rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

an episode of this is two hours!?? sorry man

you never seen chrontendo? dude is playing through every nintendo/famicom game ever made and giving background, creator stories, design commentary... they're great. best served by skipping around though. I had no idea there was an nes splatterhouse

it's SUPER nerdy stuff but loads of fun

crazy stuff going on in the world of professional gaming
http://www.dailydot.com/esports/league-of-legends-promise-suicide-match-fixing/

yikes. and i thought the pot-splitting in the fighting scene was bad! this sort of thing is inevitable once gambling creeps in, unfortunately

http://www.polygon.com/features/2014/3/24/5519352/defense-grid-2-fun

Uhhhhhhhh I'm just going to put this here.

Just skimming the photos - these are teenagers doing an elaborate performance piece for April Fools, right? Or am I old?

I can't get over how long that thing is

thanks for reminding me this dude still exists. and by thanks I mean BLARRRFFFFFFFFF

It says he wrote 3 essays on SMB3? I've only read the one on Actionbutton, are the others published online?

Starbaby

i preferred seanbaby

DISC 1: Roy Ozaki of Mitchell Corp / Kouichi Yotsui of Strider / Westone offices / Ryuichi Nishizawa of Wonderboy / Cannon Dancer director's commentary / TGS 2013 tour / Yusaku Yamamoto of GameSide / BEEP Shop with Takayuki Komabayashi / Keigo Matsubara and his 14,000 books / Data East's Deco Cassette / unseen footage of Flash Boy & Ninja, the rarest Deco games / Michitaka Tsuruta of Solomon's Key / Sony Indies Stream / Yuzo Koshiro of Sega / Bare Knuckle 4 / Professor Yoshihiro Kishimoto of Pac-Land / BONUS: photo slideshows

DISC 2: Hifumi Kouno, Masaki Higuchi, and Masatoshi Mitori on Human Entertainment / Toru Hidaka, legendary Enix programmer / Yutaka Isokawa of Catrap / dissecting Namco's neGcon controller / visiting Kobe, Kyoto and Osaka / unreleased MSX game by Yuichi Toyama / PCE vs FC audio with Takayuki Hirono / design documents for Guardian Legend, MUSHA, and Aleste 2 / Masayuki Suzuki explains Taito pixel art / parallax scrolling on PCE / artist Satoshi Nakai / flying to Hokkaido / composer Yasuhito Saito / Sapporo by night / capsule hotel / Hudson's abandoned R&D laboratory / The Game Preservation Society / the rarest PCE game / OutRun tapes with Yoji Ishii / Famicom programming with Manabu Yamana / Yoshiro Kimura / unreleased CBM game / Hiroshi Suzuki / Masakuni Mitsuhashi / prototype MSX / Akira Takiguchi / rock, paper, scissors with Kotaro Hayashida of Alex Kidd / Akihabara / Nakano Broadway / Night photography / BONUS: photo slideshows

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/japandvd/japandvd.htm

A DVD accompanying a book, with lots of interviews of Japanese game developers. Looks very interesting!

40 pounds, fffffffffffff

articles about EVE never not good:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/04/28/eve-diary-part-three-oui-together/

true but also supports the axiom that its more interesting to read about eve than it is to play it

a great chick article even if i don't imagine i'll ever get around to playing the game: http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2014/05/05/ten-reasons-imperialism-ii-greatest-strategy-game-ever-made/

i disagree w/ his take on civ iv (that it has no opinion about history - i think it pretty obviously has a techno-neo-liberalism opinion), and i think he's a little confused about french colonialism (and the ottoman empire's endurance), or just eliding it. otherwise pretty great and makes me want to play.

still maintain that despite all the obvious nonsense in its modeling (and only at slow speeds) civ4 can teach you stuff abt how history works in a v general tolstovian way because it's such a sandbox, because things you do (or find in the ground) ripple outwards in coherent ways you don't always expect. have never played imp2 but played a lot of 1 and chick is right that it is much more specific: most of what it is is an elegant lil game-model of an industrial economy (raw materials, labor, manufactured goods, imports, exports) so if yr even a lil bit marxist and who isn't it's immediately more provocative and interesting than civ (where cities can't even feed each other).

