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thomcoldman-blog · 6 years

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My 10 Favourite Games Of 2017

This list was originally posted on the forum Resetera, but I felt like putting it up here too, with a little more insight into why I liked these games so much, and so they don’t get lost in the muddle of forum posts. Enjoy!

10. Snake Pass (Sumo Digital; Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, PC)

Sumo Digital has been a developer I've admired for years, particularly for their work on the Nintendo-tier kart racer Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. Snake Pass is their first independently-produced title, and it has a great hook - the player controls a snake in much the same manner as a real snake might move. There's no jump button, no Earthworm Jim spacesuit, just the power to raise one's head and the strength to grip tightly to any object you've coiled around. There's no timer or enemies; Snake Pass is content to let you explore its levels at your own pace, letting you getting used to its unique feeling and take in the calming David Wise soundtrack. It's a game that feels like learning to ride a bike again, and the progression in ability over time is such a pleasing sensation that it earns it its place on this list by itself. The good use of collectables and generous helping of levels is icing on the cake.

9. Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus (MachineGames; PS4, Xbox One, PC)

B.J. Blazkowicz returns and he's lost all meaning of subtlety whilst he's been out of action. Wolfenstein 2 shoots all of its shots - the action is bloody, explosive carnage, and the subject matter isn't satisfied with just skewering Nazi idiocy and narcissism, taking time to shine a light on White America's love affair with sitting back and reaping the rewards of compliance under fascist rule. Whether it's exploring B.J.'s broken psyche, giving Wyatt a crash course on hallucinogenics or putting you under the spotlight in a terrifying audition, MachineGames refuse to pull their punches, each great moment coming swinging like B.J.'s Nazi-reprimanding fireaxe. The combat encounters are far from polished, with stealth being heavily nerfed from The New Order and the half-way shift in tone from borderline-satirical diatribe on mortality and American race relations to comic-book capers is incredibly stodgy, but Wolfenstein 2 leaves a hell of an impression all the same. Shame about that credits music.

8. Gorogoa (Jason Roberts; PC, iOS, Nintendo Switch)

A good puzzle game can make a really strong impression, guiding you subtly by the hand to make you feel like a member of MENSA just for pressing a few buttons or prodding at a screen. With Gorogoa, I can't even begin to describe how the puzzles actually work. Imagine a window segmented with 4 panes of glass, and now imagine you can drag elements out of those panes and into other panes, or over where there isn't a pane to create a new pane... See, it’s hard! In as simple terms as I can muster, it’s a game about taking the world apart and putting it back together again to create paths and progress for your anonymous young hero. It’s intensely abstract, yet the South Asian aesthetic feels like a living locale, an exploration of a boy's days-to-come. It's a short experience, but with each puzzle solved making me feeling smarter than Albert god damn Einstein, it's one that will stick with me for a long time.

7. Splatoon 2 (Nintendo EPD; Nintendo Switch)

Like pretty much everyone, I didn't own a Wii U, but the sting of that decision never really happened until the arrival of Splatoon - Nintendo's first proper new "core" universe since what felt like Pikmin. It instantly looked like sheer fun - and as a big fan of both Jet Set Radio and The World Ends With You, it was clear as day Nintendo's younger designers were picking up the Shibuya fashion torch those games dropped behind them. Put simply, it's totally my shit. Splatoon 2 confirms my suspicions and then some, being the first multiplayer title I've enjoyed online in forever. I can't get enough of the soundtrack, the sound effects, the amazingly catty banter between Pearl and Marina, and just the feeling of dropping into ink, strafing around a sucker and blasting them straight between the eyeballs with my N-ZAP '85. 20% of Switch owners in the US can't be wrong.

6. Yakuza 0 (SEGA; PS4)

The only games I've played previously by SEGA's Toshihiro Nagoshi are the brilliant arcade/Gamecube bangers F-Zero GX and Super Monkey Ball 2, plus his one-off PS3 sci-fi shooter Binary Domain. Loving those 3 wacky games, I always felt a little put-off by his regular gig nowadays being a series about Japan's most decorated crime organisation, and a bare-knuckle brawler at that. Yakuza 0, the 80s-set series prequel that serves as a perfect entry point for series newcomers, proved my suspicions ill-founded. It's a game which instantly casts the majority of the yakuza as control freaks and bullies, pits its protagonists Kiryu and Majima as their unfounded targets and pawns... and then lets you fight your way out of hell via brutal finishing moves, bizarrely complex business management sidequests and, if you're so inclined, a gun shaped like a giant fish. It's that kind of game that always keeps you guessing whether or not you should take it seriously, and so it wins you over with its best-in-class action choreography, astonishingly good direction and a never-ending deluge of sidequests, minigames and challenges. Don't sleep on Kamurocho.

