Mobile game testing during summer 2020, part 2 (Game Dev Tycoon & Girls X Battle 2)

During the summer I also tested two Android games I liked: Game Dev Tycoon (GDT) & Girls X Battle 2 (GXB2). I'll say a few words about those.

Game Dev Tycoon

GDT is a management game, where you're a game developer starting in a fictional reality apparently early in 1980's. It was originally released on PC in 2012, which I've never tried. Android version is much newer, but not sure if there are any actual changes in the game. During the summer I felt like oh well this is quite much praised game and I've bought only one game before, so let it go. I didn't regret - I did several few days for several hours with it. I nowadays rarely have time to put in more than 10 hours ever on a single game, so by a rule of thumb it's clearly a successful game if I feel myself enjoyed for more than 10 hours with a game.

Anyway, the game itself is quite simple. At the beginning you're alone and code games - coding is basically set by setting different amount of emphasis during three development stages, where there are three different sliders such as World Design, Graphic and Sound, or Gameplay, Dialogues and AI. Characters have skills in Design, Technology, Research and Speed - first two affect to making better results at different sides of the game development, while research is for generating reports and researching new technology. Speed then decides obviously how fast something is completed. If the project is larger than small, there is a need to dedicate one person to various fields during a phase - three people can do all the phases, but if the the project is too big, it's exchausting to be responsible of everything, and results will suffer.

During the time there will be time there will be new more capable computers and consoles availeable, and every now and then those are declared not supported by the producer, after which no more games can be developed to them. Devices model after real life devices with minor deviation in name and/or looks. New features will become available for research as well, and late game games are hugely more complex (indicated by points development and technical points required to finish) than the starter things. Also the company size will grow, there are various other choices too (such as genres and target audiences), your workers (and you yourself) will become better and more specialized, there are few semi-random events and eventually it's even possible to have own dedicated research department too. Overall everything is quite simplistic and abstract though, and various factors define which sides make a good game for this platform.

As a downside the game has in my opinion relatively poor replay value, because there is no randomness in game history course. Therefore I can always know beforehand that I'll need to stop making games for this device, as it's going to be shut down abruptly the next year, and likewise can know that soon there'll be a new device for which it's good to make strategy games and so forth (and actually since the devices are based on real devices, one can often foresee various things already on the first try). On the other hand at least it's possible to keep knowledge saved in game for the features which are important in some game combinations, and with multi-genre games etc. there are quite a few options in a long run. And of course needs to keep balancing with money, which seems a bit too easy though.

Overall a nice experience, especially for the first time, which can take quite a few hours already. Second time might go alright as well, but don't really feel like playing the game for many times through, mainly for reasons stated in the previous paragraph.

Later I decided to purchase in Steam a game in Early Access called City Game Studio. It is essentially a game like GDT with maybe a bit more crude interface at least for now, but also more features - even while it's not stated as completed. This also seems to have at least to a degree of variation with device development as an option. Will see if it will be the full mantle bearer of game developing simulations for me in the future - or if I'll just have already oversaturated myself with the genre.

Girls X Battle 2

Last year I tested and reviewed Empires & Puzzles, and deemed it had something a bit similar to Dungeon Link. This summer I thought I could go back to see the game and maybe do a review of it. Alas, I could not, the game had become victim of the modern times and the servers had been simply shut down. Now it's relatively difficult to find much about the game anymore from the Internet. Ok, that's not really true, there are still lots of sites referring to it, but still I see it's more like nothing stays in the Internet if not actively upkept. As I tend to think it's quite opposite to those who keep telling that anything placed to Internet will never vanish from there. Anyway, I'm digressing.

So since Dungeon Link was no more, I tried to find something more or less similar. I came across this game GXB2, which I'd seen in advertisements for quite a few times. According to the ads I'd probably never played the game; it was advertised by stupid 3D animations (completely unrelated to the game, in completely different style than in the game) where some guy is dating girls and dumping them hoping to get a better one. Essentially the advertisement videos gave the idea that it's a dating sim where all the girls are yours to be abused, even if some of them would sometimes ignore you. However, unlike with the Game of Lust, this time the actual game proved out much better than could've deduced by the ads.

So yes, it's a game where you collect girls (gotten from gacha balls), and there is kind of a date a girl feature, but it's really much more like tactical RPG management game. Girls must be fed to get levelled and then also merged to get empowered. They'll need equipment and have different skills, so the tactical side comes with combining the more efficient team - in case you can choose. There are also mild level of storytelling about sort of monster invasion to the academy...can't really remember much of it as it was so generic and meaningless.

