using a local disk. Before setting everything up, I had been excessively worried about this. I was even working on a custom UDP-based network protocol where the server would broadcast all responses, so that when all clients were reading the same data (the common case when everyone is in the same game), each block would only need to be transmitted once. However, this proved entirely unnecessary.

Original Setup: Linux

Originally, all of the machines ran Ubuntu Linux. I felt far more comfortable setting up network boot under Linux since it makes it easy to reach into the guts of the operating system to customize it however I need to. It was very unclear to me how one might convince Windows to boot over the network, and web searches on the topic tended to come up with proprietary solutions demanding money.

Since almost all games are Windows-based, I ran them under WINE. WINE is an implementation of the Windows API on Linux, which can run Windows software. Since it directly implements the Windows API rather than setting up a virtual machine under which Windows itself runs, programs execute at native speeds. The down side is that the Windows API is enormous and WINE does not implement it completely or perfectly, leading to bugs. Amazingly, a majority of games worked fine, although many had minor bugs (e.g. flickering mouse cursor, minor rendering artifacts, etc.). Some games, however, did not work, or had bad bugs that made them annoying to play. (Check out the Wine apps DB to see what works and what doesn't.)

I exported the master image using NBD, a Linux-specific protocol that is dead simple. The client and server together are only a couple thousand lines of code, and the protocol itself is just "read block, write block" and that's it.

Here's an outline of the boot process:

1. BIOS boots to the ethernet adaptor's PXE "option ROM" -- a little bit of code that lives on the Ethernet adapter itself.
2. The Ethernet adaptor makes DHCP request. The DHCP response includes instructions on how to boot.
3. Based on the instructions, the Ethernet adaptor downloads and runs a pxelinux (a variant of syslinux) boot image from TFTP server identified by DHCP.
4. pxelinux downloads and runs the real Linux kernel and initrd image, then starts them.
5. initrd script loads necessary drivers, connects to NBD server, and mounts the root filesystem, setting up the COW overlay if desired.
6. Ubuntu init scripts run from root filesystem, bringing up the OS.

Crazy, huh? It's like some sort of Russian doll. "initrd", for those that don't know, refers to a small, packed, read-only filesystem image which is loaded as part of the boot process and is responsible for mounting the real root filesystem. This allows dynamic kernel modules and userland programs to be involved in this process. I had to edit Ubuntu's initrd in order to support NBD (it only supports local disk and NFS by default) and set up the COW overlay, which was interesting. Luckily it's very easy to understand -- it's just an archive in CPIO format containing a bunch of command-line programs and bash scripts. I basically just had to get the NBD kernel module and nbd-client binary in there, and edit the scripts to invoke them. The down side is that I have to re-apply my changes whenever Ubuntu updated the standard initrd or kernel. In practice I often didn't bother, so my kernel version fell behind.

Copy-on-write block devices are supported natively in Linux via "device-mapper", which is the technology underlying LVM. My custom initrd included the device-mapper command-line utility and invoked it in order to set up the local 60GB hard drive as the COW overlay. I had to use device-mapper directly, rather than use LVM's "snapshot" support, because the master image was a read-only remote disk, and LVM wants to operate on volumes that it owns.

The script decides whether it is in master or replica mode based on boot parameters passed via the pxelinux config, which is obtained via TFTP form the server. To change configurations, I simply swap out this config.

New setup: Windows 7

Linux worked well enough to get us through seven or so LAN parties, but the WINE bugs were pretty annoying. Eventually I decided to give in and install Windows 7 on all the machines.

I am in the process of setting this up now. Last weekend I started a new master disk image and installed Windows 7 to it. It turns out that the Windows 7 installer supports installing directly to a remote block device via the iSCSI protocol, which is similar to NBD but apparently more featureful. Weirdly, though, Windows 7 apparently expects your network hardware to have boot-from-iSCSI built directly into its ROM, which most standard network cards don't. Luckily, there is an open source project called gPXE which fills this gap. You can actually flash gPXE over your network adaptor's ROM, or just bootstrap it over the network via regular PXE boot. Full instructions for setting up Windows 7 to netboot are here.

