rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

Friendship with Blow requires patience for his rigid, often puzzling personal codes. He enjoys talking, but abhors idle conversation and is intensely private.

what a deep and paradoxical fellow!

fuck braid

coming close to that opinion without ever actually having played it.

nah, braid was cool. soulja boy nailed it.

braid was gorgeous and inventive and fun but of course every think piece about how paradigm-shifting it was concentrates on the parts before each level where you read some coy prose about being a sad boy, because obviously that's where the Art is

nah fuck braid, any game that relies that much on hushed artifice and a busted prince of persia gameplay mechanic is just as phony and overblown as modern warfare 3 but way less honest.

i don't even like braid that much but whaaaa?

braid is great, jblow sucks

i always walked past the books without reading them

"he enjoys talking, but abhors listening"

"he enjoys blazers, but abhors long pants"

ignore the overblown plot and braid is a very sweet game; preferred limbo where shit was less spelled out if more tim burtony

interview made me want to replay infocom's trinity tho, maybe i could get somewhere in it now that i'm not 11

i like how the guy's next game is myst.

― adam, Wednesday, 18 April 2012 15:21 (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol first thing i thought when i read about it

I liked Braid until it got too hard for me (about 10 minutes in as I am totally uncoordinated) but that article seriously made me regret giving him any of his giant pile of money which he feels such ostentatious indifference towards

(didn't buy it full price, but then I bought it on its own and bought some bundle with it in, so I guess I gave him money twice)

At some point, Steam holiday sales will deliver them all to me anyway

http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2012/04/dissident-designer.html

blow currently responsible for reinventing: myst, marshall mcluhan, sturgeon's law, the wheel...

wish Michael Abbott wrote more often

since there isn't a "rolling thread of furniture worth buying on videogames"

http://www.gizmag.com/nintendo-controller-coffee-table/22224/

ha, and it actually works!

http://images.gizmag.com/inline/nes-table-3.jpg

although admittedly, that looks like the kind of activity that you hype up all day but only end up doing for about 3 minutes.

the giganto tv and controller/table compared to the tiny NES makes it look like Giant world on SMB3.

http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf

Yeah that was brilliant and now I wanna work for valve

i love how it looks like a 90s computer game manual

xp mega, mega OTM

Didn't realize that AV Club had spun off the gaming section its own site. Nice little piece on Majora's Mask/Dark Souls:

http://gameological.com/2012/04/games-played-in-inches/

In Decadent, where we explore two games united by a common theme and separated by time—specifically, by a decade or so.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/169159/the_origins_of_night_trap_an_.php

dear lord. i should've known what i was in for when the first paragraph describes this as an excerpt from the book "GENERATION XBOX"

coming at the movie/game crossover from the opposite angle, i liked these two wired pieces:

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/04/halo-movie-generation-xbox
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/04/generation-xbox-super-mario-movie/

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/may/01/zone-chernobyl-tarkovsky-video-game/

Stalker, game & film

i just read the new yorker blurb on that book; think i need to watch stalker tonight. never got around to it.
Free on youtube! Hit CC for english subtitles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYEfJhkPK7o

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2012/5/3/diablo-3s-ability-system.html

that Nephalem Valor buff sounds like amazing design

i guess i'm gonna buy this

definitely sounds interesting, but i'm retaining skepticism - with the millions who will play this, it will be somehow be broken soon enough

if there's a good launch deal i'll get it, otherwise i can wait

This really long writeup on Super Mario Bros. 3 is my favorite piece of videogame writing I've ever read.

http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=426
(for some reason my Chrome warns me of Malware at this site)

His style is pretty awesome, stream-of-consciousness, Unnecessary Capitalization, lots of real world asides from some kind of uber nerd hipster fantasy lifestyle.

nooooooooooooooooooooo Tim Rogers

Hah. He's like the Pitchfork Reviews Reviews of videogames.

*cough*iknowthatguy*cough*

is that something you're really proud of? :P i don't even want to imagine what that guy would be like in person

*cough*idon'tlikehim*cough*

hah!

Yeah, i've read maybe a dozen or so of his pieces. Only today did I realize the amount of hate he gets online. If i lived in Japan for a long time and worked for videogame companies, I'd probably write life anecdotes all the time too.

definitely sounds interesting, but i'm retaining skepticism - with the millions who will play this, it will be somehow be broken soon enough

I'm not entirely certain what counts as broken here though - they're not claiming that all billion possible builds are going to be of exactly the same power, just that if you find a style you enjoy, you can go pretty far with it, and you can switch later on if you change your mind.

my guess is eventually there will be a maxed character build that everyone uses

btw i will admit i used to love some of rogers' earlier stuff, but he eventually crossed this threshold where i couldn't take his style anymore. i think it was around the time he wrote this 20 page article on FF7 with about 2 pages about the game itself

"The question was “How to fit a cinematic narrative into Pac-Man“, which didn’t even end in a question mark (this is crucial)."

The "this is crucial" tick is v. v. Tim Rogers. Anyone know where he got it from particularly?

Also this a tim rogers thing is this indiedev fetishism of simplicity:

"The game begins with our hero, Mario, facing the right. He must now run to the right. The “visual language” communicates the character’s goal in a dreamlike fashion to the player: our hero is standing just to the left of the screen, facing right. Finish three stages, and Mario enters a castle. The castle feels different — more dangerous — than the other levels."

My problem with him is basically that the games he likes, which are about mood and twitch in equal parts, are nothing like the games I like, which are about escapism and transitory accomplishment and never feeling too anxious because there's enough to be anxious about already thank you.

It is a very nice article though, once it warms up, and makes a good case for SMB3 as a sort of Disco Tex "Keep Dancin'" moment.

he makes no bones about wanting to be as "punk rock" as possible

i think lots of tim rogers' ideas are thoughtful and accurate and i like the severity of his taste but christ his prose. i've read a lot of him anyway because he has an aesthetic and when the style settles down a bit he writes well about mechanics. he's also good at making me want to play games; he has a really evocative thing about the original diablo (embedded in a furiously and pretty convincingly negative review of the sequel, itself embedded i'm sure in a cloud of irrelevant bullshit) that describes the atmosphere w/ total accuracy and joy. but yeah.