Much like Dungeon Link, actually, except this time there is not as tedious grinding - but also no any tactics in battles either. On the other hand, most battles can simply be skipped thereafter, at least after few ingame levels. Also in Dungeon Link there were characters not only girls, and well, GXB2 is also filled with fan service anime, unfortunately. I'm fine with manga/anime style characters, but I dislike it when almost all the characters have overemphasis on bursting bosom, flashing knickers and having unnecessarily indecent clothing. Not to mention, most of the girls are supposedly underage, sigh.

If I'll rationalize, I can't actually even properly recommend this game. I mean it's a nice free to play game with ridiculously high possibilities to waste money for nothing while levelling your characters, and sooner or later the waiting will go on nerves of many people if not paying to speed up the progress. However, it's made quite nicely in my opinion, and to do the dailies it just takes few taps here and there and there's still stuff that is alright to play. Quite simple yes, but at least not annoying effort every day. Empires & Puzzles (and many other games) I played for some months until I got exhausted with grinding as F2P and not willing to pay, but this I've played several months without feeling tired - and therefore I felt I can actually pay a bit for the game. It's hard to explain, but I've enjoyed despite so limited actual gameplay options.

There is some humour also, even while not always that great, and I appreciate it that there are actually manga strips running ingame (with at least one strip falling under self-cencorship due to an incest reference - I think the game's normal graphical content is actually worse than this one relatively fun strip was). The manga is not necessarily my favourite comic as such, but at least it does make the ingame characters more lively and it's sometimes jesting with the ingame mechanics: eg. one character Giana causes her biggest damage after she dies, so in one manga strip Giana is used (reluctantly) as an exploding cannonball to vaporize the opposing team.

On the dark side though, it seems to me like every second girl in the academy is at least depressed. Some sound like they'd been abused or something, and several of them are plain mad (stuff like can I sharpen my chainsaw with your bones, master). I suppose it's supposed to be comical, but for some parts it almost sounds like if the developers would be human trafficked to do their game code locked into a dark cellar, and those little filler dialogue lines would be their only voice out from their personal hell. I'll never get to know if this is just my vivid imagination, which helps me across dull times in life.

Mobile game tests during Corona summer of 2020, part 1 with the lesser games: D&D Style Choice Game & King's Throne

During the summer I spent several weeks in a small town in Eastern Finland, obviously without my dear personal computer(s). At some point I felt like testing few games on my newly bought (second-hand) Samsung Galaxy S10. Might write a word or hundred about the games I tried, after I'll get to that.

This new old flagship model S10 replaced my 2015 model Samsung Galaxy J5, which was not very good for playing in a long run - performance was acceptable, but with only 8 GB of total internal storage it was not good. It could be acceptable if the 8 GB would have been actually available, but OS and bloatware took already away like 6 GB of it, and even while SD card can be used, most applications do not support running from SD card. Android 6 Marshmallow (best the J5 would officially support) would have feature of using SD as extension of the internal storage, but Samsung had decided to disable this feature in their OS version... So anyway with my old J5 it was therefore inconvenient to even have more than one or max few games on the device to begin with... 

I suppose those smartphones could already take their own post, but this is what happens when not writing anything for five months. To be honest, also each of the games alone could have been worth one separate post, but now I'll try to be short and pack a line or few of several, since I know I'd otherwise have a long hiatus between each comment. This already was supposed to be written two months ago. Work, studies and family do take their toll in time consumption - and actually just now a little hungry beast came to tell me that it is foodie time. Very well, I'll continue in a moment.

Originally I intended to write also about games Girls X Battle 2 & Game Dev Tycoon, but I think writing this all took long enough to make it two-part post. Maybe it won't take me months to get the second half of my summer 2020 games reviews written - those two are after all games I clearly liked more than the two following ones I tested first.

 

D&D Style Choice Game

You have chosen...
poorly

"You have found a clichéd Dungeons and Dragons inspired game for your smartphone. You are at your childhood home and feel bored. Nobody is around. What should you do?

A. Play the darn game!
B. Forget it, find out if there are some other people around.
C. It's already late. You can rest and wake up another day."

Actually there are quite a few
pictures in the game. Ads too.

The first game I tested was named in very generic fashion: D&D Style Choice Game. Well, I guess that pretty much tells what to expect from a game amidst endless hordes of other games one can download and at least try for free. So yes, it is a text based game where you'll read the story and then pick a choice, according to which the game continues and narration branches. 

This feels to me something really ancient; choice based text adventure games were a thing already in my childhood in 1980's (including analogue variants: solo adventure books, where results of choices are determined by turning into page X or Y). Those pretty much seemed to lapse into obscurity for most parts by 1990's, although not necessarily as deeply as parser based text adventures (which I believe were deemed as more advanced stuff in 1980's than choice based games). Then of course there were this related genre of visual novels, which were not as familiar in the West despite being constantly around during the decades in Japan.

