Keith's Blog

If you’ve been reading this blog, you might have noticed by now that I have a penchant for answering questions that nobody asked. This is an essential part of my blogging experience, because if a question were worth answering, I just sort of assume somebody has already answered it better than I could and then what’s the damned point.

I’ve got a friend who took an extended leave from the gaming world. He’s a busy fellow, and his time is valuable. So what should, and can, that person play?  Well, I’d recommend games that were vitally significant experiences, novel in some way, and with limited time commitments. Games that are important to this culture in one way or another, and make it clear what kind of play time we’re looking at for each of these titles.

I’m also biasing games that I’m fairly sure he missed out on. I will point out if a game is available only on Windows, or if it is platform independent, because I know that’s also a key feature. The game time estimates are based on my own Steam metrics if I have them, or else based on community submissions to Howlongtobeat.com, a handy website that I only learned about thanks to writing this post.

I’m working with the years 2005-2015 as my time frame. And what a decade it was. These entries are ordered not chronologically, but by my personal sense of their priority.

 

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Bastion

Supergiant Games, 2011
Platform Independent
6 hours

This isometric action RPG features the best narration in gaming history and I’m not even exaggerating. It’s on this list for its excellent art design, it’s blending of mechanics with narrative, and setting a high bar for voice acting. If I were forced to point to a single title in which to make the case of video games as an art form, it would be this one.

But best of all, the game doesn’t sacrifice gameplay quality or enjoyment for storytelling, as many narrative-heavy games tend to do. It has a great deal of replayability, but you’ll probably be all set after going through it once.

It’s relatively short, it plays great on Linux, and it’s a masterpiece. If you only play one game on this list, make it this one.

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Transistor (Optional)

Supergiant Games, 2014
Platform Independent
5-6 hours

Supergiant Games is all about quality over quantity. To date they have released two games. This is the second. It’s still an isometric action RPG, still has amazing narration, and sports another absolutely amazing soundtrack. They switch it up with a Cyberpunk theme and make the storytelling a little bit more nuanced. If you enjoyed Bastion you should play this.

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Portal

Valve Software, 2007
Platform Independent
3-4 hours

This tech demo was included in the Orange Box deal (apparently as an afterthought) and became an instant classic. It’s an excellent puzzle game that forces first-person-shooter fans to think about navigating the world in a novel way. And the execution of its mechanics is perfect. You’ll find yourself “thinking in portals” in no time, able to solve puzzles by exploiting the simple rules that are set out from the beginning. It also sports a captivating story that seems to suddenly come out of nowhere.

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Portal 2 (Optional)

Valve Software, 2011
Platform Independent
7-8 hours

Longer than the original, but with better production values overall. If you enjoyed Portal and want more, give this a try. Not nearly as critically acclaimed as the original, it adds several interesting mechanics while keeping the pitch black dark humor largely intact. Also Stephen Merchant is great. I’m calling it optional because of the added time investment for much of the same game.

This game also includes a very novel 2-player cooperative mode that is completely distinct from the single-player game.

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Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Eidos Montreal, 2011
Windows-only
20-30 hours

This prequel comes close to replicating the excellent level design and storytelling of the original. I wouldn’t say they nailed it, but it is still very much worth experiencing. The developers made sure not to repeat the mistakes of Invisible War and hired a third party contractor to handle the PC version, and it was a great decision. The Director’s Cut fixes heavily criticized boss fights, but it’s still not possible to skip killing some characters.

In this entire list, I believe this is the second longest single entry. It’s what you would want in a Deus Ex entry: large amounts of content and a deep branching storyline. But I would only recommend attempting to tackle this you know you have the time; it’s not the kind of game you can just walk away from or leave unfinished.

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Minecraft

Mojang, 2011
Platform Independent
?? hours

The indie gaming darling that exploded in popularity while it was still in beta, and after launch somehow became the game that every 8-year-old plays. I’m not sure how that happened. Don’t let the demographics of the fan base distract you; this is a game that deserves the credit it received.

The problem here is the time sink. With no narrative, no hard objectives, and creative freedom, you can spend limitless amounts of time in this game. But we don’t have limitless time nowadays, do we? At the very least, play this for a few hours to see what everybody is on about, and maybe watch the video where a guy made a functional CPU in-game.

Personal aside: this game’s enjoyability scales well in multiplayer, so let me know if you want to team up.

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Braid

Number None, Inc, 2008
Platform Independent
5-6 hours

This list isn’t big on platformers, but this one made quite a splash.  It was one of the first indie game hits on X-Box Live and was one of the talked-about games in Indie Game: The Movie.

By the way, go watch Indie Game: The Movie. It’s free. I’ve watched it three times now.

This puzzle platformer comes with a very short time commitment, but it an artistic and design marvel that shows what a small team (two, as far as I can tell) can put together. Since Minecraft and Braid, the indie game scene positively exploded. This is a great starting point. Honestly I could have also put the other stars from the aforementioned documentary in this list: Super Meat Boy and Fez. Those are great games to explore if this one resonated with you (more the latter than the former).

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Bioshock

2K Boston, 2007
Windows-only
12-15 hours

System Shock 2’s spiritual successor. It features great voice acting and storytelling, but I almost didn’t include it on the list due to how much of a slog it becomes towards the end. The combat isn’t great, and eventually starts to feel like a chore. But it’s a chore you push through because of how invested you become in the world. You can safely skip the sequels.  Bioshock Infinite got a ton of press, and is worth investigating if you really want more of this style of game.

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Spec-Ops: The Line

Yager Development, 2012
Platform Independent
6 hours

It occured to me that I didn’t include much in the pure FPS genre (DX and Bioshock are technically RPGs). So I might as well include the one that pokes fun at typical military shooters and hits the player with a severe mindf**k.

This game is basically Heart of Darkness set in modern Dubai, and presents itself as a cookie-cutter shooter. But over time, through clever imagery and illusions of choice, it becomes clear that the game is presenting a critique not just of the genre itself, but of the players. It caused a stir and remains controversial for a number of reasons that I can’t quite explain without spoilers. For how short and accessible it is, I think it’s worth trying.

Extra Credits said it better than I did, but listen to their advice and watch part 1 of their review, play the game, then watch part 2 to get what the big deal was all about.  “Holy hell I did not see this game coming,” echoes my impressions.

