No Time To Play
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Weekly Links #152

Hello, everyone! We're having a slow week again, and most of it dedicated to interactive fiction as usual (sorry). For one thing, PC Gamer puts the recent IFComp in the spotlight, thus further cementing the genre's return to the mainstream. And via K.D. we learn that Douglas Adams was working on a modern Hitchhiker's Guide game right before his untimely death in 2001. It's a bit of non-news, really, as the assets being lost means there's no chance of reviving the project after all these years. Doubly so as those assets were likely made for VGA displays back in the day, which would make them unusable in the 4K era.

And that, of course, highlights yet again the folly of obsoleting perfectly good technology at the drop of a hat. Imagine if vinyl had been completely abandoned within the year from CDs hitting the market. No more support for turntables, nothing. Entire collections of old, rare music becoming completely useless unless people worked hard to maintain failing hardware until there were just no more dead units left to scavenge for parts. That's what we're doing with computer games, and before you ask why we should bother preserving some piece of shovelware, the answer is that you can only know a classic in retrospect. If you didn't take care of it on time, sixteen years down the road -- when you finally realize it wasn't just another piece of shovelware after all -- you can only weep for the loss. And that's terrible.

Last but not least, my friend Kris is at it again with a batch of capsule reviews for tabletop RPGs and board games. Enjoy, and see you next time.