rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/117848-Kickstarter-Video-Project-Attracts-Misogynist-Horde

Oh, ha, just posted that to a different thread. I guess it's not surprising, but still. Fuck humanity.

don't lose sight of the fact she has shattered her goal.

the epic civ game had a mention on Today on BBC Radio 4 this morning.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jrj7v#synopsis

(details not there as i type as programme has just finished)

a better link (beware the audio starts automatically)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9728000/9728077.stm

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/12/3051197/tetris-future-touchscreens-buttons

although lols at zach gage getting interviewed for every article about video games ever it seems.

this is crack to me:
http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2012/06/wizardry-v-final-rating.html

i fell down that hole too when thomp first posted it. here i go again.

i used to have a gold box copy of pool of radiance yknow. with the code wheel and the map and and and. i got it for fifty cents at a rummage sale at the kailua public library on oahu. i wonder if it's still at my parents' house. probably not. it might as well be a box of baseball cards.

i don't know that the world needs an exhaustive survey of the early history of CRPG's, but i'm still kinda glad it is getting one

give this guy a book contract and put him on this project full time until it's done

even then i bet he'd still die before he got to fallout.

this is gonna be embarrassing but after i read a bunch of those entries i booted up ultima 4 and stared at the screen and really tried to ~use my imagination~, like i walked my (the) stifflegged avatar along a swampy coast square-by-square and thought about the smell of salt, and then i fought an orc, which ran away into the forest, snapping branches in my head. it was great and my gpu's fan didn't spin at all. it's still weirdly hard to find the dungeons in that game though, or maybe i'm just a pampered 90s wimp no matter how hard i try. i did beat ultima 1 when i was a kid! what a strange game to beat.

wow that site is insane and a dangerous potential time sink

hey forks, i sent u email

will check it out.

that guy didn't like Larn, he is dead to me :(

(but his blog is still amazing and ALSO I learnt things I didn't know about Larn from the comments, so, win)

(I might not like Larn either if it hadn't been my first ever RPG - there are many infuriating things about it which have not aged gracefully, even for those with a high ASCII roguelike tolerance. Like when you prowl around the last dungeon level wondering which door the guardian boss dude is lurking behind and bam, it turns out you fell into a pit, and since it's the last level, oh, it's a bottomless pit, game over)

i have read the entire thing. mordy have you read the entire thing yet or am i the only one.

this is gonna be embarrassing but after i read a bunch of those entries i booted up ultima 4 and stared at the screen and really tried to ~use my imagination~, like i walked my (the) stifflegged avatar along a swampy coast square-by-square and thought about the smell of salt, and then i fought an orc, which ran away into the forest, snapping branches in my head. it was great and my gpu's fan didn't spin at all. it's still weirdly hard to find the dungeons in that game though, or maybe i'm just a pampered 90s wimp no matter how hard i try. i did beat ultima 1 when i was a kid! what a strange game to beat.

― a hauntingly unemployed american (difficult listening hour), Thursday, 21 June 2012 02:51 (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

when i was ... nine? i played the (gorgeous) master system version of u4 for hours until the contacts got dirty or something and random tiles loaded on every screen and the save function wouldn't work. i got absolutely nowhere: just wandered around and found the towns and recruited i think everyone, but found the way in to one dungeon and was a little too worried to go there. (despite being, like, max level.) (which is funny because the overworld enemies scale so i was spending all my time, like, running the hell away from balrogs.) i had very little idea what to do on the main quest because i. as a child i was not exactly a lateral thinker ii. for some reason the spellbook and 'codex of britannic wisdom' or whatever it was came in french so i was very vague on what exactly i was doing, save for saving up for new swords and running away from balrogs

lol nes version

http://hardcoregaming101.net/ultima/Ultima%20IV%20Quest%20of%20the%20Avatar/ultima4%20-%20NES%20-%2006.png

i got absolutely nowhere: just wandered around and found the towns and recruited i think everyone, but found the way in to one dungeon and was a little too worried to go there.

Ha! That's exactly the same as what I did with The Ring of Darkness when I was the same age.

i've said this before but i wasted an entire summer to beat ultima 1 nes and it's still the hardest game i've ever beat

the hardest game i've ever beat is the hugely underrated zelda 2. the final boss fight (yourself) (it's pretty deep) was nervewracking beyond belief. i mean i was six so maybe it'd be easier now but not that much easier, i hope.

in defense of nine?-year-old thomp the U4 main quest is kinda designed to mess with your preconceptions about video games. like one of the things you have to do to progress is not kill fleeing enemies. (but you also can't flee yourself, i think, so those balrogs drive you down.)