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Dark Souls

From Software, 2011
Windows-only
40-50 hours

This was a very hard game for me to recommend. Not for any glaring reasons; it hits so many of the right notes. It has a fair and engaging combat system, sports a perfectly executed artistic style, and has hands-down the best map design I’ve ever seen. It’s highly revered as one of the best action RPGs ever made.

But it’s long. There’s a huge amount of content here, and more importantly the game will keep you bogged down by its brutal and unforgiving difficulty. You will face challenges, and fail over and over again. You’ll inevitably overcome them, and it will feel deeply gratifying, but in doing so you’ll probably lose a great deal of time.

The problem I faced here is that the game is so well done, so highly regarded, and so influential that I couldn’t not put it on a list of essential or important releases over the last decade. But it’s near the bottom of the list for a reason: the time commitment it asks of you, the player.

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Mechwarrior: Online

Piranha Games, Inc,
Windows-only
?? hours

Okay fine I’m only putting this one on the list because we both bonded over Mechwarrior when we were little kids, okay?!  It’s actually not particularly noteworthy in the grand scheme of things. And it has a significant grind. But I want more people to play it with.

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So one thing I just noticed is how many of these games were published in 2011 or 2007. Big years, I guess?

I did cross reference my list with a few Game of the Year lists, and found a surprisingly small amount of overlap. This was most likely a side effect of my self-imposed constraints coupled with my urge to focus on novelty and cultural impact over pure execution. Or, simply put, I don’t care how good Call of Duty 4 was, give me something different. As such, I’m asking you to trust my instincts as they do seem to conflict more than a little bit with industry insiders.

Of course, I can’t pretend to be the be-all-end-all when it comes to opinions about games.  My own experiences and tastes weigh heavily on the above choices.  Ultimately, with so damn much art out there to choose from, we must each form our own opinions on what constitutes novelty and impact.  And, at times, help each other along in the process.

It’s been almost a year since the wife and I embarked on the quest to marathon-watch all of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  We’re rounding the bend now, so I thought I’d do the proper thing and vent my thoughts on the Internet like so much opinionated exhaust gas.

This show began in 1987, and ran for seven seasons with 26 episodes each.  We started at the very beginning, and endeavored to watch every episode through to its end.  So without further ado, let us catalog our findings as we boldly went where very many nerds have gone before!

Season 1

Holy shit.  This is bad.

This is really bad.

Our overall verdict after finishing this season on a marathon run was “this show was lucky get renewed.”  We found ourselves wondering what it was up against at the time, since syndicated TV of the 80s didn’t really have the production values we enjoy nowadays.  Well, according to Wikipedia, here are the top 10 rated shows from 1987.

1.  The Cosby Show
2. A Different World
3. Cheers
4. The Golden Girls
5. Growing Pains
6. Who’s the Boss?
7. Night Court
8. 60 Minutes
9. Murder, She Wrote
10. The Wonder Years

OK, that provides some context.

Note that TNG isn’t on that list.  Because it was syndicated, it doesn’t appear in the network television ratings ranks.  But (again according to Wikipedia), “The new show indeed performed well; the pilot’s ratings were higher than those of many network programs, and ratings remained comparable to network shows by the end of the first season despite the handicap of each station airing the show on a different day and time, often outside prime time.”

So, it was a popular and well-received season, and even won a few Emmy awards.  I don’t think people of the time were wrong to appreciate it thusly, but it does show you how much the world of science fiction television has changed since the halcyon days of The Next Generation’s premier.

This season, TNG won awards for Outstanding Sound Editing for the episode “11001001”, Outstanding Costume Design for “The Big Goodbye,” and Outstanding Achievement in Makeup for “Conspiracy.”  I wasn’t even aware that some of those were awards, but there you go.  What made them special?

“11001001” featured a race of partially cybernetic being who communicate mostly in auditory binary, which doesn’t make a ton of sense, but is fascinating in a life-but-not-as-we-know-it kind of way.  Even though it features another Riker the Horndog arc, his role is tastefully handled.  It might very well by favorite episode from this season.  But for the life of me I have no idea why it won an Emmy for Outstanding Sound Editing.

 

“The Big Goodbye” did have decent costumes; the cast was all done up in film noire style garb because it was a holodeck episode.  I never like holodeck episodes but the fact that it picked up an Emmy maybe explains why they utilize them: there’s clearly an appeal to the idea of breaking up the monotony by picking literally any setting and just running with it.  I tend to write off holodeck episodes because they tend to be non sequiturs or just nonsense, though.

 

“Conspiracy” is the penultimate episode of the season, and honestly I enjoyed it!  Apparently this episode’s airing caused a bit of a stir because the of surprisingly graphic violence of a single climactic scene that lasts about 10 seconds.  I don’t disapprove of violence in media, but I totally get the shock that came with this.  It comes out of nowhere and is about 10 shades darker than any other content in the rest of the season.  Maybe even the series as a whole.  I’m not sure why they did this.  Perhaps to make waves.  And to win Outstanding Achievement in Makeup.  Which it did.

But exploding torsos aside, this episode had tension, an acceptable amount of treknobabble, and characters overcoming the odds through teamwork and guile.  It’s far from the worst way to end the season.  That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement, but you take what you can get here.

So, those are the high points.  Unfortunately not every entry into this season was so shiny.  We see the emergence of a pattern in these early episodes: an attempt at an interesting idea lost in poor execution.  “Code of Honor,” for example, almost touches on themes of cultural relativism but quickly gets bogged down by a script that is covertly sexist and overtly racist.

We are introduced to the Ferengi as a primary adversary, and it’s painful to watch.  A greedy materialistic and profit-driven race is an obvious attempt at making an uncanny caricature modern human society.  But in this 24th Century post-scarcity society, it doesn’t make sense.   What makes even less sense is the fact that every interaction with them involves the Ferengi perpetrating multiple acts of war against the Federation and Starfleet.  And we can only assume they’ve behaved as badly in their encounters with every other race in the quadrant.  There isn’t a clear reason why they haven’t been phasered back into the stone age at this point.  Their replacement by the far-more-interesting Borg, introduced much later in the series, was entirely welcome.

What really nags me is how Denise Crosby’s character, Tasha Yar, is killed in action (apparently because the actress she wanted out).  Mind you, I’m not upset that her character died.  I’m upset with how it was handled.  At the end of the episode the cast finds a recording from Tasha.  One with a message to each and every named cast member, which apparently she recorded just in case this exact thing were to happen.  Thus providing closure and solace in the face of such a loss.  “Hey guys, it sucks that I’m dead now, but everything’s going to be okay because you’re all great folks.”

