Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Gaming Round-Up: January 26, 2015


"Mass Effect" by France-based Virak
Check out the WIP videos on YouTube.
Wallpaper available for download from the artist's website.


Aoife Wilson why Hatred’s recent AO rating was useful as publicity.

At The Escapist, Robert Rath addresses concerns that a game with dragons, demons, and elves is unrealistic in depicting a woman holding a sword.

Carolyn Petit says games can deal with real-world problems, but shouldn’t.

Detailed Timeline Shows How All of Nintendo's MARIO Games Are Connected

This five-minute video on the creation of a Mario AI is interesting, for the way it learns how to kill things and for the speech commands that order it to feel sad.

G. Christopher Williams wonders how South Park got away with an M rating.

Half-Life levels from an isometric perspective.

History Respawned hosts history professor David Andress to talk about the French Revolution and Assassin’s Creed: Unity.

Infamous. Thoughtless. Careless. Mark Bernstein on recent editorial decisions at Wikipedia: "The infamous draft decision of Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) on Gamergate is worse than a crime. It’s a blunder that threatens to disgrace the internet." Wikipedia bans five editors from gender-related articles

Kate Gray returns to the Guardian to talk about boob physics: "You’ll find a range of breast-related mishaps in video games, from over-stuffed, rigid lumps that protrude from the chest like a fist through a wall, to the comically large hooters favoured by fighting games and RPGs, often set in a parallel universe where breasts have the power to wobble violently, completely of their own accord, like a couple of drunken jellyfish in a mosh pit."

Over at Kill Screen, David Wolinsky digs into Grim Fandango’s Mexican folklore roots.

At PC Gamer, Richard Corbett draws a distinction between what games call “quests” and what Corbett claims games should just call “**** to do.”

At Reality Check, Shonte Daniels discusses race in games through the lens of Spawn On Me’s #BlackLivesMatter gaming marathon.  Adrienne Shaw, assistant professor of media studies and production at Temple University, discusses the outcomes of her research on representation in games, and addresses common criticisms of advocating for representation.

Speedrunner Minecraft SethBling explains how he beat Super Mario World in around 6 minutes by using in-game actions to manipulate the game's memory so that it glitches to the end credits. The glitch had already been pulled off in-game using emulators, but this is the first time it has been done on an actual SNES. Technical details here.

The Untold Story of the Invention of the Game Cartridge by Benj Edwards of Vintage Computing and Gaming, who started researching the subject after interviewing one of the people involved, Jerry Lawson, in 2009.  Haskel based his first program on the prevailing trend in the video game market: sporty, ping-pong type games popularized by the [Magnavox] Odyssey and Atari's Pong arcade machine.

USA Today names 15 video games to watch in 2015.

You probably know Richard Garfield as the creator of Magic: The Gathering. But his favorite creation is actually Netrunner, intended to be a "richer game" with bluffing and skill "more like Poker." Android: Netrunner is an asymmetrical Living Card Game based on the original Netrunner (which still has its fans). Set in a cyberpunk future, you play a megacorp using "ICE" to protect servers hiding company agendas (like The Future Perfect and Hostile Takeover) or the hacker "runner" trying to steal them. Chose from five megacorps and three runner factions and get started with a few data packs, important jargon, and deck-building. 


No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...