rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

luckily nothing unethical happens during the manufacturing of those PCs

https://www.patreon.com/saint11/posts?tag=tutorial

good piece on the architecture of dark souls: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-06-18-an-obituary-for-the-architecture-of-dark-souls-eternally-dying-land

https://www.polygon.com/2017/7/17/15974096/what-it-costs-to-run-an-independent-video-game-store

good piece, albeit depressing

this is nuts:

Jake Stoner at Cap'n Games in Sparks, Nev. simply has an Amazon Prime account and preorders one copy of every new game. Since Amazon offers 20 percent off preorders, he gets a lower per-unit price than distributors offer. Then he turns those around for a $5 profit on each.

"I don't try to mislead my customers, but I'll let them know that I'll have one," he says. "So if you want it, that's great. I don't have an issue with that. But I'll only have one. And that works OK. But most of the time, I just refer people elsewhere."

For some like Brossman at Complete in Box, though, it's worth it to suck it up and play the distribution game. He points out that certain items have even worse margins than new games, noting that he pays $29.90 for a Microsoft gift card that sells for $30. If a customer buys that with a credit card, his store loses money on the sale.

fell into a youtube hole last night watching a series called 'boundary break', where a guy pokes around in areas outside the limits of videogame spaces

super-dorky but i love this shit - here's the dark souls iii one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbaA6_84gyY&list=PLYfhW_P-MkU7vBmWwwyqdIWNDzXfEZwnO&index=24

directly related but not specifically about games - http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-08-04-bungies-13-year-battle-to-kill-crunch-culture

"A lot of people get burned out because they don't take the vacation, so as a manager part of your job is to make sure they do," Timmins said. "Leadership needs to set examples. It can take years for a culture to develop; for people to believe it's okay to take a vacation, that it's not a crazy crunch culture where something bad is going to happen when they come back."

i wish i could staple this to my PMs' foreheads (i don't work in games, but i am a software dev; at one point this summer i worked 29 days in a row, and we still haven't launched)

good article. hope people in the business read it!

https://gamehistory.org/aladdin-source-code/

https://kotaku.com/the-runescape-players-who-farm-gold-so-they-dont-starve-1819720013

herne bay arcade, kent. not rly heavy on video games but there’s some good vignettes:

http://www.seasphotography.org.uk/search/results/6b8242cef3ec13ea3a46da0b9e2ecbf7

https://splendorsvendor.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/behold-a-paleblood-sky/

https://kotaku.com/one-of-the-most-famous-faces-on-twitch-refuses-to-let-t-1820333034

good one

So the developers behind one the first idle RPGs to take off have announced they’re abandoning the free-to-play model because it’s unethical:

http://www.clickerheroes2.com/paytowin.php

Regarding Metal Gear Solid samples in Burial's 'Untrue'.

https://kottke.org/17/12/the-making-of-burials-untrue

Not a whole lot on Metal Gear Solid, but thanks for linking that, lots I didn't know yet

this is not "worth reading" but is it weird that i think Tim Rogers is my favorite person to hear talk about videogames? is anyone else a tim rogers fan?

Where be the kingfish

me, usually

Tim Rogers and his little lackey wanted to fight me and my friend at an E3 party because he was wasted and mad we didn't know who he was

hah! that sounds right.

this is not "worth reading" but is it weird that i think Tim Rogers is my favorite person to hear talk about videogames? is anyone else a tim rogers fan?

yeah i read/listen to everything he does. i highly recommend the "violence island" podcasts. they are basically battle royales styled after grade school playground debates (basically: who would win in a fight, X or Y). my favorite moment was during a battle between Flubber and Bo Jackson, the two merge together and become the unstoppable Flubbo Jackson.

like some sort of overdriven bo jackson

i like tim rogers's more recent content. met him a couple times at pax and he seemed alright

yeah he has a pretty cool series on Kotaku about translating FFVII

can't find violence island?

the original podcast was hosted at www.earthblows.com. the site is down now but you can still find the archived shows:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160304064152/http://earthblows.com/

there are also some recent ones on youtube. this is the Christmas 2016 episode, "Violent Night", where they pit all the movie Santa Clauses against each other.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NYA0KlWoY4

the first episode of Violence Island has Godzilla vs. Tinkerbell i believe. they argue that she could either fly into his nasal cavity and disconnect his brain or explode his heart from within, or that she could sprinkle dust on him and cause him to float away (winning her the match by ring-out). when her character's homicidal tendencies were questioned they looked to her temper and the low key jealousy and violence shown towards Wendy in the "Peter Pan" film.

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