 

No.  No no no.  You were so close and then you ruined it.  They shouldn’t get off that easy.  That’s not how life works.  If you want to give this moment weight, they don’t get closure.  They don’t get to wrap it all up in a feel-good blanket at the end.  One of their fellow crew members died for no fucking reason.  She’s gone, and they’re never going to see her again.  It’s senseless, it’s tragic, and it just as easily could have happened to any one of them on any number of these dangerous missions.  We could have gotten to watch each character come to terms with this over the remainder of the season, grappling with the loss in their own way, or maybe watch them never get over it.  But, no, this is what we got instead.  It might seem like a minor issue to harp on, but I see the problem as a symptom of trying way too hard to fit into a procedural formula despite having to deal with the permanence of cast attrition.

Rant over.

Okay, so this season, things were a little rough.  Upon review, it feels like done I’ve far more complaining than praising.  But as I said earlier, this series debuted with an overall positive reception and good ratings.  So is this all unfair?  Is it legitimate to criticism television, science fiction especially, outside of the context of its time?  Are people ten years from now going to look  back on Babylon 5 and say “I can’t believe people thought this was good TV?”  I’m not sure.  I want to believe that great art has staying power.  And I know for certain that if this show were to air today, it would need to put forth an astounding turnaround in its second season.

And as Stephanie and I have learned…it did not.

TO BE CONTINUED.

One of my goal for this year was to write more.   Of course, this means I need something to write about.  Since the games I’m playing tend to change from month to month, I thought this might serve as a good source of brain droppings with which I can litter the internet.  The rules are simple: this is just a list of the stuff I’ve played, new or old, this month.  Video and board games both count.  It doesn’t necessarily mean these games are great, it just means they’ve occupied my time for whatever reason.  Usually the two are correlated.

So, what have I been playing so far in 2016?

 

Defense of the Ancients 2

It’s been so long since I typed out the whole name of that game that it didn’t feel natural.  In fact, the Steam listing doesn’t even say it.  It just says “Dota 2.”  It’s like the acronym turned into it’s own word shortly after turning into its own genre.

This game oscillates between being a source of either joy or blinding frustration, as it remains one of the least fun games to lose in the history of multiplayer gaming.  But as a rule, I never play it alone, ever.  Friends that rage together, stay together.

I often judge games by the simple boolean metric of “would I recommend this game to a friend?”  No.  In this case I would absolutely not.  But it’s the most-played game in my Steam library by leaps and bounds.  I’m not sure what to make of that.

 

Castles of Burgundy

I didn’t expect to like this game as much as I do.  The boards seem daunting and there’s a lot of dice rolling.  But it is engaging, easy to learn, and not nearly as random as it looks.  It’s a 2-4 player game that actually plays well (and differently) at all player counts.  The fact that it scales well to 2 players is really nice.  Also, every game I’ve played has ended with fairly close scores.

The setting is boring as all hell.  It’s yet another castle-building game in the middle ages.  Also on the down side is the fact that the game does still involve a fair amount of luck, despite several mechanics that exist specifically to mitigate bad rolls.  A 4-person game can easily last 3+ hours.  But again, since the games seem to always come out close, it’s not so bad when the games run long.  I’d recommend it to fans of tile-placement board games.

 

Mechwarrior: Online

This game is getting good.  It took a long road to get here, with an open beta that went way too long, a store that opened way too soon, and a soft launch with way too many features unimplemented and an unforgiving new user experience.  But the UI is slowly getting better, balance is improving, the community is supportive and helpful, and in the end it is still the best iteration of Mechwarrior multiplayer to date.  I’m not regretting my time with this game one bit.

My main problem is that I’m flying solo.  This game works really well with a team, but I don’t have the time to join an organized unit or go hunting for community groups (of which there are plenty), and it’s hard to recommend this game to friends because of the steep learning curve.  So I stomp on alone.  Ping me if you are interested in playing this game and want a mentor.  At the very least, hey, it’s free!  You’ve got nothing to lose!

 

Fallout 4

Obvious entry is obvious.  I will say this, I am having fun.  The game feels more like Borderlands in the Fallout universe than a proper Fallout entry.  The dialogue system is bad.  The factions are dumb.  The graphics are lackluster.  The story is making increasingly less sense as it goes on.  There’s way too much mindless combat.  The UI is bad.  There’s no way I’d call this a great game, or game of the year, or any of that.

But I am having fun.  And I can’t stop playing.  True to Bethesda’s roots, the amount of content presented to the player is staggering.  The writing and voice acting are actually spot on, to the point where I don’t mind having a voiced character this time around.  The combat feels great, even if there is too much of it.  There are interesting characters and I find myself wanting to know more about them and their world.

Despite its many flaws, I’m having fun, and in the end perhaps that’s all that matters.

 

Splendor

The visceral satisfaction of this game, coupled with its short play time, make it a frequent choice in our board game shelf.

One downside is that I’m starting to see how much of a role chance plays in this game, and how that results in a fairly low skill ceiling.  This is great for new players, but when you’ve been playing for a year and those new players blow you away, you start to wonder.

I sometimes ponder about the competitive scenes of these board games.  That is, whether or not they exist and what their play looks like.  Usually when I’m getting schooled at a video game I watch some replays or Let’s Play footage and get some pointers, but I haven’t really found a good source of board game tips and tricks.

 

Space Engineers

When describing this game, I’ve often called it “Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program’s lovechild.”  That’s not really accurate, but it’s close enough.  You are collecting stuff to make things, but you’re in going to space and the laws of physics matter.  While playing this game, I have calculated thrust-to-weight ratios and fuel efficiency metrics for fun.  I taught myself how to pilot a single-engine gyrocopter because I could.

Unfortunately, this game is still in Early Access as an alpha product.  And boy does it show.  Shit has a tendency to just explode for no reason.  The netcode has issues: if Dan and I touch each other, one of us dies instantly.  And it’s the only early access survival crafting game that isn’t available cross-platform.  Even the dedicated server is Windows-only, which would cripple the multiplayer scene if the broken netcode didn’t already do that.

If this game were stable, and had a Linux dedicated server, I’d recommend it to every single gamer I know.  And the non-gamers, too.  It’s that good.  Even without a Linux client (which I do not expect to see happen).

