Nuclear Monster

  • Brianna Wu & Zoe Quinn were interviewed by MTV’s Shaunna Murphy recently, a year after the GamerGate bullshit kicked off:

    Wu: When I got dragged into Gamergate it felt like there were people that actually believed, “It’s about ethics in game journalism.” What I [later] saw was people stopped believing that. They understood it was about harassment of women. When you go over to Gamergate headquarters, you can look at what they’re saying, and now I think they’re a lot more honest that this is about harassing feminists. I think they know the jig is up. And I certainly think the press knows the jig is up.

    The bullshit cover story about ethics is, thankfully, gone, now we’re just left with the shamelessly hateful who still think that women shouldn’t be treated equally and have equal representation in games and games press. No critique of the status-quo will ever be acceptable. 

    The most personally disappointing part of GamerGate for me has been the people I used to respect who bought into GG or have even just been emboldened by the backwards thinking that it represents. Over the past year die-hard racists, misogynists, and homophobes who were once only privately terrible have been publicly hateful and will do whatever they can to defend their attitudes because there is no question in their mind about the inferiority of anyone who commits the crime of being different from birth or by choice. To the hateful, compassion is censorship, feelings are lies, opinions have no place in journalism, and any hint that they should stop being terrible is cause to throw a tantrum or leave when it doesn’t work and they don’t get their way.

  • I got a chance to play the Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 multiplayer beta on Windows today. Here’s the footage from the live stream of my first hour or so with the game. It looks like Treyarch has done a great job with the Windows version. The FOV and FPS police should be happy with the options in-game, but I’m sure they’ll find something else to complain about.

    Here’s my suggestion: Linux/SteamOS support.

  • There’s this action-puzzler on sale for just 19 cents right now on Steam called Waveform, at that price who could pass it up. Linux, Mac, Windows. I like it and put together that quick gameplay video.

  • Dan Whitehead reviewing the Sinclair ZX Spectrum-in-a-controller:

    I’m holding a Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega, the crowdfunded plug-and-play gaming device produced with the involvement of Sir Clive Sinclair himself. Even the box, with its black cardboard sleeve and rainbow corner flash, has been designed to mimic that of the original 48k home computer. I can feel the nostalgia juices rising, but also a wave of scepticism. Is this a genuine new Sinclair product, or a cleverly packaged emulator, ruthlessly designed to tweak my middle-aged yearning?

    […]

    As an actual piece of hardware, the Vega does not impress. It’s light and feels cheap. The input buttons are stiff, and the odd button placement does it no favours in games that require more than just moving, jumping and shooting. More troubling is how many corners have clearly been cut. Two long and rather ugly wires trail from the Vega. One is a standard AV input which plugs directly into the basic Video In and left/right audio sockets on your TV. There’s no HDMI, and if you even want to run it through SCART, you’ll need to supply your own connector.
    This is also true of the power, since your only option out of the box is a USB cable. The idea is that this plugs into the USB socket on your TV – assuming your TV has one – or else you’ll need to borrow a phone charger or find some other USB port to draw power from. The absence of even a simple plug really makes this feel like a bargain basement offering. This wouldn’t be too much of a problem if the Vega retailed for around thirty quid, like other plug-and-play TV game devices, but when the asking price is £100 requiring the customer to dig around for spare parts is very cheeky.

    Who would have thought that a Sinclair-approved product would feel like cheap junk? Still, I’d like to play Elite on an original ZX Spectrum at some point and I suspect that it’ll cost much less than the £100 (157.68 USD) asking price for the Vega to acquire one.

  • Luke O’Neil:

    On Saturday, cops arrested two men who may have intended to carry out a shooting spree at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, where thousands gathered over the weekend for the Pokémon World Championship.

    James Austin Stumbo, 27, and Kevin Norton, 18, high-level competitors in the internationally popular card game, had traveled from Iowa to take part in the event, and were listed in the “Masters Level,” according to the Pokémon website. (Their names have apparently since been removed.) Boston police say the duo was turned away on Thursday by private security after they had been alerted to a threatening message posted by Stumbo on a Facebook group called Mayhem Pokémon Crew. The post, a picture of firearms arranged on the back of his vehicle, read, “Kevin Norton and I are ready for worlds Boston here we come!!!”