Nuclear Monster

  • For the past few days I’ve been enjoying Puzzmo, a new daily words-and-more puzzle service from Zach Gage (Really Bad Chess, Sage Solitaire, Typeshift, and so on), Orta Therox, and their fellow puzzle makers and artists.

    It’s got just what freaks like me who are tired of just doing the daily Wordle crave.

    Puzzmo’s got your classics like challenging crosswords but with helpful twists like get out of jail cards in the form of different hints when you get stuck, but only if you want them.

    Then there’s the new stuff, like Flipart, a game where you just gotta spin a bunch of tiles to make em fit into a rectangle.

    There’s also a bunch of stuff that Gage worked on before, but stuffed into the daily puzzle genre, like Typeshift, Spelltower, and Really Bad Chess.

    Like almost everything these days there are some caveats to Puzzmo. The first is that it’s in a limited access beta. Trying the service out is hidden behind a puzzle and a daily limit unless you have a friend with a special link to get in. Once you go to get in, you get a fun postcard in the mail with a special puzzle to decode a key.

    In the future, it looks like Puzzmo will be ad-supported, which would be kinda bad but people who get in early have access to a one time purchase for a lifetime version (I forked over the $60 USD), or a slightly cheaper yearly fee ($40). It’s possible or even likely these options and plans will change as Puzzmo’s player base grows.

    Once you’re in, you get all kinds of online stuff if you want it, like friends lists, groups, leaderboards, and so on. The leaderboards and other stuff can be toned down and hidden if you’re not a fan of competition. Not everything has to be about stepping on someone else to get ahead, even puzzles.

    My biggest gripe with Puzzmo is that it seems super friendly and indie until you realize that Hearst, one of the richest newspaper nepo-conglomerates in the world, is the money behind it. Who else could be printing out hundreds of puzzle cards and mailing them?

    I really like Puzzmo. Hopefully Hearst doesn’t ruin it.

  • Valve just announced a Steam Deck OLED coming on November 16th at 10AM Pacific time for $550 with the 512GB model and 650 for a new 1TB model. The upgraded Linux or “SteamOS” handheld has a new 90hz OLED screen that gives you a better picture that supports HDR, a slightly larger 7.4 inch (versus 7.0 on the older LCD models) screen size with smaller bezels, 50 watt-hour battery (versus 40 on the LCD) which Valve claims nets you anywhere from 1 to 4 more hours of battery life, 45 watt power supply with a 2.5 meter cable (1 more meter than the LCD deck), WiFi 6E (WiFi 5 on the LCD), and the last key feature is a slightly shrunk down 6 nanometer APU (combination CPU and GPU) versus the 7 nanometer APU on the LCD decks. The 1TB OLED model also has a second limited edition version for $30 extra with a slightly different colorway.

    Reviewers have had it for a little while and report that newer APU nets slight performance boosts and keeps the deck cooler. They’ve also said the system’s fan is larger so the fan can turn slower to move the same amount of air. There’s also a small 5% weight decrease that I’m looking forward to.

    Here’s Digital Foundry’s Rich Leadbetter reviewing the OLED model:

    James Archer reviewed the whole OLED Steam Deck can of beans for RPS:

    Personally, if I were a prospective shopper of fine SteamOS handhelds, I’d go for the new one in a blink. The Steam Deck OLED not only directs its focus to the two biggest shortcomings of the original, but takes the time to polish up design details and build quality to the point where you can literally feel its superiority. If Valve are right in that a Steam Deck with truly next-gen performance is still several years away – and in hindsight, they’ve been very particular with mentioning the performance bit – then I’m more than happy to pass the time on this OLED version.

    The Steam Deck’s new store page has discounted LCD models, the 64GB model has been dropped to $350, the 512GB to $450. After those Steam Decks are sold out, they’ll be gone, leaving the last LCD model as the 256GB LCD for $400.

    Crucially, this isn’t a Steam Deck 2. It’s kind of wild that in the face of new challengers with faster APUs, Valve has released this new handheld without a huge APU upgrade, but the OLED upgrade still seems like a substantial improvement for new or heavily addicted Steam Deck users like me. The other handheld gaming computers from ASUS, Lenovo, and so on, are also stuck on Windows and reviewers and users have enormous software complaints because there’s only so much the hardware developers can do to customize the handheld Windows gaming experience. Similarly, getting a highly customized SteamOS version of Linux to run Windows games may produce a better experience where any individual game might not run well or lack needed features like anti-cheat software compatibility, but the OS isn’t as awful until you want to run a game from anywhere but Steam’s store and find the tools to run games from Epic, gog, or other stores are often frustrating to use.

    All of that makes me wonder if Valve’s lack of effort and their lip service to making a version of SteamOS widely available for users and device makers might be a strategic choice instead of a failure.

    Eurogamer’s EIC Tom Phillips spoke with Valve’s Yazan Aldehayyat about what’s missing to make the OLED a true 2.0 model: 

    “Obviously we’d love to get even more performance in the same power envelope, but that technology doesn’t exist yet,” Aldehayyat said. “That’s what I think we’d call a Steam Deck 2.0.

    “The first Steam Deck was the first moment in time where we felt like there was enough GPU performance in a portable form factor that lets you play all your Steam games. We would love for the trend of perf-per-watt to progress rapidly to do that, but it’s not quite there yet.”

  • People Make Games has posted this video about the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government. YouTube won’t let this video be embedded, but you can click on the link above or here to see it.

  • The “Fan Software” creation, Bloodborne Kart just got a release date announcement, it’s coming to Windows computers via itch.io on January 31st, 2024. Bloodborne Kart’s trailer has a cool PlayStation 1-esque style that the developers last demade with their freely-available Bloodborne PSX. As of yet, there’s no price available for Bloodborne Kart, but we do have a list of modes and features like 12 racers, 16 stages, single-player campaign with boss fights, split-screen multiplayer, and a versus battle mode. Sounds like a lot of fun, I’ve been enjoying playing Bloodborne on stream and can’t wait for more in this universe of ridiculous gothic horror.

  • Earlier this year I got back into the remake of the first two Tony Hawk Pro Skater games, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 that Vicarious Visions made. It took a lot of fiddling but the game ran alright on the Steam Deck. As an Epic Game Store exclusive you could run THPS 1+2 through the Heroic Games Launcher with two big caveats: save game syncing is in beta for HGL, so that isn’t on by default so you’d also have to manually adjust a save game path with a keyboard and mouse in the HGL preferences. The second caveat was that THPS 1+2 would try and go online every few minutes and then momentarily freeze the game. Not fun, but it was tolerable because the game is so good.

    Until, surprisingly, THPS 1+2’s exclusivity came to an end earlier this month and it came out on Steam, you could finally play on the Steam Deck without fiddling. It’s still a non-native port, but THPS 1+2 was almost fantastic on the Steam Deck. It had to be always online, but that was a minor inconvenience unless you were traveling. 

    Today, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 got an update for the Steam Deck to play offline and so the keyboard overlay works better on the Deck.

    It looks like Iron Galaxy did the work to update Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 for Steam, since Vicarious Visions has been handed over to the Blizzard half of Activision Blizzard and unfortunately cancelled Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3+4 along with any other games Vicarious was working on that weren’t Blizzard titles.