The Gunslinger: David's Take

"What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him....?"

A slow-motion chase. A cast of characters which rarely exceeds two. A journey that is, in fact, entirely linear.

Described in its structure, The Gunslinger does not leap out. Its tension builds so slowly - and releases so suddenly - that I didn't notice my emotions until they were already present. Disappointment? Anger? Depression? How could he do that? How could I expect him to do anything else?

The eponymous gunslinger walks a bleak, bleached out world, pursuing "the man in black". The world is slowly painted in vaguely, intentionally bastardized, Biblical overtones - the first clue this is not a pure work of fantasy. It's a shadow of the 1970's world in which the book was written but is still connected, albeit tenuously, with our reality. What that reality is, how it came to be that way, is unclear even to those who walk it.

Enough clues are revealed along the way to form a picture about the gunslinger and the man he pursues but the reader is left with more questions than answers - and the thinnest sort of conjecture to bridge them together. If it hooks you, you'll want to immediately pick up the next book in the Dark Tower series, something I was glad I had already.

It's not a perfect read, the ending almost suffers from too much exposition, but it's my favorite sort of book: a genre-bending tale with fantastical elements (and characters) whose events nevertheless feel distinctly grounded in its version of reality. Time slows, speeds up, and is otherwise pliable. Characters speak in disjointed dialect, could feel at home in a stereotypical Western, but the timeline is millenia in the future. I think.

Rating: Four Stars

ITX is dead to me

I love high-powered PC hardware but with that said, massive towers have never appealed to me. I appreciate the beauty of the Cosmos II, but 50 pounds sans components makes me count every pinched nerve in my upper back. Maybe someone needs a case like that but I certainly don't.

The opposite end of the spectrum held my interest. 2011 into early 2012 was my year of mini-ITX. When my PC building business was still active, I was searching for ways to differentiate and settled on compact powerhouse systems. Research narrowed it down to Silverstone's Sugo Series and Lian-Li's PC-Q08. The latter's available red-anodized brushed aluminum construction really won me over. It's a sexy case:

I knew going in that such a small enclosure posed challenges. Without custom wiring for the PSU and other cables, there's a lot of excess wire bunched inside the chassis, but cable management options are slim. After a few hours of experimentation, this is the best I came up with:

Hidden under there was ZOTAC's Z68ITX-A-E, at the time the best motherboard available. With the advent of Z77, other board companies have started to move into the space, but performance isn't the issue - thermals are. Even with an upgrade to Noctua's brand-new NHL-12 low-profile HSF, an i5-2500K at stock speed crests over 70C. Many people push those chips to the 90C mark or higher but it's not a result I was happy with.

Worse, note the position of the graphics card in the picture. ITX cases have to put their cards at either the very bottom or right next to the side wall and the lack of great ventilation requires spooling the card's fan to 80% or more. Especially in the case of my card, 80% is loud, and the orientation meant all the sound was reflected off of my desk surface into my ears. I play my games with over-ear headphones and even then constant whine of the card grated quickly.

Noise and thermal performance was an issue but the worst problem was myself. I love tinkering with my computer. Swapping a part here, upgrading this, changing that. Changing parts in this case requires a lot of work. I enjoy building computers but two hours of teardown and rebuild just to change a CPU is enough to kill that.

My advice? Stay away from ITX, particularly if you swap a part at least every six months.

Still interested in the form factor? Bitfenix just introduced a case that looks incredibly promising and has gotten favorable reviews. Called the Prodigy, it's slightly larger than the PC-QO8, but it looks much easier to work with for the initial build and any component changes thereafter. It's not perfect but I would describe it as the ITX case with the least compromises.

Diablo 3: the Not-so-easy-anymore Edition

My main character, a level 19 Barbarian, had a rough time in Diablo 3 last night. 5 deaths in two hours, doubling the number of deaths across the entire game so far. In a world where nearly every game allows you to select difficulty on the fly, Blizzard's locked difficulties strike me as odd, but my complaints about Normal being too easy are gone. Pardon me while I throw some crow on the barbie.

5 deaths in one night of gaming is nothing. Hell, I've done that in thirty seconds with Trials HD, but this is Diablo 3! The game that everyone and their mothers are complaining is too easy the first time through.

I still had a blast playing it. I bowed out really early in the Maghda event, watched my wife's health bar slowly drain as the game taunted me with the respawn button, but then we talked for five minutes afterwards about how she managed to eke out the win at half-power. Situations like these are why we play games. A smooth-as-butter loot grind has its appeal but barbarians need to get their asses kicked a bit before they Hulk-smash through a barricade. Or something.

I'm not going to blame Blizzard for this, not going to say there's a difficulty spike. What I am going to do is shut up about the game being too easy.

