My Favorite iOS Apps and Games
I recently purchased an iPhone 4 (review forthcoming!), so I thought I would share some of my favorite applications on the iOS platform! In no particular order…
Carcassonne ($4.99/iPhone)
Easily one of the best games on the App Store, Carcassonne is a German-style board game where players take turns placing road and city tiles in an attempt to earn the most points. To score, you need to place one of your seven “meeple” tokens on a road, in a city, or on the land surrounding these structures. The catch is that you only get these tokens back during the game when you complete a road (by having it terminate on both ends) or a city (by enclosing the entire structure in walls). There’s a lot of strategy involved with trying to block off your opponent (trapping their meeple tokens) and preventing the same from happening to you!
An iPad upgrade is due out sometime this summer (and with that, a price increase to $9.99). However, anyone who purchases the game now gets a free upgrade when the iPad version is released. The game fully supports the high-res display on the iPhone 4.
SquareUp (Free/Universal App)
SquareUp allows you to take credit/debit card payments using your iPhone or iPad. Designed for small businesses and individuals who can’t afford expensive point-of-sale equipment, Square charges lower transaction fees than the large credit card processors. When paired with their headphone jack dongle, you can swipe cards instead of performing manual-entry transactions.
Square also includes some nifty features like emailed receipts and purchase tracking (so it can automatically award your customers that free cup of coffee after they buy 6 cups).
Runkeeper (Free/Universal App or $9.99/Universal App)
Runkeeper uses the GPS in your iPhone or iPad to plot your walks, runs, and other travel-related exercises on a map, which you can view and (if you prefer) share with others. It can also help you with pacing and show various statistics about your runs. The Pro version adds voice prompts to let you know how you’re doing.
Words with Friends (Free/Universal App or $2.99/Universal App)
Words with Friends is a Scrabble clone, but it’s actually much more polished than the official Scrabble application from EA! It supports just two players asynchronously, but you can have as many games as you like going on at once. The paid version (totally worth it) removes the advertisements that appear in between turns.
Pocket Legends (Free/Universal App)
Pocket Legends is the closest thing you’ll get to a Diablo-esque action RPG on the iPhone/iPad. With three classes, 45 levels of advencement, tons of random loot, PvP arenas, and 6 (and counting) campaigns, the game keeps getting bigger every day. The UI is excellent, and most importantly, the game is a blast to play. The Spacetime Studios team supports PL through microtransactions – you pay small amounts of money for things like new campaigns or extra items.
iPad users get their own special client optimized for the larger screen (thanks TouchArcade)!
Killer 2100 Gaming Network Card Review
Bigfoot Networks made something of a splash in 2007 with the release of their Killer M1 network card. The premise? That the Windows networking stack was never built for gaming. By offloading network traffic to a dedicated card with its own processor and RAM, you could cut down on a bit of latency, potentially improving your gaming performance. In practice, the M1 didn’t really do all that much to improve ping times. In certain cases, it actually made things worse! Early drivers were buggy, the card was expensive ($300 at launch!), and the M1 was widely regarded as expensive networking snake oil.
Fast forward three years. Bigfoot Networks has recently released their Killer 2100 gaming network card at a much more affordable price point of $129. Has Bigfoot made significant strides in the four years since the M1? Have the drivers improved? Is the card just another piece of networking hooey? Let’s find out!
Hardware and Packaging
I purchased VisionTek’s edition of the Killer 2100 from NewEgg (amazing service as always, thanks guys!). The contents of the box are fairly spartan, containing the card, a driver CD, and a short owner’s manual. The card itself isn’t nearly as flashy as the original Killer M1. I actually prefer the toned-down look; the mesh keeps you from accidentally touching the board when you install the card, and there’s a subtle red LED that lights up the interior when the card is plugged in. The card itself is a single slot PCI Express x1 affair, but it will install in any PCI Express slot size (mine’s in an x4).
