Field of View feels analagous in games to Aspect Ratio in film.
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Thinking about the trick in some Final Fantasies (certainly at least IX, maybe XII too? I don’t remember) where you cast reflect and have your black mage nuke your own party with an AoE spell to deal multiplied spell damage to a boss. Feels like the video game equivalent of that myth of Archimedes using an array of mirrors to burn ships down during the siege of Syracuse.
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we never had any game store near my hometown until around the year 2001, when someone started a new business. i got my ps2 from there. later on i bought some nes/snes games from there for the two or so years i was trying to get back into collecting them. miraculously, in spite of moving locations several times… it is still there. (i think they possibly have multiple business too? i’m not from columbus, ohio)
i like this blurry photo of the front of the store. i have no idea why this person took a picture of the place at night but the sort of liminal space of sterile/empty shopping plaza at night is definitely how i think about that area.
i think them hosting magic the gathering tournaments and board game events and stuff like that is sort of their bread and butter, and probably why they’ve been able to stay in business for so long. it makes me feel weird to think about how much people across the US seek the often intense community and need for belonging that comes from playing the longer/more intense analog games from spaces like this that just exist within sterile storefronts in a shopping plaza… some of the most oppressive feeling places imaginable to me.
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I live in Northern Virginia and it’s wild to me how many different types of spaces exist in the strip mall architecture. You have something like Eden Center which is like a Little Hanoi but totally contained within a strip mall. I appreciate these spaces but wish they existed in a different, more communal urban plan.
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We live in the low density commercial malaise era.
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I’m so sorry
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It gets worse. I live in the least diverse, most conservative pocket. It’s just this black hole where people complain about taxes and hate poor people.
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How Twin Peaks is the Harry Potter of indie games. I love Lynch too but watch a different fuckin’ TV show already, fuckin’ hell people, there’s lots of worthwhile art out there, doing a GREG THE HEDGEHOG: ORIGINAL CHARACTER DO NOT STEAL is more fertile ground than yet another riff on the red room, fuuuck I swear I’m not as cranky as I sound, I just don’t like video games that’s all!!
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I can’t remember if I ever voted for Link’s Awakening in the 85 games poll but if I did I’m sorry, it’s responsible for all this, the only reason half these nerds ever watched a show for adults is cuz it had a tiny influence on a Nintendo game
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Really feel like the big impact of Twin Peaks in indie games is that it made a lot of people less embarrassed than they should have been about making more games where you play as a cop.
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just from narrative function, as a protagonist, cops are so useful; they have a reason to not know things, to go places & talk to people, are sanctioned for that ever-tempting friction source, violence
I’m more surprised cops aren’t as popular in games as they are in TV and movies but honestly I think it’s because they aren’t violent enough for normal game loops
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Maniac Cops are though, it’s weird there aren’t more games about them
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well that would require a sense of humor,
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Robocop and Judge Dredd are comic-sized cops and that type of satire through crass meatheadedness is the easiest kinship a game has with comics
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Every track in the R-Type Leo soundtrack starts with a different “3-2-1 Lets Go” Sample.
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Googled “robert z’dar video game” cuz you’d think he would have appeared in one by now, that maybe there was some ninja-themed 8-bit revival platformer on Steam that slipped him in there somewhere, but seemingly that’s not the case
He hosted a…video tape? That reviews video games?
He is counting down the best selling games of February 1989. Where did they get these numbers from? I don’t know. Also he’s actually counting up. Don’t see that often. Casey Kasem wouldn’t be down with this. #6 was Deadly Towers. Gonna pretend they pulled this list outta their ass based on the top shelf at some video store.
I think the game that gets the most coverage in this video is Karnov. I now know how to get extra mans in Kanov. I will probably make people watch this in Gay Watch someday.
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There is a roguelike famous for intricate world generation called Ultima Ratio Regum. The developer said in an interview I listened to that its source code used to be in one enormous Python file but he had to add another file recently because he hit Python’s built in file length limit.
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I admire this commitment to getting things done to the exclusion of any order or decency. I’m working on a game now and I’m currently writing an implementation of Haskell style do-notation in Scheme and a handful of monads so I can write a command line argument parser for a utility in my asset pipeline.
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unfortunately the police procedural has sort of digested and absorbed all the previous genre fiction mainstays that were useful for this purpose (including: private detectives, criminals, spies, elderly lady crime novelists, meddling kids, crazed war veterans on a mission, the occasional catholic priest, etc) but it’s still funny to me that the closest i can think of to a vgame version of Mike Hammer is basically Sam & Max
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