Nuclear Monster

  • In addition to refunds, we have pre-orders available for the first three pieces of Valve’s Steam-appointed hardware.

    Steam Machines. They’re from third parties like Alienware, they run Valve’s SteamOS variant of Linux and play games on Linux via Steam or can stream games from a Windows desktop in another part of your home. If you pre-order you can get one a month early on October 16th The machines available for pre-order today a range of prices from $450 to $1,419. Everyone else can get them when they’re released November 10th.

    It’s still ridiculously awesome to see hardware manufacturers shipping a Linux-based gaming computer. After buying boxed games over a decade ago for Linux, watching it all burn down only to be resurrected through downloadable ports via Valve and the Humble Bundle. Not since the days of Civilization: Call to Power have Linux gamers had this much reason to be hopeful for the future. The Linux-based computers are almost as strange as the fact that some of the pre-orders are being handled through GameStop.

    The second item in the pre-order lineup isn’t as hopeful. For those that want to spend far less and just want to stream from another gaming computer in their home to their TV there is the Steam Link. At the moment though, people who order the Link won’t be running any version of SteamOS’ Linux and won’t be downloading Linux games. Maybe in the future it’ll seem like a better option to get a Steam Link and stream games from a more powerful Linux machine. The Link is $50. Just like with the Steam Machine, the Steam Link can be pre-ordered for arrival on the 16th of October. Everyone else has to wait for the tenth of November.

    Finally we have the controller. I’ve had the prototype model along with the Gigabyte Brix Steam Machine for over a year. This controller design looks incredibly different from the prototype and I don’t know what to expect at all in terms of usefulness. The prototype ended up being fun to try for a while but was only a stepping stone to this final design. The Steam Controller is $50 and has the same mid-October availability for pre-orders and November for not-pre-orders.

    Sensing the potential for maximum confusion at the Steam Controller’s presence in a world dominated by 360, Xbox One and Playstation 4 controllers, Valve has created a trailer for potential controller purchasers to make up their minds. I don’t recall ever watching a trailer with this much production expense having gone into it just for a controller. Unless they were up for crowd funding. Almost more ridiculous than Valve’s foray into the living room involving Linux is that these cross-platform supporters still require Adobe Flash plugin in Apple’s Safari web browser to watch videos or you get this unplayable mess:

    Steam controller flash failure

  • Valve just added refunds to Steam. CD Projekt’s Gog and Electronic Arts’ Origin already had similar policies.

    If you’ve played a game for two or fewer hours, and want your money back within the first two weeks of your purchase? You can get your money back. It’s great.

    Got an incomplete game in Steam’s Early Access program that isn’t what you expected or maybe just a game that is completely broken? Get your money back.

    Where it falls apart is for developers who must have questions that mostly have bad answers.

    What if a game takes less than two hours to complete and players ask for refunds?

    What if a player buys the game, plays it offline and completes it in less than two weeks and asks for a refund?

    Right now, it seems like developers are screwed in those situation. The game is done. The player gets their money back.

    Valve has said the rules are flexible for users who have played more than two hours or who have had the game in their Steam library for more than two weeks. They’ll still be able to get refunds.

    What if that flexibility extended to developers who could specify a length of time their game takes to complete, and then the refund system could factor in a percentage of that time to allow for refunds? A two hour game could give you 25 minutes to decide if it’s good or not.

    Having a standard policy for customer service agents to apply to every piece of software and refund situation on the service makes it easier for players as well as Valve’s customer service agents to apply that policy but Valve should be flexible enough in their technology as well as their application of this policy to not ruin the experience for developers who want to take risks by making shorter games that don’t require you to be online in Steam to play them.

    It’s always better for a policy and system to focus on benefits for the people that use them, even over the needs of the people who feed these systems with software. Doing the right thing for their customers is why companies like Valve and Apple succeed where so many others fail. Overall, this policy is great. I’m just not sure about the two-hours.

  • Mike Beasley on the beautiful new version of Tweetbot for Mac:

    Tweetbot 2 fully embraces the Yosemite aesthetic that was introduced in OS X last year while still maintaining much of the same functionality and layout with which users are already familiar. Everything has been flattened, and timelines that previously sported a light gray tone are now pure white.

    The dark gray color on the sidebar has been swapped out in favor a dark translucent look, while the sidebar buttons for each section have been replaced with simpler glyphs. A circular blue indicator on the right side of the icon now indicates new activity in place of the vertical bar that previously appeared on the left side (a change which, if you can believe it, actually hampered my workflow for a while). The iconography throughout the app is now more in-line with its iOS counterpart.

    It’s the best Twitter client on any computer.

  • Patrick Klepek has this fascinating article covering two developers who come to find they’re working on almost the same premise for a game:

    Perception, where you play a blind person who taps a cane to see around them, was revealed last week. Soon, an email went around indie studio Tiny Bull. “Panic started to spread among the team,” said CEO Matteo Lana. Why? Tiny Bull had been making Blind, a game with the same premise, for more than a year.

    It all started when a Tiny Bull programmer was surfing new Kickstarter projects and came across the one for Perception.

    “He sent me a message saying ‘Hey, this game looks a bit like our game.’” said Lana. “And I went ‘No, that is our game.’ It was a bit hard. It was quite a blow at the time.”

    This kind of thing happens all the time, a few years ago it was the “year of the bow” when every game coming out seemed to feature bows and arrows regardless of the setting. Even Battlefield 3 added a crossbow. Is this the year of indie games with a visual aesthetic that can’t be played by people who are actually blind? Fortunately there are other developers who make games where all the gameplay is aural. 

  • SourceForge has taken it upon themselves to resurrect “abandoned” projects. Of course, the projects aren’t actually abandoned and have just moved elsewhere so what SourceForge is actually doing is taking free software installers, loading them up with ads, and then shitting them out on SourceForge download servers.

    You can see the full list of projects that SourceForge has gracefully swooped in to destroy here.

    Previously.