Really wish my brother would abuse his friendship with the lone echo devs to get me a free copy of the new one

The Balan Wonderworld demo came out yesterday. If you haven’t been keeping up with this, it’s a game by Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima, two of the original creators of Sonic the Hedgehog. A lot of that original team has gone on to do solo work outside of Sega, but this is the first time two former members of Sonic Team have gotten back together to make a new game.

If the demo is anything to go by, Balan Wonderworld (which I keep trying to type as “Balan Wonderland,” because it has a much nicer rhythm to it) is a game that lives deep in the shadow of NiGHTS into Dreams and Sonic the Hedgehog. It is very clearly trying to be an “Old School Sonic Team” experience, which it... sort of succeeds at, for better and worse.

This feels like a game they ripped straight out of 1995, warts and all, and remastered it with modern-ish graphics. I say “modern-ish” because in broad strokes, I think Balan looks pretty good. The character designs are charming, the level themes are interesting, but if you really stop and look at the game, it’s honestly pretty ugly, with simple lighting, limited detail and blurry textures.

One gets the impression maybe that’s because Balan is on everything -- Playstation, Xbox, PC, and even Switch. The gross texture work could be to squeeze the game down for Nintendo’s handheld, but apparently it runs extremely poorly there. On the PS4 Pro, it sticks pretty closely to 60fps, though there are occasionally hiccups here and there. Nothing worth fretting over, honestly.

But how does it play?

This is where the shadow of Sonic the Hedgehog looms large. Balan is designed to be simplistic to a fault: You get one button to control your character. Or, more specifically, every button on your controller will do the same thing (for the most part). This is right out of the Sonic handbook, as that game was also designed to be operable with only one button, as well.

Now, what your one button does can change. Scattered around levels are different costumes for your character to put on, and each costume has its own unique ability. The full version of Balan promises 80 different costumes, and there’s probably half a dozen in the demo. Each one serves a unique purpose, and some of them don’t even have the ability to jump. Which is fine, mostly, because you can carry a stock of three costumes with you that you can swap between sort of like the team mechanics in Sonic Heroes. Once you finish a level, those costumes get added to your dressing room, allowing you to customize a loadout of costumes at any checkpoint.

On paper, that much sounds fine. But this is where things start getting weird.

Costumes are not freely available to pick up. The jewels that hold costumes are locked with a key. This creates an obvious gameplay loop: find key, unlock costume, use costume to solve puzzle, right? Right.

Except that, at least in the demo, most keys are only a few feet away from any given costume jewel. On top of that, keys respawn. Crack open a costume jewel, grab the costume, but hang out for a little while and eventually the key will reappear. In doing this, you can stock up on keys early on in a level, smoothing out the process of acquiring new costumes as you go. I’m not sure why Balan does this. The time between key respawns is a few seconds too many -- just enough that it starts to feel tedious. But, as far as I can tell, there is no penalty for farming up a bunch of keys from the first key spawn point, either. It’s the worst of both worlds. If it was trying to be convenient, keys would spawn more quickly, but if it was trying to plan puzzles around acquiring keys, you can completely side step that by just waiting it out and hoarding keys early on.

You’ll not only want to hoard keys, but hoard costumes, as well. If you’re unlucky enough to take damage or even die while wearing a costume, it’s gone. You can build up stocks of costumes so you’ll always have spares to pull out of the dressing room, but that requires you to specifically go out of your way to get duplicates and bank them. If you don’t, you might find yourself at a puzzle that requires a specific costume that you simply don’t have anymore. When that happens, your only recourse is to backtrack in the hopes of finding a crystal that contains the costume you need, and characters in Balan aren’t exactly fast moving.

The chances of you losing a costume seem pretty low, admittedly. Balan Wonderworld doesn’t really seem like it’s aiming for anything resembling difficulty. Enemies exist, but only in very small numbers, and they’re easily dispatched. Most of the game is more about exploring the dream-like environments and playing around with the various costume abilities in order to solve basic puzzles.

You aren’t working against a clock, there isn’t a scoring system, and you usually aren’t being graded on your performance. Talking it over with some others, the vibe is that this could be a good game for young children. It requires little in terms of controller dexterity and is generous in every sense of the word.

The primary complaint against that, I guess, is that Balan Wonderworld is a weird game. Like, “Elsa and Spider-man Finger Family Youtube Video” weird. Every level is packed full of gently dancing ghosts that phase out of existence once you get too close to them. They’re all the creatures your costumes are based on, but they don’t exist as NPCs in the world for you to touch and interact with. Like I said, they’re ghosts, and they disappear the moment you get within a few feet. Those same ghosts will suddenly materialize when you touch certain checkpoints, throwing you something of parade. They interrupt the level music and everything just to play their own special celebration song. Move more than a few feet and they will fade back out of existence again, taking their special parade song with them, never to be seen for the rest of the stage.

It lends a strangely “uncanny” feeling to the game. I think the dancing characters are meant to add a sense of carefree fun, but they look like people wearing mascot suits, doing the same basic scripted routine over, and over, and over, for eternity. They don’t look like they’re having fun, they don’t appear to be choreographed to the stage’s music, and yet there they are, eternally dancing the days away. It’s kind of eerie. They were performing before you got here, and they'll keep performing after you leave.

The demo pits you against a single boss, which is notable for being someone who has the same powers you do, but combined and amped up. Seeing the same costume motifs come up in the boss as they draw from the same abilities that you have is actually a really fun idea, and the game rewards you for getting creative and swapping between costumes when you deal damage.

Balan Wonderland is a very odd game, and I’m not sure what to make of it. It took me a while to start wrapping my head around its aesthetic and vibes. It contains shades of something like Super Mario Odyssey to be sure, but it feels like it’s trying to elevate itself above that. Again, it’s a game living deep in the shadow of NiGHTS and Sonic, and in particular, it feels like it borrows NiGHTS’ penchant for putting artistic expression at the top ladder rung. Balan often feels like a very inscrutable sort of game, but in a way that seems to be reaching for some kind of greater meaning beyond simply gameplay. Everything in Balan feels like it might be conveying a message of some sort, even if it’s not immediately apparent. Its ideas do not come from a vacuum.

But here’s the deal: even though a lot of people couldn’t grok NiGHTS into Dreams, I did. I love that game to death. But with Balan Wonderworld, even I’m often left scratching my head. Despite its dead-simple gameplay, it may be just a little too high concept for its own good.

But at the end of the day, it’s not a game I hate. It’s strange, and charming, and even if it feels sort of impenetrably "artistic," at least that makes it interesting. The simple gameplay works its magic, making it an easy game to drop in to even if you don’t necessarily understand what you’re looking at.

Like, what’s the deal with the “Isle o’ Tims” between levels? It kind of has the vibe of a chao garden from Sonic Adventure, but the individual “tims” creatures don’t seem to have statistics or anything like that. You feed them so they crank a wheel, which builds a tower that helps them crank the wheel better. It turns in to a bizarre sort of perpetual motion machine. To what end? I don’t know. And what exactly is Balan himself, anyway? Some of his visual cues call to mind character designs for NiGHTS, but he appears to be a different sort of creature altogether. There’s a rather lengthy intro FMV, as you can no doubt see from the Youtube embed, but it’s more about swirling colors and hyperactive animation than conveying what’s going on or who Balan is. How much of this is even really happening, and how much of it is purely metaphysical? It’s very unclear.

I’ll be interested in seeing how the full version of Balan Wonderworld fares. I get the distinct impression that this will be another NiGHTS -- a game beloved by a core audience of hardcore fans, but shunned for being “too weird” by the populace at large.

I’m not quite sure which group I belong to yet.

MID Review (finally)

Now that I’ve had a while to reflect on MID, I feel like I can give an honest, spoiler-free review. This turned out to be a much more in-depth review than I had planned on doing, but you can just read the italics at the end of each section if you just want the gist.

Controls: Okay, so for like the first fifteen minutes (or however long it takes you to adjust), the controls are frustrating. Once you get used to how to move (and it is still point-and-click), you’ll be fine. The only thing that I still didn’t have a solid grasp of by the end of the game was moving Nancy’s head around with the right mouse button--it might have helped to slow the mouse down for this function. That being said, the controls offer a lot to the game. The environments and navigation feel more realistic, and instead of jumping from scene to scene, Nancy slides through the space. It’s weird at first, but it’s ultimately superior. (Just for kicks, I went back and played a bit of LIE as a comparison, and the jumpy movement felt so weird after the smoothness of MID). Controls get a 8/10 for the steep learning curve and the more realistic movement.

Graphics: They’re not that bad, okay? On high render, the environments actually look really good and the characters are decent (low render is an understandably different story). Given the technical reasons behind the graphics looking as the do (full 3D render here versus painstakingly painted video files before), I don’t think that they’re really that bad. Puzzle renders and zoomed-in items/POIs really shine, appearing arguably better than previous games. It’s also important to consider what SCK/STFD look like compared to SEA--MID obviously looks better than SCK/STFD, but it has room for improvement. Just like the development team refined the graphics on their proprietary engine, they will refine the graphics on Unity over time. Again, looking back to the first three games, there is a huge jump in graphics quality between each game, indicating their ability to improve quickly. I’m willing to best that the next game (yes, I believe there will be a ‘next game’) will look much better than MID, and so on from there. Character renders are not as great, but this, too, is likely to improve and is probably also due to the fact that it’s 3D and not a painted video file. Their movements may be awkward, but the fact that they are mo-cap means that they may improve in future games. The only real gripe I have about the characters is the lack of facial expressions. Graphics get a 7/10 for up-close realism and room for improvement.

Performance: If you have a gaming PC or a relatively new device, you should be golden. The game runs smoothly at high render on my 2018/i7/SSD PC, but has some lagging issues at high render on my 2014/i5/HDD PC (issues that all but disappear by adjusting to low render). For those with older PCs or PCs with less processing-power, you may have to deal with way-off lip-syncs and choppy cut scenes if you also want to see the best possible graphics. The game only crashed once on my older PC (and it was more likely due to unrelated background processes I was running), but the autosave feature prevents crashes from being anything more than a brief annoyance. Performance gets a 6/10 for high requirements and the Sophie’s Choice of graphics or speed.

UI: I love the sleek, full-screen appearance and minimalist inventory/phone bar. If I had to ask for any improvements here, I might suggest that the inventory collapse into a bag icon when it’s not in use. UI gets 10/10 for maximizing space and minimizing distractions.

Environment (independent of graphics): HeR definitely stepped up their game (heh) on this front. While there are arguably no more locations to explore than in SEA, the environment is far more expansive and cohesive. You feel like you are in a small town (Salem), and you have the freedom to explore all the relevant places without jumping around or magically transporting. There’s only one location that is distant from the town center, and Nancy travels via car to get back and forth, which adds a dose of realism. We have our usual forest navigation (though it is mercifully straight-forward, unlike DOG or CAP), with the added bonus of looking around and using it to get from one place to another. The game makes good use of each space, though it’d be nice if there was more to do in certain lesser-used locations. Some of the locations really only seemed to be present to flesh out the whole environment--which is fine--but it’d be nice to utilize those locations a bit more. And when graphics are set high, the environments are quite stunning. The lighting and weather also do a good job of reinforcing the current atmosphere in-game. Environment gets a 9/10 for cohesion and light usage.

Characters (independent of graphics, story): This is probably one of the spots where MID won me over. Not only do we have eleven (11!) official characters, we have background characters that make the setting real! I didn’t count, but there were probably 10+ background characters that were present for minor commentary and realistic liveliness. For the first time in a Nancy Drew game, I wasn’t questioning where the rest of the world was. Yes, their movements were awkward and if your computer couldn’t handle the graphics, then their lips were flapping in mysterious ways, but they moved around and interacted with each other in semi-human ways. It is absolutely baffling to me that there are people who think there were too many characters. For one thing, we as fans asked HeR for more characters and that’s what they gave us. For another, the game never felt crowded. There were seven characters that were considered “main” that you interacted with often, three side characters that you interacted with occasionally, and one character that you only interacted with once. If they hadn’t been fully-formed characters with solid backstories, I might be persuaded that the number was an issue, but almost all of the characters were fully- or mostly-developed. Characters gets a 10/10 for quantity and quality.

Puzzles: This is probably the one facet of the game where it is most clear that HeR listened to fans’ requests. We asked for more realistic puzzles that were integrated into the game play and not totally irrelevant. That’s what we got. For some people, I think this made it seem like there were fewer puzzles, but I think there were just as many as before, it just wasn’t always super obvious that you were solving a puzzle (and they all but eliminated chore-type puzzles). The cooking mini game and serving mini game were both fun, nostalgic time-wasters in the best of ways. Another nice thing about the puzzles was that they weren’t super difficult as long as you were paying attention, so there wasn’t any need to google solutions or get frustrated. Puzzles get a 9/10 for fan service and perception (after all, perception is reality).

Story: MID really shines when it comes to the story line. The game delves into the full history of Salem, rightfully choosing to discuss topics that were always skirted in earlier games (prejudice, discrimination, slavery, torture, etc.). My only issue regarding the presentation of history is that a lot of the learning is optional, and can be easily ignored or missed. The actual story line of the game is well-established and doesn’t have any gaping plot holes (at least that I noticed on my first play through). There are multiple crimes to solve, multiple items to recover, and thus multiple endings/outcomes to achieve. I can’t go into too much more detail without spoiling parts of the game, but suffice it to say that the story has depth and gravity that might even place it ahead of previous games. Story gets a 10/10 for more mature themes and multiple, successfully interweaving story lines.

Dialogue: While the content of the dialogue is great and forms the foundation for much of the story, it loses me in presentation. First, the line-by-line captioning system is awkward at best, and a monologue behind at worst. I see no reason not to present the player with sentences or paragraphs at a time as before. Second, dialogue options are not so much options as dialogue tasks. You have questions you can ask, but there is no choice of how to ask them or how to respond to an answer. For the most part, you are just choosing the order in which to ask things. This, in my opinion, is a step backward from the previous games, where Nancy could be optimistic, pessimistic, direct, or passive-aggressive. Lastly, there is a strange lack of subject in Nancy’s sentence structure at times. She says “should do xyz” instead of “I should do xyz,” or “wanted to ask about abc” instead of “I wanted to ask you about abc.” While this isn’t really too weird in the context of modern speech patterns, it is still a little awkward. There are examples of this in previous games when Nancy speaks to herself, but never in dialogue with other characters. Again, this isn’t a big deal, but it crops up enough to make it noticeably strange. Dialogue gets a 6/10 for solid content and poor presentation.

Music: At first, the music seems to be nothing special; the main theme is quiet, unassuming, and a bit repetitive at times. But much like the rest of the game, it gets better as you progress. The music in Luminous Infusions and at the end of the game really stick out as great pieces, although the rest of the tracks are also very well-composed. There is thematic continuity between tracks and the tracks also reflect the game’s current atmosphere well. The music, while from a new composer, is still reminiscent of the old games, particularly the mystical tracks in CUR. I’m hoping HeR releases a soundtrack for MID in the future, but I do know there are no current plans for an official soundtrack (though you can find unofficial ones on YouTube pretty easily). Music gets a 10/10 for quality and cohesion.

Nancy: Nancy finally sounds like the late teen that she is meant to be! Nancy is witty and assertive, no longer speaking with the voice of a thirty-year-old and expressing the thoughts of a thirteen-year-old. The new voice actress is just what Nancy’s voice needed, in my opinion, though I have admittedly been a supporter of replacing Lani since about DED/GTH (don’t get me wrong, I love Lani and she will always be the classic voice of Nancy in my head, but I could also admit that her voice was losing its spark and pep). It takes a little while to get used to the new voice, but once it stops sounding different, it’s easy to fall in love with. Another great aspect of Nancy 2.0 is that she’s willing to get into it with other characters, even if they are in a position of authority. Nancy has always been an assertive character who stands up for what is right, even if it’s not easy to do. We see the return of this kind of Nancy in MID, and I hope we don’t lose her in future games. The only thing that I found a tad bit odd was how sugar-sweet Nancy was toward Deirdre. I like how their relationship was updated in order to model more appropriate/healthy female friendships, but it is a little weird considering the canon interaction model set forth by ASH and DED. Nancy’s other relationships have also matured and improved. Nancy gets a 10/10 for assertiveness and expressiveness.

Physical Copy: Well, almost two weeks after the release date, I finally got my physical copy of MID. This is unprecedented, as I always received physical pre-orders the day of or even the day before release. The long wait drove me to buy the digital download, which I didn’t mind doing, but this could be very frustrating for those not willing to pay for the game twice. I was disappointed to find that the disc art is just a copy of the cover art (which is minimalist at best), and not a characteristic color like the other games. The box art seems like it was put together at the last minute, not unlike the cover art. If it weren’t for my compulsive need to own all of the physical copies, I probably would have skipped it. Physical copy gets a 1/10 for slow delivery and lackluster appearance.

Weird Things to Complain About: Yes, there is one background character whose voice sounds like it was recorded on a Motorola Razr, but she says one sentence that you don’t even have to listen to. Yes, some of the background characters are overt clones, but we’ve never even had background characters to complain about before. Should there have been more to do in the Hathorne House or other one-off locations? Yeah, probably, but we were given a ton of locales to visit. The characters were always bobbing around and breathing, but--surprise!--this is something that real humans do. Did their feet/hands occasionally meld with other objects or the environment? Sure, but why were you looking at their feet during a conversation? Admittedly, Teegan sometimes looked like she was trying to scare off a bear or prepare for flight, even I can’t argue that that wasn’t odd. But for the most part, these are minor, petty issues. There weren’t gaping plot holes, there was actually a mystery to solve (looking at you, MED), and we got a lot of the things that we asked for over the years. There is always room for improvement, and this game is certainly no exception. I expect that the next game will make refinements based on our feedback and be even better. HeR completely changed the Nancy Drew game formula, but they used our input as a guide. They’ll take what we say about MID into consideration with the next game, and hopefully over time we will see the same level of improvement we saw from SCK to SEA. They started from scratch, and even though they had five years to work on it, the first time you try something new is almost always the worst. I don’t condone the way they treated us over the hiatus or how they treated their own staff, but I don’t think it’s time to abandon ship yet. If you play this game with nostalgia goggles on and a closed mind, you’re going to hate it, you’re going to ask for a refund. If you go into it with an open mind and excitement for something new, you might just find that you like MID more than you’d care to admit. Weird things to complain about gets an 8/10 for minor oddities that should be expected in a pilot endeavor.

Conclusion: Change is inevitable. If you were around when TMB came out, you might remember the absolute uproar that came with the UI change. People threatened to walk away from the series because of the new menu screen and bulkier interface. If you’ve played the original SCK and STFD, then you know how drastically the games improved over the span of a single year. And compare those games to SEA and it’s clear that the games are always improving. But you have to start (or in this case, restart) somewhere, and MID is our new starting point. The games will get better, and we’ll still find things to complain about (like we always do), because there is always room for improvement. There’s no point in lamenting about how good the game would have looked on the old engine, because that misses the point. The old engine could not deliver what we as fans desired. It could not handle more than six characters or more than eight hours (this is being generous) of game play. It couldn’t give us more expansive environments or smoother navigation. The new engine gave us all of these things, but sacrificed a bit of graphics. Big whoop. I’m willing to bet that none of us got into the games for their graphics, especially those of use who became fans early on in the games’ history. Bottom line? HeR gave us a good game. Not their best game, maybe not even one of their better games, but it’s certainly better than MED or SCKR. And hey, at least we finally got the game. Midnight in Salem gets an 80%, an admirable B-, because the effort and progress is there, but there are definitely things that they could have done better.

Growing Pains - Zelda, Tony Hawk, The Sims, games and related memories from my formative years

This blog post is about my personal history with video games, how they influenced me growing up, how they sometimes helped me, and more or less an excuse to write about associated memories with them.

This is a very straightforward intro, because I’ve had this post sitting as a draft for ages, trying to glue all of it cohesively, but I’m not a very good writer, so I never really succeeded. Some of these paragraphs date back at least one year. 

And I figured I should write about a lot of this as long as I still remember clearly, or not too inaccurately. Because I know that I don’t remember my earliest ever memory. I only remember how I remember it. So I might as well help my future self here, and give myself a good memento.

Anyway, the post is a kilometer long, so it’ll be under this cut.

My family got a Windows 95 computer when I was 3 years old. While I don’t remember this personally, I’m told that one of the first things I ever did with it was mess up with the BIOS settings so badly that dad’s computer-expert friend had to be invited to repair it. (He stayed for dinner as a thank you.)

It was that off-white plastic tower, it had a turbo button, and even a 4X CD reader! Wow! And the CRT monitor must have been... I don’t remember what it was, actually. But I do once remember launching a game at a stupidly high resolution: 1280x1024! And despite being a top-down 2D strategy, it ran VERY slowly. Its video card was an ATI Rage. I had no idea what that really meant that at the time, but I do recall that detail nonetheless.

Along with legitimately purchased games, the list of which I can remember:

Tubular Worlds

Descent II

Alone in the Dark I & III

Lost Eden

Formula One (not sure which game exactly)

Heart of Darkness

(and of course the famous Adibou/Adi series of educational games)

... we also had what I realize today were cracked/pirated games, from the work-friend that had set up the family computer. I remember the following:

Age of Empires I (not sure about that one, I think it might have been from a legitimate “Microsoft Plus!” disc)

Nightmare Creatures (yep, there was a PC port of that game)

Earthworm Jim (but without any music)

The Fifth Element

Moto Racer II

There are a few other memorable games, which were memorable in most aspects, except their name. I just cannot remember their name. And believe me, I have looked. Too bad! Anyway, in this list, I can point out a couple games that made a big mark on me.

First, the Alone in the Dark trilogy. It took me a long time to beat them. I still remember the morning I beat the third game. I think it was in 2001 or 2002.

There was a specific death in it which gave me nightmares for a week. You shrink yourself to fit through a crack in a wall, but it’s possible to let a timer run out—or fall down a hole—and this terrifying thing happens (16:03). I remember sometimes struggling to run the game for no reason; something about DOS Extended Memory being too small.

I really like the low-poly flat-shaded 3D + hand-drawn 2D style of the game, and it’d be really cool to see something like that pop up again. After the 8-bit/16-bit trend, there’s now more and more games paying tribute to rough PS1-style 3D, so maybe this will happen? Maybe I’ll have to do it myself? Who knows!

Second, Lost Eden gave me a taste for adventure and good music, and outlandish fantasy universes. Here’s the intro to the game:

A lot of the game is very evocative, especially its gorgeous soundtrack, and you spend a lot of time trekking through somewhat empty renders of landscapes. Despite being very rough early pre-rendered 3D, those places were an incredible journey in my young eyes. If you have some time, I suggest either playing the game (it’s available on Steam) or watching / skimmering through this “longplay” video. Here are some of my personal highlights: 25:35, 38:05, 52:15 (love that landscape), 1:17:20, 1:20:20 (another landscape burned in my neurons), 2:12:10, 2:55:30, 3:01:18. (spoiler warning)

But let’s go a couple years back. Ever since my youngest years, I was very intrigued by creation. I filled entire pocket-sized notebooks with writing—sometimes attempts at fiction, sometimes daily logs like the weather reports from the newspaper, sometimes really bad attempts at drawing. I also filled entire audio tapes over and over and OVER with “fake shows” that my sister and I would act out. The only thing that survived is this picture of 3-year-old me with the tape player/recorder.

