Eduardo Morais'Great news from archive.org! Play Atari #games directly in your browser — theverge.com/2013/10/25/502… #retro
Posts tagged games
TwitterMust buy: this folio about the legendary CBM Amiga videogames producer Sensible Software — readonlymemory.vg #books #games
Daniel Dennett's seven tools for thinking | Books | The Observer www.guardian.co.uk/books Instapaper
TheDrawbridge | Be a gentleman on the treadmill www.thedrawbridge.org.uk/issue_16 Instapaper
Stupid for Art maisonneuve.org/article Instapaper
A list of open-source and free software videogame clones. Here's part of my summer holiday — osgameclones.com #games
“San Francisco” by Foxygen is my new jam. ♫ t.thisismyjam.com/eduardomorais/…
Pushover for Windows. I remember obsessing over ending the Commodore Amiga version back in 1992 — pushover.sourceforge.net/ #games
Lucas Pope makes dystopian serious #games. 'Papers, Please' is his latest — dukope.com
... and here's a the Ultimate Conteporary Timewaster: The Useless Web — theuselessweb.com #websites #one_thing_well
Here's a port of Dune II you can play in your web browser. Also known as Ultimate Retro Timewaster — play-dune.com #games
Misc. links Aug 19th - 29th
Browsers running Javascript are the hottest thing right now in visuals programming: vvvv has its .js counterpart; while the toxiclibs have been ported for use in Processing.js. ¶
Bootstrap, made by Twitter, looks like a good approach to a HTML+CSS framework. ¶
Falsehoods programmers believe about names. A fascinating read about the actual complexities of implementing something as simple as people’s names in an application. (via Boing Boing) ¶
Convoluted TOS and ‘open’ APIs will be the death of us. A good rant on the pitfalls of using public web APIs and being subjected to the whims and Terms of Service of whoever provides it. Open APIs allow people to do great stuff, but there will always be issues of trust. Handle with care. ¶
A transcript of Charlie Stross’ talk Network Security in the Medium Term, 2061-2561 AD. Worth a read if only for the idea that network security is increasingly synonymous with identity security — as Stross points out, if our existence also manifests itself in bits, protecting those bits becomes a very basic need. ¶
A DSLR controller for Android. Looking at this made my Android 2.1 phone go from ‘great’ to ‘piece of shit’ instantly (as it requires Android 2.3). Even though I’d probably not use this app that much. ¶
90 percent of people don’t know the shortcut to find a word in a webpage. Actually, one of the things I miss from Firefox (I use Chrome) is the option to search-as-you-type. But hitting Ctrl+F is not that much work. ¶
Tom Waits on the difficulty of throwing a private listening party in this day and age. ¶
Kingdom Rush (Flash game) is definitely not recommended visiting unless you want to lose the next few hours of your life. (via Kottke) ¶
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Video games vs Real Life: When I was a child, I may have spent too many rainy days playing Double Dragon in my ZX Spectrum. Such my Pavlovian reaction to this picture.
Instant adventure gaming
I was never much of a Sierra gamer, probably because unlike Lucasarts’ you would get to a Game Over screen if you did something wrong… days before. Which was pretty frustrating. But there’s something compelling about being able to play those games instantly in the browser. If only you could play Monkey Island…
No, I better not hear about it. I’ve got work to do.
ZXSpectrum.net
A huge part of my childhood now fits in a website. To think of all the anxious Fridays, waiting for my dad to arrive from work with a bootleg copy of some new game (back the 80s, at least in Portugal, there was no such thing as ‘piracy’, in fact there were quite a few ‘game copy shops’). To think of all the time spent anxiously waiting for that first load attempt, only to see the game crash after 15 minutes of loading. To think of all the constant fiddling with the tape recorder, trying to ‘tune’ it for that particular tape — in a couple of years I’d be fixing radios (or destroying them in a puff of noxious electrical smoke, more likely).
And now, this website has 28 years (up to 2010!) of Spectrum games accessible and always-loadable at the click of a button, and all I can say is that for all the nostalgia, Kick Off looked like shit.
Robert Overweg’s The End of the Virtual World is a collection of virtual worlds’ ends (Half Life 2’s, in this image). It’s funny to think that once upon a time people believed Earth had boundaries like this — which it doesn’t, right?