Nuclear Monster

  • The extremely adorable Slime Rancher has exited out of Steam’s Early Access and is available on Steam for Windows, macOS, and Linux as well as on the Xbox One where it’s currently available for free to anyone who has the Xbox Live Gold subscription. Otherwise it’s $20, except for right now when it’s on sale for $13.39 on Steam.

    According to Steam I’ve put in a little under 5 hours of collecting Slimes and their poop and I know that I’ve enjoyed my time with it prior to release, it’ll be fun to come back and see how it has changed.

  • Recently, Apple started removing VPN apps from their iOS App Store in China in order to comply with local laws. That may be something they have to do as a business, but it’s time to allow apps from developers outside of the App Store. Gruber:

    To me, the more interesting question isn’t whether Apple should be selling its products in China, but rather whether Apple should continue to make the App Store the only way to install apps on iOS devices. A full-on “install whatever you want” policy isn’t going to happen, but something like Gatekeeper on MacOS could.

    Keep iOS App Store-only by default. Add a preference in Settings to allow apps to be downloaded from “identified developers” (those with an Apple developer certificate) in addition to the App Store. In that scenario, the App Store is no longer a single choke point for all native apps on the device.

    The App Store was envisioned as a means for Apple to maintain strict control over the software running on iOS devices. But in a totalitarian state like China (or perhaps Russia, next), it becomes a source of control for the totalitarian regime.

    Gruber doesn’t think this will happen, but it should. These pocket computers are supremely important to communications and it’s well past time for Apple to open things up.

  • The creators of Gone Home have a new game coming out. This time you are playing the role of protagonist Amy Ferrier on the Tacoma space station. Here’s part of Andy Kelly’s review at Windows Gamer:

    The first wing of the station I can access is Personnel. Now pinned to the floor by artificial gravity, I walk into a communal dining area and an AR recording flickers to life. A timeline appears on the HUD allowing me to scrub through the memory, pausing, rewinding, or fast forwarding at my leisure. The crew, represented as digital silhouettes, are preparing for a party, and I’m immediately struck by how believable the dialogue is. It has a natural, conversational flow, never feeling contrived or overly expository.

    The crew, despite appearing to Amy only as faceless, transparent figures, have nicely rounded personalities. This is thanks to the game’s impressively expressive animation and superb voice acting, which combine to create characters who buzz with life. At first the recordings don’t seem to be anything more than elaborate audio logs, passively relaying a story to you in a way games have been doing for years now. But the clever thing about Tacoma is how they cover a large area, with conversations spread between many different rooms. Say you’re observing an argument between three people and one leaves the room. If you stick around you might hear them talking about her quietly behind her back. And if you decide to follow her, she might confide in someone in another part of the station about what just happened.

    The thing I love about these games from Fullbright is that they take something that is kind of ridiculous at this point, the audio log, and turn it into the centerpiece of their game. Taking an overused piece of gaming mechanics and turning it into something special drew me to O E S and Black Shades when their original developers took the escort missions that everyone loathes and made it the focus of their games.

    Tacoma will be $20 and available on August 2nd for Windows, macOS, and Linux* via Steam and gog, as well as the Xbox One.

    I’m looking forward to playing it.

  • Step 1) Never increase the minimum wage, which peaked in 1968 at (adjusted for 2014 inflation) $10
    Step 2) Strip healthcare away from 32 million people even when they get it through their workplace.
    Step 3) Invest in tech startups and profit on suffering!

    Bloomberg’s Suzanne Wooley:

    Crowdfunding platforms such as GoFundMe and YouCaring have turned sympathy for Americans drowning in medical expenses into a cottage industry. Now Republican efforts in Congress to repeal and replace Obamacare could swell the ranks of the uninsured and spur the business of helping people raise donations online to pay for health care.

    […]

    With enough volume, the business of helping people raise money for medical care has a lot of profit potential. GoFundMe takes 5 percent of each donation, 2.9 percent goes to payment processing, and there’s a 30¢ transaction fee. Smaller sites, such as Fundly and FundRazr, charge much the same. YouCaring donors pay just a 2.9 percent processing fee plus the 30¢.

    […]

    For more and more Americans, vying in a popularity contest for a limited supply of funds and sympathy may be the only way to pay the doctors and stay afloat. House Republicans passed a bill last month to replace the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. As is, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, it would leave 23 million more Americans uninsured in 2026 than under the ACA. Even a law just resembling the bill is likely to raise the cost of health care for older and sicker Americans and for those with preexisting conditions, bolstering the medical crowdfunding business.