It also turns out that the tape recorder AND the shelf have both survived.

(I don’t know if it still works.)

On Wednesday afternoons (school was off) and on the week-ends, I often got to play on the family computer, most of the time with my older brother, who’s the one who introduced me to... well... all of it, really. (Looking back on the games he bought, I can say he had very good tastes.)

Moto Racer II came with a track editor. It was simple but pretty cool to play around with. You just had to make the track path and elevation; all the scenery was generated by the game. You could draw impossible tracks that overlapped themselves, but the editor wouldn’t let you save them. However, I found out there was a way to play/save them no matter what you did, and I got to experiment with crazy glitches. 85 degree inclines that launched the bike so high you couldn’t see the ground anymore? No problem. Tracks that overlapped themselves several times, causing very strange behaviour at the meeting points? You bet. That stuff made me really curious about how video games worked. I think a lot of my initial interest in games can be traced back to that one moment I figured out how to exploit the track editor...

There was also another game—I think it was Tubular Worlds—that came on floppy disks. I don’t remember what exactly lead me to do it, but I managed to edit the text that was displayed by the installer... I think it was the license agreement bit of it. That got me even more curious as to how computers worked.

Up until some time around my 13th or 14th birthday, during summer break (the last days of June to the first days of September for French pupils), my sister and I would always go on vacation at my grandparents’ home.

The very first console game I ever played was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on my cousin’s Super Nintendo, who also usually stayed with us. Unlike us, he had quite a few consoles available to him, and brought a couple along. My first time watching and playing this game was absolutely mind-blowing to me. An adventure with a huge game world to explore, so many mysterious things at every corner. “Why are you a pink rabbit now?” “I’m looking for the pearl that will help me not be that.”

Growing up and working in the games industry has taken the magic out of many things in video games... and my curiosity for the medium (and its inner workings) definitely hasn’t helped. I know more obscure technical trivia about older games than I care to admit. But I think this is what is shaping my tastes in video games nowadays... part of it is that I crave story-rich experiences that can bring me back to a, for lack of a better term, “child-like” wonderment. And I know how weird this is going to sound, but I don’t really enjoy “pure gameplay” games as much for that reason. Some of the high-concept ones are great, of course (e.g. Tetris), but I usually can’t enjoy others without a good interwoven narrative. I can’t imagine I would have completed The Talos Principle had it consisted purely of the puzzles without any narrative beats, story bits, and all that. What I’m getting at is, thinking about it, I guess I tend to value the “narrative” side of games pretty highly, because, to me, it’s one of the aspects of the medium that, even if distillable to some formulas, is inherently way more “vague” and “ungraspable”. You can do disassembly on game mechanics and figure out even the most obsure bits of weird technical trivia. You can’t do that to a plot, a universe, characters, etc. or at least nowhere near to the same extent.

You can take a good story and weave it into a number of games, but the opposite is not true. It’s easy to figure out the inner working of gameplay mechanics, and take the magic out of them, but it’s a lot harder to do that for a story, unless it’s fundamentally flawed in some way.

Video games back then seemed a lot bigger than they actually were.

I got Heart of Darkness as a gift in 1998 or 1999. We used to celebrate Christmas at my grandparents’, so I had to wait a few days to be back home, and to able to put the CD in the computer. But boy was it worth it! Those animated cutscenes! The amazing pixel art animations! The amazing and somewhat disturbing variety of ways in which you can die, most of which gruesome and mildly graphic! And of course, yet again... a strange and outlandish universe that just scratches my itch for it. Well, one of which that forged my taste for them.

I can’t remember exactly when it happened or what it was, but I do remember that at some point we visited some sort of... exposition? Exhibit? Something along those lines. And it had a board games & computer games section. The two that stick out in my mind were Abalone (of which I still have the box somewhere) and what I think was some sort of 2D isometric (MMO?) RPG. I wanna say it was Ultima Online but I recall it looking more primitive than that (it had small maps whose “void” outside them was a single blueish color). 

In my last two years of elementary school, there was one big field trip per year. They lasted two weeks, away from family. The first one was to the Alps. The second one was... not too far from where I live now, somewhere on the coast of Brittany! I have tried really hard to find out exactly where it was, as I remember the building and facilities really well, but I was never able to find it again. On a couple occasions, we went on a boat with some kind of... algae harvesters? The smell was extremely strong (burning itself into my memory) and made me sick. The reason I bring them up is because quite a few of my classmates had Game Boy consoles, most of them with, you know, all those accessories, especially the little lights. I remember being amazed at the transparent ones. Play was usually during the off-times, and I watched what my friends were up to, with, of course, a bit of jealousy mixed in. The class traveled by bus, and it took off in the middle of the night; something like 3 or 4 in the morning? It seemed like such a huge deal at the time! Now here I am, writing THESE WORDS at 03:00. Anyway, most of my classmates didn’t fall back asleep and those that had a Game Boy just started playing on them. One of my classmates, however, handed me his whole kit and I got to do pretty much what I wanted with it, with the express condition that I would not overwrite any of his save files. I remember getting reasonably far in Pokémon before I had to give it back to him and my progress was wiped.

During the trip to the Alps, I remember seeing older kids paying for computer time; there was a row of five computers in a small room... and they played Counter-Strike. I had absolutely no idea what it was, and I would forget about it until the moment I’m writing these words, but I was watching with much curiosity.

The first time I had my own access to console games was in 2001. The first Harry Potter film had just come out, and at Christmas, I was gifted a Game Boy Advance with the first official game. I just looked it up again and good god, it’s rougher than I remember. The three most memorable GBA games which I then got to play were both Golden Sun(s) and Sword of Mana... especially the latter, with its gorgeous art direction. My dad had a cellphone back then, and I remember sneakily going on there to look up a walkthrough for a tricky part of Golden Sun’s desert bit. Cellphones had access to something called “WAP” internet... very basic stuff, but of course still incredible to me back then.

I eventually got to play another Zelda game on my GBA: Link’s Awakening DX. I have very fond memories of that one because I was bed-ridden with a terrible flu. My fever ran so high that I started having some really funky dreams, delirious half-awake hallucinations/feelings, and one night, I got so hot that I stumbled out of bed and just laid down against the cold tile of the hallway. At 3 in the morning! A crazy time! (Crazy for 11-year-old me.)

(The fever hallucinations were crazy. My bedroom felt like it was three times at big, and I was convinced that a pack of elephants were charging at me from the opposite corner. The “night grain” of my vision felt sharper, amplified. Every touch, my sore body rubbing against the bed covers felt like it was happening twice as much. You know that “Heavy Rain with 300% facial animation” video? Imagine that, but as a feverish feeling. The dreams were on another level entirely. I could spend pages on them, but suffice to say that’s when I had my first dream where I dreamed of dying. There were at least two, actually. The first one was by walking down a strange, blueish metal corridor, then getting in an elevator, and then feeling that intimate convinction that it was leading me to passing over. The second one was in some Myst-like world, straight out of a Roger Dean cover, with some sort of mini-habitat pods floating on a completely undisturbed lake. We were just trapped in them. It just felt like some kind of weird afterlife.)

I also eventually got to play the GBA port of A Link To The Past. My uncle was pretty amused by seeing me play it, as he’d also played the original on SNES before I’d even been born. I asked him for help with a boss (the first Dark World one), but unfortunately, he admitted he didn’t remember much of the game.

We had a skiing holiday around this time. I don’t remember the resort’s or the town’s name, but its sights are burned in my memory. Maybe it’s because, shortly after we arrived, and we went to the ski rental place, I almost fainted and puked on myself, supposedly from the low oxygen. It also turned out that the bedroom my parents had rented unexpectedly came with a SNES in the drawer under the tiny TV. The game: Super Mario World. I got sick at one point and got to stay in and play it. This was also the holiday where I developed a fondness for iced tea, although back then the most common brand left an awful aftertaste in your mouth that just made you even more thirsty.

We got a new PC in December of 2004. Ditching the old Windows 98 SE (yep, the OS had been upgraded in... 2002, I think?). Look at how old-school this looks. The computer office room was in the basement. Even with the blur job that I applied to the monitor for privacy reasons, you can still tell that this is the XP file explorer:

A look at what the old DSLR managed to capture on the shelf reveals some more of the games that were available to me back then: a bunch of educational software, The Sims 2, and SpellForce Gold. 

I might be misremembering but I think they were our Christmas gifts for that year; we both got to pick one game. I had no idea what I wanted, really, but out of all the boxes at (what I think was) the local Fnac store, it was SpellForce that stood out to me the most. Having watched Lord of the Rings the year prior might have been a factor. I somewhat understood Age of Empires years before that, but SpellForce? Man, I loved the hell out of SpellForce. Imagine a top-down RPG that can also be played from a third-person perspective. And with the concept of... hero units... wait a second... now that reminds me of Dota.

Imagine playing a Dota hero with lots of micro-management and being able to build a whole base on new maps. And sometimes visiting very RPG-ish sections (my favorites!) with very little top-down strategy bits, towns, etc. like Siltbreaker. I guess this game was somewhat like an alternate, single-player Dota if you look at it from the right angle. (Not the third-person one.)

I do remember being very excited when I found out that it, too, came with a level editor. I never figured it out, though. I only ever got as far as making a nice landscape for my island, and that was it!

A couple weeks after, it was Christmas; my sister and I got our first modern PC game: The Sims 2. It didn’t run super well—most games didn’t, because the nVidia GeForce FX 5200 wasn’t very good. But that didn’t stop me or my sister from going absolutely nuts with the game. This video has the timestamp of 09 January 2005, and it is the first video I’ve ever made with a computer. Less than two weeks after we got the game, I was already neck-deep in creating stuff.

Not that it was particularly good, of course. This is a video that meets all of the “early YouTube Windows Movie Maker clichés”.

Speaking of YouTube, I did register an account there pretty early on, in August of 2006. I’ve been through all of it. I remember every single layout change. I also started using Sony Vegas around that time. It felt so complex and advanced back then! And I’m still using it today. Besides Windows, Vegas Pro is very likely to be the piece of software that I’ve been using for the longest time.

I don’t have a video on YouTube from before 2009, because I decided to delete all of them out of embarassment. They were mostly Super Mario 64 machinima. It’s as bad as it sounds. The reason I bring that up right now, though, is that it makes the “first” video of my account the last one I made with the Sims 2.

But before I get too far ahead with my early YouTube days, let me go backwards a bit. We got hooked up to the Internet some time in late 2005. It was RTC (dialup), 56 kbps. my first steps into the Internet led me to the Cube engine. Mostly because back then my dad would purchase computer magazines (which were genuinely helpful back then), and came with CDs of common downloadable software for those without Internet connections. One of them linked to Cube. I think it was using either this very same screenshot, or a very similar one, on the same map.

The amazing thing about Cube is not only that it was open-source and moddable, but had map editing built-in the game. The mode was toggled on with a single key press. You could even edit maps cooperatively with other people. Multiplayer mapping! How cool is that?! And the idea of a game that enabled so much creation was amazing to me, so I downloaded it right away. (Over the course of several hours, 30 MiB being large for dialup.)

I made lots of bad maps that never fulfilled the definition of “good level” or “good gameplay”, not having any idea how “game design” meant, or what it even was. But I made places. Places that I could call my own. “Virtual homes”. I still distinctively remember the first map I ever made, even though no trace of it survives to this day. In the second smallest map size possible, I’d made a tower surrounded by a moat and a few smaller cozy towers, with lots of nice colored lighting. This, along with the distinctive skyboxes and intriguing music, made me feel like I’d made my home in a strange new world.

At some point later down the line, I made a kinda-decent singleplayer level. It was very linear, but one of the two lead developers of the game played it and told me he liked it a lot! Of course, half of that statement was probably “to be nice”, but it was really validating and encouraging. And I’m glad they were like that. Because I remember being annoying to some other mappers in the Sauerbraten community (the follow-up to Cube, more advanced technically), who couldn’t wrap their heads around my absolutely god awful texturing work and complete lack of level “design”. Honestly, sometimes, I actually kinda feel like trying to track a couple of them down and being like, “yeah, remember that annoying kid? That was me. Sorry you had to deal with 14-year-old me.”

At some point, I stumbled upon a mod called Cube Legends. It was a heavily Zelda-inspired “total conversion”; a term reserved for mods that are the moddiest mods and try to take away as much of the original foundation as possible. It featured lots of evocative MIDI music by the Norwegian composer Bjørn Lynne. Fun fact: the .mid files are still available officially from his website!

This was at the crossroad of many of my interests. It was yet another piece of the puzzle. As a quick side note, this is why Zelda is the first series that I name in the title of this post, even though I... never really thought of myself as a Zelda fan. It’s not that it’s one of the game series that I like the most, it’s just that, before I started writing this, I’d never realized how far-reaching its influence had been in my life, both in overt and subtle ways, especially during my formative years.

And despite how clearly unfinished, how much of a “draft” Cube Legends was, I could see what it was trying to do. I could see the author’s intent. And I’m still listening to Bjørn Lynne’s music today.

The Cube Engine and its forums were a big part of why I started speaking English so well. Compared to most French people, I mean. We’re notoriously bad with the English language, and so was I up until then. But having this much hands-on practice proved to be immensely valuable. And so, I can say that the game and its community have therefore had long-lasting impacts in my life.

I also tried out a bunch of N64 games via emulation, bringing me right back in that bedroom at my grandparents’ house, with my cousin. Though he did not have either N64 Zelda game back then.

The first online forum I ever joined was a Zelda fan site’s. There are two noteworthy things to say here:

It was managed by a woman who, during my stay in the community, graduated from her animation degree. At this stage I had absolutely no idea that this was going to be the line of work I would eventually pursue!

I recently ran into the former head moderator of the forums. (I don’t know when the community died.) One of the Dota players on my friends list invited him because I was like “hmm, I wanna go as 3, not as 2 players today”. His nickname very vaguely reminded me of something, a weird hunch I couldn’t place. Half an hour into the game, he said “hey Max... this might be a long shot, but did you ever visit [forum]?” and then I immediately yelled “OH MY GOD—IT IS YOU.” The world is a small place.

Access to the computer was sometimes tricky. I didn’t always have good grades, and of course, “punishment” (not sure the word is appropriate, hence the quotes, but you get the idea) often involved locking me out of the computer room. Of course, most times, I ended up trying to find the key instead. I needed my escape from the real world.  (You better believe it’s Tangent Time.)

I was always told I was the “smart kid”, because I “understood things faster” than my classmates. So they made me skip two grades ahead. This made me enter high school at nine years old. The consequences were awful (I was even more of the typical nerdy kid that wouldn’t fit in), and I wish it had never happened. Over the years, I finally understood: I wasn’t more intelligent. I merely had the chance to have been able to grow up with an older brother who’d instilled a sense of curiosity, critical thinking, and taste in books that were ahead of my age and reading level. This situation—and its opposite—is what I believe accounts for the difference in how well kids get to learn. It’s not innate talent, it’s not genetics (as some racists would like you to believe). It’s parenting and privilege.

And that’s why I’ll always be an outspoken proponent for any piece of media that tries to instill critical thinking and curiosity in its viewer, reader, or player.

But I digress.

Well, I’ve been digressing a lot, really, but games aren’t everything and after all, this post is about the context in which I played those games. Otherwise I reckon I would’ve just made a simple list.

I eventually got a Nintendo DS for Christmas, along with Mario Kart DS. My sister had gotten her own just around the time when it released... she had the Nintendogs bundle. We had also upgraded to proper ADSL, what I think was about a ~5 megabits download speed. The Nintendo DS supported wi-fi, which was still relatively rare compared to today. In fact, Nintendo sold a USB wireless adapter to help with that issue—our ISP-supplied modem-router did not have any wireless capabilities. I couldn’t get it the adapter work and I remember I got help from a really kind stranger who knew a lot about networking—to a point that it seemed like wizardry to me.

I remember I got a “discman” as a gift some time around that point. In fact, I still have it. Check out the stickers I put on it! I think those came from the Sims 2 DVD box and/or one of its add-ons.

I burned a lot of discs. In fact, in the stack of burned CDs/DVDs that I found (with the really bad Sims movies somewhere in there), I found at least three discs that had the Zelda album Hyrule Symphony burned in, each with different additional tracks. Some were straight-up MIDI files from vgmusic.com...! And speaking (again) of Zelda, when the Wii came out, Twilight Princess utterly blew my mind. I never got the game or the console, but damn did I yearn badly for it. I listened to the main theme of the game a lot, which didn’t help. I eventually got to play the first few hours at a friend’s place.

At some point, we’d upgraded the family computer to something with a bit more horsepower. It had a GeForce 8500 GT inside, which was eventually upgraded to a 9600 GT after the card failed for some reason. It could also dual-boot between XP and Vista. I stuck with that computer until 2011.

We moved to where I currently live in 2007. I’ve been here over a decade! And before we’d even fully finished unpacking, I was on the floor of the room that is now my office, with the computer on the ground and the monitor on a cardboard box, playing a pirated copy of... Half-Life! It was given to me by my cousin. It took me that long to find out about the series. It’s the first Valve game I played. I also later heard about the Orange Box, but mostly about Portal. Which I also pirated and played. I distinctly remember being very puzzled by the options menu: I thought it was glitched or broken, as changing settings froze the game. Turns out the Source engine had to chug for a little while, like a city car in countryside mud, as it reloaded a bunch of stuff. Patience is a virtue...

But then, something serious happened.

In the afternoon of 25 December 2007, I started having a bit of a dull stomach pain. I didn’t think much of it. Figured maybe I’d eaten too many Christmas chocolates and it’d go away. It didn’t. It progressively deteriorated into a high fever where I had trouble walking and my tummy really hurt; especially if you pressed on it. My parents tried to gently get me to eat something nice on New Year’s Eve, but it didn’t stay in very long. I could only feed myself with lemonade and painkiller. Eventually, the doctor decided I should get blood tests done as soon as possible. And I remember that day very clearly.

I was already up at 6:30 in the morning. Back then, The Daily Show aired on the French TV channel Canal+, so I was watching that, lying in the couch while waiting for my mom to get up and drive me to my appointment, at 7:00. It was just two streets away, but there was no way I could walk there. At around noon, the doctor called and told my mom: “get your son to the emergency room now.”

Long story short, part of my intestines nuked themselves into oblivion, causing acute peritonitis. To give you an idea, that’s something with a double-digit fatality rate. Had we waited maybe a day or two more, I would not be here writing this. They kind of blew up. I had an enormous abcess attached to a bunch of my organs. I had to be operated on with only weak local anaesthetics as they tried to start draining the abscess. It is, to date, by far the most painful thing that has ever happened to me. It was bad enough that the hospital doctor that was on my case told me that I was pretty much a case worthy to be in textbooks. I even had medical students come into my hospital room about it! They were very nice.

This whole affair lasted over a month. I became intimately familiar with TV schedules. And thankfully, I had my DS to keep me company. At the time, I was pretty big into the Tony Hawk DS games. They were genuinely good. They had extensive customization, really great replayability, etc. you get the idea. I think I even got pretty high on the online leaderboards at some point. I didn’t have much to do on some days besides lying down in pain while perfecting my scoring and combo strategies. I think Downhill Jam might’ve been my favorite.

My case was bad enough that they were unable to do something due to the sad state of my insides during the last surgery of my stay. I was told that I could come back in a few months for a checkup, and potentially a “cleanup” operation that would fix me up for good. I came back in late June of 2008, got the operation, and... woke up in my hospital room surrounded by, like, nine doctors, and hooked up to a morphine machine that I could trigger on command. Apparently something had gone wrong during the operation, but they never told me what. I wasn’t legally an adult, so they didn’t have to tell me. I suspect it’s somewhere in some medical files, but I never bothered to dig up through my parents’ archives, or ask the hospital. And I think I would rather not know. But anyway, that was almost three more weeks in the hospital. And it sucked even more that time because, you see, hospital beds do not “breathe” like regular beds do. The air can’t go through. Let’s say I’m intimately familiar with the smell of back sweat forever.

When I got out, my mom stopped by a supermarket on the way home. And that is when I bought The Orange Box, completely on a whim, and made my Steam account. Why? Because it was orange and stood out on the shelf.

(As a side note, that was the whole bit I started writing first, and that made me initially title this post “growing pains”. First, because I’m bad at titles. Second, because not that I didn’t have them otherwise (ow oof ouch my knees), but that was literally the most painful episode of my entire life thus far and it ended in a comically-unrelated, high-impact, life-changing decision. Just me picking up The Orange Box after two awful hospital stays... led me to where I am today.)

While I was recovering, I also started playing EarthBound! Another bit of a life-changer, that one. To a lesser extent, but still. I was immediately enamored by its unique tone. Giygas really really really creeped me out for a while afterwards though. I still get unsettled if I hear its noises sometimes.

I later bought Garry’s Mod (after convincing my mom that it was a “great creative toolbox that only cost ten bucks!”), and, well, the rest is history. By which I mean, a lot of my work and gaming activity since 2009 is still up and browsable. But there are still a few things to talk about.

In 2009, I bought my first computer with YouTube ad money: the Asus eee PC 1005HA-H. By modern standards, it’s... not very powerful. The processor in my current desktop machine is nearly 50 times as fast as its Atom N280. It had only one gigabyte of RAM, Windows 7 Basic Edition, and an integrated GPU barely worthy of the name; Intel didn’t care much for 3D in their chips back then. The GMA 945 didn’t even have hardware support for Transform & Lighting.

But I made it work, damn it. I made that machine run so much stuff. I played countless Half-Life and Half-Life 2 mods on it—though, due to the CPU overhead on geometry, some of those were trickier. I think one of the most memorable ones I played was Mistake of Pythagoras; very surreal, very rough, but I still remember it so clearly. I later played The Longest Journey on it, in the middle of winter. It was a very cozy and memorable experience. (And another one that’s an adventure wonderful outlandish alien universe. LOVE THOSE.)

I did more than playing games on it, though...

This is me sitting, sunburned on the nose, in an apartment room, on 06 August 2010. This was in the Pyrénées, at the border between France and Spain. We had a vacation with daily hiking. Some of the landscapes we visited reminded me very strongly of those from Lost Eden, way up the page...

So, you see, I had 3ds Max running on that machine. The Source SDK as well. Sony Vegas. All of it was slow; you bet I had to use some workarounds to squeeze performance out of software, and that I had to keep a close, watchful eye on RAM usage. But I worked on this thing. I really did! I animated this video’s facial animation bits (warning: this is old & bad) on the eee PC, during the evenings of the trip, when we were back at our accomodation. The Faceposer tool in the Source SDK really worked well on that machine.

I also animated an entire video solely on the machine (warning: also old and bad). It had to be rendered on the desktop computer... but every single bit of the animation was crafted on the eee PC.

I made it work.

