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GSW/Gamasutra's write-up of Eric Chahi's Another World retrospective. Marvellous stuff in here, about the organic, improvisational manner of development, which explains why the beginning is perhaps the most striking impression the game leaves – it had a disproportionate amount of time spent on it. Some nice insight from Chahi; what a creation.
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"We attempt to further examine the nature of the chicken: is it a particle, or a wave? Watch to find out." Great experiments of physics, built in Minecraft, applied to chickens.
My favourite piece of games writing (this week)
03 March 2011
This is from the help pages to Tiny Wings (iTunes Store link) by Andreas Illiger.
That’s all you need to know, right there:
- Goal: flight.
- Conflict: this will be difficult because your wings are tiny.
- Game mechanic: perhaps you can use the many beautiful hills to help.
And then there’s an illustration to piece all the pieces together and explain what you’re going to do.
The whole game is explained in two sentences; two sentences that manage to contain pathos, hope, a goal, and hints at the gameplay mechanic for achieving that goal.
It doesn’t even matter that “beautyfull” is misspelt (or whether that misspelling is deliberate or not); it’s some of the clearest and most effectively concise writing I’ve seen in a game for a long while.
Lovely. (As, of course, is the whole game – fun, simple, very pretty, and full of flow-state euphoria when it’s going well. Its success is deserved.)
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"So is it worth reading dusty IF history? Well, I haven't read it yet. But I can say that the book really represents a tour through the past ten years of the IF community's thinking. Some of the essays are from 2001; some have been revised for this edition; some are brand-new. Many have been published in other forms, so if you've been devouring our blog posts and essays for the past few years, you will see few surprises. But if your awareness of IF dates from the last century — or if you've been following us only casually — I think this book has something to offer."
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"NOTE: This is a demake of the third level of Irem’s 1987 arcade game R-Type, retold as an interactive story. You'll need a dice to make rolls and something to write down your armaments (and points if you wish)." Brilliant.
Slight Outage
02 March 2011
This site was down for about four days, from Saturday, owing to a server failure.
We’re now back in the world, after a hair-raising few days. Usual service now resumed.
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Matt Brown and Mark Slater, writing about music and things. Looks set to be like a cracking little blog.
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Reviews of Phill Niblock's "Touch Three": drones created by stripping out attack/release/breath sounds from acoustic performers, and then gluing them together. What we're listening to right now, too. (It is better than that description makes it sound).
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This is, in fact, the most successful rotary encoder code I've found to date.
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Excellent summary of what happened on the Yaroze – and a quest to track down all the released Yaroze titles.
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Jason Rohrer's recursive shooter, which I must pick up at some point.