This next year will make or break this game, and one can only hope the developers will move it out of alpha and focus on performance and stability.

 

FTL: Faster than Light

Do you own a computer?  Do you have a few bucks hanging around in your pocket?  If so, you can and should play this game.  Cross platform, easy to walk away from, addictive and infinitely replayable.  And that awesome damned soundtrack.  This is on the list because I still pop it open every now and then and play a Random round.

 

BattleTech

Why yes, I did spend some time playing a tabletop game from the 80s that still has a devoted following.  This game is in a weird place for me.  I own an intro box set but I’ve never played with it.  It’s complex enough that I don’t feel comfortable running my own game, and the community is so small that I have trouble finding anybody interested in playing it.  Were it not for a monthly meetup in Boston I probably wouldn’t.  But thankfully, that does exist, and it is awesome.

I do wish they would update their miniatures and republish their ‘mech spec sheets to be a little more interesting.  This game needs a face lift.  I haven’t tried the Alpha Strike rules yet; maybe they shake things up a bit.  All I know is that between this and MW:O, I find myself wondering just how much ‘mech action I can get before I burn out on this franchise.  Hasn’t happened yet.  Not even close.

 

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I think that’s about it.  Was this interesting?  Should I do more?  Because I’m probably going to.

What the hell, WordPress?! Look at this shit. LOOK AT IT. THIS IS RIDICULOUS. I’m afraid to upload pictures to you now.

 

Okay now that that’s out of my system I can explain why all my previous posts are currently filled with broken image links.

 

I decided on a whim I wanted to try to install a dedicated server to play Ark with my friends, on the personal web server that also happens to host this blog. So I tried, and found I had been running with a very outdated version of the Gnu C library. Okay, let’s just run a package update. Wait, my kernel is how old? Upon further inspection it looks like the “long term stable” version of Debian Linux I was running had gone out of date a while ago and wasn’t really taking updates. Oops.

 

So, no problem, I’ll just upgrade in-place to the latest Debian. What do you mean, I have unmet dependencies. For the update. I find out later that I was trying to skip a generation of releases (that’s how out of date I was) and just trying to automagically update wouldn’t work. And attempting to force it had…consequences. In that I now had wildly conflicting packages running around. Web server is down, PostreSQL database is unrecoverable (there goes the calendar), MySQL database (my blog) is reachable but not through the web interface.

 

Okay. Abandon ship.

 

I still have the external hard drive. I managed to dig up the commands I needed to export and backup the MySQL table for the blog contents. Copy those over. Don’t need the media, I have the originals already. Copy major config files for the web server. Copy anything I left in the home directory. Let the rest burn. Download the latest Debian install, shove it on a USB drive and start fresh and new. Reinstall apache, MySQL, and wordpress. Restore the database.

 

Okay. As you can tell by the fact that you’re reading this, it mostly worked. But if you navigate to any of my previous posts you’ll see that I was clearly wrong when I thought I didn’t need to back up the media. Not that it would have helped. You see, when you upload pictures to a wordpress site, it silently goes and resizes them, and then renames them to include the resolution of the resized picture. So the original file names are not good enough. Ouch. And, between versions, they seem to have changed the resolutions they use, so re-uploading the originals won’t work either. Ouch.

 

I think I can fix this, but it’ll take a lot of Perl. Yay. Problems spawning problems.

 

Why am I writing all of this? I mean I doubt anybody is going to discover my silly blog, try to re-read my posts from years ago, see all the broken links, and throw up their hands in disgust if I don’t provide a reasonable explanation. No, there’s a greater lesson here. This is part of the risk I assume when I go with the roll-your-own approach. I could have just created an account on wordpress’ main site and let them host it. But then it isn’t mine. This way, I get to own it.

 

But it also means I have to deal with this bullshit. You think I had spare time to spend hours trying to repair a borked operating system to get my 2-readers-a-year blog back online? And during the downtime my personal calendar didn’t work either, because I decided to run that myself too. I think I missed a doctor’s appointment or something. I shudder to consider what it would have been like if I had decided to run my own email on the server as well.

 

It’s all well and good to think about taking back our data from centralized third parties. But nothing is free, and nothing is easy. It becomes a very harrowing cost-benefit analysis of privacy versus convenience, and I’m starting to wonder if the grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence.

Home ownership is a process in which you pay, handsomely and repeatedly, for the failures of others.

This may sound like a pessimistic conclusion to draw, but it does cut to the heart of the human experience, doesn’t it? So many of our attempts to make the world a better place revolve around correcting the choices of those that came before us. Choices that, with a few decades of hindsight, seem ludicrous. Like not putting any insulating material behind the walls of a house. Or building a house at the bottom of a slope but not accounting for drainage. Or building a house with an attic and forgetting to put in any sort of access to get in to said attic.

Note to self: check my attic for treasure. Clearly they were hiding something.

Well, the choices of yesterday become the problems of today. And we’ll tackle them one by one. I might even blog about them. But today, I’m going to focus on one very minor change we decided to make to our little domicile.

With three cats, it becomes important to secret away litter boxes to an undetectable corner of the house. The goal being to prevent guests from recognizing that we are playing host a trio of odor-generating food processors. Once we moved into a house with a basement, the proper location for the Poop Zone became clear. But this means that we have to keep the basement door slightly ajar, because the cats cannot turn door knobs (yet) and probably wouldn’t be bothered to shut the doors behind themselves.

This isn’t a great long term solution for the sake of both safety and aesthetics. The accepted solution to this problem is to embed a door within the door, for use by small furry animals exclusively. For a seasoned homeowner and handy man, this is a trivial task. As I am neither of those things, it was kind of an ordeal.

This commercial cat door comes in two pieces. The front piece is a small frame and contains the actual flap. The back is just an empty frame, meant to simply cover the whole you cut in the door.

First, we start by drawing a frame around the area of the door which will become void, by tracing out the inner frame of the pet door. Drill large holes in the corners to accommodate a jigsaw blade. Then jigsaw out the hole. This would be straightforward if not for a few complications.

1. Interior doors are mostly hollow, but have struts of solid wood running through them intermittently. I opted to leave the bottom inch of the door intact. This proved to be the correct choice: it was solid wood down there.

2. The width of the door is just about equal to the throw of my jigsaw blade. It’s close enough to cause a real mess if you aren’t careful.

