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.

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.

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.

Tell you what, I’ve been a fan of the Battlefield series for a long time. Didn’t play much 1942, but I’ve played the HELL out of Battlefield 2 and loved every minute of it. As you all may know, I also happen to love Team Fortress 2. These reasons are why I was so excited to hear about Battlefield Heroes. With the announcement of an expanded public beta yesterday, I couldn’t help but sign myself up and give it a review.

The Good

The game look great. Very stylized (like Team Fortress 2), good sounds, great models. I like the “gain points to buy new items” aspect, because it encourages players to play consistently to buy and keep better weapons. Besides the pilot there are two extra seats on planes, and by seats I mean you sit on the wing and shoot at people.

The Bad

The game has no focus. The loss of the mini map makes you feel like you are just one guy running around a field. The weapons dont’ feel like they do damage (except to you, of course), and you feel thrown into a game with no teamwork whatsoever. My favorite ability in the Battlefield games was the ability of teammates to spot enemies for you. They have removed this from Battlefield Heroes and without this it is VERY hard to find snipers (and trust me one good sniper can just wreck a spawn) or let your pilots know where enemy planes are. There is also no voice chat or commander, which makes it TERRIBLY difficult to coordinate a team.

The vehicles are TERRIBLE. When flying a plane you have no clue where the other planes are and no seeming way to gain an advantage on them. The tanks just seem silly and without the mini gun for the driver there seems to be no good way to kill infantry with it.

The sounds get annoying QUICK. They tried to make the sounds as cartoony as possible, but I can only hear the sad trombone sound (only much higher pitched) so many times before I want to choke myself with my mouse cable.

The Ugly

As it stands right now, I would pass on this game. It just feels too disconnected. There is no teamwork and therefore it’s just another run around and shoot things, only this time you are stuck in a cartoon.

All the scout stuff added I don’t care about, the only thing I see that matters in this update is:

Changed backstab handling to fix facestabs

I kidding, of course I care about the rest of the update! I’ll play around with it when I can and report back, in the mean time you can read the full update details and hop on yourself.