Weekly Links #104

It feels so good when links worth sharing appear to seek me out on their own. I'll start with a couple of retrospectives. For once, Hardcore Gaming 101 runs a feature on a modern game, that only seeks to emulate the classics: L'Abbaye des morts. I remember it being widely discussed on the World of Spectrum forums, and never realizing it first saw life as a PC game. Fun!

On a similar note, PC Games has a postmortem of Lemmings. It's not the first one I mention here on No Time To Play, but there's always something new to learn, so all is well.

In unrelated news, it turns out that personal games (a topic I mention with increasing frequency) are becoming mainstream, as evidenced by this article in The Telegraph. Good news indeed. And while I stopped following the Don't Die project some time ago, there's the occasional interview I simply can't miss. This one covers many of the ugly problems with the modern game industry, from the endless crunch mode that's the normal way of life for developers, through burnout, abusive behavior online and back to the killing of creativity. Along the way, they even find the time for a jab at virtual reality, a piece of tech everybody always seems to want except for the buying public. But sure, this time it just has to catch on. Or else next time. Just like we've been saying for decades now.

Last but not least, I just found out about a 20-part tutorial on making your own roguelike in Java. I haven't looked at it, but from the table of contents it looks pretty detailed. And then there's an article about making games more accessible through visual cues and other forms of assistance. Which promptly reminded me of Cheetah's old plead for configurable games. Because we don't all have the same ablities, even if you don't factor in the little issue of gamer aging.

Until next week, help combat snobbery in gaming.