Nuclear Monster

  • The Verge’s Chris Plante has an article about an online magazine (The Tablet) that has decided to charge their own community money for the ability to comment. The rates seem kind of outrageous at $2 (a day), $18 (for a month) or $180 (for a year,) but that will work itself out.

    If it isn’t a price that people will pay, and readership goes down I am sure the price will change. Some fantastically popular and successful communities have done this. The two that come to mind are, of course, SomethingAwful and MetaFilter. Both serve their readers well. They’ve both been operating for decades now, and both charge a one-time-only fee which as far as the business model goes is the only major difference between them and The Tablet. There is plenty of room for people to try new ideas around commenting. If The Tablet wants to charge money on a recurring basis instead of one time, go for it.

    Maybe they’ll be able to hire community managers to moderate the comments and build relationships with their commenters with this money, and not face the crisis faced by the one-time fee sites like the one Metafilter had last year.

    There is only one good argument against paying for the right to comment that I’m aware of, it keeps out people who can’t afford to comment. It’s a great way to systematically suppress the voices of the poor.  The Tablet does still have a few other ways to get in touch with them on social media as listed in their announcement.

    What’s kind of hilarious is that The Verge’s article is complaining about this practice. No, not by mentioning the classism of the fee. Instead, they end with their article and ending it with a pithy…

    The Verge’s comments remain free. Feel free to use them below.

    The Verge is yet another large media blog that can’t bother to link to their source, or any link at all to The Tablet until a tiny source link at the bottom of the post, which nobody is going to click on. I have a great deal of respect for their writers, but the business practice of not linking to your source and/or only populating your article with links to your own website is despicable. If your readers want to go check out who is doing the thing your article is about, you have to trust them and the quality of your work that they will come back and finish your article instead of putting a tiny source link in where you know they won’t click it. The web is made to be linked.

    TimeDoctor dot org continues to link to its sources. Even when they’re dirtbags like The Verge.

  • I cannot believe how talented some of the people making short animated films with Valve’s Source Film Maker are. The tools are great but they still have to make these films and tell a story without having access to the original voice actors behind these characters, which is why most are “silent.” Hats off to James McVinnie and team for the End of the Line:

    They’ve got a bunch more shorts on their channel and if you search for “SFM” on YouTube you’ll find other great teams doing great work.

    Thanks to the esteemed Andrew Henderson, most recently of BeagleSNES fame, for the heads-up.

  • John Walker, writing about the lack of progress on the kickstarter-funded Peter Molyneux god-game, Godus:

    As for those Kickstarter promises, it’s not looking good. The silliest claim made was that it would be finished in “seven to nine months”. That wasn’t even true of the money-raking mobile versions, and with the PC game in Early Access since September 2013, it’s been missed by a further 17 months on top. The Linux version, added as an achieved stretch goal, has shown no signs of appearing (and the game is built in an engine that doesn’t support Linux).

    As unsurprising as this failure is from Molyneux, people wouldn’t be writing about it if they didn’t want his god-game to succeed. I played a ton of the free-to-play version of Godus on the iPad last year until the buggy network synchronization code eating hours of progress finally got to be too frustrating to deal with.   Even though the developers are still posting updates, the adversarial nature of their forums (Steam, Boards) and the quotes in the rest of Walker’s article don’t lend any hope to a finished PC Godus coming out of Steam’s Early Access program. Awful.

  • Join NuclearMonster as he gets in his airship to reign fire and smite his foes.

    2014-09-19_00006

    Do you like strategically shooting cannons, flying airships, and earning experience points as you crush your enemies? Maybe you’d like to take the ground right out from underneath them and send their castle falling into oblivion while you laugh.

    Cannon Brawl from Turtle Sandbox is little bit of real-time-strategy mixed with tower defense and Worms/Scorched Earth/Gorillas.bas and was originally prototyped for, and won, a game jam put on by Activision. Like so many other games anymore, it’s been developed over months in Steam’s Early Access program.

    The single player story in Cannon Brawl is about a princess whose uncle has formed a coup against the rightful king. You, as the princess, navigate an over world map to pick levels and then use your airship as your cursor and select sites to build offensive and defensive towers in order to free the king and defeat the evil Uncle. The writing isn’t particularly hilarious or interesting but still provides a structure for gradually unlocking unlockables.

    Through your airship/cursor you get to pick a tower, aim it with the handy targeting reticule and attack pattern display, and fire it. Most likely slamming some rockets or cannons into the enemies shields and then waiting for a cool down on your towers to expire before you do it again.

    At first I thought it was odd that the offensive towers didn’t fire automatically. Maybe I’ve been corrupted by too many tower defense games, but it wasn’t long before I was used to it.

    There are shield towers and repair towers. Laser towers and ice towers. There are plenty more, too. You pick out a selection of five before each match based on what you think the enemy will have and the layout of the map’s terrain.

    As you progress through the single player campaign you’ll unlock new towers and unique pilots with skills that buff your towers or do damage. They’ll make you a nightmare for your foes in multiplayer if you take the time to learn them.

    That strategy and balance of the towers and pilots unlocked in both single player, and multiplayer through XP are what will keep you coming back. Without any skill balancing in multiplayer you’ll be fighting people who have had plenty of time with the game already and although that might seem like an insurmountable challenge on the order of a 40 year old playing Call of Duty online, it isn’t. With a good set of towers and strategic ideas earned in the single player game you can be a fierce fighter in online multiplayer.

    Now even if you aren’t a tactician you can play skirmish versus A.I. and couch co-operative mode versus your pals. This will require a few gamepads and hooking your computer up to your TV, but it is totally worth it. Cannon Brawl is at its best in multiplayer and even better when played with drunk pals.

    Get in your damned air ship on Steam for Linux, Mac, or Windows right this second and join me in dropping castles out of the sky.

    cannon brawlin

    4/5 Scottish Independences

  • Join TimeDoctor as he swaps some clones and engages in a complete disregard for humanity.