Overall, setting up Windows 7 to netboot was remarkably easy. Unlike Ubuntu, I didn't need to hack any boot scripts -- which is good, because I wouldn't have any clue how to hack Windows boot scripts. I did ran into one major snag in the process, though: The Windows 7 installer couldn't see the iSCSI drive because it did not have the proper network drivers for my hardware. This turned out to be relatively easy to fix once I figured out how:

• Download the driver from the web and unzip it.
• Find the directory containing the .inf file and copy it (the whole directory) to a USB stick.
• Plug the USB stick into the target machine and start the Windows 7 installer.
• In the installer, press shift+F10 to open the command prompt.
• Type: drvload C:\path\to\driver.inf

With the network card operational, the iSCSI target appeared as expected. The installer even managed to install the network driver along with the rest of the system. Yay!

Once Windows was installed to the iSCSI target, gPXE could then boot directly into it, without any need for a local disk at all. Yes, this means you can PXE-boot Windows 7 itself, not just the installer.

Unfortunatley, Windows has no built-in copy-on-write overlay support (that I know of). Some proprietary solutions exist, at a steep price. For now, I am instead applying the COW overlay server-side, meaning that writes will actually go back to the server, but each game station will have a separate COW overlay allocated for it on the server. This should be mostly fine since guests don't usually install new games or otherwise write much to the disk. However, I'm also talking to the author of WinVBlock, an open source Windows virtual block device driver, about adding copy-on-write overlay support, so that the local hard drives in all these machines don't go to waste.

Now that the COW overlays are being done entirely server-side, I am able to take full advantage of LVM. For each machine, I am allocating a 20GB LVM snapshot of the master image. The snapshots all live on the 240GB SATA-3 SSD, since the server will need fast access to the tables it uses to manage the COW overlays. (For now, the snapshots are allocated per-machine, but I am toying with the idea of allocating them per-player, so that a player can switch machines more easily (e.g. to balance teams). However, with the Steam Cloud synchronizing most game settings, this may not be worth the effort.)

Normally, LVM snapshots are thought of as a backup mechanism. You allocate a snapshot of a volume, and then you go on modifying the main volume. You can use the snapshot to "go back in time" to the old state of the volume. But LVM also lets you modify the snapshot directly, with the changes only affecting the snapshot and not the main volume. In my case, this latter feature is the critical functionality, as I need all my machines to be able to modify their private snapshots. The fact that I can also modify the master without affecting any of the clones is just a convenience, in case I ever want to install a new game or change configuration mid-party.

I have not yet stress-tested this new setup in an actual LAN party, so I'm not sure yet how well it will perform. However, I did try booting all 12 machines at once, and starting Starcraft 2 on five machines at once. Load times seem fine so far.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you handle Windows product activation?

I purchased 12 copies of Windows 7 Ultimate OEM System Builder edition, in 3-packs. However, it turns out that because the hardware is identical, Windows does not even realize that it is moving between machines. Windows is tolerant of a certain number of components changing, and apparently this tolerance is just enough that it doesn't care that the MAC address and component serial numbers are different.

Had Windows not been this tolerant, I would have used Microsoft's VAMT tool to manage keys. This tool lets you manage activation for a fleet of machines all at once over the network. Most importantly, it can operate in "proxy activation" mode, in which it talks to Microsoft's activation servers on the machines' behalf. When it does so, it captures the resulting activation certificates. You can save these certificates to a file and re-apply them later, whenever the machines are wiped.

Now that I know about VAMT, I intend to use it for all future Windows activations on any machine. Being able to back up the certificate and re-apply it later is much nicer than having to call Microsoft and explain myself whenever I re-install Windows.

I highly recommend that anyone emulating my setup actually purchase the proper Windows licenses even if your machines are identical. The more machines you have, the more it's actually worth Microsoft's time to track you down if they suspect piracy. You don't want to be caught without licenses.

You might be able to get away with Windows Home Premium, though. I was not able to determine via web searching whether Home Premium supports iSCSI. I decided not to risk it.

UPDATE: At the first actual LAN party on the new Windows 7 setup, some of the machines reported that they needed to be activated. However, Windows provides a 3-day grace period, and my LAN party was only 12 hours. So, I didn't bother activating. Presumably once I wipe these snapshots and re-clone from the master image for the next party, another 3-day grace period will start, and I'll never have to actually activate all 12 machines. But if they do ever demand immediate activation, I have VAMT and 12 keys ready to go.

Do guests have to download their own games from Steam?

No. Steam keeps a single game cache shared among all users of the machine. When someone logs into their account, all of the games that they own and which are installed on the machine are immediately available to play, regardless of who installed them. Games which are installed but not owned by the user will show up in the list with a convenient "buy now" button. Some games will even operate in demo mode.

