rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

tink could also shoot godzilla with a gun

or oversalt his tater tots after swapping his high blood pressure meds with sugar pills

I love Tim Rogers’ content and also I have a crush on him.

the classic content-supplemented crush

https://kotaku.com/no-man-s-sky-players-had-their-first-war-and-it-killed-1821399331

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/20/16800924/silver-snipers-senior-counter-strike-team

http://mightyvision.blogspot.com/2017/12/cinco-paus-dev-notes.html

Knowing that the majority of my audience won't be able to read everything made an interesting design constraint, gave me extra inspiration about how to make everything deducible through reason and experimentation - not a bad goal anyway (as every game designer learns - players do not read the instructions)! From a few reactions I've gotten it seems like for some people it is much more upsetting to encounter a genuine foreign language than gibberish symbols or no text at all; I don't quite understand this but I find it a valuable experience to spend time in an environment where things aren't made for people like me, and if I can share some of this to challenge others then I'm happy.

http://www.sirlin.net/posts/adding-a-friend-in-street-fighter-5

oh wow adventures in subcontracting

what there's another new brough game okay no one needs anything from me this month right

https://www.polygon.com/features/2017/12/18/16175268/indie-developer-road-trip

https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/a3n8ea/how-sierra-and-a-disgraced-cop-made-the-most-reactionary-game-of-the-90s

i was too young to remember was a horrible human being Daryl Gates was

good thing videogames have now moved on from blithely endorsing the misuse of state power huh

(that was a really good piece tho, thx for posting)

the 90s were terrible except for the techno

a lot of the techno was terrible too tbf

That is true of all the days that have passed since MIDI

i was too young to remember was a horrible human being Daryl Gates was

i remember the LA Riots and D.A.R.E., had no idea the guy behind all of those was brought in to take over the Police Quest series!

at this point it wouldn't be too hard to draw lines directly from Halo/COD and Microsoft to US military recruitment (and for people failing that, enrolling in police academy)

he claims to have invented SWAT as well. he's like ground zero for paramilitary police propoganda

this article from a couple of years ago is pretty good on the direct and indirect links between gaming and the military: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-02-02-the-military-recruitment-of-gamers

Great story on Police Quest. Game looks super pleasant!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BR1u-qT3J4&feature=youtu.be&t=3h18m50s

Oops, link here

thought the article was kind of patchily-written/edited but still well worth reading, thanks! ken williams perpetually coming off worse and worse in my mind. one of the living avatars of how easily west-coast/60s counterculturalism slid into reactionary 80s-mustached business conservatism.

The counter-cultural Sierra stuff was always pretty conservative! Leisure Suit Larry, for obvious reasons. And Space Quest, which I don't think has a female character till the 4th game.

(I never played any of the Roberta Williams stuff till recently - Colonel's Bequest holds up quite well!)

at this point it wouldn't be too hard to draw lines directly from Halo/COD and Microsoft to US military recruitment (and for people failing that, enrolling in police academy)

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Friday, January 19, 2018 5:46 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It sometimes occurs to how non-implausible it is that FPS-es could be employed as a Last Starfighter-esque tool by the military.

drone pilots already use xbox controllers iirc

because hellworld

yeah i posted the article for the content, not the writing. i had a vague memory of the daryl gates police quest but hadn't really thought through the implications, and i didn't know about sierra's conservative underpinnings

I wanted to know more about what happened next (like, did anyone quit/how it changed how people felt about Sierra/etc) but this was the 90s and your work options were "get used to it or quit"

I always looked at the PQ series as a bizarre outlier for Sierra's output. The police code crap was insane, even compared to LSL's stuff

remember lucas arts taking shots at sierra

http://www.eeggs.com/images/items/4266.full.jpg

One of the top Twin Galaxies record holders gets caught cheating multiple times; all his records are still on the site.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e-H4sEHB54

pretty good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYjbCJXxWLg

Bennett Foddy, the maker of "Getting Over It" (and QWOP!), plays "Getting Over It" with Tim Rogers.

glad to see Rogers still looks and acts like a tool

i had been holding off on watching speedruns or anything so this is fascinating

—How did the development of Revenge of Shinobi begin?

