rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

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

Wow! Curiouser and curiouser.

I've been slowly dipping in to the rest of the articles in Aaron Reed's series (as he is slowly rolling them out over the year), and honestly I'd recommend them all. I've played quite a few of the games so there is definitely an element of nostalgic fondness, but I genuinely think they're good overviews, too.

https://if50.substack.com/people/21082121-aaron-a-reed

i don't recognize most of these titles, but THIS ONE:

A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985)

Pops out at me in a really strange way. like an early memory or something? maybe not. they just seem like an old memory somehow. anyone played it?

or possibly just a game that an ilxor (maybe emil.y!) raved about years ago here, i'm not sure :)

i want to read all of those articles, but i also want to play most of those games (esp. a mind forever voyaging). but i never get around to either :(

is it a kind of standout among standouts of the genre? perhaps i just came across it in a "best of" kind of list. it's just...a REALLY good name for a game, immediately enticing

i've played it a bit, it's really clever and well done, especially for it's age

emil.y is probably the authority here but as for me, i saw it on a "best of" list and it piqued my interest (in no small part due to the awesome name)

I have a interactive fiction app called Frotz on iOS, and you can use it to download titles like A Mind Forever Voyaging from the IFDB with it. It's a good way to go into them I think.

yeah it's still pretty easy to play a lot of the IF classics from back then

problem is i'm not as patient as i was back in the 80s

It's definitely one of the best regarded of the old guard of IF, and stands up well today. I'd be surprised if I've not mentioned it before, but I'm not sure if I would have raved about it - it has incredibly interesting ideas but in my memory I didn't get that far into it, and has been on a mental "to revisit" list for a while.

It had some great promo materials, too:

https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/joybooth.jpg

problem is i'm not as patient as i was back in the 80s

― cheesons to be rearful (Noodle Vague)

I feel like a philistine but I've never been able to properly appreciate the really old games like Zork. Parsers are far too small, the world isn't interactive enough, they're too unforgiving on the cruelty scale, hand-mapping is required - pah!

mordy likes amfv a lot iirc

it is often cited as a masterpiece yeah which is something it is openly attempting to be-- formalists may prefer a tight little knot like spellbreaker or one of the mysteries; i bet it's been argued that the austere suspended does the interplay between top-level you-are-a-menu and bottom-level get-keycard-go-west better than amfv (which also does this); many in search of deliberate masterpieces may prefer trinity anyway. i think about it (amfv) all the time tho, certainly more than any of those-- has a v nicely paced grim arc and uses the medium for emotional effect in ways that feel v natural. be sure to read the accompanying short story before beginning play lol

https://tedium.co/2021/09/15/trivia-technology-arcades-1980s/

I guess I'm the Polygon simp now who'll share their videos on stuff at any opportunity, even as the actual writing on the site gets worse and worse, but truly this is a really fun video:

https://www.polygon.com/videos/22633055/weird-french-adventure-games-polygon-video

That was good. I don't think I knew anything about any of that.

well done, good video
also agree that the site writing has been getting worse sadly

it's all bad. there's not enough news to warrant covering 40 things a day. plus, it's one of those sites that look like this:

https://i.imgur.com/ASXJyY7.png

i don't really have a better idea and i'm not a designer but i recognize when i hate looking at the internet

Yeah, way it's shaken out is all the cool ppl that made me like the site have either left or are in the video team and the writing's been left to ppl with takes like "is Ace Attorney Chronicles a convincing critique of British imperialism?".

Part of me wonders if they're straight-up clickbaiting the 'gaters with that stuff

Eh, I think it's done earnestly. It's just that while I think "keep politics out of my culture!" is a fundamentally ridiculous stance to take, expecting a fun little adventure game to double as the definitive historical analysis of British imperialism is also, erhm, somewhat unhinged.

i think it's a strength of that game that it goes hard on that stuff! i know what you're getting at though, there's a lot of headlines like that that are way more of a stretch

yeah the problem is too many gaming articles about the politics of games

I don't think any of the stuff we're discussing here re: Polygon's output is really about "the politics of games", tbh.

as in, holding tight to even the slightest patina of progressiveness in a game and then discussing the whole thing solely through that lens is not really analysing its politics in any meaningful way