Nuclear Monster

  • Star Trek: Bridge Crew looked fun before, but when they finally patched the Windows version to let you play without a virtual reality helmet of shame I wasn’t able to get the game to work thanks to an error message popping up every few minutes and destroying all of my progress.

    Finally, the latest patch fixed whatever was broken and now I can stay in the game as long as my family will let me, and they’ve also just added Star Trek: The Next Generation content to the Windows version. I am almost as happy as a targ in shit, except the DLC has been available on the PlayStation VR Goggle System for months.

    The good news is that if any of our cross-platform friends on that PlayStation 4 are still looking to crossover some chairs as oddly as you can, ST:BC TNG DLC absolutely won’t let them. Ubisoft’s bridge game is all business, don’t get any ideas Commander Riker.

    Fire

    The bad news is that the game’s art still has a very strange weird and plastic style that makes it look a little bit like something from 2005, at least when you’re in the non-VR mode. I haven’t tried ST:BC with an HMD yet. I’d guess that this is because Ubisoft wants to maintain a solid framerate on console VR systems so that nobody pukes on the bridge.

    Ubisoft’s “CrewBots” that substitute when you don’t have enough friends to fill the ship’s roles are as dumb as bricks, they’ll routinely fly directly into asteroids and mines and incorrectly prioritize your orders. Want your shields at full strength? I hope you don’t mind giving the same order again and again. The hilarious excuse Ubisoft came up for the mediocre AI is that anything smarter would somehow destroy the game’s framerate for VR players:

    Keep in mind that with VR, performance is at an extreme premium to keep framerates high to avoid player discomfort so highly sophisticated AI that heavily affects that performance was not in the cards. The crewbots are a very effective solution that meets the goals of providing basic crew substitutes without any negative impact on framerates.

    The ST:BC:TNG:DLC:ABC:BBD does add the Borg and Romulans as foes, as well as other features and major changes to the Enterprise D’s UI, and then it doesn’t explain any of it. Good luck.

    ST:BC:TNG:DLC:TLA is on Steam as well as through Ubisoft’s UPlay store for $15. The base Bridge Crew game goes for $40 and you can’t play the DLC without it.

  • Co-founder of my favorite old pub, The Rock, The Paper, The Shogun, John Walker has written a bit about how the introduction to No Man’s Sky has changed with the latest update:

    More usually a feature of games that have spent far too long in early access, No Man’s Sky feels like a game that’s made for people who already play No Man’s Sky. When an available game’s opening is reworked and reworked, iteration colliding with iteration, both the developers and current playerbase seem to lose track of accessibility, and that is woefully apparent in No Man’s Sky’s latest incarnation. Already being a very familiar player, I knew to just wearily restart the game three times until I got a planet that wasn’t outrageously toxic with Sentinels that attacked on sight. Three times it took me to get a habitable starting location where I could wrestle with all the daft new faff. None of this would be communicated to someone coming in cold, who would be left to assume that either the game was idiotically difficult, or broken.

    The game’s controls and feel especially overloaded as Walker says:

    Each menu seems to have contradictory controls, leaving me never knowing if I’m supposed to be left clicking, holding down left click, or pressing E, F or X, and even something as simple as moving items between your inventories is now a confusing jumble of both. Once where you could open a green box on the ground by just pressing a single key to get its contents, now you have to press X and select a menu to move some “rusty parts” out of the way, before it then dumps the item inside into a menu of its own choosing. It’s like they went through every single system and pondered how they could make it far more of a fiddle.

    Despite all of the flaws, I love No Man’s Sky particular brand of exploration, quirks and all.

  • Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games (Shadow Hand, Regency Solitaire, and more) has a good article up talking about the history of casual games for personal computers from a developer’s perspective.

    Tetris is, to me, the pinnacle of casual gaming. Experts can have so much skill to be at the higher levels, but it was always as approachable as less demanding puzzle games. Maybe people who balk at “casual games” would hesitate to slap the title on Tetris because they recognize how important it was as a foundational element of the modern gaming era.

    Birkett ends his article by talking about what he wants from Steam:

    However, Steam isn’t very appealing to casual gamers with it’s dark “gamer” theme and the inability to easily view old-fashioned casual game categories like match-3, HOG, card game etc. on a single landing page. If you browse “casual” on Steam, you’ll get a huge variety of games including “naughty” visual novels.

    If Steam fixed that and basically made a really nice CURATED casual game landing page I think could poach a huge amount of sales from the casual portals.

    The entire Steam storefront is a game for Valve to exploit the maximum profit from users. The only curation Valve’s team is interested in is the kind that users and journalists do without Valve paying them. If you’re not going to buy anything this second, they want you to look at a selection of games and tell their algorithms if the games are any good. If you get a virtual trading card for doing that you can sell it for 7 Steam Cents to someone else and they’ll end up with the majority of the sale. Steam will never be presentable to regular people because the theme is part of the game. Decoupling the theme from the program and website would unmask Steam for the nightmare exploitation machine that it has become.

  • Hello Games’ No Man Sky is two years old, but if you are like me and tried it out back then only to move on before finishing the main quest then you might want to check out the latest updates. Hello Games has added multiplayer, Jack wrote that they have also added third-person options, base building, biological horrors, redone all of the story progression, and so much more to the game.

    I liked NMS when it was just a 1950’s sci-fi book cover simulator about lonely astronauts exploring space, now I’m even more interested. Or, maybe Hello Games changed just one variable:

    Nearly two years after it first released, the incredibly lazy developers at Hello Games have finally bothered to open up their fucking computers and set the ‘make_game_good’ variable in the code of the game to ‘true’.

    Point & Clickbait understands that lead developer Sean Murray finally decided to make the game good after accidentally turning on his computer for the first time in two years and saying “Oh, haha, yeah, shit, that thing.”

    There are a bunch of details about the content of the update at the No Man’s Sky site, the update is live now on Windows (via gog, Humble, and Steam), PlayStation 4, and the Xbox One.

    There’s no cross-play between platforms, unfortunately. The DRM-free versions on gog and Humble don’t have multiplayer yet.

  • Doug Bock Clark has an incredibly detailed account of Otto Warmbier’s time in North Korea as a hostage. This is the American whose torture and eventual death our national embarrassment used for justifying possible war with, and bellicose rambling at, North Korea.