Software
The Killer 2100 comes bundled with the Killer Network Manager, a combination benchmarking, tweaking, and monitoring utility that serves as a sort of command center for the card. The app is divided in to five sections: Overview, PC Monitor, Applications, Network, and Advanced.
The Overview section displays basic system information, along with average pings, network processor usage, and whether certain software features like bandwidth control and LAN Exceptions are enabled. The PC Monitor can graph NPU usage and other stats over time. The Applications section lets you prioritize applications and artificially limit their bandwidth (for example, I set my BitTorrent traffic to low priority and restrict it to using 30% of my available bandwidth, leaving plenty of bandwidth available for Katt and my other applications).
The other two sections allow for low-level tweaking. The Network section lets you test (or manually configure) your connection speed, toggle the LAN Exceptions feature (which prevents the card from throttling internal network traffic), and change built-in Windows TCP settings like TCPNoDelay and the TCP ACK frequency. The Advanced section allows for altering the behavior of the Killer 2100’s traffic prioritization rules and some miscellaneous options like turning the built-in LED on or off.
The drivers have been rock-solid. No crashes or bluescreens!
Performance
Snazzy software aside, I’m sure you want the answers to the only questions that really matter: Does it actually work? Does the card reduce latency in games? I’m actually quite pleased to report that the Killer 2100 delivers on its promises. Latency tests are difficult to replicate, since there are myriad variables that can affect that sort of performance. To try and gauge the card’s impact on the two games I play most often, DICE’s Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, I kept a spreadsheet of latencies across five days of playtime. The timeframes were relatively consistent, with most gameplay occurring between 8pm and 11pm, Monday through Friday.
My box has the following specs:
- ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 motherboard
- Intel Core i7 920 (2.6GHz)
- 6GB of Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600 RAM
- Western Digital RE3 1TB hard drive
- ATI Radeon 5870 1GB graphics card
In World of Warcraft, I had an average ping of 180ms running on my Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet controller. In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, I had an average ping of 148ms on the same built-in NIC. Then I installed the Killer 2100, disabled my built-in NICs, and started tracking latencies again. I only have 3 days of sample data (compared to 5 for the Yukon), but the averages have definitely dropped. With the Killer 2100 installed, my average World of Warcraft latency is 98ms. That’s a 46% decrease. In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, my average ping is 101ms, a 32% decrease over the Yukon controller.
My connection in general feels a lot smoother — I used to get small latency spikes and hangups in Bad Company 2 when a helicopter would crash or I was riding shotgun in a vehicle. in World of Warcraft, I’d regularly experience the “teleportation effect” in the major cities where large numbers of players gather. Players would be standing in one spot, running in place, then appear 200 feet away in the blink of an eye. These problems have disappeared on the Killer 2100. The best part is that I didn’t have to manually prioritize my gaming traffic: the card takes care of that for you automatically.
So is the Killer 2100 worth its $129 cost? That depends on two things:
- Is your connection at least mediocre?
- Are there other upgrades (like extra RAM or a new video card) that you could put that $129 towards and get better performance?
The Killer 2100 won’t fix a crummy connection, although it can make a mediocre one good and a good one great. It’s definitely geared towards the PC gamer who already has the essentials taken care of (processing power, RAM, and a good video card). If you’re lacking in one of those departments, save your money. However, if you’re searching for a product that will give you an edge that’s next to impossible to gain with other hardware, the Killer 2100 is the upgrade for you. The automatic application prioritization and Windows network stack bypass features really do work, decreasing latency and improving overall network performance. You’ll notice a difference!
You can buy the Killer 2100 from Newegg for $129, but I get a small cut through Amazon Affiliates if you pick it up from Amazon.com.
Adventures with the Death Llamas
I noticed that it’s been a whole year since I started my 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons campaign! Since this is my first time acting as a Dungeon Master, I thought I would lay out some of my experiences with world building and running a campaign (along with a few lessons I learned along the way).