This has always been one of my favorite things about Steam. The entire "steamapps" folder, where all game data lives, is just a big cache. If you copy a file from one system's "steamapps" to another, Steam will automatically find it, verify its integrity, and use it. If one file out of a game's data is missing, Steam will re-download just that file, not the whole game. It's fault-tolerant software engineering at its finest.

On a similar note, although Starcraft 2 is not available via Steam, an SC2 installation is not user-specific. When you star the game, you log in with your Battle.net account. Party guests thus log in with their own accounts, without needing to install the game for themselves.

Any game that asks for ownership information at install time (or first play) rather than run time simply cannot be played at our parties. Not legally, at least.

Is your electricity bill enormous?

I typically have one LAN party per month. I use about 500-600 kWh per month, for a bill of $70-$80. Doesn't seem so bad to me.

Why didn't you get better chairs!?!

The chairs are great! They are actually pretty well-padded and comfortable. Best of all, they stack, so they don't take much space when not in use.

You can afford all these computers but you have cheap Ikea furniture?

I can afford all these computers because I have cheap Ikea furniture. :)

I had no money left for new furniture after buying the computers, so I brought in the couches and tables from my old apartment.

How can you play modern games when most of them don't support LAN mode?

I have an internet connection. If a game has an online multiplayer mode, it can be used at a LAN party just fine.

While we're on the subject, I'd like to gush about my internet connection. My download bandwidth is a consistent 32Mbit. Doesn't matter what time of day. Doesn't matter how much bandwidth I've used this month. 32Mbit. Period.

My ISP is Sonic.net, an independent ISP in northern California. When I have trouble with Sonic -- which is unusual -- I call them up and immediately get a live person who treats me with respect. They don't use scripts, they use emulators -- the support person is running an emulator mimicking my particular router model so that they can go through the settings with me.

Best of all, I do not pay a cent to the local phone monopoly (AT&T) nor the local cable monopoly (Comcast). Sonic.net provides my phone lines, over which they provide DSL internet service.

Oh yeah. And when I posted about my house the other day, the very first person to +1 it on G+, before the post had hit any news sites, was Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic.net. Yeah, the CEO of my ISP followed me on G+, before I was internet-famous. He also personally checked whether or not my house could get service, before it was built. If you e-mail him, he'll probably reply. How cool is that?

His take on bandwidth caps / traffic shaping? "Bandwidth management is not used in our network. We upgrade links before congestion occurs."

UPDATE: If you live outside the US, you might be thinking, "Only 32Mbit?". Yes, here in the United States, this is considered very fast. Sad, isn't it?

What's your network infrastructure? Cisco? Juniper?

Sorry, just plain old gigabit Ethernet. I have three 24-port D-Link gigabit switches and a DSL modem provided by my ISP. That's it.

Why didn't you get the i5-2500k? It is ridiculously overclockable.

I'm scared of overclocking. The thought of messing with voltages or running stability tests gives me the shivers. I bow to you and your superior geek cred, oh mighty overclocker.

What do you do for cooling?

I have a 14000 BTU/hr portable air conditioner that is more than able to keep up with the load. I asked my contractor to install an exhaust vent in the wall of the server room leading outside (like you'd use for a clothes dryer), allowing the A/C to exhaust hot air.

My house does not actually have any central air conditioning. Only the server room is cooled. We only get a couple of uncomfortably-hot days a year around here.

Dragging over your own computers is part of the fun of LAN parties. Why build them in?

I know what you mean, having hosted and attended dozens of LAN parties in the past. I intentionally designed the stations such that guests could bring their own system and hook it up to my monitor and peripherals if they'd like. In practice, no one does this. The only time it ever happened is when two of the stations weren't yet wired up to their respective computers, and thus it made sense for a couple people to bust out their laptops. Ever since then, while people commonly bring laptops, they never take them out of their bags. It's just so much more convenient to use my machines.

This is even despite the fact that up until now, my machines have been running Linux, with a host of annoying bugs.

How did you make the cabinetry? Can you provide blueprints?

I designed the game stations in Google Sketchup and then asked a cabinet maker to build them. I just gave him a screenshot and rough dimensions. He built a mock first, and we iterated on it to try to get the measurements right.

I do not have any blueprints, but there's really not much to these beyond what you see in the images. They're just some wood panels with hinges. The desk is 28" high and 21" deep, and each station is 30" wide, but you may prefer different dimensions based on your preferences, the space you have available, and the dimensions of the monitor you intend to use.

