Nuclear Monster

  • 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.

  • The people behind the US launch of the C64 Mini today announced an October 9th US release date for the C64 Mini that we last talked about more in-depth way back in April:

    The miniaturizing nostalgia shrink ray is sprayed at everything now: Cars; entertainment systems both super and conventional Nintendo; iPads; arcade cabinets… There’s also now a The C64 Mini, not a Commodore 64 Mini or Classic Edition, but strictly The C64 Mini. Apparently they couldn’t get the name Commodore 64.

    It doesn’t appear that much has changed since April, so this is your reminder that besides being a tiny clone of the original Commodore 64, it still has a completely non-functional keyboard and barely functional joystick, and is probably not worth buying. No price has been announced for the US yet.

  • Albert Burneko talking about the situation with Tronc, Inc, the company that just laid off half of the editorial staff of a paper after paying out an executive a $15 million award for groping women:

    It’s legal, if you’re rich enough, or carefully enough obscured behind the legal fiction of a hedge fund or corporation, to borrow vast sums of money, purchase a company with it, and then simply pass that debt along to the people who do the company’s work and make its products, by stripping their jobs so you can redirect their salaries toward debt payment. It’s legal to decide, freely, that you will pay a disgraced former executive tens of millions of dollars all at once rather than over a period of years—or rather than going to court to argue you shouldn’t have to pay a guy $15 million for not being able to keep his fucking hands to himself!—and then recover some or all of the cost by just straight-up taking people’s livelihoods away from them. It’s legal for the parasites who buy an ownership stake in your company to decide they will appropriate your livelihood for themselves; it’s legal for them to say that your wages and health care must pay their debts for them. It’s legal for them to trade your employment for their enrichment; it’s legal to purchase a company for the sole purpose of liquidating it, laying off all its workers, and keeping the money for yourself.