The Refined Geek

If you’ve ever played QWOP you can understand the appeal of games that are intrinsically badly designed, usually to provide challenge in an otherwise ru rudimentary game. I’m not sure what it is but they seem to trigger the competitive OCD part of my brain, pushing me to master them even though there’s little to be gained since none of the skills gained in these games translate to other titles. They do provide a rather weird sense of enjoyment though, usually when I find a way to beat the system through an emergent property of the game that is, again, due the deliberately bad programming/controls/physics. Surgery Simulator 2013 is yet another title that fits in the “deliberately bad but devilishly fun” genre and I spent some time with it over the past week.

Born out of this year’s Global Game Jam Surgery Simulator 2013 started off as a comical heart transplant simulator where you, an unnamed doctor (or are you? It’s never really made clear), must get a new heart in your patient before they run out of blood. Unlike games like Trauma Centre which attempt to recreate the tension of performing medical procedures like this Surgery Simulator instead puts you incontrol of a single hand that you must use to perform all tasks, one that’s incredibly awkward to control. Still you persevere, performing heart transplants, double kidney replacements and even a brain transplant.

For a game that was originally created in 48 hours I have to say I was very impressed with the graphics in Surgery Simulator 2013. Granted they’re nothing spectacular but the stylization, almost TF2 like in nature, adds to the overall comedic tone. The level of detail in the environments are also quite astounding with all sorts of stuff you’d expect to see in a reception/surgery and, quite surprisingly, most of them functioning in some way. I have to say I didn’t expect any of the floppy disks to work when I put them in the drive, nor the pen to draw on the paper when I first started mucking around.

The premise of Surgery Simulator 2013 is simple: you need to get the new organs in the patient before they run out of blood. This sounds a lot easier than it is as the patient loses blood every time you hack into them and should you be… less careful with where you bash/slash/cut they’ll start to continually lose blood, putting a firm timer on how long you have to complete it. This is made all the more difficult by the controls which aren’t exactly intuitive, especially with the way they interact with the various tools and organs you’ll be working with.

Your hand is controlled by a combination of your keyboard and mouse. The A, W, E, R and Space bar keys represent your fingers which works fairly well although I often found my hand getting out of place after a little while. Your hand’s position and rotation are controlled by the mouse with regular mouse movement changing the overall position, depressing the left mouse button dropping your hand down and the right mouse allowing you to rotate your arm and move your wrist. If this sounds confusing it most certainly is and this is where the challenge comes in, mastering these whacky controls in order to perform the correct actions.

I thought that since I’d played a little bit of the original game I’d be more than capable of doing the same actions in the full version of Surgery Simulator 2013 but I couldn’t have been more wrong. The original was a little more liberal in what you could accomplish without severely injuring your patient like being able to bust open the entire rib cage with a single, well placed hammer strike. Attempting the same thing in this version seemed to do a lot more harm than good, often resulting in ~10% of their blood disappearing and leaving them bleeding rather quickly. It seems that the best way to complete most surgeries was with a light, precise touch, something I didn’t think was actually possible.

So whilst you might be able to accomplish everything by using the power tools to slice and dice your way through and knock organs flying with the hammer should you want to go after any of the numerous achievements you’d be advised to try the light touch and use the scalpel/surgery laser more often. Indeed whilst I might not be at A++ level on any of the surgeries yet I definitely found it a lot easier once I started playing it a little more carefully. There’s also the green syringe on the side which when used on the patient stops any bleeding completely which is a godsend when you’re trying to find out where to cut and failing miserably.

If you’re not finding the regular surgeries much of a challenge then there’s the Ambulance Mode which ratches up the difficult level significantly. You’ll get all the same tools however you’ll be constantly bounced around, moving all your tools around and often throwing something onto/into your patient. You can also lose things out the back of the ambulance, including the organ you’re trying to replace. Whilst it’s not impossible it sure is a damn sight harder, especially when the fire extinguisher keeps landing on your patient’s head.