3. My jigsaw is corded, and the proximity to the floor meant I couldn’t cut vertically upwards from the lower holes, because the power cord was too intrusive. If I were legit I would have taken the door off of the hinge and mounted it on horses to work flat. Hindsight.

4. The veneer (this layer on the surface that makes a door look like real wood) splinters like a motherfucker when jigsawed, especially the opposite side from the jigsaw (maybe because of #2).

Despite all of these problems, I managed to slice out a rectangular chunk of the door for the front side of the cat door, which fit perfectly and covered up the minor chipping I had. The back was a mess, but meh, it’s dark on that side.

Not too shabby. Now to put the rear side in and…it doesn’t fit. Remember that second side I mentioned? Well, the inner flange is significantly larger than the opening for the front side. So that perfectly fitting hole I cut out is actually too small. Why? Why why why why why. Why. This means I have to widen the hole on both dimensions to fit in the piece that otherwise has no functional value. And that means the hole for the front side is now going to be slightly large.

Now I have to saw out the back-side hole to make it larger. Which thanks to #4 meant that my pretty front facing hole was soon turned into a splintered mess, and the hole wound up being over-sized to the point where one of the screws didn’t have anything to screw into.

What began as a minor home improvement project soon turned into a life lesson on accepting imperfection. For a denizen of the digital world, this is a tough pill to swallow. My craft is based in the imaginary world of ones and zeros. If I don’t like something, I have the opportunity to change it. Over and over again. At no cost. Nothing has any meaning until I decide it’s perfect enough to send out into the world. This post, for instance. How many proofreads and grammar fixes did I have to do? Nothing was permanent.

Now, what if I never could make edits or fix typos? What if the first draft was the only draft? That’s what home improvement is like. There’s no Ctrl-Z. Every mistake becomes a fixture. Edges will be rough. Details will be missed. You have to live with imperfection, or you will go stark raving mad. Or, worse, you get scared and stop trying. I’m going to see that cracked veneer every time I walk down that hallway, and it will hound me until I learn this lesson.

-K

 

It’s been a while since I’ve managed to see a side-project to completion. So it seemed like a logical choice to pick my next electronic diversion carefully. Maybe this time take on a task both that is straightforward and compelling enough to finish .

In my previous post I mentioned how much fun I had playing Elite: Dangerous with an Oculus Rift. Well, long before VR came along, “head tracking” hardware has been a staple of flight sim enthusiasts for years. The idea is for the player to move his or her head, and have the in-game view react accordingly, usually in an exaggerated way (so that one can still see the screen). This creates both a greater sense of immersion and improved situational awareness.

It should come as little surprise that I wound up buying Elite: Dangerous a few days after PAX. I found myself wanting to replicate the immersion of the VR headset but without paying $300 for a DK2. Unfortunately most commercial IR head tracking solutions are rather pricey as well. But, through the miracles of Reddit I found that a enterprising group of British E:D fans had put together a DIY head tracker, the EDTracker , using an accelerometer and an Arduino micro controller. They posted their source code and some detailed instructions.

Now this sounds like something I can sink my teeth into.

I quickly ordered the parts, sticking to US based distributors. The stars of the show are the Sparkfun Pro Micro control board and an MPU-6050 Accelerometer breakout board. Sparkfun has an updated version of the Pro Micro for sale, but they were not offering the 8-pin version of the MPU that I needed to follow the edtracker guide, and their only offering for this particular accelerometer was $20, so I picked one up on ebay for a quarter of that. The parts all arrived a week later, at the same time. Handy that.

 

First I needed to soldering some header pins into the two boards. I still haven’t mastered the art of the helping hands so I’m not sure if they came out perfectly straight. But close enough.

 

I decided to start with a breadboard prototype. Looks like the pins were straight enough after all; they fit into the breadboard slots, albeit a bit snugly. I followed these directions  and routed some signals under the boards. Also, I didn’t realize how small the Pro Micro and MPU really were, so I wound up buying buttons that were comically large. The button is used to “zero” the device for quick re-calibration.

 

Next I needed to get the edtracker software onto the Arduino. This is when the project took a frustrating turn. I’ve only ever developed Arduino project in Linux, where the operating system has very little trouble recognizing and communicating with these devices. But, currently, Elite: Dangerous is a Windows-only game (Mac client is in beta, Linux client promised but no ETA). So I needed the Arduino to be recognized correctly in Windows, which is something I’ve never really tried to do. It sucks. I had hoped never to look upon the Device Manager again. After yesterday I think we’re on a first-name basis.

When I installed the Arduino drivers from the EDTracker site, the GUI and console scripts they provided would not work at all. I couldn’t even use the Arduino IDE to flash the bootloader, I just got mysterious USB errors. Also the EDTracker sketches won’t compile in the outdated version of the IDE they insist you use. Apparently the new Pro Micro that Sparkfun is selling uses an entirely different AVR core than the one that the EDTracker was originally built around. So blindly following their instructions was actually detrimental to my efforts, and cost me a couple of hours of banging my head on a wall trying to flash the thing. I needed to download the “Arduino Addon” files from Sparkfun, unpack them, dive into their hierarchy and find the signed Windows drivers, and associate those with the mysterious device Windows created. Once I did that, the EDTracker GUI sprung to life.

 

Calibration seemed to be successful. Now I just need to test it! By wearing it. On my head. While it’s plugged in. Somehow. I’m sure in the future I’ll have it enclosed and properly mounted on my headphones or something. But for now, double-sided tape will have to do.

 

I couldn’t use a baseball cap because they all have that little button on top. This was the best alternative. The good news is that I’m also protected from the sun’s harmful rays while I play my videogames indoors. I had the wife take pictures of my “field testing.”

The good news is… IT WORKS. Almost perfectly. I occasionally get some snapping to center when I’m looking very slightly in any direction. It could be an issue with dead zones in the game clashing with the fine input from the Arduino, but I’ll play with it a little more. And, of course, find a better way to wear it.

I could talk more about this experience, but they pretty much mirror the results from the EDTracker demonstration video.

Despite this being a fairly simple one-day project, I still have the opportunity to perfect it by giving it a proper PCB and enclosure. That said, I fear I may be taking the first step down a very dangerous path. There are communities out there dedicated to passionate players building custom controls, cockpits, and peripherals for simulation games. I mean check out this redditor’s home made E:D control panel! And this guy’s custom ‘mech pit! People make their own flight sticks and throttled out of spare parts, repurpose racing pedals, all kinds of things to enrich their experiences and…

I should… I should turn back now.  Or should I?