I started out with something of a naive vision: I had some grand tale I had penned in my head, tales of daring-do and epic adventures. Lots of non-player character interactions, environmental challenges (surviving scorching deserts and the like), and most importantly a coherant plot that kept people coming back each week. However, as Robert Burns once wrote “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley.” I had made my first rookie mistake: I had attempted to craft a narrative where the players were puppets in an ‘on-rails’ tale, rather than allowing them to craft their own story. I quickly realized that if the mercenaries of the Death Llamas were going to stay interested, they needed to feel like they had control of the plot.
This is a lot more difficult to do than it sounds. Being able to improvise is a learned skill for most of us, improved with practice and hard work. I rapidly arrived at the conclusion that I was terrible at handling pivotal plot decisions on the fly, so I ended up compromising a bit. Rather than adhering to a rigid plot (no fun for the players because every event is a forgone conclusion) or giving my players complete narrative freedom (which requires lots of rapid improvisation from the DM and a 100% story-committed playerbase), I decided to take the middle ground. By preparing two or three ‘options’ at a given plot point in the narrative and some sketchy frameworks/ideas for the eventual impacts of those decisions, I found I could give my players choices without taking away the advantages of four hours of preparation each week.
While this might sound obvious, I found that it’s extremely important to take each of your players’ wants and needs in to account. Sending a combat-loving, ‘dungeon crawl’ type of party in to the duke’s annual Winter Ball is a recipie for disaster. Ask each player (preferably in private) what they want out of the game. As an example, my group leans heavily towards combat, broken up with the occasional skill challenge and NPC interaction. They rarely need an excuse to slay monsters (although they do appreciate some world building — more on that in a moment).
Even if your campaign is light on plot, you still need to make your player characters feel as though they are the focus of the tale. When the locals welcome them home with open arms or a visiting bard sings tales of their exploits, it makes everyone feel more attached to the world you have created. As an example, the Death Llamas were granted a guildhall early on in their adventuring careers by a local lord (who would eventually become their benefactor). Through the course of their adventures, they put their treasure and time in to transforming the hall in to a bustling tavern. When a beloved companion perished trying to save them from the martial arts of an evil monk, they renamed the tavern in his honor. Eventually, the tavern became their base of operations and a source of income. The running joke nowadays is that most adventures begin like this:
- The Llamas have recently returned from an adventure. Everyone is using the downtime for training, running the tavern, working for their affiliated factions, or just chatting with the locals.
- A haggard figure/panicked villager/old sage from 5 adventures ago bursts in to the tavern with some dire need or task that needs doing
- The price of doing said task is agreed upon
- The Llamas set out on their newest adventure
A few other tips I’ve picked up along the way:
- Keep an adventure log. Not only will it help you remember what you did last week, your players will appreciate it as well!
- Use a campaign management system (like Obsidian Portal). This lets you keep all of your party’s treasures, gold, maps, etc. in one place!
- Encourage your players to add descriptions and depth to their characters.
- Even if you use boxed adventures, take the time to tweak them for your players. I try to work in subplots for at least one player each adventure.
- If things seem slow and/or boring, ask people what they think is wrong. (In my case, combat often reached a ‘forgone conclusion’ state where victory was assured, but it would take another 20 minutes to kill the monsters. Consider having the enemies surrender or offer to take away some health from the players to skip to the end of combat.)
It’s been an exciting year so far. Here’s to the next one!
Twenty Years of Gaming
Over the past few days, I’ve been pondering the major role games have played in my life. I write a lot of reviews on games, but I don’t often talk about them in their social, personal, or intellectual contexts. It’s easy to forget that games aren’t just pastimes, they have the ability to shape and change lives. I would never have met people like Alex, my wife Katt, Tim, Scott, Greg, and countless others without them! With that in mind, I proudly present my Twenty Years of Gaming and all the people, places, and events that came along with them.