Speaking of software that did not run well: around that time, I also played the original Crysis. The “but can it run Crysis?” joke was very much justified back then. I had to edit configuration files by hand so that I could run the game in 640x480... because I wanted to keep most of the high-end settings enabled. The motion blur was delicious, and it blew my mind that the effect made the game feel this smooth, despite wobbling around in the 20 to 30 fps range.

Alright. It’s time to finish writing this damn post and publish it at last, so I’m going to close it out by listing some more memories and games that I couldn’t work in up there.

Advance Wars. Strategy game on GBA with a top-down level editor. You better believe I was all over the editor right away.

BioShock. When we got the 2007 desktop computer, it was one of the first games I tried. Well, its demo, to be precise. Its tech and graphics blew my mind, enough that I saved up to buy the full game. This was before I had a Steam account; I got a boxed copy! I think it might have been the last boxed game I ever bought? It had a really nice metal case. The themes and political messages of the game flew way over my head, though.

Mirror’s Edge. The art direction was completely fascinating to me, and it introduced me to Solar Fields’ music; my most listened artist this decade, by a long shot.

L.A. Noire. I lost myself in its stories and investigations, and then, I did it all again, with my sister at the helm. I very rarely play games twice (directly or indirectly), which I figure is worth mentioning.

Zeno Clash. It was weird and full of soul, had cool music, and cool cutscenes. It inspired me a lot in my early animation days.

Skyward Sword. Yep, going back to Zelda on that one. The whole game was pretty good, and I’m still thinking about how amazing its art direction was. Look up screenshots of it running in HD on an emulator... it’s outstanding. But there’s a portion of the game that stands tall above the rest: the Lanayru Sand Sea. It managed to create a really striking atmosphere in many aspects, through and through. I still think about it from time to time, especially when its music comes on in shuffle mode.

Wandersong. A very recent pick, but it was absolutely a life-changing one. That game is an anti-depressant, a vaccine against cynicism, a lone bright and optimist voice.

I realize now this is basically a “flawed but interesting and impactful games” list. With “can establish its atmosphere very well” as a big criteria. (A segment of video games that is absolutely worth exploring.)

I don’t know if I’ll ever make my own video game. I have a few ideas floating around and I tried prototyping some stuff, though my limited programming abilities stood in my way. But either way, if it happens one day, I hope I’ll manage to channel all those years of games into the CULMINATION OF WHAT I LIKE. Something along those lines, I reckon.

Modest Media Game Reviews Sonic Series Extravaganza        Sonic Spinball

Game – Sonic Spinball Year of release – 1993 Developer – Sega Publisher – Sega Genre – Pinball platformer Rated – Everyone Platform- Mega Drive/Sega genesis, game gear, Virtual Console, PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, Xbox, PC, Game Boy Advance, iOS devices, PS3, Xbox 360 For all sakes and purposes I am playing the genesis version available on the genesis collection for ps3.

Sonic Spinball, one of the first of many weird Sonic spinoff titles. This game is often overlooked and ignored by Sonic fans. This is most likely due to its status as a spinoff and not a mainstream sonic game. Sonic goes on a pinball themed adventure in an attempt to stop Dr. Robotnik once again. Four large levels and some surprises await the blue blur. Is this game bad? Is it good? Lets find out.

Gameplay – Average at best and annoying at worst. This game is a pinball style platformer of sorts. The general concept of a pinball themed adventure is unique. Given Sonics affinity for rolling into a ball this seems like it would be a good idea. Now as for the game itself, Sonic will spend most of his time in the air at the mercy of physics. He will often bounce off enemies and obstacles and get thrown around each zone like a ragdoll. While in the air the player has limited control over Sonic’s movements, you can somewhat sway him left or right to get to where you want to go. The only way to stop is to land of a flat surface which is rare. If Sonic falls into the pit between the bumpers, then in most cases that’s a game over. This game does require skill, but also seems a bit to random in its nature. The game is short and only spans through 4 different levels, each with an end boss. These levels all have their own gimmick but act fundamentally identical to one another. Between levels there is a mini-game that can be played for more points, some cool cameos are seen here as well. In my opinion this game can be difficult to control and frustrating to line up the shots and get Sonic to where you want him to be. I wouldn’t say its bad, but I would say it’s more so on the mediocre side. Score – 13/20

Graphics – The graphics are fine but are more drab and dull when compared to previous games.  Sonic looks a bit lower quality and many of the enemies look cartoony and goofy when compared to the main series. Dr. Robotnik and his machines look rather terrifying. Levels are diverse in color schemes and said colors fit the theme of the level. However, it still just feels off. Score – 7/10

Story – The game features a story that does slightly impact the game, so I am counting it. The plot is the general plot of Dr. Robotnik stealing the chaos emeralds and Sonic going to stop him. The game tries to tie into the Sonic SatAM cartoon series which was popular at the time. These tie ins include the Mt. Mobius, as Sonic’s home world in the cartoon and comics is called Mobius. Some other tie ins include cameos of characters from the Archie series including princess Sally. The robotocizer, a device that turns animals into robots is present as well. Some contradictions arise as well, part of the game is of course getting the chaos emeralds. There are about 10 emeralds now and they are all blue. Since the emeralds are mandatory to complete the game, it counts as a story element. This game’s story while not splendid is alright given the time. If not somewhat contrary to the established lore. Score – 6/10

Replay Value – Low. The game offers no secrets, no post game bonuses or extras. Everything that this game has to offer is mandatory and thus you will see all the game can give in one playthrough. Unless you have a desire to play it again for nostalgia or to get a high score. Though of all the sonic games for the genesis this is the one I return to the least. Score – 2/5

Music – The music is somewhat ok, but not as good as previous sonic games. The game gives off a funkier and techno themed songs. So even though its funky and jazzy, its not as diverse or memorable as the original sonic trilogy and the songs tend to blend together. While it has some good tracks, some can be ear grating. One infamous example is the options/game over results screen song.  This is perhaps one of my least favorite sonic osts. I will repeat that its not a bad ost, but it’s not as memorable or well composed as the other genesis games. The games sound effects are not that good either, with a lot of them frankly being painful to listen too. Score – 3/5

Overall – A quirky spin off that tried something new. It tried to be original and I give it praise for that. However, this game was clearly an afterthought. You can tell that not as much work was put into this as say, sonic 3. While I think this game is not of the highest quality, I would not say its bad. If you are a sonic fan or a fan of pinball you might find enjoyment in this title. I would say try it, if you can beat the first level then you know how the game is in terms of quality. Final Score – 6.2/10  - So-So

One thing this game did good – The levels do look diverse and unique.

Here’s my little Fallout New Vegas modding guide

Modding new vegas is a bit more tricky than some other stuff because it recquires some very specific out of date stuff and manual handling sometimes. Remind yourself that sometimes if a mod isn’t 100% working it’s because the rar file came with a loose file you need to specifically put in the folders rather than just using a mod manager to load it.

Important things to install:

FOMM - I learned the hard way that NMM although more accessible is very weak, FOMM is strong and overwrites permissions, actually being able to install mods properly, sometimes NMM won’t even install textures because it didn’t get all of the permissions or something.

NVSE - It’s a way to extend the limited engine of New Vegas, it is an exe file and loader that opens New Vegas, if you have it extracted to your Data folder you’ll have FOMM have a “launch NVSE” in it. You’ll need this to practically run anything. 

Mod Configuration Menu - Neccessary to configure many mods, sometimes other mods overlap with this by trying to insert their own version of MCM, just fix that by re-activating this mod in the end.

Anything else will probably be recommended by Nexus before you download something.

Mods I recommend:

Solid Project - Do you like Fallout 4′s little tweaks but like a sane person know it’s a badly designed and paced game? Well There’s something called “Solid Project” that does a lot more than that, it adds a few Fallout 4 mechanics but most importantly goes well with “enhanced camera” and gives you animations of going out to open doors, climb ladders and pick up things with your hands! 

It also has a super useful weapon wheel (that you activate with mouse3) that you equip each slot with R and a quick inventory you can leave with K, the little item menu reminds me of Tomb Raider for PS1. Oh and each special item you pick up spins around in 3D, there’s a lot more too like the dynamic quest markers from Fallout 4 but unlike Fallout 4 you cannot un-mark a quest so you’ll have to get a empty quest mod called “The Quest” in case you don’t want “300meters afar” always on your screen.

 All it’s missing is the quick menu from Fallout 4 which is found seperate but is a must-have to anyone wanting some more fast gameplay: Fallout 4 Quicklook

Roleplayers Alternative Start - Start in a shed where you can customize your character a little more quicker and even give them some backstory that can give some extra stats. It might be a bit weird because the pacing of New Vegas is specifically done in such a way that makes you start in Doc Mitchell for your own good, it might put you somewhere where you are underleveled but if that bugs you, you can practically start in the same place rather than randomly.

FOOK - The only overhaul mod I seem to use fully, it changes the little things in games such as making items change their stats, it’s not too unfair, the changes are fairly little and it’s usually stuff like “why does this item not do this” and this game does it, it also fixes a lot of bugs, adds a few items and changes the texture for the stimpack.

As far as overhaul mods go, this one’s fairly simple and runs well with all of the other mods I ran, unlike other overhaul mods where you can only run them alone for a seperate playthrough. It’s important to note that this overhaul mod comes in 2 files, you need the esm file and the data file, run both or else you’ll have missing textures and a lot of issues.

Project NEVADA - The most recommended overhaul one, keep in mind that after installing you have to manually activate the esm files. In terms of immersion it gives you that cool visor vision that might annoying for many, and it does kind of make the HUD stuff stuck in place which nullifies aHub a little bit (talk about later), but it does improve stuff like FPS mechanics like a grenade button (G). 

I dissagree with the re-balance esm file though so I recommend disabling it since I’m too used to everything New Vegas. If you add this mod and realistic headshots, the slowmo function where you press C to slow down time gets REALLY fun and challenging, changes the whole game into a more strategic FPS game rather than a RPG one.

NVEC Complete - Considering how finnicky New Vegas is sometimes when it comes to adding a lot of mods without them clashing and overloading the engine, NVEC Complete is a easy way to just bundle everything toghether. It’s a exe file that installs a compilation of some of the best user-made mods that you can turn off in the mod configuration menu. There is a lot to cover here but it includes most famous quest mods.

Blind - Wanna make New Vegas look like more of an RPG? How about numbers popping out showcasing how much damage you make? If some specific numbers coming out of specific places annoy you, you can just disable them in the MCM. I don’t like the “heal” effects, I just want the damage numbers on enemies, I never knew my fists only did 1 HP of damage towards radscorpions before this.

Textures and other aesthetics:

NMCs_Texture_Pack - Honestly this has probably been used by about everyone, it is THE texture pack everyone uses, comes in 3 big 1gb files, takes a while to load them in FOMM but they do make everything look nice.

Wasteland Flora Overhaul - Based on an actual study of the flora of Vegas, and considering New Vegas is nuclear missile hit free, it’s realistic that New Vegas would actually look like this. Also the textures are very nice and I really like the plants.

A Familiar Friend - Pip-Boy 2500 - This really makes the pip boy more interesting and it makes me feel more connected to the classic Fallouts, in fact a lot of the replacements or additions I have in textures is making the game feel like more of a original Fallout and that Fallout 3 never happened, stuff like:  Classic Adobe Buildings is great because it’s more true to the lore.

Fonts:

Fallout Classic Fonts  To spice up your new experience you may want a new font because Fallout’s New Vegas font is kind of ugly after a while, I use “Fallout Classic fonts”, keep in mind that you do have to follow extra instructions on how to set a new font, you need to go to Fallout.ini in your “my games” folder and edit the [Fonts]. Usually there’s a text file to help this process, also I’m pretty sure most font mods can only be loaded through FMM. 

HUD:

aHud is a must (Or it’s upgraded counterpart if you want more:  One HUD - oHUD that includes more features), you can organize your hud that way, you can get some custom huds, the one I use is cellHUD which is a bit finnicky because one of the versions of that HUD is the main file needed for the second version (install the non-icon version then icon if you want the icon version).

Also I’m pretty sure (or at least mine) custom HUDS do not erase text such as “HP” or “AP”,  you'll need to edit  \Steam\steamapps\common\Fallout New Vegas\Data\Textures\Interface\interfaceshared0.dds ...A dds file is something you can edit like an image. Nevermind you will never get the HP text out of your hud apparently? 

Animations:

Get Enhanced Camera, seriously, it’s very cute to always look down and see your body, it sometimes clashes with other animations but just keep your head up if you are doing common FPS things like the pick up animation from Solid Project.

I use Weapon Animation Replacers - Enhanced Camera compatibility pack, it makes me feel as if I’m in the game or something.  (The Mod kind of is broken combined with other mods that use animations) It’s not everyone’s cup of tea in FPS games because the weapon is realistically low and cannot be seen all the time unless you are aiming down it’s scopes. Be sure to copy  NVSE_EhancedCamera.ini in the rare towards the NVSE plugins folder in New Vegas’s data and you won’t have a wonky body with no arms. If anything follow the good instructions on their page.

ENB:

If you got a PC that can run Nier Automata in it’s lowest settings chances are you have a PC that can run a pretty neatly modded beautiful New Vegas that adds modarn things like better shadowing, a fancy depth of field. I recommend installing an ENB for last because some say that it might cause issues while you are configuring mods and cause them all to crash? 

So your ENB only starts working when you see in the corner your graphic card information at the start, to be able to do this you gotta follow instructions very clearly (usually each ENB you get has it’s own easy to follow install instructions), and be sure to get d3d9.dll from the latest version: enbseries_falloutnv_v0322, or else your ENB won’t work.

Add to enblocal: in my case it is “VideoMemorySizeMb=8192″ (the ENBlocal should be the ENB pack you installed from Nexus or something, unless it won’t have this option), you can put your graphic card ram in there or just put 0 if you want to skip this entirely?

Important: Go into the New Vegas Launcher and turn off anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, HDR needs to be checked, go into Advanced and turn off Depth of Field, Water Displacement off, you need to do this because the ENB reprograms this things, now when you use the new vegas launcher your fallout.ini file becomes read only again, so do the fallout.ini stuff (like the fonts). 

You’ll know you’ve hit your limit when certain mods just do not respond anymore. The most obvious sign would be lack of custom HUD if you are using one. Considering New Vegas loads fairly fast, it shouldn’t be that painful to test each mod individually. 

Anyways I got kind of lazy with this post so I’m just going to show a list of my mods since the rest is fairly obvious:

Some Stuff I had in NMM which might be the reason why they’re not 100% working unlike the ones I put in FOMM. 

Mod Gta San Andreas For Mac

San Andreas is arguably the best Grand Theft Auto game ever made.

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GTA San Andreas Mac 11 'Converted' Mod was downloaded 5233 times and it has 10.00 of 10 points so far. Download it now for GTA San Andreas!

But with the game being so many years old, it’s only natural for players to look for mods in order to spice up their experience in this GTA – especially with the countless new features that we had on GTA IV and GTA V.

Today I come to you with the best mods that you can install to make GTA San Andreas feel like a completely different game.

Download GTA San Andreas Mods: modifications, new weapons, missions, textures, scripts, and other cool new mods for GTA San Andreas.

The GTA SA Mods category contains a wide variety of mods for GTA San Andreas: from script mods and new buildings to new sounds and many other types of modifications. There are almost no limits and this way you can completely change the environment in Los Santos. Besides funny modifications there are also some that will turn you into superheroes.

Reinvigorate your San Andreas experience with these fantastic mods and see how much the game changes – I’m sure you’ll love the new gameplay afterward!

Also if this is the first time that you’re installing mods, let me remind you that it’s better to make a backup save of your game files before installing them.

Be sure to make backup saves every time you install new mods as well, as some of them might not be entirely compatible with one another and it could corrupt your files.

Furthermore you’ll need to install CLEO if you want most of the mods on this list to work. I’ve put it at the number one spot on my list so check it out!

30. Tuning Mod

The Tuning Mod is a fantastic modification for all vehicle enthusiasts out there.

It allows you to tune your cars like no other mod in the community, rivaling and even surpassing the tuning system of GTA V.

Modify the way tuning works in the game and give yourself a new car once you’ve installed this mod.

29. Skin Selector

I’m putting this mod here instead of any skin mod because you’ll need it to change the way CJ looks.

It basically lets you open up a menu that will allow you to browse through all of the skin mods that you’ve installed, so you can change the way CJ looks in-game.

28. HD Weapons

This amazing mod pack changes the way every single weapon in San Andreas looks.

It replaces all of the basic models that come with the vanilla game and turns them into the same weapons, but with an HD look to them all.

The UZI model looks particularly good, although all additions to the game are very well made.

It does seem like making this mod took a lot of time, but the effort of the creator was worth it.

The results speak on their own, and I’m sure you’ll love these new guns as much as I did. It makes everything feel new in an otherwise old game.

27. Teleport Mod

I find it hilarious how this mod uses the Portal logo as its own, given that it literally works nothing like Portal.

It’s still a really useful mod, though, as it basically adds quick travelling to the game.

Open up your map, place a marker, and once you unpause the game CJ will directly teleport to the spot that you marked.

CJ initially screams as if he was falling, but don’t worry – it’s just the map loading. You won’t take any fall damage!

26. New Effects V1

Are you tired of looking at the same and really old effects of San Andreas? I was too!

This mod changes the way water, light, fire, and interactions with other natural objects work in the game, to make everything look better and modernize San Andreas a tad more.

You will notice how many of the mods on my list are related to the graphics of the game, and that’s to be expected.

San Andreas is super old and many people don’t play it mainly because of its outdated graphics.

Some modders have come to create some fantastic graphical changes to the game, and I want to share them with you. I know you’ll love them as much as I did.

25. Collection of Graphic Mods

As its name suggests, the Collection of Graphic mods makes enhancements to the way the game looks by changing up a bunch of textures, shadowing, and lighting to make it look better and a bit more modern.

It’s a cool little overhaul that will improve the way your San Andreas game looks without breaking the natural aesthetics that made it such a popular title back in the early 2000s.

24. Wheels Pack

San Andreas is a pretty old game, so you probably already tried all of the wheels that the game has in the tuning stores for you.

I was tired of looking at the same tires too, so this mod came to be pretty handy for me.

It basically adds a bunch of additional tires that you can put in your cars once you visit any of the tuning shops across the dangerous city of SA.

23. Ghost Rider Mod

Mod Gta San Andreas Mac

Are you tired of associating an amazing character like Ghost Rider with Nicolas Cage?

Trust me, me too.

Something had to be done about it, and this is the mod to completely wash your Caged Ghost Rider image by turning CJ into the popular Marvel anti-hero.

Ride the streets of San Andreas and wreak havoc among them with the outfit and powers of the mighty Ghost Rider.

You will be able to see the flames on the skull as well as in the tires of your mighty ride. It looks awesome apart from being a cool gameplay change, so give it a shot and prepare to enjoy some of the most hilarious cutscenes in GTA.

22. The Best Sound Pack for GTA San Andreas

This mod is a complete overhaul to the sounds of San Andreas.

It adds so many sounds that you won’t even believe that it’s the same game if you cover your eyes while playing it (no idea why would you do that, but hey, to each their own).

This mod changes the sounds of explosions, cop cars, car breaks, opening doors, and much more.

If you’re tired of listening to the same sounds for years, this mod will provide you with a fantastic relief that will guarantee you to stay hooked to San Andreas for a little bit more.

21. Holes from Bullets

I have always hated how bullets seem to bounce off cars after damaging them in the old GTA games.

Yes, I even hated that back in the days when this game was the hottest title in the market – I don’t know why, but hey, there’s a reason why this seemingly pointless addition has made its way to a spot on my list.

It simply adds bullet holes to your shots, so whenever you hit a car, for example, you’ll see the spot where the bullet landed. It’s pretty cool!

20. V Graphics

V Graphics, as its name suggests, was made with the intention of giving you the graphical feel of GTA V in the world of San Andreas.

It’s a pretty complex graphical overhaul of the game, and you’ll need a decent computer to run it, but it’s super worth it if you can do it.

Combine this baby with a texture mod and you won’t notice a difference in visuals between San Andreas and GTA V.

Maybe even download a mod to turn CJ into Franklin or Michael and change the way the San Andreas story unfolds by looking at it from a different perspective.

19. GTA United

GTA United replaces the entire city of San Andreas with none other than Liberty City and Vice City, in a complete overhaul of the game map.

It adds new side missions to the game as well as Easter Eggs that could be found in the two predecessors of the famous San Andreas game.

This isn’t a canon mod by any means, but it will help you reminisce with two of the most emblematic maps that have graced our old TV screens and computers.

As far as San Andreas map mods go this one takes the cake.

18. Gravity Gun

Man, this is one of the most overpowered gun mods that I’ve seen made for the Grand Theft Auto series in general.

You can use the gravity gun to bring people towards you and throw them back to where you’re aiming at unfathomably rapid speed.

If you love canon mods, then you’re going to despise this one. Looking for some fun, though?

Go through the story of San Andreas using this baby. You won’t regret it – trust me.

17. Insanity Vegetation

This beautiful mod enhances every plant texture in the game to make vegetation look as great as in some modern games.

But I do warn you – be sure to download other graphical enhancement mods if you’re going to install Insanity Vegetation.

If you don’t it’s just going to look super weird watching a bunch of HD plants in an otherwise SD environment.

16. Weapon Menu Mod

The Weapon Menu Mod simply brings up a menu where you can choose whichever weapon you want in the game and instantly spawn it for CJ.

Gta San Andreas Play

It’s not cheating if you’re using a mod, am I right?

Regardless of how you want to use this mod, it’s a very practical tool that will help you get your hands in the game’s finest as well as least desired guns. Use it wisely!

15. Ultimate Graphics Mod

If your computer isn’t capable of handling high-quality graphics, this is the best mod that you can download when tired of the traditional San Andreas look.

It enhances the way texture load in the game, and even though it does improve everything substantially, it’s still suited to be used in low-end computers.

I believe this is possible mainly because shadows tend to be the one thing that computers struggle to handle (like Minecraft shaders, for example).

This mod adds a ton of graphical enhancements, but keeps shadows to a very low level of quality. It makes everything look great, but it doesn’t compromise the memory usage of your PC. Just what I need.

14. Textures for GTA SA

This sweet mod enhances the way the graphics of roads and streets look in the game.

It basically adds new textures to every single street in San Andreas to make the whole gaming look smoother, something that couldn’t be added back in the days of the release of the game because computers and consoles couldn’t handle higher resolutions in the game files.

Times have changed, though. And this is just one of the many mods that completely enhances the game graphically.

Combine it with others to make San Andreas some justice and modernize the way the game feels, at least in a visual sense!

13. Iron Man Mod

So, apparently, it wasn’t Tony Stark who created the Iron Man suit, and it somehow made its way to the streets of San Andreas.

How dangerous could be a gangster dressed up in the most powerful body armor ever created by mankind?

It’s up to you to write the fate of the people of San Andreas as well as the fate of your own foes, as you’ll be able to harness your favorite Iron Man powers and use them in San Andreas thanks to this ridiculously well-made mod!

12. Dragon Ball Mod

Why play with CJ in a world where you can simply download this mod and become Goku, or even Vegeta, the Prince of all Saiyans?