The only tricky part is the track mounts for the monitors, which came from ErgoMart. The mount was called "EGT LT V-Slide MPI" on the invoice, and the track was called "EGT LT TRACK-39-104-STD". I'm not sure if I'd necessarily recommend the mount, as it is kind of difficult to reach the knob that you must turn in order to be able to loosen the monitor so that it can be raised or lowered. They are not convenient by any means, and my friends often make me move the monitors because they can't figure it out. But my contractor and I couldn't find anything else that did the job. ErgoMart has some deeper mounts that would probably be easier to manipulate, at the expense of making the cabinets deeper (taking more space), which I didn't want to do.

Note that the vertical separators between the game stations snap out in order to access wiring behind them.

Here is Christina demonstrating how the stations fold out!

What games do you play?

Off the top of my head, recent LAN parties have involved Starcraft 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, UT2k4, Altitude, Hoard, GTA2, Alien Swarm, Duke Nukem 3D (yes, the old one), Quake (yes, the original), and Soldat. We like to try new things, so I try to have a few new games available at each party.

What about League of Legends?

We haven't played that because it doesn't work under WINE (unless you manually compile it with a certain patch). I didn't mind this so much as I personally really don't like this game or most DotA-like games. Yes, I've given it a chance (at other people's LAN parties), but it didn't work for me. To each their own, and all that. But now that the machines are running Windows, I expect this game will start getting some play-time, as many of my friends are big fans.

Do you display anything on the monitors when they're not in use?

I'd like to, but haven't worked out how yet. The systems are only on during LAN parties, since I don't want to be burning the electricity or running the A/C 24/7. When a system is not in use during a LAN party, it will be displaying Electric Sheep, a beautiful screensaver. But outside of LAN parties, no.

UPDATE: When I say I "haven't worked out how yet," I mean "I haven't thought about it yet," not "I can't figure out a way to do it." It seems like everyone wants to tell me how to do this. Thanks for the suggestions, guys, but I can figure it out! :)

The style is way too sterile. It looks like a commercial environment. You should have used darker wood / more decoration.

I happen to very much like the style, especially the light-colored wood. To each their own.

How much did all this cost?

I'd rather not get into the cost of the house as a whole, because it's entirely a function of the location. Palo Alto is expensive, whether you are buying or building. I will say that my 1426-square-foot house is relatively small for the area and hence my house is not very expensive relative to the rest of Palo Alto (if it looks big, it's because it is well-designed). The house across the street recently sold for a lot more than I paid to build mine. Despite the "below average" cost, though, I was just barely able to afford it. (See the backstory.)

I will say that the LAN-party-specific modifications cost a total of about $40,000. This includes parts for 12 game machines and one server (including annoyingly-expensive rack-mount cases), 12 keyboards, 12 mice, 12 monitors, 12 35' HDMI cables, 12 32' USB cables, rack-mount hardware, network equipment, network cables, and the custom cabinetry housing the fold-out stations. The last bit was the biggest single chunk: the cabinetry cost about $18,000.

This could all be made a lot cheaper in a number of ways. The cabinetry could be made with lower-grade materials -- particle board instead of solid wood. Or maybe a simpler design could have used less material in the first place. Using generic tower cases on a generic shelf could have saved a good $4k over rack-mounting. I could have had 8 stations instead of 12 -- this would still be great for most games, especially Left 4 Dead. I could have had some of the stations be bring-your-own-computer while others had back-room machines, to reduce the number of machines I needed to buy. I could have used cheaper server hardware -- it really doesn't need to be a Xeon with ECC RAM.

Is that Gabe Newell sitting on the couch?

No, that's my friend Nick. But if Gabe Newell wants to come to a LAN party, he is totally invited!

UPDATE: More questions

Do the 35-foot HDMI and 32-foot USB cables add any latency to the setup?

I suppose, given that electricity propagates through typical wires at about 2/3 the speed of light, that my 67 feet of cabling (round trip) add about 100ns of latency. This is several orders of magnitude away from anything that any human could perceive.

A much larger potential source of latency (that wouldn't be present in a normal setup) is the two hubs between the peripherals and the computer -- the powered 4-port to which the peripherals connect, and the repeater in the extension cable that is effectively a 1-port hub. According to the USB spec (if I understand it correctly), these hubs cannot be adding more than a microsecond of latency, still many orders of magnitude less than what could be perceived by a human.

