rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

that bissell piece was better than i expected, i guess he goes on my very short list of People Actually Capable of Writing About Videogames

super cool blog! xp

i've got his wasteland blogs opened up in my browser to read throughout the day

whelp thomp, u have fucked me royally here as not only do i want to read every entry in this blog, but i'm thinking about playing thru a bunch of these games on a DOSBOX emulator myself. goodbye lif.

unsurprising and depressing
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18280000

Tom Bissell sucks dick.

nb, I did not read the Max Payne article.

Multiplayer taunting is & has been generally incredibly juvenile and offensive to everyone involved for a long, long time.

the bissell article was ok, but he still needs a few more to undo the "gta iv on coke" crap

this CRPG website has broken my brain

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/06/08/ah-i-just-need-to-share-this-day-z-story/

mordy i feel ur pain brah, i have like 48 hours left to hand in my dissertation and i'm still going 'i'll just finish the entries on might & magic ii'

guy plays same game of Civilization II for 10 years, posts the results
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/uxpil/ive_been_playing_the_same_game_of_civilization_ii/

lol that is fucking mental

The results are as follows.

The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.

There are 3 remaining super nations in the year 3991 A.D, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands.

I like that there are people proposing victory strategy, and he's going "That would take an actual year! Thank you!"

I guess there is no shortage of the materials to make nuclear weapons and other weapons of war? Despite there being shortages of everything else?

i don't think civ2 really simulates material shortages. natural resources are never exhausted in 4 (my civ) and iirc it was the same in 2. the food shortages are because the world's been nuke-trashed and farms don't work at all. although the cities are so depopulated i'm a little unclear on where he's getting the workforce to pump out icbms and tanks. maybe he has a couple industrial hellholes where he's managed to keep people concentrated and working. anyway, shortages of everything except weapons is very soviet.

i played a game of age of empires once that was so prolonged eventually every nonrenewable resource on the map was exhausted and none of the players could train advanced units and everyone went back to fighting with clubs over the decaying cities no one knew how to build anymore.

civ2 doesn't really simulate anything!

i don't really understand that post. how do you play until the year 4000 with two other civs remaining? that guy sucks.

also iirc if you have spies in your own cities it prevents other spies from doing anything

man i'd love to play this again, haha

also how does it take ten years, he must be playing this game very occasionally indeed

He mentions that he's 'won' the game already (you just have to get to 2020), and once again by the space race. He's just interested in the fact that he's got a balanced stand-off, I reckon.

what an asshole! man fuck that guy

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/117848-Kickstarter-Video-Project-Attracts-Misogynist-Horde

Oh, ha, just posted that to a different thread. I guess it's not surprising, but still. Fuck humanity.

don't lose sight of the fact she has shattered her goal.

the epic civ game had a mention on Today on BBC Radio 4 this morning.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jrj7v#synopsis

(details not there as i type as programme has just finished)

a better link (beware the audio starts automatically)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9728000/9728077.stm

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/12/3051197/tetris-future-touchscreens-buttons

although lols at zach gage getting interviewed for every article about video games ever it seems.

this is crack to me:
http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2012/06/wizardry-v-final-rating.html

i fell down that hole too when thomp first posted it. here i go again.

i used to have a gold box copy of pool of radiance yknow. with the code wheel and the map and and and. i got it for fifty cents at a rummage sale at the kailua public library on oahu. i wonder if it's still at my parents' house. probably not. it might as well be a box of baseball cards.

i don't know that the world needs an exhaustive survey of the early history of CRPG's, but i'm still kinda glad it is getting one

give this guy a book contract and put him on this project full time until it's done

even then i bet he'd still die before he got to fallout.