Molasses going uphill

"So, what'd you do last night?"

"Oh, I ran about 5 klicks."

"Good exercise?"

"Ummm, maybe for my military dude."

Arma 2 could be described as a running simulator - one in which you happen to carry military hardware. You can't run with your sights up. Walking with the scope up induces a bob in your weapon that's incredibly disorienting.

An early mission tasks you with supporting an amphibious invasion from a high overlook point. Your job is to lase targets for missile strikes. In a "normal" military game, this would be twenty targets in five minutes. In Arma it's three targets over five minutes and you see all of twenty enemy infantry far, far off in the distance.

The game is as slow as molasses. Going uphill.

Whether this is a bad thing remains to be seen, however, as I'm all too conscious of how standard military shooters have altered my expectations. The game told me there was an invasion but my squad was deep in-country destroying a comm tower and (on the way) freeing abused prisoners. Well, I tried to free them: my Chernarussian's a little rusty and the rape victim thought I was a terrorist of a different stripe.

I've read that real war is twenty-three hours and fifty minutes of boredom punctuated by ten minutes of sheer terror. Arma 2 captures the slow pace of what I imagine to be normal military operations but the dry presentation and low production value has yet to effectively show the ten minutes of terror part. A counter-sniping mission gave me problems for quite some time until I took a slightly different route and suddenly the objective cleared. One of my squad killed the sniper. I think?

What I am sure, however, is that it's a very different experience. On the one hand it's very relaxing to walk from objective to objective. On the other hand, enemies are rarely more than a head bobbing through a treeline 150 meters off, so getting complacent means death.

I'm thankful that others do this in real life to protect us.

Budget Gaming System Guide (May 2012)

Assembling a PC can involve headaches. Troubleshooting a problem can take time and exhaustive experimentation. On my last build, I installed the CPU cooler backplate backwards, causing a hot trace on the motherboard. Once I figured out the problem, it took some time to tear down and reassemble with insulated side of the backplate facing the motherboard. On another build I could boot into the OS but the instant I placed a cooler on the processor the computer shut down. That one required junking the entire motherboard because the damaged socket was irreparable.

The longer you work with computers, the more horror stories and head-scratchers you will accumulate.

Building a computer can be intimidating faced with stories like this. After all, you are your own tech support. Assembly, however, is the easy part. The really intimidating part is hardware selection. It's easy to pick the best of the best if money is no object and you're after "balls to the wall" performance. It's considerably harder when you're a normal person with a budget - particularly if that budget is under four figures. The inaugural system guide for Text, Play, Tinker enters into precisely that territory.

Live pricing courtesy of PC Part Picker:

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/8XAx

• Case: Cooler Master HAF 912 The HAF 912 offers aggressive-styling without the "OMG LED" aesthetic that characterizes far too many low-priced gaming cases. The feature list is bare-bones but it is a solid case that's easy to build in. My personal system is inside one of these with an extra 120mm side fan and a 200mm in the top of the case but the stock cooling is surprisingly good.
• CPU: Intel Core i3-2120 Until "Ivy Bridge" moves into dual-core, this is the arguably the best processor for budget gaming on the market. As games become increasingly GPU-dependent, this is more than fast enough to feed high-end graphics cards, let alone the card selected here.
• Motherboard: ASUS P8Z77-V LK I've handled boards from all the major vendors at different price points and ASUS constantly delivers quality products for the price. Moreover, as UEFI replaces BIOS as the firmware of the future, ASUS' implementation is head-and-shoulders above any of the other vendors. The LK offers SLI and CrossFireX support; if you've no interest in dual-graphics configurations, you can save around $30 and drop down to the LX version. Z68 boards can be had slightly cheaper but going with Z77 ensures compatibility with a future "Ivy Bridge" upgrade.
• RAM: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3-1600 CAS 9 Lower speed RAM is cheaper but DDR3-1600 is the memory standard for Intel going forward so I've included this as another nod to a future upgrade. Lower CAS latency modules are available for a premium but don't be suckered in. Synthetic benchmarks love them but real-world applications could care less.
• Graphics Card: MSI Radeon HD 6870 Twin Frozr II While they remain in production, AMD's 6800-series cards offer the best performance/price at standard resolutions (1080p) and MSI's version reviews consistently well. Keep in mind, however, that cards several tiers higher still can't completely max out games like Battlefield 3 or The Witcher 2 even at 1080p, let alone multi-monitor gaming. 
• Storage: Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB Hard drive prices have fallen enough that 1TB drives are affordable for a build in this price bracket, whereas I used to recommend 500GB drives even a couple months ago. Samsung's Spinpoint series performs well and has one of the lowest failure rates to date. Western Digital's Caviar Blue is another option.
• Optical Drive: Samsung SN-208BB DVD/CD Unless you spend a lot of time mastering discs, optical drives have become commodity parts. ASUS, Samsung, and Lite-On all make solid offerings.
• Power Supply: Antec Earthwatts 650W (plus ~$5 power cord) Antec's Earthwatts series is an ugly green power supply with absolutely no cable sleeving. It's also dead quiet for a basic offering and offers more than enough capacity for future upgrades. The worst thing about it? In trying to be "green" it doesn't ship with a power cord, so make sure you get one before assembly.
• The Microsoft Tax: Windows 7 Home Premium (OEM) I've included the OEM-version but think long and hard whether you plan a motherboard upgrade in the near future. If you plan more than two motherboard swaps in the next 5-7 years and are scared of Windows 8, it might be worth getting the full retail license, which isn't tied to a specific motherboard.

