Tag: Modules
Buy Junk Food, New Organs, And Clone Yourself At The Gas Station Of The Future In Flat Eye
America's gas stations aren't always pretty to look at. They can often be a grimey lens into people's most basic, and at times, unflattering needs. We rely on them when we're desperate for a bathroom, or when we need to buy junk food, cigarettes, questionable beer, and a lottery ticket to pin hopes and dreams on before filling our car with gas and speeding off like we were never there to begin with.
Developer Monkey Moon's new game, Flat Eye, looks at the gas station of the future--a very believable, even dystopian, future.
It takes place in a world on the brink of becoming a utopia, one where machines are sufficient replacements for human labor. Think self-checkouts, self-cleaning toilets, kiosks that take your order, and machines that make your breakfast sandwich before popping it out a little window. It's a world where you seldom have to come face-to-face with a working human being.
In this alternate future, gas stations (branded as Flat Eyes) are still the place where you get junk food, gas, and use the bathroom, but it's also where entirely new technology is used and showcased, so Flat Eyes are also referred to as "automobile fill-up stations and technological access points." So as well as filling up gas and buying bad hot dogs, you can buy new organs from an organ vending machine, receive medical treatment from an automated medical module, or even clone yourself.
The game is a management sim where you overlook the needs and expansion of a Flat Eye location, where you point-and-click from an overhead view (though the camera is fully moveable), clicking on modules, and dragging and dropping things in place on a grid-like layout. In my short hands-on demo, I ordered a human employee to restock the shelves, repair equipment, and install new amenities like toilets, self-checkouts, and medical modules, all while cashing out other customers in the process. The customers are depicted as colorful, albeit characterless, silhouettes that scurried in and out to use the bathroom or cash out.
Flat Eye takes a hard look at humanity's increasing dependency on technology. It depicts a scenario in which humans themselves become as automated and as mechanical as the very machines they rely on to exist through their day-to-day lives. Despite its bleak view of a possible future, developer Monkey Moon was clear in conveying it wanted to ultimately tell a positive story of humanity. Humans embody more of a machine-like presence in Flat Eye, operating on autopilot through a clean, perfect-looking world. But it's still not without its distinct characters and personalities.
As you manage Flat Eye, special customers will visit, giving you the opportunity to talk to them and navigate branching conversations that present glimpses into the lives of those who inhabit this pseudo-utopian world. When I had initially felt like a floating manager ordering around an employee, these branching conversations had suddenly felt intimate as I was choosing the employee's responses. It's also during these conversations where you interact with Flat Eye's AI, a character that I will not spoil, but one I anticipate will have a strong role in the game's somewhat mysterious narrative.
It's in the introduction to this AI and the conversation with it that I was left most eager to see where Flat Eye will go next. There's a dual narrative working alongside an already interesting management sim here.
At the end of each day, you are able to dive into the data of the Flat Eye's productivity and receive an overall score for how well you did. It's also during the transition between days that you'll have an opportunity to look through emails from Flat Eye's corporate executives and look at messages within the company sent between other gas stations--a humanizing element in a rather detached position as a lowly clerk.
Developer Monkey Moon is building a knack for telling stories through the lens of working-class characters that rarely get the spotlight in games. In its previous title, Night Call, you played as a cab driver in Paris, hearing the stories of his passengers, engaging in conversation, and divulging in the intricacies of people's most intimate stories. But like Flat Eye, Night Call goes beyond its surface level, with layered narratives and themes at play throughout.
Despite my short time with the game, its concepts, themes, and mechanics clicked instantly. Furthermore, seeds were planted for a greater overarching story that seems to be heading towards a redemptive look at a dystopian future.
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Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus NVMe SSD review: Fast on PCIe 4, fast on PCIe 3
At a GlanceExpert's Rating
Pros
- Excellent performance
- Exceptional sustained writes from the 2TB version
- Nice-looking copper color scheme
Cons
- 1TB version ran out of cache before the end of our 450GB write
Our Verdict
This drive is a worthy competitor to Samsung's 980 Pro, at least in the 2TB version. The 1TB will run out of juice on very long writes, something the 980 Pro won't do. Regardless, for the price, an excellent SSD.