It’s been about twenty years since my brother Ryan and I got our first video game system: an original Nintendo Entertainment System with the Duck Hunt/Super Mario Bros. cartridge and two controllers. I can remember afternoons spent playing cooperative Mario Bros. with my Dad (switching off every level) and crashing my car repeatedly in Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat with Ryan. (Maybe I shouldn’t have spent all of my upgrade money on engine power and boosts.)
That little 8-bit system fostered a love of video games in my siblings and I that continues to this day. My brother is graduating with a BS in Interactive Media and Game Design from WPI. My sister and I talked the other day about Dragon Age characters on her Xbox 360. Katt and I even had a gaming theme at our wedding. With that in mind, I thought I’d run through some of my favorite titles from the past two decades — those that really resonated with me because of their stories, gameplay, or events they ushered in to my life.
The Early Years
After the NES and Super Mario Bros., the first thing that comes to mind is a game that was hosted on Prodigy’s internet service (and later standalone on PC) back in the late 80s/early 90s…
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
Carmen Sandiego was the first video game I can remember playing on a computer way back in 1990. I was 4 at the time and terrible with geography, but Carmen’s crazy capers (who steals the Indy 500?) kept me coming back for more.
Eagle Eye Mysteries and its follow-up, Eagle Eye Mysteries in London
Ah, Jennifer and Jake Eagle. My partners in crime-fighting! The characters and attention to detail are what made the Eagle Eye series great. The London-based sequel was particularly good, featuring cases that ramped up in difficulty and eventually all tied together story-wise. Armed with our trusty notebook, the Eagle twins and I solved cases ranging from animal theft to art forgery.
Just about everything in the Super Solvers series
That includes Treasure Mountain, Treasure Mathstorm, Treasure Cove, Spellbound, and (my favorite) Gizmos and Gadgets. They might be a bit old (and firmly in the edutainment category), but they’re a great way to teach math, reading, and physics to a young audience. I certainly played them for hours on end (and was, many years later, somewhat disappointed to discover that you couldn’t technically ‘beat’ any of them — the little prizes you were awarded at the end doubled/tripled/etc. up after awhile). Nothing could beat the feeling I got when I built my go-kart in Gizmos and Gadgets with the fiberglass body and lapped Morty’s (the main antoganist od the series) box-shaped kart in the race.
Yep, the line-clearing, block filled puzzle game that’s made an appearance on just about everything with a screen. My first experience was with the one that shipped with the original Game Boy in 1989. I think I got my Game Boy in 1991 (it was awhile ago, my memory’s fuzzy), but I remember how excited I was to find that it came bundled with Tetris! My grandma still carries a Game Boy Pocket and a copy of it wherever she goes. She tells me it helps her pass the time while waiting in movie theaters. Unsurprisingly, her high scores are off the charts!
The Legend of Zelda series, but Link’s Awakening in particular
To this day, Link’s Awakening is my favorite game on the original Game Boy. I first spotted a classmate playing this during recess in 2nd grade and fell in love. I was over at his house for a sleepover and brought my Game Boy with me. I asked him if I could play it “for a bit” and promptly spent the entire night playing! With its 8 dungeons, tons of sidequests and items, and wonderfully varied scenery to boot, it’s a marvel even 17 years later. I mean, look at the size of this world map. This was in 1993 on a cartridge that held half a megabyte! The sheer scope of the game still amazes me — it was the first truly epic adventure I played on a handheld and continues to set the bar for RPG/adventure games to this day.
The Middle Years (and my first MMO)
Sometime in early 1995, we traded in our mostly-broken NES at FuncoLand (now more commonly known as GameStop) for $10. The guy behind the counter frowned as every game he put in to the system seems to be broken. Eventually, he pulled out the trash can, dumped the whole lot in, and said “Okay, you know what, I’ll give you $10 for the lot. It’s a steal.” We walked out with a shiny new Super Nintendo, two controllers, and copies of Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Thus began the SNES era in the Bedell household: a time of role-playing games, my first exposure to cooperative gaming, and lots and lots of Tetris Attack.
