Monday, January 11, 2016

Gaming Round-Up: January 11, 2016

Legend of Zelda Designs by Dan Elijah G. Fajardo

"Master Sword" by Philippines-based Dan Elijah G. Fajardo
Prints available for purchase from Threadless.


News: Chicago college first in U.S. to offer video game scholarships to "e-athletes"

Alex Wiltshire  investigates Infected Planet’s mutation mechanic and the AI it uses to counter single-strategy play.

Bianca Batti examines how literary examination can be used to explore videogames: "such a lens might allow us to more fully realize how video games converse with other new media forms and how it is they converse with other means of storytelling. And such an understanding of games can allow us to understand how it is that games expand the way we interact with and engage with narrative structures and with the stories we tell."

CES confirmed what most of us already knew: virtual reality is still the next big thing.

Chris Livingston of PCGamer.com remembers the the old sci-fi magazines that inspired 2015’s biggest videogames.

Doctor Professor weighs in on how bigger game worlds aren't necessarily better, citing Randal Monroe's recent XKCD comic featuring a hoverboard game.

Eurogamer's Simon Parkin argues that narration is becoming the most interesting tool of game design.  I'm not sure I agree, seeing as narration has been at the heart of some the best games of the past five years.

Flickering Myth looks ahead to the Most Anticipated Video Games of 2016.

Giant Bomb asked a number of game developers to pick top ten games of 2015, including 80 Days writer Meg Jayanth, Her Story creator Sam Barlow, Cibele creator Nina Freeman, and the best of the bunch, Old Man Murray co-creator Erik Wolpaw.

How long does it take for civilization to collapse in Just Cause 3 if you don't press a single button?  Quicker than you might guess.

Mashable's Adam Rosenberg reflects that David Bowie's only video game is as perfectly weird as he was.  The singer and actor appeared in bizarre Dreamcast video game Omikron: The Nomad Soul.

Massively Overpowered's Justin Olivetti suggests Six MMO soundtracks that need to be in your collection, to which I would add my personal favorites, Borderlands, Borderlands 2, and Kingdom Hearts.
On the latest episode of DIY Prop Shop on Break’s AWE me channel, host Vinny Logozio demonstrates how to make a low-budget version of a weighted companion cube from the Portal video game series.
At PCGamesN, Ben Barrett explains why he thinks Street Fighter IV is "the greatest spectator game of all time."

At Polygon, Allegra Frank talks about attending the No Quarter exhibit with a particular focus on the diversity of tone, style, and sociology.

Psychology Today delves into game criticism with an examination of the way a game displaying the effects of poverty conflicts with players' personal agency.

RetroAchievements provides customized emulators and an account structure to add Achievements to hundreds of old-school video games on the NES, SNES, MegaDrive/Sega Genesis, GameBoy, GameBoy Color, GameBoy Advance, and PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16. Browse the most commonly won achievements, the games with the hardest achievements, and the most popular games. Or if you're more into coding than gaming, you could always just check out the GPL-licensed source code for the emulators.

Richard Moss of Gamasutra has a list of the 7 uses of procedural generation that every developer should study.

Robert Yang wrote about his 2016 new year’s resolution, “to make a double-A 7/10 open world stealth game. It is tentatively called ‘Maven.'”  For the record, I would play that game so hard.

Vice's Mike Diver asked a real-life drug dealer How Realistic the Drug Dealing in Grand Theft Auto Is.  He didn't get dragged out of his car and shot, so not very.

Wired's Jake Muncy asks Why Videogame Speedruns Are So Fascinating to Watch


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