Hardest game I ever beat was Ancient Domains of Mystery, took me two years of playing through leisure time and a five-day binge at the end. This was followed by a renewed interest in physical fitness and no patience for videogames of any kind

hardest game i ever beat was Adam Cadre's Varicella. i did use some hints to solve it, but i was proud that i figured a lot of it out myself. that game is a puzzle gauntlet.

oh i'd forgotten about IF! i beat infocom's sorcerer without help. i was so proud of that. then spellbreaker i never got anywhere.

honestly the most amazing thing to me about that CRPG blog is how many of them he beats. all of them! except the ones he decides are No Fun. and he has some seriously forgiving standards in that department.

Oh god, Varicella did my head in.

Owen, did you read crpg addict's four or five posts about Omega? I read them all and their comments late last night. I used to play the town over and over again and die in a lot of random ways. I used to play the first adom dungeon to the southeast (?) as if that were the whole game. The inscrutability and vastness and mystery of some crpgs and roguelikes appealed to me a lot. Beating them seemed beside the point.

on an unrelated note, Film Crit Hulk is on the latest ep of the Indoor Kids, talking about game-related OCD

http://www.nerdist.com/2012/06/the-indoor-kids-50-ocd-gaming-moments-with-film-crit-hulk/

For 1989, I've structured my game list so that a game I know (or at least strongly suspect) that I'll like comes up every four or five games. These cornerstones include NetHack (version 3), Magic Candle, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Starflight 2, Dragon Wars, and Hero's Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero (the game that was later re-named Quest for Glory).

Excited for him to do Hero's Quest. In my eyes it's the first 'modern' RPG game.

Reading these made me realize I've never actually played a dungeon crawler. And level grinding is usually my favorite part of RPGs!

Had zero interest in Spec Ops: The Line, but these conflicting articles have my interest:
http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/spec-ops-the-line-ditches-faux-heroism-for-a-harrowing-look-at-how-war-make
http://gameological.com/2012/06/the-greatest-of-ease/

-an acquaintance gave me 'ready player one' to read - 5th generation snow crash xerox copy, ugh

oh dangit, i linked the wrong gameological article
http://gameological.com/2012/06/the-horror/

I love this whole series, Saturday Crapshoot, about only old PC games. This week it's "Street Fighting Man", which looks awesome in a bad way.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/06/30/saturday-crapshoot-street-fighting-man/

i dont know where to put this so im putting it here: http://howlongtobeat.com/

also someone is doing a crpgaddict thing for jrpgs at http://allconsolerpgs.blogspot.co.uk/ apparently? but he can't write and is kind of dense.

and how have i not been to the terrifyingly completist (e.g.) http://segaretro.org/ before?

http://segaretro.org/images/thumb/6/6a/TheBlackOnyx_SG1000_JP_Box.jpg/640px-TheBlackOnyx_SG1000_JP_Box.jpg

I've always loved the disparity between the boxart and screenshots on retro games.

fun: http://gamasutra.com/view/news/172990/The_psychology_of_Diablo_III_loot.php

good article

-an acquaintance gave me 'ready player one' to read - 5th generation snow crash xerox copy, ugh

― Faith in Humanity: Restored (dayo), Saturday, June 30, 2012 12:04 PM (6 days ago) Bookmark

this was like the da vinci code written by a tv tropes nerd as imagined by whiney

http://www.mcvpacific.com/news/read/interview-deus-ex-creator-warren-spector-talks-narrative-heavy-rain/098986
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-06-14-warren-spector-the-ultraviolence-has-to-stop

i'm afraid Spector hasn't put his money where his mouth is for quite some time, but i never played Epic Mickey

anna anthropy's book is terrible, hamfisted, reductive. the fucked up thing is that i basically agree with her thesis but man the way she goes about advancing it is progressive self-defeating bullshit 101.

i guess i should have known from her blog but i was really hoping for a good thoughtful book on videogames and how they could be better.

/goes back to saints row 3, beats prostitute to death with giant purple cock, sips coffee, laments, considers

it's published by random house? hunh

oh, never mind, it's seven stories press but on the random house website because they're the distributor

that's disappointing to hear about anthropy's book; i still kinda wanna give it a shot, but i'm already inclined to fear what you're saying about it