rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

marco ‏@elrokxxo May 31
@tha_rami a skull near a toilet, enviromental story telling gets me

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-06-01-why-did-ancient-egypt-spend-3000-years-playing-a-game-nobody-else-liked

Dr Finkel should probably know. His job title is the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Script, Languages and Cultures in the museum's Department of the Middle East. In a multiple choice scenario you would not struggle to match his headshot with his occupation. Unless one of the other options was "wizard".

This guy is amazing! Here is a video of him talking about the Game of Ur (as mentioned in that article): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHjznvH54Cw

(good article, thank you)

ditto!

http://shmuplations.com/iq/

http://www.vice.com/read/tibia-game-players-journey-to-open-a-locked-secret-door

just read that article on senet; any poker players on ilg? the only game i've been playing on the reg lately is android texas hold-em, and I often think about what a stupid card game texas hold-em is, hardly a game at all really, until of course you throw the betting game on top, and then it's fantastic.

the foremost senet expert mentions betting may have been involved, though there doesn't seem to be any obvious evidence for it. anyway, fascinating that there are games we don't know how to play anymore

which android hold 'em do you prefer?

not sure if I've tried them all, but I've given three or four of them a shot and the only one I can get into is dragonplay, aka live holdem pro.

it's the best i've found but it's still not very good. very strange I think that there isn't one obvious best mobile poker game, maybe poker is waning in popularity a bit? anyway if I knew how to program smart phone games I would make the best one available by a country mile and retire to a cozy cottage on the beach, que sera sera

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvYlxnHOY-Q

Took me like 5-10 minutes to get used to the narrator's voice ("compwession"??) but this is really, really good so far. Love the crazy prog-rock album cover style of the company early on. Damn this is long though, I'll have to finish it in pieces over the week.

that was excellent

yeah he does have a distracting speech impediment but he also does his research and puts a lot of work into these.

Psychnosis games always tripped me out. i remember being amazed at a display Amiga running Shadow of the Beast inside a Software, Etc. someday i will play through those games...

i also love that there is a shooter called "Agony" where you play as an owl.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3063298/breaking-the-status-quo/ed-smith-and-the-imagination-machine-the-untold-story-of-a-black-vid

Think Kim identifies as female, according to twitter: https://twitter.com/kimxxxjustice

These videos are great. The narration takes getting used to, and some jokes fall super-flat, but the knowledge and research is superb. Was Kim a videogame journalist or programmer back in the 8/16-bit days, or simply a megafan?

there's a 5 part / 4 hour history of molyneux on her channel too which is excellent - well worth a watch

well this is an absolutely fantastic read

http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/09/26/the-24-year-feud-that-has-dogged-star-citizen

yeah, that's great - thanks for sharing

the whole star citizen debacle is endlessly fascinating

Great article!

unless they're a star citizen fan i think everyone has concluded by now that the entire project is - tho likely initially well-intentioned - abandonware and never going to live up to its initial promises.

Fantastic article

yeah that was long and also really good, what a weird story. has anyone played any of the games mentioned in the article?
I

my uncle was an og Wing Commander dude, wonder if he was in on the kickstarter...

my first pc (a 75mhz pentiium) was bundled with a copy of wing commander 3 and it seemed impossibly futuristic to me at age 14. full-motion video with luke skywalker ffs!

first wing cmdr was a key experience for me

I watched my friend's Russian dad play a lot of Wing Commander. And I played a ton of Wing Commander 2, it was very difficult (and barely ran on our computer iirc) but also mind-blowing at the time.

http://i.imgur.com/TVXFyl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/NzVH5A9.png

apparently wing commander images are my proustian madeleines

"It's true, sir. The Kilrathi have invisible fighters."