Press a couple of buttons after installing this fantastic mod and use your favorite Dragon Ball characters to wreak havoc through in San Andreas and bring misfortune to the citizens of this seemingly-cursed city.

Fly around, use ki blast to attack, and take advantage of the super-strength of these Dragon Ball characters to give your GTA San Andreas save a twist like no other mod can give you (except maybe the Iron Man or Superman mods, but you get my point).

11. Skateboard Mod

Oh man, this one is really well done.

The Skateboard mod will allow you to pick up a skateboard and roll around the streets of San Andreas like Tony Hawk would do in an alternate reality where he’s actually a drug dealer.

You would think that making such a complex mod work well wouldn’t be too easy, but the movement of CJ with this mod is so smooth that it makes you think that it’s a vanilla feature.

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10. Car Spawner

Ugh, don’t you guys hate it when you want to spawn a car but you need to input some annoying code to activate it?

I hate it too, and that’s why this mod has come in as handy as they get.

It basically adds a whole new menu to the game, which allows you to instantly select a car and spawn it by just hitting one button. Pretty simple, right?

It’s great if you’re looking to spawn yourself some sweet rides and just enjoy the game for a bit!

9. Street Love

Alright, let’s get this one out of the way, as it definitely needs to have a spot on this list.

Let’s cut the explanation straight to the point as well: Street Love is a lovey-dovey making mod for GTA San Andreas.

Yes, you’ll be able to use CJ (or with your friendly neighbor Spiderman, if you have the mod installed) and screw around with digital chicks.

8. Superman Mod

CJ does know how to take bullets like Superman in the original game, as he could’ve gotten shot 10 times and just barely flinch.

However the Superman mod allows you to take things to the next level and actually become Superman in your game!

Fly around, use your super strength, and murder civilians as it would happen in a dark DC alternate universe.

7. Car Pack for San Andreas

San Andreas has been around for far too long, and I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of seeing the same cars over and over again.

There are some car mods that you can download, which will install them directly into the game. But you may also use this pack to get a bunch of them added instantly to your San Andreas safe.

Gone are the days of seeing the same cars pass time and time again – it’s time to spice up your game with a plethora of new rides!

6. Parkour Mod

The fantastic Parkour Mod allows CJ to perform true acrobatic moves without getting interrupted in the air.

Combine the essence of Assassin’s Creed with San Andreas and experience being a true gangster while also knowing a thing or two about street athleticism like it wasn’t originally possible in the game.

It really does spice up the game, and it’s actually hilarious seeing CJ perform many of these unexpected moves!

5. Portal Gun for GTA San Andreas

The Teleport mod that we mentioned above is cool and all, but why not bring the essence of GLaDOS to GTA San Andreas if you have the chance?

Sure, this mod will not take you from one corner of San Andreas to the other, but it will enable you to create portals, much as you do in the Portal games!

This mod is fantastic to be installed if you loved the famous puzzle-solvers, and it does enrich your San Andreas experience like no other mod on this list.

4. Memory Update for San Andreas

San Andreas was made to be run in old computers as well as the PS2 and the Xbox, which meant that the game was very limited in terms of how much memory it was allowed to use.

This mod updates the core GTA San Andreas mechanics and makes the game work with all of the power that modern computer has. Which enables your game to load much more of the map, increasing your viewing distance by almost as much as GTA V allows you to have.

Definitely worth trying in my opinion.

3. GTA V Hud for San Andreas

Weapon swapping in the early GTA games was a nightmare. There’s just no other way around it.

Gone are the days where you scroll past the weapon that you actually wanted to select, though!

This mod brings you the ultimate experience of the famous wheel weapon selector that was introduced in the PS3 and Xbox 360, and I’m therefore bringing it to you now.

2. San Andreas First Person Mod

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Rockstar enabled first-person gameplay when GTA V got its current-gen console release, but San Andreas never really had it and people were still playing the game, which is not really fair to them.

Some of these mods might even look better if you were to play in first person, don’t you think?

I do too, and that’s why this mod takes such a high spot on my list.

It basically enables you to play San Andreas like never before, so you can see how CJ truly feels across the story.

You’ll also be able to play around as Iron Man or Spiderman in first person, were you to install the respective mods that enable you to do so, but bear in mind that this mod was made to work with vanilla SA.

1. CLEO 4

The CLEO 4 Mod takes the first spot on my list because it basically enables most of the mods that I’ve mentioned before, all at once.

It unlocks many features that the game didn’t initially come with and allows modders to alter certain features of the game that weren’t meant to be altered in the initial release.

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The original version of this mod allowed most modders to work with new tools, and completely overhaul San Andreas with new ideas of their own.

The revolutionary nature of this fantastic add-on rightfully earns it the first place on the list. And you will probably need it if you want many of the others to work so it’s almost like the framework of all San Andreas modding.

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The Biggest Geek Culture Moments of 2020

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This article contains a spoiler for The Mandalorian Season 2

2020 has been a wild and unpredictable year for most of us, but it also brought with it a ton of key cultural incidents and shifts that kept online news and trade outlets pretty busy at their keyboards. As we finally grind toward the end of a very weird 12 months, we’ve been looking back at some of the more stand-out moments in geek culture, which we’ll recap with you here.

You may find that these cultural markers aren’t listed in chronological order. That’s because in 2020, time ceased to exist in its previously understood form. Wednesday rarely meant anything, Monday was still technically the worst but couldn’t be trusted either way, Saturdays were no longer reserved for the notion of relaxation, and any given Tuesday might as well have taken place in a different universe, such was the obliqueness of its concept. Is it December right now, or July? No one really knows anymore.

But things still happened in 2020! Things and stuff definitely happened, we’re almost sure of it. Here are some of the things and stuff that probably happened, several of which you’d struggle to explain to a past version of yourself without the board from Chernobyl and scheduled breaks…

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson Get COVID-19

Shit got real on March 11 when beloved Forrest Gump actor Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson both tested positive for COVID-19 while filming on location in Australia. 63-year-old Hanks, who has Type 2 Diabetes and a stent in his heart, was fairly sure he was in a high-risk group, but at the time we still knew very little about the virus.

Hanks’ updates on he and Wilson’s recovery were little lights in the darkness over the next few weeks, and when the pair appeared to have made it through the worst, there was a sense of relief that 2020 would – at the very least – not steal him, but Hanks said he was way more relaxed than us about the whole thing. “I’m not one who wakes up in the morning wondering if I’m going to see the end of the day or not,” he told The Guardian. “I’m pretty calm about that.” He’s since become a strong advocate for social distancing measures. – KH

Tiger King of the World

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness debuted on Netflix globally on March 20, becoming the first quarantine binge of the pandemic. A problematic series from the get-go, there was comfort to be found in its existence, as it became apparent that even if things were really quite shit at home, at least you hadn’t been fed to a tiger yet. Or sent to jail for arranging a hit on your nemesis. Or had accidentally shot yourself in the head. Or, etc and so on. – KH

The Snyder Cut Rises

They said it would never happen. And by “they” I have to confess, I mean “we.” But it’s true, Warner Bros. actually is spending tens of millions of dollars to let Zack Snyder finish his Justice League movie as he originally intended it. And the fans who have kept hope alive since the disappointing Joss Whedon-helmed theatrical cut of the movie are getting even more than they bargained for, since the no-longer-mythical “Snyder Cut” isn’t just a movie, it’s a four hour long miniseries event headed to HBO Max.

The early 2021 release of the Director’s Cut of Justice League (which now appears to be its official title) will mark the culmination of five years of fan demands, and will finally put a bow on Snyder’s original vision of the DCEU, completing the trilogy he began with 2016’s Man of Steel. Hopefully it lives up to everyone’s expectations. – MC

Next-Gen Gaming Breaks the Internet…Literally

2020 turned out to be a very important year for gaming. Not only did it see the release of many highly-anticipated titles, such as The Last of Us Part II, Cyberpunk 2077, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and Ghost of Tsushima, but it also ushered in a new generation of gaming with the arrival of the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 as well as new PC graphics cards from NVIDIA and AMD.

Unfortunately, when it comes to next-gen gaming in 2020, all other topics of discussion are eclipsed by just how difficult it’s been to actually buy any of these new consoles or GPUs. From the moment pre-orders opened, getting one of these next-gen products has been a nightmare. Retail sites like Amazon, Best Buy, and GameStop went down almost immediately on day 1 of pre-orders for both consoles, and have remained generally low in stock ever since, servers shaky at best. And the scalpers who used bots to buy up consoles and graphics cards to flip for exorbitant prices certainly haven’t helped.

If you got that next-gen gaming experience you wanted for Christmas this year, count yourself lucky! – JS

Trolls World Tour Starts a War

Universal’s Trolls World Tour was the first major movie to properly break and go straight to go streaming in 2020. Whether this was a movie you’d have personally sought out or not, it would have made a ton of money in a non-pandemic year. After that, eyes turned to the big studios, as we waited to see whether the likes of Black Widow, Bill & Ted Face the Music, or Mulan would follow suit.

Warner Bros., who had strenuously backed Christopher Nolan’s Tenet for a theatrical release, did a handbrake turn late in 2020 when it announced – to much industry outrage – that its full schedule of big budget movies, including Dune and The Matrix 4, would see a “day and date” streaming release on HBO Max in 2021 after Wonder Woman 1984 would do the same on Christmas Day. Disney has so far refused to match this gambit, but there are big changes and repercussions afoot for the theatrical release model, even when this is all over. – KH

Disney Doesn’t Throw Away Its Shot

While the first couple of movies to crack the theatrical window such as Trolls: World Tour and Onward were treated as relatively low stakes and aimed at a younger demographic, no early release came earlier, or made as much noise, as Hamilton going to Disney+ over Independence Day Weekend. The filmed version of the original cast performance dropped on the streamer a full 15 months ahead of its planned theatrical release, and it was by any measure a roaring success, finally enabling millions of people who had long been enamored with the soundtrack but been shut out of ticket lotteries and prohibitive Broadway pricing to experience Lin-Manuel Miranda’s history lesson in the comfort of their own home.

Early data suggests that his was the biggest direct-to-streaming release of the year, which should surprise exactly nobody. – MC

Of course, the success of Hamilton emboldened…

Borat 2 Sex Lawyer

Donald Trump’s most visible lawyer Rudy Giuliani already had a bad rep, but in late October he was literally caught with his hands down his pants in a New York City hotel room after being tricked into comedian Sasha Baron Cohen’s Borat sequel, Subsequent Moviefilm. During one particular scene, Borat and his ‘daughter’ Tutar (Maria Bakalova) tried to seduce Giuliani.

“Rudolph was Donald’s best buddy in the whole world,” Borat narrated. “And also very dignified statesman of the highest order. This would not be easy.”

If you’re really serious about legally challenging the vote you don’t send your two worst kids and the Borat sex lawyer.

— Ned Hartley (@NedHartley) November 6, 2020

It was in fact very easy, and he reportedly thought she was only 15. Still struggling with the knowledge that Giuliani got away with it? You and everyone else, pal. Still, at least he might go down in history as “the Borat sex lawyer.” – KH

Timthetatman’s Fall Guys Twitch Gauntlet

Timthetatman’s August quest to win a crown on Mediatonic’s smash hit battle royale knockout game Fall Guys was a supremely satisfying highlight of the year. Streamer Timothy Betar, who can typically be found playing slightly more ‘grown up’ games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on Twitch, simply got a bee in his bonnet about not being able to win at Fall Guys. Betar spent nearly two weeks playing the game for long stretches of time as his audience grew exponentially, almost always failing at the very last moment, while a huge chunk of the gaming community trolled and encouraged him in equal measure – including the official Fall Guys Twitter account.

In the end, almost 340,000 viewers were watching Tim live on Twitch as he finally snatched a single Fall Guys crown, giving those of us trapped at home a chance to experience a single vicarious moment of pure exhilaration. Truly wonderful. – KH

“Crisp Rat”

It was a big year for Chris Pratt on social media, despite the fact that he didn’t really do much of note except have a baby and finish filming Jurassic World: Dominion. The fallout from 2019’s accusations that the actor attends an anti-LGBT church was the blood that pumped through the veins of Twitter’s 24/7 cancellation machine, refueled by Pratt’s non-appearance at Joe Biden’s virtual fundraiser alongside other MCU castmates.

Some saw this as “evidence” that the actor was deserving of a cancelation, and he was dubbed “the worst Chris” in Hollywood. Robert Downey Jr. and other Marvel stars jumped to his defence, declaring Pratt “a real #Christian who lives by #principle” and who has “never demonstrated anything but #positivity and #gratitude”, but Twitter had made up its mind, and it was soon recasting Jack Black in every role Pratt had filled to date. – KH

His Name …Is Grogu

It’s rather surreal to think that The Mandalorian’s powerful pop culture impact was mostly attributed to a character who had no proper name, only officially referred to as “The Child,” and colloquially—for lack of a better term—dubbed “Baby Yoda.” However, this year’s Chapter 13 would see Rosario Dawson’s debuting live-action version of animated favorite Ahsoka Tano use the Force to child-whisper the name of “Grogu.” In doing so, fans, Star Wars-driven SEO, and the Disney merchandising apparatus received an early Christmas present. However, even with the emotionally evocative Season 2 finale in the rear-view mirror, breaking the habit of calling him Baby Yoda is going to be a process as tough as worrying about his safety, especially given his new destination, and with whom it will likely have him come into contact. – JB

Tenet-cious C

Christopher Nolan was the butt who wouldn’t quit in 2020 as he sought to Save Cinema with his highly anticipated blockbuster about time travel, heists and many guns going pow-pow-pow. Whether it was his intention or not, he seemingly encouraged punters to ignore escalating scientific evidence to avoid indoor public spaces and trot along to their local theatre to watch the film. Nolan’s heart was probably in the right place, but it was a bad look for the director overall, compounded by Tenet’s eventual release on streaming, when the majority of keen audiences finally got a chance to clap their eyes on what turned out to be …well, let’s just say “not exactly a masterpiece.” – KH

Actual footage of people responding to Nolan’s pleas.

DC FanDome

Fandom has collectively been at a loss as far as how to replace the convention experience during the pandemic. And so far, attempts by heavy hitters like San Diego Comic-Con and New York Comic Con to replicate the buzz of a weekend packed with fan experiences and big news drops were tremendous disappointments. Pre-recorded Zoom panels don’t excite when all we do all day as a society is stare at that cursed app, buggy launches make it worse, and the fact that studios/networks/publishers didn’t really help put their best foot forward didn’t help.

But then along came DC FanDome.

What many (including this writer) expected to be a weekend-long infomercial about DC Universe intellectual property and how wonderful new corporate overlords AT&T would be for all these juicy brands was instead the slickest, most exciting, and yes…even newsworthy virtual event of the year. Rapid fire announcements from the big screen debut of the Justice Society in Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam movie to concept art from the long-awaited Flashpoint film were only the appetizer, with Warner Bros. unveiling a stunningly cool trailer for The Batman, and delivering the equivalent of a Saturday night in Hall H to fans who have been mostly confined to their homes since the spring. – MC

Meet Elliot Page

In a year when so much of the news was bad, joyous announcements felt that much more sweet. This was the case for Elliot Page’s sharing that he is trans, and uses “he” and “they” pronouns.

“I feel lucky to be writing this. To be here. To have arrived at this place in my life,” the 33-year-old Canadian actor, who is perhaps best known for their work in Juno, the X-Men prequel films, and Netflix’s Umbrella Academy, wrote on Instagram in early December. “I feel overwhelming gratitude for the incredible people who have supported me along this journey. I can’t begin to express how remarkable it feels to finally love who I am enough to pursue my authentic self.”

While it was a moment of celebration and affirmation, Page also used the opportunity to educate the public on the ongoing epidemic of violence against Black and brown trans women in particular, at least 40 of whom have been killed in the U.S. this year. Page wrote: “To all trans people who deal with harassment, self-loathing, abuse and the thread of violence every day: I see you, I love you and I will do everything I can to change this world for the better.” -KB

The Diamond Monopoly Breaks

Diamond Comics Distributors has for years been a uniter in the comics industry for years. It didn’t matter how much DC or Marvel heads would be at each other’s throats – when a damaged box with only 70% of the comics your shop ordered rolled in a day late, everyone agreed that Diamond was terrible. 

Until April, when, in the middle of the pandemic, DC backed two new distributors. Then, a contingent of fans couldn’t rush to Diamond’s defense fast enough. 

Lunar Distribution and UCS Comics Distribution were new comics distributors created by DCBS and Midtown Comics, respectively, and stood up by DC to create competition against Diamond’s not-technically-but-really monopoly. This was an enormous shift decades in the making, and coupled with DC’s move to a Tuesday NCBD, represented the biggest change in the comics industry this century. – JD

Dr DisRespect Gets Kicked off Twitch

The live streaming community was rife with controversies this year, especially when it came to Twitch: misconduct allegations lodged at many of its most high-profile streamers, a reportedly toxic and abusive work environment within the company, and a DMCA fiasco that saw streamers’ content disappear over night. And then there was Dr DisRespect’s exit from the platform.

Booted from Twitch at the end of June despite a hefty multi-year, multi-million dollar contract, the streamer, whose real name is Guy Beahm, suddenly found himself completely erased from existence, his channel and content deleted from the service. But why? At first, many in the industry assumed the worst, especially since it came just as Twitch was beginning to address misconduct in its community.

But despite the high-profile break up between Twitch and one of its key stars, we still don’t actually know why Beahm was kicked off the platform all of these months later. All Twitch has said on the matter is that Beahm “acted in violation of our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service,” while the streamer himself has remained largely silent on the matter. For now, Beahm’s exit from Twitch remains one of the streaming community’s biggest mysteries. – JS

The Depp-osition

In the #MeToo era, it is still incredibly rare for powerful men to be held accountable for the abuse of their power, but there are signs that this is beginning to change. The November announcement that Johnny Depp had been asked to resign from the Fantastic Beasts series was one of those signs. The announcement, via Depp’s Instagram, came only days after a U.K. court ruled that British tabloid The Sun was not committing libel when they described Depp as “a wife-beater” in 2018.

While the decision by Warner Bros. to fire Depp is an important step forward, it could still be described as a baby one. Depp will still be getting his full $16 million salary for his Fantastic Beasts 3 role, even though Mads Mikkelsen has been recast in the role of Grindelwald, because there was no morality clause in his contract. (It should be noted that Depp’s contract for the third film was finalized well after allegations against Depp first came to light.) Following the announcement, Amber Heard, Depp’s ex-wife and the survivor in this “wife-beater” scenario, has had to face a wave of online harassment that includes a petition to have her fired from her role as Mera in the DCEU.

The whole thing demonstrates just how ill-equipped Hollywood is as an industry and we as a culture still are when it comes to dealing with abuse. Let’s hope, in 2021, we do better when it comes to holding alleged abusers accountable and supporting survivors. – KB

The Last of Us Part II Leaks

Arguably the most highly anticipated game of 2020 (and our Game of the Year), The Last of Us Part II faced a mountain of seemingly insurmountable expectations. Could Naughty Dog not only follow up one of the greatest games ever made but top itself? Many fans learned the answer much sooner than expected when the game leaked weeks before its release in June.

Despite rumors that the leak was the work of a disgruntled employee, the security breach actually turned out to be courtesy of a hacker, who published most of the game’s cinematics and story beats on the internet for all to find. All of its big twists, reveals, and emotional moments lay bare before we were really ready for them. – JS

Marie Javins Becomes Editor in Chief of DC Comics

After a year of massive changes at DC Comics – which saw long-tenured co-publisher Dan Didio fired, a new new comic book day established through new distributors, and a merger with AT&T bear bitter fruit – DC’s year started to turn itself around when they pulled off the only successful online convention with FanDome.

And hot on FanDome’s heels was the historic announcement of their new EIC: Marie Javins, a longtime comics pro who worked her way up from colorist to become the first woman to serve as DC’s Editor-in-Chief since Jenette Kahn. Javins’ keen eye for talent and long history in the industry inspired a good deal of confidence in DC’s future, and the new talent lined up for DC’s Future State initiative and beyond have only reinforced that. – JD

George R.R. Martin Jailed in Theory

George R.R. Martin’s self-imposed deadline for finishing The Winds of Winter passed in July, and with it came the knowledge that he could now be jailed for his lackadaisical approach to completing the long-in-gestation addition to the A Song of Ice and Fire series. See, ol’ George had previously told Game of Thrones fans that they had “formal written permission” to imprison him “in a small cabin on White Island, overlooking that lake of sulfuric acid” until he was done writing, should he not produce his manuscript by July 29. A little bit of fun was had online that day, as people threatened to frogmarch Martin straight to jail. We were pretty desperate for something to do at that point, tbf. – KH

Cyberpunk 2077 Is a Disaster

CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 went from one of the year’s most anticipated games to a title that had fans genuinely begging for refunds when it was finally released in December, after they discovered it was virtually unplayable on PS4 and Xbox One, riddled with occasionally hilarious bugs, missing big features, and packed with potentially offensive characterizations and broken AI, leading to an online meltdown from gamers that didn’t even really compare to the similar release troubles of titles like Anthem and No Man’s Sky. What a mess.

Whole game is going to be a meme.

— Cyberpunk 2077 (@CyberpunkGame) July 2, 2018

They really called it. – KH

Chris Evans Posts His Dick

If you’ve ever accidentally posted something online that you definitely didn’t mean to post online, you’ll know the pure, heart stopping panic that Chris Evans must have felt in September when he shared a screen-recorded video to Instagram that he’d forgotten to crop, revealing his personal camera roll. Yes, the Avengers: Endgame actor had indeed just shown a rabid fan base his (surprisingly thick) cock, and there was no going back, because so many people took a screenshot at once that the collective noise probably triggered a spike in seismic activity visible on the Richter scale.

Evans removed the video and likely cringed so hard that he collapsed in on himself like a dying star forming a black hole, but took it on the chin and used his eventual response to encourage people to vote in November’s election. – KH

Now that I have your attention 🤦��‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️…. VOTE Nov 3rd!!!

— Chris Evans (@ChrisEvans) September 15, 2020

Rick Moranis Attacked

Ghostbusters and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids star Rick Moranis – by all accounts a total sweetheart – was randomly attacked near Central Park at the start of October. The formerly-retired actor was punched in the head and knocked to the ground by a man wearing an “I Love NY” hoodie who was later apprehended and charged. Violence on the streets of New York isn’t exactly unheard of, but when the geek community heard of the attack on Moranis, it went full on Taken in under a minute. “I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.” How DARE. – KH

John Boyega’s Black Lives Matter Speech

On May 25th, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black father, grandfather, son, and brother—a human—was killed by Derek Chauvin, a white member of the Minneapolis Police Department, as three other policemen stood by. Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for 9.5 minutes as Floyd begged, “I can’t breathe.” The video of the killing launched a wave of Black Lives Matters protests across the United States and world, aimed at eradicating white supremacy in all of its forms.