For a game that was built in 48 hours then polished over the next few months Surgery Simulator is a surprisingly well done game, expertly capturing the “so bad it’s good” idea with it’s awkward control scheme and rediculous game premise. If you’re someone who likes to master the nigh on impossible then there’s a lot to love in Surgery Simulator 2013 and the myraid of achievements is sure to keep you coming back in the hopes of performing the perfect surgery. It’s certainly not a game for everyone, especially if you can’t stand being frustrated by bad controls, but the hilarity that ensues is most definitely worth the price of admission.

Rating: 8.5/10

Surgery Simulator 2013 is available on PC right now for $9.99. Total game time was approximately 2 hours with 29% of the achievements unlocked.

It was a late night in March 2007 where deep in the bowels of the Belconnen shopping mall dozens of consoles gamers gathered. I sat there, my extremely patient and soon to be wife by my side, alongside them eagerly awaiting what was to come, adrenaline surging despite the hour rapidly approaching midnight. We were all there for one thing, the release of the PlayStation 3, and just under an hour later all of us would walk out of there with one of them tucked under our arms. I stayed up far too long setting the whole system up only to crash out before I was able to play any games on it. That same PlayStation, the one I paid a ridiculous price for in both cash and sleep, still sits next to my TV today alongside every other current console.

Well, apart from one, the Wii U.

The reason behind me regaling you with tales of my more insane gamer years is not to humblebrag my way into some kind of gamer cred, no it’s more to highlight the fact that between then and now 6 years have passed. I’ve seen console games rapidly evolve from the first tentative titles, which barely stressed the hardware, to today’s AAA titles which are exploiting every single aspect of the system that they run on. Back in their day both the PlayStation3 and Xbox360 were computational beasts that could beat most other platforms in raw calculative potential without breaking a sweat. Today however that’s no longer the case with the PC having long retaken that crown and people are starting to notice.

Of course console makers are keenly aware of this and whilst the time between generations is increasing they still see the need to furnish a replacement once the current generation starts getting long in the tooth. Indeed if current rumours are anything to go by we’ll likely see both the PlayStation4 and Xbox-something this year. However the rather lackluster sales of the first installment in next generation consoles (the Nintendo WiiU) has led at least one industry critic to be rather pessimistic about whether the next generation is really needed:

Whatever the case, what lessons can Sony and Microsoft take on board from how their rival has fared, as they prepare to make their moves into the next console generation? Well, there’s one immediately apparent lesson: Don’t start a new fucking console generation, because it’s a bad climate and triple-A gaming is becoming too fat and toxic to support its own weight. If you make triple-A games even more expensive and troublesome to develop – not to mention forcing them to adhere to online and hardware gimmicks that shrink and alienate the potential audience even further – then you will be driving the Titanic smack into another iceberg in the hope that it’ll somehow freeze shut the hole the first one made.

The thing is the problems that are affecting the WiiU don’t really translate to Sony or Microsoft. The WiiU was Nintendo’s half-hearted attempt to recapture the more “hardcore” gaming crowd which, let’s be honest here, was a small minority of their customer based. The Wii was so successful because it appealed to the largest demographic that had yet to be tapped: those who traditionally did not play video games. The WiiU, whilst being comparable to current gen consoles, doesn’t provide enough value to end users in order for them to fork out the cash for an upgrade. That then translates into developers not wanting to touch the platform which starts a vicious downward spiral that’ll be incredibly hard to break from.

However the biggest mistake Yahtzee makes is in assuming the next generation of consoles will be harder to develop for, and this is simply not the case.

Both the Xbox360 and the PlayStation3 are incredibly complicated beasts to program for with the former running on a custom variant of PowerPC and the latter running on Sony’s attempt to develop a supercomputer, the Cell. Both of these had their own quirks, nuances and tricks developers used in order to squeeze more performance out of them, none of which were translatable to any other platform. The next generation however comes to us with a very familiar architecture backing it (x86-64) which has decades, yes decades, of programming optimizations, frameworks and development behind it. Indeed all the investment that game developers have made in PC titles (which they’ve thankfully continued to do despite its diminutive market share) will directly translate to the next generation platforms from Microsoft and Sony. Any work on either platform will also directly translate to the other which is going to make cross-platform releases far cheaper, easier and of much higher quality than they have been previously.

