No Time To Play
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Weekly Links #141

What a week. First I spent three days working on a side project (that I'm not going to announce until next month). Then had to rest a little, because a three-day coding marathon is exhausting when you're pushing 40. And then an ISP outage kept me offline for a day and a half. At least that gave me the time to put a high score table in Laser Sky, not to mention play and review a couple of games.

In news that aren't about No Time To Play, two weeks ago Techdirt covered the case of a game developer suing Steam customers only to have their games removed from the platform. Turns out, now they are dropping the lawsuit, citing bankruptcy. Should we count the number of ways in which they had it coming?

To move from business to game design, here's an article about the balance between gameplay and realism. But while the overall argument is sound, the chosen example betrays painful ignorance of actual history. Um, guys, you do realize firearms — even small arms — were developed centuries before the industrial era, do you? Heck, they were commonly made of bronze (otherwise an obsolete material) before steel became good enough (which just so happened to also make it good enough for steam engines). And there was a time roughly two centuries ago when, demand for guns having outpaced the still nascent industry's ability to provide, it was common to make gun barrels by hammering spiral strips of metal around a stick until they held together. Which gave you rifling for free, but tended to end in the barrel bursting, with that flowering effect you can see in old Loony Tunes cartoons.

Funny how animators from half a century ago, who were only trying to be funny, knew their history better than people making, you know, historical videogames. And there was no Wikipedia back in the day...

Last but not least, Hardcore Gaming 101 has a feature on 80 Days, the indie smash hit from a couple of years ago. Appropriate, given the IFComp is in full swing.

And that's really all. See you next week.