Both of these are dwarfed the video latency. The monitors have a 2ms response time (in other words, 2000x the latency of the USB hubs). 2ms is considered extremely fast response time for a monitor, though. In fact, it's so fast it doesn't even make sense -- at 60fps, the monitor is only displaying a new frame every 17ms anyway.

Do you use high-end gaming peripherals? SteelSeries? Razer?

Oh god no. Those things are placebos -- the performance differences they advertise are far too small for any human to perceive. I use the cheapest-ass keyboards I could find ($12 Logitech) and the Logitech MX518 mouse. Of course, guests are welcome to bring their own keyboard and mouse and just plug them into the hub.

Why not use thin clients and one beefy server / blades / hypervisor VMs / [insert your favorite datacenter-oriented technology]?

Err. We're trying to run games here. These are extremely resource-hungry pieces of software that require direct access to dedicated graphics hardware. They don't make VM solutions for this sort of scenario, and if they did, you wouldn't be able to find hardware powerful enough to run multiple instances of a modern game on one system. Each player really does need a dedicated, well-equipped machine.

I'll keep adding more questions here as they come up.

New Computer

I used my last computer from 2006 until last week. It was serviceable, given that it was a slapdash affair when I put it together - a barebones system with cannibalized parts from my previous computer, which suddenly stopped working (in retrospect, it was likely the power supply, the one thing I didn't check at the time). Anyway, the last computer got me through Bioshock, Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead 2, and more, surprisingly given that it was probably something like 2004's finest. But it wouldn't run Dragon Age: Origins, or Fallout: New Vegas, and in the straw that broke the camel's back when I was offered a review copy, Shogun 2: Total War. My hard drive was also filled to the brim, and my wireless flaky as hell. With my tax return showing a decent amount of numbers, it was time to treat myself.

I had a few things to consider, and they didn't all work together well. At all. First, I wanted something energy efficient, in order to soothe my bleeding heart, and hopefully not destroy my electricity bill either. I'd also have preferred to have parts not made from blood cadmium or whichever, but that's unfortunately far too difficult to research. On the other hand, I wanted power - enough to play new games for three years or so. Happily, the rate of technology has slowed down over the last decade, so this is actually pretty possible to do. More good news - newer technology in chips and in video cards indicates that they're actually better than previous models at lower power usage, even when they're more powerful overall, because they do a better job of lowering energy using when not being used at full force.

Of course, the bigger issue is money. I didn't get that big of a tax return. Unfortunately, since the newest of those more-efficient pieces of hardware had the best efficiency, I'd have to figure out how much money to spend on bleeding-edge stuff now, which is "not very much." I also wanted to avoid doing too much computer-building, since that can be a pain in the ass, but I left it as an option.

I'm happy that I did keep that option open, because I cut probably 20% of the cost out, and was able to research my parts directly. Here are my specs:

Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Motherboard: MSI MS-7642
Processor: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor (4 CPUs), ~3.2GHz
Memory: 4096MB RAM
Video Card: ATI Radeon HD 5670
Video Card Display Memory: 2295 MB
Video Card Dedicated Memory: 503 MB
Sound Card: Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS*
Total Space: 476.8 GB
Hard Drive Model: WDC WD5002AALX-00J37A0 ATA Device
CD-ROM Model: _NEC DVD_RW ND-3550A ATA Device*

*cannibalized from older computer

All this was roughly $600. (though I also picked up Windows 7 and some accessories). No new monitor, though, and my current one maxes out at 1240x1040, so I'm not getting the very best resolution. But everything seems to be running well, Shogun 2 is a blast (my AV Club review is coming soon). I hope that this allows me to get more directly into reviews and discussions of current-generation PC games - and lets me play the best mods for the ones which have been out for a while.

Blood, Sweat, And Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made

In this moment I'm reading the excellent book "Blood, sweat, and pixels: the triumphant, turbulent stories behind how video games are made". True stories about how the work in the gaming industry could be full of anxiety and despair.

Jason Schreier (the author) interviewed more than 100 professionals from this field and the result is a book with many different views about the creative process behind a game, the difficulties, the mistakes and victories.

Schreier (2017) in the introduction of the book discusses about why is so hard to make games. The author points out that: 1) games are interactive; 2) technology is constantly changing; 3) the tools are always different; 4) scheduling is impossible; 5) it's impossible to know how "fun" a game will be until you've played it. From this point to the end, in each chapter, one game is used as an example to explain the how this area (as the title of the book says) is full of "blood, sweat, and pixels".



