Nuclear Monster

  • It’s a requirement for playing Jazztronauts, a mod for Garry’s Mod. Yes, you’ve read that correctly. You have to reinstall a bunch of old Source-engine games and get this weird ass $10 sandbox thing called Garry’s Mod to play Jazztronauts. You’re also going to need to read these instructions to get the game going. It’s worth it.

    There are cats, they talk to you, they want you to steal for them. What are you stealing? Stuff, from random Source-engine game levels, like lamps, or tables, or chairs, or headcrabs in levels made for Team Fortress 2. The cats are funny in their conversations, the gameplay systems are normal but the manner in which you’re to carry them out are just so odd.

    You’ll fulfill the fetch quests the bar-dwelling cats give you with a a “prop snatcher.” That’s the device the cats, and you, use to summon a Half-Life 2 scientist model in a t-pose with a gravity gun to grab the objects in the world and pull them back to the bar. A very strange machine in the bar converts those objects into money that you can use on upgrades and new tools to better traverse and collect objects in Source-engine levels that absolutely aren’t meant for you to explore outside of the original context of whatever game or mod they came from.

    There’s a lot more to Jazztronauts that I wish I hadn’t known about before I tried it out. It’s very strange to play, and fun to explore the worlds that map makers create, with charmingly funny writing, and you can play it cooperatively with friends. Try it out.

  • Highly recommended reading from Heather Alexandra :

    …the intersection of work and labor at play when we buy games also means that there’s a lot more going on. Being a responsible game player requires understanding the dynamics at play.

  • Eurogamer’s Robert Purchase spoke with Pete Hines about their decision to pursue legal action against people reselling games. Go read Purchase’s article and come back.

    While I agree that it’s difficult to tell if a “sealed” copy of anything actually contains what it says, or is something that just weighs the same, I found this part of Hines’ argument particularly telling:

    “He, specifically, was trying to list it as a new product as if he was GameStop or Best Buy… He’s not a company, he’s not a distributor…”

    To Pete Hines you’re not allowed to sell something as new unless you’re part of an incorporated legal entity.

    Last week I bought some electronics from a person off of Craigslist, they were selling it as “new” because it was still sealed. When I met the seller I had them open it up before buying it because you do need to be able to tell that it isn’t a box with a brick in it.

    That is a legitimate concern, and I’m not sure how you resolve that question over an online purchase, but it isn’t really up to a the original software developer or publisher to police that. If they are going to do that,  you would hope that they have a very strong argument against the individual seller.

    Hines is quoted as saying:

    “…we don’t want our customers buying stuff from a vendor like Amazon where they think they’re buying a new product and suddenly finding out they got a disc that’s been played, somebody kicked across the floor and scratched and ‘oh they took out the insert that had the special items I was supposed to get for buying this’.”

    Hines never makes any statement that the original seller, Hupp, was actually selling a resealed product as new, but he sure does love to speculate that this is what is happening. This is an incredibly flimsy excuse to approve the legal threats against Hupp, and it absolutely isn’t the same argument that his lawyers are using. Their argument is all about a bogus missing warranty.

    Even if they’re successful in their pursuit of shutting the practice down, you don’t need to be a lawyer to smell the stench from Maryland. This is about locking out individuals from doing what they want with the things they purchase, not protecting anyone from buying a resealed game.

  • IGN recently fired an editor that covered Nintendo platforms and software, Filip Miucin, when it was discovered that he had plagiarized a review for Dead Cells from another video review.

    This situation was awful enough, but IGN’s managers did a good job of resolving it quickly, and I thought it could be an opportunity for the journalist who plagiarized to grow and learn a valuable lesson. That isn’t at all what happened, he posted a video apology to YouTube and it is just completely insincere garbage that I won’t embed or link to. ResetEra has a transcript.
    Portions are excerpted in this retort from another writer that Miucin plagiarized, Chris Scullion:

  • Epic is skipping Google’s Android app store (the advertising publisher calls it Google Play as if that meant anything) for their upcoming Android version of the free-to-play Fortnite (which is already on iOS and almost every gaming and computing platform.) There’s a beta signup here and the compatibility situation on Android is already a nightmare, check out the list of supported devices. It is extremely specific and the few Android devices I have aren’t supported.

    Epic’s Tim Sweeney was pretty straightforward about why they’re avoiding Google’s app store in this interview with Dean Takahashi:

    There’s typically a 30/70 split, and from the 70 percent, the developer pays all the costs of developing the game, operating it, marketing it, acquiring users and everything else. For most developers that eats up the majority of their revenue. We’re trying to make our software available to users in as economically efficient a way as possible. That means distributing the software directly to them, taking payment through Mastercard, Visa, Paypal, and other options, and not having a store take 30 percent.

    I’m not sure how well this is going to work out for people playing Fortnite. Google’s app store security is awful and routinely distributes software that compromises user privacy and security already, but at least they can moderate that. To get started with Fortnite on Android users are going to have to disable built-in security functionality that disallows third-party apps. Sideloading applications is useful and should be possible on any computer we use, but there are going to be negative consequences for users who don’t fully understand the risks involved.

    Parents and tech savvy folks helping their friends and family are going to be busy when they realize their devices are compromised by installing a phony version of Fortnite, or a version that works but steals their credit card data. Try searching your favorite web search engine for the premium currency in the game, “Fortnite Free V-Bucks”, those scammers are oiled up and ready for anyone who falls into their trap.

    Julia Alexander investigated the versions of these “V-Buck” scams that run on YouTube:

    Since Fortnite’s meteoric rise, there have been multiple YouTube videos running as ads that pitch Fortnite players easy ways to get free V-Bucks. (V-Bucks are Fortnite’s premium in-game currency, which lets them purchase limited-edition skins, gear and weapons.) Search “free V-Bucks” in YouTube’s search bar, and more than 4.3 million results will populate.