-K

My last post covered only Friday, which covers only 33.3 (repeating, of course) percent of PAX.  So let’s see how the second two days went.

Saturday

Check Yourself

First off, showing up at 10:00AM was a mistake.

The bag check line was kind of crazypants and began to snake around the block. While Kristen and I were okay in our winter jackets, my heart goes out to the skin-exposed cosplayers sitting out there in the freezing winds. The bag checks are a security theater joke, and it’s unfortunate that they were so poorly staffed that the health of attendees was put at risk.

The wait lasted about half an hour, which got us into the building just in time to get seats for the Make-a-Strip panel. I didn’t take any pictures here and the Penny Arcade folks haven’t uploaded the fruits of the day’s labor yet, so I have little to show. But it was 90 minutes of fascinating insight and hilarious storytelling. Mike and Jerry never fail to entertain; the chemistry and charisma they bring almost make the cost of the day’s pass worth it in a single panel. Also Jerry sang a sea shanty and a thousand people cracked their knuckles in unison.

 Expo Hall: Black Ice

The developer of Black Ice, Super Duper Games Company, spoke at the Extra Credits panel yesterday. I got to try this game at the Indie Megabooth and was impressed at how well he channelled the hacking visualizations from the early cyperpunk novels. Having a pre-existing fascination with William Gibson, this kind of game is right up my alley. When I found out the game was on sale for $5 and had a working Linux client, I bought a steam key right then and there. I’ve been playing it here and there over past couple of days, and it’s very promising, but still clearly in Early Access.

Spare Panels

The middle of my Saturday contained a pair of panels, which wound up being the only ones I would see that day. The first carried the eyebrow-raising title “The Universality of Video Game Music.” It was run by a few musicians and composers, as well as Larry Oji of OCRemix.org. I was happy to make it to this panel, having missed the actual OC Remix panel the day before.

It was an interesting talk about how under appreciated video game music composers have been lately, and how we rarely know their names. They make a good point, as I can’t think of any I know off the top of my head besides maybe Alex Brandon and Darren Korb.

I then ventured to the Building a Gaming PC Panel, run by representatives from Newegg, Asus, Intel, and Thermaltake, as well as Bob from KMBOD.com.  These guys clearly know their stuff about PC building, but I’m not sure I learned anything new. There were so many industry representatives, it was clear they didn’t want to take sides on what hardware is better suited to specific applications. Props for them also not pimping their own brands too aggressively.

After the panel I got a chance to talk to Bob one on one, and asked him about a PC building class I was thinking of running out of Lowell Makes. He was extremely approachable, and it turns out he’s done the exact same thing at a high school. So he definitely thought it was worth trying, and gave me some avenues I could use to find scrap components. I’m very happy I went to this panel and even happier I gathered the guts to stick around and ask questions.

Small World with Fez

Random interactions with strangers can be a boon to any PAX experience. When Kristen offered to teach me how to play Small World, we were approached by a fellow named Fez from Missouri, who asked if he could join us. We had a remarkably fun time watching the clash of flying Halflings and swamp-loving Sorcerers play out. Fez, if you’re out there, you’re a chill dude and it was tons of fun playing with you. Hope to see you next year!

FLOOOOOOOOOOOOR

We missed out on the Angry Video Game Nerd and Cards Against Humanities panels, due to our unwillingness to line up over an hour and a half before time. While it’s a bummer we missed out on the panels, that’s not a worthwhile use of PAX time.

So instead we followed the rest of the crew to the Rock Band Free Play stage. This is an area where faux bands can get into a real line to play real songs on faux instruments in front of a real audience. Well, at this point in the evening “audience” was really more of a gaggle of increasingly fatigued PAXgoers. Dan, Steve, Geoff and Kris took to the stage and queued up Bodies. And that’s when the evening went from good to great.

Nothing could top it. Mostly because the convention closed minutes later at midnight and we had to take the party to the hotel. Similar to the previous night, we rounded out the evening with drinks, board games, and a few debates regarding the finer points of Dragon Ball Z’s story line.

I was told the festivities went long into the night. But I peaced out around 1:00AM. I had somewhere to be the next morning.

Sunday

More Expensive Minute

I arrived at the SBCC around 9:30AM Sunday morning to line up for the Expo Hall. My goal was to get in line for Elite: Dangerous before the line capped out, which I did. They were running setups that looked like this.

 

That’s a modern space flight sim controlled by a Saitek X52 HOTAS and an Oculus Rift 2. Yes. Very yes.

The bad news was that of the eight demo stations that were running the game, only four had Oculus Rifts. When you got to the front, you got the next available station, by luck of the draw. So I had a 50/50 shot of trying an Oculus. For a half hour wait, I could live with that.

Behind me in the line, there was a ~10 year old kid and his dad. The kid was a combination of very excited and very well spoken. It was uplifting to see somebody so young also be so interested in a neglected game genre that I first got into…well when I was about his age.

When I reached the front of the line, one of the Frontier folks pointed me towards a vacant Oculus

station. I turned to the kid and told him to go ahead and take it. He was confused at first but caught on, and he and his dad thanked me for the gesture. Apparently the woman running the line saw this exchange take place and thought it was “just lovely,” and pulled me out and put me behind another Oculus station so that I’d get it next. Okay, I guess it all worked out in the end.

So how was it?

Life changing. But all too brief. The demo put you up against a single enemy fighter, and I would have taken more time in dispatching it if I had known that its death ended the demo. Overall I probably spent about 2 minutes in the chair getting the explanation from the company rep, and 1 minute actively flying. But it was definitely worth it. I could look behind me and see the entry door to my ship, or look at any of the functional heads-up displays over the cockpit. Coincidentally (or not) my arms were positioned on the flight sticks in the same manner as my in-game avatar’s. There was a moment in the dogfight when the enemy fighter flew over my head, and I raised my head to track it and was able to turn the way it was turning, instead of just instinctively pitching directly up to the last where spot I saw it. You can do this with a head tracking setup, but with the Oculus the sense of immersion was breathtaking.

After I left the booth, I wandered around in a daze, rethinking my priorities in the gaming world. If I wanted to replicate this setup I’d need to drop no less than $500. This might prove to have been the most expensive minute of life. I’ve already bought the game, and I’m looking into DIY head tracking projects.

