Gunhouse

Gunhouse

I started playing Gunhouse in February 2019 as it was provided in the PlayStation Plus games package for that month. It was originally released on the PlayStation Mobile platform in 2014.

I've been playing this game for way too long (5 months, mostly during my work commute when I feel like it). I've decided to document my datapoint for reference, in the chance that someone else out there has been too. This means that most of the following will make sense to very few.

Day 300

Game progression is split into days where each day is split into three levels. My estimate is that 30 days is more than enough for most people. The highest trophy/achievement requires 100 days, which is a slog. I just kept going till day 300 and onwards because I had my 'system' and executing it felt like going into a flow state.

I think the game gets progressively harder, either way I'm not at the point where the game is hard yet; completing each level is still a formality, even if I die here and there out of carelessness.

Hardcore

"Hardcore" mode is a typical survival mode where you start off at the beginning, levels get progressively harder and you keep going until you die.

Reaching Day 8 is probably good. The hi-scores shows I reached Day 8 on my second attempt, I didn't want to make further attempts in case I didn't do any better and make it look like I took multiple attempts instead. Which is funny because as if anyone cares!

Blocks Loaded

A full house of 3x6 is what I try to go for most of the time.

Weapons

Here's the trio of weapons that I feel most comfortable using, in order of most important first:

• Sine Wave (Special) - Temporarily freezes all enemies; for this duration you can have your way with the enemies. You could probably survive with this weapon alone but it would take a while as it doesn't do much damage.
• Beach Ball (Gun) - These are very powerful and linger for a good while on-screen. The lingering helps deliver even more damage but also gives enemies time to move forward, which is why I only use it when enemies are frozen with the Sine Wave special. Using this as a powered-up full-screen attack (all guns at once) annihilates everything, so that's what I do.
• Dragon (Gun) - Meh, I'd rather have more beach balls instead. However this does a lot of damage in little time, the "little time" being important as you don't have to care about freezing them. But another weapon may well be better choice.

My "Favorite Gun" switches between those three weapons:

The Good

There's plenty more good than what I'm listing here, but it's what pops out in my mind:

• The weapons are varied and interesting. If a lot of thought went into designing these weapons, it really shows.
• You can sell weapons for as much money as you bought them, it took me a while to realise this! There's no refund-tax which means you could enjoy experimenting with any weapon.
• The game is a little weird, humorous and doesn't take itself seriously, which works for this title.

"I've been playing this too long"

Here are some amusing oddities that occur when you've played this game for probably much longer than it was designed:

• In my flurry of swiping, quite often I'll get "lucky" and inadvertently create a big block and swipe it off, overwriting some powerful guns I was saving up to be replaced by a puny weapon that I didn't want. After being burned by this too many times, I've now learned to build my blocks such that I have to swipe in the direction away from the guns/specials that I'm building up. Still, every now and again I'll get bitten by this and I'll yelp (in public)!
• After reaching Day 200, I found that when the game refreshes any objectives you've cleared (after completing a level) the game intermittently crashes. It's no biggie since the levels are easy to re-do and sometimes quitting to the Shop before the refresh happens helps.
• Sometimes the 3 "current random objectives" get stuck to the same "Upgrade healing to Level XXX" which costs more money than you have, so you can't clear them for a long while.
• It would have been nice if the balance display accommodated a few more digits... :)

Misc

I originally started playing on the Vita but very soon re-bought the game on my phone (Pixel 3) since I carry it with me more often. This was also a good choice because the Vita has a lot of lag when swiping, no issues on the phone.

Overall

This section shouldn't be here since it isn't a review, it's more just a brain dump of my experience of the game. However it's worth noting that despite this game not having any of the psychologically-underhand game design typical of mobile games (such as timers, depleting resources), I still found the game compulsive to play by my attempts to get better at the core game mechanic. I think I'm pretty good at swiping those blocks now.

Review.

Aesthetics: It looks quite neat and has a pretty small footprint on my desk.

Performance: It runs TF2 at 1920x1200 at around 20-40 FPS which is fine by me. Maya loads a lot faster but Photoshop only marginally more. It seems to run fairly nippy but then a fresh Windows install always feels nimble compared to a stale one.

Noise: It's extremely quiet, but that's all pretty subjective isn't it? Well, I can only notice the noise when it's the only sound being made in the room. Low volume music drowns out the hum pretty well. My PS3 is an order-of-magnitude-and-a-half louder. Never hearing data being accessed from the hard drive is bliss! The 'crunking' sound of a HDD really ruined the tranquility of my previous PC.

