Nuclear Monster

  • Bonesweeper in sweeping for bones mode.

    Cheese, the developer of Hive Time and other games, has released a new free or “name your own price” game prototype with the most metal name for a game post-Crüe Ball called Bonesweeper for Windows, macOS, and Linux. In Bonesweeper you’re a paleontologist searching for fossils at a dig site and trying not to break them, just like Minesweeper but with fossils and a dig site instead of mines and a minefield. Not very metal, but there is also an assembly mode where you can attempt to put together skeletons for a museum exhibition after you’ve found their fossils in the dig site.

    I’ve been playing the prototype of Bonesweeper and giving feedback on the design to the developer and it has gotten me back into this Minesweeper style of gameplay. It is very fun to solve the little puzzles of where a fossil might be and try to flag and avoid that spot but if you give up on a level or make a mistake it can be extremely satisfying to hear the crunchy sound effects of accidental fossil smashes Cheese created using food and other objects in his kitchen.

    Here’s a tutorial from the developer:

    It’s unclear at this time if the prototype will be developed further, but I think it is pretty fun as it is.

  • Selaco looks like a fun new sci-fi FPS and it is using the free-software GZDoom engine which is a very cool thing to see as a proponent of free software game engines. Check out the first trailer of the game’s combat above.

    Hopefully the developers of this retro FPS don’t milkshake duck themselves like Ion Fury and Brutal Doom did. It almost goes with the retro FPS territory at this point. Though it was impressive when Ion Fury also milkshake ducked the entirety of whatever the hell 3D Realms is at this point.

    Selaco’s YouTube channel also has a little bit more world building in the original announcement video:

    There’s no release date announced yet for Selaco, but the developer says it’ll have a Steam page soon and there will be a demo later this year.

  • The second in Tim Hunkin’s eight-episode series for makers, The Secret Life of Components, is up. This episode focuses on LEDs. A subject I finally know a tiny bit about because some mechanical keyboards can use them, but there is a lot more to learn from Hunkin about LEDs and he goes through a short bit of history through all the options out there to brighten up your projects that he uses in his arcade machines.

    One of the things I like about Tim Hunkin’s new demonstrations is that there is no artifice. This is just him in his workshop and he is playing with some components and is happy to share that joy for exploring with others. While it would be funny for a moment if this turned into your typical polished YouTube video and Hunkin was shouting out his highest tier patreon subscribers and saying “…if you liked this video, make sure to give it a like and RIIING THAT BELLL!” he isn’t catering to YouTube that way today and that is a nice change of pace. There’s nothing wrong with the people who do those things, it is the way to succeed on video at the moment and people listen to these calls to action, the systems are at fault for not allowing us to do the things that make us happy like making videos without worrying about the dollars coming in when we live in a time of utter surplus that is dominated by a very few billionaires.

    With this new video I’ve also noticed two great updates to The Secret Life of Components web page, the first is a schedule for the upcoming videos, the second update is that Hunkin is going to re-release the original Secret Life of Machines with some kind of AI up-scaling via tapes made from the original film recordings.

  • There’s a new 2D Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game in the style of the old side-scrolling beatemups from Dotemu and Tribute Games. TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge doesn’t have a release date yet, but there is a page up on Steam for it on Windows, and it will also come to “consoles”.

  • This past week has apparently been a watershed moment for “cryptoart”, and the past few months have helped grow cryptocurrencies and Non-Fungible Tokens. Everest Pipkin:

    The current ecological cost of cryptoart and cryptocurrency is very real and very large, and while steps can be taken to reign in some of that energy cost, the crypto- market is still based in a value system that fundamentally ties worth to spent physical resources.
    There is no undoing that relationship, no matter how low the cost to mint tokens gets or what the percentage of green energy is in doing so.

    A value system that understands itself only in terms of what, materially, has been burned so far to create investment and what, materially, will need to be burned tomorrow is one that is untenable to the future we have to build, one that has decoupled worth with waste, one where units of labor are not bought and sold for wage.

    Don’t trust anyone who is accelerating the destruction of the planet so that fake copies of gifs can be bought and resold.