Weekly Links #142

Hello, everyone. There was no Laser Sky update this week because, frankly, there's not much to say. I did manage to add the high score table, then the promised menu system, including an option screen. Forgot to add one to limit continues, but those should remain infinite until the game is done, anyway. The bad news is, now I have no excuse: it's time to add the remaining levels. And that will require potentially tricky code changes, in addition to yet more of that exhausting balancing work. At least now I have some experience...

Otherwise, lots of retrogaming news this week. From Gamasutra, we have the birth of Japanese RPGs — a story that's usually both whitewashed and oversimplified, it turns out. And via Vintage Is the New Old we learn of a website called Games That Weren't, dedicated to saving canceled or lost games from the dustbin of history. Last but not least, here's a review of a quasi-roguelike born on the (in)famous Tandy TRS-80 in 1980 and carried into the Windows era by a fan. A terrible game, but a fascinating delve into history — not to mention a challenge. How can you make that format actually work?

Also in the way of game design, the people who made Dungeons of Dredmor are at it again, with a write-up on challenge in videogames, which touches on configurable difficulty among other things. Thought-provoking indeed. In untelated news, Emily Short points at a blog post about teaching history with interactive fiction. Not much that's new to me, but the links therein promptly sent me down a deep, branching rabbit hole. (How appropriate!) It's remarkable what academics can come up with when they set out to study videogames. Too bad their work isn't more widely known, even when it's accessible to laypeople.

Until next time, consider what the past can teach us.