this is gonna be embarrassing but after i read a bunch of those entries i booted up ultima 4 and stared at the screen and really tried to ~use my imagination~, like i walked my (the) stifflegged avatar along a swampy coast square-by-square and thought about the smell of salt, and then i fought an orc, which ran away into the forest, snapping branches in my head. it was great and my gpu's fan didn't spin at all. it's still weirdly hard to find the dungeons in that game though, or maybe i'm just a pampered 90s wimp no matter how hard i try. i did beat ultima 1 when i was a kid! what a strange game to beat.

wow that site is insane and a dangerous potential time sink

hey forks, i sent u email

will check it out.

that guy didn't like Larn, he is dead to me :(

(but his blog is still amazing and ALSO I learnt things I didn't know about Larn from the comments, so, win)

(I might not like Larn either if it hadn't been my first ever RPG - there are many infuriating things about it which have not aged gracefully, even for those with a high ASCII roguelike tolerance. Like when you prowl around the last dungeon level wondering which door the guardian boss dude is lurking behind and bam, it turns out you fell into a pit, and since it's the last level, oh, it's a bottomless pit, game over)

i have read the entire thing. mordy have you read the entire thing yet or am i the only one.

this is gonna be embarrassing but after i read a bunch of those entries i booted up ultima 4 and stared at the screen and really tried to ~use my imagination~, like i walked my (the) stifflegged avatar along a swampy coast square-by-square and thought about the smell of salt, and then i fought an orc, which ran away into the forest, snapping branches in my head. it was great and my gpu's fan didn't spin at all. it's still weirdly hard to find the dungeons in that game though, or maybe i'm just a pampered 90s wimp no matter how hard i try. i did beat ultima 1 when i was a kid! what a strange game to beat.

― a hauntingly unemployed american (difficult listening hour), Thursday, 21 June 2012 02:51 (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

when i was ... nine? i played the (gorgeous) master system version of u4 for hours until the contacts got dirty or something and random tiles loaded on every screen and the save function wouldn't work. i got absolutely nowhere: just wandered around and found the towns and recruited i think everyone, but found the way in to one dungeon and was a little too worried to go there. (despite being, like, max level.) (which is funny because the overworld enemies scale so i was spending all my time, like, running the hell away from balrogs.) i had very little idea what to do on the main quest because i. as a child i was not exactly a lateral thinker ii. for some reason the spellbook and 'codex of britannic wisdom' or whatever it was came in french so i was very vague on what exactly i was doing, save for saving up for new swords and running away from balrogs

lol nes version

http://hardcoregaming101.net/ultima/Ultima%20IV%20Quest%20of%20the%20Avatar/ultima4%20-%20NES%20-%2006.png

i got absolutely nowhere: just wandered around and found the towns and recruited i think everyone, but found the way in to one dungeon and was a little too worried to go there.

Ha! That's exactly the same as what I did with The Ring of Darkness when I was the same age.

i've said this before but i wasted an entire summer to beat ultima 1 nes and it's still the hardest game i've ever beat

the hardest game i've ever beat is the hugely underrated zelda 2. the final boss fight (yourself) (it's pretty deep) was nervewracking beyond belief. i mean i was six so maybe it'd be easier now but not that much easier, i hope.

in defense of nine?-year-old thomp the U4 main quest is kinda designed to mess with your preconceptions about video games. like one of the things you have to do to progress is not kill fleeing enemies. (but you also can't flee yourself, i think, so those balrogs drive you down.)

Hardest game I ever beat was Ancient Domains of Mystery, took me two years of playing through leisure time and a five-day binge at the end. This was followed by a renewed interest in physical fitness and no patience for videogames of any kind

hardest game i ever beat was Adam Cadre's Varicella. i did use some hints to solve it, but i was proud that i figured a lot of it out myself. that game is a puzzle gauntlet.

oh i'd forgotten about IF! i beat infocom's sorcerer without help. i was so proud of that. then spellbreaker i never got anywhere.

honestly the most amazing thing to me about that CRPG blog is how many of them he beats. all of them! except the ones he decides are No Fun. and he has some seriously forgiving standards in that department.

Oh god, Varicella did my head in.