Nuclear Monster

  • The Talos Principle is a puzzle game from Croteam that I found to be top fun in my review. They’ve just released the first expansion to the game, Road to Gehenna. You should get it, I’ll have a video for it later today.

  • Speaking of unknowingly acquiring games, PICO-8 showed up in my Lexaloffe account recently. Lexaloffe are a small game developer who also produce what they call Fantasy Consoles, like PICO-8. Fantasy Consoles are game consoles that only exist in software but have similar limitations for developers to a real console.

    For example, PICO-8 limits developrs to 128×128 pixels with 16 colors and like older 8-bit computers that had their own versions of BASIC and a minimal operating system you can launch games and switch to the editor in order to immediately start developing your own in Lua.

    Or you could just play a ton of games that others have developed using PICO-8 right in your browser. There are scrolling shooters, train (riding) simulators, drawing programs intended for Japanese calligraphy that are abusable into creating artful sketches of Splatoon characters, hardcore platformers, and many others posted to the Lexaloffe BBS.

    If you had Voxatron before from a Humble Bundle or directly from Lexaloffe, then you already have PICO-8 available to you via your Lexaloffe account.

    Unfortunately sound for the browser-based PICO-8 games doesn’t work in Safari, they’re fine in Firefox and Chrome. The downloadable PICO-8 Fantasy Computer is available for $20 in a bundle with Voxtraon on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.

  • Alex Nichiporchik has a fascinating story about how the first No Time To Explain got made, and almost didn’t.:

    We’re about to release No Time To Explain on Xbox One, and a “Remastered” version on Steam. The game’s finally been rebuilt in a proper engine (Unity), with developers who actually know how to code games. Neither Tom Brien or I – the pair who started tinyBuild four years ago – know how to code properly. We can do rapid prototyping, but we’re in no way professional programmers. This is one of the main reasons why the original release of No Time to Explain sucked.

    I’ve had this weight on my shoulders for four years, and it seems the right time to finally tell the story of how tinyBuild was nearly killed off before it had even begun. This is also an explanation of why the original release of No Time To Explain had so many issues.

    The new remake is quite good and it was a nice surprise to get it for free as an owner of the original.

  • Don’t buy Temper Tantrum unless you want to gift it to a friend and pass the curse of how awful it is on to them. This game is terrible. After recording the video I consulted the wisdom of the Temper Tantrum Steam forum and found out that the assets in the game are all from the Unity asset store. Not that you couldn’t make a good game with Unity assets, but in this case there seemed to be minimal effort into what could have been a Rampage or King of the Monsters style game.

  • Balloon Fight was a game I had missed out on when I was younger and wish I had gotten to sooner. The sad news this week was all the encouragement needed to go back and try out the 20-balloon-in-a-row challenge from Game Center CX. Always collect the bubble.