Post-apocaltypic roguelike Nuclear Throne was a blast. Knife-edge dodge rolls, chunky shotguns, playable telekinetic eyeball monsters. It had it all – except clearly a team of modders disagreed. Their homebrewed “Territorial Expansion” came out last week, with enough doo dahs and polish to pass as an official update. There are new areas, enemies, bosses, weapons and characters. Also, pet parrots. Nothing like a pet parrot to lure me back to armageddon.

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After a string of larger games (including the excellent roguelike shooter Nuclear Throne), Vlambeer are getting back to their roots. At PAX West last weekend, the tiny studio with the big screen-shake effects had an interesting prototype on show – an arcade arena shooter with simple controls and an unusual puzzle-like spin.

Vlambeer are getting right back to the score-chasing roots of videogames here, minus watching all your 20p coins mysteriously vanishing. A spaceship zaps aliens in a single-screen arena, but the enemies you shoot determine where and when the next wave spawns. IGN caught some of the game (as well as developer Rami Ismail to explain it) at the show, and you can see it in action below.

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Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail (Nuclear Throne, Ridiculous Fishing) is one of the nicest people in the industry. When he’s not hammering away at the code-forge, he’s travelling the world, meeting new people and advocating diversity in games. Recently, he swung by Barcelona to moderate talks at industry conference Gamelab. While he was there, he found the time to give a few interviews, including a particularly interesting (and lengthy) one to Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat’s games division, wherein he detailed the problems faced by both sides of the industry today.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.>

Nuclear Throne [official site] is a bullet hell, twin-stick shooter roguelike set in an apocalyptic wasteland. Like, seriously apocalyptic – playable characters include a telekinetic sack of eyeballs, a mutated plant that s 90% mouth, and a blob of radioactive gloop. (more…)

The rad roguelikelike shoot ’em up Nuclear Throne has launched what developers Vlambeer are calling its “final major update”. This comes almost two years after Nuclear Throne launched out of early access. Update 99 brings balance tweaks and buckets of bug fixes, improves the game’s performance, and should make modding easier. It doesn’t add gobs of new content but is intended to tidy up odds and ends to leave Nuclear Throne in a fit state for posterity. Well, mostly – it does seem to have a nasty little bug wiping progress for some players. Maybe wait a bit, just to be safe. (more…)

Online co-op multiplayer has arrived in Nuclear Throne [official site], Vlambeer’s John-pleasing rougelikelike shooter, thanks to an unofficial new mod. YellowAfterlife’s Nuclear Throne Together mod cleverly adds online multiplayer completely with Steam invitations and lobby lists, which is awfully impressive considering Vlambeer never shared source code – this is reverse-engineered. Now you and a pal can try to become kings of the nuclear wasteland together.

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After two years on Early Access, Nuclear Throne [official site] is now declared FINISHED, and released on Steam and Humble. Bullet heaven or bullet hell? Here’s wot I think:>

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Being bad at something doesn’t always mean it’s not enjoyable. And that’s never more the case than when there’s not an opponent to let down or feel crushed by. In the solitary land of single-player video games, it’s very possible to be absolutely dreadful at a game and yet adore playing it. Perhaps it’s even possible in multiplayer gaming too?

For me, the best example is Teleglitch. I’m not even going to tell you how embarrassingly far I’ve gotten into that game, but I’ve played it so> much. But what is it for you?

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When I meet Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail, it’s in the middle of the annual Develop conference in Brighton. He’s a striking figure in a sea that’s half middle-aged businessmen and half wide-eyed, unshaven young developers in t-shirts: improbably tall, wearing a leather jacket on a hot summer’s day, hair everywhere, and a mile-a-minute patter that conveys extreme confidence without evident arrogance. He’s nearing the end of Ramadan, which means he hasn’t eaten during the day for several weeks, but has the energy and enthusiasm of someone about to climb Everest. Like his company’s offbeat action games and his often highly outspoken social media style or not, it is little surprise that this guy became so successful – though of course the raw, joyful appeal of games including Nuclear Throne, Super Crate Box, Luftrausers and Ridiculous Fishing went a long way towards that.

But would the confidence and conviction that he has when he wades headlong into the gaming issues of the day or, as he does in his keynote Develop speech the next day, declare that listening to one’s customers is not necessarily the best policy, be there if he didn’t already have the safety net of that success? In the unedited transcript below, we talk about that, about his feelings towards his own customers, indie ‘luck’, why games want rockstars, Ubisoft’s women characters controversy and why he doesn’t feel he can tell anyone else how to be successful. … [visit site to read more]

Twitch has its fair share of problems, but there’s no denying the utter ubiquity of the massive videogame streaming service. Heck, I use it for two separate shows here on RPS, and I’m sure plenty of you stream out your cursing-and-bad-joke-ridden exploits as well. It’s interesting, then, to see what Twitch has decided to do with the powder keg of potential influence sitting right beneath its purple buttocks. Its latest decision? A move into game sales and – in one special case – funding. You can now purchase Vlambeer’s madly addictive Nuclear Throne from Twitch. Meanwhile, the Twitch Plays Pokemon inspired Choice Chamber is having its Kickstarter funding matched dollar-for-dollar by the streaming goliath.

… [visit site to read more]