Daily Linksplosion: Thursday, August 19, 2010
- The Paris Review – Searching For Me in Red Dead RedemptionA voice-actor’s horror. (via @betajames)
Archive for Linksplosions
Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, August 18, 2010
- Enemy Airship! – The Finite, Irreplaceable Hours of Your LifeSteve Swink’s contribution to "Size Doesn’t Matter Day," which was yesterday, apparently.
- SXSWi 2011 Panel Picker – Hey, Gamers, Where the Girls At?Current TV’s Mario Anima has proposed a SXSW panel about games and girls. It needs your vote! Panelists include: Area 5’s Matt Chandronait, Game Informer’s Philip Kollar, Funtank producer Robin Yang, and ME! So please vote for us, oh please, oh please.
- ALBOTAS – Epic SEGA Desk PrankSEGA’s Aaron Webber leaves for vacation, returns to an EPIC DESK
- Burning North – On Echo Chambers"The same dozen or so ideas get lobbed back and forth like so many frisbees until all the interesting material gets stuck on the roof and the players stagger about, blithely wondering where all the stimulation went."
- The Daily What – Star Wars Lego Thing of the DayStar Wars / Space Invaders / LEGO mashup: only the nerdiest nerds need apply
- Gamasutra – Freeplay 2010: Brandon Boyer Tells Indies To ‘Be Yourself, Be Wonderful’Really inspiring words for indie game developers and those of us who love them
Daily Linksplosion: Monday, August 16, 2010
- Bitmob – Scott Pilgrim Reviews Reveal What Film Critics Really Think of GamersLinks to disparaging remarks about the "types" of people who have grown up with video games. (Also: Scott Pilgrim Versus the Unfortunate Tendency to Review the Audience)
- Edge Magazine – Interview: Eric ChahiEric Chachi (‘Another World’) on his upcoming ‘Project Dust.’
Daily Linksplosion: Friday, August 13, 2010
- 1UP – Spectraspective: The History of the Sinclair ZX SpectrumJess Ragan has become one of my favorite retro-writers. Five pages in length, this particular retrospective is pretty in-depth for a 1UP piece, but you should probably read it.
- GameLife – Virtual Boy, Nintendo’s Big 3-D Flop, Turns 15I remember the day the Virtual Boy launched—August 14, 1995—because it was my 13th birthday! I almost bought a Virtual Boy, and I had waited and waited for the day to arrive, and I ended up spending the money on a leather jacket instead. I still have that jacket, though!
- Cactusquid – Cactus Arcade 2.0Brand new, downloadable compilation of games from indie developer Cactus. Free! Go get ‘em!
- GOG.com – Phantasmagoria up to 30% offFINALLY! Phantasmagoria AND PHANTASMAGORIA II YOU GUYS PHANTASMAGORIA II sold together for the low, low price of US$11.18! WHAT THE—but only until Monday, August 16. Hey! It’s almost as if gog.com knew my birthday is this Saturday! Happy birthday to me!
- Pink Tentacle – Vintage Tokyo subway manners postersDecades-long poster campaign exhorts train passengers—often in clever or surprising ways!—to use their best manners. At least one poster alludes to a video game. Enjoy!
Daily Linksplosion: Tuesday, August 10, 2010
- Kotaku – Beat Takeshi Hates Games, Computers And Email (What About Twitter?)Actor, comedian, director, and games designer Kitano “Beat” Takeshi hates video games. Also, stop applying your makeup on the subway: it’s rude, ladies.
Daily Linksplosion: Thursday, August 05, 2010
- Attract Mode – So… Who Or What Exactly Is “Babycastles”?Matt "Fort90" Hawkins is officially Attract Mode’s blogger! Not bad, Adam! After all, Matt’s done plenty of work for Gamasutra and Tiny Cartridge, just to name a couple outlets from memory. Anyway: Babycastles is what you ought to be doing tonight, except that I’m adding it to my del.icio.us links, which means you probably won’t see it until 1am EST
Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, August 04, 2010
- Ars Technica – Opposable Thumbs – An edu-game that entertains? Inside The Curfew’s dystopiaCommissioned by Channel 4’s Alice Taylor and written by RPS’s Kieron Gillen, this free-to-play point-and-click adventure game has great writing, terrific (if scene-chewing) acting, and high production values. A review at Ars Technica.
