Nuclear Monster

  • If this actually ships with this name it probably won’t be the worst-named product Microsoft has ever shipped, but it will be close. The Xbox One S All-Digital Edition has been rumored to come out in May without a disc drive. Jez Corden of Windows Central has the sources and more details.

    As I’ve remarked before, the Xbox One is such an odd console. Every exclusive game I want for it is now either available on Windows 10 or will be. Sunset Overdrive is even finally available on Steam for Windows. Still, I keep the Xbox One because of the backwards compatibility features for some 360 and original Xbox discs. However, the 360 games I’d like to play with my family are Kinect games that won’t work on the One.

    I don’t know what a disc-less machine really offers anyone picking out a console besides, possibly, being slightly cheaper and more reliable. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft makes the pitch for this revision, if it happens.


  • Nintendo and Game Freak debuted the first original mainline, non-remake, Pokémon game for the Nintendo Switch, and its new starters, in the direct above.

    Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield are on their way with a “late 2019” release window.

  • An Ape has escaped, but he isn’t a friendly little hominid with a siren. No, this is a vicious one from Gabe Cuzzillo, Matt Boch, and Bennett Foddy, oddly enough. Ape Out is an overhead smash-em-up with noisy drums and it looks like much fun for anyone who enjoys escapism.

    Alice Bell of RPS enjoyed Ape Out:

    The whole game has an algorithmic masterpiece of a score by Matt Boch, frenetic drums that grow louder and faster as the violence increases, or dip into a lull at times of calm. Each death is greeted by a triumphant crash of cymbals, so you feel like a conductor in your own mad orchestra of carnage. You, somehow, feel part of the creative process. The way you smashed three men together, just so, leaving a blush of red over the blue carpet, and adding just a soupçon of orange viscera from your own wounds. “Ah, exquisite,” you think. “Perhaps I was always meant to be a great improvisational artist.” But there is no time to pause and admire your work, for you must knuckle on and create another.

    Ape Out is $15 on the Nintendo Switch, and various stores for Windows, like itch.io, Humble, and Steam.

  • Jeremy Hobson for WBUR interviewing Martha Kegel (executive director of a non-profit) on how New Orleans reduced their number of houseless people by 90%:

    And lastly, she says, the team took a “Housing First” approach, which is “simply the idea that you accept people as they are,” whether they are sober or not.

    “You just accept them as they are and you provide the housing first,” Kegel says. “Then, once they’re in their apartment, you immediately wrap all the services around them that they need to stay stable and live the highest quality life that they can live.”

    This article is tough to read, even with the positive news, but there are some really important basic fact checks in here for people who aren’t convinced that housing people is the first solution to houselessness. In relating an anecdote about someone who turned down help, Kegel says: “…which isn’t actually the typical thing, most homeless people want to be housed.” 

  • In Steam‘s Early Access program you’ll find multiplayer-only mech stomp-em-up Vox Machinae from the developers of Signal Ops. Vox looks to be severely different from Ops, and they’re calling their mechs GDR‘s or Grinders. They’ve got people in between layers of metal, so I suppose it’s okay to refer to a mech as a meat sandwich.