Link Roundup, 4/19/2022

Sega looks to revive Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio properties

On using a serial port SD card reader on a Sega Dreamcast

How a Sonic fanfic writer ended up leading Sonic Frontiers

A roguelite that looks like an 80s Saturday Morning cartoon

Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games could be coming to Switch Online

Old Super Mario Bros. anime restored in hi-def quality and available to stream or download

The anime appears to have the “sucked into gameworld” premise used in Captain N: The Game Master and Bug tte Honey
Cameo by special guest star Gamera!

Game posts from 10 years of waxy.org

Via cortex over on Metafilter, venerable blog waxy.org celebrated its 20th anniversary, and its maintainer Andy Baio marked the occasion with a collection of favorite posts from the past ten years. A few of these were game related:

Playfic (2012 post) is both an online Inform 7 compiler and runner, and a place to store the games you create with it. Inform 7 is a language for interactive fiction that compiles down to the old Infocom Z-machine. Inform 7 source code reads like written English, and is pretty awesome, although my own experiments with it demonstrate easily that, while it looks like you’re just writing text, its syntax is actually pretty exacting. Still, with a good reference in hand like the Recipe Book, you can make some pretty great things with it.

72 Hours of GamerGate (2014 post) dredges up a lot of painful memories of one of the worst moments for gaming culture. (So far?) It weaponized meme and chan culture and, in hindsight, it can be seen as a trial run for Trump’s internet-based presidential campaign, and we all know how that turned out. Andy Baio did some mathematical analysis of many of the accounts that were spreading #GamerGate and #NotYourShield hashtags and noticed that many of them were recently created.

Playing With My Son (2014 post) talked about Andy’s experiences introducing his then four-year-old son Eliot to video games, in chronological order according to the games’ release dates, starting with a Pac-Man Plug-n-Play TV unit and moving forward by generations until eventually, at the age of 8, he became possibly the youngest player ever to complete Hell in Spelunky. After that, he asked his father if he could get Nuclear Throne. That kid’s gonna go far.

Never Trust A Corporation (2015 post) remembers a time when Google seemed like it might redeem the idea of the Silicon Valley tech corporation. I still remember that ancient age, as it seems few now do. Google’s early strengths were not just the quality of its search results, but that it didn’t compromise them for money; nearly every other major search engine of the game, forgotten names Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, and AltaVista, accepted money from people to rank their sites higher in the results. There was even a thread of thought at the time that this improved results, because it showed sites cared about their content.

It was a Google night-and-day different from the company, now “Alphabet,” of today, that seems to care little for their original mission of organizing and presenting the world’s information. In contrast, there’s the Internet Archive, a non-profit that is now the standard-bearer of the Old Web, but also hosts thousands of old movies, videos, books, and even software titles, and usable in-browser through a special version of the emulator MESS. I worry frequently that something my some day happen to the Internet Archive, the world changes rapidly, and cyberspace, as we should all know by now, is ephemeral. Use it while it lasts, folks.

You Think You Know Me (2017 post) is a “conversational card game” invented by Andy’s wife Ami, which they took from idea to production and a Kickstarter in five months.

And then there’s Unraveling the Mystery of Visit Eroda (2019 post), investigating an ARG involving an ad campaign for an island that doesn’t exist, ultimate to promote Harry Styles album Adore You.

And Skittish (2021 post) is a game-like virtual event space for conferences, invented during the dark times of the pandemic.

Link Roundup, 4/17/2022

Bear And Breakfast

Polygon’s Nicole Carpenter: 22 Games To Look Forward To In 2022. They are: The Garden Path, Venba, Citizen Sleeper, Call Me Cera, Dordogne, Serial Cleaners, Frank And Drake, Chinatown Detective Agency, Spirit Swap: Lowfi Beats To Match-3 To, Mothmen 1966, A Shiba Story, Validate: Struggling Singles In Your Area, Super Space Club, She Dreams Elsewhere, Hindsight, Norco, Terra Nil, Card Shark, Bear And Breakfast, Afterlove EP, Silt, and Thirsty Suitors. Descriptions and videos are in the article!

Looking back over their history, and forward to that Metaverse thing Zuckerberg things is something new and ground breaking, is Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse. That’s from an Atlantic newsletter. You might be interested in New World Notes, a long-running blog covering Second Life. They linked to an old Daily Show with Jon Stewart piece “covering” Second Life.

Group recreates New York City in Minecraft, part of a project to reconstruct the whole damn world.

Polygon’s Ben Betoli looks into the Playdate‘s crank control.

The Verge interviews Ron Gilbert on Return to Monkey

Link. Information in the article includes screenshots, the team, and the news that they’ve been working remotely. Hype is running high for a new 2D Monkey Island game. The last trip to this well was Telltale’s episodic 3D take Tales of Monkey Island, which was appreciated but some thought was lacking.

