Weekly Links #319

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Hello, everyone! Thanks for being with me today. Not many of you are left. This site's readership has been in freefall since at least the start of the year, and it's getting really hard to stay motivated. Which of course leads right into a vicious circle, but there you have it.

For what it's worth, Tee-Wee and Ramus are still getting views, if slowly, and I'm sitting on another feature to give the latter. To my surprise, last year's Keep of the Mad Wizard is also staying right ahead of both. To think I was ready to take it down from Itch.io! And Glittering Light 2 is slowly catching up with games that had years to become popular. So this year's hardly a bust. But then, what gives?

Oh well, I'll see once we're out of lockdown, and able to get a new computer, so I can safely work on the second No Time To Play book. One more week to go, if all is well. In the mean time, there's a game engine to review (it's a surprise) and not much else in the way of plans.

As for news, today we have a write-up on reverse-engineering N64 games, along with a couple of links without comment. Details under the cut.


This week started slowly. On Thursday, Ars Technica writes about the efforts to reverse-engineer N64 games. Which as they point out is different from emulation and valuable in a whole other way, even though results can be similar. I was going to present it without comment, but then I remembered something important: in the middle of this damnable lockdown (whose hamfisted enforcement was just deemed unconstitutional in Romania), the hard drive in my primary PC failed, and my oldest backup was from early September. Yet I didn't lose anything important, and you know why? Because all my games and tools were also published on my website, complete with source code. And that's the best backup there is. Does that mean people can take it and do things with it I don't approve of? Sure. But I'll have that any day over the prospect of losing my life's work forever. If you'd rather weep, suit yourself.


Otherwise, there's just my recent rant on how games progress, and an opinion piece from a week ago arguing that games should get weird. Enjoy the Sunday, and see you next time.

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Tags: meta, preservation, game design