Nuclear Monster

  • The developer behind The Stanley Parable has released a new game for Mac, Linux, and Windows. It’s called The Beginner’s Guide. It wouldn’t be right to do a video of this, at about an hour and a half long the video could spoil the whole thing. Wreden describes it like this:

    It lasts about an hour and a half and has no traditional mechanics, no goals or objectives. Instead, it tells the story of a person struggling to deal with something they do not understand.

    Paste Games’ Cameron Kunzelman has a positive review:

    In his 1960 New York Times review of Psycho, Bosley Crowther leans into talking about Alfred Hitchcock rather than the film. He writes in the comparative, calling Hitchcock an “old hand” who has made an “obviously low-budget job,” but it’s crucial for me to point out that those things aren’t necessarily negative for Crowther (although the review isn’t a positive one). Instead, his entire review is about attempting to navigate the relationship between Psycho the film with Hitchcock the man. Ultimately, Crowther finds the film lacking in something and suggests that the problem might be that Hitchcock’s “explanations are a bit of leg-pulling by a man who has been known to resort to such tactics in his former films.” Time has been kind to Psycho, but for Crowther, it couldn’t escape the known-quantity orbit of its creator.

    When Davey Wreden opens The Beginner’s Guide with his voice, name and email address, you get the feeling that there’s something Hitchcockian going on here. Hitchcock made himself a part of his cinematic worlds both as a framer and as a cameo actor, and through that he was able to infuse those films with a weird energy.

  • This is a strange one. MirrorMoon EP feels like a first-person puzzle and exploration game with barely any instructions and no mouselook.

  • There’s this kind of weird genre of games being called Suchandsuch Simulator. A category immortalized into flesh and code by Surgeon Simulator, the game that asked you, person that doesn’t know how to surgeon, to simulate being one with intentionally poor controls. Or there’s Goat Simulator which asked you, person that doesn’t know how to goat, to goat. They’re comedy games. You get the idea.

    Owlchemy Labs, ye of Jack Lumber and Smuggle/Snuggle Truck fame,  appears to be playing on this naming scheme and the gameplay style of Surgeon Simulator with Job Simulator, here’s their description:

    The year is 2050.

    Robots cook, clean, service, and rule organize the world with precision and speed. Human occupations are now memories of the past; long gone are the blue collar jobs that ran the old world. Humans raised in our perfect automated society must not forget their useless ancient ancestors and history.

    This is why JobBot was born. JobBot created Job Simulator to teach humans what it is ‘to job’. All praise to JobBot, for he is the keeper of human history.

    Yes, perfect. Yes, I would like to job. Unfortunately I don’t have a VR headset yet, and it also requires motion control on either the Oculus Touch (Oculus’ motion controller dinguses) or  the HTC Vive (Valve’s first Steam VR dingus) in order to achieve the unprecedented level of realism depicted in the trailers. Of which there are two more:

  • For most people reading this, I would suppose that you are already kind of familiar with the de-centralized bullshit currency, Bitcoin. Either you’ve tried it out and made a little bit of money mining it and then were quickly outpaced by minining farms, or you at least know a little bit about it. That is my guess, anyway. My first real introduction to it was when somebody gave me a few tiny pieces of Bitcoin that I promptly spent on a Humble Bundle once they started taking it in exchange for game bundles. If I had held onto that, it would have been worth significantly more virtual space bucks.

    For most people, that is not their introduction to Bitcoin. It’s irrelevant to every day life, I haven’t really touched it since that one trial run buying some games and people just don’t need to know about it. But, for some folks, their first introduction was the day their computer files were locked off from them by the ransomware known as CryptoLocker. Radiolab’s latest episode (Overcast link) has an interview with someone who had no idea what Bitcoin or CryptoLocker was, and how she had to deal with this ransomware. Surprisingly, the people holding the ransom even have customer service.

  • The Call of Duty blog has details on the Black Ops 3 letdown, but it amounts to Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 players getting a download code for Black Ops 1 and a price drop to $50 as a pittance for the deficit as the game is now multiplayer and zombies-only on those platforms. The multiplayer will also be lacking various features like the weapon paintshop and others compared to the Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Windows versions. The Linux version will continue to lack all features and not exist.