Excellent reading.

Click here to buy.

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Reference:

SCHREIER, Jason. Blood, sweat, and pixels: the triumphant, turbulent stories behind how video games are made. New York: Harper, 2017.

Gaming Update

I am in a new parish since I last posted, I completed my first year in parish in Croydon, England, now I have been moved out onto the Kent coast. Offering Holy Mass is my joy and consolation in hac lacrimarum vale.

Since I last posted I have been plodding along with my 30mins a day.

 I finished Metal Gear Solid, I really loved it! I can see why it is rated as in the top 5 on the psx by most people, I would probably put it second only after my first love which was FF7. I had been starting to lose the idea that you could really love a game once you passed the age of 18, but I have been proved wrong. Of course, you can never really cult after a game once you have a proper life and an adult vocation, you can't go around defeating every monster or collecting every possible item in some RPG, that kind of thing is only for kids with way too much time on their hands.

After Metal Gear Solid I played through Beyond Oasis.

I nearly gave up at this point in the Volcano where you have to jump across platforms while there are nasty sorcerers firing at you, in fact I did give up, but I gave it a week's break or so, then I conquered it. I thought it was a decent game. Not quite Secret of Mana, bit of a crappy soundtrack, but a lot of fun.

After Beyond Oasis I started Shining Force 2, and and mid way through it, only to start Kingdom Hearts, which again I am about mid way through, I will go back to these games next I think. I got sidetracked by I am Setsuna which I found out about by accident. I am going to write about that game in another post.

Recomendación De Fire Emblem Fates

Fire Emblem Fates es la duodécima entrega de la serie convirtiéndose en la más vendida de la saga y batiendo récord de ventas tras el éxito que tuvo su antecesora (Fire Emblem Awakening). Estamos ante la entrega más ambiciosa de la franquicia ya que nos ofrece 3 juegos diferentes: Estirpe, Conquista y Revelación, que a pesar de contar con los mismos personajes, narran historias totalmente diferentes... Este título no estuvo exenta de polémica, ya que la versión occidental fue brutalmente censurada, en primer lugar quitando las relaciones homosexuales que sí estaban presentes en la nipona, también eliminaron la posibilidad de tener doblaje en japonés y omitieron un minijuego presente en la versión original... Esto fue un golpe muy fuerte para los fans que esperábamos por el juego, pero a pesar de esto estamos ante un juego sobresaliente y uno de los juegos imprescindibles para Nintendo 3DS. Me gustaría destacar la edición coleccionista que pudimos comprar unos pocos afortunados entre los que me incluyo, ya que dicha edición trae los 3 juegos en un solo cartucho, un libro de ilustraciones de impresionante calidad, una caja metálica y un hermoso póster por solamente 80€... Para que entendáis como de buena es esta compra, los 3 juegos comprados por separado te valen 120€ y la edición coleccionista vale 40€ menos... Una verdadera ganga a la que era imposible resistirse.

Pero ahora comenzaremos a analizar este grandioso título a fondo, pero como dije antes, intentando evitar los spoilers. Sin nada más que añadir comenzamos con el asunto.

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ARGUMENTO.

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El argumento del juego no es tan potente como otras entregas de Fire Emblem, como es el caso del infravalorado Radiant Dawn, pero destaca por su gran capacidad de inmersión debido a todo lo que rodea a nuestro avatar (Corrin). El juego nos expone 2 reinos enfrentados en una cruenta guerra, Nohr y Hoshido, encarnando a un príncipe Nohrio. A los pocos capítulos descubriremos una oscura trama que rodea al reino del que procedemos, debido a sus estrategias tan poco honorables al mismo tiempo que nos contarán nuestra verdadera historia. Nacimos en Hoshido, pero fuimos secuestrados y criados en el país enemigo y eso nos obligará a tomar una amarga decisión... ¿Defenderemos a nuestra familia de sangre (Fire Emblem Estirpe) o pelearemos junto a los hermanos con los que hemos vivido desde que tenemos memoria (Fire Emblem Conquista)?

Ambos juegos tienen exactamente el mismo prólogo de 6 capítulos, donde conoceremos a todos nuestros hermanos y tras los cuales tendremos que elegir el camino que recorreremos. Como dije hace nada, la historia no es tan potente como entregas anteriores a nivel narrativo, pero estamos ante el juego más emotivo e inmersivo de toda la saga y esto es debido a la decisión que te obliga a tomar, ya que todos los sucesos del juego son a causa de dicha elección por lo que se vuelve una historia mucho más personal; tristeza, impotencia, enfado, decepción... Son algunas de las cosas que sentirás mientras disfrutas de este videojuego.