George Floyd was neither the first nor the last Black person who died at the hands of a police officer in 2020. (Say Their Names is an ongoing, work-in-progress list of all the Black men, women, and children killed in the U.S. by police and civilians.) And there is not just one moment or human that has defined the ongoing Black Lives Matters movement in 2020, which is made up of many people, including the many activists who organize within the decentralized movement. One of many moments, however, came when John Boyega took up the megaphone to give an impromptu and emotional speech during a Hyde Park demonstration about the death of George Floyd in early June.

“Black lives have always mattered. We have always been important. We have always meant something. We have always succeeded regardless. And now is the time. I ain’t waiting,” said the British-Nigerian actor and producer, who was visibly holding back tears, to the other protestors gathered.

Boyega has continued to use his celebrity to speak out against racism in the industry and beyond, all while knowing that it could affect his career. In September, Boyega did an interview with GQ in which he spoke about the unequal narrative treatment he and other actors of color got in the Star Wars franchise compared to the white actors in the film.

“You get yourself involved in projects and you’re not necessarily going to like everything,” Boyega said. “[But] what I would say to Disney is do not bring out a Black character, market them to be much more important in the franchise than they are, and then have them pushed to the side. It’s not good. I’ll say it straight up … You knew what to do with these other people, but when it came to Kelly Marie Tran, when it came to John Boyega, you know fuck all.” – KB

Quibi? I Hardly Knew Ye

“Is it better to burn out than fade away?” could have been a question knocking about in the heads of Quibi’s founders during 2020. The newbie streaming service, which developed content as “quick bites” consumable in 7-10 minute increments, ended up being a flash in the pan as it struggled to rustle up subscribers in a year very much not suited to the concept of “I don’t have time to watch anything”.

Quibi had initially raised $1.75 billion in pre-launch funding and had more than 175 shows and movies lined up for viewers, but none of it was enough to counter the madness playing out behind the scenes of the hopeful, and ultimately hopeless, platform. RIP to a real one. – KH

Whedon Under Fire

It’s safe to say that the one-time King of the Nerds has not had a pleasant last few years, and that’s even before COVID-19 struck. But much of Joss Whedon’s troubles seem increasingly to be of his own making. As if the disapproving response to his version of Justice League wasn’t enough, Whedon was accused by actor Ray Fisher (Cyborg) of fomenting racism and toxicity on the set – a claim indirectly backed up by co-stars Jason Momoa and Gal Gadot.

The fallout, true or not, seems to have landed close enough for Whedon to depart his upcoming HBO fantasy series The Nevers, a project he created but won’t see through to its launch after three years of work. The Whedon-produced Pippa Smith: Grown-Up Detective was also quietly scrapped at Freeform. – DK

pic.twitter.com/e3N00xCr5i

— Patty Jenkins (@PattyJenks) December 10, 2020

Patty’s Squad

At the moment, the future of Star Wars would seem to be on television. The success of The Mandalorian and the galaxy of spinoffs (more on those in a moment) announced by Disney and Lucasfilm would seem to indicate that. But Star Wars is far from finished on the big screen, and when it returns in 2023, it’s going to make history, with Patty Jenkins finally shattering the glass ceiling of Star Wars directors with her take on the fan favorite Rogue Squadron concept.

Jenkins is, of course, no stranger to big franchise projects, having helmed both Wonder Woman movies for Warner Bros. The announcement of a coveted director taking on a big franchise competitor coming in the wake of WB’s troubled relationship with talent after sending their entire theatrical slate to HBO Max for 2021 sure feels like a victory for Disney, even as Jenkins is still confirmed to direct a third Wonder Woman film for WB. Regardless of studio politics, Jenkins promising to deliver “the greatest fighter pilot movie of all time,” albeit one set in the Star Wars galaxy is a wonderful promise, and we’re looking forward to seeing how she keeps it. – MC

Disney Goes Even More Franchise Crazy

Disney’s December investors call didn’t produce the kind of announcements expected – there were rumors that a global 18+ streaming element was in the wind and that Black Widow would go straight to Disney+ – but the Mouse House tried to make up for it by revealing a fistful of new projects that included ten (10!) new Star Wars series, a bunch of new Marvel series and movies, a Toy Story spinoff film called Lightyear and a sequel to Enchanted. That’s not even the half of it, though, as the reveals just kept on coming, to the point where even a dedicated Disney fan felt downright exhausted, and prompting many a “how much is too much?” think piece. – KH

This is by no means an exhaustive list! Feel free to share your own big geek moments in the comments.

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Virtual Reality, was supposed to be the elusive modern-day entertainment medium that is set to take gaming to its next quantum leap… if it wasn’t just too expensive. Here we explore some of the most affordable virtual reality headsets and the equally cheap gaming systems to go with them.

Mobile VR options like Google Cardboard, have so far tried to mend this issue, but typically to no significant avail. It just isn’t the same with the experience you get on “real” higher-end PC setups.

But, we are probably on the cusp of finally being able to provide VR for most PC users. Because, in the last few years, we have witnessed the introduction of a brand new whole class VR headsets, as well as the emergence of super-efficient CPUs and GPUs that rocked the entire PC industry. So if you’re trying to get VR on the cheap today, there certainly are a few options that we can now recommend.

The Headsets: Shattering the $500 Barrier

For our comprehensive VR experience, we will be looking for lower-cost headsets that are capable of providing the same baseline performance to more expensive setups. As such, any VR headset that does not offer area positional tracking is automatically off our choice list, no matter how insanely cheap they might be.

With that point clarified, we shall attempt to slash your overall VR system price tag with the absolute best cheap VR options that can challenge the “meta”:

Sony Playstation VR (2016) – CONSOLE BASED

Weight 600g Resolution 960x1080p Display OLED Refresh Rate 90/120 Hz Type Console FOV approx. 100 degrees

Introductory Price: $400, Offer Price Under $300

This one is technically a no-brainer, and is the most straightforward and easy-to-setup out of all the relatively cheap VR headsets available after all these years. That is because it is a console-based headset; no need to worry about the hardware of the “PC” connected to it. All you need to do is to play a VR compatible game for the PS4 Pro, and you’re ready to go.

Sony Playstation VR

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Samsung HMD Odyssey+ (2018)

Weight 590g Resolution 1440x1600p Display AMOLED Refresh Rate 60/90 Hz Type WMR FOV 110 degrees

Introductory Price: $500

Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) headsets like the Dell Visor or Lenovo Explorer have typically earned the reputation of being THE entry-level gateway to VR. However, there are few let’s just say… accuracy kinks, which prevent these headsets from directly competing with full VR headsets. The Samsung Odyssey Plus may be more expensive, but it attempts to solve the aforementioned issue by providing superior controller tracking, heftier visual specs, and better user comfort.

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Oculus Rift S (2019)

Weight 560g Resolution 1280x1440p Display Fast-switch LCD Refresh Rate 80 Hz Type Full VR FOV undisclosed

Introductory Price: $400

The official successor of the Oculus Rift, this VR headset actually focuses more on optimization than straight up upgrading its systems. Most noticeable is the tracking system, switching to the now-familiar headset-mounted camera array, significantly increasing its overall portability. While plain visuals are technically more crisp (e.g. much less pronounced screen-door effect) than even some of the actual expensive VR setups, the 80Hz refresh rate could throw off a few users more accustomed to more standard refresh rates. Higher refresh rate offers smoother motion, allowing users to enjoy a more immersive gaming experience.

Oculus Rift S on Amazon

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Oculus Quest (2019) EDITOR’S PICK

Weight 570g Resolution 1440x1600p Display OLED Refresh Rate 72 Hz Type Standalone/Full VR FOV undisclosed

Introductory Price: $400

If 80Hz is weird enough for you, then Oculus Quest’s 72Hz might just disorient you altogether. Kidding aside, the Oculus Quest is a standalone VR unit, meaning it is wireless, and can be used independently without a PC. What makes it different from other standalone VR headsets, is that features the same six-axis tracking as other more standard VR headsets. In other words, you get the full VR experience, in a package that is even more portable than the Oculus Rift S! With its current updates, you can even step directly into high-end VR, by plugging it into a PC. This makes the Oculus Quest the most versatile low-end cost VR headset available for consumers at the moment.

  Oculus Quest on Amazon

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Affordable VR Systems: CPU/GPU Combos, Combining ‘Entry-level’ and ‘VR PC’

The advertised minimum for VR setups has always been a combo of the Intel Core i3-6100/AMD Ryzen 3 1200, and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti/Radeon RX 470 or Geforce 960/Radeon R2 290.

However, the selection is nigh endless for more efficient and/or economical choices out there. Older, second-hand CPUs/GPUs may have the better purchase deal, and thus be potentially cheaper while still providing great VR performance.

Because of this, we need to narrow down our recommended selections to just 2019 and 2020 CPUs and GPUs. This is to provide a more linear comparison that uses introductory prices to compare with relative performance.

Here, we explore three affordable VR ready systems with their alternative counterparts, varying the processor and graphics processing unit. These are grouped under entry level, balanced and optimised and the third being a high mid-range system. For an idea of its’ performance, we include benchmark figures from cpubenchmark.net.

Alternative Entry Systems to: Intel Core i3-9100 + Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650

Combined Cost: $250-$280 Yesterday’s technology, made more efficient. If we are going to the absolute rock bottom, then the only way is to grab one of the cheapest competitive CPUs and GPUs of 2019, then quickly slap them together for your VR machine. Base-experience wise, it somewhat performs just the same as the advertised minimum and in some cases, better.

The architecture of both processors however, makes VR rendering tasks comparatively more optimized for this combo. Of course, at this tier, you can’t expect to play all things VR, but you at least get the much-more-important frame rate stability.

Intel Core i3-9100 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Alternatives (source cpubenchmark.net)

Ryzen 3 Gaming PC on Amazon

Balanced and Optimized: AMD Ryzen 3 3300X + Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super

Combined Cost: $420-$460

The super popular budget competitive CPU of 2020 (so far) would of course inevitably also become the core component of budget VR build. What better way to showcase Ryzen 3 3300X’s VR capabilities? Pair it with another very popular VR recommendation of the last year!

As expected it works very well, for example pairing nicely with the predictive features of the Oculus Rift S for very sudden movements. A large portion of the overall VR access library is also unlocked with its performance parameters.

AMD Ryzen 3 3300X and Nvidia Geforce GTX 1660 Super Alternatives

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Playing with Fire: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X + AMD Radeon RX 5700

Combined Cost: $520-$600

We finally arrived at the crossroads of entry-level and mid-tier. If you a have bit more cash to crunch towards the very end of “entry-level”, then this combination can provide a purchase template. Find some 2017 or 2018 equivalent of this benchmark that is selling at a bargain, then settle for that combo.

Performance stability-wise, it is almost at the meta level. In fact, you can even expect this combo to overcome AMD graphics cards’ inherent problems with Unreal Engine 4, which is like, used by a good chunk of indie VR games out there.

AMD Ryzen 5 3600X and AMD Radeon RX 5700 Alternatives

AMD Ryzen 5 Gaming Desktop on Amazon

Final Thoughts

As a final note, it is also highly recommended of course, that every single one of these combos be paired with the SSD as your storage capacity choice. Standard VR games tend to fall around 1 GB or less, but full mainstream titles that have VR modes in them will require probably 20 to around 50 GB, so you better estimate the amount of storage space you might need beforehand.

RAM is of course another no brainer, as the more the better. An 8 GB RAM might be the advertised baseline, but 16 GB is the realistic minimum, and 32 GB is the best balanced amount for the cash you are willing to invest on hardware. Trust us, it would be more useful than just VR.

Just as how you cannot expect your mid-tier PC to be able to play the latest triple-A titles at the highest possible settings, so does your cheap VR setup shouldn’t be expected to play every VR game that will ever be available. However, it breaks the threshold of what is minimally needed to get the full experience. You are still able to play games of the last few years on your budget PC, and a few latest tiles provided you tweak the settings a bit down. Again, same with VR.

AMD Ryzen Gaming PC on Amazon

Affordable Virtual Reality Headsets & Systems: VR Gaming is Cheaper than Ever, For Real This Time! Virtual Reality, was supposed to be the elusive modern-day entertainment medium that is set to take gaming to its next quantum leap… if it wasn’t just too expensive.

(Via: Hacker News)

The log/event processing pipeline you can't have

Let me tell you about the still-not-defunct real-time log processing pipeline we built at my now-defunct last job. It handled logs from a large number of embedded devices that our ISP operated on behalf of residential customers. (I wrote and presented previously about some of the cool wifi diagnostics that were possible with this data set.)

Lately, I've had a surprisingly large number of conversations about logs processing pipelines. I can find probably 10+ already-funded, seemingly successful startups processing logs, and the Big Name Cloud providers all have some kind of logs thingy, but still, people are not satisfied. It's expensive and slow. And if you complain, you mostly get told that you shouldn't be using unstructured logs anyway, you should be using event streams.

That advice is not wrong, but it's incomplete.

Instead of doing a survey of the whole unhappy landscape, let's just ignore what other people suffer with and talk about what does work. You can probably find, somewhere, something similar to each of the components I'm going to talk about, but you probably can't find a single solution that combines it all with good performance and super-low latency for a reasonable price. At least, I haven't found it. I was a little surprised by this, because I didn't think we were doing anything all that innovative. Apparently I was incorrect.

The big picture

Let's get started. Here's a handy diagram of all the parts we're going to talk about:

The ISP where I worked has a bunch of embedded Linux devices (routers, firewalls, wifi access points, and so on) that we wanted to monitor. The number increased rapidly over time, but let's talk about a nice round number, like 100,000 of them. Initially there were zero, then maybe 10 in our development lab, and eventually we hit 100,000, and later there were many more than that. Whatever. Let's work with 100,000. But keep in mind that this architecture works pretty much the same with any number of devices.

(It's a "distributed system" in the sense of scalability, but it's also the simplest thing that really works for any number of devices more than a handful, which makes it different from many "distributed systems" where you could have solved the problem much more simply if you didn't care about scaling. Since our logs are coming from multiple sources, we can't make it non-distributed, but we can try to minimize the number of parts that have to deal with the extra complexity.)

Now, these are devices we were monitoring, not apps or services or containers or whatever. That means two things: we had to deal with lots of weird problems (like compiler/kernel bugs and hardware failures), and most of the software was off-the-shelf OS stuff we couldn't easily control (or didn't want to rewrite).

(Here's the good news: because embedded devices have all the problems from top to bottom, any solution that works for my masses of embedded devices will work for any other log-pipeline problem you might have. If you're lucky, you can leave out some parts.)

That means the debate about "events" vs "logs" was kind of moot. We didn't control all the parts in our system, so telling us to forget logs and use only structured events doesn't help. udhcpd produces messages the way it wants to produce messages, and that's life. Sometimes the kernel panics and prints whatever it wants to print, and that's life. Move on.

Of course, we also had our own apps, which means we could also produce our own structured events when it was relevant to our own apps. Our team had whole never-ending debates about which is better, logs or events, structured or unstructured. In fact, in a move only overfunded megacorporations can afford, we actually implemented both and ran them both for a long time.

Thus, I can now tell you the final true answer, once and for all: you want structured events in your database.

...but you need to be able to produce them from unstructured logs. And once you can do that, exactly how those structured events are produced (either from logs or directly from structured trace output) turns out to be unimportant.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves a bit. Let's take our flow diagram, one part at a time, from left to right.

Userspace and kernel messages, in a single stream

Some people who have been hacking on Linux for a while may know about /proc/kmsg: that's the file good old (pre-systemd) klogd reads kernel messages from, and pumps them to syslogd, which saves them to a file. Nowadays systemd does roughly the same thing but with more d-bus and more corrupted binary log files. Ahem. Anyway. When you run the dmesg command, it reads the same kernel messages (in a slightly different way).

What you might not know is that you can go the other direction. There's a file called /dev/kmsg (note: /dev and not /proc) which, if you write to it, produces messages into the kernel's buffer. Let's do that! For all our messages!

Wait, what? Am I crazy? Why do that?

Because we want strict sequencing of log messages between programs. And we want that even if your kernel panics.

Imagine you have, say, a TV DVR running on an embedded Linux system, and whenever you go to play a particular recorded video, the kernel panics because your chipset vendor hates you. Hypothetically. (The feeling is, hypothetically, mutual.) Ideally, you would like your logs to contain a note that the user requested the video, the video is about to start playing, we've opened the file, we're about to start streaming the file to the proprietary and very buggy (hypothetical) video decoder... boom. Panic.

What now? Well, if you're writing the log messages to disk, the joke's on you, because I bet you didn't fsync() after each one. (Once upon a time, syslogd actually did fsync() after each one. It was insanely disk-grindy and had very low throughput. Those days are gone.) Moreover, a kernel panic kills the disk driver, so you have no chance to fsync() it after the panic, unless you engage one of the more terrifying hacks like, after a panic, booting into a secondary kernel whose only job is to stream the message buffer into a file, hoping desperately that the disk driver isn't the thing that panicked, that the disk itself hasn't fried, and that even if you do manage to write to some disk blocks, they are the right ones because your filesystem data structure is reasonably intact.

(I suddenly feel a lot of pity for myself after reading that paragraph. I think I am more scars than person at this point.)

ANYWAY

The kernel log buffer is in a fixed-size memory buffer in RAM. It defaults to being kinda small (tens or hundreds of kBytes), but you can make it bigger if you want. I suggest you do so.

By itself, this won't solve your kernel panic problems, because RAM is even more volatile than disk, and you have to reboot after a kernel panic. So the RAM is gone, right?

Well, no. Sort of. Not exactly.

Once upon a time, your PC BIOS would go through all your RAM at boot time and run a memory test. I remember my ancient 386DX PC used to do this with my amazingly robust and life-changing 4MB of RAM. It took quite a while. You could press ESC to skip it if you were a valiant risk-taking rebel like myself.

Now, memory is a lot faster than it used to be, but unfortunately it has gotten bigger more quickly than it has gotten faster, especially if you disable memory caching, which you certainly must do at boot time in order to write the very specific patterns needed to see if there are any bit errors.

So... we don't do the boot-time memory test. That ended years ago. If you reboot your system, the memory mostly will contain the stuff it contained before you rebooted. The OS kernel has to know that and zero out pages as they get used. (Sometimes the kernel gets fancy and pre-zeroes some extra pages when it's not busy, so it can hand out zero pages more quickly on demand. But it always has to zero them.)

So, the pages are still around when the system reboots. What we want to happen is:

The system reboots automatically after a kernel panic. You can do this by giving your kernel a boot parameter like "panic=1", which reboots it after one second. (This is not nearly enough time for an end user to read and contemplate the panic message. That's fine, because a) on a desktop PC, X11 will have crashed in graphics mode so you can't see the panic message anyway, and b) on an embedded system there is usually no display to put the message on. End users don't care about panic messages. Our job is to reboot, ASAP, so they don't try to "help" by power cycling the device, which really does lose your memory.) (Advanced users will make it reboot after zero seconds. I think panic=0 disables the reboot feature rather than doing that, so you might have to patch the kernel. I forget. We did it, whatever it was.)

The kernel always initializes the dmesg buffer in the same spot in RAM.

The kernel notices that a previous dmesg buffer is already in that spot in RAM (because of a valid signature or checksum or whatever) and decides to append to that buffer instead of starting fresh.

In userspace, we pick up log processing where we left off. We can capture the log messages starting before (and therefore including) the panic!

And because we redirected userspace logs to the kernel message buffer, we have also preserved the exact sequence of events that led up to the panic.

If you want all this to happen, I have good news and bad news. The good news is we open sourced all our code; the bad news is it didn't get upstreamed anywhere so there are no batteries included and no documentation and it probably doesn't quite work for your use case. Sorry.

Open source code:

logos tool for sending userspace logs to /dev/klogd. (It's logs... for the OS.. and it's logical... and it brings your logs back from the dead after a reboot... get it? No? Oh well.) This includes two per-app token buckets (burst and long-term) so that an out-of-control app won't overfill the limited amount of dmesg space.

PRINTK_PERSIST patch to make Linux reuse the dmesg buffer across reboots.

Even if you don't do any of the rest of this, everybody should use PRINTK_PERSIST on every computer, virtual or physical. Seriously. It's so good.

(Note: room for improvement: it would be better if we could just redirect app stdout/stderr directly to /dev/kmsg, but that doesn't work as well as we want. First, it doesn't auto-prefix incoming messages with the app name. Second, libc functions like printf() actually write a few bytes at a time, not one message per write() call, so they would end up producing more than one dmesg entry per line. Third, /dev/kmsg doesn't support the token bucket rate control that logos does, which turns out to be essential, because sometimes apps go crazy. So we'd have to further extend the kernel API to make it work. It would be worthwhile, though, because the extra userspace process causes an unavoidable delay between when a userspace program prints something and when it actually gets into the kernel log. That delay is enough time for a kernel to panic, and the userspace message gets lost. Writing directly to /dev/kmsg would take less CPU, leave userspace latency unchanged, and ensure the message is safely written before continuing. Someday!)

(In related news, this makes all of syslogd kinda extraneous. Similarly for whatever systemd does. Why do we make everything so complicated? Just write directly to files or the kernel log buffer. It's cheap and easy.)

Uploading the logs

Next, we need to get the messages out of the kernel log buffer and into our log processing server, wherever that might be.

(Note: if we do the above trick - writing userspace messages to the kernel buffer - then we can't also use klogd to read them back into syslogd. That would create an infinite loop, and would end badly. Ask me how I know.)

So, no klogd -> syslogd -> file. Instead, we have something like syslogd -> kmsg -> uploader or app -> kmsg -> uploader.

What is a log uploader? Well, it's a thing that reads messages from the kernel kmsg buffer as they arrive, and uploads them to a server, perhaps over https. It might be almost as simple as "dmesg | curl", like my original prototype, but we can get a bit fancier:

Figure out which messages we've already uploaded (eg. from the persistent buffer before we rebooted) and don't upload those again.

Log the current wall-clock time before uploading, giving us sync points between monotonic time (/dev/kmsg logs "microseconds since boot" by default, which is very useful, but we also want to be able to correlate that with "real" time so we can match messages between related machines).

Compress the file on the way out.

Somehow authenticate with the log server.

Bonus: if the log server is unavailable because of a network partition, try to keep around the last few messages from before the partition, as well as the recent messages once the partition is restored. If the network partition was caused by the client - not too rare if you, like us, were in the business of making routers and wifi access points - you really would like to see the messages from right before the connectivity loss.

Luckily for you, we also open sourced our code for this. It's in C so it's very small and low-overhead. We never quite got the code for the "bonus" feature working quite right, though; we kinda got interrupted at the last minute.

Open source code:

loguploader C client, including an rsyslog plugin for Debian in case you don't want to use the /dev/kmsg trick.

devcert, a tool (and Debian package) which auto-generates a self signed "device certificate" wherever it's installed. The device certificate is used by a device (or VM, container, whatever) to identify itself to the log server, which can then decide how to classify and store (or reject) its logs.

One thing we unfortunately didn't get around to doing was modifying the logupload client to stream logs to the server. This is possible using HTTP POST and Chunked encoding, but our server at the time was unable to accept streaming POST requests due to (I think now fixed) infrastructure limitations.

(Note: if you write load balancing proxy servers or HTTP server frameworks, make sure they can start processing a POST request as soon as all the headers have arrived, rather than waiting for the entire blob to be complete! Then a log upload server can just stream the bytes straight to the next stage even before the whole request has finished.)