Today, my brother Ryan continues to jealously guard our collection of prized RPG cartridges (Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana among them), original controllers, and an SNES Jr (a late-model redesign we bought after our 1991-era model fried itself). I relive our console golden age with a hacked up Wii, an original controller, and one of RetroUSB’s SNES-to-Wii adapters.
I’ll start with my absolute favorite SNES game…
“Ryan, you can play this one with three people AT THE SAME TIME!” I was stunned to discover with Square’s Secret of Mana that RPG/adventure games weren’t just limited to a single player. Mana’s cooperative gameplay was, for me, revolutionary. My brother, sister, and I often watched one another play through different titles, but for the very first time in our lives, we could play a console game together. For a trio of RPG lovers, Mana was heaven-in-a-cartridge. Weapons and magic that got better as you used them, an open world you could fly around (in MODE 7 pesudo-3D!), and a decent storyline — we were sold. Many hours of fun (and bickering about who got the fancy new helmet) ensued, and the game remains a family favorite to this day.
Two player racing with characters from Mario? Sign me up. Super Mario Kart was the second racing title we ever owned. Even with just two players, the Grand Prix racing and Battle modes were fantastic (I can see the red balloons popping now). It doesn’t look like much in 2010, but it was the only kart racer around at the time. When you think about it, the mechanics of the series haven’t changed much over the years. Those pesky heat-seeking red shells and banana peels are just as hazardous as ever! In fact, I saw a fellow with this bumper sticker just the other day…
Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds
(wow, it looks a lot better these days than it did 12 years back)
Oh boy. Where to begin with this one. Nexus was the very first massively multiplayer online game that my brother and I ever played — it was also one of the first to be released in the U.S., right around Ultima Online. Ryan and I beta-tested it through 1997, then begged my dad to front the $10/month/account fee so we could keep playing it for the majority of 1998 when it officially launched in the U.S. We even got some of our friends playing! It is responsible (along with me having no willpower) for:
- Convincing my parents to switch over from 56k dial-up with AOL to a 1 megabit broadband line from MediaOne (“We won’t tie up the phone anymore, mom!”)
- Me nearly flunking 7th grade (academically, it was my worst year of public school hands-down — I went from a solid A student to Cs in the span of 6 months)
- Me realizing that, perhaps, I should play certain games in moderation
- Improving my time-management skills!
Despite all of its negatives (both from a gameplay perspective and the fact that it completely sucked me in), Nexus opened the door to some great social experiences with Ultima Online and its free server community…
Another doozy that kept Ryan and I busy from 1998 to 2001. After deciding that we didn’t want to pay for another MMO to play, a friend of ours directed us to a player-hosted server called Lair of the Sorceress. It was there we met two individuals who would be a major part of our online lives for years to come: Wolverana from the great state of Texas and Nabisco from Canada. Wolv was a Game Master on the server, a sort of combination administrator/police officer/ who resolved disputes, put on events (more on that in a moment), and generally kept everything running smoothly. Nabisco was a friend-of-a-friend who loved Dungeons and Dragons and writing various modification and extra content for our little server. He started an online D&D group that brought many hours of monster slaying and adventure
A few rounds of drama later, and Wolv had started her own server running off a little 3 megabit cable line in Austin, TX. Ryan and I took advantage of the low population and UO’s awesome open-world “do anything” gameplay to start our first guild: the Obsidian Artificers. Ryan’s incredible powers of wizardry and mining ability combined with my fencing and blacksmithing skills made us a force of benevolence (and sometime mischief) in the world. There are too many tales to tell, but here are some of my favorite stories in one line apiece:
- Founding outposts across the land and stocking them with supplies for players in need (way over the maximum number of buildings two players could put down)
- Holding a complete monopoly on magically-enhanced armor and giving it away for free
- The day we had our first Player vs. Player arena tournament (Ryan cast Flamestrike on every participant and fried them in a single hit, myself included, taking the victory)
- The day we founded Irondale, the first player town on the server (I had a restaurant!)