In principle I agree with the idea, we don’t need another generation of consoles like we have in the past where developers are forced to retool and spend the next 2 years catching up to the technology. However the next generation we’re getting is nothing like the past and is shaping up to be a major boon to both developers and consumers. As far as we can tell the PlayStation4 and Durango are going to be nothing like the WiiU with many major developers already on board for both platforms and nary a crazy peripheral has been sighted for either of them. To cite the WiiU as the reason why the next generation isn’t needed is incredibly short sighted as Nintendo has shown it’s no longer in the same market as Sony and Microsoft are.

The current generation of consoles have run their course and its time for their replacements to take the stage. The convergence of technology between the two major platforms will only mean good things for developers and consumers alike. There are issues that are plaguing the wider industry, there’s no doubt about that, and whilst I won’t say that the next generation will be the panacea to their ills it’s good step in the first direction as there’s an incredible amount of savings to be made in developer time from the switch to a more common architecture. Whether that translates into better games or whatever Yahtzee is ultimately lusting after will have to remain to be seen but the next generation is bright light on the horizon, not an iceberg threatening to sink the industry.

As most readers are aware I’m an incredibly amateur photographer having dabble in it on and off again for the past 5 years but only really started taking it seriously towards the end of last year. I’m still very much in the early stages of my understanding as whilst I can produce some pictures that I (and others) like my hit rate still feels incredibly low, especially when I set out to create a very specific image. A lot of that is comes from my still nascent understanding of how to light subjects properly and how the direction/intensity changes the resulting image.

Now whilst the following video isn’t exactly the greatest introduction on how you should go about lighting your subject (in this a model’s face) it does showcase just how dramatically you can change the resulting image simply by moving the light source:

Showing this to my wife she was adamant that they were splicing video together with different models as the changes are quite dramatic. It is the same person however as if you look at the eyes you can see the light source rotating at a rather impressive clip which is what gives rise to the dramatic changes in shadows. Pausing at different sections also makes it quite clear what the impacts of the direction of light are and how they are reflected in the final image.

I wonder what the effect would be if instead of moving the light they used multiple sources then just cycled through them. Hmmmmm…….

It’s hard for me to hide my fan boy nature when it comes to private space flight. Whilst all credit must go to Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic for getting me inspired about all things space they have unfortunately taken a second seat to my current space crush. Not-so-long time readers will know that I’m talking about SpaceX, a company that has shown time and time again that they’re capable of not only developing technology that no private entity had previously but also delivering on their patently crazy promises. However I’m not in favour of monopolies/single points of failure (stemming from my capitalistic/engineering nature respectively) and the more options we have available to us for putting things in space the better.

Today it appears we have another contender: the Orbital Science’s Antares rocket.

Now I’ve only mentioned Orbital Sciences briefly in the past, noting that they won a contract to provide launch capabilities to NASA alongside SpaceX as part of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, but their legacy stretches back quite a long way. Founded in 1982 they’ve developed several different launch platforms in tandem with NASA and have also been involved in numerous high profile scientific missions. Most recently they developed the Dawn craft which is currently in the asteroid belt transiting from the asteroid Vesta to the dwarf planet Ceres. Needless to say if anyone has the chops to develop their own launch system it’s orbital sciences and the Antares rocket is their first such system.

On paper it looks to be somewhere between the Falcon 1 and 9 with a total payload to LEO of around 5000kg. The two first stage engines are curious little beasts, originally designed to form the basis of the Russian N-1 rocket that was bound for the moon. Considering that launch system was a dismal failure you’d then have to wonder about them using the engines from it but N-1′s issues were mostly process/design based rather than stemming from issues from one particular component. It also has a slightly wider payload fairing than the Falcon 9 at 3.9m in diameter which could come in handy for certain mission profiles.

