Nuclear Monster

  • 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.

  • If you were thinking about finding out if Linux had any games, where might you go? Well, if you type “Linux Games” into Google today or if you were to look up a website on the Yahoo! directory in the 90s, you would have ended up on LinuxGames.com.

    During the early 2000s I was hanging out in the #loki IRC channel and had been writing for my own sites, a few weeks of pestering later and Dustin “Crusader” Reyes was good enough to give me a chance to write for LinuxGames.com.

    There were always other sites like Happy Penguin, Holarse, and today the major place I would look to is Gaming on Linux, but we kept LinuxGames going through technology migrations and I was there to help move the site to a modern WordPress core.

    For over a decade, LinuxGames was where I went when I wanted to write seriously about games on Linux, and that was where the readers were.

    Yesterday I found out just like everybody else that the site’s host plans on shutting down or archiving LinuxGames.com and I could not have been more shocked:

    After 17 years on the Internet, AtomicGamer, the site who has been hosting LinuxGames is shutting down at the end of the month. I think it is time also that we put LinuxGames to bed as well. It has been a wild and fascinating ride all these years watching the Linux community mature and come to age. The passion that created this site has left me years ago and I know it is time to put the site to rest.

    I would like to personally thanks Dustin and Al for all their support thru the many years and well as the countless people who have contributed to this site over the years.

    This is at a time when Valve is shipping their version of Linux called SteamOS with the help of third party computer builders and folks like the Humble Bundle and Ryan ‘icculus’ Gordon continue to bring many games to Linux. With no advertising the Facebook page I set up for LinuxGames has over 1300 Likes and the twitter account I set up has 650 followers.

    It could not be a more interesting time to write about these developments.

    There are so many other solutions than shutting down what has been a mainstay for the community of Linux gamers.

    I have offered to host the site for free in the comments on the article, and hosting WordPress sites is something I’ve been doing for years.

    Ryan ‘icculus’ Gordon has offered to buy the domain name.

    If you have a minute, please politely tweet @mmalkowskijr or comment on the news post, and encourage him to not let LinuxGames.com fade into oblivion.