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HISTORIA DE ESTIRPE.

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En este juego, tras ver las atrocidades y las estrategias tan poco éticas de Garon, decides proteger a tu familia de sangre y el reino de Hoshido, abandonando a esos hermanos que a pesar de no tener lazos sanguíneos te aman como si existieran realmente... El rey nohrio no perdonará tu traición y mandará a tus seres queridos contra ti, a pesar de que ellos no quieran eso e intenten una y otra vez que vuelvas a su lado. Esta entrega muestra como a veces, por tus ideales tendrás que enfrentarte a las personas que amas.

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HISTORIA DE CONQUISTA.

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En este título te pones de lado de la familia con la que has crecido y a la que amas realmente a pesar de las estrategias tan deplorables que usa tu "padre", por lo que tus hermanos de sangre te ven como un miserable traidor, aunque alguno de ellos te siga queriendo e intente que cambies de bando. El rey nohrio no va a cambiar sus métodos, por lo que estarás obligado a seguir sus órdenes, por muy crueles y poco éticas que sean... En esta entrega eliges en base a tus sentimientos, siendo la senda más espinosa moralmente ya que choca totalmente con los ideales de nuestro protagonista.

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HISTORIA DE REVELACIÓN.

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En este juego tomas una decisión realmente radical, ya que eres incapaz de elegir entre la familia con la que te criaste a causa de los métodos del rey nohrio, pero a la vez eres incapaz de traicionarla de forma directa pasando al otro bando, por lo que decides no defender ningún bando y actuar de forma independiente... Obviamente esta decisión no es bien recibida por ninguna de las familias, por lo que a pesar de que la guerra continúa, ambos reinos te tratarán como un traidor e intentarán darte caza. Este juego cuenta muchos detalles que quedan en el aire en las otras 2 entregas, por lo que recomiendo encarecidamente jugar a las 2 dichas anteriormente.

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APARTADO GRÁFICO.

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El apartado gráfico en cuanto a resolución y nitidez ingame es bastante modesto, llegando a crear caras que se diferencian bastante de las imágenes que aparecen en el juego, pero a pesar de eso tenemos un juego muy vistoso en cuanto al moveset de los personajes, teniendo el mejor de la saga y mostrando unas cinemáticas realmente impresionantes (aunque por desgracia bastante cortas) para una consola portátil, a continuación dejaré la introducción del juego para que la disfrutéis.

Y ahora dejaré una de las cinemáticas más hermosas de todo el juego, para que veáis que a veces se puede hacer arte con un vídeo de animación.

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BANDA SONORA.

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La banda sonora del juego es realmente notable y compagina realmente bien con lo que se muestra, teniendo una variedad de canciones bastante decente para cada situación, canciones épicas para los combates, tristes para las escenas dramáticas... Seguramente no tenga tanta variedad ni personalidad como entregas anteriores, pero eso no disminuye la calidad que tiene este título en el apartado sonoro, usando este increíble OST para demostrarlo.

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JUGABILIDAD.

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Estamos ante un juego de rol táctico, por lo que el propio género al que pertenece no permite una evolución jugable tan notable como los juegos de acción o de plataformas, pero a pesar de eso estamos ante el título de la saga más potente con diferencia en este aspecto. Para empezar coge la fórmula base tan buena de su antecesor (Fire Emblem Awakening) como son los ataques coordinados o la protección entre nuestras unidades, pero a diferencia de la anterior entrega donde ambas acciones eran cosa del azar y porcentajes aquí podemos crear una estrategia sólida ya que si pones 2 unidades en casillas adyacentes crearás una combinación ofensiva donde siempre harán ataque coordinado pero si en cambio las agrupas será una pareja defensiva que al llenar una barra protegerá de cualquier daño a nuestra unidad, pero hay que tener en cuenta que en este título no somos los únicos que pueden hacer esto, ya que los enemigos también pueden hacerlo. La combinación defensiva (agrupar unidades) nos protege de todos los ataques coordinados por lo que deberemos crear una estrategia más o menos ofensiva dependiendo de la situación, cosa que realmente es brillante y te ofrece una libertad de estrategia muy superior que anteriores entregas. Para continuar esto, Fire Emblem Fates coge el triángulo de armas clásico (espadas vencen hachas, hachas vencen lanzas y lanzas vencen a espadas) y lo amplían también a las armas a distancia, creando un triángulo de armas mucho más completo, implementando en primer lugar los shurikens y dándoles un valor equivalente a las armas cuerpo a cuerpo (grimorio = espada, arco = hacha y shuriken = lanza), simplemente con hacer esto, aumenta de forma exponencial el valor estratégico del título creando una auténtica maravilla dentro del género. Otra de las grandes innovaciones del título es la implementación de las venas de dragón, que son unos puntos estratégicos situados en ciertos mapas que aportan un valor estratégico extra, como es la de crear puentes de tierra para sortear precipicios, congelar un lago para andar sobre el agua y demás, siendo sólo personajes de la realeza, tanto Hoshidiana como Nohria los únicos que pueden activarla. A continuación dejaré un gameplay de una partida avanzada, para que podáis contemplar todo lo que ofrece el juego.

