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Reading List (February 2023)
🕑 Added 2023-02-27 09:38:33 +0000 UTCHey, welcome back to the reading list. It's a short month, but I've still got plenty of stuff to read and watch. Without further ado, let's jump in.
The Design of Games
[Read] A Tale of Two Relics - "[Obra Dinn and Case of the Golden Idol] stand on their own as engaging and innovative entrants into the mystery genre thanks to their unique take on logic-based puzzles. "
[Read] Vampire Survivors and The Glory of Floor Chicken - "Floor Chicken serves as a quintessential example of how every system in this game interlocks and mutually reinforces each other"
[Read] The hourglass philosophy behind Dishonored and Deathloop's level design - Eurogamer interviews Arkane's Dana Nightingale, to talk loopy level design.
[Watch | CC | 19 mins] What's the Deal with Fast Travel? - "Fast travel is a bedrock of game design, but what's the point of fast travel anyway?"
[Read] One Day, This Videogame Will Be Perfect - "15 years and a great expense later, the new Dead Space’s Ishimura is exactly the same, only more intricately rendered."
The Development of Games
[Read] Death in service - "It must be horrible to work on a failing live-service game, ploughing on through the content roadmap, while the graphs tumble unstoppably down"
[Watch | 15 mins] Results After Releasing my First Game on Steam - "It's been a month since I released Punch A Bunch on Steam. In this video I sum up how the release went, reception, how many copies I sold and what the future holds."
[Watch | 28 mins] How to make a Game - from Start to Finish! - The developer of Patch Quest explains the long road from initial idea to Steam release.
[Watch | 15 mins] How Do Videogames Even Work Anyway? - Same dev, very different video
[Read | Long Read] Deep Dive: A framework for generative music in video games - "The goal is to use computational creativity and generative techniques to extend the capabilities of human composers."
[Read] Teardown Frame Teardown - "Teardown is, in my view, a love letter to decades of real-time games and graphics".
The Playing of Games
[Watch | 4 mins] I rewrote Portal from scratch and solved the Portal Paradox - "The Portal Paradox has been the subject of a lot of debate online, but now it has been implemented by rewriting Portal with moving portals."
[Read] In praise of the 7/10 - "I like bad games. They can often be more interesting than the current standard of highly polished, triple-A titles"
[Read] Your Brain is Made of Meat - "At some point, in your experience playing Dead Space - whether the original or the remake - you're probably going to start desecrating corpses."
The Art of Games
[Read] How can games engage with the complex realities of mental health? - "Games that convey the experience of depression and grief – particularly indie games – have flourished in the past few years,"
[Watch | 14 mins] Overanalyzing the Undeniable Style of Hi-Fi Rush - Looking at cel shading, ben-day dotting, and more.
[Watch | CC | 35 mins] A Tale of Two God of War 2s - Jacob Geller looks at two God of War sequels, and how they both challenge the idea of fate in different ways
[Read] Citizen Sleeper: Communities of Food - "The game believes in your capacity to survive – and not just survive, but to survive with others, pulsing with creation."
[Read] The Indie Pop Legacy Of Super Mario Land 2 - "It’s a good example of the rather inconsistent way video game music gets recognized by the larger pop music machine."
The History of Games
[Read] How Bill Gates’ Minesweeper addiction helped lead to the Xbox - "While Minesweeper love at Microsoft wasn’t universal, the game managed to get its hooks into the most important backer a Microsoft game could have."
[Watch | CC | 25 mins] Wario Land 3: The Best Nintendo Game - "We dive into 2000's Wario Land 3; the full realization of Nintendo R&D1's decade of handheld experimentation. "
[Read] How the greatest Japanese RPGs of the ‘90s came to the West - "In the span of just a few years, Western localizers, using laughably rudimentary technology and techniques, redefined what it meant to translate and localize video games for Western audiences."
Beyond Games
[Watch | mins] How The Parthenon Marbles Ended Up In The British Museum - From the comments: "Why are there Pyramids in Giza?" "Because they’re too big to put in a British museum"
[Read] Steven Spielberg’s Oscar Curse - "Inside nearly 50 years of frustration at the Academy Awards for the most popular director of all time."
[Read] ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web - "It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it"
[Read] ChatGPT is just the beginning: Artificial intelligence is ready to transform the world - "New chatbots capable of generating text and images from a few, simple prompts provide glimpses of how AI could change the workplace, education, superpower relations and our daily lives"
Comments
Bizau Cristian (Biz)
This list truly is inspiring
Germanos
Fantastic list! Thanks Mark <3
JC
Great list as always. This'll keep me busy for a while. Thanks Mark!
I saw the video and actually found it quite funny the first time I watched it. But mainly because I thought the message was: "Gaming culture is bad, please be better". But now that I watch it again I feel like it's more: "Twitter won't let me play anything fun anymore" and that's just the wrong message to take away here imo. So yeah I get why you put it in, would have made the same mistake honestly
Game Maker's Toolkit
Removed. I thought it was a clever take on the discourse, and definitely wasn't pro-Hogwarts Legacy. But I think I'll just ignore the existence of that game entirely - not worth the hassle!
ZoidbergForPresident
"Dunkey has trouble finding a non-controversial game to talk about" he'd have more trouble finding games that finances a multimillionnaire who uses her money to influence the killing of a part of the population. Dick move to include that video, sorry, not sorry.
