Nuclear Monster

  • There’s a new competitor in the Battle Royale genre of multiplayer-only survival shooters, Apex Legends, from Respawn. It’s a free-to-play Battle Royale-style shooter with a risky system that lets you revive your teammates by retrieving an object at the box they leave behind, and a middle-click option on your mouse to let you mark items, enemies, and other important objects on your HUD that you would otherwise have to manually call-out.

    The good news is that Respawn are some of the original Call of Duty developers, so the shooting feels good, even though this game lacks the wall-running and mech-suits from Titanfall.

    Apex Legends also has different character classes. The first of which drops a healing drone, for example.

    There are only 3-player squads in Apex Legends, are no other modes besides a short training mode that doesn’t really explain the now-traditional Battle Royale mechanics of the shrinking battlefield and dwindling players until there is one winning team.

    Wes Fenlon has a positive write-up from his experience at a preview event on PC Gamer:

    I had a lot of thrilling moments in Apex Legends, mostly around reviving and respawning squadmates. Death isn’t necessarily the end in this game: even if you get killed, your squadmates can pick up your ID tags within a short window and bring you back at respawn points scattered about the map, as you spectate and bite your nails. It’s a feature you wouldn’t see in most battle royales, but it makes total sense in a squad-focused game, and adds great tension to every fight. You can be dead but still rooting on a friend. You could be alive and wonder if your squadmate’s killer is camping their body, waiting for you to come claim their ID. You can make it to a respawn point and stand there activating it, totally exposed, praying you don’t get shot in the back.

    No matter what you’re doing, the ping system is just such a great tool for communication. In some cases it’s better than voice chat: you can highlight a specific object, like a door or a gun, and tap middle mouse to make your character say something about it. They’ll call out the name of a gun you might not know. You can double-tap to signal an enemy’s nearby and that’ll show up red for your teammates. After someone pings an item, if you pick it up, a prompt will pop up on your screen to thank them for pointing it out. In the world of horrors that is online gaming, it’s so pleasant (and, honestly, weird) to have a built-in courtesy button. Saying thank you: Somehow, just as thrilling as shooting a guy.

    Unfortunately, like most free to play games, Apex Legends has loot boxes and different currency systems. They mostly seem to be for aesthetic choices, like weapon skins, but there are also new characters to unlock with unique skills you won’t get to play without ponying up with either real money or through another currency that might be earned in-game. The free-to-play business is as sad as ever, and many games that cost money up-front have these systems anyway.

    Apex Legends is out now and free-to-play on Origin for Windows, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.

  • If you use Apple Music, the streaming music service from Apple that gives artists pennies instead of dollars, and want to listen on your computer, Musish is open source, runs in your web browser, and a much better alternative to running the full desktop iTunes instance if you don’t need to listen to a locally-stored collection of music.

    Musish appears to log in to your Apple ID via an Apple-supplied authentication system. Very handy, I look forward to using this on Linux, where iTunes isn’t available at all.

  • If there’s a constant in the gaming universe right now, it’s pixelated side-scrollers. Door Kickers: Action Squad is pixelated, yes, but it isn’t another exploratory metroidvania style adventure. Action Squad is a co-operators special that’s for distant or couched friends to shoot bad guys with the not-at-all-questionable overarching theme of police buddies just busting up mansions and warehouses, going room-to-room, looking for hostages and bombs.

    Action Squad doesn’t take itself seriously. There is a progression system of upgrades to purchase between levels. Both skill points on a tech tree of sorts, and among the purchasable gear options are just regular frag grenades that don’t care if you’re hitting a hostage or a hostage-taker and this is what you see if you’re thinking about buying grenades:

    It's a Gear selection screen with the frag grenade unlockable selected. One of the features and benefits is

    I haven’t chosen those yet, but they’re in-line with the type of parody of police work that Action Squad is going for, and there are definitely situations in the game’s levels that call for room-clearing explosives.

    There’s a very fine line between parody and cringing, and while I think that Action Squad earns its comedic violence, I also cringe every time I hear the unfortunate suicide-bombing character charging and yodeling what is probably nonsense at the forgettable player characters.That’s a stereotype best left behind.

    I won’t be reviewing Action Squad, but I can recommend it for anyone looking for a good game to play with a friend. It isn’t perfect, Action Squad has crashed once or twice over the three hours I’ve spent with it so far, but I like that a studio called “Killhouse Games” can prove they don’t take themselves entirely too seriously by working with PixelShard Labs on this project. The music is good, the sprite work is good, the gameplay is fun. I love almost everything about this game. It even seems to revel in your loss, because you still earn experience points towards leveling up your characters and then it throws out an exclamation mark that seems to indicate an excitement in your SWAT team dying:

    Swat team lost

    Once you restart the mission, the level layouts are the same, so you will sometimes need to figure out how you’re going to do things differently the next time. One level in particular stands out where I had to kick a corpse through the odd skylight in a room with another room above it. Dropping the corpse lured enemies to one side of their basement. Every time I dropped down through the basement’s skylight without first luring the two other murder-men waiting below, I would almost always cause a stray bullet to hit a door, that would then open and bring in two more killers which was about one too many to deal with. Even once I figured out this piece of the murder-puzzle I had to remember to turn on the generator and press the elevator call-button. Otherwise opening the door to the elevator shaft would release the two bonus slayers.

    In a world where we need to get the people who enjoy the knowledge that the doors of the powerless are kicked down all the time, this is a good start for Killhouse Games to pivot away from the serious tone in the original Door Kickers. Oh, what’s that? You say they’re working on Door Kickers 2? Well, good luck to them on that.

    One more unfortunate note, while Door Kickers was on Windows, macOS, and Linux, the Action Squad is only available for Windows through Steam at the moment. However, Action Squad‘s price is right at $14, and there are a ton of other modes, including one infinite Die Hard-esque tower with procedural generation

  • Will Sommer for The Daily Beast:

    Untold riches are promised on Mystery Brand, a website that sells prize-filled “mystery boxes.” If you buy one of the digital boxes, some of which cost hundreds of dollars, you might only get a fidget spinner—or you might get a luxury sports car.

    For just $100, users can win a box filled with rare Supreme streetwear. For only $12.99, they can win a Lamborghini, or even a $250 million mega-mansion billed as “the most expensive Los Angeles realty.”

    Or at least that’s what some top YouTubers have been telling their young fans about the gambling site—with the video stars apparently seeing that as a gamble worth taking, especially after a dip in YouTube advertising rates.

    Yikes.

  • Tom Francis is the developer of Heat Signature, games about ant eaters, Gun Point, and he’s made a ton of other stuff. Currently, Francis is working on Tactical Breach Wizards, which I’m very interested in. He’s also recently had to figure out how to solve for making business cards when you need each one to have a different design:

    At one point I wanted to get business cards made that would each have a free copy of my game on them. That meant each card needed a different code printed on it. I had 200 codes, and one image with a blank space for the code to be written. The card company would happily take 200 different images, but they couldn’t combine the images and text for me – I had to do that. A solution for this should exist.

    It does, actually, there are dozens. But all of them would require me to learn some new scripting language or tool that was far more complex than what I needed. This was a programming problem, and the only programming language I knew was the one I made the game in: it’s called Game Maker.

    So, technically, I made a game. It’s a game where the only level is a giant room that looks like my business card, the menu system writes a giant code across it, then it takes a screenshot. Thirty times a second. You win the game by waiting for 7 seconds. Then when you quit, you have a folder full of 200 images, each with a different code on them, which you can send straight to the printers.

    But the real point of this is about an Egg Controller, which, you should read the rest of here.