A continuación os explicaré levemente todas las clases existentes en este título.

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CLASES DE HOSHIDO.

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Las clases de este reino son nuevas en su mayor parte, ya que están basadas en la época medieval japonesa, cosa realmente ambiciosa de este título, ya que la única clase que aparece en entregas anteriores son los caballeros pegaso y las aurigas. Están enfocadas en la infantería, ya que muy pocas clases van a montura y contamos con personajes muy ágiles, por lo que tienen un buen ataque, velocidad y evasión pero en contraparte tienen una defensa realmente baja. En Hoshido también usan armas japonesas, como son las katanas (espadas), nagitanas (lanzas), porras (hachas), shuriquens (dagas), yumis (arcos) y tomos (grimorios) como armas ofensivas y varas/fastos como objetos curativos. Los últimos mencionados tienen una diferencia enorme con respecto a los bastones tradicionales, que es la distancia de uso, mientras que los bastones necesitan estar en casillas adyacentes (la mayoría) las varas tienen un mayor alcance a costa de poder curativo.

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CLASES DE NOHR.

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El reino de Nohr en cambio es el más tradicional, ya que la mayor parte de sus unidades han aparecido en entregas anteriores, basadas en la Edad Media Europea. El ejército de este reino está más enfocado a la caballería, por lo que contaremos con personajes con un alcance de movimiento muy elevado, pero la mayor diferencia con Hoshido es que las unidades de este reino son más toscas, por lo que tienen un ataque y defensa elevados pero una evasión y velocidad inferiores. Las armas que usan son las que hemos visto en sus predecesores, espadas, hachas, lanzas, dagas, grimorios y bastones.

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OPINIÓN PERSONAL.

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Como en todos mis blogs me gustaría terminar con mi propia reflexión del juego del que hablo. El Fire Emblem Fates es mi juego favorito de toda la franquicia, a pesar de no tener la mejor historia ni la banda sonora más potente... Pero su forma de meterte en el argumento, lo personal y emotivo que es, su jugabilidad tan pulida dentro del género, sus nuevas incorporaciones como todas las clases creadas para este título, las nuevas armas, el triángulo de armas más perfeccionado y unos combates tan satisfactorios han logrado ganarse un hueco en mi corazón. Como recomendación diría que cualquier amante de los juegos RPG táctico se lo tiene que pillar SI o SI, si buscas un juego de acción, frenético, con una jugabilidad arcade ni te plantees comprar este juego y si en cambio no estás seguro de que te guste ya que nunca has jugado a un RPG táctico, te aconsejo fervientemente que descargues el juego Fire Emblem Heroes disponible en la Store de Android, ya que es un Free to play muy simple que respeta las bases de la saga, por lo que es el juego perfecto para iniciarse y averiguar si te atrae el propio género. Pero si en realidad sabes que quieres el juego, si o si, pero no puedes permitirte todos, te aconsejo mirar en youtube vídeos de los 6 primeros capítulos, ya que explican el prólogo y así puedes decidir a priori el camino que quieres recorrer, obviamente te aconsejaría conseguir los 3 juegos para aclarar todas las dudas posibles y matizar que el de Revelación sólo está disponible en formato digital (como si fuera un DLC por así decirlo), pero aconsejo a todo el mundo comprar un juego en físico y los demás en digital ya que Nintendo te deja los 2 juegos digitales por 20€ cada uno, logrando ahorrar 40€ si te compras los 3 juegos.