Ohba: Sega was upgrading their console hardware from the Mark III to the Megadrive, and in tandem with that we were trying to think of something new and exciting to do. At that time in America, the arcade version of Shinobi had become a huge hit. In fact, ninjas in general were all the rage in America then. And so we decided our next game would be ninja-themed.

On the technical side, since this was going to be on the new Megadrive hardware, we wanted to use as much parallax scrolling as we could. We wanted every stage, if possible, to have over 3 layers of background scrolling. Our idea was to come up with a style of gameplay that actually made use of those multiple backgrounds.

--

By the way, as for the title of the game (“The Super Shinobi” in Japan)… at the time, a lot of Sega games had “SUPER” in the title. We didn’t just want to go with plain old “Super Shinobi” though, so we (quite meaninglessly) added “The” in front of it. (laughs) Those were the days!

—By the way, this game is called “Shinobi”, but the hero never does anything stealthy! Why is that?

Ohba: Hmm, it’s probably because we wanted to show how cool and badass ninjas are. They can jump higher than normal people, they’re physically stronger… we wanted to show them off, I guess? (laughs)

--

—The game balance for Revenge of Shinobi is undeniably difficult in places, but it felt like if you practiced, you could clear it.

Ohba: I actually did very extensive simulations—on paper. We imagined a very good player and asked ourselves, how many points could this player get by X stage? How much life would he need to get through X part? I had mapped everything out and knew the item locations—plus, the number of enemies was limited by the hardware, so with all these variables in hand, I could actually simulate and predict a lot of things on paper alone.

--

—I understand you actually had permission to use the copyright for Spiderman; how did that happen?

Ohba: Sega had already acquired copyright permission for the Spiderman arcade game they were developing. We were actually asked by Sega to include Spiderman as part of the promotional effort for that game. In that case we were actually told to make him look more like Spiderman. (laughs) That’s also why he doesn’t die when you beat him, he just runs off.

http://shmuplations.com/shinobi/

discovered this via Metafilter and have only skimmed it so far but kudos on the work involved. a fanmade history of the CRPG:

https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/

is this a crpg addict project or totally unrelated?

i think it's a different set of people - started at a site called RPG Codex. the reviews aren't all earth-shatteringly insightful but the scope of it and the design are really nice

i automatically read rpgcodex on whatever i'm playing because the people there have played everything and play v critically and have a whole conflicting assortment of furious dogmas that makes for good discourse, but a lot of posters there have more or less the political profile you might expect fyi (dunno who did the book tho)

have been meaning to start a thread about GRIMOIRE, the retro blobber developed by a megalomaniacal rightwing gen-x codex guy, which was vaporware for like decades but was "finally" "released" on steam last year, at premium prices, undocumented, and half-functioning-- well not about the game, which i have not played, but about the codex thread where he screams about how it's not priced for lazy millennials and sjws while a small coterie of fans adores him (and adores the game for being broken) and a furious nemesis (who also seems to be pretty rw) sets himself to cracking each new updated executable out of spite

soon to be a major motion picture

https://kotaku.com/sex-pong-and-pioneers-what-atari-was-really-like-ac-1822930057

https://www.filfre.net/2018/02/adventure-game-rock-stars-live-in-conference/

that Atari article was really good, esp in light of Bushnell recently getting dissed

I enjoyed both of those, thanks Nhex. Lot of good Sierra reading-up to do on that filfre website.

yeah, the atari piece was great

i've just finished reading john markoff's what the dormouse said, about the intersection of california counterculture and the early development of personal computing in the 60s and 70s, which covers some similar ground to the kotaku piece

it feels like there's a lot of potential for a mad men-style sprawlingly ambitious tv show about that whole era, something like halt and catch fire but with a different focus

^i love that book! it is as if the 60's hippie dream of no country boundaries where everything was free and shared was somehow made flesh by all those acid-dropping engineers.

yeah, it's great! been on my list for ages so i'm glad i finally got around to reading it