Nuclear Monster

  • Judy Newman in the Wisconsin State Journal:

    In a place like the Madison area, where people supported home-grown businesses way before the phrase “Buy local” became a battle cry, it’s not all that unusual to find companies that have been a mainstay for decades.

    But in the highly competitive and ever-evolving world of video games, it’s much more rare.

    Raven Software is one such survivor.

    Launched in 1990 by brothers Brian and Steve Raffel, Raven, 8496 Greenway Blvd., Middleton, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.

    […]

    Raven is one of several studios working on any particular game for Activision, its parent company.

    Daniel Suarez, vice president of production for Activision, called Raven “an impressive developer with a wide range of experience.”

    “As the primary studio on ‘Call of Duty Online,’ Activision’s free-to-play product for China, and as a supporting studio on the last several ‘Call of Duty’ games, the team is an incredible group of talented designers, engineers and artists whose contributions are invaluable to Activision,” Suarez said from company headquarters in Santa Monica, California.

    […]

    Raven is responsible for 10 to 25 percent of the “Call of Duty” games, he said, a series that has drawn more than $11 billion in worldwide revenue since it launched in 2003. “Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare” was the No. 1 console game, worldwide, in 2014, Activision said.

    “Yeah, we’re part of the success,” Raffel said.

    The company that made Jedi Knight, Jedi Academy, Elite Force, Soldier of Fortune, Heretic, Hexen and so many other great games has been reduced to a B-team working on a free-to-play Call of Duty redux, and 10-25 percent of assets and code for other Call of Duty developers at Activision.

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4r0mJtNENc

    Samantha Kalman’s music game Sentris was released this week out of Steam’s Early Access program, it looks very innovative:

    Sentris is a musical performance puzzle game. Make your own music as you Drop, Recycle, and Stack “Sound Blocks” into a spinning loop. Freestyle with a huge degree of musical control. Or focus on achieving the goal and let your song emerge organically.

    There’s also a great interview with Samantha on the latest episode of Giant Bomb’s Beastcast podcast where they discuss the game’s development and the challenges of crowdfunding and Ouya’s failed developer investments which partially funded Sentris.

  • On Don’t Die:

    I don’t know how you come to the point where you think the problem in your hobby is that more people want to be involved with it and they want to explore that medium in new and different ways.

    [Laughs.]
    Like, how is that a problem? When students make student films, when auteur film critics make their weird, post-modern stuff, when people have those plays where they just pour honey on themselves and roll around in newspaper for an hour and a half — like, “Oh, I get it. That’s not art to you.”

    Don’t buy a ticket. Who cares.

    Yeah.
    I don’t understand, again, the mentality where it’s like, “No. You’re not allowed to like my thing.” Like, the fact that Gone Home exists doesn’t mean that the next Call of Duty isn’t coming out. Right?

  • Grow Home is going to be put out on the Playstation 4 soon so I thought this would be as good an excuse as any to go back and play one of my favorite games from earlier this year. You can get it right now on Steam, and I would recommend that you do so. It’s an amazing game.

  • Daniel Jalkut:

    If you’re a Safari user and you’ve updated to the Safari 9 or OS X 10.11 beta, you may have noticed a minor change in the default keyboard shortcuts for the app.

    In Safari 8 and earlier, keyboard shortcuts combining the Command key and a number, e.g. Cmd-1, Cmd-2, Cmd-3, would open the corresponding bookmark bar item. So if you arranged your most-frequently-visited sites in the first few bookmark bar slots, you could easily jump to those pages by muscle memory thanks to these shortcuts.

    In Safari 9, these shortcuts now switch to any open tabs you have in a Safari window. This will come as a surprise to folks who have gotten used to e.g. using Cmd-1 to quickly jump to e.g. Google News, or Yahoo Stocks.

    I was happy to read that Safari is finally going to let you swap tabs with the same hotkey shorts as every other browser. It’s been a frustration for years to swap tabs in a different way from every other browser.

    Now Firefox just needs top to drop the cmd/control+shift+P shortcut for private browsing, because you might not want to accidentally print out whatever you’re attempting to privately browse.