Nuclear Monster

  • SimCopter was an incredible game idea, implemented about as well as 1996 allowed. It felt like the ambulance missions in GTA, plus a little bit of firefighting in the form of buckets full of water, but in a helicopter, and every mission was in the cities you made in SimCity 2000.

    Unfortunately, at the time of release the game had been reduced to a joke due to a bizarre easter-egg, and no sequels were ever made. A few recent games have similar goals, but none are in the style of SimCopter.

    The good news is that a mod for the recently-released Cities: Skylines is in development that brings back SimCopter’s helicopter and will have more from SimCopter in the future. The developer calls it CityCopter, and is organizing the mod’s development on this subreddit, and there is a preview video up here.

  • Crowdfunded space trucking simulator and long-time hold-out, Elite: Dangerous, is now available on Steam. 

    Cashed in the remaining money I’d made from selling trading-cards to get it.

    At this time Frontier’s (Elite’s developer) Elite: Dangerous doesn’t have any Steam-specific features, and like some games you’re only downloading the initial launcher through Steam. All updates appear to be through the game-specific launcher.

    Because it was previously available only direct from the developer, the Elite: Dangerous players (a comedy troupe touring in your locality!) are rightfully upset that they haven’t received Steam keys for the game. People always want to consolidate their gaming libraries into one place, and a decade in it’s still surprising that some game developers don’t get it.

    On the second page of the relevant forum thread, a Frontier community manager had this to say in response to a player’s request:

    Hi Macro, thanks for the question. We don’t have any plans to do this at the moment, but we’ll be listening to player feedback and looking to see how much demand there is.

    Just an FYI – there’s no functional difference between the Steam and our website version of the game. You can add the game to your existing Steam library. See the instructions below:

    We have no plans to do so but we will of course listen to player feedback and assess demand.

    Click Games > Add a non-Steam game to my library and add EDLaunch.exe, ordinarily located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Frontier\EDLaunch\ on a PC.

    Cue 25 more pages of players demanding their Steam keys.

    Valve provides developers as many keys as they would like for their games to be sold on the developers’ own store, so the only cost to Frontier would be in developing the infrastructure to hand out the Steam keys.

  • Gates

    What if people were robots who were created from, and routinely yelled at by, an angry god that just wants to be respected and obeyed when he asks you to maybe solve some puzzles without questioning him so much?

    He just wants you to go along with what he says to do no matter how ridiculous his request. Especially that time when he repeatedly asked you to ignore the spiraling tower in the middle of the overworld hub area that he created and you could very well climb it if only he hadn’t forbidden it.

    Well if this were the case you and I would be the robotic children of Elohim in The Talos Principle: Solving puzzles by arranging surprising combinations of boxes, lasers, gun turrets, semi-autonomous mines, laser connectors, fans, and jammers in the first-person (or third-person if you’re into viewing robo-booty) world that Elohim created.

    If The Talos Principle were from anyone else I might have thought it was going to be a bible game and would have thrown my still-running computer through the nearest window. Instead, it’s from the developers of Serious Sam. A fast-like-Doom first-person shooter series that is anything but serious. You could say that Cro-team aren’t known for making contemplative puzzle games when they’ve been making first-person shooters for over a decade. You would be right.

    These puzzles with the boxes, lasers, gun turrets, semi-autonomous mines, laser connectors, fans, and jammers? They’re great. They have that perfect difficulty curve so rarely achieved in puzzle games. There is a gentle progression with the challenges getting slightly more difficult and sometimes (rarely) maddeningly so. Up until you walk away and come back and go “why didn’t I think of putting that over there earlier? Duh.” After you figure out the solution you always feel like a smarty-pants puzzle-solving person because the designers have excelled at making you feel brilliant instead of feeling like the solution isn’t achievable without a hint-guide.

    Those few times that you do get frustrated with a puzzle you can just walk your robot avatar to another because the game is designed to let you walk away and pick an easier trial without walking away from the game. Talos‘ arrangement of puzzles into three level hubs, each with a bunch of puzzles that you can go away from and come back to at any time is brilliant and refreshing. Forgivingly, Elohim encourages you to walk away if you’ve spent a lot of time in a puzzle and there’s an achievement for doing so. There’s also an achievement for sticking it out and solving a tough puzzle. In the 30 hours or so I spent in Elohim’s world I experienced each of those scenarios: often breezing through a puzzle in a few minutes, as the difficultly increased there were a few more occasions of frustration and sticking with it, and a few times I just had to walk away to find some peace in an easier puzzle

    If the game were just this surprise first-person puzzler from a shooter developer I’d still rate it highly. Talos is so much more than just puzzles.

    If it were just those characters of Elohim and protagonist-bot the one-sided dialog from the big E (your protagonist-bot isn’t much of a talker) might have gotten boring and I still would have skipped merrily along through many lands to solve the shit out of placing boxes on fans and then placing jammers on top of them. Fortunately, there are more questions in the The Talos Principle that graduate the story from both the shackles of Elohim’s reverberating narration and the perfectly robust puzzling.

    Why is the protagonist a robot?

    Who is Elohim really, why does he call you his child, and why does he want you to solve these puzzles?

    Why is there a giant multi-tiered tower, what is on those tiers that Elohim insists you not see?

    It is so difficult to talk about this game and what it offers without spoiling more . I will say that the …other main characters… are generous with revelations and sometimes more questions. Extremely deep, philosphical questions. I’m not sure if they would challenge any philosophers, but the game’s story is ultimately going to require your interest in them. Which is fine, because the way it asks them is charming.

    Puzzles, god, philosophy. I hope you’re convinced to try it and that you won’t read any more. The Talos Principle is something special.

    5/5 Robo-butts

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  • Dave James reviewing the new $999 graphics card from Nvidia:

    Inside that chunky chip are 24 streaming microprocessors (SMM) in six graphics processing clusters (GPC). With the Maxwell design running to 128 CUDA cores in each SMM that makes for a grand total of 3,072 cores in the GTX Titan X. Completing the core configuration are 192 texture units and 96 ROPS.

    That’s a whole heap of graphics processing power right there.

    Nvidia have also doubled the size of the frame buffer compared to the previous Titan cards, maxing out at 12GB GDDR5 memory, running across six 64-bit memory buses to deliver an aggregated 384-bit total memory bus.

    That memory capacity might well look a little bit like big numbers for the sake of it, but we thought it would be a long time before the original Titan’s 6GB frame buffer was anywhere near fully utilised. Yet right now Shadow of Mordor is filling up around 5.7GB with the HD texture pack at Ultra 4K settings; we may only be a couple of years away from 12GB actually getting used. Right now, 12GB is more future-proofing than anything else.

    I’ll take ten.

  • Mike Fahey:

    This morning Nintendo announced a partnership with Japanese company DeNA to produce games using Nintendo properties on mobile platforms. As the owner of mobile platform Mobage, DeNA is one of the most powerful names in mobile gaming, but the sort of games it’s known for won’t make traditional console gamers happy.