Quick Look: Unfinished: Nuclear Throne 10/16/2013

I really enjoyed the Mojam version of this (back when it was called Wasteland Kings).

Edit: I'm surprised Brad didn't make a salacious comment relating to triple wielding...

Pretty psyched to see how this one goes!

Radioactive butts? Sign me up!

Vlambeer are turning into one of my favourite developers, loved Super Crate Box, played earlier alphas of this it was a load of fun

YESSSS - Been playing the hell out of this game. Watching the livestream (which is going right now) of development has been fun as well.

Vlambeer are KINGS

Oh this is/was Wasteland Kings!

"i dont think you can play this with a gamepad"

Well, you will! Since its coming to PS4 and Vita!

Hot Justice is my favourite Vlambeer game.

I don't know... what's the point of random levels if all the events are scripted? I mean, "arena with enemies" is a fairly generic thing to procedurally create. The fun in Rogue Legacy, Binding of Isaac, Spelunky or FTL is the random special events planted alongside the randomized layouts. Maybe they'll eventually build in something like that?

Don't get me wrong, this seems pleasantly Crimsonland-y, but that game still exists, you know? I'd like to see some more original ideas here.

You can only control movement with the gamepad at the moment, so with someone else on the mouse you can get some poorly coordinated co-op hot justice

VINNY MADE A PARADISE LOST REFERENCE!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry for caps, but as a graduate student in Early Modern poetry my particular interests don't get called out much on GB.

I initially didn't like the change in name but Nuclear Throne has grown on me. The game is also pretty neat!

Pineapple Smash Crew seems better

what? they were talking about how the game is too fast for it to be any good with a gamepad and would be terrible if you tried to use one. Im just saying thats not true since they are making it for PS4 and Vita.

roguelike thing

Nah. Though it's not like Brad of all people would care to learn the meaning of something before tossing around inaccurate genre terms.

@mdnthrvst said:

Lol.

@fartgod666: Wow, how insightful.

pop-pop!

looks kinda like Space Funeral, graphically. only you know, less crazy

This game costs more now in Early Access than it will on release. That's insane.

Was going to buy it until I saw that.

What the developers say:

“By buying Nuclear Throne you can support Vlambeer and the rest of the team whilethey're working and livestreaming the development of the game. You'll receive a new build of Nuclear Throne pretty much every week. After launch, when all the live development is over, the game will be available for slightly less than the Early Access price.”

The hex characters when starting with the robot translate to 'robot'

Good to know. The game looks fun but I don't care for m/kb controls.

I too got a weird Hotline Miami vibe.

I wish they had not brought up the argument of rogue-like. You get the purists stomping on their own penises every time. And probably the other extreme missing that inherent part. I wasn't very good at Issac, but the only thing I resented was having the mandatory beginning after the 20th time. Thought it was intelligent the first 19.

I do not like early access, Alpha or any of that. Still may get this, I do like what I saw.

"Fudge!"

Wait why would this not be good on a gamepad? Did I miss the part where you have to be super accurate with your aiming like in Hotline?

A gamepad seems perfect for this.

Or they could have just not brought up the word (which is never spelled with a hyphen, by the way) because it's not accurate. It's not accurate because this game is a dual-joystick shooter in the vein of Geometry Wars, and any dual-joystick shooter, even one with random levels, is, necessarily, not a roguelike.

'Roguelike' is its own genre, not a dressing you drizzle onto your video game salad that stands for 'randomness and permadeath.' FTL is a spaceship-combat game that takes influence from roguelikes. Influence is not the same thing as identity. I believe Rogue Legacy coined the term 'roguelites' for its own thing. Edmund McMillen freely admits Isaac isn't a roguelike. Even if Brad doesn't consider any of this, which of course he won't, that doesn't mean I'm going to roll over and let a thirty-year old genre term be co-opted by oblivious game journalists for a three-year old fad in commercial indie games.

As someone who's played pretty much every roguelike that's come out in the last two decades, I know what I'm talking about and care about it too. Of COURSE I'm perfectly okay with bringing it up every single time it gets misued, though penis-stomping is a pretty good slight.

@mdnthrvst: calm down

Steam + controller = Steamroller

@depecheload: Always one dude who flips. As for me I think Nuclear Throne will make a great addition to roguelikes.

@lovemuffin: Yeah, someone who I bet can't even name three of them and goes by a definition supported by no game developers at all. If the FTL guys and the Spelunky guy and the Isaac guy say they don't make roguelikes, then that's the end of it for me.

This looks like a fun rogue-alike. I think I'll buy it!

Eh, it's an easy shorthand for what is ultimately a difficult-to-define trend. Technically most games are a little hard to categorize into one specific genre. RPG elements was the last big fad I can remember, and that made some weird grognard people angry too. Ultimately I LOVE when elements of disparate genres and styles get mixed together.

Oh, and also, the games press generally doesn't use the same exact terminology and references as game developers. It gets a little too inside baseball.

Best roguelike ever.

