THE LOWS
Tuan Nguyen: Meltdown and Spectre
2018 is starting off badly for Intel—and all of its customers. In fact, it’s pretty much bad for everyone who uses a product with a CPU. This means desktops, servers, laptops, tablets, mobile phones and even consoles.
Security scientists this week at Google, universities and other firms released details of an unprecedented vulnerability baked into the basic design of modern CPUs. Two serious exploits, now called Meltdown and Spectre. Meltdown impacts basically all Intel CPUs released in the last two decades, and Spectre is exploitable from CPUs from all the major players, AMD and ARM included. Meltdown is addressable by OS and BIOS updates, which manufacturers are scrambling to do now, but remain truly unfixable until Intel releases new CPUs.
Spectre is more serious as it’s more sophisticated than Meltdown. While difficult to make exploits for, Spectre is also much more difficult to fix. Right now there’s little solid evidence that it’ll be addressed soon. While neither Meltdown or Spectre impacts gaming, it does affect everything else you might do online by specifically being dangerous to online service providers. That’s everything from online banking, cloud storage, game services, and other services. Your best bet? Keep your system up to date and don’t download questionable things. Bad Intel!
Tom Senior: Bad pupil
I dipped into Mad Max over the holidays. I prefer it to Avalanche’s Just Cause games, and I can’t wait to properly explore its beautiful deserts once I’ve fought my way out of its linear tutorial sequence. I get terribly impatient with tutorial missions, especially in open world games when they railroad your progress for ages before giving you the full game.
Good tutorials are essential. A first-time player should be able to pick up the game with no prior experience, but for those of us that have played a lot of games, I’d love the option to skip them and figure things out myself in the full sandbox. In fact, in open world games with skill progression systems I would like to skip the entire first quarter of the thing to get to a point where there are enough interesting skills unlocked to make combat and exploration fun. Don’t worry about the story part either, just put a few paragraphs in a journal entry that I can ignore at my leisure.
Tyler Wilde: Civilization’s nations
After playing some Civilization 6 over the holidays, reading a bit of history, and this week hearing the Poundmaker Cree Nation's objections to its upcoming inclusion in the game, I admit a deficit in my criticism of the series over the years. All of history, to Civ, is conflict and negotiations between competing states on equal footing—which is insultingly ahistorical in some cases—and it takes a backwards view of history, where player-leaders define policies as if they were inevitable, rather than simulating how changing ecologies and modes of production define the state or lack of it. (For example, the transition from foraging to agriculture and the invention of surplus, which led to feudalism.)
Civ is a retelling of brutal history with the names of the dominant civilizations switched up, rather than a way to truly experiment with what might have been or what might be. It’s the ‘arcade’ version of some other, fictional alternate history game, and it succeeds at that, but makes me crave something that truly lets us tinker with past societies, as well as contend with ecological issues like global warming (which was axed from the series after Civ 3).
Andy Kelly: Clean break
Holidays are great, but something happens whenever I leave my PC for a few days. I'll be playing a game, totally in love with it. Then I'll go away for a bit and return, only to have lost all drive to play it. There's something that happens in that absence. Something dies. The passion fizzes away. And I'll feel absolutely no urge to return to whatever I was playing, despite being utterly enamoured with it previously. It's a bizarre phenomenon.
It happened this year. I was only away for five days, but that was enough to make me lose interest in every game I had on the go before I left. But, to put a positive spin on it, it's a good chance to start anew. A clean slate. I should just ditch those games and start some new ones. New year, new me, new games, right? I wonder if many other people have this problem with taking a break from their PC, or it's just a quirk of my own weird brain.
Joe Donnelly: Groundhog day
Movie adaptations of videogames hardly work at the best of times, never mind when the game in question has no story whatsoever. And yet this week PUBG Corporation CEO Chang Han Kim said he'd like to see a movie version of his company's battle royale shoot 'em up PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.
"We want to take part in diverse industries including esports, movies, drama, cartoons, animation, and more," said Chang Han Kim in a recent interview.
Now consider that PUBG is based on a mod, that was based on a movie, which was based on a novel, that was also at one point adapted into manga series. My head is spinning. Perhaps we should give adaptations a rest, no?
James Davenport: Damned digit
Over the holiday break, having not played a game in over a week, the joints on my pointer finger (the clicker, as we call it) started swelling up. If I try to curl it, I get about 60% there before the inflammation stops me and starts to hurt. Worst part is I have no idea what's making my poor boy inflate. I took a big spill on a sled last week and the frigid conditions in Montana might have done it, but I can't quite connect the dots; the swelling was too delayed. Point is, I can't point and when I click, my clicker clicks. Playing PC games is going to be difficult until I get it sorted out, which means it's back to books for me. But with all the rain I came back to in the Bay Area, I'm thinking this might be a happy accident.
