Nuclear Monster

  • The FTL developers, Subset Games, are working on a single player turn-based-strategy game that looks a bit like Advance Wars. Into The Breach has no release date yet, but it will be out (not simultaneously) on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Here’s their description:

    The remnants of human civilization are threatened by gigantic creatures breeding beneath the earth. You must control powerful mechs from the future to hold off this alien threat. Each attempt to save the world presents a new randomly generated challenge in this turn-based strategy game.

    I’m pretty disappointed that Nintendo hasn’t announced a new Advance Wars, but I’m willing to bet that Subset has a good spin on it.

  • Liam Dawe:

    Steam has hit another milestone for Linux games. We now have over 3,000 Linux games to fill our time with. The exact count for me right now is 3,008!

    An impressive number of games with Linux support. I wonder how many are native ports versus Windows pretendulation.

    My search comes up with 3164 for Linux and 13433 total games on Steam.

  • Valve is replacing Steam Greenlight. Alden Kroll:

    The next step in these improvements is to establish a new direct sign-up system for developers to put their games on Steam. This new path, which we’re calling “Steam Direct,” is targeted for Spring 2017 and will replace Steam Greenlight. We will ask new developers to complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account. Once set up, developers will pay a recoupable application fee for each new title they wish to distribute, which is intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline.

    While we have invested heavily in our content pipeline and personalized store, we’re still debating the publishing fee for Steam Direct. We talked to several developers and studios about an appropriate fee, and they gave us a range of responses from as low as $100 to as high as $5,000. There are pros and cons at either end of the spectrum, so we’d like to gather more feedback before settling on a number.

    Steam Direct sounds like Valve is moving a little bit closer to the free-for-all of itch, which is good but $5000 is a bit much. They should have had the dollar amount straight before going live with this.

    Valve are also still making money off of software that encourages rape. That shit needs to go.

    How will this work for free games? They wouldn’t recoup a fee unless it can be done after a certain number of downloads.

  • Bryan Menegus:

    Some of these servers, especially the Discord chat spun out of 4chan’s far-right stomping ground /pol/, use their room to coordinate “raids” on other servers with ease and impunity. Trolls acquire invite links to other servers and post them in a room called “Raids” (formerly “Raids Defense”), encouraging the chat’s 1000+ members to descend en masse on vulnerable or unsuspecting communities, bringing with them a tidal wave of abuse. Other servers have rooms for doxxing—the posting of personally identifying information like addresses and phone numbers of victims. Such behavior is a clear violation of Discord’s Terms of Service, though it seems those rules cannot be presently enforced.

    I recently started a Discord server (an odd term for a set of chat rooms and and not an actual physical or virtual piece of hardware) for the ioquake3 and iodoom3 communities, to see if that would help those communities stay current with gaming culture. Those communities have been fortunate enough to not be harassed via Discord, yet, but they have been targeted in the past by people from Reddit and 4Chan.

    Reddit and 4Chan have been responsible for allowing hate groups to form for years, and only removing hate groups when it becomes fiscally irresponsible to continue hosting them. It sounds like Discord has the same problem. The leaders of these businesses don’t value responsible community management, and aren’t punished for it unless users and communities leave.

  • Under attack pleas stand by by heder

    Just a brief note to say that TimeDoctor.org is now NuclearMonster.com. You might see some stuff broken as the site moves over, if you have any questions please feel free to send me a message on twitter or via email. There are new Twitter, Twitch, and Facebook pages for following the site if you’re interested in those. They’re plural (nuclearmonsters) instead of singular because the /nuclearmonster URLs were taken on all of those sites.

    If you’re using the site via an RSS feed reader (or another app that isn’t going to timedoctor.org directly), you may need to manually update the URL in your feed reader to https://nuclearmonster.com/feed/

    My feed reader did not change the URL automatically, and will only work as long as the redirect works.

    I’ve been writing TimeDoctor.org for over 15 years, my hope is that moving to Nuclear Monster will provide a freshness that couldn’t be found on the old site.

    Who knows, maybe if you search the web for Nuclear Monster you’ll actually get this site.