The first launch of the Antares (dubbed A-ONE) was scheduled to happen in the middle of last week however some minor technical issues delayed the launch. The rocket itself was fine however one of the umbilical cables disconnected 12 minutes prior to launch, far too early when it usually happens right before lift off. Thankfully this didn’t require the rocket to be stood down and they were able to reschedule it for a couple days later. Unfortunately high winds on the second launch day caused them to issue a no-go due to weather and it was rescheduled for today. Thankfully conditions improved and they were able to launch, making the Antares rocket the second fully private rocket to make it to orbit.

Apart from that it’s still notable for many reasons. If the picture above looks a little unfamiliar to you it’s because the Antares wasn’t launched from the iconic Cape Canaveral. Instead it was launched from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility located in Virginia, a place that doesn’t usually see rockets of this size. Indeed the Antares rocket is the largest rocket to ever be launched from this facility and will likely become the defacto launch site for the rocket in the future thanks to its much less crowded launch schedule. If all goes to plan this site could see another 2 launches of the Antares rocket this year which would be on par with SpaceX’s rapid turnaround times.

Today marks a great achievement for Orbital Sciences and the greater space industry as it shows that not only is the private space industry viable, it can likely support several competing players. This will only help spur innovation forward as companies look to outpace each other on every aspect. Whilst SpaceX might be the current starlet Orbital Sciences has decades of experience behind them and I can’t imagine them being in the backseat for very long. As always this means that the cost to launch will trend downwards and from there it’s only a matter of time before it reaches the commodity level.

And that, my friends, is really exciting.

It really is quite staggering to see how far games have come since I first started playing them nearly 3 decades ago. Even more surprising is how each style of game still has a place in the market today, even those that forego all modern trimmings in favour of recreating those early experiences. Last year saw a bevy of such titles cross my path and I was really quite surprised just how enjoyable revisiting that period of gaming could be. When I first read about Evoland it seemed like an intriguing idea as it would take you through the history of adventure games whilst also telling its own story.

Evoland starts out as a classic Legend of Zelda clone, all the way down to the pixely graphics and limited colour pallette. However as you move around and start finding chests of loot you’re not greeted by additional items to help you on your journey. No instead you will typically get an upgrade to your game experience like the addition of music, better colours and, my personal favourite, extra dimensions. These all build upon each other so as you progress through Evoland it becomes an ever increasingly varied game, one that aptly captures the essence of nearly all adventure games that have come before it.

Considering that Evoland’s primary goal is to take you through the history of adventure games the art style varies wildly from flat, 2D pixel art right up to full 3D environments that are reminiscent of titles like The Longest Journey. The pixelart is quite good, especially after a couple pallette upgrades, but the 3D feels incredibly rudimentary by comparison. It’s somewhat in line with the rest of the game as nothing about Evoland is terribly complicated so it all kind  of fits together, at least enough to carry the overall thrust of the game forward.

In the beginning Evoland is your run of the mill, top down 2D adventure game complete with enemies that run around randomly and you equipped with only a sword with which to dispatch them. It plays exactly like the old Zelda games as well as you’re left to run around the environment looking for the next puzzle that’s blocking your progression. You can also, if you’re so inclined, explore even further to find all the collectibles that are scattered around the map although there’s little reason to do so outside of wanting to complete all the achievements.

The more you play Evoland the complex and nuanced it becomes, something you’ll be acutely aware of because it’ll tell you every time you unlock another game mechanic with an alert plastered across the bottom of the screen. Some of them have obvious and immediate impacts on the way the game plays, like the introduction of a world map which introduces random turn based combat encounters ala Final Fantasy, and others are more subtle like the “Something happened somewhere” alert that indicates you triggered an off screen event.

Initially the introduction of new elements is quite fun as it’s like a whole new game has been opened up for you. However due to the rudimentary nature of Evoland’s many different aspects they quickly start to descend into tedium. The random turn based encounters are probably the best example of this as you can’t walk for more than 10 seconds without one of them occurring. After a while these don’t take too long to resolve but the lack of variety in these encounters means that after the 3rd or 4th fight you’ve seen all the enemies Evoland has to offer and you’re essentially just grinding away XP and glis (a nod to Final Fantasy’s Gil system) which only has a limited amount of utility.

