Weekly Links #132

Hello, everyone. This week, Vintage Is the New Old notes that the Internet Archive just uploaded 13 years' worth of Nintendo Power issues. Which reminded me of the times in 8th grade when all the boys would gather around a classmate whose parents were wealthy enough to get him issues of a similar magazine from France, along with Famicom games. It would be years before I got my own console, a Chinese clone, and by then everyone else had moved on to the SNES. But magazines still made people gather around in the classroom...

In unrelated news, we have a couple of rants, like this one about big game companies jumping into virtual reality feet first and messing things up, thus giving the medium a bad reputation. An interesting argument, but I predict that's not what will kill VR again -- rather it will be the realization that VR is still a gimmick with nothing new to say. And from a different source, here's an opinion piece about what actually matters in procedurally-generated games. Gee, you mean some people play games for the (gasp) mechanics? As in, the one thing that's unique to the medium? What a surprise... not.

I'll end with an article on testing interactive fiction with automated gameplay, which contains some ideas easily applicable to other genres, like board games. It's a kind of fuzzing, really, with comparable benefits and limitations. Also, the bit about repeating game states made me think about certain rules from the games of Chess and Go -- it's not just an issue for computers.

But you already know to take inspiration from the analog world, don't you?