I think it's fairly truthful to claim, however, that visual novels and even pure text based story games have gotten a renaissance also in Western gaming culture during the past ten years or so. Some material have clearly gotten inspirations from Japanese visual novels, however, these pure text based games have a bit different and more traditionally Western feeling on them. I also partially got inspired to try some of these, since I've been also testing Twine, which is sort of a game engine for making text based games (essentially as HTML pages). In addition could imagine that this kind of a game suits well on a mobile device, and I suppose I still agree with that.

Narissa, the dream girl of every RPG
nerd - she's even cladded in proper
armor instead of a bikini mail.

The game itself is essentially an "interactive novel", which is not exactly consisted of award winning narration as such. In fact the text reminded me a lot about my own high fantasy short stories I'd written as a teenager, riddled with a very traditional RPG fantasy setting (healer clerics with mail and mace fighting goblins etc.) not forgetting to gasp upon how hot every randomly encountered NPC female is. At least some of them are also well suited in combat against various beasts and abominations. This being said, in addition to sexual innuendo there is a fair deal of violence as well, so clearly it is not for children either. Maybe this is for someone who likes Twilight and Divergent?

The story might well surprise the reader though at times, as there didn't really feel like being much limit or rule upon what might get encountered by the narrator's random encounter table (the game events themselves are not random), but as such it also makes everything kind of meaningless, since pretty much all the characters lack depth and plot twists do not really need to follow any mature logic. Seen worse in games though, don't get me wrong, but the main point I believe is that I'm no longer the target audience for youth high fantasy which might have felt fresh to me in 1990. Age reference is a bit unfair though, since the cultural reference points feel rather like 21st century instead of 20th century, although with some impression that the author is not necessarily too familiar what was already written in the previous century. On the other hand while like insinuated in the beginning, I think the game developer has been either at late teens or young adulthood, yet he seems to develop as a writer as the chapters go on.

"Selling a quality virgin!"
Is this an obvious bad choice?

For game mechanics could mention that there are also items and few stats like health and strength which might increase or decrease during the gameplay. So that if for instance health and magic powers are in high level, can be fairly safe to take some risks or cast spells in order to reach for something more valuable.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed several chapters of adventures, until at some point my hiatus become infinite so far. One can get more adventures unlocked for free after finishing previous parts, and as light entertainment without better stuff available it's fine - and like said, it's also free. Then again, also libraries are free, if I want to read something.

Grading (5 star maximum):
Esthetics: **
Graphics are limited to few quite nice looking drawings and there are but few insignificant sound effects; mostly it's just text which wouldn't outshine even J. K. Rowling's texts.
Playability: ***½
Keep it simple sugarpie. There are options and some else, but mostly it's just picking up text choices by tapping. However, playing is frequently interrupted by ads as a free player.
Value of time and money: ***½
It's a free game but not world class literature.
Content: **

Lunchtime!

There are lots of text-only adventures, they are fairly easy to make, and I can hardly think of anything too special in this one.
Challenge: **
I don't think this is meant to have real challenges but that the player can just keep progressing the story. You can choose wrong though (and have no way to determine without trial and error which choice causes bad results), but it's also always possible to just try again.
General grade: **½
If you have nothing better to do, enjoy generic adolescent aimed high fantasy and want some light written entertainment of that kind on your smartphone, it's free to try. Arguably the narration and hence the game gets gradually better as the story goes on.

King's Throne: Game of Lust

Where choices matter not.

I could have mentioned more clearly about the Wizard's Choice and other Choice game chapters above that as a free player there are actually stops for ads quite frequently, which on the other hand seem to be a commonplace anyway. Commercial propaganda claims that advertisement are for conveying information, so maybe in this context it's fair to admit I first came across this King's Throne - Game of Lust with advertisement while playing the previously reviewed Choices game. The advertisement gave me impression of a game which would be likely more or less stupid but also seemed to have some potential as a kingdom management game. However, even if I expected not much, I still was disappointed and didn't feel like playing this one for a very long time. In fact I would not really feel like even writing this short review of mine, especially as I'm not hired to do so by anyone else but myself. I should ask myself a raise, but that is hard as a voluntary worker.

In any case, the subtitle of the game obviously is a reference to Game of Thrones. While that series obviously contains stories of lust (2nd hand knowledge - I've never gotten aquaintanced with the TV or book series), having lust included in the subtitle makes it sound like the game's carrot is being intentionally lewd. There are hentai games with great narration apart from their often absurdly unfitting and out of the blue appearing lewd sections, and this didn't seem nearly as frivolous after all, so I figured maybe it's something tolerable. In the modern world the audience might not believe it, but regardless I have to say that this lustness part was not something I really looked after, but the kingdom part and potential narration and doing meaningful choices.