- Chris Hecker – Achievements Considered Harmful?Chris Hecker’s GDC lecture, now online! (via Christian Nutt)
- Gamasutra – In-Depth: No Female Heroes At Activision?‘Black Lotus’ was allegedly stripped of its main character and ultimately reworked into an entirely new game, thanks to Activision’s semi-unspoken policy against female protagonists
- Laughing Squid – Nerdcore For Life, A Documentary About Nerds, Geeks, Dorks & The Hip-Hop They MakeNow on DVD and Netflix, you guys!
Daily Linksplosion: Monday, August 02, 2010
- ALBOTAS.com – ALBOTAS is now on Tumblr!Holy shit! I’m actually a little bit in shock! Does this mean no more indieclicks ad banner, though? Man. I mean, I have tried, and indieclicks does not just give that privilege out to people. However: now it’s a lot easier to read ALBOTAS from work! Yaaaay!
- DOS Nostalgia – Leisure Suit Larry (VGA) reviewMeant to repost this awhile ago (via @gnomeslair)! There is something unspeakably, face-punchingly endearing about Anatoly’s "DOS Nostalgia" video reviews, which themselves focus mainly on DOS-based point-and-click adventures. Here, Anatoly praises the good-lookin’ Leisure Suit Larry I remake.
- The Bygone Bureau – Editor’s List: Required ReadingWow. Um, I saw I was getting a little traffic from this particular link, and Bureau editor Nick Martens has absolutely paid me I think the compliment of my life. But all the articles listed here—this is a mid-year best-of-2010 reading list—are utterly due your time and interest.
For instance: I know the Robin Sloan piece well, and David Cole’s "Metagames and Containers," an interactive demonstration of our human tendency to invent our own games and little rulesets, is a tremendous accomplishment. As a reader and gamer and Internet-user, you’ll find plenty more hyperlinks to articles sure to engage: there’s "Playing the Odds," "Toy Soldiers," and "On Tetris," to start. So follow the link to, uh, find all those links.
- SideQuesting – The Trouble with GameJournosI’m a little obsessed with GJAIF, but only in the same way I was—for years—obsessed with Perez Hilton (who will get totally burned today? Let’s watch and wait!). The unhappy truth is, I can’t help but agree. There is now more wrong with Ben Paddon’s humorlessly vindictive Tumblr than ever. Time for me to disconnect?
Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, July 14, 2010
- Joystiq – Atari’s Haunted House returns to scare PC, Xbox 360 and WiiIf there’s one thing I’m internet-famous for, it’s talking about Haunted House. Like, I talk about it a lot, and I’m not even sorry. So what do we think? Does the Haunted House remake seem promising? (P.S. Thanks to the two of ye who Tweeted me.)
- Tiny Cartridge – Hotel Dusk sequel coming to the West...or at least to Europe. But that means gorgeous, hand-drawn noir is sure to come to North American DSes, too, right? Right, you guys?
Daily Linksplosion: Tuesday, July 13, 2010
- Indie City Games – The Indie City Games July 2010 MeetingBecause the inaugural meeting was such a success, the organizers of Indie City Games have arranged a tidy, half-day symposium for current and aspiring game developers based in the Midwestern United States. Among those scheduled to speak at the July 24 event: Ben Collins-Sussman demystifies interactive fiction; Dai5ychain’s Jake Elliott demonstrates the possibilities of Flixel; Puzzle Bots designer Erin Robinson explains Adventure Game Studio.
- Game Journalists Are Incompetent Fuckwits – I think I’ve made my point, don’t you?You know, there have been other blogs before this one that subscribed to exactly the same theme, and those made me laugh. (When I worked at Ziff, a coworker constantly refreshed one such blog out of grim paranoia, scanning the page for his own name, and that also made me laugh.) This Tumblog never made me laugh, though—in fact, it made me a little bit uncomfortable—so alarmingly serious seemed its author. Which is too bad, because vitriol can be hilarious, so long as it doesn’t get personal. And I’d rather laugh and squirm uncomfortably than never ever laugh, maybe.
In any case, author Ben Paddon now writes that he is closing up shop and hiatus-ing. I have strongly mixed feelings about it because, the truth is, I and a few friends have very actively followed Paddon’s ongoing catalogue of complaints, and as a reader, I’ll miss his blog. I suspect he’s exhausted himself by caring too much, though, and I do think the good games writing is more worth caring about than the bad.
