rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

Pretty good unless you know all this already
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJiwn8iXqOI

i knew most of that but it was well organized and presented!

it's kind of like that mini-doc about the amen break, in that way

listening rather than reading but... (it wasn't really fame-related lols)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000nv36

"Playing With The Dead

Jordan Erica Webber explores how video games allow us to play with people after they have died."

(about the memorialisation of people in games)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e6xOBCAVvA

that youtuber is a sex pest iirc if you care about such things

what? shit.

https://thehardtimes.net/harddrive/gamer-disgusted-to-discover-they-just-watched-nick-robinson-video/

I am honestly not sure what I think about The Hard Times having a gaming section.

Be funny if it was just about speed runs.

they're consistently funnier/more tuned in than the onion's gaming section

at least based on the ones that make it to my Feeds i dont read it actively

One of my best friends constantly texts me links from The Hard Times. I hate him for this.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/shigeru-miyamoto-wants-to-create-a-kinder-world

LOL I opened that in Dark Mode and got a creepy negativ-Miyamoto surrounded by black clouds. Good interview. Miyamoto, for all his beatific demeanor, sounds like a guy it kinda sucks to work for.

couple of years old now, but i don’t *think* this piece on donkey kong high scores has been posted before?

couple of years old now, but i don’t *think* this piece on donkey kong high scores has been posted before?

it was posted fifty-nine minutes ago i think

was going to make a joke to that effect and thought, no, no one will come in and gazump

spotted over the horizon urging his steed ever faster...

NV TO THE RESCUE

i can hear the Holy Grail music now

just for the gimmick: https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/interactive/2021/can-you-pet-the-dog/

lol nice

fuck, this packaging is my madeline
https://obscuritory.com/essay/incredible-boxes-of-hock-wah-yeo/

http://obscuritory.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/yeo_princeofpersia-1024x683.jpg
http://obscuritory.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/yeo_broderbundnes-1024x337.png
http://obscuritory.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/yeo_ironehelix-1024x732.jpg
http://obscuritory.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/yeo_havoc-1024x731.jpg

Hooh, I remember perusing my local Egghead Software and Software Etc. and seeing these boxes all the time. Had no idea so many came from the same source. Owned the trapezoid boxes for Prince of Persia I and II. That Jetfighter II box definitely stood out (for the time, also a pretty good game iirc!) Lotta great stuff in this article, even baering the painfully '90s color aesthetic of some.

Ahoy has a great video on boxes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWLMbmAv0tg

https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/4/1/22352583/simcity-hidden-politics-ideology-urban-dynamics

packaging article is fantastic. the only ones i actually remember are the more generic NES ones and Prince of Persia, but it brings back the era for sure. actually i wonder if the lack of major, still-celebrated titles in that list is revealing in some way.

SimCity one is good too! from the subhead i was expecting it to be more specifically about Forrester's models, but it's a good overview and there are promising links to other pieces. was it on this thread that someone shared the 2-part piece about users' problems with homelessness in a recent version of the game?

was it on this thread that someone shared the 2-part piece about users' problems with homelessness in a recent version of the game?

i haven't read it, but is it this one?

https://inthesetimes.com/article/press-altf4-to-end-homelessness

for some reason, i have an are.na channel set up to collect things related to Sim City: https://www.are.na/zach-tbd/simcity--2

nope, found it:

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/is-simcity-homelessness-a-bug-or-a-feature

(via Trayce)

― ♪♫_\o/_♫♪ (Karl Malone), Tuesday, January 20, 2015 1:28 PM bookmarkflaglink

(short article but i guess my brain subbed in the expensive two-part book?)

your brain remembered that the article is discussing a two-volume book:

You can read all of these proposed final solutions in Matteo Bittanti's How to Get Rid of Homelessness, "a 600-page epic split in two volumes documenting the so-called 'homeless scandal' that affected 2013's SimCity."

yeah, that!

Haven't played tetris for 20+ years but thought this was a good watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-BZ5-Q48lE

meant to post that in the 'are you any good at tetris' thread but might get a bigger audience here!

lol wow amazing. "The method was first discovered by Cheezfish..."

That's President Cheezfish to you.

love it

This was fascinating and sent me down several rabbit holes: https://if50.substack.com/p/1992-silverwolf

wow that is interesting

several rabbit holes

you weren't kidding. great article

Yeah, I had to stop myself from going overboard with searching the femme-fantasy 'discipline and punish' internet archive, not sure my browser history wants too much of that. It's a shame that so much of it wound up being retrogressive, I was really hoping for a feminist text adventure utopia story.

Fascinating article, love seeing weird bits of history unearthed like that. Anyone here alive/aware of this scene when they were around?

i used PAW a lot, there were a lot of PAW based games around at the time, most of them not very good. but the only one i recognise by name in the article was Very Big Cave Adventure.

further down the rabbithole

https://i.imgur.com/TEOlI1Y.png

Whaaaaat?

lol

what the

Holy shit at that article, not just for its mystery and weirdness, but for suddenly flashing me back to the early '80s when I was in a gifted and talented program called LEEP, which stood for ... learning experience enrichment program? Something like that. And I recall it had a rudimentary computer lab where we could play text based games like Zork and something else about a haunted house which I don't think I've thought about ever since.

It's a video, but this Dunkey essay on video game pricing makes some good points/observations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvPkAYT6B1Q

I appreciate the implicit acknowledgment that even the best, most classic video games eventually face some form of forced obsolescence. Also that value is such a weirdly subjective thing, and pricing today is almost arbitrary.

Aristasia has snuck up on me again. i've been learning japanese and watching some videos from a "virtual android sensei" named "cure dolly" (hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSvH9vH60Ig). once you get over the creepiness and bad production, there's actually some good info in there.

i was curious who she was and did some digging and found out that she was some mother-earth lesbian and i was like ok i'm 100% down with this now. i even described her to my partner as "like the woman from that spanking cult with the commodore 64 but without the spanking."

well it turns out that cure dolly is likely miss martindale