Weekly Links #189

Hello, everyone! This week more than half the links are about looking backwards. Via Vintage Is the New Old we learn of a history of Nintendo arcade games, showing a less known face of the company. Their earliest effort was especially interesting. In related news, there's a new effort to preserve videogame history, focused on a less-known form of marketing from the 1980s. Then we have a (reprinted) postmortem of Civ 5, and a look at Van Buren, the canceled Fallout 3 prototype from before the franchise was revived. Turns out, Chris Avellone prototyped the story in the form of a tabletop RPG campaign, long before he had an engine. Which not only took care of the game design early, in a portable way, but consider this: had New Vegas never happened, he would still have had a product, albeit in a different medium.

Speaking of game design, we have someone exploring how much rules really matter in videogames and not only, then some thoughts on how to stop players from hoarding — a detailed, well-considered analysis. I applied technique #1 intuitively in Escape From Cnossus, and it works great, by the way.

For the more technical developers out there, I'll end the week with the story of an OpenGL shader and the trouble it caused. Keep in mind that fluffy is a professional with years of experience coding advanced experimental computer graphics. You likely aren't. Are you sure you want the headache?

Until next time, use the level of technology you can handle and get away with.

(P.S. In the original comments, fluffy dropped by to explain how I missed the point: the same mistake, fluffy says, could easily have been made in other contexts.)