Goodnight PAX

Despite the fact that I’m only one hour into Sunday, that’s the biggest story I have to write about. Kristen and I went to a Game Quiz panel run by Wikia but it lasted less than half an hour. We played a bunch of Borderlands Pre-Sequel and Borderlands 2, only to determine we liked 2 better. And then I picked up another game of Small World with the fellas, which seems to have convinced most of them to buy the digital version of the game. I may do so as well; platform-independent multiplayer is extremely rare.

Having completed half a decade at PAX, I’m pleased for the most part at the direction this convention is taking. I’m still not sold on the importance of the bag check, the Tabletop area could be a little larger, and the ESL zone can probably be eliminated entirely or moved to a theater. But beyond that, I was able to get a great amount of enjoyment while spending comparatively little time in line. I’ve made new contacts, learned about new upcoming games, gained new insights, and met friends old and new. The allure of PAX is derived from the rare opportunity to have these myriad experiences all in a mere three days, crammed into a building with thousands of like-minded enthusiasts. I hope we can do so for years to come.

Goodnight, PAX East, and see you next year.

-K

For any recurring extravagant event, there exists the risk of becoming repetitive. Old hat. Eventually the spectacle and novelty fade away, and such an occasion has to stand on its merits. Such as it is for PAX East, the three days out of the year when the collective gaming community comes to my backyard one hell of a get-together.

I’ve been to every PAX East since it started in 2010.  So this year I wanted to approach it differently.  Fewer panels, to reduce time spent in lines.  More time in the Expo Hall to talk to devs and get more details on upcoming games and technology.  And much more time in the tabletop area, to explore the recent explosion in board game enthusiasm.

You can find my musings on PAX East 2013 somewhere on this very blog. For some reason (laziness) I never did post about 2014.  But enough about the past! Instead, let’s talk about the past! The past weekend, that is. Because that was PAX East 2015.  I’ll start with my breakdown of Friday.

“You have a cyber womb…”

The panel on 3D printing might have been more interesting if I hadn’t spent the past year slowly steeping in the maker movement. I learned a little bit more about the FormLabs 3D printer, and about Nervous Systems and their strange procedurally generated creations. But I’m not sure if I’m going to get much mileage out of this newfound information.

I would have liked a more detailed breakdown of CAD and slicer software, or good avenues to find free or pay-for 3D models. I mean, you either have to take somebody else’s data or design something yourself to make a 3D print. They didn’t even mention 3dhubs!

The good news?  This panel was packed.  The room was almost filled up with hundreds of people are interested in 3D printing.  This bodes very very well for the future of makerspaces everywhere.  This is an exciting time indeed.

Extraterrestrial Gas Boxes

Alienware was demonstrating modern games running on some small form factor Steam Machines, complete with a Steam Controller. It was the latter I was really interested in, as it is poised to be one of the first innovations in input technology since the popularization of motion control. I wanted to see firsthand what this trackball-emulating touchpad could do. The demo stations were playing Dying Light, a zombie survival FPS that I’m not terribly interested in. I would have rather seen an RTS, to really be convinced that I could play a wider variety of PC titles on this device.

The trackpad took a lot of getting used to, and I’m apprehensive about its ability to replace a mouse (or even an analog stick) in an FPS. Perhaps the sensitivity would need to be adjusted but I only had 6 minutes to play with so I didn’t attempt to mess around. I found small movements having too little effect, and getting used to flicking the “trackball” to take advantage of its simulated inertia was difficult. Also it has buttons on the bottoms of the handles, which I’d never experienced.  I suppose this is to replace the ability to push down on twin analog sticks?

Overall, the Steam Controller seems difficult to use. I’d have to really spend some time getting used to it to play a traditional console game. How it will fare with other genres is still a mystery.  But the small form factor console seemed perfectly capable of handling a modern shooter.  I have high hopes for SteamOS (and gaming  on Linux in general) once these hit the market.

A Classic Letdown

I swung by the Classic Arcade room, always one of my favorites at previous PAX iterations.  (post edit: Here’s a picture of the PAX East 2014 Classic Arcade area from the ACAM website).  Something was… different this time.

 

The fuck is this? There’s one line of machines along the back wall, but most of them were pinball machines, Street Fighter games, and one Mortal Kombat. None of the retro classics were represented. Gone are the multiple rows of classic cabinets. No Food Fight, no Galaga, no Missile Command, no Dragon’s Lair auto-playing in the background.  What’s going on here?!

After a bit of inspection, I found out that the American Classic Arcade Museum did not set up the arcade room this time around. This year, Screwattack and some company called Arcade4Home put it together. Well, I don’t know why this came to pass, but I don’t approve. Bring back ACAM for 2016, guys. These are our gaming roots, here! Leave it to the pros.

Stompy LASER Robots in Space

I stopped by the Catalyst Game Labs booth in the Tabletop merchants area. Randall Bills, one of the creative minds behind BattleTech, was there. But multiple attempts to engage him in conversation were met with pretty short responses. Oh well.

I bought a hard and digital copy of the Alpha Strike rule book and got to talking with another different CGL employee (alas I forget to get a name) about the fact that I still haven’t had a chance to play a tabletop BT game to due difficulty of finding interested friends. Turns out he runs a monthly out of Boston at a game store adjacent to BU’s campus that I never knew about despite living there for four years. I might just stop on by!

I’d like to get on my soap box for a moment. I think Catalyst has done a poor job of reaching out to potential BattleTech players. I have consumed MechWarrior content for most of the time I’ve been alive, but have not played a single tabletop BattleTech game. Catalyst is sitting on a franchise with decades of history, a richly developed universe, and one of the most prolific video game series in existence. But they’re still selling books with aging art and outdated (and frankly rather ugly) miniatures, with no digital version of the game available besides Megamek, a fan-made Java program that I could not figure out for the life of me.

Tabletop gaming is bigger than its ever been right now. Take a look at this picture of the Tabletop area at PAX this year.

Look at all those fucking people. They’re all playing board games. Get on reddit facebook and pimp local events. Put out a crowdfunding campaign, get some cash for better art and better casts. Work with PGI to share in the success of MechWarrior: Online (use their amazing ‘mech models and concept art for starters). Start reaching out to players like me who are struggling to take part. Don’t just sell rulebooks, build a community.