Phil Fish on Fez’s 10th Anniversary

Screenshot courtesy my own personal 209.4%, 64 cube, three heart-cube game

Eurogamer’s Robert Purchese got in contact with early indie superstar turned recluse Phil Fish, creator of the brilliant Fez on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the game’s initial publishing.

Fez was eagerly anticipated in development for several years, and Fish was one of the subjects of the movie Indie Game. It was the subject of tremendous applause when released, winning the both the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and Eurogamer’s Game of the Year in 2012, as well as Indiecade Best in Show in 2011, . For some idea of how long ago that was, the 2011 winner of the Seumas McNally Grand Prize was freaking Minecraft.

But then, at the height of its popularity, Phil Fish got into an argument on the center of all internet strife, that place where sanity goes to die: Twitter. He would cancel Fez’s sequel and swear off game development. He returned briefly in 2014 at what would turn out to be exactly the wrong time, the shameful era of GamerGate, before going underground again.

It was something of a coup that Robert Purchese got an interview with him. If I had known it was something one could just do I might have considered it myself.

Phil Fish’s Fez remains one of the outstanding achievements of the early days of indie game culture, and his being basically hounded out of it during GamerGate remains an egregious travesty.

Link Roundup 4/15/22

“Coming to you from the planet Koozebane”

Jeremy Parish’s NES Works looks at Robot Block (the original R.O.B. game in Japan), Geimos and 10-Yard Fight

Hardcore Gaming 101 covers No One Lives Forever: The originalThe sequelContact J.A.C.K.

Simon Carless’s Game Discoverability Newsletter takes a look at game ownership stats uncovered from a survey of 5,000 Switch owners

And for bargain hunters, GOG is having a sale on indie games, up until the 18th.

Game Boy Camera Virtual Art Gallery

From Cat Graffam on Twitter, the Game Boy Camera Art Gallery is a Game Boy rom image, in the form of an RPG-style walkaround, showing off photos taken with Nintendo’s crazy and awesome little heavily-dithered, 4-color foray into 90s digital photography. It can be viewed in-browser or as a downloadable rom, or you can purchase a cartridge with it for use on your own Game Boy or Game Boy-compatible hardware! Here are a few works from the compilation:

Nethackathon 2022

April 15th through the 17th, a group of 24 streamers will be playing classic roguelike NetHack for 48 straight hours on Twitch! Their site is at nethackathon.org, and they’re on Twitter. Last year’s marathon can be found archived on YouTube.

They did a similar stream last year in the month of September, but this year they’ve moved it to April in order to space themselves better around the two major NetHack tournaments in June and November.

What is that? You don’t know anything about NetHack? Oh boy, I get to explain it again-it’s a venerable roguelike game that’s been in existence for 34 years! The first version of NetHack is older than the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It began during the presidency of Ronald Reagan! While there have been lulls in its development, and at least one major member of its dev team, Izchak Miller, passed away years ago, it’s still going, and it’s still being worked on. It’s notable for its high difficulty, the large amount of information a player must assimilate to be successful, and for its high degree of fairness (although sometimes it doesn’t seem fair)

NetHack comes across as like a solo adventure in an old school first-edition AD&D megadungeon. It’s full of monsters with weird properties, you have to figure out what your items do, and every game is randomly generated.

Windows 3.1 Turns 30

Windows 3.1 logo

Windows 3.0 is where it became obvious that Windows was going to be a big thing. Previous versions of Windows were novelties. Now Microsoft had something that looked as good as a Mac. MS-DOS had become the de-facto standard for computing, but its UI was a command prompt, great for power users but impenetrable for the average PC owner. Windows 3.0 began to change that, and Windows 3.1 was a substantial improvement upon that.

April 6th is the 30th anniversary of Windows 3.1, released in 1992. While many of its elements may seem unfamiliar to younger users-there is no Start Button, desktop directory, taskbar, Windows Explorer or web browser-millions of people got their first exposure to Windows here. It used a “Program Manager” to allow users to launch their software.

File icons don’t appear on the Desktop. Minimized programs appear there instead, at the bottom of the screen. And under the hood is MS-DOS, which would remain around in some form until Windows XP finally annihilated it completely in 2001.

Benj Edwards of HowToGeek spoke with former Microsoft VP Brad Silverberg on the version of Windows that many cut their teeth on.

Benj’s Twitter feed has some more discussion.

You can run Windows 3.1 in your web browser at pcjs.org.

The file manager of Windows 3.1, called File Manager natch, has been officially remade for Windows 10 and later, and is available on the Microsoft App Store.