Party to Assassination

Another entry in the port forwarding goodness series.

Spy Party is currently in early access. I first heard about this game some years ago - I want to say 2015 - and purchased alpha/beta ccess as it seemed really interesting. Chris Hecker's games are usually worth a look, as they raise themselves above the standard fare in game design alone.

The steam spiel:

"SpyParty is a competitive espionage game about subtle human behavior. A Spy hides in plain sight at a fancy cocktail party, trying to accomplish missions while blending in with the other guests, while a Sniper with a single bullet looks inward, searching for the Spy."

In reality it's a pretty interesting take on a 2 player asymmetric game, requiring the sniper to take note of activities and goings on at a party, with the spy passing on a codeword to his contact, bugging the ambassador, swapping a statue (presumably for one with a camera in it) and seducing another party attendee. From the sniper's point of view overlooking the room, there a number of tells that may give the game away or at the very least allow the sniper to narrow down the field, all set within a time limit to up the ante for the spy. As the spy, you have your list of missions that you need to complete in as innocuous a way possible to not arouse the sniper's suspicions - completing these actions will produce an action for the sniper to observe - if they're looking in the right place. The set up allows for a complex interplay of subterfuge which can be really absorbing. If you're playing against an experience opponent however, expect to get spotted immediately or not be able to discover the spy as there are a number of ways to spoof actions and throw the scent off or disguise your sniper focus (denoted by a laser sight). By all accounts the community is pretty friendly and help is plentiful and on hand if required.

The discord server is probably your first port of call for information and advice, which can be found here: https://discord.gg/SpyParty

Meanwhile, here are the ports that you may need to open to play MP:

TCP/UDP: 88, 5000
UDP: 7000
TCP: 54784, 54998

Discordant Voices

Next in a slightly irregular series of port forwarding business, Discord chat is most annoying. For reasons best known to the devs, they have chosen a vast port range that voice chat is initiated on - I'm sure there is a very good reason, it's not just them being lazy. Is it?

All kudos to them though, it is one of the best pieces of software to come out in the last few years for gamers. It is pretty much essential, is free (but you can support them and you get animated emojis), and doesn't seem to want to install horrible bits of malware or steal all your data. As a bonus, the patch notes generally have a sense of humour - whilst not going to rival say, Dwarf Fortress, for silliness (which is a big ask), they are at least inventive and may crack a smile, a chance to pat yourself on the back and say, 'I got that reference!'. Top work all round.

Any road, ports required for voice are:

UDP: 50000 - 53500

Earliest Video Game Memory

Way back in the mists of time, men were real men, women were real women and small furry... you get it.

I am old enough to remember an Atari 2600 clone, of sorts.. I don't think it was an Atari, it was wooden, had little silver post slider switches, and two detachable joysticks with a single button apiece (these had little cubby holes to fit into, my first experience with cables just being annoying and never, ever fitting back into the space that they came in when it was new). One of the only games that I distinctly remember was some kind of motorcross game - it might actually have been called 'Motorcross' - where you had three horizontal lines on the TV screen, and your little bike. Pressing the button at the right time made you do a wheelie over an obstacle on the track. I was very bad at games, even back then, and failed more often than I should have. That didn't matter. IT WAS A WONDEROUS THING!

The other was 'Tennis'. Or Pong, but it might not have been branded.

Thinking harder, I seem to remember there only being a few colours. The games on the 2600 seem to be too colourful, maybe it was even older than that. The motorbike game looked like this:

Except that was the bus-jumping game type (one of 4! Stunt Cycle, Motorcross, Drag Race and Enduro). That screen shot comes from the Atari Stunt Cycle Game, which looks like this:

But the console most definitely did not look like that. I could have sworn that it had cartridges - although maybe the games were built in (as were the little joysticks). I'd like to know what it was.

Fortnightly, So Tightly

Following on from Rainbow 6 port discovery, I installed this the other day, and didn't like it much. But, here are the ports that I have opened to get it to work thus far:

UDP: 7862, 9003, 9005, 9013, 9016, 9017, 9022, 9033, 22222

Suspect by looking at the progression that 9000-9035 or something similar are used, but yet to see them.

All Steamed Up

Recently I tightened up my firewall rules. A while back I got hold of a Watchguard T10, nice piece of kit for the home. Turned the wifi off, as already had some Ubiquiti kit in, and that knocks the socks off in-built router wifi, as you might expect.

With the aforesaid tightening, I expected a few teething troubles, but some have manifested in curious ways. Watchguards are good in that they are set up to default block everything incoming but also outgoing - if it doesn't use a common port (i.e. less than 1023), then it will default block outbound traffic.

Examining the logs, I found that some traffic was being blocked by the HTTP Proxy - although the traffic was going out on port 80, it was being denied with the reason: "Body content type match". A bit of research into the error found that the WG was blocking the traffic due to a strange (i.e. whichever game was trying to update) executable dialling out. This is desirable behaviour, clearly, as you don't want some sneaky virus exe dialling home to start cryptolocking all the things. That said, it took a bit of sorting out, so figured I'd write it up for the other 2 people in the world who run home T10s and play steam games.

Firstly, here are the steam ports:

TCP: 27015 - 27030

UDP: 4830, 27000 - 27030

For completeness, here's Valve's IP address space pulled from ARIN:

162.254.192.0/22
192.69.96.0/22
205.196.6.0/24
208.64.200.0/22
208.78.164.0/22
2620:f9::/44

How to fix the HTTP proxy issue:

• Check the policy properties to see which proxy/content action the policy is using, likely to be HTTP-Client.Standard.
• Go into Setup | Actions | Proxies
• Scroll down the list until you see the proxy action you're interested in.
• Edit, and select 'Body Content Types' from the menu on the left.
• Highlight Windows EXE/DLL and ensure that 'If matched' picklist doesn't say 'Deny', 'Drop', or 'Block'. I've chosen AV scan, as I have an active subscription on the T10, but you can also choose 'Allow'.
• OK out and save the config back.
• Enjoy correctly updating Steam games.

Whilst I'm on it as well, here's the (full) list of ports required by Rainbox Six Siege, as the Ubi support pages don't appear to have a complete list:

TCP : 13000, 13005, 13200, 14000, 14001, 14008, 14020, 14021, 14022, 14023, 14024

UDP : 2070, 3075, 3478, 6015, 6019, 6020, 6021, 6250, 6085, 30000, 30100, 30200