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Showing posts from December, 2022

Advent Calendar 23: Home(screen) For The Holidays

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Well, gang, this is our last video game entry for the Advent Calendar this year. Tomorrow and the next day are reserved for photos of food and rat cage decorations. I hope you've had fun with all of my nerdery. I actually specialized in this in college, not that anybody knew what I was talking about. My faculty advisor was the one dude who admitted to owning an Intellivision in the '70s. People study it now, but this was in the early Aughts, when video games were still a degenerate pastime that rotted your brain. But what of the video games we leave behind? Do they, as the song asks , know it's Christmas? It turns out that some of them do. Big kid computers have had real-time clocks forever. There was a business need -- early mainframes were timeshare systems. You couldn't charge someone for their computer time if the computer didn't know what time it was to record the billing data. Home computers didn't get them until the PC and Macintosh came on the scene. The

Advent Calendar 22: If You Don't Succeed, Tri, Tri Again

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Early 3D graphics have a really distinctive look. First you had wireframe , then you added flat shading , and finally we got to a point where could texture and shade the virtual shapes. But they all look kind of simultaneously blurry and pointy. Faceted. Triangular. You could, in theory, build three-dimensional shapes out of any polygons with any number of sides -- N-gons, in mathematical parlance. You either need a shape that tessellates with itself, like squares, or alternate between two that tessellate together, like squares and hexagons. The problem here, though, is that no matter how round your model is, the computer needs all the individual shapes in it to stay flat. If you're using a shape with more than three vertices on it, there's a chance that manipulating your model will force one or more of the faces to warp such that all of its corners are no longer on the same plane, at which point the computer will have to break it up into smaller N-gons until it finds a soluti

Advent Calendar 21: That Is Bad, And You Should Feel Bad

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Not all games are classics. Last week I covered some games ( E.T., Superman 64, Duke Nukem Forever ) that simply couldn't surmount the enormous gap between expectations and reality. But what about games that took a swing at expectations that were low or non-existent, and somehow still missed? Games that no one asked for, which could easily have remained unpublished forever, but somehow still escaped the facility to waste the public's disposable income? Stuart Ashen, better known as "ashens" or "the guy with the manky brown sofa", has a particular love of these things, mostly from the UK 8-bit micro scene, and in addition to running his YouTube channel, gleefully makes the rounds of auditoriums and lecture halls to tell people all about them live. This also exists in the form of a pair of books, Terrible Old Games You've Probably Never Heard Of and Attack Of The Flickering Skeletons , which I dearly want but don't dare buy because I have nowhere left

Advent Calendar 20: "Silly. Didn't you know? This IS Hades!"

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Testing a video game is an involved process. There's a lot of content to get through. While simple platformers or shoot-'em-ups tend to derive their "playtime" from skill-building repetition, and visual novels from multiple story paths, RPGs tend to be 20+ hours just to get through the main linear plot, and run up to 60+ hours of "playable time" if you feel the need to 100% all of the side quests and minigames. Playtesting the very beginning of the game is easy -- just pop it in and start a new quest. But how do you check the rest of it? You cannot demand that your playtesters run through thirty hours of gameplay to test one thing you changed near the end and report back "yo, it's still broken". Enter the "debug room". In order to understand what these are and how they work, you need to know a little bit about how RPGs are constructed. The game tracks your progression through the plot through "flags", specific variables that

Advent Calendar 19: Pointed Observations

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The advent of the mouse was a revolution in computing technology. It did nothing to augment the brains of the computer, but it did a lot bridge the communcation gap between the computer's brain and the user's. Early home systems only spoke their own language, and you had to learn computerese to get anything out of them; early consoles only knew left-right-up-down and fire. Most computing histories only cover the mouse in terms of accessibility of the OS and filesystems, but the mouse was also integral to games. After text-based interactive fiction and before full-motion video, there was the point-and-click adventure. These games built environments out of still pictures, sometimes with limited animation, and took full advantage of the mouse cursor's mobility to put interaction points anywhere on the screen. If you could see it, you could use the mouse to poke it, and if you poked it right, it might do something. IF's eternal game of "guess the verb" was simplif

Advent Calendar 18: A Golden Shiny Wire Of Hope

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Time for a personal story. In summer 1997, I informed my parents that they would be getting me a Playstation. They could buy one for my birthday in September or wait until Christmas, but they were  going to get me one. My mother, you see, loves giving gifts. This has sometimes been a problem; historically, she has a habit of using presents or offers of resources to get around boundaries she doesn't like. My parents are overall not very functional adults. But the Christmas blow-out, at least, was string-free and well-intentioned. We kids always got a big package and a pile of smaller things, and the "family" gift, as I mentioned way back on the 1st, was always a video game for us to play during vacation. My mother is not super techie, and also not super good at listening to people, so we came to an agreement: I would just tell her what my big gift was going to be every year, and let her channel her unfocused, unfettered spending into candy and stocking stuffers. It worked

Advent Calendar 17: Won't Somebody Think Of The Children?

