Set Side B

News 12/15/22

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Scott Stein at CNet (they’re still around) says his favorite gadget of the year was the Playdate.

Wes Fenlon at PC Gamer says that Tarn and Zach Adams, have become millionaires from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress. Earth blogger John Harris, a.k.a. rodneylives, says they’ve communicated with Tarn several times, including a couple of interviews at Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra), and that this could not have happened to nicer people. The article notes that, despite the windfall, they’re being cautious with the money. Steam DF was made specifically because the brothers need healthcare, and whatever long tail DF has is pretty much it, since they aren’t making a sequel or expansion pack.

At Inverse, Mo Mozuch describes the accomplishments of Carol Shaw, creator of Activision’s Atari VCS hit River Raid, one of the first vertically-scrolling shooters, and early woman pioneer in gamedev.

Rock Paper Shotgun’s C.J. Wheeler tells of a situation where the developer and publisher of The Outbound Ghost are feuding, which resulted in the game being temporarily pulled from Steam. Lead dev Conrad Grindheim has accused publisher Digerati of unethical practices, and Digerati claims to have been “blindsided” by the accusations.

Anthony Wood at IGN has a piece noting that, while Sonic Frontiers certainly has vocal detractors, that hasn’t stopped it from selling 2.5 million copies!

There is a great article on PC Gamer from Corwin Hayward about controversy with a certain extremely rare mount in World of Warcraft that, due to a couple of bugs, became extremely unrare among a small base of players for a short while. It’s a primer about the way the game’s loot system has been perceived and exploited for over a decade, and how it finally resulted in the relaxing of a whole category of ultrarare mounts. The article is long but very rewarding!

NPG’s Megan Lim speaks with Atari founder Nolan Bushnell on 50 years of Pong. Bushnell’s always been a bit of a huckster figure, but I’m glad he’s still kicking and talking with folk.

Scott McCree at Nintendo Life has a review of River City Girls 2 from favorite developer Wayforward! His premise is that it’s great, but ultimately not really differentiated from the original that much?

rodneylives

News 12/1/22: DABLOONS

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Quite a bit to get through today! Pull up a florb and moop for a bit!

Luke Plunkett at Kotaku informs us of Nintendo pulling support from the third-party tournament Smash World Tour, leaving them in a gigantic financial hole. This will severely harm tournaments’ willingness to trust Nintendo in the future, and the esports scene around future Nintendo products. Nintendo’s response at the end is especially frustrating, claiming they did not request any events be cancelled while still denying SWT a license, forcing them to cancel anyway.

Benj Edwards at Ars Technica: an AI from Nvidia can play Minecraft now, performing tasks based on text prompts. Congrats, you’ve invented a 10-year-old!

After our initial post, I’ve purposely been trying not to talk up the Super Mario Bros. movie, but I do think this post from Ryan Leson at IGN is of interest, about Shigeru Miyamoto noting that Donkey Kong’s been a bit redesigned for the movie, still recognizably the Rare-made version of the character, but with some adjustments to more resemble the original version.

Here’s Rich Stanton at PC Gamer on the effort to preserve a Ridge Racer Full Scale, a version of the arcade game that featured an actual car chassis the player would sit it, had triple ultra-wide display, and cost operators $250,000. Very few were sold, and it’s possible only one survives, which was in Blackpool. After an arcade museum sought to purchase it, but refused when they learned of damage to the frame, it was thought lost, but although the physical structure of the unit has not been salvageable, the car portion and the hardware have been saved, and its code dumped. More can be read at Arcade Blogger.

Richael Watts at Rock Paper Shotgun has a piece up on Dabloontok, an RPG-ish thing a bunch of people are doing on TikTok, involving cat videos trading an imaginary currency called “dabloons.” This isn’t imaginary in the sense of crptocurrency, or indeed all money when you think about it; this is really imaginary. How many you have is completely on the honor system. Participants use it to “trade” with these cats, and they can also be “stolen” by them. The whole thing seems pretty silly overall, but it’s entertaining to learn about!

And at Engadget, I. Bonifacic remarks upon Pong turning 50 years old. Yeah, that number isn’t getting any smaller. It’s a useful retrospective, although I take issue with them saying that without Pong Nintendo would not exist. Nintendo is over a century old, originally making playing cards. What is more likely is they wouldn’t exist as we know them today-they may not have gotten into video games at all. (By the way, they make traditional Japanese game playing equipment too, like go boards!)

rodneylives

The New Yorker: Mario at 40

In addition to the ZX Spectrum, Nintendo mascot Mario, née Jumpman, also turns 40 this year.

I’ve actually seen people claim that Mario is the perfect mascot, like he were destined towards super-stardom. He was nothing of the sort! Only a vaguely ethnic stereotype at first, although purposely a bit ugly in his original incarnation, he’s a working-class kind of guy. It seems prescient now, but it was the 80s at the time of his creation. Who picks a carpenter (his original occupation) to be their hero? Shigeru Miyamoto does. That’s really the secret of Mario’s success: he was created by one of the most successful game designers of all time, as part of his first project.

The New Yorker, which, it’s a fact, publishes humor other than cartoons, has a pretty funny bit of short fiction in tribute to Nintendo’s plumber and his advancing age by Simon Rich, even if it posits a version of Mario who’s a bit seemy, and worries that he’s-a gonna be cancelled. But it ends on a happy note, with Mario finally getting that back surgery he’s been needing for so long. Wait, what? Also he gets scammed by Wario.

The New Yorker is one of those publications that throws up a paywall at times, probably related to how many articles you’ve seen this month, so be warned.

And I know what you’re-a thinking: “How does Super Mario go broke? You collected entire rooms of coins! What happened?” And the answer is-a simple: I trusted a close personal friend to manage-a my money. And I can’t say too much about what happened, because the lawsuit is-a ongoing, but essentially, all those years I thought that I was riding Yoshi, it was the other way around.

rodneylives

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.

rodneylives

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.

rodneylives