5. Sonic Mania (SEGA/Christian Whitehead/Headcannon/PagodaWest Games; Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, PC)

If you’re reading this, you probably know I'm a Sonic apologist. I don't really stand by the 3D entries - bar Sonic Generations, which I genuinely love - but the narrative that "Sonic was never good" is some ridiculous meme that I can't stand. They were genuinely fun games, albeit far from perfect; every game can use some improvement. Sonic Mania is that improvement, spinning the level themes and gimmicks from the original Mega Drive (and Mega CD) games into vast new forms, with myraid routes, tons of secrets, an astonishing sense of speed from beginning to end and fairer, more agreeable, more exciting level design. Old locales, new levels - oh, and some new locales as well, one of which (Studiopolis Zone) is an instant classic. 16:9 presentation, all new animations and crazy levels of animation detail, and a mind-blowing soundtrack by Tee Lopes - Sonic Mania is the perfect Sonic game.

4. NieR: Automata (Square Enix/PlatinumGames; PS4, PC)

For my first foray into the sunken mind of Yoko Taro, he couldn't have left a better impression. NieR: Automata uses Platinum's engaging-at-worst, thrilling-at-best melee combat as the language to tell his new story of how pointless it is for anyone to even bother throwing themselves after ideals of society or humanity, and why it's worth trying all the same. Every inch of this game feels crusted in Taro’s sensibilities, with the no-bullshit 2B and her curious whiny partner 9S running into robots waving white flags, avenging fallen comrades, establishing monarchies, throwing themselves to their deaths, and coming to terms with their crumbling existence in apocalypse. It's crushing, it's raw, it's often dull, but its uniquely bleak vision of AIs breaking free of their programming has a grip as powerful as a Terminator's. And when it’s ready to let you go, it has you send it off with the most memorable credits sequence in history. Glory to Yoko Taro, glory to PlatinumGames - glory to mankind.

3. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo EPD; Nintendo Switch, Wii U)

Standing in the centre of a bridge connecting Hyrule’s broad, emerald green fields to the desert mountain approach, a bridge overlooking the still Lake Hylia, I fire an arrow into a lizard bastard’s head, or at least I try to. He dodges it and rushes me, forcing me to jump away and retaliate with my claymore. Out for the count, I resume looking for the lost Zora wife I’ve been asked to seek out, who apparently washed all the way downstream in a recent downpour. I can’t see any wife - my entire view is dominated by the giant green dragon snaking across the night sky above me. The wind picks up, but I am too awestruck by its presence to take note that I could glide up to it and shoot off a valuable scale. Instead, I just stand and stare, this utterly unexpected moment happening before my eyes. Friend or foe? A boss monster, perhaps? A vital story element later on? The answer ended up being none of the above: in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, there be dragons, and that fact in and of itself speaks volumes about what this game is about. After 30 years, Hyrule finally feels alive.

2. Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall; PS4, Xbox One, PC, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS)

Very few games instil a genuine emotional response within me, but the story of Mae Borowski's no-fanfare return from college to suburban gloom resonates hard with me. It's an expert at the little touches - the needless-yet-fun triple jump, the not-so-starcrossed rooftop musicians, the impulsive reaction to poke a severed arm with a stick - and woefully precise with its big swings, like an upsetting cross-town party, a wave of violent frustration amongst the townspeople, and the inability to just lay it all on the table with friends and family when you need to most. In the cosmic dreams of shitty teens, Night in the Woods finds an ugly beauty in depression.

1. Super Mario Odyssey (Nintendo EPD; Nintendo Switch)

It’s impossible to deny 2017 has been the year of Nintendo. There’s plenty of celebrate elsewhere, but the Switch’s rise to prominence as the machine to be playing ideally everything on, and the amount of absolute smash hits Nintendo has producing this year makes it hard for the narrative to focus elsewhere. The epitome of all this is their final killer game of 2017: Super Mario Odyssey, the grand return of a more open-ended style of Mario platformer. A true blue achievement in joyous freedom, it brings together everything from Mario's history of 3D platforming - 64's freedom, Sunshine's other-worldliness and sky-high skill ceiling, Galaxy's spectacle, 3D World's razor-sharp platforming challenge - and throws into one big pot, creating a Mario where both the journey and the destination are one and the same, and exciting to the very end. In a year of amazing games that hit upon horrid, upsetting themes with delicate, pinpoint accuracy for tremendous success, I’m not sure whether it’s a shame or an inevitability that such an unapologetically surprising, happy game made the biggest mark on me this year, but either way, I’m welcome to have Mario be truly Super once more.

