Nuclear Monster

  • Tom Jubert spoiled us with his writing in The Talos Principle, FTL, and The Swapper. Everything he works on is 100% pure gold pressed latinum that might be consumed in a manner not unlike that of a starving teenger wolfing down hot pockets without regard for the ensuing restroom debacle. Each time Jubert’s blog (Plot is Gameplay’s Bitch) updates it’s a new world of excitement at what incredible game could pop out that he’s touched next. This time he’s about to talos about the upcoming expansion pack for The Talos Principle called Road to Gehenna:

    Without spoiling anything, the pitch we went with provides us huge flexibility in terms of the sort and tone of material we deliver. It gives us a world that fits within the original game’s religious and science fiction mythology, but which resolutely has its own identity. Most importantly for me, it lets us explore completely new ideas about how to interact with the game.

    There’s plenty of more Talos in the post, most exciting is that the story is just as large for the expansion as it was for the original, however he also mentions a new game coming out that he had a hand in, The Masterplan. It’s a top-down heistery already in Early Access on Steam but I will probably wait for the game to be finished on June 4th to enjoy it.

  • Bruce Horovitz:

    Domino’s regulars will be able to order by tweeting only the pizza emoji to @Dominos.

    In 2016, Domino’s regulars will be able to order lap-band surgery just by tweeting a lap-band emoji to the hospital of their choice.

  • Fascinating article from Jon Peterson goes over the history of government intervention in gaming, and how it relates to the internet we have today. Includes this on the Dungeons & Dragons scare of the 80s:

    This misunderstanding arose only five months after TSR obtained widespread notoriety in a similar confusion surrounding the disappearance of college student James Dallas Egbert III in East Lansing, Michigan. A private detective hired to find Egbert had learned that the young man played TSR’s role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons–at the time virtually unknown to mainstream America–and hypothesized that Egbert had come to believe the game was real. Famously, this led to calls for a search of the college steam tunnels, where presumably Egbert would be found wandering in a deluded stupor, questing for monsters and treasure.

    Actually, Egbert had run away to Louisiana for unrelated reasons, but a seed was then planted in the American popular imagination. Role-playing games were dangerous: they warped fragile young minds, breaking down the barriers between the real and the imaginary. The irony is that it was the authorities, not the players, who couldn’t tell a game from reality.

  • There aren’t a lot of 2D side-scrolling RPGs, I can’t think of any that aren’t from consoles like Odin Sphere on the Playstation 2 and Valkyrie Profile on the Playstation and Playstation Portable. Certainly none were cyberpunk. We’ve had a resurgence of cyberpunk gaming with the isometric Shadowrun Returns, the third-person Republique, and the first-person Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Those tough-times for cyberpunks looking for their side-scrolling fix are at an end. 

    Originally crowd-funded way back in December 2013, the side-scrolling cyberpunk RPG Dex has been released for Windows, Mac and Linux on Steam.

    Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go scroll through the listing of cyberpunk games and dreaming of a sky tuned to a dead channel.

  • Oh no.

    Newt:

    The implications for education and entertainment will be enormous. Imagine crossing the Delaware with George Washington on Christmas night of 1776. Imagine watching the debates of the Constitutional Convention as no one but the Founding Fathers did. Imagine being a member of the audience at Ford’s theater the night Abraham Lincoln was shot. Or imagine watching the State of the Union in real time from a seat in the center aisle of the House chamber—with your best friend from the other side of the country sitting beside you.

    First we put the reptloids into immersion vats where they might become sedate. Then we turn on the virtual world where everything they want has come to pass and they can no-longer harm the real world.