@mormonwarrior said:

And roguelike fans like myself resist the trend, seeing it as the co-opting of a term for weird and niche games to mean something much broader than what it originally meant. We have to. Because FTL and the like is never going to be Crawl or Cataclysm or ToME. Those games are unlike anything else out there, and they deserve their own genre term, the one that was invented for them, 'roguelikes'. There is no other term for them. This game, on the other hand, is a dual-joystick shooter. That's what you call it. Elements from roguelikes don't remove the dual-joystick shooter part.

@mdnthrvst: haha dude you genuinely care whether or not people spell roguelike with a hyphen, you might not be the #1 authority on this subject.

Why can't you call it a dual-joystick-shooter-rogue-like, then? ;)

@moonwalksa said:

Then look it up. It really never is hyphenated. Doing so is something of a shibboleth, really - anyone who would hyphenate it probably isn't all that familiar with it.

"This game is a dual-joystick shooter roguelike, and this game is a roguelike... roguelike".

That's real dumb, dude. And yes, the latter group does exist, an ignorance of which probably drives a lot of this angry dismissal. "Who are these jerks with their old text games I've never heard of? Why do they matter?"

@mdnthrvst:

Honestly thank you for the last allowance. It was a wee-bit short of a slight :)

@mdnthrvst: Dude, it doesn't matter. The hyphen thing or the genre definition thing. Nothing is simply one genre and that hasn't been the case for a very long time. To try to say that Wasteland Kings can only be called a dual-stick shooter is doing it a disservice.

And before you go off about newbies not familiar with the roguelike genre or whatever the fuck, I've beaten ToME and Dredmor multiple times, played a shitton of Elona and Elona+, played even more Dwarf Fortress adventure mode, and almost made it to the end of adom and crawl. You're just being a pedant for no reason - people can love things without trying to claim arbitrary ownership over a useful descriptive term.

Sitting on a nuclear throne would be really bad for your health regardless of how cool it made you look.

Wonder why they changed the name? Wasteland Kings is way better. Looks cool as shit though.

I didn't say it can only be called a dual-joystick shooter. It obviously takes the notions of permadeath and random level generation from roguelikes. Clear influence by any measure.

The only point I'm making is that these two ancillary features, neither of which truly define gameplay, don't in themselves constitute a definition of 'roguelike'. Roguelikes are turn-based games on square grids.

An apt comparison is Call of Duty - it is, first and foremost, a first-person shooter, and having RPG progression elements doesn't remove the primacy of the shooter part. The relationship between dual-joystick shooters or spaceship combat games or anything else, and roguelikes, is quite similar to the Call of Duty shooter/RPG thing. Call of Duty is a shooter with RPG elements, Planetscape: Torment is an RPG. Likewise, Nuclear Throne is a shooter with roguelike elements, while Tales of Maj'Eyal is a roguelike.

You would never call Call of Duty 'an RPG' without bringing up the shooter part.

I love how brad never stops being surprised by those things that explode into maggots. And also likes to just leave enemies alive and forge ahead.

@mdnthrvst: Roguelike = Like Rogue. If it has some elements, such as permadeath, that are Like Rogue, it at the very least has Roguelike Elements. Oh my goodness.

@mdnthrvst: Like it or not, roguelikes are not just turn-based games on grids anymore.

A similar argument was had when more roguelike developers shifted away from ascii graphics and more tilesets were being made; there was an older group resistant to change who insisted that roguelikes could only ever be ascii-based and anything different was a different kind of game. Obviously that isn't the case anymore, and that viewpoint has fallen out of favor due to being stubborn and limited.

The same thing is currently happening with whether or not roguelikes even need to be dungeon crawlers or turn-based rpgs or limited to a grid, and the prevailing opinion is once again shifting towards the direction that allows more creative freedom and exploration of new concepts rather than the one that likes putting things in simple boxes because change is scary.

"Roguelike = like Rogue" is a silly recent argument that has no basis in the roguelike community, and I trust the consensus of roguelike players a bit more than one random person who likes to have arguments.

There are actually plenty of codified definitions for roguelikes that go quite a bit deeper than the trite fallacy that is 'like Rogue', the most prominent being the Berlin Interpretation, which lays out quite a number of conditions, some more important than others. Every community has their own, some more strict and some more liberal, and none of them are simply defined as 'like Rogue'. Roguelikes have a rich and detailed and history going back to 1980. Roguelike-likes started three years ago when Isaac came out.

Who's prevailing opinion? And no, this isn't some curmudgeonly old-timer thing, either. FTL is awesome. It also clearly isn't the same type of game as Crawl. NetHack or Cataclysm or ToME certainly are. And making the equivalence to the 'tiles or ASCII' thing doesn't make sense. NetHack has had tiles since the late 80s. Graphics don't affect gameplay. Roguelikes and ASCII have been together for a very long time, but they've never been inseparable as a rule.

Hahaha holy shit. Ok, nevermind, I see you're one of Those.

@larrydavis said:

Proudly, in fact. People who play a niche genre of game tend to discuss said genre with a measure of authority. Condescension and cursing about it isn't making you look good.