Trying out some Steam games on the netbook

I have recently tried out a few games on my Asus EeePC 1101HA netbook and will now briefly report the results:

• Flight Control HD: Not playable
• Worms Reloaded: Not playable
• World of Goo: Playable

You'd think that Flight Control, which also exists for mobile phones, would run on a netbook, but no. Sure, it's HD, but still. The same actually goes for Worms Reloaded: Worms 2 was released in 1998 and the graphics seem to be essentially the same as back then, but now I couldn't even get past the initial "This is your first time playing the game! Would you like to create a player profile?" screen of the newest incarnation! World of Goo is a happy surprise and runs almost smoothly, even though I'm willing to bet it does more complex calculations all the time than either of the two other games. Goes again to show you that the weak spot of this netbook is its Intel GMA500 graphics chip. Oh well, at least I've got my still brand new'ish desktop computer.

The Humble Indie Bundle #2

There's only 13 hours left of this offer so act quickly: The Humble Indie Bundle #2 offers five indie games for whatever price you choose to pay! The games are Braid, Cortex Command, Machinarium, Osmos and Revenge of the Titans and most of them are redeemable on Steam as well. If you pay above what the average user pays (currently 7.80 USD) you'll also get the first Humble Indie Bundle which contains six games, including the hits World of Goo and Gish. World of Goo alone is well worth the 7.80 USD and I have heard good things about Braid, Machinarium and Gish as well. This is the first time I hear about Osmos but it looks interesting too. I already bought the games and might have done that even if I already had all the games as I find the Humble Bundle concept very supportable.

New computer for playing Civ5

So, a month went without any updates, sorry about that to both of my readers. What have I been up to? Well, I bought Civilization V but found out that my computers wouldn't run it. The game wouldn't even start on my 9-year-old desktop computer. It did start on my Asus EeePC 1101HA netbook, but it took no less than 15 minutes to get into the game with all the loading, and even then the game responded to mouse clicks with a one second lag. So, I was forced to buy a new desktop computer.

My new desktop computer is built on an Asus P7P55D-E LX motherboard into a Nexus Version 1 case. It has got 4 GB of DDR3 RAM, an Intel Core I7-870 processor and a silent Gigabyte R575SL-1GI Radeon HD 5750 graphics card. There's also an OCZ Agility 2 90 GB SSD data storage device. The computer is fast and rather quiet. :) A small mistake was that I bought the processor as the boxed version, i.e. with a heatsink and a fan. A separate, larger heatsink would've been in order as under full stress the CPU core temperature rises above 90 °C, when the idle temperature is around 40 °C! :O Intel customer service did assure me that modern processors can take high temperatures and that the CPU will shutdown itself to protect itself before any damage occurs, but I'm still a bit skeptical... Maybe I'll buy a better heatsink (something like this) later.

So anyway, the new machine runs Civilization V (and other games) very smoothly. :) In case you are interested in my experiences with the game, see my blog post at the Civilization wiki. There's also another game log I posted.

Free arrow icons

Some time ago I was looking for some arrow graphics to be used at work. The criteria I had for the arrows were:

• pointing to all eight directions
• round background
• in multiple colors
• nice looking (think "Web 2.0")
• permissive license

I searched Wikimedia Commons and a few other resources but didn't manage to find a good icon set matching all these criteria. Luckily these were more of a nice-to-have feature than an absolute requirement so I just went without the arrows then.

Later on at home I began to think it shouldn't be too difficult to create the arrows by myself. So, I surfed to Six Revisions, which is an excellent blog for web developers and designers, and did a few searches to their archives. Surely enough, I found a great tutorial for creating Web 2.0 -like icons.

The result you can see in sample image attached to this post. Download the icons (.zip file, 1.5 MB) and see them all. The images are saved as 256x256 pixel PNGs with transparent backgrounds. There are 48 different images: all eight directions in white on green, white on yellow, white on red and inversed colors. I have licensed them with the CC0 1.0 Universal license which is effectively the same as giving them into public domain. In other words you are free to do whatever you want with these images, no restrictions. I would appreciate a note if you use them somewhere but that's not required either. Enjoy!

Dropbox

Dropbox is a neat online service for saving your files. It is basically an online hard drive where you can store any kind of files to be accessed from anywhere. Using Dropbox has been made very easy: you register to the site and download and install a client application, which then displays as a regular folder in your file system. The magic happens when you move or copy files into that folder: they are automatically copied into the Dropbox servers and you can access them from any other computer, either by using the online user interface or by the dedicated client! 