I worry about being far too obsessive about noise, but something about silent stuff attracts me. I might buy some acoustic padding for the inside of the case and see if that helps at all (without affecting the thermal conductive properties of my case too much).

Heat: Most of my case is lukewarm, the only real source of heat is my graphics card. My HSF is lukewarm to the touch most of the time (I used good thermal paste and applied it as appropriately as I could). My PSU is very efficient and doesn't need to draw that much power either. SSDs emit no real heat at all. I'm no expert though, so I plan to do a stress test on it sometime and see if it all survives.

Problems: For some reason my PCI wireless network adapter isn't working anymore. I hope it isn't the PCI slot that's not working! I've ordered a new card and am using a spare USB adapter meanwhile.

Conclusion: So-so. I'm generally pleased with the results. I'm trying to convince myself that it's OK for my PC to emit a whisper of noise. I can play TF2 at 1080p adequately. If I were to build another PC I wouldn't go for mATX again, it's just too small for a real PC. I don't regret making it though, I think I've actually got what I wanted!

Construction.

My desk fell victim to my efforts and looked a good mess.








Initial fitting of mobo, CPU and HSF. However, my case uses a strange bracket holds the DVD drive and has a hole for the HSF to protrude from. The question is, is the hole big enough?






It might not be clear from the photo but the HSF is too large (by only a few mm) to fit through!







Good job I have a dremel, otherwise I'd be truly stuffed. I bought it many months to cut open a padlock and it's had many uses since!

I marked off 5mm with a pen and cut it off in the garden. It took about 10 minutes and was extremely noisy to do! Not bad for a noob. :)



The picture shows the new larger hole and the strip of removed metal standing in the middle.







This is what it looks like with everything fitted and running. I doubt I'll ever have anything to do with mATX again since it's a maintenence nightmare: Just look at how cramped it is!

Let's build a PC.

For various reasons I ended up building a PC. These were my motivations:

1. I want a faster PC. TF2 took 3 minutes to load and could only run decently at 800x600.
2. I'd never built one from scratch before so it'd be interesting to do so. I've swapped bits and pieces around before but that's about it.
3. I like quiet PCs and wondered if I were given full control over the components: How quiet could I make it?
4. I want a smaller PC that looks smart since I don't like things that take up loads of space and is also an eyesore.

Most of the time was spent deciding what components to use. This isn't too surprising since most of my motivations contradicted each other: Fast PCs are less likely to be small and quiet, and given my experience of building PCs I wondered if it I might as well not bother! As a compromise, I settled on the following:

• Case: Lian Li PC-A01 (Looks nice to me and got some good reviews)
• PSU: 625W Enermax MODU82+ (Apparently very quiet)
• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (Good balance between performance and heat output)
• HSF: Zalman CNPS8000 (The only low-noise HSF I could find with even a hope of fitting inside my mATX case)
• Mobo: Asus P5E-VM (Fanless)
• RAM: 4GB Crucial Ballistix
• VGA: Geforce 9500GT (Fanless)
• HDD: OCZ 60GB SSD (No noise of course since it's a SSD)

The only sources of noise are the PSU and HSF. There's not much airflow at all, but the design of the case is such that it uses the HSF as an exhaust. The case is made of aluminum which is said to itself act as a giant heat sink.

Views

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471578142/
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/c/cpu/part-1/cpu1-1.html
http://fms.komkon.org/EMUL8/HOWTO.html
http://www.atariarchives.org/mlb/
http://e-tradition.net/bytes/6502/
http://www.6502asm.com/

After reading most of the above, I've decided to start by emulating the 6502 CPU as a standalone code module. I've no idea if this is the best way to begin but it sounds logical to me and would give me a base to work from! Additionally there are a bunch of 6502 emulators from which I could test my results from.

Bit by bit

So I decided to make a NES emulator. I've glanced at emulation a few years ago but didn't have a clue how to start. My reasons for giving this a shot are:

• Understand better how computers work.
  
• Be more familiar with assembly.
• To feel better! It's nicer when you know how things work.
  

This is definitely not an attempt to make the best NES emulator! It's more about extending my knowledge rather than anything else. It'll be dumbed down in C++ with code clarity preferred to performance. Optimisation could be done later (sounds like fun) but may be considered another project.

The goal of this project is:

• Create a NES emulator that can run at least one game working video.
  

Doesn't sound like much but it'll help keep me motivated and likely to keep going! No doubt if I complete this, I'll extend it to something else.