#goty #2017 #splatoon2 #super mario odyssey #zelda breath of the wild #yakuza 0 #night in the woods #snake pass #sonic mania #gorogoa #wolfenstein #nier automata

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just4programmers · 7 years

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13 hours debugging a segmentation fault in .NET Core on Raspberry Pi and the solution was...

Debugging is a satisfying and special kind of hell. You really have to live it to understand it. When you're deep into it you never know when it'll be done. When you do finally escape it's almost always a DOH! moment.

I spent an entire day debugging an issue and the solution ended up being a checkbox.

NOTE: If you get a third of the way through this blog post and already figured it out, well, poop on you. Where were you after lunch WHEN I NEEDED YOU?

I wanted to use a Raspberry Pi in a tech talk I'm doing tomorrow at a conference. I was going to show .NET Core 2.0 and ASP.NET running on a Raspberry Pi so I figured I'd start with Hello World. How hard could it be?

You'll write and build a .NET app on Windows or Mac, then publish it to the Raspberry Pi. I'm using a preview build of the .NET Core 2.0 command line and SDK (CLI) I got from here.

C:\raspberrypi> dotnet new console C:\raspberrypi> dotnet run Hello World! C:\raspberrypi> dotnet publish -r linux-arm Microsoft Build Engine version for .NET Core raspberrypi1 -> C:\raspberrypi\bin\Debug\netcoreapp2.0\linux-arm\raspberrypi.dll raspberrypi1 -> C:\raspberrypi\bin\Debug\netcoreapp2.0\linux-arm\publish\

Notice the simplified publish. You'll get a folder for linux-arm in this example, but could also publish osx-x64, etc. You'll want to take the files from the publish folder (not the folder above it) and move them to the Raspberry Pi. This is a self-contained application that targets ARM on Linux so after the prerequisites that's all you need.

I grabbed a mini-SD card, headed over to https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ and downloaded the latest Raspbian image. I used etcher.io - a lovely image burner for Windows, Mac, or Linux - and wrote the image to the SD Card. I booted up and got ready to install some prereqs. I'm only 15 min in at this point. Setting up a Raspberry Pi 2 or Raspberry Pi 3 is VERY smooth these days.

Here's the prereqs for .NET Core 2 on Ubuntu or Debian/Raspbian. Install them from the terminal, natch.

sudo apt-get install libc6 libcurl3 libgcc1 libgssapi-krb5-2 libicu-dev liblttng-ust0 libssl-dev libstdc++6 libunwind8 libuuid1 zlib1g

I also added an FTP server and ran vncserver, so I'd have a few ways to talk to the Raspberry Pi. Yes, I could also SSH in but I have a spare monitor, and with that monitor plus VNC I didn't see a need.

sudo apt-get pure-ftpd vncserver

Then I fire up Filezilla - my preferred FTP client - and FTP the publish output folder from my dotnet publish above. I put the files in a folder off my ~\Desktop.

Then from a terminal I

pi@raspberrypi:~/Desktop/helloworld $ chmod +x raspberrypi

(or whatever the name of your published "exe" is. It'll be the name of your source folder/project with no extension. As this is a self-contained published app, again, all the .NET Core runtime stuff is in the same folder with the app.

pi@raspberrypi:~/Desktop/helloworld $ ./raspberrypi Segmentation fault

The crash was instant...not a pause and a crash, but it showed up as soon as I pressed enter. Shoot.

I ran "strace ./raspberrypi" and got this output. I figured maybe I missed one of the prerequisite libraries, and I just needed to see which one and apt-get it. I can see the ld.so.nohwcap error, but that's a historical Debian-ism and more of a warning than a fatal.

I used to be able to read straces 20 years ago but much like my Spanish, my skills are only good at Chipotle. I can see it just getting started loading libraries, seeking around in them, checking file status, mapping files to memory, setting memory protection, then it all falls apart. Perhaps we tried to do something inappropriate with some memory that just got protected? We are dereferencing a null pointer.

Maybe you can read this and you already know what is going to happen! I did not.