Because we lacked streaming in the client, we had to upload chunks of log periodically, which leads to a tradeoff about what makes a good upload period. We eventually settled on about 60 seconds, which ended up accounting for almost all the end-to-end latency from message generation to our monitoring console.

Most people probably think 60 seconds is not too bad. But some of the awesome people on our team managed to squeeze all the other pipeline phases down to tens of milliseconds in total. So the remaining 60 seconds (technically: anywhere from 0 to 60 seconds after a message was produced) was kinda embarrassing. Streaming live from device to server would be better.

The log receiver

So okay, we're uploading the logs from client to some kind of server. What does the server do?

This part is both the easiest and the most reliability-critical. The job is this: receive an HTTP POST request, write the POST data to a file, and return HTTP 200 OK. Anybody who has any server-side experience at all can write this in their preferred language in about 10 minutes.

We intentionally want to make this phase as absolutely simplistic as possible. This is the phase that accepts logs from the limited-size kmsg buffer on the client and puts them somewhere persistent. It's nice to have real-time alerts, but if I have to choose between somewhat delayed alerts or randomly losing log messages when things get ugly, I'll have to accept the delayed alerts. Don't lose log messages! You'll regret it.

The best way to not lose messages is to minimize the work done by your log receiver. So we did. It receives the uploaded log file chunk and appends it to a file, and that's it. The "file" is actually in a cloud storage system that's more-or-less like S3. When I explained this to someone, they asked why we didn't put it in a Bigtable-like thing or some other database, because isn't a filesystem kinda cheesy? No, it's not cheesy, it's simple. Simple things don't break. Our friends on the "let's use structured events to make metrics" team streamed those events straight into a database, and it broke all the time, because databases have configuration options and you inevitably set those options wrong, and it'll fall over under heavy load, and you won't find out until you're right in the middle of an emergency and you really want to see those logs. Or events.

Of course, the file storage service we used was encrypted-at-rest, heavily audited, and auto-deleted files after N days. When you're a megacorporation, you have whole teams of people dedicated to making sure you don't screw this up. They will find you. Best not to annoy them.

We had to add one extra feature, which was authentication. It's not okay for random people on the Internet to be able to impersonate your devices and spam your logs - at least without putting some work into it. For device authentication, we used the rarely-used HTTP client-side certificates option and the devcert program (linked above) so that the client and server could mutually authenticate each other. The server didn't check the certificates against a certification authority (CA), like web clients usually do; instead, it had a database with a whitelist of exactly which certs we're allowing today. So in case someone stole a device cert and started screwing around, we could remove their cert from the whitelist and not worry about CRL bugs and latencies and whatnot.

Unfortunately, because our log receiver was an internal app relying on internal infrastructure, it wasn't open sourced. But there really wasn't much there, honest. The first one was written in maybe 150 lines of python, and the replacement was rewritten in slightly more lines of Go. No problem.

Retries and floods

Of course, things don't always go smoothly. If you're an ISP, the least easy thing is dealing with cases where a whole neighbourhood gets disconnected, either because of a power loss or because someone cut the fiber Internet feed to the neighbourhood.

Now, disconnections are not such a big deal for logs processing - you don't have any. But reconnection is a really big deal. Now you have tens or hundreds of thousands of your devices coming back online at once, and a) they have accumulated a lot more log messages than they usually do, since they couldn't upload them, and b) they all want to talk to your server at the same time. Uh oh.

Luckily, our system was designed carefully (uh... eventually it was), so it could handle these situations pretty smoothly:

The log uploader uses a backoff timer so that if it's been trying to upload for a while, it uploads less often. (However, the backoff timer was limited to no more than the usual inter-upload interval. I don't know why more people don't do this. It's rather silly for your system to wait longer between uploads in a failure situation than it would in a success situation. This is especially true with logs, where when things come back online, you want a status update now. And clearly your servers have enough capacity to handle uploads at the usual rate, because they usually don't crash. Sorry if I sound defensive here, but I had to have this argument a few times with a few SREs. I understand why limiting the backoff period isn't always the right move. It's the right move here.)

Less obviously, even under normal conditions, the log uploader uses a randomized interval between uploads. This avoids traffic spikes where, after the Internet comes back online, everybody uploads again exactly 60 seconds later, and so on.

The log upload client understands the idea that the server can't accept its request right now. It has to, anyway, because if the Internet goes down, there's no server. So it treats server errors exactly like it treats lack of connectivity. And luckily, log uploading is not really an "interactive" priority task, so it's okay to sacrifice latency when things get bad. Users won't notice. And apparently our network is down, so the admins already noticed.

The /dev/kmsg buffer was configured for the longest reasonable outage we could expect, so that it wouldn't overflow during "typical" downtime. Of course, there's a judgement call here. But the truth is, if you're having system-wide downtime, what the individual devices were doing during that downtime is not usually what you care about. So you only need to handle, say, the 90th percentile of downtime. Safely ignore the black swans for once.

The log receiver aggressively rejects requests that come faster than its ability to write files to disk. Since the clients know how to retry with a delay, this allows us to smooth out bursty traffic without needing to either over-provision the servers or lose log messages.

(Pro tip, learned the hard way: if you're writing a log receiver in Go, don't do the obvious thing and fire off a goroutine for every incoming request. You'll run out of memory. Define a maximum number of threads you're willing to handle at once, and limit your request handling to that. It's okay to set this value low, just to be safe: remember, the uploader clients will come back later.)

Okay! Now our (unstructured) logs from all our 100,000 devices are sitting safely in a big distributed filesystem. We have a little load-balanced, multi-homed cluster of log receivers accepting the uploads, and they're so simple that they should pretty much never die, and even if they do because we did something dumb (treacherous, treacherous goroutines!), the clients will try again.

What might not be obvious is this: our reliability, persistence, and scaling problems are solved. Or rather, as long as we have enough log receiver instances to handle all our devices, and enough disk quota to store all our logs, we will never again lose a log message.

That means the rest of our pipeline can be best-effort, complicated, and frequently exploding. And that's a good thing, because we're going to start using more off-the-shelf stuff, we're going to let random developers reconfigure the filtering rules, and we're not going to bother to configure it with any redundancy.

Grinding the logs

The next step is to take our unstructured logs and try to understand them. In other words, we want to add some structure. Basically we want to look for lines that are "interesting" and parse out the "interesting" data and produce a stream of events, each with a set of labels describing what categories they apply to.

Note that, other than this phase, there is little difference between how you'd design a structured event reporting pipeline and a log pipeline. You still need to collect the events. You still (if you're like me) need to persist your events across kernel panics. You still need to retry uploading them if your network gets partitioned. You still need the receivers to handle overloading, burstiness, and retries. You still would like to stream them (if your infrastructure can handle it) rather than uploading every 60 seconds. You still want to be able to handle a high volume of them. You're just uploading a structured blob instead of an unstructured blob.

Okay. Fine. If you want to upload structured blobs, go for it. It's just an HTTP POST that appends to a file. Nobody's stopping you. Just please try to follow my advice when designing the parts of the pipeline before and after this phase, because otherwise I guarantee you'll be sad eventually.

Anyway, if you're staying with me, now we have to parse our unstructured logs. What's really cool - what makes this a killer design compared to starting with structured events in the first place - is that we can, at any time, change our minds about how to parse the logs, without redeploying all the software that produces them.

This turns out to be amazingly handy. It's so amazingly handy that nobody believes me. Even I didn't believe me until I experienced it; I was sure, in the beginning, that the unstructured logs were only temporary and we'd initially use them to figure out what structured events we wanted to record, and then modify the software to send those, then phase out the logs over time. This never happened. We never settled down. Every week, or at least every month, there was some new problem which the existing "structured" events weren't configured to catch, but which, upon investigating, we realized we could diagnose and measure from the existing log message stream. And so we did!

Now, I have to put this in perspective. Someone probably told you that log messages are too slow, or too big, or too hard to read, or too hard to use, or you should use them while debugging and then delete them. All those people were living in the past and they didn't have a fancy log pipeline. Computers are really, really fast now. Storage is really, really cheap.

So we let it all out. Our devices produced an average of 50 MB of (uncompressed) logs per day, each. For the baseline 100,000 devices that we discussed above, that's about 5TB of logs per day. Ignoring compression, how much does it cost to store, say, 60 days of logs in S3 at 5TB per day? "Who cares," that's how much. You're amortizing it over 100,000 devices. Heck, a lot of those devices were DVRs, each with 2TB of storage. With 100,000 DVRs, that's 200,000 TB of storage. Another 300 is literally a rounding error (like, smaller than if I can't remember if it's really 2TB or 2TiB or what).

Our systems barfed up logs vigorously and continuously, like a non-drunken non-sailor with seasickness. And it was beautiful.

(By the way, now would be a good time to mention some things we didn't log: personally identifiable information or information about people's Internet usage habits. These were diagnostic logs for running the network and detecting hardware/software failures. We didn't track what you did with the network. That was an intentional decision from day 1.)

(Also, this is why I think all those log processing services are so badly overpriced. I wanna store 50 MB per device, for lots of devices. I need to pay S3 rates for that, not a million dollars a gigabyte. If I have to overpay for storage, I'll have to start writing fewer logs. I love my logs. I need my logs. I know you're just storing it in S3 anyway. You probably get a volume discount! Let's be realistic.)

But the grinding, though

Oh right. So the big box labeled "Grinder" in my diagram was, in fact, just one single virtual machine, for a long time. It lasted like that for much longer than we expected.

Whoa, how is that possible, you ask?

Well, at 5TB per day per 100,000 devices, that's an average of 57 MBytes per second. And remember, burstiness has already been absorbed by our carefully written log receivers and clients, so we'll just grind these logs as fast as they arrive or as fast as we can, and if there are fluctuations, they'll average out. Admittedly, some parts of the day are busier than others. Let's say 80 MBytes per second at peak.

80 MBytes per second? My laptop can do that on its spinning disk. I don't even need an SSD! 80 MBytes per second is a toy.

And of course, it's not just one spinning disk. The data itself is stored on some fancy heavily-engineered distributed filesystem that I didn't have to design. Assuming there are no, er, collossal, failures in provisioning (no comment), there's no reason we shouldn't be able to read files at a rate that saturates the network interface available to our machine. Surely that's at least 10 Gbps (~1 GByte/sec) nowadays, which is 12.5 of those. 1.25 million devices, all processed by a single grinder.

Of course you'll probably need to use a few CPU cores. And the more work you do per log entry, the slower it'll get. But these estimates aren't too far off what we could handle.

And yeah, sometimes that VM gets randomly killed by the cluster's Star Trek-esque hive mind for no reason. It doesn't matter, because the input data was already persisted by the log receivers. Just start a new grinder and pick up where you left off. You'll have to be able to handle process restarts no matter what. And that's a lot easier than trying to make a distributed system you didn't need.

As for what the grinder actually does? Anything you want. But it's basically the "map" phase in a mapreduce. It reads the data in one side, does some stuff to it, and writes out postprocessed stuff on the other side. Use your imagination. And if you want to write more kinds of mappers, you can run them, either alongside the original Grinder or downstream from it.

Our Grinder mostly just ran regexes and put out structures (technically protobufs) that were basically sets of key-value pairs.

(For some reason, when I search the Internet for "streaming mapreduce," I don't get programs that do this real-time processing of lots of files as they get written. Instead, I seem to get batch-oriented mapreduce clones that happen to read from stdin, which is a stream. I guess. But... well, now you've wasted some perfectly good words that could have meant something. So okay, too bad, it's a Grinder. Sue me.)

Reducers and Indexers

Once you have a bunch of structured events... well, I'm not going to explain that in a lot of detail, because it's been written about a lot.

You probably want to aggregate them a bit - eg. to count up reboots across multiple devices, rather than storing each event for each device separately - and dump them into a time-series database. Perhaps you want to save and postprocess the results in a monitoring system named after Queen Elizabeth or her pet butterfly. Whatever. Plug in your favourite.

What you probably think you want to do, but it turns out you rarely need, is full-text indexing. People just don't grep the logs across 100,000 devices all that often. I mean, it's kinda nice to have. But it doesn't have to be instantaneous. You can plug in your favourite full text indexer if you like. But most of the time, just an occasional big parallel grep (perhaps using your favourite mapreduce clone or something more modern... or possibly just using grep) of a subset of the logs is sufficient.

(If you don't have too many devices, even a serial grep can be fine. Remember, a decent cloud computer should be able to read through ~1 GByte/sec, no problem. How much are you paying for someone to run some bloaty full-text indexer on all your logs, to save a few milliseconds per grep?)

I mean, run a full text indexer if you want. The files are right there. Don't let me stop you.

On the other hand, being able to retrieve the exact series of logs - let's call it the "narrative" - from a particular time period across a subset of devices turns out to be super useful. A mini-indexer that just remembers which logs from which devices ended up in which files at which offsets is nice to have. Someone else on our team built one of those eventually (once we grew so much that our parallel grep started taking minutes instead of seconds), and it was very nice.

And then you can build your dashboards

Once you've reduced, aggregated, and indexed your events into your favourite output files and databases, you can read those databases to build very fast-running dashboards. They're fast because the data has been preprocessed in mostly-real time.

As I mentioned above, we had our pipeline reading the input files as fast as they could come in, so the receive+grind+reduce+index phase only took a few tens of milliseconds. If your pipeline isn't that fast, ask somebody why. I bet their program is written in java and/or has a lot of sleep() statements or batch cron jobs with intervals measured in minutes.

Again here, I'm not going to recommend a dashboard tool. There are millions of articles and blog posts about that. Pick one, or many.

In conclusion

Please, please, steal these ideas. Make your log and event processing as stable as our small team made our log processing. Don't fight over structured vs unstructured; if you can't agree, just log them both.

Don't put up with weird lags and limits in your infrastructure. We made 50MB/day/device work for a lot of devices, and real-time mapreduced them all on a single VM. If we can do that, then you can make it work for a few hundreds, or a few thousands, of container instances. Don't let anyone tell you you can't. Do the math: of course you can.

Epilogue

Eventually our team's log processing system evolved to become the primary monitoring and alerting infrastructure for our ISP. Rather than alerting on behaviour of individual core routers, it turned out that the end-to-end behaviour observed by devices in the field were a better way to detect virtually any problem. Alert on symptoms, not causes, as the SREs like to say. Who has the symptoms? End users.

We had our devices ping different internal servers periodically and log the round trip times; in aggregate, we had an amazing view of overloading, packet loss, bufferbloat, and poor backbone routing decisions, across the entire fleet, across every port of every switch. We could tell which was better, IPv4 or IPv6. (It's always IPv4. Almost everyone spends more time optimizing their IPv4 routes and peering. Sorry, but it's true.)

We detected some weird configuration problems with the DNS servers in one city by comparing the 90th percentile latency of DNS lookups across all the devices in every city.

We diagnosed a manufacturing defect in a particular batch of devices, just based on their CPU temperature curves and fan speeds.

We worked with our CPU vendor to find and work around a bug in their cache coherency, because we spotted a kernel panic that would happen randomly every 10,000 CPU-hours, but for every 100,000 devices, that's still 10 times per hour of potential clues.

...and it sure was good for detecting power failures.

Anyway. Log more stuff. Collect those logs. Let it flow. Trust me.

Update 2019-04-26: So, uh, I might have lied in the title when I said you can't have this logs pipeline. Based on a lot of positive feedback from people who read this blog post, I ended up starting a company that might be able to help you with your logs problems. We're building pipelines that are very similar to what's described here. If you're interested in being an early user and helping us shape the product direction, email me!

Title Contra Anniversary Collection Developer Konami Publisher Konami Release Date July 11th, 2019 Genre Platformer Platform PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One Age Rating E for Everyone 10+ – Fantasy Violence, Mild Blood, Mild Language, Use of Tobacco Official Website

Every gamer has those series that helped define them. Games that spoke to your first perception of what made a game fun, and despite quirks or faults, are still seen through the rose colored glasses of nostalgia. One of those series for me was Castlevania, which I covered last year. But there’s another big series published by Konami that also helped define who I am, and that’s the Contra series. Admittedly, they’re both very different, since one focuses on precision and strategy and the other focuses on adrenaline pumping mayhem. Contra taught me patience and the importance of learning enemy patterns, amongst other lessons. It wouldn’t be fair to cover one series and not the other, so today I’m gonna review the Contra Anniversary Collection. Yes, it came out a while ago, but the gaming world has been ridiculously jam packed for a long period of time now, and it’s better late than never. So I’m going to cover the 10 main games in the Anniversary Collection, as well as the bonus features I spent time with. Unlike my Castlevania Anniversary Collection review, this one won’t have games listed in the order I played them. Instead, I will list them in order of preference, starting with my least favorite and working up to most. So go ahead and crack your knuckles and pop some drops in your eyeballs, cause this is gonna be a big one!

Game # 1 – Contra (Arcade version)

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I really wish I could say I loved the arcade version of the original Contra. After all, I had never played either of the arcade cabinets, so the opportunity to tackle them now seemed like a good idea. The graphics were definitely more impressive here than on the NES or Famicom, which should have translated to a better experience. Unfortunately, I ended up disliking both of these arcade variants. Sure, they’re pretty, but they’re also completely unbalanced. And that’s saying something considering how hard this series is. But there’s a difference between fair and unfair difficulty, and this Contra fell into the latter category.

For one thing, enemies move much faster than usual, and the turrets that track you are no joke. They are rapid firing mechanical death machines that track your every move and trip you up in streams of bullets. Worse, there’s not any invincibility frames in this game, so you’ll respawn and think you’re safe, just to get gunned down again. This happened many times during one boss fight, and even against the basic enemies I had a rough time.

Much like in the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, I made use of the save states here to spend less time reviewing, and even then I was getting destroyed. While I did beat nearly all the other main games in this collection, I made an exception here. I just didn’t have the patience to beat this particular game. I’m happy I got a chance to see what the Contra arcade experience was all about, but I’m much happier that I don’t ever have to play this one again. Let’s move on with a step in the right direction.

Game #2 – Super Contra (Arcade version)

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Yes, I know I just said I didn’t like the arcade Contras, and while that’s largely true, at least this one felt a bit better balanced. So much so that I was able to actually beat it! Sure, it’s still a rollicking ride, and largely unfair, but not so unbalanced that it’s unbeatable. Especially with my good friend, save states. The biggest challenges I encountered here were in the top down stages, most notably the final boss. It managed to pin me in place many times with projectiles and other threats, and it took a good amount of practice to finally put it down. But at least I mostly had fun, and didn’t find the other bosses overwhelming.

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In many ways, this one reminded me of the first console versions of the original game put into a blender with Super C. Which sounds weird, but it does make sense. The thematic focus was more on organic creepy critters than robotic threats. But don’t worry, there’s still a good chance a surprise turret will take you out. I guess my biggest issue with this particular entry was it wasn’t clear which upgrades you were collecting. I grew up with Contra III, and I like knowing exactly what upgrade I’m picking up. But at least it took the sour taste out of my mouth after the last arcade experience.

Game #3 – Probotector

I should point out here that until I bought the Contra Anniversary Collection, I had never played the European releases of the games. I honestly wasn’t even that familiar with them, and initially thought they were unique entries. Imagine my disappointment when I learned that both European entries were just remakes of Contra III and Hard Corps, but with some new quirks. For one, to get published they had to replace the humans with robots (probably cause blood was too scary for the rating board back then). More importantly, both Probotector and the other EU variant had a slower framerate. At first I didn’t notice that, but when I played the games they were based on, it became very apparent. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, since both Contra III and Hard Corps are incredibly fast paced and challenging games. In a way, Probotector is a more laid back game.

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The one downside that I saw very clearly when I was playing Probotector was the screen size. I’m not sure if this was originally the case or is due to faulty emulation in this Collection, but it’s odd. Everything looks fine, but it’s super tiny and scaled down, which hurts the eyes. And that’s a shame, cause Probotector is actually a pretty good entry, quirks aside. It just can’t live up to Hard Corps. Honestly, once I found out that both games were essentially the same experience, I stopped playing this one and moved onto the real deal. But we’ll talk all about that later. Next up, time for a portable Contra experience.

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Game #4 – Operation C

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Much like for Castlevania, Contra had a surprisingly great portable game. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was the best in the series or anything, but it does take many elements I associate with a real Contra and made them work. There’s various weapons, difficult bosses and long stages. In fact, the final boss in this game, some flying mecha that harasses you with missiles, was one of the harder bosses I’ve faced in this notoriously difficult series.

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Even with a limited color palette, Operation C was very visually impressive. I would even go so far as to say I liked the visuals more here than in either of the arcade games. Everything was more clear, albeit less colorful. The only real low points are that the game is relatively short, which was likely due to the Game Boy’s limitations, and that the music wasn’t that compelling. For better or worse, I grew up with fond memories of Contra III, so whenever I think about the series, I think about that game. And that game had some incredible music. Sadly, unlike Castlevania, the Contra series isn’t known for having consistently amazing music, but there are still some standout games. Operation C just wasn’t one of them. But, mechanically, this was a very solid entry, and one I’m glad I finally got the chance to play.

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Game #5 – Contra (NES)

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It was very cathartic for my childhood self to play through and beat this game. Because when it originally came out, I was a young whippersnapper, and I was not nearly as good then at gaming as I am now. I hadn’t yet learned true patience or developed the reflexes I rely on, which made the first Contra a real pain. Playing through it now, it actually holds up remarkably well. You could tell Konami was just figuring out what they wanted the series to be, and there are distinct influences from other sources, such as the Rambo tough guys, some levels that reminded me more of Ninja Gaiden, and some bosses that could have worked in the TMNT games.

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You wouldn’t be faulted for initially thinking the series was just about humans fighting other humans. Eventually you’ll come across some high tech crazy and start to wonder, and then the final level goes full Alien, with horrifying biological nightmares and monstrous entities. I feel that final stage really set the tone for later games, and how they alternate more fluidly between mechanical threats and the alien bastards behind it all.

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All in all though, the game which gave me so much trouble as a child was a lot more fun as an adult. Sure, it’s still a bit frustrating at times, and you can easily die from jumping at the wrong time, but overall this was a fun entry with the tight controls the series is known for. The biggest thing holding it back was the version that came out in Japan…

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Game #6 – Contra (Famicom)

A common refrain from gamers of a certain age was that Japan got all the best stuff. That ranged from swag to special editions to pre-order bonuses, but it also often applied to versions of games. The Famicom version of Contra was frankly the superior one. Not only was it graphically more impressive, allowing for effects like trees swaying or snow falling, but it was just more ambitious. This game has a full introduction, and even though I can’t read a word of it, it’s evident they put some real effort into making an interesting plot. One that was totally missing from the US version of the game.

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I especially found it interesting how this version has cutscenes after each stage, as well as a map that was very reminiscent of Ghouls ‘n Ghosts. While most of the bosses and enemies are the same, those foes more dependent on speed are much harder, like the spiked tank in the snowbound stage.