The Next Upgrade: For my money, the next thing I'd do with this system is install an SSD as the OS/application drive. A quality one doesn't come cheap and many are scared off by premature drive failures. The drive with the best performance also happens to be the one with nearly-perfect reliability: the Samsung 830 series. I just installed the 256 GB version in my system and I'm really impressed with the effect on everyday computing as well as game loads. I saved up for this size because even though all my media are stored on a standard HDD, the number of programs I keep installed at any one time is just over 128GB, and the most annoying thing about a smaller SSD is constantly uninstalling/re-installing games to keep within the space constraints. 

Diablo 3 Impressions

My current "alt"

Diablo 3 is a game that will stay in our "In Review" list for a long time. Most game franchises present sequels that iterate on story and tinker with mechanics. In contrast, Blizzard has shipped a title that presents five experiences which tinker with story but heavily iterate on mechanics. For a game that boils down to "click-to-kill" there is a remarkable amount of variety between characters and sub-builds of the same character.

After enjoying the beta and admittedly getting swept up into the hype machine, Maria and I purchased two copies of the game shortly after launch. In waiting a couple of days we avoided the worst of the server load problems and quickly got to enjoying some co-operative play and experience-swapping with our friends over at Splitkick. It's a lot of fun.

Part of the fun is the co-operative experience. Finally a game that Maria and I can play together. Part of it is the game's atmosphere. It's not a graphics powerhouse and the cut-scenes aren't eye-watering CG but the quasi hand-drawn art will age particularly well. Part of it is that loot-driven games hit all of my buttons.

If you've purchased the game and you're not hooked or you're underwhelmed, roll a different character. Though we have yet to beat Act I together, time constraints on Maria's end had me rolling a new character - and opened my eyes to the true magic of Diablo 3. My "main" build is a Barbarian and my "alt" is a Monk. She can wield most of the same weapons as my brute but her abilities engender a much more frenetic (and athletic) approach. Where the Barbarian just stands and bangs with enemies, she teleports around and just inherently feels faster with every hit. Add to that completely new voice acting and the experience feels fresh again. I can't wait until I try a truly different character like the Witch Doctor.

Yes, the always-online DRM is a pain but at this point adding my voice to that complaint is futile. Worse is the inherent server-side hoarding of data. On logging out or dying, you're never quite sure where the game will put you back in, something made worse by a rather badly done checkpoint system. I get the "anti-cheating" rationale (though, admittedly, hacked characters and duping items were part of Diablo 2's single-player fun) but at least give me manual saves. Of course, the most you'd lose would be some quest progression, right?

If only quest progression is what I'd lose! I laugh at people cursing lost time because they're not playing the same game. The base game is, for the most part, easy - and I'm no aRPG hound. After ten levels, however, Blizzard "allows" you to start a Hardcore character. Die even once and the character is gone. Forever. Poof. There's even a warning that Customer Service will never, ever, resurrect a dead Hardcore character. Even if you say "pretty please".

Suddenly the whole game changes. I have to be perfect otherwise Elara will be gone. I'll have no proof she even existed outside of the screenshot above. It's a whole new game. Again.

Welcome

The Internet is a vast place, filled with more content than any one person can parse. In creating a new site, the question is always: why? What do you have to offer that other sites are not?

An easy answer is: opinion.

An even easier answer is: who cares?

After spending several years writing semi-professionally on the Internet, I'm not stupid enough to make a claim about being biggest, best, or most informative. What I do hope, however, is that Text, Play, Tinker offers a helpful perspective. Our reviews will be concise, our coverage of news - and the overall churn of the web - minimal, with the emphasis being on quality over quantity or speed.

Books, Games, and Computer Hardware may seem a strange combination but that is what we are passionate about and you have to write where your passion lies.