Indeed whilst Evoland is a cohesive game on the surface the actual mechanics of it aren’t exactly uniform across every new iteration. Most dungeons have been designed with a specific idea in mind and whilst some of the abilities will transfer across (like the upgraded combo sword attack) most of them won’t. So whilst one dungeon might give you a health orb rather than the 3 hearts system you’ll likely find that once you go anywhere else the health system du jour is back again. They also all seem to have separate internal values as well as half health in the turn based combat system doesn’t seem to translate to 1.5 hearts in the dungeon system.

Realistically Evoland is more like 4 distinct games that are loosely tied together by common elements. Viewed like this I’m more inclined to overlook the faults of them not completely interacting with each other. Indeed since the overall thrust of the game is more to take you through the evolution of adventure games rather than provide an in depth experience in each successive iteration of them I’d be missing the point if I judged it on the merits of the individual section’s gameplay. I guess what I’m getting at is if you’re looking for a solid gameplay experience you’re likely to come up short with Evoland, but that’s not the reason you’d play it.

There is some semblance of a story which really only sees development during the last couple sections. It might have been because I named my characters Dudeface, Butts and  Mouman respectively but I didn’t feel any attachment to them nor any real drive to move the story forward apart from the desire to see which game mechanic would be unlocked next. The final boss battle was pretty cool though with the combination of music and larger than life boss aptly capturing the essence of those same encounters in games of yore.

Evoland serves as a great history book, detailing the many transitions that adventure games have undergone during the years. As a game it’s nothing spectacular but the essence of each era of adventure games is captured within each upgrade of the Evoland’s mechanics. There’s a very specific audience in mind for Evoland and it’s for people like me who grew up on all the titles that inspired it. So if you find yourself pining for the golden age of gaming or you’d just like take a trip down memory lane then Evoland is the game for you.

Rating: 7.5/10

Evoland is available on PC right now for $9.99. Total game time was approximately 2 hours with ~83% completion and 34% of the achievements unlocked.

After a long weekend of staying up late, drinking merrily and enjoying the company of many close friends I found myself being a little under the weather. This is pretty atypical for me as I’ve only ever had the flu twice and I usually pass through the cold season relatively unscathed. Whilst there’s thousands of possible reasons for this I’ve always found that should I find myself in the beginnings of an infection a strong dose of chilli seems to make it subside, or at least take my mind off it long enough to start feeling better. I realised yesterday that whilst I might have some anecdotal evidence to support this I hadn’t really looked into the science behind it and the stuff I uncovered in my search has been pretty intriguing.

For starters there are some strange experiments out there that have used chilli (well the chemical that gives it the burn, capsaicin) as an apparently reliable method to induce coughing in test subjects. The first one I came across was testing whether or not coughing is a voluntary action and the results seem to indicate that the coughing we get with the common cold is a mixture of both. Other experiments showed that people with an upper respiratory tract infection (which includes things like the common cold) are more prone to coughing when exposed to a capsaicin/citric acid mixture. None of these really helped me in understanding whether or not chilli aids in reducing the symptoms of the common cold or helping to cure it but a couple other studies do provide some potential paths for benefits.

Subjects with perennial rhinitis, a permanent allergic reaction to stimulus that doesn’t vary by season, showed a marked decrease in nasal complaints when treated with a solution of 0.15mg of capsaicin per nostal every 2nd or 3rd day for 7 treatments. The benefits lasted up to 9 months after the treatment and incredibly there were no adverse effects on cellular homeostasis or overall neurogenic staining (which sounds rather impressive but is a little out of my league to explain).  Whilst this doesn’t directly support the idea that consumption helps the common cold it does provide a potential mechanism for it to relieve symptoms. However how much capsaicin ends up in your sinuses while eating it isn’t something I could find any data on.

