Years Apart

Warning! This post contains minor spoilers for Assassin’s Creed.

I finally got around to finishing Assassin’s Creed for the first time. Nice game, spectacular visuals, top-notch voice acting (which is something that Ubisoft is very good at, apparently). However, the game ends abruptly, leaving the story as open-ended as it gets. Assassin’s Creed was released in 2007. The sequel is due to be released in the second half of 2009, two years after the release of the first game.

Jerusalem, 1000 years ago. When the sequel is released, this is what we will call today’s Jerusalem…

I’m not sure how I feel about open-ended games. It seems to me that games, which take years to develop, leave the player in suspense for too long with open endings. This also applies to movies which usually take years to create. The problem is that suspense wears off after a while. How much can I care about a story, however interesting and engaging it was, 2-3 years after I read/play/watch it?

Of course, this does not apply to the recent epidemic of trilogies in films. Trilogies (such as Lord of the Rings) are usually created together as a single movie and are then released on a yearly basis. In this way a story can be told over a longer period of time, sometimes surpassing the story depth that is possible in a single movie. But what happens when the time between each chapter is longer than a year? Even longer than two years? For video games this is usually the case. Quality video games take years to develop. A trilogy cannot be developed as a whole and then released yearly, because each year the technical expectations grow and by the time the series would hit the third chapter it might not be good enough for the audience.

Will he win the sword fight? Stick around for a few years to find out.

One could say that episodic gaming was invented to answer these problems. However, episodic games are usually very short, making the collection of episodes as a whole the length of a single game. Episodic gaming is just an excuse for companies to break the development of their games into smaller segments, allowing them to charge for these segments separately. Other than the obvious economic benefit, I cannot really say that episodic gaming can solve the problem with open endings in video games. What’s more, some companies can’t even get episodic games to be released quickly enough (Half-Life 2: Episode 3, where art thou?!).

I think that as long as the time between the development of games in a series is longer than, say, a year, games should not be cut short as with Assassin’s Creed’s ending. It is reasonable to end a story with a small twist, leaving it open for a continuation. However, cutting the story right in the thick of it with absolutely no conclusion just doesn’t make sense to me. By the time Assassin’s Creed 2 is released, I probably won’t feel the suspense I am feeling now, which is a shame, because if a sequel would have been able to arrive in a shorter time, its impact would have been much more satisfying for me.

Left 2 Change

I must admit that when I first heard about Left 4 Dead 2 being announced at E3 2009, I felt a bit bad. After all, its unlike Valve to release a sequel so fast (only one year after the release of the first Left 4 Dead). Also, a sequel usually means that the previous game is obsolete. Apparently I wasn’t the only one to feel this way. Many Left 4 Dead fans are protesting against the impending release of a sequel for a variety of reasons, some of which make some sense (‘Significant content for L4D1 was promised, and never delivered’), others are just plainly a reflection of a fear of change (‘L4D2 is too bright to fit in with L4D1’s visual aesthetic’).

And that’s just the thing. The fear of change had lead to many protests on the Internet for technically ANY change. Facebook got a new interface? ‘But we like the old one better!’. The new Star Trek movie has a different theme than the Star Trek movies of the 60’s? ‘We want more of the same!’. It’s like there will always be a huge group of ‘hardcore’ fans of <insert franchise name here> that will say ‘better is badder’ for any change to their beloved <insert franchise name here>.

On the other hand, there are times that a group opposing a change is on to something. Sometimes, the change really is for the worst and the opposers manage to reverse it back. It’s these rare occasions when a group of idiots gets it right.

So when I found myself resisting something because its different, which in this example is the fact that Valve, which is known for releasing sequels years in between, would be releasing a sequel only a year after the original, I couldn’t make up my mind on whether or not my reasoning for this ‘mental’ resistance to this particular change is solid, or whether I am just another nay-sayer for all the wrong reasons.