Well, unfortunately choices matter only to the degree whether you'll want a bunch of soldiers or bag of gold. Kingdom management is all about tapping more resources with no effect to anything whatsoever, no matter if you're being a tyrant to the peasants or order your troops to seize some highwaymen, the choices are just very thinly veiled selections of tap to get more resource A or B. That is very boring. 

There are no tactics to employ. Numbers are absurd and all victories are pyrrhic. Every battle ends up as a bloodbath no matter how strong you are.

Some math might give an
impression about grinding efficiency.

It also doesn't help that there are like half dozen of similar resource boosters that will only give a small amount a time, you can tap them like max 7 times (can't remember exact counts) and then they'll regenerate one in 5 minutes. This means that you'd need to keep the game constantly open and keep tapping every few minutes to get almost nothing useful. Really grindy in the worst mobile game fashion, if I'm asked, and it doesn't help that nothing really has narration or anything that actually matters either, even while almost everything is attempted to be disguised as something that there'd be some "story potential" around. Or well ok, there is sort of storyline which starts by beating rivaling relatives or something, whom you'll get them imprisoned, can't bother to remember and didn't really seem to matter. Wars also are like you'll need a million soldiers to beat enemy's 10000 troops, yet those numbers also are just very meaningless numbers of resources. YAWN!

What about the lustful side that was advertised? In the ad actually there was like choices of save the princess (and get laid with her) or let her rot in prison. Well one resource source is to "find" maids, and this actually seems to be some of the most sophisticated content of the game. After a maid is found, you can flatter and bribe her to make her like you more until she becomes another wench of the lord whom he just screws alongside other maids in order to breed kids, who can then apparently be married with kids of other players and so forth. Didn't ever get to really see much of it as playing seemed so effortsome and boring. There also is the town where it's sort of possible to go get random encounters with citizen and even find more maids, but everything just seems so much like there is core by no content. These advertised choices also do not really exist in such fashion as the advertisement gives the impression - obviously I've noticed a long time before already that advertisement of mobile games usually contain very little truth of the actual game, but I was semi-hoping that there could have been something like quests in Fallout Shelter for instance. 

In this game women are around
to provide sex and offspring.
Also the main point in the game?

(Speaking of Fallout Shelter, Hustle Castle, a blatant clone of Fallout Shelter, was also in some advertisements. Those advertisements gave the impression that HS would also have similar quest mechanic as Fallout Shelter. I started wonder if it is true nowadays, since such features did not exist back then when I tried Hustle Castle maybe two years ago. Like said, ads are generally full of lies when it comes to mobile games, but at least this time the ad was implemented by actual game graphics - not necessarily from actual gameplay, and I doubt they'd have it even close to the ad really, but at least characters were the same kind of figures as in the game. Also like said Fallout Shelter had that stuff already a long time ago, so it would make sense if a clone game gets the same content. Didn't bother to try though.)

As some final nails in the coffin I felt that humour is bad and some parts of graphics and representation are just made in bad taste. Like the mechanics of prisoners. They're just extra resource sources, but the representation of "interrogating" them is just disgusting: essentially the player needs to tap the prisoner to torment him until blood has been spilled sufficiently. I'm not sure if it has been meant as fun, but I don't find it so. Again, even while I would not get so enthusiastic about violence in games anymore, back in the days I've found over the top violence rather entertaining already decades ago like in executions of Commando Libya, excess jumpy slaughters in Cannon Fodder and gruesome torture chamber murders of Chiller. However, something just doesn't feel fitting at all in King's Throne's torture chamber. 

Overall the lord seems like a douchebag, and you're forced to play as that character without a choice. Maybe the developers have thought about it, having just forgotten to leave any potential of philosophical aspects openly implemented or even mildly insinuated into the game. Honestly though, I doubt it. Too bad, as actually with some decent content writing the game frame could have made something acceptable.

This is how I felt playing the game.

Grading:
Esthetics: ***½
Drawings are fairly good looking, and I guess the style is even more or less personal comics style stuff. Although I dislike the modern animation style where drawn characters are "bent" back and forth in stupid looking fashion to make them look more lively. However, content of the drawings just tends to put me off. I can't remember much about sounds (I usually turn them off after testing, since sounds would likely bother other people around), but I don't think there was more than some generic sound effects and not much of music.
Playability: **
Interface is quite standard no problem modern mobile game, but there are too much unnecessary menu layers (disguised as castle sections or such, which of course sort of improves atmosphere). Unfortunately there is way too much tapping here and there to get bits of resources with both too long and too short regeneration times of charges.
Value of time and money: *
A free game with micropayments for this and that. Actually in the current state I felt like I should get paid instead to bear to play the game any further.
Content: *
Under fairly pretty cover this cake is both hollow and rotten inside.
Challenge: **
Actually I played too little to comment much about challenge. If you pay, all gets faster no doubt, if you play for free, price is sanity. However, I suspect the sanity is lost in any case if the game is played much further.
General grade: *½
I don't know if the game lacked a proper content designer who'd actually try to make the game enjoyable and interesting, or if this person was just not given resources to do anything as intended. Frame seems fairly alright, but design solutions are mostly just poo for what I'm concerned.

