Tag: Nuclear throne

News

Vlambeer has written a book about six years of making videogames

We haven’t heard much from Dutch videogame studio Vlambeer for a while. Since the release of Nuclear Throne last December, they’ve been rolling out updates to that and some of their other games: Super Crate Box (2010), Serious Sam: The Random Encounter (2011), and LUFTRAUSERS (2014) are all getting updates. Besides that, Jan Willem Nijman’s been working on solo projects like DISC ROOM, which was a Humble Monthly exclusive, while Rami Ismail made Breach and Clean, a game about every hotel cleaning lady who’s ever hated you. But Vlambeer as a whole has still been kinda quiet. open pages sneak us…
Feature

The irresistible appeal of roguelike storytelling

A 20-something girl stands in an elevator. There’s an eye patch on her face, a shotgun on her back, and a pistol in her right hand. The door opens, and she hits the ground running into a room full of drones. They hover over her, firing red lasers completely bent on killing her. After all, why wouldn’t they be? Molly Pop is the head of the Zero Sum Gang, and she’s on a mission to topple the Fero corporation by raiding their bunkers one-by-one. She wastes no time, shooting down the flying robots in seconds, then travelling down a hallway…
News

New word processor lets you type letters with satellite images

Imagine painstakingly combing through the entirety of Google Maps trying to find buildings, pools, and other structures that resemble letters, then compiling those images together to make new fonts created wholly out of aerial imagery. That’s exactly what creators Benedikt Groß (a computational designer) and Joey Lee (a geographer) did while working on Aerial Bold Typewriter, a new word processor that allows users to easily type full sentences using satellite images of various man-made structures. “Satellite and aerial imagery are rich with stories,” write the duo, explaining how they came up with the idea for the Typewriter. In 2013, they released a…
Review

Nuclear Throne is hotter than a smoking gun

For a game that has zero puzzle elements Nuclear Throne sure feels like a seeing-eye puzzle. If I keep at it long enough I will eventually see the fire truck or star or whatever image it is hiding. There’s a sense that if I stay with it one more turn I’ll land on a magic run that sends me to the eponymous Nuclear Throne where I’ll be a king of the wasteland, like Immortan Joe, or anyone more flattering. The Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) comparison goes more than skin deep. The world of Nuclear Throne is overrun with bandits and…