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Though this entry is in most ways identical to the NES one, I am very glad I could finally compare the two. The only thing I wish this Collection had was a way to translate all the dialogue into other languages. But I know that’s a tall order, and ultimately the plot is the least important aspect of any Contra game.

Keep reading for the top 4 games plus more ->

Game #7 – Super Probotector Alien Rebels

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Now, I know I spent some time earlier talking about the EU Contras. And yes, this one is pretty much an exact clone of Contra III. But that doesn’t change the fact I adore that game, so I found this one entertaining as well. It’s still a very pretty game, with tons of mechanical and biological threats to combat. I also found the robotic heroes looked really cool, and in some odd ways it makes more sense to have powerful robots fighting aliens than bare chested humans with guns.

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Honestly the only real complaint I have about Super Probotector Alien Rebels is that they didn’t try something new. With the whole robots versus aliens theme, it would have been cool if Konami had thrown in a new boss or two, or even a unique stage. Cause honestly, I’m invested in that concept. That said, if you like the series but feel the other games are too hard, this slowed down adventure should be more your speed.

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Game #8 – Super C

Now we’re really starting to get to the good stuff. While the original Contra was fun but a bit of a mess, Super C is where the series started to come together. There was no question that aliens were up to no good here, and they mixed horror with action very well. Infected soldiers, creepy skull ships and much more made this a game worth remembering.

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Not only was the balance better in Super C, but they had some really iconic fights that were echoed in later games. A noteworthy one is the freaky final boss, which is reused later in Contra III, but there’s a lot more that I loved. Take the dangerous metal spider you have to stand on top of and shoot bullets into. Also, the top down sections here were much more interesting than the first game.

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All in all, I feel Super C did a memorable job of bringing Contra into a more coherent place. It wasn’t afraid to try crazy shit, and the bosses were more significant and fun to battle. But the next game is one that has a very special place in my heart.

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Game #9 – Contra III: The Alien Wars

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This is the game that I have held up for years as my example of what the best Contra is. And there’s a few reasons. One is the nostalgia factor. I can still clearly remember playing this with my friend in elementary school on a giant TV, yelling and screaming as we blasted aliens to bits and got destroyed in return. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was great at the game way back then, I didn’t care. I kept playing cause I enjoyed it so much, and in the process got better and better.

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Another really obvious reason I love Contra III is the music. This is the entry in the entire series that has my favorite soundtrack. I can still hear the haunting tunes from Neo Kobe Steel Factory, the upbeat tracks of Road Warriors and the tense tenor of the boss track, Invasion. While the tunes are definitely better blaring at you from a giant sound system, they also are quite enjoyable on the portable Nintendo Switch. But it wasn’t just the music, I also loved the gameplay in this entry. Not only is it rock solid, it’s very well balanced. You won’t die for stupid reasons once you get down the patterns.

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I feel Contra III did the best job of streamlining the action while still keeping it complex. Dual guns you could swap between, bombs and shields all were in this game. And that’s a good thing, since it had some gnarly boss fights. The whole game is almost a boss rush, with grunts rushing you in between. Sure, the final stages are a bit much, and the fact you have to play through it more than once to get the best ending is a challenge, but that’s just part of the special sauce that makes a Contra. Next, we have the game that stole the gold from Contra III in a surprising upset.

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Game #10 – Contra Hard Corps

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As a lifelong Nintendo fan, this is hard for me to admit, but the sole Sega Contra in this collection has become my favorite Contra game. Which is a sentence I never thought I’d write. The primary reason is this – the staggering ambition of this game. Konami wasn’t content to sit on their laurels and phone this game in. It’s almost so over the top I can’t classify this as a Contra. There’s multiple endings, for one. For another, the primary focus of the game are out of control robots (at least initially). But then you throw in things like multiple playable characters with different weapons, and I was just staggered.

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Now, while in many ways I still feel that Contra III is the purest experience, this one is worth owning for how nuts it is. You won’t know what’s coming down the pipe next, other than the fact it’ll be angry and bloodthirsty. This is also a rapid fire Contra, making Contra III appear like it’s standing still in comparison. One jungle stage has hordes of angry critters that rush you, and if you’re not ready they’ll tear you to ribbons. Oh and did I mention there are bosses that also get some character development? Not much, mind you, but still that’s impressive. I love Colonel Bahamut, who reminded me of Dracula mixed with Dr. Wily. Or take Noiman Cascade, an obese hacker that attacks you with virtual constructs.

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In many ways, I think Hard Corps is remarkable, and it’s evident now how fully it inspired another game I love, Blazing Chrome. But Hard Corps is also really, really difficult. Even with save states, you’ll be replaying fights over and over til you get the patterns down pat. I do think the balance is a little skewed, but I still had a blast. I managed to get two different endings, but I know there’s still a handful more waiting for me. But this is one of the few games in the Collection I’ll be replaying multiple times just for the hell of it.

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Now, while those 10 are the main reason you’ll buy the Contra Anniversary Collection, there’s still more. There are Bonus JP versions of some of the games, but I didn’t have the time or inclination to play those. Mostly because I don’t believe there was enough new variation in any to justify playing them. But if you want some added replay value, you certainly have it there. Or if you want to play with a friend, I’m pretty sure all the games that originally had co-op can be played locally with a friend on Switch. Which is a nice touch.

Aesthetically, there’s really not a bad game in the bunch. Sure the series started more primitive, but even the earliest examples here had great and vibrant designs. I would definitely point to later games, such as Hard Corps and Contra III, as having the best monsters in the Collection, but there’s nothing ugly here. Even the arcade games I disliked are well animated. Musically, the game is good, not great, with the exception I mentioned earlier. Overall, the design is very solid, and I love the creativity on display in all the games.

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Another cool bonus in the Anniversary Collection is the gallery. Not only does it include tons of artwork, but a lot of behind the scenes info and even an interview or two. It even features a Contra Timeline (proving Konami didn’t learn their lesson from Castlevania) as well as a really nifty list of how many games each of the iconic weapons from Contra appeared in. My favorite is still the good old Spreadshot, but I have some affection for the Crush and Homing guns as well. However, just like the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, this compilation lacks one key feature – a music box. Now it’s not as unforgivable here as it was there, since all Castlevania games have amazing music, compared to only a couple Contra games, but it’s still a bummer.

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Altogether, the Contra Anniversary Collection is still a hell of a bargain. As a gamer that grew up playing many of these games, it’s nice having a bunch of them together in one place. I probably spent 12 hours or so playing through the entire thing. I’m a bit dissatisfied that some of my other favorite games in the series aren’t here, such as Shattered Soldier and Contra 4. But even without those, this Collection is a great deal for only $19.99. If you love over the top mayhem, giant bosses and lots of challenge, look no further.

[easyreview cat1title=”Overall” cat1detail=”” cat1rating=”4.5″]

Review Copy Purchased by Author

REVIEW: Contra Anniversary Collection Title Contra Anniversary Collection

Dell's XPS 13 (2018) is easily one of the best laptops you can buy

The Dell XPS 13 has been one of my favorite laptops since the company first revamped the line with a near-edgeless display and super-slim design in 2015. And like Apple and its MacBooks, Dell has decided to offer incremental, but meaningful updates to the XPS 13 over the years.

Which brings us to the latest incarnation of the Dell XPS 13. Available starting at $999, the 2018 version of the XPS 13 includes a thinner display bezel, improved performance, realigned webcam and, most noticeable of all, a beautiful rose gold and white color combination to compliment the current silver and black offering.

Dell’s clearly got a winner on its hands, and when it comes to the competition for your cash, this notebook comes out on top.

Rose-colored glasses

Dell’s latest XPS 13 is the first to be made available with a rose colored chassis and white keyboard deck, for an extra $50, of course. The styling has received rave reviews around my office, save for the white keyboard deck and palm rest, which at least one coworker found off-putting.

The reason you don’t see many white palm rests is because they tend to stain easily. To ensure the XPS 13’s palm rest stays clean, Dell manufactured it with woven glass fiber. I’ve had the notebook for a few weeks, and haven’t noticed any stains from things like sweat, oil, food or drinks, which would typically accumulate on my laptops’ palm rests.

(Ed.’s note: That’s gross.)

If you opt for the rose gold XPS 13, you’ll also get a white keyboard deck and palm rest. Choose wisely.

Outside of its new color scheme, the updated XPS 13 trims about 0.14 inches off of last year’s model, making it one of the thinnest 13-inch laptops on the market. In fact, the XPS is slimmer than all of Apple’s (AAPL) MacBooks, as well as Microsoft’s (MSFT) Surface Laptop and Surface Pro with that device’s keyboard attached.

In reality, though, the weight and thickness of most modern laptops have reached a point where you won’t notice much of a difference between one or the other. It’s more about bragging rights now than anything else.

More screen

Since its debut, the redesigned XPS 13’s claim to fame has been its near-edgeless InfiniteEdge Display. For 2018, Dell went even further in its attempt to make the laptop’s bezels disappear by shrinking them by 23%. I didn’t notice the change at first sight, but if you’ve got a 2017 or older model, you should see the difference.

The base model XPS 13 comes with a 13.3-inch, non-touch, 1,920-  x 1,080-pixel resolution panel. You can, however, upgrade that to a 13.3-inch, 4K touch screen panel with a 3,840- x 2,160-pixel resolution. The Surface Pro comes with a 12.3-inch, 2,736- x 1,824-pixel display, while the Surface Laptop gets a 13.5-inch, 2,256- x 1,504-pixel screen.

The XPS 13’s 13.3-inch InfiniteEdge display offers crisp, colorful visuals.

Apple’s MacBook features a 12-inch display with a 2,304- x 1,440-pixel resolution. The MacBook Pro gets 2,560- x 1600-pixel panel. All of these screens, with the exception of the base XPS’s, are more than crisp and sharp enough for everyday users and photo editors.

The one notebook that falls short is the MacBook Air, which is still rocking with an ancient 1,440- x 900-pixel resolution screen. Going from my trusty Air to any of these other laptops is always a shock when I see how their screens compare with Apple’s offering.

Colors look absolutely stunning on the XPS 13, thanks to its 1,500 to 1 contrast ratio, which makes blacks look infinitely deep. Even desktop icons pop on this display. Especially dark shows like “Stranger Things” also look fantastic, but you do end up seeing reflections in the panel.

There’s just one problem with the XPS 13’s screen: it messes with the position of the laptop’s webcam. With such a small bezel, there’s no place for Dell to fit a webcam above the display. With older models of the 13, Dell moved the webcam just below the bottom left corner of the panel. Naturally, that resulted in whoever you were talking to getting a weird look up your nose.

Unfortunately, the XPS 13’s camera still looks straight up your nostrils.

For 2018, however, Dell centered the bezel below the screen. It makes for a slightly better experience, but anyone you talk to is still going to get a great view of your nostrils. And forget about typing while using the webcam. Unless you recently got a manicure, you’re not going to want the person you’re chatting with to get an up-close look at your nail beds.

Power and battery life

My review unit came with an Intel (INTC) Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage space, a 4K touch screen, and handled all of my daily tasks with ease. I ran Chrome with 20+ tabs, streamed Spotify and was chatting on Slack and didn’t run into any issues. For the kind of power this XPS is packing, it would be more of a story if it did have a problem handling any of those simple processes.

For 2018, Dell said it managed to increase the XPS 13’s power by improving its internal heating system. It now uses Gore Thermal Insulation and a dual fan and dual heat pipe setup to help move heat away from the processor and graphics chip. Doing this allows the XPS 13 to maintain stable performance levels longer than competing devices.

But don’t expect to do things like play the latest and greatest games on the XPS 13 at their highest settings, though, as it only packs an Intel graphics chip. I managed to fire up “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds,” but the graphics were so low that every characters’ head looked like it was covered in individual pixels rather than hair.

The Dell XPS 13’s rose gold chassis is a stunner, but it’ll cost you an extra $50.

If you really want to get your game on, you can plug an external graphics card into the XPS via its USB C port, and get gaming. Naturally, that requires you have a graphics card and adapter readily available, but it can be done.

The XPS 13’s battery was also a solid performer. I worked through my entire workday, eight hours or so, without having to worry about the machine giving up the ghost. That said, the XPS’s 4K display does eat through power faster than the standard 1080p screen, so make sure to take that into account when configuring your system.

Pricing and the competition

At its base price of $999, the XPS 13 comes with an Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage and a 1080p, non-touch display. 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage is small potatoes in today’s world, though, so I’d recommend moving up to the $1,199 model to get 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

If you’re itching for more power you can get a Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD for $1,399. If you want that sweet 4K display, you’ll have to add an additional $400. And if money is no object, you can get an XPS with a Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and a 4K display for $2,299.

Microsoft’s Surface Pro is slightly more expensive in each of its configurations thanks to the fact that you’ll need to spend an additional $130 on a keyboard cover to use the device as a laptop. The Surface Laptop, on the other hand, starts at $799 with a much less powerful processor. For $899 you can get a similar configuration to the base Dell XPS 13, but you’ll also have to upgrade the machine from the Windows 10 S operating system it comes with to full Windows 10 for $49.

The XPS 13 is one of the thinnest 13-inch laptops in the world.

You’ll end up spending slightly less on the low- to mid-range Surface Laptop, but you don’t get that 4K display found on the XPS 13. And when you push the Surface Laptop’s specs to match the top-of-the-line XPS, you end up paying $2,699.

On the Mac side of things, a base MacBook Air starts at $999, but comes with a fifth-generation Core i5 processor. That’s three generations behind the processors available with the Dell. You do get 8GB of RAM for that $999 price, but with the older chip and lower resolution screen, it’s not really a bargain. What’s more, Apple is rumored to be updating the Air in the spring, so it’s probably not worth buying the Air until we find out more about Apple’s plans.

The MacBook, for its part, starts at $1,299 with a less powerful Intel m3 processor, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. You’re basically paying for the MacBook’s slender frame and sleek design, but that’s a lot to ask. Jump up to a Core i5 with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD and you’ll pay $1,399.

Apple’s MacBook Pros all start at higher prices than the XPS, with the base model coming in at $1,299. But the Pros are designed for use by professional video and photo editors and pack a heck of a performance punch, so it makes sense that they’d cost more.

Should you get it?

The Dell XPS 13 is the best Windows 10 laptop in terms of overall value and looks. It’s also less expensive than Apple devices, which makes it a solid option even for Mac fans. If you’re in the market for a new PC, and don’t mind its odd webcam placement, the new Dell XPS 13 is easily a top pick.

More from Dan:

Trump is wrong about video games and violence

Vero is the anti-Facebook social network everyone is talking about

Sony’s PlayStation Vue just became an even better cable TV killer

Samsung’s Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus bring major camera improvements

What to do when you’re hacked

Email Daniel Howley at [email protected]; follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley. Follow Yahoo Finance on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn

The Turing Test (2016) Review

The Turing Test is a first person puzzle adventure game where you play as Ava Turing (heh heh get it? Turing test?), an engineer who has been sent to a base on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moon, to discover the reason behind the sudden disappearance of the ground crew there. When you arrive, however, you find that the crew has converted a set of rooms into puzzles that only a human could solve, as to keep robots out (theoretically, I’ll get to that in a bit).

This review is going to avoid blatant spoilers of anything major.

Gameplay

As aformentioned, The Turing Test is a first person puzzle game. I probably will draw a lot of similarities to games like Portal and other games in the same genre. Anyway, the main way you interact with puzzles is with your ‘Energy Manipulation Tool’ (their quotes not mine), which is essentially just a gun that allows you to sudck up power core thingies which act as batteries to power elements of the environment. You can only hold three at once and you can’t change the order they’re stacked in, so in other words if you suck up a new core, you’ll need to stick that core somewhere before you can use the other cores you’ve previously sucked up. On paper, this sounds pretty well and good, and even in the game for the most part it’s a pretty intriguing concept. There are different types of cores that you can find, some of them alternate on and off, some are only on for a short while after they’ve been placed, and it works well. Usually the puzzles are a matter of getting what is effectively a door open so that you can get through to the next puzzle, with there being 70 puzzles in total and 7 extra optional puzzles. I have some issues with the puzzles. By the end of the game, puzzles start to end up feeling like a chore. The puzzles don’t become challenging to get through like near the end of the Portal games, instead they just have so many bits tacked on that you have to take a minute or two to actually figure out what the hell is going on. And the inability to change which orb you fire out quickly becomes obsolete as you can always expect there to be three power sources for you to sort things out with. The middle of the game is where the puzzles really peak, and even then they’re not super difficult, just kinda clever. There are a lot of times where I felt like I wasn’t supposed to solve the puzzle how I did. Like how Portal speed runners sometimes do little tricks where they shoot a portal at just the right angle at just the right time so it goes through a tiny little gap and hits a wall right at the end of a puzzle. Except that seemed like the main way to solve some puzzles near the end of the game. Nevertheless, the puzzles are worthwhile, and you’ll have fun with them. The puzzles are the game’s strong point, and honestly if you just want a first person puzzle game for the intent of doing nothing but playing through puzzles, you can basically stop reading now because you’ll probably like it. It only took about 5 hours to 100% it for me, but I don’t feel like I wasted any of those five hours.

Performance and visuals

This game is made on Unreal Engine 4. As you can imagine, it looks pretty excellent, albeit most of the game does take place in sterile test chambers. Except occasionally there’s a little section in some ice, or sometimes you’re in a laboratory with lots of props and the like, and visually it really shines in those areas. And it runs great too, although the graphics menu has some questionable choices. For instance, it has these lens flares that go over a chunk of your view sometimes which I’m absolutely fine with personally, but I know that there are people who would hate them. The issue is that you can’t just disable them. You’d need to lose them along with bloom and that brightness adjustment thing where everything gets darker if you’re looking at something bright all at once. It’s only a minor thing, but it’s not that hard to put some check boxes in your menus. Everything is on a slider from Low up to Ultra, and while there’s a lot you can modify, I’d still like to be able to manually choose specifically what I enable.

Overall it’s pretty well optimised for PC.

Story

This is where everything goes to shit. The story at the start stays intact, but as you go it tries to be more and more clever, then starts being pretentious, and then everything bursts open. At the start, you’re flown onto the moon base and you go inside and “Woah!” you say “It looks like they’ve transformed the base into a series of puzzles!”. Or at least you would if it weren’t that the base’s AI, T.O.M. hadn’t of already said it. Lots of puzzle games have a robot that tells you stuff, except generally they either start off knowing as little as you do (think Weatley from Portal 2), or they start off knowing everything except they don’t have a real relationship with the player character so they don’t tell you anything (think GLaDOS from the original Portal). T.O.M is a weird mix between the two, and it just doesn’t work as well. Anyway, so T.O.M explains that he thinks the puzzles are some sort of Turing Test type thing to keep any robots and AI out, and explains that they’re too lateral for an AI to handle. That’s hilarious, considering AI would be much quicker to solve that type of test if anything. Now you’ve got that little hole in the story which is questionable, but really they didn’t do too terrible of a job explaining why there are so many puzzles on a space base for some reason. The issue comes up later, when this whole robots-can’t-do-puzzles thing contradicts itself when the writers start trying to be more clever than they actually are.

But then you get to the optional puzzles. These simply aren’t likely to ever exist in a situation like this, but for some reason, the people who built the puzzles thought “Hey, why don’t we put some audio logs behind more difficult puzzles for no apparent reason?”. It seems fine on the surface, seeing as though they wanted to include some story bits that you need to work for. Except then you go back to Portal, and remember that there’s a whole subplot you could skip hidden around the puzzles. Granted, these are a slightly different concept; they’re less direct story telling moments, but my point stands that it makes more sense in Portal.

You can ignore that, but then you’ll find that every 10th room, the people who built the puzzles thought “Hey, why don’t we keep a small section of the base with all our stuff still in it, and always put it at exactly every 10th puzzle?”. It just makes no sense, if the base was actually still being used after they built the puzzles, you’d need to go through 60 puzzles every single time you wanted to cross the god damn base! But the last 20 you probably won’t be doing, because they literally make zero sense if you think about it. To put it spoiler free, you need to start taking advantage of robots and AI to get through a set of puzzles designed to keep robots and AI out.

And then the game starts asking that you show some emotion for the characters near the end, even though they’re all mentally retarded. They want you to think that the robot is mean and heartless and other bad things, but really he’s the only one thinking logically out of all of them. So when the inevitable moral choice comes around, it’s not at all warranted, and you don’t feel like you’re actually doing anything. It seems that every time this game throws another interesting concept into the mix, it breaks everything else and weakens the story.

Overall, the story tries some interesting things, but constantly fails to execute them all that well.

Music and Sound Design

Eh, it’s alright. Nothing amazing, but it’s alright. The music is pretty good, but it’s not the sort of music you’d listen to outside the context of the game. A majority of the music is classical style piano based stuff, usually with the same melody which changes slightly to reflect the mood of the story. The sound is alright, but sometimes it feels slightly off to what’s happening on screen. Voice acting isn’t bad either. Nothing is bad in this department, but nothing is really anything more than average. Not bad, just not amazing.

Steam Controller Support

For this review onward I’ll do a grade system for this bit, just so I don’t waste your time.

Grade: A

Simultaneous mouse and keyboard works fine, although there are as always some issues with changing button prompts. Overall though, basically flawless in this area. Works best with either a mouse and keyboard or Steam Controller, entirely up to you.

Tidbits

Price to length

As I mentioned earlier, this game took me about 5 hours to 100%. It costs $19.99 on Steam. That’s just too much, especially when you consider that there’s almost no replay value. They needed something like the challenge maps in Portal, or a time trial mode, or just anything to give it a bit more content and replay value. I’d pick it up for $10 or less, preferably around $5. There are some games, like The Witness, which deserve this price point, but The Witness actually has $20 worth of content.

The Verdict

Gameplay - 8/10 Visuals - 8/10 Performance - 7/10 Story - 2/10 Music & sound - 5/10 Tidbits (incl. SC support) - (-0.5)

Score out of 50 = 8 + 8 + 7 + 2 + 5 - 0.5= 30.5/50 Final score =

62%

(Above averaqe) (6/10)

A great puzzle game which has its head up its own ass when the story sections come around.

TL;DR: Definitely consider this game, but don’t expect a great story, and wait for a sale.

In these modern days, 3D fighting games are a rare commodity. Born from 3D craze of the mid-1990s, with an urge for every single console in the market to enter this new dimension, the genre flourished… until it almost disappear entirely. Let’s face it, in the case of fighting games, a combat in a 3D environment can pose many gameplay worries and few titles have mastered this trend, like Soul Calibur and especially the Tekken series (both published by Bandai Namco). Known for these endless combos, the series had lost some of its punch after the release of Tekken 6, but Katsuhiro Harada wanted to bring back the saga with the might of an iron fist, worked for years with the perfectionist mind of a Japanese developer, and finally gave us Tekken 7 on consoles after a year in Arcades, and might be the series best entry so far.

Since its early days, the Tekken series suffers from many of the genre’s clichés which were too difficult to forget (I’ll refrain from mentioning the horrible Tekken 5 and Tekken 6 which did not help at all). With its lengthy combos, its endless aerial juggles and a certain amount of accessible playability, the franchise did not bother to reshape the gameplay. Now with Tekken 7, Harada’s team had the main goal to get away from the old trends, and get back to the days of being a fun but also very technical fighting game for the sake of the fighting game tournament scene. On that competitive front, Tekken always played a role in major international tournament series like EVO. For that, the franchise decided to expand that by adding native eSports features in the game, such as the possibly to organize your very own bracket online tournaments, participate and spectate matches being played, which help tremendously streamers.