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Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games. The Ratmas card order has been slightly delayed, so if you want one you still have a chance! Subscribe to my writing Patreon  here   today for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one! I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence! Video games, like animation and footie pajamas, are one of those things that is often unfairly dismissed as "just for kids". There is nothing about the medium that is inherently more childish than not; this image is largely down to Atari trying to justify the cost of the 2600 -- much higher than single-game Pong consoles -- by marketing it as 'fun for the whole family', and later Nintendo strictly regulating the contents of their games to keep them suitable for all ages.  PC gaming has

Advent Calendar 16: Some Very Stable Genius

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All this info about old video games is cool and all, you are (hopefully) saying, but what good is it really when I can't play any of them? Well, you can. Mostly. A lot of the super famous ones have gotten modern remakes, and can be bought online in various places like Steam, or Xbox Live/Playstation Store/Nintendo eShop. Myst has been remade about a thousand times, and there are some pretty good re-renderings of old point-and-clicks like The Secret of Monkey Island or Sam and Max: Freelance Police .  Nintendo's Virtual Arcade is a prominent player here, except most of the games available there aren't remakes -- they're emulated . An emulator is a piece of software run on one kind of computer architecture that makes it appear, to a second piece of software, to be a different kind of architecture, usually the system that the second piece of software was originally written to run on. This is distinct from a port, where the program itself is translated from the language o

Advent Calendar 15: Great Movie! When Do We Play?

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Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games. As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon  here   today  for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one! I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence! The wonderful thing about putting games on optical discs is that you can include as much full-motion video as you want! The terrible thing about putting games on optical discs is also that you can include as much full-motion video as you want.  The first FMV games were constructed not by leveraging the capacity of a CD-ROM to add video to a computer program, but by grafting a simple program onto the video format. LaserDiscs are a non-contact medium. Unlike video tapes, which are worn by every pass across the playback heads, an LD can be play

Advent Calendar 14: Nintendo's Crazy Ex

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Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games. As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon  here  by TOMORROW for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one! I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence! Gather 'round, children, and let me tell you the story of How The Playstation Came To Be. Once upon a time, there was a Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The SNES was a shiny, shiny thing in 1991 (1990, as the Super Famicom, in Japan). A spiffy new 16-bit games console that played all the latest Mario  and Castlevania  and Metroid  games, its main rival was the slightly older Sega Genesis (né Sega Megadrive, 1988 in Japan, 1989 in North America). The two coexisted for some time with only the usual sibling rivalry, where Sega pulle
Good news: I have been very kindly sent things like shampoo and vitamins and about four pounds of oatmeal by some people here. Yay! Thank you! I now have a slightly greater volume of rat food than I have of actual rats, and they have some high-quality Amazon boxes to destroy. They will have a happy Ratmas no matter what. They are all slightly grompy that it has gotten cold outside, and I am not willing to jam their dinner bowls all the way into their cozy nests where I will never get them out again, but they will get over it when they realize they are getting warm grains and peas tonight. Bad news: Les Fromages need more medication, probably chronically; I have no idea how I am going to pay rent at the end of the month; Boston has developed a certain climatic lability lately that has bounced me straight into a migraine with every sudden bout of precipitation. Boo. I wanted some pretty snow for Christmas, but I didn't want it delivered so quickly it did my head in.  The only other n

Advent Calendar 13: Snatching Defeat From The Jaws of Victory

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Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games. As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon  here  by tomorrow for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one! I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence! Some of you, like moi , might be almost old enough to remember the great Video Game Crash of 1983 (known in Japan, as Wikipedia has just helpfully informed me, 「アタリショック」). Those of you who don't know what this is all about... brace yourselves. You remember the Nintendo Seal of Quality? There is a reason for that -- or, rather, another one less obnoxious than Nintendo keeping a stranglehold on cartridge manufacturing. It's because Atari once managed to produce a game so terrible it tanked not just its own sales, not just sales of

Advent Calendar 12: The Shiny Frisbee

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Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games. As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon  here  by December 15th for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one! I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence! Picture it: Phoenix, Arizona. 199... uh, 3, ish? It's been a while. As mentioned, my father did a lot of CAD design and sometimes worked at home, back in the days when the brontosaurus stampedes sometimes interfered with his morning commute, so we always had at least one up-to-date PC in the house.  The big purchase that year was a tricked-out '486. For those of you who were not buying desktop PCs when you had to know and care what all the parts were, the CPU (and the motherboard it went on) was usually the single most costl

Advent Calendar 11: Into The ~THIRD DIMENSION!~

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Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games. As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon  here  by December 15th for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one! I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence! Video games from the very start have made creative use of two dimensions. The ancestor of the video game as we know it was a Pong-like amusement that involved creative misuse of an oscilloscope, a device meant specifically for graphing electrical signals on an XY plane. But almost as soon as they had worked out how to draw pictures on a flat surface, game makers set their sights on the magical, mystical THIRD DIMENSION. The first attempts actually mimicked the nascent processes of computer animation. The earliest way to get compute

Advent Calendar 10: Invisible Insane

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Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games. As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon  here  by December 15th for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one! I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence! If you look back through the history of video games, right around the mid-80s, you see an odd geographical jump: The epicenter of the industry suddenly hurtles across the Pacific from California to Japan. I'll get to what tanked the American end of things in a few days, but the rise of the Japanese industry can be attributed to the explosive popularity of the Nintendo Entertainment System, née Famicom. From the NES' debut in 1985 to the release of the original Xbox in November 2001, Japan was where console games were born, a

Advent Calendar 09: Praying To RNGeezus (And Giving Him Some Help)

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Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games. As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon  here  by December 15th for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one! I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence! Speedrunning video games has grown from a niche hobby in the mid-90s to a thriving e-sport today, with thousands of amateurs training up their fingers on Twitch, and the real pros performing for an audience at Awesome Games Done Quick. Real money can be involved these days -- not as much as, say, basketball, but enough for people to make an actual career out of it. And, like any other professional sport, speedrunning has had its own cheating scandals. The great granddaddy of all controversial speedrunners is a guy named Todd Rogers.