Blog: New Computer, Games and Ingress
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New Computer, Games and Ingress - Thursday, November 28, 2013
I realized I'd never written about the computer I built last year. In late August and early September, I began amassing components when they were on sale. I got the following from Newegg:
I assembled the computer in September, and I was running with an old, cheap GeForce card until December, when I scored a sweet deal on a GeForce GTX 650 Ti from Amazon.
Since then, I've played through several games: Torchlight II, Portal, Portal 2, and Faster Than Light. None of those games are extremely graphics intensive, so my rig can run them at max settings.
Two months ago, Alex from church introduced me to a mobile augmented reality game called Ingress, made by a startup within Google. Ingress is a cross between capture the flag and Foursquare, fought between two factions: the Enlighted (green) and the Resistance (blue). Exotic Matter, or XM, is a new type of energy discovered that emanates from portals in the game which are located at landmarks such as public art, fountains, post offices, churches and historical buildings in the real world. The two factions are embroiled in an ongoing fight for control of these portals in order to achieve global dominance.
Portals can be interacted with only by being at their location in the real world, hence the challenge. And since the game does not always work well when commuting by automobile (there seems to be a 25% chance of requests failing at normal road speeds, and nothing works at freeway speeds), the preferred methods of commute are biking and walking. Through this gamification, Google gets a ton of user-submitted data about landmarks, and pedestrian mapping data for areas inaccessible by car. Once again, Google proves its brilliance.
The gameplay is simple: "hack" portals to acquire items like resonators and bursters, destroy enemy portals using bursters, and build friendly portals using resonators. Hacking a portal has the chance of yielding a portal key, which is used to create energy links between portals. Linking three portals creates a control field, which yields a number of mind units calculated based on the size of the field and the real-life population density within. The real-time total mind unit counts for each faction is shown in the game client and on the Ingress Intel webpage, and maximizing one's faction's mind unit count is seen by some as the ultimate goal of the game. Some people come up with impressive operations to create links thousands of kilometers long and fields of millions of mind units, which is especially a challenge because no two links can cross. Huge fields have been created covering all of the Bay Area, all of the west coast, a good portion of the continental U.S., and New Zealand, to name a few.
So back to my own Ingress-ventures. Alex plays Enlightened, but I found that my beliefs aligned more with the Resistance, people distrustful of XM and their alleged source, the Shapers, so I joined the blues to Alex's good-humored chagrin. I quickly joined the South Bay Area Resistance Google+ group and have met two Resistance agents in person while out playing the game; I also found out that a co-worker at Pure is also a blue player. I was hooked nearly instantly, and achieved Level 8, the highest level possible, in seven weeks.
Since reaching this personal end goal, I haven't been playing as much. I'll still run the client when in a car (or have Priscilla do it when I'm driving) to drive-by hack portals, but I don't go out as much as before to play. The game is a bit pointless entertainment, but it's something fun that can be enjoyed responsibly. It's made me exercise more- the game says I've walked 210km, and that's not including distance covered by bike. Plus I've gotten to know where many landmarks are in my area, which can't be a bad thing!
- Intel Core i5 3570K processor, 3.4GHz
- ASRock Z77 Pro3 motherboard
- Corsair Vengeance 2x4GB DDR3-1600 RAM
- Corsair TX650 650W power supply
- Antec DF-35 black case
- LG DVD burner
- Windows 7 Home Premium
I assembled the computer in September, and I was running with an old, cheap GeForce card until December, when I scored a sweet deal on a GeForce GTX 650 Ti from Amazon.
Since then, I've played through several games: Torchlight II, Portal, Portal 2, and Faster Than Light. None of those games are extremely graphics intensive, so my rig can run them at max settings.
Two months ago, Alex from church introduced me to a mobile augmented reality game called Ingress, made by a startup within Google. Ingress is a cross between capture the flag and Foursquare, fought between two factions: the Enlighted (green) and the Resistance (blue). Exotic Matter, or XM, is a new type of energy discovered that emanates from portals in the game which are located at landmarks such as public art, fountains, post offices, churches and historical buildings in the real world. The two factions are embroiled in an ongoing fight for control of these portals in order to achieve global dominance.
Portals can be interacted with only by being at their location in the real world, hence the challenge. And since the game does not always work well when commuting by automobile (there seems to be a 25% chance of requests failing at normal road speeds, and nothing works at freeway speeds), the preferred methods of commute are biking and walking. Through this gamification, Google gets a ton of user-submitted data about landmarks, and pedestrian mapping data for areas inaccessible by car. Once again, Google proves its brilliance.
The gameplay is simple: "hack" portals to acquire items like resonators and bursters, destroy enemy portals using bursters, and build friendly portals using resonators. Hacking a portal has the chance of yielding a portal key, which is used to create energy links between portals. Linking three portals creates a control field, which yields a number of mind units calculated based on the size of the field and the real-life population density within. The real-time total mind unit counts for each faction is shown in the game client and on the Ingress Intel webpage, and maximizing one's faction's mind unit count is seen by some as the ultimate goal of the game. Some people come up with impressive operations to create links thousands of kilometers long and fields of millions of mind units, which is especially a challenge because no two links can cross. Huge fields have been created covering all of the Bay Area, all of the west coast, a good portion of the continental U.S., and New Zealand, to name a few.
So back to my own Ingress-ventures. Alex plays Enlightened, but I found that my beliefs aligned more with the Resistance, people distrustful of XM and their alleged source, the Shapers, so I joined the blues to Alex's good-humored chagrin. I quickly joined the South Bay Area Resistance Google+ group and have met two Resistance agents in person while out playing the game; I also found out that a co-worker at Pure is also a blue player. I was hooked nearly instantly, and achieved Level 8, the highest level possible, in seven weeks.
Since reaching this personal end goal, I haven't been playing as much. I'll still run the client when in a car (or have Priscilla do it when I'm driving) to drive-by hack portals, but I don't go out as much as before to play. The game is a bit pointless entertainment, but it's something fun that can be enjoyed responsibly. It's made me exercise more- the game says I've walked 210km, and that's not including distance covered by bike. Plus I've gotten to know where many landmarks are in my area, which can't be a bad thing!