Gaming Round-Up: February 3, 2014

"My First Game Console (Sprite Edition)" by Chris McVeigh
Available for purchase from StoreEnvy. US$58.50

"This is a really fun build, with a lot of great little details. It’s 220 pieces which allows you to construct the main unit, two controllers and two cartridges. And yes, the cartridges can be popped into the main unit — just be sure to blow the dust off ‘em first!"

As a developer and a gamer I always wanted to make games, but I never actually did it. To change that I threw myself a public challenge: build a new game every week in html5. You can play the games for free on lessmilk.com. Expect the games to become better over time.

Do not play this game. You will be dead in seconds. Did it get popular using sneaky tactics? Probably not. But do you want it to haunt your dreams? No, you don't. Stave off your existential despair in some other way. I repeat, do not play this game.

Rock Paper Shotgun's John Walker on copyright and the need for videogames to enter the public domain. "So why should a singer get to profit from a recording of his doing some work thirty-five years ago? The answer “because it’s his song” just isn’t good enough."

Simon Parkin writes 1600 words for The New Yorker online about The Far Lands or Bust!, an ongoing effort to walk to the end of a world in Minecraft.

Street Fighter 2: An Oral History: Street Fighter 2 is one of the game industry's biggest success stories, but its history is often told secondhand... In an effort to remedy that, over the past year we tracked down more than 20 former Capcom employees and business partners and asked them to tell it in their own words.

Thomas Baekdal writes on How In-app Purchases Have Destroyed The [Game] Industry: "We have reached a point in which mobile games couldn't even be said to be a game anymore. Playing a game means that you have fun. It doesn't mean that you sit around and wait for the game to annoy you for so long that you decide to pay credits to speed it up. And for an old geezer like me who remember the glory days of gaming back in the 1990s, it's just unbearable to watch."  Drew Crawford answers: "See, in the in-app purchase model actually predates phones. It predates video game consoles. It goes all the way back to the arcade, where millions of consumers were happy to pay a whole quarter ... to pay for just a few minutes"

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