Best Prices Today
Sabrent must've read some of my articles and discovered my love of the color copper. The heat-spreader and the metal carrying case for the brand spanking new Rocket 4 Plus PCIe 4 NMVe SSD feature the color in copious amounts. I like it. Even if copper leaves you flat, the drive's stellar performance will grab your attention—it bested the Samsung 980 Pro in many tests. This is one of the best SSDs around.
Editor's note: This review originally published on December 21, 2020. As of late January 2022, Sabrent has upgraded the NAND in the Rocket 4 Plus to Micron's B47, which has increased its sustained throughput substantially in our follow-up testing in March. As of this addendum, it's the sixth fastest NVMe SSD we've tested under CrystalDiskMark, and the second fastest drive in our 48GB transfer tests, up from 8th place.
Specs and pricing
The NVMe SSDs we review all use the M.2 connector, and are 22 mm wide by 80 mm long (2280). The Rocket 4 Plus is an x4 PCIe 4.0 device featuring a Phison PS5018-E18 controller and 96-layer, Micron TLC NAND. Sabrent promises not to change to slower components, as has happened with a couple of SSD vendors recently. There's also 2MB of DRAM cache. NAND is treated as SLC for secondary caching to the tune of 25 percent.
Beyond that, the drive is enveloped in coppery goodness (the label) and is available in two flavors: 1TB ($160 on Amazon) and 2TB ($310 on Amazon). A 500GB model exists for $90 but can be hard to fine online, while a 4TB flavor costs $750.
The drives carry a 5-year warranty, and are rated for 350TBW per 500GB of capacity. TBW is the number or terabytes that may be written before the drive warranty lapses. It's quite likely capable of writing more, but that's the company's cut-off point for replacement. Most users are unlikely to come close to that in a decade.
Performance
All that coppery goodness would mean nothing if the Rocket 4 Plus didn't haul the freight. The 2TB version I tested delivers. The Rocket 4 Plus's CrystalDiskMark 6 sustained throughput numbers are impressive indeed, trading first place between writing and reading with the Samsung 980 Pro.
The Rocket 4 Plus couldn't quite match the 980 Pro's overall real world performance in our 48GB transfer tests, but it took a solid second place.
CrystalDiskMark's 4K tests showed another story—the Rocket 4 Plus lagged significantly.
Where the 2TB Rocket 4 Plus really rocked was in our 450GB sustained write tests. Note however, that the 980 Pro Samsung sent me was only a 1TB model. Though it's not shown in the charts, the 1TB version dropped to around 675MBps (PCIe 3) at around the 350GB mark in the copy and took 386 seconds, compared to the 2TB version's 250 seconds on PCIe 3 and 209 seconds over PCIe 4. Yes, cache makes a difference.
I should also mention that in general, it's never a good idea to run an SSD close to capacity. Write speeds will slow down tremendously without NAND available as cache. Always overbuy in terms of capacity.
The PCIe 3 tests utilized Windows 10 64-bit running on a Core i7-5820K/Asus X99 Deluxe system with four 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (NVidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, and an Asmedia ASM2142 USB 3.1 card. It also contains a Gigabyte GC-Alpine Thunderbolt 3 card, and Softperfect Ramdisk 3.4.6 for the 48GB read and write tests.
The PCIe 4 testing was done on an MSI MEG X570 motherboard socketing an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-core CPU, using the same Kingston DRAM, cards, and software. All testing is performed on an empty, or nearly empty drive. Performance will decrease as the drive fills up.
A nice buy at 2TB
Though there's room for improvement in small- and 4K file performance, there's little else to complain about with the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus in its 2TB incarnation. That it can wrestle at all with the 980 Pro at this price point is a feather in Sabrent's (and Phison's) cap.
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