Nuclear Monster

  • Bloomberg’s Anders Melin:

    Three Equifax Inc. senior executives sold shares worth almost $1.8 million in the days after the company discovered a security breach that may have compromised information on about 143 million U.S. consumers.

    The credit-reporting service said late Thursday in a statement that it discovered the intrusion on July 29. Regulatory filings show that three days later, Chief Financial Officer John Gamble sold shares worth $946,374 and Joseph Loughran, president of U.S. information solutions, exercised options to dispose of stock worth $584,099. Rodolfo Ploder, president of workforce solutions, sold $250,458 of stock on Aug. 2. None of the filings lists the transactions as being part of 10b5-1 pre-scheduled trading plans.

    Equifax said in the statement that intruders accessed names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and driver’s-license numbers, as well as credit-card numbers for about 209,000 consumers. The incident ranks among the largest cybersecurity breaches in history.

     

  • Speaking of games that have left a void and been inexpertly filled by well-intentioned developers. The Neo Geo classic disc tossing game that’s basically pong if it involved a gruff euro beach 90’s future aesthetic,  Windjammers, has been riffed on so many times. It’s actually been thrilling to see who gets the closest to surpassing the original game because it was so difficult to get a hold on many Neo Geo games legitimately.

    Those days are over, as long as you have a PlayStation 4 or (surprisingly) a PlayStation Vita. DotEmu has brought the original game back out on these Sony platforms for $15, with some pretty big updates to multiplayer and leaderboards that go beyond your typical ROM-in-an-emulator package but don’t seem to change the art or gameplay. Buying one version also nets you the other with Sony’s cross-buy promotion.

  • It has been almost a decade since Nintendo and Intelligent Systems released Advance Wars: Days of Ruin for the Nintendo DS. This void in the turn-based-strategy-with-cute-troops genre has been poorly filled by third party developers looking to recreate the past. We’ve got another challenger to fill the TBSWCT hole in our hearts. The development group Area35 are working on Tiny Metal for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows and macOS. They’re promising a single-player campaign that lasts eight-to-ten hours.

    I actually like the 3D-toy style of Tiny Metal a bit more than Advance Wars, but it’s good that they’ve found something a little different than the 2D perspective that is typical to Advance Wars games.

    The pre-release gameplay footage above is promising, here’s hoping that Area35 hits the mark when the game is released later this year.

  • Ubisoft has developed XCOM: Baby Mode with a Nintendo license for the Switch called Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. It reminds me of my favorite JRPG, Super Mario RPG, because both games were developed by third-parties using a Mario license to get a genre of games out to more people than would normally try them. With Super Mario RPG, that was the JRPG, with Mario + Rabbids, it’s the turn-based strategy from old DOS games brought to life again but this time Mario has a gun for some reason.

    Chris Scullion reviewed it:

    …the game’s still funny thanks to the character animations. From the way Rabbid Mario poses like he thinks he’s God’s gift to hares, to the way Rabbid Peach takes selfies of herself while one particular boss plummets to its doom (as Luigi looks on disturbed), the cutscenes and animations constantly had me chuckling in ways the dialogue never threatened to.

    Ultimately, despite the exploration sections and the writing being slightly underwhelming, the main meat of Mario + Rabbids remains the turn-based combat sections so it’s a good job this is where the game truly shines.

    Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle is out now on the Nintendo Switch.

  • I’ve been kind of blindsided by this one. Although I don’t enjoy many of the mechanics in even the supposedly good original Sonic games, there was something special about them at the time that has been elusive to any of the developers working on the countless Sonic games since the first few on the Genesis.

    From everything I’ve heard and read, Sonic Mania, from Christian Whitehead and other third-party developers, fulfills the promise of a Sonic game in a way that Sega has been unable to fulfill. That includes the pitfalls of the original games, but without dumbass additions like guns that ruin modern Sonic games.

    It’s out now on Steam for Windows as well as the Switch, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 for $20.