Server Stories, Pt 2 - The Hunt for Yellow CAT

Noticed that an accident had happened: this blogpost was supposed to be published months ago - in fact before the previous update. My bad, somehow I thought I had already done this. On the other hand my notes got a bit messy as I forgot to write everything more clearly early on, and then it become happened a long time ago... I'll have to reconstruct and recall from lost memories some details, since doing all the tests again would not feel like being worth it.

In a summary I went on testing how transfer speeds would variate between transferring to and between SSD/HDD and if there was noticeable difference between software RAID 1 setup and separate drives. All my testing went pretty much bogus from the beginning, as I got shocked by my transfer speed through the network becoming just a fraction of what it used to be earlier though the network...

From Dr. Serverstone's jungle diary:
"Mon  6 Jan 15:35:15 EET 2020:
Transfer to SSD (second test below) is basically just as fast as on HDD (first test below). Networking is the bottleneck now. There is a setup where the sending computer is connected to switch and then router, while the server is hooked directly to the router. This might be an issue.

Transfer package 15.9 GB. Transfer speed was maybe around 11 MB/s.

Test 1, time cp to HDD: 22:45.97 min
Test 2, time cp to SDD: 22:41.18 min

What the fart has happened with the speed though?!?"

The diary doesn't directly tell me whether that was a copy on RAID drive, but as far as I know the RAID was disabled at this point. At this point I had installed a new CISCO Ethernet Switch, and I started to suspect it actually caused some serious slowdown even while that should have not happened.

Is this the culprit for lost networking speed?

More notes from Dr. Serverstone's jungle diary:
"Mon  6 Jan 16:10:37 EET 2020:
New test - both computers straight to router. Transfer speed to SSD up to around 56 MB/s with dropdowns to around 25 MB/s probably during file switch. Package size 8.2GB. Transfer to HDD seemed more or less similar, however, at least dropdowns seemed less deep.

SSD test: 3:59.37
HDD test: 2:57.62

Transfer speeds were now largely as expected regarding to networking. As a surprise though, HDD transfer this time was 25% less than the SSD transfer. This would suggest that the motherboard connection employs SATA 1 connection while the PCIe card with SATA adapters go with SATA 2. This also means that the SSD seems speedwise practically useless on this drive."

Of course there could have been some random variation as well, since there were no repeated testings done. The old computer's resources were considerably limited, so sometimes the computer just started hickuping with background processes that would be nothing for a modern computer. This was of course one important part of my testing too.

Server Jungle diary continues:
"New test - both computers connected straight to router. Transfer speed to SSD up to around 56 MB/s with dropdowns to around 25 MB/s probably during file switch. Package size 8.2GB. Transfer to HDD seemed more or less similar, however, at least dropdowns seemed less deep.

Transfer speeds were now largely as expected regarding to networking. As a surprise though, HDD transfer was 25% less than the SSD transfer. This would suggest that the motherboard connection employs SATA 1 connection while the PCIe card with SATA adapters go with SATA 2. This also means that the SSD seems speedwise practically useless on this drive."

So yea, something often overlooked with recommending SSDs as a boostup for an old computer: if it's a computer old enough to only use SATA 1, it's not really of use anymore... My wife's old laptop Lenovo Thinkpad T61 from 2007 (which she btw used no problem till the Autumn, and still occasionally uses - I bought her an used Thinkstation S30 desktop computer from 2013 as a replacement for sort of a late Christmas/wedding gift, so that we could play World of Tanks and some other games together more properly) was boosted with an SSD drive and there it worked fine and speeded up a lot - but only after BIOS upgrade, since the stock BIOS did not support SATA 2 even while the hardware itself supported it. Although it also must be remembered that an old HDD is often also a lot slower than a new HDD, and these HDDs were brand new Western Digital Red NAS drives.

Server diary continues:
"Mon  6 Jan 16:51:49 EET 2020:
Important general test result:
SSHFS process was constantly below 50% CPU now that there was no software RAID applied to. With the software RAID the CPU was regularly hitting at least over 80% values.

Test with HDD moved straight to HDD. There seemed to be a longish hiatus at the beginning of transfer, after which the transfer rate seemed to jump all the way to around 59 MB/s, before returning to similar transfer rates as before - but the minimum apart from file change drops seemed to be around 55 MB/s.

