Nuclear Monster

  • I need to get better at Rocksmith.

  • There are two new interviews this morning with Peter Molyneux about the failure of Godus to ship a finished PC version two years and change after the game’s kickstarter crowdfunding completed with over half a million pounds which had an expected delivery date of September 2013.

    First up is Laura Kate Dale’s interview with Molyneux titled It’s over, I will not speak to the press again via Gameranx where we find out that he’s both quitting giving out interviews anymore and that his family is being harassed:

    “People get so frustrated with me, so much so that they’ve threatened me, they’ve threatened my family and it just cannot go on, it really can’t,” he says. 

    Awful. Failing to ship a game successfully isn’t worthy of harassment.

    The second interview is from John Walker, which is just an incredible read. Super long, but well worth going through.

    It makes particular mention of the Linux version, a financial stretch goal on the original Godus kickstarter that was reached, but will probably never ship due to an issue with the engine:

    Peter Molyneux: No, it wasn’t shitty of us. If you look at Kickstarter campaigns a lot of people do this, and at that time, you know, Linux seemed more than possible, and we’re waiting for an update from Marmalade to do Linux and they just haven’t supplied it. At that time, it was on the cards for them to develop. They haven’t developed it. And us going back and re-writing the whole of the middleware is, would mean that the development of Godus would stop. We’ve considered it. But you know, it’s months of work.

    In both of these interviews Molyneux says it is the last he’ll ever do, which is what both journalists believed until reading the other interviews.

    I still hope that Godus eventually becomes a great game, but it does not seem likely based on the mobile version at least. The world-sculpting there was as much fun as it seemed like it would be from the kickstarter, but the game limited the sculpting and gated all progress through micro transactions or the standard free to play timers thave have been with us since the old facebook game Mafia Wars.

    If Godus hadn’t been free-to-play on mobile it would have been work that could have gone into the PC version and both versions could have been better and probably would have been completable. 

  • Raptor was the best shoot-em-up on computers for a long time, it’s exciting to get the chance to play it again thanks to DotEMU. This time it’s the “2015 Edition” which seems to only add Steam’s achievement system to the game. Gog previously had the most recent update with the “2010 Edition.” I’m still writing “Year of the Linux Desktop” on my checks. Both versions are, unfortunately, only for Windows computers.

  • Jason Schreier has this article with anecdotes from various layoffs in the game industry.

  • Jon Ronson’s How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life:

    In the early days of Twitter, I was a keen shamer. When newspaper columnists made racist or homophobic statements, I joined the pile-on. Sometimes I led it.

    The journalist A. A. Gill once wrote a column about shooting a baboon on safari in Tanzania: “I’m told they can be tricky to shoot. They run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out.” Gill did the deed because he “wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger.”

    I was among the first people to alert social media. (This was because Gill always gave my television documentaries bad reviews, so I tended to keep a vigilant eye on things he could be got for.) Within minutes, it was everywhere. Amid the hundreds of congratulatory messages I received, one stuck out: “Were you a bully at school?”

    Still, in those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized. As time passed, though, I watched these shame campaigns multiply, to the point that they targeted not just powerful institutions and public figures but really anyone perceived to have done something offensive. I also began to marvel at the disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment. It almost felt as if shamings were now happening for their own sake, as if they were following a script.

    Every mistake is a learning opportunity. When somebody doesn’t get the opportunity to recover because their career and life get destroyed by public shaming, they don’t get a chance to learn.

    Even Sam Biddle, the person who initially brought the public shaming to the subject of Ronson’s article realized his mistake and publicly apologized.