rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

spoiler: poor leadership

Thanks for linking the Errant Signal guy - enjoyed the violence one and the DOOM one equally. Nice takes, feels pretty on-the-money without ever trying to be the single definitive take or anything.

yeah, they've all been good
can't say anything for the "game grumps" thing he recommended though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB2ty4Qhdlw
i kinda hate bastion but the points he makes are all good. it's just no fun to play is all.

His Sonic the Hedgehog one is pretty quietly truth-bomby too I think.

nice read on Bastion! admittedly by the end I was kind of trudging though the fights, the music and graphics got me through it. i also really appreciated the themes/ending as discussed well in the video (regardless of the heartbreak interpretation)

I liked the article in general, but "Kid finds a memento from a girl he knew. Always used to fancy her" to "This is about the breakup of a serious long term relationship" is nearly hilariously creepy.

Or he played braid.

Oh yeah!

this might not be worth reading, but i dug it
http://gameological.com/2012/11/on-the-level-secret-of-mana/

CRPG and The Adventure Gamer are simultaneously playing through So You Want to Be a Hero

http://www.salon.com/2012/11/25/big_buck_hunter_meet_the_worlds_best_fake_marksmen/

http://i.imgur.com/Eo9kJ.png

this is going to confuse the hell outta metacritic
http://www.oxm.co.uk/47898/reviews/family-guy-back-to-the-multiverse-review

are there any other smart youtube channels like errant signal? or is he in a league of his own?

i certainly wish he wasn't; i could watch a dozen of those every day

tenuous, but http://gameological.com/2012/11/the-stuff-of-knightmare/

Where are those graphs from forks? Are they releases or sales? Presumably the former. Weird that that don't always sum to 100% either - I mean I can maybe believe that 10% of the games released in 2010 don't fit into any of those genres, but 20% of the games released in 1982 weren't on any platform? huh?

Maybe other platforms not covered? 5200, Colecovision... just guessing, though.

honestly, i found the graphs on a random tumblr; no sense of veracity or methodology.
but GRAPHS! INFORMATION!

Id love the data set, maybe make something a bit more legible

holy crap that family guy review is amazing

are there any other smart youtube channels like errant signal? or is he in a league of his own?

― ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) (diamonddave85), Wednesday, November 28, 2012 2:53 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i certainly wish he wasn't; i could watch a dozen of those every day

― (alternatively, “Respec’”) (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, November 28, 2012 4:28 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he did a collabo video with "HyperBitHero" on RE 5 that really just underlines how good he is and how unnatural the other guy is imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0Xtbb669eg

Interesting piece from Eurogamer on GTA San Andreas and the story behind Hot Coffee: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-30-who-spilled-hot-coffee

"Why would a 17-year-old be allowed to run around the city bearing weapons, a game in which you're free to shoot cops and beat up women but in which you're not allowed to make love to his girlfriend after dating her for a while?" - Patrick Wildenborg

i kinda forgot about sweet home... and that it's based on a kiyoshi kurosawa movie, one of the only one of his i haven't seen. gotta watch that. maybe my fave movie director!

errantsignal has some good stuff. just watched the Deus Ex: Invisible War one which is pretty on point, though I will slightly defend that game as passably fun, more awful in comparison to the original

i like the holographic britney manque in dx:iw who appears in every level turns out to be an advanced form of AI surveillance equipment and ends up helping you in oblique oracular ways, and then after you become accustomed to thinking of her as v wise you meet the actual flesh-and-blood pop star she's a holograph of and she's a stereotypical Dumb Pop Star; that was kind of neat. but yeah, he's otm that every single room had a keypad, a vent and a guard. and the right answer was always the vent because it didn't use any consumables.

ha, i remember that - nice running subquest plot

http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/games-are-art-rock-band-and-its-history-prove-it/1

i know "games as art" is a dead horse, but i really think this is a well-written, researched, original article

Yeah, interesting stuff. Mainly, though, it reminded me of how much fun I had playing Rock Band games, and then super-annoyed all over again at Activision for running the videogame/band idea into the ground with their torrent of shitty Guitar Hero titles.

I don't mind that these titles don't get released any more though, because they don't need to. Rock Band 3 is basically a platform in itself now, it does everything you'd want one of those games to do and the content updates still come like every week or whatever.

kinda wanna know from anyone who's played Far Cry 3 is this article has some teeth to it, or is just total garbage:

http://killscreendaily.com/articles/reviews/kill-screen-review-far-cry-3-first-game-about-millennials/

http://archive.org/details/crt_emulation_test_videos_2012_11
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3786
shocking how nostalgia inducing the video is

wow, totally! The sort of thing that's changed sort of gradually and you forget how everything used to look.