Morning edit: without so much as a dramatic pause, Paddon keeps blogging
Daily Linksplosion: Monday, July 12, 2010
- Pixel Prospector – The Big List Of Indie Game SitesWhoa. (via superlevel.de’s @Fabu)
- McSweeney’s Internet Tendency – Roland Barthes Reviews "Pac-Man."Cross-saving Mike Nowak’s (@n0wak) hilarious del.icio.us link.
- GameLife – Spooky Platformer Eversion Gets Polished Up for SteamGuilherme Töws, whom I know best as "Zaratustra" from IRC channels, now has a game on Steam! And while you can still grab the freeware ‘Eversion’ from his website, the US$5 download promises redesigned levels and better graphics. Hop to it!
- Numberless – Sight UnseenScott Jon Siegel wonders: with HD televisions and cable services, three-dee tee-vee, the iPhone 4’s "Retina Display," and now the Nintendo 3DS, how is a company supposed to market a technology that the consumer cannot see until he is, well, actually seeing it?
- Lost Levels – Review: ColorsOh, man, I can’t believe I am only just reading this. I have always dreamed of somehow getting ahold of the source code for this game, slapping it on an SD card, and loading it right up on my beloved Gizmondo. As I understood it back in 2005, ‘Colors’ was meant to be one of two planned ARGs for the Gizmondo handheld device: using cellular network service and the gadget’s built-in GPS, you were supposed to basically wardrive around town until you found another player to brutally murder in-game—kind of like foursquare for Haters. (Or, OK, the idea of cell phone drive-by social gaming is actually pretty old and, I think, Swedish.) Anyway, apparently the solo play in ‘Colors’ is not too great. Oh, well! I guess I’ll just go back to looking for the Gizmondo source code for ‘Johnny Whatever’ instead.
- Drunken Moogle – The Rainbow Road Shot ChallengeThe best looking worst idea ever.
- GameLife – Next post UK’s Channel 4 Uses Games to Teach Teens HappinessGames for good.
- Artful Gamer – The Changing Nature of Gaming InterfacesExcellent read that elegantly conveys, ultimately, my own horror at touch screen devices. Here’s Chris Lepine’s footnote on button-mashing: "I am using a very special meaning of the word ‘repression’ that Merleau-Ponty introduces in his phenomenology of the body. ... For more details see Lawrence Hass’s book Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, pp. 89-90."
Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, July 07, 2010
- Kotaku – When Instant Death Was Only A Step AwayThe blargh is about Space Quest, but hang out the comments section afterward for some really cool videos (like Waxworks which, let’s face it, you’re basically playing to see how graphic your deaths can be, but that game is totally impossible, so, oh cool someone made an age-gated YouTube video).
- Boing Boing – This Gaming Life free onlineLet’s all read a book, for free! Oh, look. Here is a book I have always wanted to read.
Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, June 23, 2010
- RPGs be broke – need more women in te gamesindustrySatire makes me nervous.
Daily Linksplosion: Sunday, June 20, 2010
- IndieGames – ModDB Launches Indie Community Site IndieDBLook, even though I completely understand that "DB" is supposed to stand for "database," I cannot read that headline without seeing something about indie douchebags instead.
- Nobuooo – Professor Layton and the Unwound Future [E3 Trailer]While I’m not toh-hoooh-tilly sold on the idea that this really counts as "videogame music news," I mostly pay attention to everything @jeriaska posts.
- Gnome’s Lair – Game Sniped Filled with Ancient ToysWow! I’d never been to vintage games auction site gamesniped.com before, and now I feel like the biggest dick in London (that’s a line from Snuff Box, B.T. dubs)
Daily Linksplosion: Thursday, June 17, 2010
- Game Play: a Celebration of Video Game Performance ArtHEY HEY did you know that in my old life I did a ton of comic book performance art with like a troupe and everything? Didja?
Anyway, LOOK. Look at this! Look at how amazing all these video game performances sound! I’m glad we don’t live in Williamsburg because that’s where I got mugged at gunpoint, but I really wish we could all go to this in July!
I’d especially like to attend "Kewl-Aid Man in Second Life," because it sounds a lot like hanging out in Second Life with Scott Sharkey. He would fly around on his NES hoverboard, or we’d travel around in his TARDIS, and oh my God is it ever fun to harass people.