HDD: 3:27.71

Slower than with HDD in SATA adapter but faster than SDD on mobo. Weird results. Testing yet another part with bigger 15.9 GB package. Previous packages were those 8.2 GB.

HDD on mobo SATA, 15.9 GB package: 4:59.34

This transfer result is still faster than earlier tests for the same package on RAID and direct to SSD. A bit puzzling, might be certain degree of random variation included... For confirmation, maybe one more test with this specific setup is recommended.

Last test with this networking is a transfer to a solo HDD on PCIe SATA adapter. Transfer speed shows huge fluctuation now constantly from 14 to 57 MB/s or so with this 15 somethin GB package. In the end the transfer went on stable high rate again, so all this fluctuation might be due random factors with networking or computer processing.

HDD on SATA adapter, 15 GB package: 7:45.14

Overall I should've made multiple times the same test and take the average.

HDD on SATA adapter, 8 GB package: 2:42.61

Nevertheless, now the SATA adapter package on HDD won again with the smaller package - the fastest time of all in fact. I guess I'll simply plug in both drives to the adapter as they used to be, adds to clarity both inside and on operating system as well.

However, I should yet confirm that the speed is sufficient if both computers are going through the Ethernet switch. And that is where the disappointment comes up. With the CISCO switch the transfer speed just can't get past 12 MB/s or so. Not even while the both computers are in the same network.

HDD through switch, 8 GB package: 12:37.09

Switch instructions say to connect the switch by address 192.168.1.254, but that doesn't work unless if my computer is in the same subnet...which is not true. My computer is in 192.168.10.x, so how do I access that address? The switch should be suitable for up to a gigabit transfer rate (125 MB/s), but now it's only running apparently with 100 megabit speed. This should be configurable, but I can't access the web utility now...

Solution to access the subnet was by changing the LAN settings from router. Then I could access the switch and set it go back to the wanted subnet, after which I set the router settings back again. Unfortunately this flushed my old IP address settings as well down the drain, so some of my manually made scripts will now have incorrect IP addresses. Oh well, it's not so big thing I guess. Maybe some of the biggest things are about setting couple old LAN games working again by the correct IP such as Borderlands.

In addition obviously my connections with my server got quite messed up since I didn't shut down everything before changing settings..."

IP address calculations with all the subways and gateways can actually mess up my head quite nicely when the numbers start to roll around, but it was then found out that there was not so much to adjust with the switch settings manager. Or should I rather say, there was no need to change much.

Diary comes to its climatic plot twist:
"Mon  6 Jan 19:25:26 EET 2020:
Then I found out that Port Settings from the Switch allowed only 10FDX speed to my main computer. The unthinkable had happened: I had used an old Ethernet cable was which was of Category 5, not even 5E. CAT 5 is basically obsolete and it should not be able to reach higher than theoretical maximum of 100 Mbps speed. Now that I changed cables to CAT 5E the Switch shows port speed as 1000FDX, which is more appropriate.

Just. Single. Letter. Difference. One doesn't encounter CAT5 much nowadays.

However, to my shock when I start my copy process once again it shows transferring to only hundreds of kilobytes per second! For a moment I thought that'd been now megabytes due improved setup....fortunately, that apparently was just some temporary delay in processing, as after few moments the actual speed rose up to the preferred 50 +/- something MB/s again. Finally the speed seemed more or less expected for the home setup.

HDD 8GB with Switch and CAT 5E: 3:36.57
HDD 15GB on the same setup: 5:21.64

Then finally I plugged in my server directly to router again with my desktop client behind router & switch. This is because the switch and desktop are in another room with other computers, and the cablings would go awkwardly should I connect also the server to the switch. Transfer speeds seem all sufficiently decent ~50 MiB/s +/- something again also this way. Might in theory be marginally faster to have both computers running through the switch, but to be honest it doesn't matter that much anymore, and it might just as well be all random variation in every transfer anyway. In addition, at least the final test yielded in any case the fastest transfer results.

2:53.58

For the end I'll just yet reconnect both HDDs on my obsolete Fujitsu-Siemens server back to the SATA adapter card and close the case for now. Next stage would be setting up the server accessable for all local computers and users with corresponding folders and so on. This I'm not going to do today, since I already wasted one day of a well deserved extended weekend day."

Again the diary doesn't define which package was that fastest transfer; it would make sense for it to be the 8GB package, but if it really was the fastest transfer, there was above one faster transfer case with 8GB. I probably was just being sloppy with my markings, since like said my notes were largely a mess. In any case, I was really happy after substantial amount of frustration to realize it was the old cable that caused slow transfer, and I didn't feel like testing RAID etc. again anymore.

