Nuclear Monster

  • We’re onto the second day of E3 press events, and here’s everything that was announced at Microsoft’s Xbox E3 2018 Briefing.

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  • The Electronic Entertainment Expo media conferences for 2018 have started off. Electronic Arts is up first with their EA Play conference hosted by the internet’s Andrea Rene. Here’s everything that EA announced:

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  • Landfall, the makers of some other silly games, have put out their latest “April fools joke” called Totally Accurate Battlegrounds. As you can see from the trailer, it’s a less-than-serious take on the Battle Royale genre of games. I’ve put in a very little bit of time on the game and it definitely feels incomplete, but also like exactly what I need as someone who is a bit bored after a few hundred hours in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’ oh-so-serious murder simulator.

    A FAQ on Landfall’s site explains a bit more about why they decided to make Totally Accurate Battlegrounds:

    TABG is an April Fools joke, we’ve done one every year since 2016. We’ve previously combined one of our games with another genre or game. The first year we made Supertruck, a mix between the game Superhot and Clustertruck. Last year we made TABZ which is a mix between TABS and DAY-Z. We spend an enormous amount of lunch breaks and nights playing battle royale games, this is an homage to a genre we love.

    Despite their initial promise to not update this game at all, the developers at Landfall have been working on patches for TABG. Which is good, because I couldn’t join a multiplayer server at all a few days ago. Today I checked in again and was able to join servers.

    Totally Accurate Battlegrounds is temporarily free for the next few hours on Windows on Steam, it’ll be $5 after that. The developers have stated they a macOS version is unlikely and that they have no plans for other platforms.

  • Neo geo international

    SNK recently announced their Neo Geo Mini, their take on the miniaturized home console designs from Nintendo, but styled like their classic arcade platform from the 90’s instead of the home console version of the Neo Geo. This video has some more details on it.

    The mini Neo Geo home arcade console looks very small with a 3.5” LCD and a compact 4-button layout that doesn’t match the arcade but might be more appropriate for the smaller size of this device. Around the back there’s an HDMI-output, a headphone jack, and the port for USB power. Each side has a USB port for a controller, but it looks like a deep port, so might be difficult to connect. The colors don’t match the red and black cabinet we had in the US, but there are two versions of the Neo Geo Mini. One matches the colors of the original Japanese cabinet, and another (pictured above) is what we’ll get with the International version.

    Pad

    There’s also a wired Neo Geo Mini Pad gamepad to go with it, styled after the Neo Geo CD’s gamepad, it’ll be sold separately in black and white. I don’t think it looks as nice as the original pad, but it could be good.

    The Neo Geo Mini will have 40 games, but 14 will only be different between the Japanese and International versions. The Japanese version has more fighting games, and the international version has more action games. Each game will be based on the home version, so it’ll have more options than the arcade ROM. Like most modern mini consoles, the Neo Geo Mini will be able to save and load the game’s state to some internal storage in order to get around the limited continues of the versions of these games released for the home system. You’ll access the system menu by hitting start and select at the same time. I think most SNES and NES Classic Edition owners wish they had that feature instead of having to reset the console to access those features.

    If you hook up the Mini to a TV with an HDMI cable you’ll be able to adjust the resolution and aspect ratio.

    As far as a release date and price, it’s promised to be out this summer in Japan first and there isn’t a date yet for the international version of the Neo Geo Mini. There’s no price yet.

    Here’s the game lineup for both versions of the console:

    Neo Geo Mini (Japan)

    • The King of Fighters ’94
    • The King of Fighters ‘95
    • The King of Fighters ‘96
    • The King of Fighters ‘97
    • The King of Fighters ‘98
    • The King of Fighters ‘99
    • The King of Fighters 2000
    • The King of Fighters 2001
    • The King of Fighters 2002
    • The King of Fighters 2003
    • Samurai Shodown II
    • Samurai Shodown IV
    • Samurai Shodown V Special
    • Fatal Fury Special
    • Real Bout Fatal Fury
    • Real Bout Fatal Fury 2
    • Garou: Mark of the Wolves
    • World Heroes Perfect
    • Kizuna Encounter
    • Art of Fighting
    • The Last Blade
    • The Last Blade 2
    • Ninja Master’s
    • Aggressors of Dark Kombat
    • Metal Slug
    • Metal Slug 2
    • Metal Slug 3
    • King of the Monsters 2
    • Sengoku 3
    • Shock Troopers 2nd Squad
    • Top Hunter Roddy & Cathy
    • Ninja Commando
    • Burning Fight
    • Cyber-Lip
    • Alpha Mission II
    • Twinkle Star Sprites
    • Blazing Star
    • Top Player’s Golf
    • Super Sidekicks
    • Puzzled

    Neo Geo Mini (International)

    • The King of Fighters ‘95
    • The King of Fighters ‘97
    • The King of Fighters ‘98
    • The King of Fighters 2000
    • The King of Fighters 2002
    • Samurai Shodown II
    • Samurai Shodown IV
    • Samurai Shodown V Special
    • Fatal Fury Special
    • Real Bout Fatal Fury
    • Garou: Mark of the Wolves
    • World Heroes Perfect
    • Kizuna Encounter
    • Art of Fighting
    • The Last Blade 2
    • Ninja Master’s
    • Metal Slug
    • Metal Slug 2
    • Metal Slug X
    • Metal Slug 3
    • Metal Slug 4
    • Metal Slug 5
    • King of the Monsters
    • King of the Monsters 2
    • Sengoku 3
    • Shock Troopers
    • Shock Troopers 2nd Squad
    • Magician Lord
    • Blue’s Journey
    • Robo Army
    • Crossed Swords
    • Mutation Nation
    • 3 Count Bout
    • Blazing Star
    • Last Resort
    • Ghost Pilots
    • Top Player’s Golf
    • Super Sidekicks
    • Football Frenzy
    • Puzzled

    I’m not really interested in the Neo Geo Mini because I’m in the process of building a mini arcade cabinet myself, but if I were I’d be pretty disappointed to miss out on Japan-only games like Twinkle Star Sprites. Perhaps it’ll be as easy to hack and install your own games as the NES and SNES Classic Editions have been.

  • Erik Johnson:

    So we ended up going back to one of the principles in the forefront of our minds when we started Steam, and more recently as we worked on Steam Direct to open up the Store to many more developers: Valve shouldn’t be the ones deciding this. If you’re a player, we shouldn’t be choosing for you what content you can or can’t buy. If you’re a developer, we shouldn’t be choosing what content you’re allowed to create. Those choices should be yours to make. Our role should be to provide systems and tools to support your efforts to make these choices for yourself, and to help you do it in a way that makes you feel comfortable.

    With that principle in mind, we’ve decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling. Taking this approach allows us to focus less on trying to police what should be on Steam, and more on building those tools to give people control over what kinds of content they see. We already have some tools, but they’re too hidden and not nearly comprehensive enough. We are going to enable you to override our recommendation algorithms and hide games containing the topics you’re not interested in. So if you don’t want to see anime games on your Store, you’ll be able to make that choice. If you want more options to control exactly what kinds of games your kids see when they browse the Store, you’ll be able to do that. And it’s not just players that need better tools either – developers who build controversial content shouldn’t have to deal with harassment because their game exists, and we’ll be building tools and options to support them too.

    The end result of this is that Valve is fine with making money from software that encourage sexual assault and other awful trash as long as it isn’t “trolling.” Whatever that means. This is bad.

    Valve needs to grow up and take responsibility for the software that they sell. This policy is the opposite of that.