- The great explosion, when Ryan spent an entire afternoon covering the city in exploding potions and then set one off by accident
- The great pirate invasion (we hired every pirate mercenary in Moonglow, a pirate haven in the middle of the sea, then brought them to town by boat. It crashed the server.)
Needless to say, we had a great time.
Blizzard’s epics: Diablo and StarCraft
Ryan and I had just received our first personal computers in December 1998: Dell XPS T500s with 500MHz Pentium III processors, 6GB hard disks, and a Voodoo 3 graphics card apiece. Through the magic of telephone-wire networking, Dad managed to get an IPX LAN up and running at home (later, we would actually pipe Ethernet around the house and run a real TCP/IP network). The network multiplayer possibilities were endless! Blizzard’s Diablo and StarCraft had recently been released, and they were the first (and only, for quite some time) games we ever played on our new computers.
Because we shared a desk, we had to stick a large piece of poster-board in-between our monitors whenever we played StarCraft games against each other. I peeked all the time and to this day, I have never won a StarCraft match against my brother. Diablo was cooperative (which was much better), and many rainy afternoons were spent crushing the minions of Hell beneath our bootheels. Ryan’s barbarian and my sorcerer did a fair job of squishing any evil that came our way.
The Last Decade: 2000-2010
These last few titles have a special place in my heart because I spent most of my time playing them with the people I love. Many a Thanksgiving in East Burke, VT was spent playing…
The ’spiritual sequel’ to Goldeneye (at least in terms of multiplayer), Perfect Dark was the best multiplayer shooter on the Nintendo 64…even if it required a special RAM Expansion pack and ran at 15 frames per second on a good day. Even with its engine bringing the N64 to its knees, Perfect Dark was an incredible experience. There was nothing quite like having my brother, sister, and friends all playing at once with four computer-controlled bots making things even more hairy. The stat tracking (I am, according to the game, a grenade magnet) and the ability to tweak gametypes (hate the Laptop Gun? Get rid of it! Love Nanite Bombs? Play an entire round with them as the only weapon!) only made a great game better.
Although it feels a bit dated now, there’s a high definition remake available on Xbox Live Arcade.
Another Thanksgiving classic. Joe, my brother, sister, and I once played through the entirety of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy in a 17 hour marathon. 100% completion. We never played it again after that, but it was the first ‘marathon’ gaming session I had ever done. I don’t think anything has come close to the 17 hours-in-one-day mark since.
A college staple, especially freshman year. Super Smash Bros. Melee was the mortar that cemented my friendship with Tim and Scott (second from the left and last in the row, respectively). Every Friday and Saturday night we would head up to Scott’s room on the 4th floor of my dorm at Bentley, break out the sodas, and play Smash until our thumbs were sore. On occasion, we’d head over to Brandeis with other members of the BSGO and play with the CGX members too.
I met the Disgruntled Cookies (although at the time they were the “Uber-noober Battle Group” or UNBU) playing Team Fortress 2. Although we don’t play much of it anymore, the community often plays titles like Heroes of Newerth together. We even exchange Christmas cards during the holidays.
Yep, six years later and my shaman is still alive and kicking. WoW and I have something of a history together. I started playing in the beta in September 2004, introduced it to a number of friends (and my wife), and have been playing it off-and-on ever since. We’ve played with folks from all over the world, and even (at one point) went down to visit some guildmates in nearby Connecticut. There were the 9pm to 2am raids on the weekends in college, hours spent fighting off the opposing faction in Battlegrounds, and talks about family over Ventrillo. Server swaps and character transfers, rerolls and respecs. A thousand and one tales of our adventures in Azeroth. In short, WoW’s story is a long one best saved for another day. It’s a tale I plan on telling eventually though!
And there you have it my friends, 20 years of gaming. I may have played a lot of games in my day (our Nintendo DS library is 48 titles strong), but these selections will always hold a place in my heart!