mordy right about civ4's ideology too. alpha centauri is much more opinionless i think (a strength). in civ4 unless your plan is to kill everyone on the planet the right answer by the end is almost always to be a democratic capitalist state with freedom of religion and maybe a lil bit of environmentalism if the game goes on long enough; in smac i've built glittering rich-and-happy regimes of every political kind. though i favor total thought control.

my takeaway from that article is that imperialism 2 is a terrible game for which the writer has fabricated an elaborate personal narrative

but maybe that's just how paradox games get you. anyway, i've got to get back to orchestrating genoa's global trade empire.

the Civ games always come from a liberal capitalist perspective, maybe 4 more than most, will have to think about it later when i've read the article

I actually owned a copy of Imperialism II when I was in high school, and remember playing for many hours. Most of the stuff he says is bang on, but most of what I still remember about the game these days is how broken the combat model was once everyone maxed their artillery out. I might try loading it up again.

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.de/2014/05/the-indie-bubble-is-popping.html?

eh, he complains about this all the time
and also steadfastly refuses to make games that look like they were made after 1994

I've been getting into rpgs lately for pretty much the first time in my life. Now that I'm older and smoke weed I have a lot more patience for the reading/slow pace. And general strangeness of it all.

Moral of the story..smoke some weed before you read things in video games.

two words deus ex

Perhaps this

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BqcJOa5CQAAa9L3.jpg

someone else read it and get back to us

i accidentally read to 1002 and my life turned into a glitchy mess of random shapes and numbers, worried i might be dead

weed + video games is the most classic combo

um - not videogames but this board is called i love games + it's good:

http://grantland.com/features/diplomacy-the-board-game-of-the-alpha-nerds/

Today I will mostly be getting high and playing oblivion.

Wow somebody wrote a book about my backlog.

xps That Diplomacy article was interesting, but like with those EVE articles, I feel like I'm looking at an alien culture that bizarrely spends its free time filling itself with bile and anger.

Atari E.T. burial and excavation documentary trailer:

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

getting bored of people overstating The Great Videogame Crash Of 1983 which only happened in the US really, the rest of the world was getting on fine thanks

http://www.avclub.com/article/quest-super-mario-64s-impossible-coins-and-mystery-207910

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-us-army-has-a-new-laser-cannon-and-it-works-wi/1100-6422188/

that video is some scary shit
http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/ic/des/hel_md_0514_vid.html

stephen thecatamites @thecatamites · Sep 16
♫ flann o'briens newpaper column is funny ♫ but he's so cranky all the time ♫ i don't want to read this ♫ i want to read a strategy guide ♫

http://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2014/09/on-gamers-and-identity.html

does any one here read noyb's zero feedback?
http://zerofeedback.tumblr.com/

that ellaguro blog isn't bad

liz ryerson is cool. This is one of my favorite things she's done:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FylamIJ19n8

heh, that's great. killer boards too!
"for those of you who know history"

hahaha this rules, and yeah those levels are amazing, super awesome to see people using DOOM engine to create the kind of trippy freaky environment that the original maps were going for but only rarely came close to.

"It really resonated with me, so much that I turned on no clipping and just kinda.. swam around in this area for a while, cause I, liked it. I mean, not for very long, but, just long enough to appreciate it."

"And here's where the player sort of enters in the portal where they can...where it, the self-examination begins and you start to see, something about our own sort of internalized beliefs and acceptances of colonialism, um, through shooting people in the face. But you know, the game is really artful about that, in how it presents that."

"And this is where the game starts to be challenging and critical and really forward-thinking in a lot of ways, and not to mention a really kind of deep look into the subconscious of your character, which is a thing that very few artists, let alone game designers really care to engage in, and Cliffy B, I mean, he has to be credited for this very adventurous and risky move, especially in the context of a AAA game."

That is really amazing. I used to make Doom levels back in the day, but never saw anything as impressive as those! The cave-like environments must have taken forever to do.

The cynicism was really funny but didn't need to go on for 15 minutes
Those Doom levels were sick!!

I think I've watched it all the way through about four times. If it's not clear, (I think it is at least from the sidebar recs), Liz is really into doom and doom wads. She's done some good writing about amateur doom and wolfenstein maps.