Okay. Coming down now.

Bonus Points

The Extra Credits panel was Friday afternoon, right on top of the UT2k4 tournament into which I was considering throwing my hat. I went with the panel instead. I’m glad I did, but for an unexpected reason. The panel itself wasn’t super exciting. It was all Q&A, and although I could listen to James Portnow speak  ad infinitum and still be enthralled, I can’t think of anything that jumped out at me in particular about games or game development during the panel.

But, before the panel started, a young lady behind me started chatting about being an instructor at Game-U in Columbus, OH, doing introductory Unity3D classes. Seeing as I’m trying to learn Unity myself, this was very relevant to my interests. I didn’t even know programs like Game-U existed. This was all very enlightening and may have provided me a new avenue for my ongoing experimentation with game development.

It’s these little serendipitous moments that make PAX so unique. Unexpected conversations with random strangers that open new doors.

Free as in Freedom

I spent the remainder of Friday night playing all manner of games with my cohorts. Matt, Mike and I hit up the PC Free Play area for a rousing game of DotA 2. And by “rousing” I mean we struggled with a lackluster teammate for 30 minutes until our time ran out and we had to abandon the match. Still though, the ability to look somebody in the eye and tell them “nice job” is an opportunity we don’t get in our internet-fueled social gaming. I missed the chance to offer consolatory neck rubs after team wipes. Coulda shoulda woulda.

We then proceeded to the Console Free Play area to meet up with Dan. The four of us checked out a copy of Halo Master Chief Edition. We then spent the next 15 minutes trying and ultimately failing to get the X-Box One to sync all four controllers, recognize that we wanted a local game, and get all four us in. At the end of it all, only three of us were in the match. We dawdled around for 10 more minutes while Matt played with his DS, rather than trying to go through that mess again. Good news is that now we know to steer clear of the X-Box One if you ever intend to have a console that supports this kind of “couch” play. You fucked it up, Microsoft. You fucked it up.

We ended the night linking up with the entire crew, throwing Martian Dice and playing Flux in the Seaport Hotel over snacks and spirits. So many friends, otherwise scattered across New England, all in one place having a grand time. We ended the day on the kind of note that remains unique to PAX.

But there are two whole days of PAX left to cover! Stay tuned for my next update for how the actual weekend itself played out. TEASER: There’s a mosh pit involved, and I go to outer space.

Until then… PRAISE THE SUN.

-K

 

Up until fairly recently in gaming history, the line between the PC and the console was easy to distinguish. Consoles took input from a hand held controller, fed output to TV set, incorporated exact clones of each others’ hardware and software, featured split-screen multiplayer, and are priced for less than they cost to produce. PCs generally had none of these attributes. Thus PC gaming and console gaming catered to two very different audiences with two very different sets of features.

 

The lines have been…blurring as of late. Console have been catching up to the PC market in terms of performance, and the cross-platform releases which used to be rare and problematic are becoming increasingly common and elegant.

 

PC gaming company Valve’s new foray into the console space may render said line obsolete. Their aim is to create a console user experience with a piece of hardware that would otherwise be indistinguishable from a PC. My last post focused on the software hurdles Valve must overcome to expand the available set of games. But the hardware side of the story is equally important for their venture to succeed.

 

To this end, Valve has been partnering with multiple hardware vendors to create a set of specifications for a so-called Steam Machine. The idea is that in the not-too-distant-future, a would-be user would go to a retailer, buy a box, download some games, and start playing. No assembly required.

 

But where’s the fun in that?

 

Enterprising PC builders have long been cobbling together home brewed “set top boxes” for a variety of uses and applications over the years. These are just PCs strapped to a TV, generally running a version of Linux specifically tailored to this purpose.  A home-brewed Steam Machine would follow this mold, and would just need hardware that could handle gaming at 1080p resolution. So let me just see if I have one of those lying around…

 

Oh, hey you!

 

 

Chris and John knew exactly what they were doing when they gave me this truly awesome wedding present last year. The full specs for this shiny little machine can be found here. The half-tower form factor and black chassis blended beautifully with my existing TV stand.

 

 

With the physical construction done for me, next comes configuration. The first hiccup I encountered was a lack of AMD support. When I first started testing this box, SteamOS only supported Nvidia graphics cards. You’ll see shortly why that is. But with Steam working just fine in the Ubuntu repositories, I left intact the 13.04 installation that Chris had installed for me.  No need to fix what ain’t broke.

 

Once I had Steam up and running on Ubuntu, I gleefully set it to both start automatically upon boot, and start in Big Picture mode (the UI featured in my previous post). Shouldn’t have done that. Big Picture Mode on a Radeon card was not usable. When I tried to turn on Big Picture manually, it froze my entire OS about two frames into the splash screen. And of course, when I pounded the Reset switch, I was immediately thrust back into Steam Big Picture mode, just as I had instructed Steam to do. Whoops.

 

The only course of action at this point was to uninstall and purge Steam completely via a second virtual terminal session command line interface (yeah Linux), then re-install it. I had to do the rest of the testing for this post from a Desktop interface using a mouse to launch Steam games as one would on a PC. This works, but it still feels like I’m on the PC side of the line.

 

 

At this point, the results mimicked my earlier experiences playing Steam’s controller-friendly, Linux-compatible offerings. Since that post, Team Meat’s breakthrough platformer Super Meat Boy was brought into the fold. Playing a game with such a bright color scheme on a full-sized TV was a sight that my camera seemed incapable of describing (cameras are still poorly suited to taking pictures of LCD screens, and screenshots would add nothing to this conversation). Shank 2 was equally satisfying. If you haven’t noticed, most of the games available are either small-studio indie games or Valve products. But playing the recent Linux port of the gorgeous Metro: Last Light on a 1080p TV exceeded my loftiest expectations.

 

I played some of these hot-seat style with Danny, as I still haven’t found any good candidates in this mix for local multiplayer. This drives home an important point. Such as it is, the hardware component of the Steam Machine is easy to replicate (at least, it’s no harder than building a PC). The software is still the bottleneck. Since I went through the aforementioned rigmarole, Valve has officially added AMD graphics support to SteamOS. So for my next, I’ll be shedding Ubuntu to dive into a game studios attempt at an operating system! And with each passing day, it seems like another game adds some degree of Steam for Linux support. Perhaps it’s worth taking another walk through my library to see what’s changed. Stay tuned.