I run it under gdb:

pi@raspberrypi:~/Desktop/WTFISTHISCRAP $ gdb ./raspberrypi GNU gdb (Raspbian 7.7.1+dfsg-5+rpi1) 7.7.1 Copyright (C) 2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This GDB was configured as "arm-linux-gnueabihf". "/home/pi/Desktop/helloworldWRONG/./raspberrypi1": not in executable format: File truncated (gdb)

Ok, sick files?

I called Peter Marcu from the .NET team and we chatted about how he got it working and compared notes.

I was using a Raspberry Pi 2, he a Pi 3. Ok, I'll try a 3. 30 minutes later, new SD card, new burn, new boot, pre-reqs, build, FTP, run, SAME RESULT - segfault.

Weird.

Maybe corruption? Here's a thread about Corrupted Files on Raspbian Jesse 2017-07-05! That's the version I have. OK, I'll try the build of Raspbian from a week before.

30 minutes later, burn another SD card, new boot, pre-reqs, build, FTP, run, SAME RESULT - segfault.

BUT IT WORKS ON PETER'S MACHINE.

Weird.

Maybe a bad nuget.config? No.

Bad daily .NET build? No.

BUT IT WORKS ON PETER'S MACHINE.

Ok, I'll try Ubuntu Mate for Raspberry Pi. TOTALLY different OS.

30 minutes later, burn another SD card, new boot, pre-reqs, build, FTP, run, SAME RESULT - segfault.

What's the common thread here? Ok, I'll try from another Windows machine.

SAME RESULT - segfault.

I call Peter back and we figure it's gotta be prereqs...but the strace doesn't show we're even trying to load any interesting libraries. We fail FAST.

Ok, let's get serious.

We both have Raspberry Pi 3s. Check.

What kind of SD card does he have? Sandisk? Ok, I'll use Sandisk. But disk corruption makes no sense at that level...because the OS booted!

What did he burn with? He used Win32diskimager and I used Etcher. Fine, I'll bite.

30 minutes later, burn another SD card, new boot, pre-reqs, build, FTP, run, SAME RESULT - segfault.

He sends me HIS build of a HelloWorld and I FTP it over to the Pi. SAME RESULT - segfault.

Peter is freaking out. I'm deeply unhappy and considering quitting my job. My kids are going to sleep because it's late.

I ask him what he's FTPing with, and he says WinSCP. I use FileZilla, ok, I'll try WinSCP.

WinSCP's New Session dialog starts here:

I say, WAIT. Are you using SFTP or FTP? Peter says he's using SFTP so I turn on SSH on the Raspberry Pi and SFTP into it with WinSCP and copy over my Hello World.

IT FREAKING WORKS. IMMEDIATELY.

BUT WHY.

I make a folder called Good and a folder called BAD. I copy with FileZilla to BAD and with WinSCP to GOOD. Then I run a compare. Maybe some part of .NET Core got corrupted? Maybe a supporting native library?

pi@raspberrypi:~/Desktop $ diff --brief -r helloworld/ helloworldWRONG/ Files helloworld/raspberrypi1 and helloworldWRONG/raspberrypi1 differ

Wait, WHAT? The executable are different? One is 67,684 bytes and the bad one is 69,632 bytes.

Time for a visual compare.

At this point I saw it IMMEDIATELY.

0D is CR (13) and 0A is LF (10). I know this because I'm old and I've written printer drivers for printers that had both carriages and lines to feed. Why do YOU know this? Likely because you've transferred files between Unix and Windows once or thrice, perhaps with FTP or Git.

All the CRs are gone. From my binary file.

Why?

I went straight to settings in FileZilla:

See it?

Treat files without extensions as ASCII files

That's the default in FileZilla. To change files that are just chilling, minding their own business, as ASCII, and then just randomly strip out carriage returns. What could go wrong? And it doesn't even look for CR LF pairs! No, it just looks for CRs and strips them. Classy.

In retrospect I should have used known this, but it wasn't even the switch to SFTP, it was the switch to an FTP program with different defaults.

This bug/issue whatever burned my whole Monday. But, it'll never burn another Monday, Dear Reader, because I've seen it before now.

FAIL FAST FAIL OFTEN my friends!

Why does experience matter? It means I've failed a lot in the past and it's super useful if I remember those bugs because then next time this happens it'll only burn a few minutes rather than a day.

Go forth and fail a lot, my loves.

Oh, and FTP sucks.

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