Other studies have found similar effects when capsaicin solutions have been sprayed into the nasal cavity with the improvements lasting for up to 6 months. That particular study was a little on the small side though with only 10 patients and no controls present but the result do fall in line with the previous study which had much more rigorous controls. The theme appears to resonate through most of the other studies that I could find: topical application in the sinuses is good, inhaling it will cause you to erupt in a coughing fit.

Anecdotally that seems to line up with the experiences I’ve had and it’s good to see it backed up by some proper science. As for consumed chilli helping overall however there doesn’t appear to be any studies that support that idea but there are potential avenues for it to work. So like many scientists I’ll have to say that the results are interesting but require a lot more research to be done. Whether it’s worthy of investigating is something I’ll leave up as an exercise to the reader, but I’m sure we’d find no shortage of spice loving test subjects who’d be willing to participate.

If you’ve been here a little while you’ll know that last year I won a competition to go up to Brisbane to cover TechEd Australia 2013 for LifeHacker Australia. During my time up there I wrote three posts covering everything from PowerShell, the evolution of the term “private cloud” and why Windows Server 201 would succeed. Evidently the LifeHacker writers and readers loved what I wrote and I ended up winning the mini-competition with the 2 other guest bloggers. At the time I was told that this would lead onto another series of posts for Microsoft themselves however that never eventuated but I did end up with a shiny new HP MicroServer that’s become the mainstay of my home network.

I thought that would be the end of it but a couple months ago Angus Kidman, the man behind much of LifeHacker Australia’s tech coverage, contacted me with an offer: come with him to the USA and participate in covering TechEd North America as part of their World of Servers initiative.

Of course I said yes.

It will be much the same as it was last year, I’ll be attending TechEd in New Orleans every day and writing up a post that sums up the lessons learned that I take away each day. The primary focus will still be on Server 2012 although with Microsoft’s increasing focus on cloud integration you can rest assured that I’ll be weaseling my way into as many Azure sessions as I possibly can. It’s going to be interesting to compare and contrast the two as I’m sure TechEd North America is going to be huge by comparison and hopefully that means we’ll get some juicy insights into some of Microsoft’s upcoming products.

But this post isn’t just for me to humble brag to you guys. I’m here to tell you that LifeHacker Australia is offering this very same opportunity to 2 lucky IT professionals! To enter all you have to do is fill out this entry form and answer a few questions about your IT chops. Once you’ve done that you’re in the running to win a fully paid trip to New Orleans to cover TechEd North America and you’ll get to hang out with me for the duration of the trip (most people would consider that a perk…most people ).

If you’re a budding blogger hoping to get a foot in the door or just a tech head who loves everything Microsoft then there really isn’t a better opportunity than the one LifeHacker is offering here. You’ve only got until May 1st to get your entries in (that’s 2 weeks people!) so I’d encourage you to get it in sooner rather than later. I’m incredibly excited to be going along for the ride on this one and if my previous experience was anything to go by it’ll be a blast and it’d be amazing if I could bring one my readers along for the ride.

Hope to see you there!

If you’ve worked in the IT industry it’s safe to assume that you’re familiar with ITIL or at least however it’s manage to manifest itself within your organisation. It’s probably one of the longest lasting ideals in IT today having been around for a good 20+ years in its current form, surprising for an industry that considers anything over 3 years archaic. Indeed anyone who’s been involved in implementing, maintaining or attempting to change an ITIL based process will likely call it that anyway and whilst I’m inclined to agree with them I think the problems stem more from the attitudes around these processes rather than the actual processes themselves.

Change management is by far the best example of this. The idea behind it is solid: any major changes to a system have to go through a review process that determines what impacts the change has and demands that certain requirements be met before it can be done. In an ideal world these are the kind of things you would do regardless of whether an external process required you to or not however the nature of IT tends towards many admins starting off in areas where such process aren’t required and thus, when they move onto bigger and better environments, processes like these are required to make sure they don’t unintentionally wreck havoc on larger systems. However change management is routinely seen as a barrier to getting actual work done and in many cases it is.