― Doctor Casino, Tuesday, 1 April 2008 15:17 (eight years ago) Permalink

god i loved wing commander 2 SO MUCH

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

SPEAK OF YOUR PLANS NOT OF YOUR TOYS was a regular catchphrase for us in junior high

and let's not forget "evaluation.... TOTAL LOSS"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qYItb4g6qg

I will go to bat for privateer - it was awesome when I was a yoot. WC3 I will not go to bat for. Its a prime example in the list of new computer games I bought as a kid that would never, ever play on my slightly outdated 486 rig that I could never keep up to date because I was 12.

ahahah yes "SPEAK OF YOUR PLANS NOT OF YOUR TOYS" is pretty great

i've talked about this before but this was the perfect era for digitized speech - - - still rare enough that every line really could glow bright as it rattled around in the brain.

love how much that opening cinematic is packing in, too. kind of a lurching, herky-jerky sort of plot too. great.

I feel like I'm from another planet from you guys

i.e. I grew up strictly Apple -> NES -> Mac, and then emulators, and I totally missed out on the whole WC thing
I did have a neighbor who was big time into Star Control II and such, so at least I'm not 100% game-vegan

i also never played WC i think it was maybe an age thing? bc i was only in 6 in 1990. but i definitely played return to zork (1993), myst (1993), civilization (1991), and railroad tycoon deluxe (1993) - which were i'm thinking games my parents were probably more okay w/ me playing and also just a tad later than WC.

i never got into Wing Commander cos X-Wing and Tie Fighter were both fun and once DOOM came out i gave up on flight sims completely. i do remember seeing a demo or something and thinking it looked really cool. i bet it was a great influence on George Lucas in how to film the Star Wars prequels.

My pal Andy was way more into X-Wing and Tie Fighter than WC. Everybody with a PC owned and played WC, I think, but they played through it like once and that was that. It may actually have been that it was too easy for my PC gamer buddies to beat, so I barely got to see it. Stuff like SCII and the LucasArts games took longer to beat and came with more replay value. I could also just be hypothesizing right out my butthole here.

The chronology is important. Wing Commander was released a year and a half before Wolf 3D, two years before Star Control II, two and a half before X-Wing, three before DOOM. The engine was state of the art in terms of getting arcade-type gaming at home, with very good graphics, very smart use of sprites to fake a 3D experience (as in Wolf, etc.) and fast action. For reference, look at Flight Simulator 4.0 of the previous year, which is polygonal but er... not so pretty, or Red Baron (also 1990) which is polygonal, smooth and fast but also pretty boring to play and visually dull. The initial flurry of Wing Commander product (first two games, plus several add-ons for both) also took advantage of PC capacity to offer a full storyline and a ton of very good-looking cutscenes (mostly just 'closed-captioned,' no voice, but still).

For a little more context, in terms of canonical gaming history, the other key Christmas-season releases for 1990 were both adventure games: the Secret of Monkey Island and King's Quest V. The latter was, like Wing Commander, a top-of-the-line "time to upgrade the system" kind of title, on ten 3.5" floppies and with so many gloriously rendered VGA backgrounds you might not notice that the gameplay was essentially unchanged since the second in the series, or that the story was a substantial step back from the third and fourth. Monkey Island, less technically ambitious but more lovable, focused on puzzles and writing and it's probably the real essential classic of the year (though fans of CRPGs - the only one of these genres that really only makes sense as a PC game) will point, rightly, to Ultima VI.

Those are the top-tier games you had to gawp at. The overwhelming majority of other stuff on the shelf lagged way behind technically... which was fine, because most people were not going to upgrade to 486 and a SoundBlaster just like that! But in trying to understand how people relate to something like Wing Commander it's probably important to remember that it wasn't just fun but dazzling. We never got the first Wing Commander though - I was ten years old that Christmas, I begged for King's Quest V and got it. My jaw dropped just to behold the opening screen.

Doc Casino OTM really. The Lucas games, Wing Commander and iD were what was up when I was in junior high and high school; we played the ever living shit out of them. I kinda want to talk about this a lot but the memories are hazy, like it was someone else playing those games. it's been over twenty-five years!

WC was sort *gulp* AFTER my time.

