Montana Fragfest

I play Minecraft occasionally. It seems to be a game I use to fill in the cracks when I am getting bored with my other games. A coworker and I have been working on a map for over a year. We hardly ever get on at the same time, it is just fun to see what the other person has been building. I should also mention that we can go a couple weeks without even logging in. It is really just for tinkering. We tried several different ways of running this server.

1. We ran the server at his house on his desktop, and I just logged into it remotely. At the time, he had an 8 mbps cable connection with fairly slow upload speeds. Pairing that with my puny 1.5 mpbs DSL connection and I was in lag city.
2. Next we moved the server to my house. Our theory was that my DSL would have slightly more consistent upload speeds so it would be fine for me and decent for him. This fell apart in practice because of two things. 1.5 is a pretty small pipe and if you need to do anything else while the Minecraft server is running, things gets very slow. The other problem is that I generally don’t have my desktop up and running 24/7. We were constantly trading text messages about the state of the server.
3. I fired up a micro instance on Amazon EC2 and installed Ubuntu. This looked super promising. Micro instances are quite cheap, and it was reasonably easy to setup. You have to know a handful of Linux commands, but nothing too extreme. I was even able to setup remote world backups using Duplicity (which is super cool by the way). Except…     the Minecraft server instance kept crashing with out of memory errors. I guess this wasn’t that surprising. Micro instances give you 613 mb of memory, and Minecraft generally doesn’t run very reliably with anything less than a gb. Bumping up to the EC2 Small intance really put it out our price range.
4. We spent some time looking around for a traditional Minecraft hosting service. There are plenty of reasonably priced options, but they were just more money that we were willing to spend to play a game a couple times a month.
5. My friend upgraded his cable connection to 30 mpbs download and 8 mpbs upload (not just because of Minecraft). We moved the server back to his place. The lag was mostly gone, except for the occasional minecart riding blip here and there.
6. This winter we heard about Minefold. I moved over the server just to try it out. I have to say, I really like it! It solves a lot of the problems we were having with the other solutions. Neither of us has to run a Java server on our personal computer 24/7, it has good uptime (at least for the amount we play) and it even has an auto-generating map of our world…     well the surface anyway.

Minefold definitely fits with the amount we play. It has a unique pricing model as well. Each player pays ~$5/month for access to unlimited worlds and unlimited time on those servers. Minefold will even give you 10 free hours each month, just to get a taste. This pricing model works out great, because you don’t have to pay for a single server and then try to split up the costs between each of your players. The other benefit, that is right up my alley, is server maintenance is handled by Minefold. You basically upload your world and away you go.

If you haven’t tried Minefold, it is worth a shot. If you would like to take a peek at our world, you can see it here.

I found Bastion after hitting a game boredom wall with my selection of titles. I was actually planning on trying out Trine 2 (still haven’t played it) after watching some of the Hatventures videos, but I ended up at Bastion after a couple days of looking around. In part because of the Totally Rad Show reviews of it from last year.

Overall, it’s a pretty cool game. I classify it as a hacky-slashy-burny-isometric-platformer (I don’t know the official genre). Battles are fun! There are a bunch of different weapons to try out and each one seems cool in its own way. Some of the weapons are centered around a certain type enemy. For example, in order to fend off these nasty beasts called Anklegators you use this long sharp pike that allow you to poke them right in the nose.

The narration is one of my favorite parts of the game. It reacts with you as you go along. If you are just smashing boxes to see what is in them, you get something like “Kid just rages for a while.” If you are just running past enemies as fast as you can, he’ll say “Kid makes a break for it.” It works really well, especially with the gruff voice of the narrator.

The game starts off at a decent pace and progressively gets harder as you go along. I have had to retry a couple levels because I died so many times, but I haven’t got frustrated at the game. Use your shield! I’m actually surprised at its size considering it is a $15 XBLA game.

It put a smile on my face – Recommended

Valve has posted up a funny little comic on their blog. The comic details the torrid friendship of the blue soldier and the red demoman. The “friendship ends tomorrow”, so I guess we’ll get to see the rest then. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some kind of update announcement tomorrow, so keep your eyes peeled.

If you live in Montana and want to join a large online franchise for Madden 10 (on the Xbox 360) check out this Facebook page, join the group and call your team. We want this to be as big of a franchise as we can get so be sure to join up if you play Madden 10 or at least tell your friends about it if they play Madden 10.

I’ll be writing up a Madden 10 review soon, so keep posted!

Well I’ll be honest, I never really got into Battlefield 1942 or Desert Combat, but MAN did I love Battlefield 2. It was my World of Warcraft. I’ve never had more friends playing a single game at a single time, and I loved it. I was often the squad leader, and we would ROLL other teams. When I heard about Battlefield 1943 being release my excitement was tempered because of Battlefield Heroes, but let’s hop into the game and see how it goes.

The Good

The game is fun. It has all the classic elements of Battlefield combat: land, sea, and air vehicles mashed in with a large ground-based capture the flag maps. Another huge plus is that the game is only $15. I think that this is a great step in the right direction. I hope it sends a message to game publishers that you can publish a game that might not look the best or be game of the year but if it’s fun and cheap people will buy it.

They are also doing a challenge where the community unlocks new content by getting a large number of global kills. At 43,000,000 kills the respective system (Xbox360 or PS3) unlocked the Coral Bay map (which is an air-combat only map). This REALLY incentivized people to get on as much as possible and keep the fight going 24/7. Editors Note: Both systems have unlocked Coral Bay, although the Xbox 360 was the first to do so.

The Bad

This game is slow. While I enjoy playing it, I never get really passionate about it like I do COD4 or TF2. You have no sense of teamwork, or team goals, which is a problem in a game centered around team and squad based objectives. You basically run around capping points, trying to kill the enemy. When the game is over you are never really surprised about who won, because you have no clue what is going on elsewhere in the match.

The game in general seems very non-immersive. When I shoot my gun or run around I don’t FEEL like a soldier on a battlefield. I almost feel like I’m playing a rail shooter in an arcade.

When I hopped back into COD4 after playing this game for a couple reasons, I realized why COD4 is SO GOOD. When you run the camera moves around like I’m running, when I shoot my gun the camera makes me feel like I’m actually shooting a rifle, Battlefield 1943 just doesn’t do that.

The Down-Low

This game is fun and cheap, plain and simple. As you can tell, it wasn’t the best game I’ve ever played by any stretch of the imagination but it keeps me entertained and got me to pry open my wallet instead of GameFly’ing it like I do most games.