This is where the attitude problems start to occur. ITIL based processes (no one should be using pure ITIL, that’s crazy talk) should not be a hindrance to getting work done and the second they start becoming so is when they lose their value. Indeed the reason behind implementing an ITIL process like change management is to extract more value out of the process than is currently being derived, not to impede the work is being done. Essentially it should only be an extension of work that would be undertaken in the first place and if it isn’t then you either need to look at your implementation of the change process or why your current IT practices aren’t working with it.

Predominantly I think this comes from being far too strict with these kinds of processes with the prevailing attitudes in industry being that deviation from them will somehow lead to an downward spiral of catastrophes from which there is no escape. If these ITIL process are being routinely circumvented or if the amount of work required to complete the process outweighs the actual work itself then it’s not the people who are to blame, it is the process itself. Realistically instead of trying to mold people to the process, like I’ve seen it done countless times over, the process should be reworked to suit the people. Whilst this is by far more difficult to do than simply sending people on ITIL courses the benefits will far outweigh the costs of doing so and you’ll probably find that more people stick to it rather than attempt to circumvent it.Indeed much of the process revolution that has happened in the past decade has been due to these people rather than process focused ideals.

Whilst ITIL might be getting a little long in the tooth many of the ideals it touches on are fundamental in nature and are things that persist beyond changes in technology. Like many ideas however their application has been less than ideal with the core idea of turning IT in a repeatable, dependable process usurped by laborious processes that add no value. I believe changing the current industry view from focusing on ITIL based processes to people focused ones that utilize ITIL fundamentals would trigger a major shift in the way corporate IT entities do business.

A shift that I believe would be all for the better.

As longtime readers will know I’m quite keen on Microsoft’s Azure platform and whilst I haven’t released anything on it I have got a couple projects running on it right now. For the most part it’s been great as previously I’d have to spend a lot of time getting my development environment right and then translate that onto another server in order to make sure everything worked as expected. Whilst this wasn’t beyond my capability it was more time burnt in activities that weren’t pushing the project forward and was often the cause behind me not wanting to bother with them anymore.

Of course as I continue down the Azure path I’ve run into the many different limitations, gotchas and ideology clashes that have caused me several headaches over the past couple years. I think most of them can be traced back to my decision to use Azure Table Storage as my first post on Azure development is how I ran up against some of the limitations I wasn’t completely aware of and this continued with several more posts dedicated to overcoming the shortcomings of Microsoft’s NOSQL storage backend. Since then I’ve delved into other aspects of the Azure platform but today I’m not going to talk about any of the technology per se, no today I’m going to tell you about what happens when you hit your subscription/spending limit, something which can happen with only a couple mouse clicks.

I’m currently on a program called Microsoft BizSpark a kind of partner program whereby Microsoft and several other companies provide resources to people looking to build their own start ups. Among the many awesome benefits I get from this (including a MSDN subscription that gives me access to most of the Microsoft catalogue of software, all for free) Microsoft also provides me with an Azure subscription that gives me access to a certain amount of resources. Probably the best part of this offer is the 1500 hours of free compute time which allows me to run 2 small instances 24/7. Additionally I’ve also got access to the upcoming Azure Websites functionality which I used for a website I developed for a friend’s wedding. However just before the wedding was about to go ahead the website suddenly became unavailable and I went to investigate why.

As it turned out I had somehow hit my compute hours limit for that month which results in all your services being suspended until the rollover period. It appears this was due to me switching the website from the free tier to the shared tier which then counts as consuming compute hours whenever someone hits the site. Removing the no-spend block on it did not immediately resolve the issue however a support query to Microsoft saw the website back online within an hour. However my other project, the one that would be chewing up the lion’s share of those compute hours, seemed to have up and disappeared even though the environment was still largely in tact.

This is in fact expected behaviour for when you hit either your subscription or spending limit for a particular month. Suspended VMs on Windows Azure don’t count as being inactive and will thus continue to cost you money even whilst they’re not in use. To get around this should you hit your spending limits those VMs will be deleted, saving you money but also causing some potential data loss. Now this might not be an issue for most people, for me all it entailed was republishing them from Visual Studio, but should you be storing anything critical on the local storage of an Azure role it will be gone forever. Whilst the nature of the cloud should make you wary of storing anything on non-permanent storage (like Azure Tables, SQL, blob storage) it’s still a gotcha that you probably wouldn’t be aware of until you ran into a situation similar to mine.