My parents had a PC XT and we played STARFLIGHT (1986) which provided the same sense of a massive universe and months-long gameplay that I hear people talk about with WC

otm that wing commander even before its hamill/mcdowell days was a spectacle. (origin also responsible for ultima underworld two years later -- still pre-doom, and the one i really spent a lot of time with. this too was an amazement, a sort of giant goblin-infested terrarium in a box.) the later wing commander games (3 and 4, i mean, not the pretty much forgotten 5 or the one everyone has a soft spot for, privateer) play to me now like standard casualties of the FMV era (you have to watch luke skywalker walk across a room basically any time you click a menu option, like you're playing phantasmagoria) and having the story/dialogue enacted by actual human professionals instead of cartoons tends to throw its ultraderivative goofiness into boring relief. still fun to shoot kilrathi tho, or whomever you're shooting at that point.

(by the way i'm pretty sure the original wc2 voice of lt. blair also appears in the ultima underworld intro --

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW-Eo2Y8PmQ

-- which was a big catch-phrase source itself when i was a kid. TREACHERY AND DOOM! whether thou speak TRUTH... or FALSEHOOD... i CANNOT SAY. DC otm that there is a real lovability to scarce digitized speech that vanishes as games become more openly "cinematic", a grail chris roberts chased harder than anyone and one the medium could probably have done without. btw i saw the wing commander movie four times in the theater, and read the novelization.)

given all this ambition it's unsuprising to read that roberts didn't actually have a lot to do with privateer, a game whose defining positive feature in its genre is really lack of ambition. it came out the same year as david braben's second elite game and would look childish in comparison (tiny galaxy instead of absurdly huge procedural universe; planets and space stations as point-and-click menus instead of physical spaces; sprites instead of polygons) if it didn't work so much better: slicker combat, more coherence, a functional but not intrusive plot. funny that the open-world wing commander seemed like a minor, modest work next to the on-rails wing commanders, once they turned into movies.

now the most evocative part of privateer to me was when you pressed the "rear view" button (num 2, i think?) and got a shot of the interior of your cabin, over your shoulder, with a door leading to the rest of your ship. i dreamed of that door. the most tantalizing promise made by star citizen is the promise that that door will open. (i put what that kotaku article reassures me is a comparatively minuscule amount of money into star citizen, and even the tiny ship i have, which you can't climb into without briefly sticking your head inside a bulkhead like you're the cameraman in mario 64, is along these lines a sort of thrill -- as by the way is what as far as i'm concerned is the coolest thing in the game, which is that you can climb out of your ship wherever you want.)

star control 2, while a stone classic, not really in the same genre as all this stuff -- it had modest 2D sprite graphics even in its definitive, slickest form on the 3DO, a console nobody owned. (fortunately it's this version that's since been ported back to PC, in open source, as the ur-quan masters.) still, again, as wing commander became increasingly cinematic it became increasingly obvious star control 2 was much better-written.

lucasarts games of course a thread of their own. best developer of the 1990s? idk. but an incredible range. they basically owned the graphical adventure genre (every sierra game holds up worse imo) and probably perfected the space shooter one, but they also made dark forces, which had the best level design in a first-person shooter until idk what, if anything.

this stuff for me obv is the core, the heart games -- console knowledge of the time comparatively blank.

i dreamed of that door. the most tantalizing promise made by star citizen is the promise that that door will open.

this is great. so many of these sorts of dreams in early gaming.

The first ever speech I heard coming from a computer was THIS (from a TRS-80, and the game was called "Bug-Out" .. not sure how copyright worked in those days..)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB-y4qHI7cQ#t=3m33s

utterly thrilling and uncanny

er not Bug-Out - 'MegaBug" - HERE'S the 'we gotcha' i remember: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6-OHckz7hU&7m3s&t=7m3s

ha, xp, that magnifying glass thing's a neat variant on pacman. the way it just obscures medium-range enemies seems terrifying/maddening.