Gaming Round-Up: September 28, 2015

"Her name is Samus Aran" by Italy-based Tommaso Renieri

News: Activision announces Call of Duty World League.  As the eSport scene keeps growing, it seems like Activision is trying to get more involved in that phenomenon. Via

News: The biggest collegiate esports competition is back with $500,000 as prizes

News: The second annual Oculus conference was held Thursday, and a whole lot of important information was unveiled to the world.  Here’s what you missed by not watching the Oculus Connect 2 keynote.

Review: The heroics of the Fury Road video game are defined by dreams, not bodies.

The game that inspired BioShock , System Shock, has been remastered for modern PCs, and I can't begin to tell you how geek out I am over it.  I was a HUGE fan of the game in the back when, and I fully plan on losing whole days of my life to this game again in the very near future.

Alex Handy of Gamasutra offers a look at the Oakland, California-based Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE), which celebrated its fifth anniversary this weekend.

A Brief History of User Generated Content in Games

The Drug War in the Arcade: Sean Hutchinson of Inverse explains how the intelligence community tried to win the drug war one arcade at a time.

"The Forty Hour Millstone" is dead, according to International Hobo's Chris Bateman.

"The big money is no longer out to hold a player’s attention for forty hours, but to hold a player’s attention long enough to get the next game out, or to hold on to groups of players in the hope to pull in a few big spenders, or to hold the player’s attention throughout the year with events crafted to maintain appeal and bring back those who are slipping away into other games."

Game Informer’s Mike Futter breaks down the issues surrounding the potential videogame voice actors strike, rumors of which around early last week.  It basically comes down to issues of compensation and workplace safety.  Wil Wheaton has taken to his blog to share his own take as a voice actor who voted in favor of a strike.

At The Guardian, Simon Parkin writes about how Twitch is helping disabled gamers to earn a living, when ordinary jobs are otherwise unavailable to them.

Here's a retro computing oddity, info on the first portable color computer, the Commodore SX64, with a 5 1/4-inch floppy drive and a seriously tiny CRT monitor. Here's a demonstration and teardown. Here's a somewhat ridiculous commercial for it. Commodore had a lot of unreleased prototypes, but the SX actually made it to market. Not a prototype but still interesting is Steve Gray's hack on an old monochrome Commodore PET to display color. And he also has an archive of old Commodore brochures.

The iBookGuy explains how graphics worked within the memory constraints of the Commodore 64 and NES, and the Apple II and Atari 2600

Listen to the new Portal song by Jonathan Coulton!

Paste's Javy Gwaltney pays tribute to Newgrounds, the "turn-of-the-century" flash games and animation portal which was one of the first mainstream ‘open platforms’ for independent games on the web.  The site is still alive and kicking, but it might still scratch a nostalgic itch for anyone who was wasting time on school computers in the early oughts.

At Playboy, Jake Tucker praises the early first-person shooter Intruder for bringing an uncommon sense of realism to the genre.

SOMA, the new sci-fi horror game by the creators of Amnesia, the Dark Descent, came out last week. It was influenced by the works of Greg Egan, China Mieville, Philip K Dick, and (MeFi's own) Peter Watts.  Parts of the game are reminiscent of Junji Ito's killer-fish-with-legs manga Gyo, the creepypasta wiki SCP Foundation, and the dank futuristic corridors of Alien.

Therapist Kim Shashoua shares a couple of experiences where videogames have played an essential role in reaching young patients in group therapy.

What's going on, and how to work around it. If you play some older PC games, you may have noticed that they don't work after a recent Windows update. They don't work because the update broke SafeDisc DRM. Another reason to hate SafeDisc DRM, as if we needed one.

What′s it like to be a "girl gamer" on Twitch? Maya Shwayder offers some insight.