Monthly Archives: December 2009

It Just Works: Steam and Blizzard

I recently purchased a well reviewed laptop (ASUS UL80Vt-A1) as well as Torchlight on Steam.  This was the perfect opportunity to see how Steam works on multiple machines.  I downloaded the Steam client to my laptop, entered my password, and all of the games I had purchased both online (Torchlight and Bioshock) and at retail but had authenticated through Steam (The Orange Box) were available immediately.  I simply downloaded and installed Torchlight and Bioshock and was able to play them immediately.  It just works. The download speed was impressive reaching 2Mb/s.

Steam recently announced that its Steam Cloud feature was integrated into Torchlight.  This feature makes gaming on multiple machines much less work.  Previously, I would have had to set up a way to share my game save files and copied them to the appropriate folder each time I moved from one machine to another.  Now, I am able to just load up the game on either machine at any time and find my avatar exactly where I left him on the other machine just seconds before.  Outstanding.

The only thing that doesn’t ‘just work’ with Steam is being signed in on two machines at once. Upon signing into my Steam account on my laptop, I was kicked off on my PC.  I am told that I can avoid this by playing in offline mode on my secondary machine, but I see this as a bug, not a feature.  I can understand not being allowed to play games on multiple machines at once due to piracy issues, but signing me out just for logging onto another machine is bad design.  This is a minor annoyance, though.

Blizzard also has a client for registering retail games.  While creating an account for the Starcraft 2 beta, I decided to register my StarCraft and Diablo Battlechests.  I didn’t have any use for the service when I signed up, but having my disks who-knows-where right now, I found the perfect opportunity to test their service as well.  The ‘my games’ section of the account is a bit buried, so finding it took a few minutes, but upon finding it, I was able to download the games patched to the most recent version in about 20 minutes each.  The system also keeps the CD keys saved so that during the install, I don’t have to search for the boxes.   Considering I would have had to patch up the disk versions, this may have actually been faster than installing from the disk.

Although both systems presented minor annoyances, they represent what is so enticing about the digital age:  I have purchased these games, whether at retail or digitally and am able to access them quickly at any time even if I don’t have the disk at hand.

Torchlight: When Fewer Features Means Better Gaming

Torchlight is a recent PC game available digitally for <$20 by Runic Games.   The developers decided to match the low price with a relatively sparse feature set.  Most games based around classes have more options for types of classes (or at least more subsets for those types) and many more spells/skills to learn.  While it may sound like you are getting what you pay for, it is precisely the limited number of classes and skills that seems to make this game so well balanced.

As Jeff Atwood pointed out two years before the release of Torchlight (and in regard to non-gaming software), software should not be measured as a bundle of features.   While Dragon Age (another game based around character classes) easily has a greater number of features, it does not make it a better game, per se.  It would be unfair to compare the two games as they were developed by two teams of differing sizes and are built to entertain is different ways.   However, the smaller feature set allowed the smaller development team to create an incredibly well balanced loot driven game in Torchlight.

While adding more classes and skills would allow more flexibility, and possibly more replayability, who wants to replay an unbalanced loot game?  In addition to providing a reasonably scoped feature set to provide a more focused experience, the developers of Torchlight followed another great traditional software (and gaming) convention:  Let the users determine what is broken.  While Torchlight was initially a solid experience, a few of the mechanics were ripe for breaking the game.  Specifically, enchanting weapons and heirlooming gems multiple times made some items game breaking.

Instead of holding the game for months to find these subtle problems, Runic released a game that was fully functional with a few exploits (that they likely were unaware of).  When users found these exploits, Runic was quick to patch a solution.  Version 1 may have ‘sucked’, but they shipped it anyway.  When problems were found, they responded.

While Torchlight may not be the biggest selling, or most epic game of this holiday season, it succeeds in being great software with great support.

New Software: Fences

This week I discovered several new applications for personal use.   I plan to review most of them in the near future, but it would not be fair to review them without diving into most of the features.  Therefore, I’ll be waiting on the more complex programs.  Stardock’s Fences is a simple enough application that I feel comfortable reviewing it after only a few days of use.

Fences is a simple program that organizes a user’s desktop icons into groups such as ‘Programs’, ‘Recent Things’, etc.  The icons for these groups are then sectioned off into fences whose size and location can easily be changed.  Previously, I had organized my icons into groups this way, but with no real structure or formality.   Just the small change of having them in identified groups makes the desktop a bit cleaner.  It also makes for easier sorting when I create a new icon.  Additionally, Fences allows the user to double click the desktop to hide all icons for a cleaner look.  Another double click brings them all back.

While these features are great for organization, the most useful feature is the time saving Snapshots feature.   Instead of simply taking a picture of the desktop (my previous way of remembering how things were arranged), Snapshot actually creates a backup of the fences and their locations at the time of the Snapshot.  Now, instead of matching the icons to an image I took if my icons get jumbled after a Windows crash, I can just restore a Snapshot.

I am generally a software minimalist.  That is, I don’t like having large numbers of plug ins for Firefox or mounds of applications to do everything; I find that just means more troubleshooting if something is giving me problems.  But Fences is such a small program that performs its simple task so well, I can’t imagine not using it on any future Windows machine I work on.