    Call your represenatives.

  • Cyrus Nemati for Slate in an article titled “iPhone Gamers, Brace Yourselves for the App-ocalypse”:

    If you’re an iPhone user still addicted to Flappy Bird, be ready to experience withdrawal symptoms.
    When Apple launches iOS 11 in September, the company will drop support for old 32-bit applications—which is most apps released before 2014. Apps that haven’t been updated by their developers to run on the more efficient 64-bit architecture will cease to work

    That’s true, but this article is also completely ridiculous in its conclusions. Here’s one of the solutions that Nemati suggests:

    One obvious move: Create an emulator. By creating what amounts to simulators of old iOS versions, Apple could keep its past alive indefinitely. It’s something we saw recently when Nintendo released NES Classic, a replica of its stocky first gaming system loaded with 30 cherished early games. At 2.3 million units sold, it’s a good example of an emulator being used to make a quick buck (or more) on the back of nostalgia.

    Emulating the Nintendo Entertainment System is easy today on low-powered, cheap, hardware. The Classic Edition kind of made sense for Nintendo as a product, but it is unlikely that Apple would ever release something similar.

    Planned obsolescence is Apple’s modus operandi. It needs to keep customers buying new iPhones with updated specs. It’s unfortunate for consumers, who may have grown attached or even paid for these soon-to-be-defunct apps, and a shame for the creators who may see their work disappear.

    The idea that Apple wants people to be unhappy with their devices on a schedule is almost as ridiculous as the idea of the iPhone Classic. Would you continue to buy things from a company that make you unhappy? I think you should replace things when they no-longer meet your needs or when there are new features that would dramatically change the experience of using that object in your life.

    I agree that there should be some effort to archive these old applications, Apple is rich enough to do something about it, but it is going to be difficult to do that in today’s software environment.

    Here are some of the software and hardware hurdles anyone who wanted to archive old iOS software would have to overcome:

    1. What’s the definitive article? With desktop software and older console games you could pack something up in an ISO or a copy of a cartridge’s ROM and say “this is the definitive article.” That’s difficult to do with networked software that is constantly being updated. You might say that the final version of the software released to the public by the original developer is the definitive article, but I bet some people would want a prior version because it did something differently, or the first version because it represented the most raw and original idea the developer had.
    2. An iPhone Classic that is running an out-of-date version of iOS for using old applications would probably be inappropriate for a general audience as it would lack modern security and networking features for accessing any data online. Any exploits that enable jailbreaking also enable bad people to do bad things to that device.
    3. What about the iPad, would there have to be an iPad Classic Edition? An Apple TV Classic Edition? An Apple Watch Classic Edition?
    4. Could you imagine Apple going on stage during an event to try and explain a custom version of the iPhone that exists solely to run historical software? “Here’s the iPhone Classic, it only runs iOS versions up to 10.” It would confuse their messaging around whatever iPhone they’re actually trying to sell. That’s not our problem as users and developers, but it’s another reason why they would be less likely to have anything to do with such an effort.
    5. This old App Store. They’d also have to maintain an older version of their app store and review software updates for those 32bit apps that couldn’t be transitioned to 64bit.
    6. Users would be frustrated when something doesn’t work right because an underlying piece of infrastructure is gone like an API server for logging into games.
    7. Developers who are still around would be stuck attempting to support versions of apps that they haven’t worked on in years. Is every app in this Classic App Store going to have a “probably unsupported” label on it?
    8. Apple still needs to encourage developers to transition to 64bit. All of that infrastructure would have to exist while they’re also encouraging developers to update old apps to 64bit.
    9. Apple has offered emulators for desktop software to run during transitions in the past, but desktops have the power and the room to explain what is going on with older software running in emulation or virtualization.
    10. I’m not sure if a modern iPhone even has the potential performance to virtualize an older device without destroying the performance of modern software running on the same device at the same time.
    11. How do you explain what is going on in any way that makes sense to a regular person?

    Honestly, I think the only people in a position to solve this are software pirates, and they are still going to have a difficult time trying to do that for all of the games and other software out there on mobile platforms. Any other group would have hurdles that are too large to jump over in keeping this old software alive. It’s a problem for every modern online software distribution mechanism. Sony’s and Microsoft’s online stores for the PlayStation and Xbox both have this issue. Nintendo’s laughable online shop couldn’t even give you access to software you purchased previously without calling their support line and begging for it until they released the Switch and you’d still lose your game saves if your Switch is lost, broken, or stolen.

    Software preservation is well and truly fucked.