No Time To Play
newsletter archive

Weekly Links #94

Oh my. Late again and for once I have no excuse. So let's get started.

I'm the kind of player who, when sitting down to try out a MMO, spends a lot of time choosing and customizing an avatar. Nightwrath always gets impatient, but come on. Isn't the avatar supposed to represent me well? This is why this article about dress-up games caught my eye. Not so much the examples they give — Hero Forge is much more to my taste. But that would require going into details. Point is, dress-up isn't just for kiddies.

Moving on. On the 30th anniversary of the NES launching in the US, we get an in-depth retrospective of the console's development. And apropos of nothing, here's a personal history of the text adventure, a thoughtful and informed write-up. Last but not least, it turns out White Wolf has been sold again, from one computer game publisher to another. It remains to be seen what sort of vampire games we can expect this time.

At last we get to a headline actually related to game development. Well, the concept of a complexity budget applies to all software. It just happens that games are often among the most ambitious software projects, and it tends to kill them very dead.

Don't make that mistake. Keep it simple... son.