i went to an arcade auction recently, so definitely feelin' it

http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/iPhone/Curiosity+-+what's+inside+the+cube/feature.asp?c=46406

kinda wanna know from anyone who's played Far Cry 3 is this article has some teeth to it, or is just total garbage:

haven't played it & read that article & it sounded interesting but then i read dude's article on hotline miami and i am thinking maybe he is just future EUKARYOTE thread fodder

"the first postmodern videogame?" ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

punctuation his not mine btw

people are trying really hard to pretend far cry 3 is an unflinching stare into the heart of awful bro dudes instead of, like, a really hamfisted embrace of awful bro dude ideology in service of stupid, stupid storytelling.

i really like this piece

http://killscreendaily.com/articles/essays/press-x-not-die/

http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/2982-a-link-to-the-past-how-to-add-crt-filters-to-16-bit-games-on-pc/

I haven't really done the emulator thing in a while, but this CRT emulation is pretty interesting. Problem is it seems like there's no standard easy to use collection of this stuff, you kind of have to download multiple filters and then mix them up? Or is there a simple and good-looking all-in-one thing?

http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2012/12/28/john-butterfields-battle-of-the-bulge-rejuvenates-an-old-rogue

(vaguely disappointed that the Butterfields pictured are not stoot barfield's parents)

(sorry, I have never had the patience for war games, so the rest is lost on me)

Depressing article:
http://nightmaremode.net/2012/12/the-negative-influence-of-games-an-autobiographical-essay-24380/

These were all pretty good:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/12/28/the-very-best-of-rps-2012-gaming-made-me/

forks posted this interview on xcom thread w/ lead designer on xcom and it's worth reading:
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/08/interview-xcom-jake-solomon-pc-gamer/

Solomon: Yeah. The idea of consequences is something really interesting, because DayZ is… I know you’re a big DayZ player. That and Walking Dead and FTL and XCOM, you’re right. 2012 was almost the year of consequence. Players, I think, are looking for authentic experiences. These are games that give you those real, authentic emotions when you play.

And difficulty, too, which I think of as being related to but separated from consequence. You look at Dark Souls as well, and the popularity that’s had on all platforms. And Amnesia, in 2011. I think people are ready for brutal experiences again.

Solomon: I think that’s true, and I think that it’s been the sort of thing where… The pendulum swings a little bit. I don’t honestly know. My head is so far down in my own development experience. But it’s funny how all these things have coalesced. Maybe that’s a coincidence, although it’s probably not. It’s probably people acknowledging that… There were some forerunners with Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft’s survival mode. Then you have these experiences where then you do get things like FTL or XCOM or DayZ. I think people are ready for these experiences are that are bringing a little more of the challenge back into games. I love playing narrative-driven shooters, but there’s a lot of ways to get your fill of that. Maybe there was a void that some of these games are filling.

i think this is very otm and i've been thinking about these things - consequences, difficulty, finality (that seem to me like rogue influences) - bc my ballot this year is dominated by these kinds of games. partially i think bc a lot of them are shorter experiences - FTL is maybe an hour max, XCOM you can drop in for a mission or two and it only takes an hour (or less), Walking Dead eps are relatively short - that are easier to slot into tight schedules. also tho i do find them very gamey + satisfying to play.

...

The visual freedom of early video games opened the path for a certain abstract-motion expression, concerned with gameplay visuality and not necessarily sacrificed to verbal storytelling, a path shared by cinema during its first decades. Such coexistence of images without words, movements without plots and attractions without boundaries questions our assumptions about film and game culture, proving that the richness, multiplicity and differential nature of both mediums goes way beyond the restrictions of allegedly cinematic techniques like cutscenes, verbal dialogue and hyperrealism.

http://gameplaygag.com/videos/

This is a wonderful article and I've been tempted to write something like it. This site looks like it may swallow up a few of my evenings.

I was playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 last night and at some point it just because blatantly obvious that it was a loving homage to Buster Keaton-style silent film action serials. Even the music was some form of ragtime piano roll, just synthesized. I'd always thought there was a connection from Mario to early silent film. Take the title screen to Super Mario Bros. 2 -- it is very much in the style of those old films. Maybe this is intentional? Maybe Nintendo realized the early years of videogames could draw allusions to the early years of movies. Sound was very primitive -- any text is spoken and there was a maximum of 3 note polyphony -- so it was a good idea to focus on catchy atmospheric themes that could be repeated over and over like a piano roll. Maybe this was all intentional? I can imagine Koji Kondo getting the scoring job for SMB and being told "Make it sound like a Charlie Chaplin movie". And of course you can look back to Pac-Man's cutscenes and it's a pretty faithful recreation of early film.

At any rate I've been looking around online for stuff that talks about this. I'm tempted to write an essay but my knowledge of early film is limited and I'm not that good a writer but I still may give it a shot. Odd that connecting early videogames to early films doesn't seem to come up when the "Are videogames art?" discussion is brought up. You could even draw parallels between how the evolution of technology has affected both mediums.