Speaking of which though, the tests yielded one more important general test result:
"SSDFS [service process for file transfer through SSH] was constantly below 50% CPU now that there was no software RAID applied to. With the software RAID the CPU was regularly hitting at least over 80% values."

This means that the software RAID application mdadm actually does take a fair deal more of processing power - too much from this cake. In all documents I read about mdadm it was stated that in theory a software RAID might take a bit more CPU resources than a hardware RAID, however that would not have any practical significance... Well surely so if the computer used is less than 5 years old and not 15 years old! Nevertheless, I find it actually awesome that such aged device is still actually usable for real, even while in practice one could likely get something more powerful with less watts consumption by dumpster diving today.

Halt and Take Breeze

Next episode of ZaCoDe is under work and it will deal about MikroMikko Ergo X Pentium 133 MHz business PC from around 1995. Also included will be horrible crimes related to the computer, in a suitable detective fashion. On the almost finished drawing by my wife is an adaptation of The Scream by Edvard Munch for the episode, as I requested from her. Pukiupipiol.

Horrible things are happening...you'll see...

How about a Corona beer?

Besides computer things, I've been reading books and watching movies & series. For books I'd like to mention  two books, neither of which are about computers this time. Firstly I'll talk a few words about Pussikaljaromaani (literally Bag Beer Novel) by Mikko Rimminen from 2004, which was a Finlandia nominee at the time. The novel was compared favorably to old modernist (from early 20th century) one day novels with stream of mind narration, Alastalon salissa by Volter Kilpi and Putkinotko by Joel Lehtonen. Those on their own part were back in the days compared to Ulysses by James Joyce.

Shortly, I was not impressed. For structural reasons I can see why it was being praised, but I just didn't find it very fun or pleasant to read. Content did not give anything to me and it felt more like a phony-funny postmodern parody of those modernist novels, and more of a chore to read than the old books.

I do admit though, that I found it better than most Finnish books - on the other hand I have hard time thinking of a handful of Finnish books that I'd ever liked of. Also to be honest it felt like a book I could have imagined to write myself, not to mention how in literature studies it used to be common to come across with "unusual" features in literature. Those might be two reasons why I didn't really like the book: to me it felt like something too much dealt about both on narratological and content-wise level. What feels like a cliché to me is often not that to the big audience. Unfortunately that goes also vice versa at times: I follow mainstream entertainment so little that sometimes the most typical events in everyman's entertainment fiction feels fresh to me.


Samurai

Another book I'd like to talk about is Samurai - Japanilaisen hävittäjälentäjän muistelmat by Saburo Sakai and Martin Caidin & Fred Saito, which is a Western variant of Japanese flying ace Saburo Sakai's autobiography. The Finnish translation was released in 1958. I had had this book on my reading queue since at least 2000's, but I'm actually recalling I was supposed to read it already in 1990's. I had it once borrowed already from the library of Tampere, but I had so many other books as well that someone reserved the book before I had started it. That was unexpected, since the book was a storage book which had not been borrowed very frequently.

After having read the book I also found out that it's argued that Caidin exaggerated various factors in the book in order to increase its sell value in the Western markets - there'd been no proper possibilities to check facts in 1950's anyway, and the English language original book was never released in Japan as such. I have no proper ways to check facts either - there are many cases in the book which are about to suspend disbelief, yet they could well be possible. For instance there is a case where Sakai encountered 15 Grumman Hellcat planes and came close by because he thought they'd been friendly Zero planes (Sakai had lost sight on his another eye from earlier wounds). However, he managed to survive the encounter intact back to base on Iwo Jima after long pages of evading (p. 256-265). If the opposing pilots were inexperienced, it definitely could've happened. Nevertheless, my point here is, that I can't confirm these cases: from Wikipedia I can find this case being referred to another book from 1985, but since I don't have that book, I can't check if that book has gotten its data straight from Samurai for instance.

The translation does not exactly alleviate the issues with text. In Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saburō_Sakai) there is an English quote from Sakai about ruggedness of American Wildcat planes:

"I had full confidence in my ability to destroy the Grumman and decided to finish off the enemy fighter with only my 7.7 mm machine guns. I turned the 20 mm cannon switch to the 'off' position and closed in. For some strange reason, even after I had poured about five or six hundred rounds of ammunition directly into the Grumman, the airplane did not fall, but kept on flying. I thought this very odd — it had never happened before — and closed the distance between the two airplanes until I could almost reach out and touch the Grumman. To my surprise, the Grumman's rudder and tail were torn to shreds, looking like an old torn piece of rag. With his plane in such condition, no wonder the pilot was unable to continue fighting! A Zero which had taken that many bullets would have been a ball of fire by now. "

This section also is in Finnish in the book I read, or at least almost:

"Tältä etäisyydeltä en tarvinnut tykkiä; lasketin 200 konekiväärinluotia sen ohjaamoon ja näin niiden repivän rikki ohutta metallia ja lasien pirstoutuvan. En voinut uskoa silmiäni; Wildcat jatkoi suoraa lentoaan kuin mitään ei olisi tapahtunut. Zero, joka olisi saanut niin monta luotia sisuksiinsa, olisi ollut nyt jo yhtenä tulipallona."

