Nuclear Monster

  • To me, 2016’s Hitman is this bizarre game about planning and murder, where you’re also trying to make your cloned assassin (Agent 47) dress up and act normal to the other NPCs in the game. They aren’t particularly concerned with anything going on around them, and generally won’t be upset if you walk into a room and walk out two moments later wearing a completely different outfit, or were the only person to walk out of a room alive. They do care if they see you change outfits, or if you have the same clothes as some other bald clone who they saw do something bad recently, so the rules are a little different than reality.

    Each level has new outfits for 47 because they allow him different kinds of access, into a guard post, or into a silent auction for evil billionaires who want to bid on people or state secrets.

    It gets completely ridiculous when Agent 47 is required to do things like get dressed up, put make up on, and walk a runway in France, nailing his pose as perfectly as he nails a drum solo when he’s trying to blend in during a mission in Thailand.

    IO Interactive’s Christian Elverdam in an interview with Matthew Pellett:

    One thing we learned pretty significantly is that some of our best moments aren’t assassination moments; it might be walking onto a catwalk, simply because it’s a cool experience. Isn’t that weird? In a game about assassination and silent assassins, one of the marquee experiences is: “Do you want to be a male model?” People were like: “YEAH!”

    Most modern character-driven games are either/or propositions. Either your avatar is perfectly capable of murdering hundreds of people without flinching, or it’s some kind of narrative exploration. Hitman’s Agent 47 can’t take much fire, doesn’t talk much, and can’t fight very well unless it’s planned out in advance and goes off without a hitch.

    The assassinations never go off without a hitch, it’s just not really possible for 47 to use a gun and clear out a room of more than three people without getting dropped by security guards.

    Last week I was playing one of the elusive target missions where you’ve only got one shot to complete the mission. No saving, no loading. It took over an hour to figure out how I was going to assassinate the target, and I did, but then I had to complete the second mission objective and use the key the target was carrying to open a safe and retrieve a flash drive with information the client wanted.

    One problem: The safe was in a hotel security office brimming with guards and military. All armed, and because there were two types of personnel I couldn’t just have an army costume on and open the safe. The regular Hotel guards would freak out and shoot me.

    Bewildered, I cheated a little bit and read on a forum for Hitman players that you could pull the fire alarm and the room would empty out. Great idea!

    Of course, no Hitman plan survives contact with the game.

    I had Agent 47 pull the fire alarm in the security room, and then everyone in the room immediately got their guns out and lit Agent 47 up. Hours down the drain because it was an Elusive Target mission I couldn’t replay, and I was laughing the entire time it happened because it was just so ridiculous. Who shoots somebody that pulls a fire alarm?

  • According to an update on their crowdfunding page, the new Mystery Science Theater 3000 series starts up on Netflix on the 14th of April.

  • If you’re like me you’re gonna spend a good long moment looking at the name of this game before clicking play on the trailer. It’s Full Metal Furies, not Full Metal Furries.

    Cellar Door Games created such fine games as Rogue Legacy, and my personal favorite, Don’t Shit Your Pants. This Full Metal Furies game doesn’t seem to involve any pants-shitting, but it looks like a few characters from Rogue Legacy are hidden in there, so that’s good.

    What kind of game is it? The door that leads to the basement describes it as an RPG-ified action brawler for four, or fewer, players. They emphasize that they have modernized the genre, we will find out more later this year when the game is released.

    The announcement notes mention Xbox and Windows 10 cross-platform purchasing and online support, so we’ve got those platforms. There’s also a Steam listing, but if you purchase it via Microsoft you will only get it via the Windows store. I’ve put out a question to Cellar Door asking after Linux and macOS, will update this post if they get back.

    Update 2/22/17:

    Ryan Lee of Cellar Door let me know that macOS support is a lock, either at launch or a few months after. Linux depends on how well the game does when it is released.

  • Nick Heer has this round-up of Uber in the news for the past 3 years. It includes this gem, from Buzzfeed:

    Early this November, one of the reporters of this story, Johana Bhuiyan, arrived to Uber’s New York headquarters in Long Island City for an interview with Josh Mohrer, the general manager of Uber New York. Stepping out of her vehicle — an Uber car — she found Mohrer waiting for her. “There you are,” he said, holding his iPhone and gesturing at it. “I was tracking you.”

    Mohrer never asked for permission to track her.

  • Ashe Dryden with an older article on the subject of who can give their development time to free or open source software, and who benefits from it:

    I don’t know that we can easily measure how much labor actually goes into creating the software that we use every day. Software that we not only benefit from by saving us time, but also makes us quite a lot of money. We work at startups, consultancies, and large enterprises that pay our salaries thanks to the financial benefit of OSS and the mostly unpaid labor of those contributing to it.

    […]

    People who are contributing their unpaid and underpaid labor are investing their time into companies that are profiting greatly and giving little back in terms of financial support.

    We’ve somehow been culturally talked into accepting this arrangement, not realizing how businesses are using it to further extract value from us. Businesses are choosing candidates based on their open source contributions, knowing that they are getting more value for less money out of them. These are candidates that will continue to work on things in their free time because it’s something they care about and are passionate about. This is akin to not paying someone for overtime.

    Open source originally broke us free from the shackles of proprietary software which forced us to “pay to play” and gave us little in the way of choices for customization. Without realizing it, we’ve ended up in a similar scenario where we are now paying for the development of software that large companies financially benefit from with little cost to them.

    We are being judged on how much we contribute to the bottom lines of companies we don’t work for and what’s worse, we are policing this amongst each other as well.

    I’ve spent the past 17 years helping free and open source projects flourish as best I can, it’s not a profitable experience and it’ll tax whatever passion you have for the project you’re working on. While some things are worth doing for reasons other than money, and it has helped me in getting some work, I’m not sure I’d recommend it to anyone at this point, and demanding it of people who are applying for work is ridiculous.

    There is one problem I have with the article, I see this paragraph and instantly know what some unprincipled managers would want to do:

    As part of the interview, have one of your developers who is familiar with the project and is a good teacher pair with the candidate on an actual issue. See how they reason through problems, become familiar with new codebases, and what questions they ask.

    “My team is having a problem, lets ‘interview’ some developers and get them to solve the problem for us.”

    I have always hated when interviewers demand “homework” or in-person work that solves their actual problems today. That’s why a company hires someone, to solve business problems.

    One way to work around this would be to have a set of free software projects, that don’t benefit the company, for the interviewing developer to work on. Pick a few current issues for those projects, let the developer decide which one to work on. Work on those together.