Like any platform there are certain aspects of Windows Azure that you have to plan for and chief among them is your spending limits. It’s pretty easy to simply put in your credit card details and then go crazy by provisioning as many VMs as you want but sooner or later you’ll be looking to put limits on it and it’s then that you have the potential to run into these kinds of issues.

Stripping away certain aspects of a game is the norm for independent developers as your limited resources constrain what you’re able to accomplish. Whilst on the surface this sounds like it would make for an inferior game often it results with a game that makes incredible use of its bare essentials, creating an overall experience that’s on par with much larger titles. Then there are those that eschew nearly all aspects of traditional games in order to focus on a single aspect. Notable entries include games like Gravity Bone, Thirty Flights of Loving, Auralux and, I’m most pleased to say, the new exploration game Proteus.

Like other exploration games Proteus is one where the narrative is primarily driven by your curiosity. Upon starting the game you’ll be greeted with your own little island (which I assume is procedurally generated so each one is unique). There’s no voice telling you to walk to it, nor any other indication that you should even go there, but of course there’s that little voice at the back of your head telling you to proceed forward. Should you do so the next hour of your life will be dedicated to exploring a world that undergoes wild amounts of change and, eventually, so do you.

Proteus is unique in terms of graphical style, straddling the boundaries of pixel art and early 3D first person shooter games. What I found particularly interesting was despite the bare bones nature everything was instantly recognizable, from the various types of plants and animals to the various bits of other miscellanea that covered my island. I’ll be honest and at first I just thought it was the developer being lazy but the more I played the more I began to appreciate the simplicity as that kind of refinement doesn’t exactly come easy.

There’s no real game mechanics to speak of, the whole point of Proteus is simply for you to explore the island that it has created for you. Whilst the island isn’t particularly huge there’s definitely enough to keep you interested, especially with all the various animals that react in different ways to you approaching them. There’s also a weather system that changes from time to time which, again, changes the island. But this is all just a lead up to the best part of Proteus and it only happens at night.

What could be considered plot spoilers follow:

I remember seeing this for the first time very clearly. The sun had gone down and little lights began to appear everywhere. Up until then I had wondered what the overall point of the game was as whilst it was cool to explore a procedurally generated island there wasn’t much more to it; no purpose, no story. But then the lights began to move in a strange way, they seemed to be all moving towards a single point on the island. Curious I walked towards it and they began to speed up with more and more lights appearing out of nowhere to join them.

The lights began congregating at one location, forming into a kind of vortex centered on a point in the middle of island. I walked towards it and they spun faster still, swarming around me until they erupted in a blinding flash of light. Afterwards I saw it was day time once again but the island had changed. New life had sprung up around me and the world looked very different. I realised then and there what had happened, I had been transported forward in time to the next season.

And so this process repeated itself several times over, each time when night fell I would wait anxiously for the lights to reappear in order for me to advance to the next stage. Eventually winter came to my island and it instantly became a desolate wasteland, home to no perceptible life. I wandered my island aimlessly looking for a sign, something to show that was still alive but alas there was none. I again waited for night to come but the lights never appeared so I kept exploring, hoping that I’d find the solution to a problem I felt I had created. It was then that my slow descent into the clouds began and eventually my eyes closed and my island journey came to an end.

Spoilers over.

Proteus wins my praise for the simple fact it went from a slightly confusing experience to an incredibly magical one by the use of simple mechanics that forced me to build my own narrative. If Auralux is the essence of real time strategy then Proteus is the essence of an exploration game as it does away with pretty much all extraneous elements in favour of the exploration mechanic. It’s short and bittersweet and definitely not for everyone but if you’re a fan of creating your own narrative or exploring games that strip away all things in favour of one aspect then Proteus is definitely worth a look in.

Rating: 8.5/10

Proteus is available on PC right now for $9.99. Total game time was approximately 1 hour.