The Wikipedia reference's source is not fully clear, because it refers to a webpage which claims the quote coming from Sakai's book "Zero", but I can't find reference to a book exactly by that title. Therefore it might well be that the English quote is not from the English version of Samurai but another book where the quote is dealt differently - I don't know.

In any case, for those who can't read Finnish, the differences (in addition to obvious abbreviation) are that in the Finnish text it's claimed Sakai shot only 200 bullets to the cockpit of the plane. These claims of 200 bullets to cockpit are already internally a bit inconsistent, since elsewhere in the book it has been insinuated earlier that 200 shots per shot down plane was a fairly nice result. In addition it sounds odd if shooting specifically the cockpit did not kill the pilot - Sakai is told to go closer after shooting to look hail the pilot while wondering how it was still just flying forth. In my quote there are no remarks about the shredded rudder, but that actually is in the book later down the page.

Sort of an Easter egg:
Doesn't this look like a murder weapon?

Assembly mnemonic HCF

Then is the turn of a television series - although I'm not even certain are fictional video series entertainment really counted as television material anymore, since more and more people are not exactly watching them by television broadcasts. At least as far as I know, nobody I know would call direct-to-video shows or movies as television programs if they're not actually broadcast by a TV channel. Anyway, I watched a full season of a modern series (2014-2017) for the first time since the 2003 launched Battlestar Galactica (which on its own right was approximately the first contemporary non-animated fictional series I had seen since 1990's).

The name of the series is Halt and Catch Fire. It was their last, best hope for a better IBM PC compatible computer. It failed - to become a Macintosh before Macintosh. And I'm well aware that I'm having an allusion to a completely irrelevant another series. In any case, I had not really seen much fiction which would have a strong plot device on historical computer(s). As in this was not retrocomputing even while I think one reason they decided to make a period drama revolving around computer emergence of 1980's, was that retrocomputing has been sort of fashionable in 2010's. Nostalgia bites sweetly.

Basically content of the series was nice, although I was slightly annoyed by so many storytelling conventions that I assume are trendy nowadays with most American "quality" fiction series. Those things would probably be also part of the reasons why those series are nowadays popular and compared favorably to older style of making series TV fiction. That is drama for reasons of drama. I found the characters highly fabricated - not so much of uncreditable by acting, but rather made filled by "drama potential" by their nature just for story reasons. Ie. every character in the series seems really wrecked from some point of a view in such fashion that it will "naturally" cause conflicts with other people, and therefore there will be gain of dynamic events and excitement from plot twists all the time. That feels to me mostly as annoying and estrangening - especially as of as two of three (or four) protagonists annoyed. Again, I'm not sure about how common this is, since I don't watch series, but I have indirectly gotten the impression that this kind of scriptwriting would be typical lately. If it is, I just find it a stupid fashion which got old 10+ years ago. Still, the core content and some other characters carried out the season easily, despite the sides which I disliked in the series.

At least I won't get spoiled with German texts.

Now I might start "Staffel 2" of Halt and Catch Fire. I had to hunt for getting the series on a disc here in Europe, but found it from Germany by eBay in unopened store plastics. Fortunately it has original English audio, although needs to survive without subtitles (I'm way more skilled in written than spoken English, and sometimes it's hard to hear what people say in television, when there are people in my house making other sounds). Unfortunately it is not a Blu-ray, and maybe even more unfortunately there are not, for what it has seemed to me, seasons 3 and 4 available on physical media at all. Reviews have suggested that the season 2 (likewise as 3rd and 4th season) was much better than the first one, so I can't deny I'm quite curious how I will feel after watching this.


Hollywood went computers

Finally movies: I have had this theme of "computer" with films I've been trying to muster for watching. Since I've already written so much, I'll try to abbreviate my comments on movies to only a sentence for two movies:
1. The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969) - a disappointment, since most of the movie the "computer" was really just a kid who got his brains act like a computer, but what should be expected from a Disney produced comedy.
2. Electric Dreams (1985) - otherwise an average romantic comedy/drama apart from the very prominent presence of a vintage computer in da haus which made me quite excited and perplexed about the model of the device used in the film; also from a modern point of view the natural 1980's contemporariness felt really fresh after all these years.