The client is available for Windows, Linux, Mac and even some mobile platforms, so there's really no reason not to use Dropbox even if you use multiple computers with different operating systems. I figure Dropbox is a great way of storing data when using a netbook: even if the system breaks, your data will be safe, plus it will be available for your desktop computer as well. It is also unlikely that you will be handling very large files with a netbook that doesn't have too much power so the default amount of 2 GB that you get should be plenty. Register using this link and you'll even get an extra 250 MB of storage space. :)

I registered to Dropbox in the spring when someone wanted to share some photos with me (yes, Dropbox can easily be used for sharing files too, and no, those who then just want to view your files don't need to register). After that I forgot about it until I tried the Jolicloud Linux distribution which has got some sort of a Dropbox integration. I figured Dropbox would be an excellent place to store, for example, my KeePassX password database file so I could access it from both Windows and Linux, and from both my desktop computer and my netbook. I have now also saved the installation packages of some key software to Dropbox so that the next time I'm installing a fresh system I won't have to browse through a dozen web sites to get all the programs I need.

Steam's pricing policy

Steam is an online content delivery system where you can purchase and download games. It also involves some social networking features. Steam offers some indie games that cannot be bought elsewhere, but it also distributes some big titles. In the past I have written about a few games I've downloaded from Steam. 

Lately I have been contemplating pre-purchasing Civilization V which will be out in about five weeks. I might have purchased it already if it wasn't for Steam's ridiculous pricing policy: the exchange rate of 1 USD = 1 Euro! The basic version of Civ 5 costs $49.99 for US-based customers but 49.99 € for EU-based customers! The current real exchange rate is something completely different and the correct price in Euro would be 38.98 €. With the Civilization V Deluxe Edition the situation is slightly fairer: shopping from the US the price is $59.99 (46.77 €) but for European customers it's not 59.99 € but 54.99 €, which of course still leaves a difference of 8.22 € ($10.54)...

I was able to check the US prices using some proxy servers located in US. Basically my browser connects to a proxy server and asks for a web page, after which the proxy fetches the page and returns it to my browser. The target site (Steam) deduces the country of origin for each request and chooses the prices accordingly. When the proxy server is located in the US it looks like the requests are coming from US and Steam shows the prices in dollars even though it's me requesting the sites from Europe.

Anyway, while I was at it I decided to check the prices for the United Kingdom as well. Turns out Civ 5 is in discount at the moment: the regular version costs £29.99 ($46.78 or 36.49 €) and the Deluxe Edition £39.99 ($62.36 or 48.68 €). Still slightly more expensive than the prices in US. However, these were just the discount prices -- the normal prices are £39.99 and a whopping £49.99 ($77.97 or 60.82 €) respectively!

Alas, while writing this post I just found out I've been doing it all the hard way: you don't need to use a proxy to get the prices from different regions, just install this script to your browser! At least the US prices seem to be displayed correctly. However, for UK it only displays "N/A". For Australia it displays the prices 79.99 USD and 89.95 USD but I wasn't able to confirm those using a proxy. If the prices are correct, however, it's an enormous difference from the US price! I wonder how Steam can just keep doing this? There's even a Steam Community group called 1€ ≠ 1$ with more than twenty thousand members.

Best mobile games

I'm a Nokia user and every now and then I feel like playing something with my phone. Here's a little list of games of enjoyable games, in no particular order. They should work with other models than Nokia as well as they are made with Java.

Ukko's Escape. A free and addictive one thumb game where your mission is to keep jumping upwards to make Ukko happy. Ukko's happiness decreases if he falls or does not jump and when he's out of happiness the game ends -- unless you managed to actually jump all the way up, in which case you win. The levels get increasingly harder and you can feel how you are making progress when you get further and further with each try. Ukko's Escape has even got a global highscore list at RumbleX and it seems that my record for the Hard difficulty level is still unbeaten. :)

Yet Another Tetris. Just what the title says, but this is the best free mobile implementation that I have come across. The arcade mode keeps the games short and hectic when extra rows are regularly added to the bottom of the screen. :)

Rollercoaster Revolution 99 Tracks. This is a commercial game but I once came across an offer and got it for free. In the game you control the speed of rollercoaster cars and try to collect smileys while avoiding crashing. As the game progresses you unlock new tracks, a couple of new car types and so-called awards, which are just cosmetic but nice anyway. 99 tracks do sometimes make it feel like the game was repeating itself, but if you like perfecting your accomplishments then this game might just be for you. There's also a free online version of the game available.

Tower Wars. I had actually forgotten about this free game, found it again when writing this post and ended up playing it for quite a while. Tower Wars is a tower defense game. In the game you place various kinds of gun turrets in front of forces of Chaos and either try to create a maze for them or to fill the edges of existing mazes with as effective cannon setups as possible. The graphics are good and there's a nice twist in that the game progresses through decades and millenniums: you start with rock-slinging huts and progress all the way to laser turrets and such. My online favorite of the genre is Desktop Tower Defense. :)