To start with, when to comes to technical gameplay, Tekken 7 says goodbye to the infinite combos to return to something purer and raw, closer to the gameplay feel of my favorite entry in the series which is Tekken 3. In general fighters seem heavier on ground, but lighter in the shock of the punch and kicks, helping push back the opponent without the endless aerial juggle of the previous games. (the nuance is important) And return more quickly to the ground. In the air, the hitboxes seems more reduced than before, requiring players to time hits better to link these famous air combos. The result of all this is shorter but more violent combo threads, which above all will demand a greater mastery of the game, which is what we wanted.

The game is therefore more technical, but also more tensed, with a real work done on the defense and the possibilities to counter-attack. Tekken 7 introduces the Power Crush system, which allow the players to absorb damage from a mid to high attack and use it against your opponent (similar to Street Fighter IV Focus Attack). The Power Crush system doesn’t work on low sweeps or grabs, so don’t expect to abuse or spam these features. This is where the mindgame takes on its importance since you’ll have to be close to active that Power Crush, but at the same opens the door to get countered by a simple grab, and thus reminding you how important attack variation is in Tekken 7. Besides the Power Crush, Tekken 7 enriched the Rage system introduced in the previous opus. With RB (or R1 depending on your console), it is possible to launch a Rage Art attack, a kind of Super Attack (a bit like Mortal Kombat’s Xray Attacks), but also to use the Rage Drive, a unique attack that has the ability to break enemy guard, and initiate longer combos. Tekken 7 of course didn’t forget the cinematic angle of franchise, and added this Super Slow Motion that is activated when both of the players are at low health and are just about to hit each other.

When it comes to the story mode of Tekken 7, it tells the end to the conflict between Heihachi Mishima and his son Kazuya, known as the “Mishima Saga”. The mode will expand with a few different characters other than Heihachi and Kazuya, which could entertain fans of the series. I for one never bothered understand the storyline of the Tekken Series, and this episode is no different as it’s riddled with cliche dialogue lines and scenes. The game story takes a hell lot of time to tell the story, with too many cinematics, but also weird conversations where characters would be enacted by different lanaguage voiceovers, which is a bit weird and illogical. I mean, unless you are at an interpreter party, who would logically start a topic in English (Nina), for a Japanese (Heihachi) to answer back in his native tongue, only to be interrupted by a new Italian fighter (Claudio). Anyway, it might feel normal for people, it’s just weird to hear 3-4 different voiceover languages in the same scene.

At launch, Tekken 7 gives us a fine selection of 36 characters to play, including old ones like Nina, Kuma, Law, but also nine brand new fighters including Claudio, Luchy Chloe and our first Arabic one called Shaheen. The new fighters are necessarily more classical in terms of design styles, adding a great diversity in the roster of the game, without creating useless duplicates. Every fighter has his own personality and it will once again be difficult not to find one that clicks to your style, whether you prefer some like Lucky Chloe with very fast hits and extremely fluid movements, or go for – my favorite so far – Master Raven who’s more technical and relies on counter-attacking, as well as using teleportation and quick dodge paired with Ninjutsu style (Sort of robotic-enhanced ninja).

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As it is the case with many fighting games nowadays, including recently Injustice 2 (reviewed on our site last month) you will have the freedom to customize your favorite fighters through a dedicated editor. Clothing, hair, color schemes, and a bunch of – mostly goofy – accessories will create numerous combinations. I wish though that they focused a bit on creating real secondary identity like character specific or exclusive accessories, because most of the alternative set given are mostly just alternate color scheme sets based on the original. If you didn’t get what I mean, I’m referring to ideal secondary cosmetic skins that dramatically change the look of the fighter, maybe with a classical retro look, younger age, etc. As you would have guessed, most accessories aren’t unlocked and require you to either spend money (in-game currency) or do specific game actions and achievements. You can earn money through various existing game modes (online, singleplayer, etc) or spend time in the Treasure Fight mode. The latter, is a like a min-arcade mode, forcing you to beat a succession of enemies and will win a chest after each win that contains a customization item, and the more you chain victories, the more rare the loot.

On the side of the online mode, I’m happy to say that it’s probably the best around from this new generation of fighting games (In comparison to Injustice 2 and Street Fighter V). While it was still difficult to judge the effectiveness of matchmaking since few people had the game when I received my review code, but after the launch week, I faced no problems, with no latency issues, dropping server connection and no frame drops whatsoever.

Sadly my small issue with the game is the general visual look of Tekken 7, which is closer to an older generation game. For a game launched in 2017 – even if it was in Arcade 2016 – it visually looks like a Tekken 6, lacking a sort of finesse. Even if the game is perfectly fluid, using a brand new Unreal Engine 4 custom graphic engine, the general feel is a bit sub-par on couple of points. Menus are slick, arenas are really colorful and special effects pop, but face animations feel crude, and some clothing and other cosmetic parts of the fighters look pixelated around the edges.

But at least, on another artistic point of view, the game has some of the best audio compositions, mixing fun guitar metal shreds and heavy riffs, traditional Japanese and far east instruments and even some Arabian and Spanish influenced tunes. To be honest, that surprised me a lot, as previous games were always playing the clichés of the genre, which you can actually listen to in the PlayStation 4 exclusive Jukebox mode, which acts as a historical music library of the Tekken franchise.

Tekken 7 was reviewed using an Xbox One digital copy of the game provided by Namco Bandai as well as a PC Steam copy of the game purchased by the reviewer. The main review was done by Nazih Fares and the technical PC review was written by Mazen Abdallah after a tested on a PC running Windows 10, with an 8GB NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1070 fitted on a 4th Generation Intel i7 4790 3.6Ghz CPU and topped with 16GB of RAM. The game is also available on PlayStation 4 via retail and online stores. We don’t discuss review scores with publishers or developers prior to the review being published.

After waiting for more than 6 years for a sequel, you'd expect Tekken 7 to come back with the might of an iron fist, and Bandai Namco absolutely nailed that. In these modern days, 3D fighting games are a rare commodity. Born from 3D craze of the mid-1990s, with an urge for every single console in the market to enter this new dimension, the genre flourished...

RX 570 8gb Hashrate: Mining 2021| Review| Testing | Specs | Profit

Sapphire RX 570 8gb Hashrate - Mining | Profitability |Payback Period| Review | Best Testing (Benchmarck) Radeon RX570 Nitro 8 GB video cards are very popular among miners, so they don’t stay long on the shelves. Accordingly, it can be concluded that this type of map can be used for profitable mining. Thanks to its powerful specifications and performance it helps to quickly recoup costs. However, before making the final choice, it is recommended to pay attention to a number of nuances. Features Radeon RX570 Nitro 8 GB Model RX570 has several similar characteristics with the RX580 card, given the presence of factory boost and improved vendors. It also affects the cost. Despite the similarity, it is important to note that experienced users still stop their attention on 570 models from the manufacturer AMD. Regardless of the type of 570 cards, they have 1200 MHz core frequency. A number of vendors total more - 1300 MHz. Power is estimated at 150W.  Today on the market you can see cards with memory sizes of 4 and 8GB. Their difference between them consists only in spaciousness. As for the frequency parameters, in this case they are the same. Equally important for miners is the overclocking indicator. Experts agreed that the card from the manufacturer Samsung. They are put on the most productive versions: Nitro or Sapphire. Regarding manufacturers such as Hynix or Micron. On average, the difference is 1-2Mh / s. Please note: Please note: In spite of the bad review by a few customers, we experience no such issues (not saying you won't) but We would comfortably recommend this product for mining cryptocurrency based on our testing that will be continue below. People also ask: Common Questions RX 570 8gb What’s up techies, let’s dive right into this. I can’t say enough about the AMD/Radeon/Sapphire… let’s just go with “The non-Nvidia GPU”. You might want to keep up with your friends and be a part of the FPS and triple monitor setup talk, all while getting; the best performance for your buck, the most quiet graphics card (considering it’s in a case your keyboard strokes are probably louder all said and done) and something that looks like your rig is an aggressive graphics producer. What I find as far as looks go is that most GTX graphics card’s aesthetics are pretty much the same in color scheme. With the Radeon graphics cards you can get a red, blue silver, black and a mixed black, silver and light blue scheme. Some even have RGB lights! Not to mention the price for a mid grade Radeon is like 200$ less than that awesome GTX 1080i or what have you. Instead of 650$ you walk away around 300-350$. (Mind you this is just off the top of my head to get the idea across). With that said, this card specifically has a very nice color scheme, a protective/stylish backplate which is preferred by most when the installation of your card happens to show off the underside of it, you’ll be pleased to not see the unattractive green circuit board and instead a painted backplate. This is important now a days where there are multiple ways of mounting your GPU. Some mount them vertically, horizontally, upside down both ways or even outside of the computer case itself! Okay it looks good you got that? Now I’m gonna talk about the AMD Radeon graphics software. One key benefit I want to bring to light is the fact that when you enter the update menu you have a choice between, the latest update or the best reccomended update all while showing you the current version you have installed. With this feature you might find you’re using the latest update and your pc is being weird having random monitor black outs or maybe even pc restarts! So you’re able to switch to the recommended version which is known to work with your setup and should a revision of the latest update arrive you can give that try all on the fly. Jeesh get to the performance already! So I’ll name a couple games and my performance in relation to each game. World of Warcraft, I’ve played for the last 14 years is it now? Obviously their graphics only get so good because Blizzard refuses to update the visuals but if you’ve played as long as I have you’ll see that you can set all the settings on ultra and turn up your viewing distance, shadow detail or spell detail to get the most of what Blizzard offers. While having everything set to ultra etc.. I’m getting 80 FPS and if I just go in a room with my character I can hit 100 which is what my FPS in capped at in wow. I’ve never been over 30 due to always playing on a “beefed up” laptop lmao Also I play overwatch and it is flawless with all graphics levels turnt up I forget the exact FPS. I went ahead and bought the HTC vive and this thing handles VR without breaking a sweat! Considering I will have the in game display on the tv at all times and obviously the display in the HTC. Another noteworthy feature is that the fans shut off when it’s not in demand so add power saving to the list of why you should buy this graphics card! I honestly can’t see getting much more from a 700$ graphics card unless you’re a high end game developer? Well that’s all folks feel free to ask any questions and I will do my best to answer! Top 7 Questions Asked on Amazon Before Buying - RX 570 8gb ASRock Phantom Gaming D Radeon RX 570 DirectX 12 RX570 4G 4GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Video Card Question 1: Will this work for a ryzen 3200G ? Answer: Yes, you may want to drop into the bios and make sure it is defaulted to your PCIe slot and not integrated. Question 2: How many pins does Radeon RX 570 have? Answer: The RX 570 Have 6 Pins. Question 3: Does The Radeon RX 570 works with a pci express x16 gen 2 interface? Answer: We suggest you contact your computer manufacturer to get their list of compatible graphics cards. Many old computers require a Bios update from manufacturer. For old computers the best compatibility results is to pair with old graphics cards. Question 4: Will The RX 570 works with a Ryzen 5 3600? Answer: Absolutely! Be sure that it can fit your case though :) Question 5: Is the Radeon RX 570 compatible with intel? Answer: Yes it should be, as long as you have the proper driver from AMD u shouldn't have a problem.. Questions 6: Will The Radeon RX 570 works with the Ryzen 7 2700x? Answer: Yes, as long as you have the correct driver installed. Question 7: Why so expensive? It's the RX 570 for Christ sake! Answer: There is a chip shortage, so even the older models are being price gouged. It is a matter of supply and demand at this point. RX 570 8GB Amazon - Top 6 Underrated Questions Before Buying on Amazon + Answers - Question 1 - Please do you know if this graphic card can be use in asus m5a99x evo r2.0 motherboard. thank you in advance? Answers: This question was answered by the manufacturer - According to my research for you. You have these specs below and my answer would be yes it does fit. But a few other tips. Have at least 8gb of Ram and a have a good power supply - Question 2: What memory does this card use? Samsung, Hynix? Answer: Download tech powerup gpu-z it will tell you the type. Anyway it is Hynix - Question 3: The fans that come with the RX 570 8GB are they rgb? Answers: No, the Sapphire logo is RGB though. - Questions 4: Has anyone solved the code 43 problem with trying to install the drivers? Answer: Get driver Booster 6.2 on ebay for less then $5.00, and it keeps mine running fine. - Question 5: Is The Sapphire Radeon Rx 570 8GB a good video card for gaming or music? Answer: Yes, it is very Good. - Question 6: What's the difference between the sapphire nitro + radeon rx 580 4gb gddr5 graphics card (11265-07-20g)? Answer: This has more ram but fewer core clusters. The 580 will be slightly faster in games less ram dependent and about the same in more ram intensive games. Best Reviews Posed on on Amazon From customers - RX 570 Best Reviews Posed on on Amazon From customers - RX 570 Good Amazon Review By Customer For The RX 570: First off, I'm not a high-end gamer. I don't overclock or anything like that. My only real goal was playing Elder Scrolls Online with 30fps or better in world zones. This card can handle that just fine using the "High" but not "Ultra High" preset. And results may vary depending on what else is in my build (AMD A8 9600 APU / this GPU / 12GB slower RAM / Installed on a 7200RPM WD HDD). After tweaking settings, my build maintains 20-30fps in environment zones and 50-60fps in dungeon zones. But that's after changing a few settings to higher than "High". Anyway. For what it is, this GPU works just fine. My only complaint is that, of the two fans, one of them runs virtually silently, while the other fan has a constant low-grade bearing whistle. Ordinarily, I suppose a person would send it back for a replacement, but the low noise level is within my tolerance level, and I bought this card with the intention of getting into the game as cheap as possible, then upgrading in the near future, so I didn't want to deal with the hassle of a return. When it comes to fans on any PC component these days, one's entering into a bit of a lottery, so I expected the fans to be rather loud. Even with this bearing whine, it's still quieter than many other GPU fans I've run across over the years that oftentimes sounded like jets taking off. So, again, I'm satisfied. Remarks of the Best Review on Amazon2: WORKS REALLY GOOD I WOULD BUY FROM THIS SELLER AGAIN 😁👍🏽 GET 144+ on every game Review 3: A little pricey but during this pandemic its to be expected. Cards arrived new and in a timely fashion. Very happy with the seller and the product. Good Review 4: Using it on my 3rd gen i5 and holding up well. Just good enough to play beat sabre. Good solution for tight budget. Worst Review Posed on on Amazon From customers - RX 570 Worst Reviews Posed on on Amazon From customers - RX 570 Bad Review of the Radeon RX 570: This is a good GPU but I would not recommend buying it at this price. Spend your money on a better graphics card if you are going to spend an extra $100. It's worth $200 right now. Please note: In spite of the bad review by a few customers, we experience no such issues (not saying you won't) but We would comfortably recommend this product for mining cryptocurrency based on our testing that we will be continuing below. Poorest Remarked on the Radeon Nitro+ 570 8GB TLDR The card is defective, the seller Platinum Micro Inc Wont take back (as a return was submitted 31 days after arrival of product), Amazon can't help with a return, RMA shipping per the requested method was almost $40. I'd recommend avoiding the card. I purchased a Nitro+ RX 570 8GB from Platinum Micro Inc on 8/29/18 and received the card 9/6/18. My wife and i were about to move so i didn't test the card until 10/4/18 when i found that there was an issue with the card. I tried to trouble shoot the problem myself through the 10/6/18 when i found some postings (see toms hardware, amd support, ect...) , that this was a known issue with the Sapphire cards and likely a bios problem. 17 and 18 series drivers i tried gave me an error reading "No AMD graphics driver is installed, or the AMD driver is not functioning properly. Please install the AMD driver appropriate for your AMD hardware" on BIOS 1 and i get frames about the same as my 5 year old 7870 on bios 2. Newer drivers read bios 2 as an RX 580 in GPU-Z and same issue with frame rates. The only way that BIOS 2 functions is with drivers that are almost a year old (17 series drivers) and makes me doubt support for current gen titles coming out this year. I filed for a return on 10/7/18 and was denied as i filed 1 day outside of the window. I first called amazon and asked about their 90 day A-Z guarantee and was told that because the seller was a 3rd party seller the 90 day guarantee didn't apply. I ran through Sapphire support for a few days before they recommended an RMA with their 3rd part RMA company, Althon Micro. Althon Micro has given me an rma number and on their email requested the use of bubble wrap and packing peanuts which with shipping ran about $40. I'm worried though that their fix for the problem is a bios re-flash which would void any factory warranty i have on this card. After this fiasco I'm avoiding sapphire cards. For the $320 that this card has cost me i should have just bought a better card and that's my recommendation to you. Our Comment After Testing The RX 570 8GM We Try to be as honest as possible with our products of recommendation and based on this cards Testing and very performance that we have seen, we would gladly recommend anyone to buy. Purchase on Amazon Now - Sapphire 11266-09-20G Radeon Nitro+ Rx 570 8GB GDDR5 Dual HDMI/ DVI-D/ Dual DP with Backplate (UEFI) PCI-E Graphics Card Calculating the average result (excluding firmware), you can count on the following indicators: - Pascal 0.72Gh / s - DaggerHashimoto 23.7 Mh / s - Equihash 311 Sol - Decred 1.24 Gh / s. Speaking about the prospects of mining and which currency is most profitable to extract the most, it is worth noting ETH. The card is able to reveal its technical characteristics and show the maximum possibilities.  - 1 x CPU - 4 x DIMM 240-pin - 2 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (dual x8 mode; single card: x16 mode) - 1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x4 mode) - 2 x PCIe 2.0 x1 - 1 x PCI - If we compare the characteristics of the 500 model and 570, it is worth noting that the second option has lower power consumption characteristics, which has a positive effect on the size of the final profit. This indicator makes the card as popular as possible among the entire range from leading manufacturers.  Increasing the hash rate of Radeon RX570 Nitro 8 GB No modern video card can not be called a perfect option. For example, Nvidia manufacturers did not take care of the firmware, so after purchasing it, many users begin to solve this kind of puzzle. Firmware is needed in order to increase the hashrate. As a rule, after it the result is increased by 40-50%. The average hashrate in the factory state varies 18-21 Mh / s, which is a relatively low figure. Taking into account the cost of the card, this is a rather low indicator, and therefore it will pay off for a long time. When using the Afterburner program, it is possible to increase the rate on average to 23-25 ​​Mh / s. Unfortunately, even this indicator will not save the miner from a long payback period (about 29 months). In this case, it is worth noting that AMD seriously loses the card from Nvidia. But the firmware can fix the situation. After the BIOS is reflashed, the card can be sharpened for mining and organize optimal overclocking. Do not forget to set the optimum timing, and the most appropriate frequencies. However, this is a process that requires certain knowledge, so miners rarely can perform it on the first attempt. For some users, it is possible to achieve optimal results only from the 10th attempt, which also does not always add optimism. But after the work is finished, After the firmware is implemented, the user can expect to receive the following indicators: - When using the Nitro, Asrock, Expedition model with Samsung's memory, the hashrate index will be around 31.7MH / s - Gigabyte Aorus / Gaming using Samsung memory figures up to 30.5Mh / s - Asus loses a bit - 29.9Mh / s. It is important to take into account that the above indicators are maximum as a result of the check, therefore, they should be guided during the selection process. As a rule, similar results are given to be achieved only on maps from the manufacturer Samsung. Regarding Hynix, this effect applies only to Nitro.  Another option that can play hashrate is the choice of the operating system. Regarding Hive, it can provide stable performance, through additional functions: you can organize work with a flash drive without the need to connect the HDD, WatchDog firmware, as well as the convenience of monitoring workflow compared to Windows. Accordingly, the first version of the operating system is best suited for mining.  How long can the Radeon RX570 Nitro 8 GB pay off? Over time, the concept of payback begins to be used as a relative concept. This is due to the fact that the rate of extracted cryptocurrency also changes. As a rule, miners who are engaged in such activities constantly, try to control the situation and make appropriate adjustments. When they talk about 570 models, you can directly associate it with mining ETH. In addition, an equally important factor is the purchase price of the video card. Depending on the course of the coins, it also tends to change. The higher the rate, the higher the purchase price becomes.  Power is another important factor that the miner takes into account when choosing a video card model. Even if you spend the worst version of the system BIOS firmware, you can get an indicator of at least 28 Mh / s. If the card will differ in stable operation, it is possible to expect a stable indicator of 2 Mh / s 7 days a week. Given the average cost of the card, you can safely expect an annual rate of 70-80%. If you keep the value of the currency at the peak of its course, then you can count on the fastest 100% payback during the year. However, it is also worth considering the complexity of the farm, the higher it is, the slower it will pay off.  Card selection First of all, it should be noted that in 2021 it will no longer be possible to mine the ETH with a 570 memory card of 4 GB. This is due to the ever-increasing size of the DAG file. Therefore, for users who are accustomed to forecasting ahead, it is important to take this moment into account. Regarding the same model, but with 8 GB, there will be no restrictions.  Speaking about the total result of the 570 model, it is important to note that this is an economical option that is best suited for novice miners. This is due to the fact that energy consumption is relatively low, which means you can save a lot of money on paying bills. As a rule, vendors have an efficient cooling system. According to the testing, it is unlikely that the temperature index will go beyond 60 degrees. Due to the minimum payback period, this model is recognized as one of the best deals on the market.  However, do not forget about the prerequisite - the presence of firmware. Otherwise, an indicator of more than 26 MH / s cannot be obtained at the factory settings.  Purchase on Amazon Now - Sapphire 11266-09-20G Radeon Nitro+ Rx 570 8GB GDDR5 Dual HDMI/ DVI-D/ Dual DP with Backplate (UEFI) PCI-E Graphics Card RX 570 8gb Best Review - Still Relevant In 2021 ( How to be Profitability mining Bitcoin?) The Radeon RX 570 is not that much different from the Radeon RX 580 in terms of GPU configuration, and choosing between versions with 4 GB and 8 GB of RAM will allow additional savings on memory. Will all of this make the RX 570 a better buy than the 3GB RAM version of the GeForce GTX 1060? The SAPPHIRE Pulse Mini-ITX video card will help us to answer this question.⇣ Contents We recently tested AMD's top-end second-generation Polaris silicon-based graphics card, the  Radeon RX 580 . As tests have shown, a deep revision of the circuitry of the chips and the matured 14 nm FinFET process technology justified the hopes placed on them, significantly increasing the "quality" of the crystals. AMD thus acquired a reserve entirely invested in GPU clock speeds, which, even within the framework of the reference specifications, increased so much as to provide conditional parity in performance between the Radeon RX 580 and the  GeForce GTX 1060 . Compared to its main competitor, the Radeon RX 580 can offer the buyer such advantages as a larger amount of RAM (8 versus 6 GB) and the ability to work in multiprocessor configurations, which NVIDIA in the current generation has deprived of video cards with a lower rank than the GeForce GTX 1070. Read the full article