Weekly Links #162

Hello, everyone! I've set aside development for a while to play again, thanks to a present from a friend. But that didn't stop me from also collecting a bunch of useful links.

For starters, both Gamasutra and Emily Short write about a new interactive fiction platform called Episode, that seems to have stealthily risen to massive popularity as of late. In related news, PC Gamer has an article titled The Tricky Business of Making Modern Adventure Games. And to look back into the past, Tim Schafer shares his thoughts on digital archeology (via Patrick Hellio).

Speaking of the past, this has been a good week for fans of retrogaming. On the one hand, there's the story of a classic game magazine from the 1980s, and it's surprisingly relevant. Hint: when a publication takes advertising from the same companies whose products they cover... yeah, you can't blame the writers for being very careful what they write. It's either that, or be out of a job faster than they can press Enter.

Luckily, nowadays you can be a game journalist for free, and that's exactly what The Retrogaming Times crew is doing. Issue 7 is the first one I did more than skim, with a big retrospective of Street Fighter II — covering the social angle — and a number of Famicom games that deserve being remembered despite not being classics, among other subjects. All features are in-depth, so dive in! (And thanks to Vintage is the New Old for the tip, as usual.)

Sadly, I have to finish this issue with politics, namely an article on the people you won't meet. Yes, it's about Muslim game developers again. And it's sad having to even bring it up, as if human rights could possibly be conditional, but I had no idea so many famous AAA games only exist thanks to developers of Iranian origin.

Can we please learn humanity already?