No Time To Play
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Weekly Links #89

Despite my best efforts, some weeks are really empty. For what it's worth, I finished another toy: TB-40, a programmable calculator running Tiny Basic. It took twice as long to code as the other one, and sure enough it's also twice the size. Not so much fun to use on mobile devices as I'd hoped, but oh well, it's a learning experience.

More generally, I've been using GitHub a lot more as of late. It's a very nice service even if you don't use Git (I don't), so in an effort to take better advantage of it I uploaded a few more of my older projects. Among them RogueBot, not that there's much to it. But perhaps someone will find the code useful -- in particular, the game-window.js microframework, a product of 5 years' worth of practice making HTML5 games.

But enough about me. In a recently unearthed interview with Shigeru Miyamoto from 1998, the legendary game developer cautions against chasing realism in graphics. And while that strategy didn't always work so well for Nintendo, you might remember how World of Warcraft took the world by storm in 2004 with blocky, cartoonish artwork that worked even on low-end computers, while everyone else was busy trying to hide the sharp corners with annoying bloom effects.

And because I already filled up a page of text, here's a bit of humor to cap it off: How being a cat is like being in a videogame. Have a chuckle... and a good next week.