New characters, new weapons, new maps – New game!
(Screenshot from Destructoid.com)

I have decided that it wouldn’t be smart of me to condemn this new release. Just because Valve had gotten us used to games that were years in the making and had provided free additional content years after the games were released, it doesn’t mean they have to do this for me. Left 4 Dead was very successful. If they feel they can release a sequel that early, then kudos to them. The first game was complete and I think I got my money’s worth for it. In a world where EA is allowed to release near-identical sequels to their sports games year after year after year, I think Valve are allowed to create their own frequent release franchises without us putting them through a shit storm.

In the mean time, enjoy the E3 2009 Trailer for the game:

Zombies in broad day light seems creepier, don’t you think?

Technically Working

I promise this will be the final post about my PSU. I have already given this too much attention. For those who are interested in the personal experience (which was awful), you can read the previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4. This is a technical post in which I will details how I diagnosed and isolated the problem, which I had promised to some people. Some background: My PSU crashed completely. It died. I took it to the store for fixing/replacement. While it was at the store, I had a replacement PSU that I got from my workplace (for which I am thankful). During that time everything worked perfectly (this was an important detail for later on). After a month, I got my PSU back from the store. That's when things started to get really frustrating.

First Wave

The PSU crashed during games. It took a non-constant amount of time to crash (15-30 minutes on average). The crash was a shutdown of the computer for 5 seconds, followed by a reboot. My main suspect was, of course, the PSU. However, since it just got back from the store, I had to make certain. Also, because it only crashed during games, the graphic card was a very likely suspect. So to isolate the problem, I conducted a few tests.

Cuddly Muscles

The first thing I wanted to do is to rule out the graphics card. I had conducted a stress-test on the graphic card using FurMark, which stresses the graphic card to its limits using fur rendering, and is usually used to check overheating in overclocked graphic cards (my card is not overclocked). In my understanding, FurMark does not stress the CPU. It ran for 40 minutes without crashing. So while the graphic card reached its highest working temperatures (ever), it did not give in.

Think and Remember!

Next thing was to rule out the CPU and Memory. This also called out for a stress test, and the tool I that I used was ORTHOS, which stresses both the CPU and the RAM using some heavy FFT calculations. I let it run for two hours. It did not crash.

Balls of Fire

So now that I had ruled out the CPU, RAM and graphic card, I wanted to find a controlled way to crash the computer. Playing games and waiting for the crash was out of the question. I downloaded an nVidia demo called GeoForms. This demo utilizes both the CPU and the graphic card, although not as extremely as the stress tests I used for them separately. GeoForms uses the CPU for procedurally modifying 3D models and the graphic card for rendering them in real time. However, it was enough to crash my PC in less than 20 minutes on average. 

Conclusion

There could have been other things causing the crash. It could have been a faulty motherboard. However, given that I had just replaced my PSU, and that while it was in repair the replacement PSU (which had lower wattage) worked flawlessly, I placed my “bet” on a faulty PSU. Given the events that followed, it turned my bet was solid enough.

I hope this post can help someone who is experiencing a similar problem.

Ending with a Bang

This is the end of my PSU adventures. It appears that shouting is the only thing that works with customer services.

I was finally offered a new PSU, only to find out I was offered an inferior unit. Calling customer services gave me the honor of talking to one of the most foul people I have had the pleasure to talk to. This was the first time I had raised my voice over someone over the course of this whole affair.

In the end, I had received a brand new PSU. I have tested it thoroughly and I can finally say that my PC is back to working condition.

All I can say after all this is that it wasn’t worth it. I have learned that even though in the end I got what I was supposed to already get two weeks ago, it just wasn’t worth the effort. The only thing I did “earn” was the experience I got for handling this type of hardware with such scrutiny.

I can finally go back to writing about games, now that my mind is at ease from the entire affair. I will, however, write one post in a few days in which I will detail the procedure which I used to deduce the (now proven correct) faultiness of my PSU, despite the many false diagnoses provided by the professional technical staff at the store. I intend to post this so that others with a similar problem would be able to pinpoint the problem or, at the very least, eliminate the PSU as a suspect.

PSU Hatred

That’s it. This has gone far enough! I received my PSU from the store for the second time - still defective. These guys are making fun of me. Either they are giving me a brand new one, or I’m going to buy a new PSU at a different store, and I will get my money back from these guys.