Back again. Little of interest happened in April, but May picked up again, so it's time for another link roundup.

• For one thing: It took 13 years but Doom 2 RPG has finally come to PC, reports PC Gamer. Talk about coming full circle.
• Then, Polygon informs us that The future of tabletop role-play is hope. In their words, "Hopepunk can help us build a better world at the table". Amen to that.
  • On a related note, a fellow creator itch.io answers the question, What happens when a tiny indie RPG hits the front page of Polygon? The answer is good things, though not exactly miracles.

After this little warm-up, we have a couple of headlines occasioned by the release of a much-awaited game:

• A Link Between Genders: Trans Joy and the Legend of Zelda. As Gizmodo goes on to say, "Link’s Awakening takes a more literal meaning for many transgender people who love the main character of the Legend of Zelda franchise."
• On a related note, there's a look back to 5 design lessons learned from Breath of the Wild.

Last but not least, two chunks of videogame history:

• Christopher Strachey and the Dawn of Interactive Text, another entry in the 50 Years of Text Games series...
• ...and from the Digital Antiquarian, The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 3: Software Meets Hardware.

All in all that makes for quite a few of them. Until next time, enjoy!

Whew. Back. After skipping last month entirely, I thought this new journal ended for good. But stuff happens, and I'm still here. You're not rid of me yet.

To open with the oldest headlines:

• I've created a full game, solo, within one year! Here's some of my experiences. (A hobbyist developer's personal account.)
• Hogwarts Legacy faces renewed criticism for inclusion of antisemitic tropes (Only one episode of a big ugly story.)
• Hasbro Slapped By Bank Of America For ‘Destroying Customer Goodwill’ (The epilogue to the January scandal. There seems to be one every season.)

Then some things I did:

• Wrote a review of BBC Basic; ended up not using the language, but take a look anyway.
• Revived the original Tipsy Turtle, to the delight of a follower.

There was more, but instead let's move to March and some food for thought:

• Documenting what it’s like to be treated humanely by a journalist
• Indie Games and the promise of better spaces

The latter in particular talks about small, cozy virtual worlds like we've had since 1980, when they were text-based. When it can be about hanging out, having fun, and most of all being kind. So that strikes a chord. Cheers.

So, what is it with programmers relying on shared libraries for the longest time, despite notorious problems? Modern languages created this century all use static linking by default, and people love them for it, because software distribution is a (largely unsolved) problem.

Don't get me wrong, shared libraries have their place, for things like:

• plugins and foreign function interfaces;
• basic operating system services like user interfaces (think curses).

(By the way: a standard user interface package is the #1 requested feature in any programming language that doesn't have one. Developers, get a clue already.)

But otherwise? Fixing a bug in many apps at once doesn't happen. What happens instead is DLL hell. Memory savings? Arguably, though it doesn't seem to help in most operating systems, and then you have Electron-based apps. Reusing libraries? People almost always do that by linking against them, and for that you need the development version anyway.

Magical solutions make you lose sight of desired outcomes. Watch out.

Hey, everyone. It's a new year, and I'm back after all. Amazing what difference one friend can make. Not much more happened in late December, apart from a nice write-up about the (now completed) DOS Game Jam. Other links went directly to various parts of the main website, because reasons; I should get better at pointing them out, but it's kinda hard with a large set of static pages.

Then came January, when yet another corporation has been trying to kill its golden goose. Because why should we have nice things in late-stage capitalism?

You've guessed it, this is about the D&D licensing debacle. A story in links:

• Dungeons & Dragons’ New License Tightens Its Grip on Competition
• WotC: D&D Fanbase Not Sufficiently Alienated To Generate Profit
• D&D's Community Is Up in Arms Over a Controversial Change
• Beware the Gifts of Dragons: How D&D’s Open Gaming License May Have Become a Trap for Creators

Followed by two announcements in quick succession:

• Wizards of the Coast Cancels OGL Announcement After Online Ire
• Paizo Announces a New Gaming License Amid Dungeons & Dragons' OGL Controversy

At which point I grew tired and stopped tracking the headlines. Look: this has long ceased being about money. Corporations by now have more money than they'd ever know what to do with. This has been all about control for decades now.

Let's get that into our heads already, for our own sake and the world's.

Hey, folks. The year's last link roundup is late today, not that anyone is going to notice. It's also thin on the ground, so let me stuff it with a few extra links. For one thing, I have a fan! And a friend recommended a (new to me) tutorial for isometric tile art. In other news, we have:

• 50 Years of Fun With PONG;
• A Compleat [sic] History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame — esoteric to me, but fascinating;
• and it turns out that Roleplaying games were around hundreds of years before Dungeons & Dragons (in fact there's an entire site dedicated to that).

Last but not least, Nathalie Lawhead is busy again writing about The open-source no-code world of GDevelop. As she adds, "if you miss browser Flash games, this is keeping that dream alive!" I don't have the patience for these huge, complex tools with endless interactive tutorials anymore, but it's amazing that they exist. It's not easy, enabling everyone to make games.

That said: my last... many link roundups have gone completely unnoticed everywhere I posted about them, so there might not be another one come 2023. The site, of course, remain up and I'll keep thinking of ways to improve it. If anyone is out there at all, thanks for reading, and happy holidays, whatever you celebrate in December. Be well.

The weather just turned towards early winter, and news are still slow, but there's enough for a monthly link roundup. In mid-October, as the Wall Street Journal revealed, Company Documents Show Meta’s Flagship Metaverse Falling Short. Then there are two write-ups about freeing games from racism and colonialism:

• Meghna Jayanth is switching the narrative
• These Early 2000s Video Games Really Loved Orientalism. Have Games Improved Since?

Still on the subject of attitudes towards games, we get a plea to Stop Remaking Good Games And Start Remaking Games That Could Have Been Good. As the tagline says: "It doesn't make sense to remake games that are already classics when there are so many games with potential that deserve a second chance." And last but not least, Nathalie Lawhead takes advantage of the newest feature in itch.io to write about Video game blogging at the end of the world (and recommend some games while at it).

Which is good, but also all I have for November. See you towards Christmas.

It's been a slow news autumn, and that suits me just fine.

Let me start with a headline left over from last month: a roundup (in French) about new interactive fiction authoring tools. And while we're looking backwards, another from three years ago of The Best Command-Line-Only Video Games. There's even one I didn't know about!

Coming back to the present, there's a good opinion piece about Doom & Game Preservation. I wrote about this issue before, or rather about portability, and came to the opposite conclusion. Still a good counterpoint. Some notes over on Tumblr.

Last but not least, a delightful write-up titled How I play D&D with my kids, which as usual is always worth a read for people making computer games. And still in the tabletop department, someone put together a site to track Physical Game Jams on itch.io, which strikes me as a worthwhile endeavor.

But this is it for now. See you next month or so.

Hey, folks. Turns out I just barely missed a link for posting last month's roundup too early:

• Unity signs "multi-million dollar" contract to help U.S. government with defense, and as Game Developer goes on to note, "The deal was announced less than a year after some workers questions Unity's ethics for working on military projects."

No comment. Let's look instead at more positive news from the rest of August:

• World's biggest mod site bans mods replacing Pride flags: 'We don't want to and won't argue this with you' Good for them.
• Game over, man: How Aliens—not Alien—shaped three decades of gaming history A good point as it turns out, and still awesome either way.
• An Oral History of Tim Curry’s Escape to the One Place Uncorrupted by Capitalism Long, interesting piece.

Last but not least, September opens with Défis fantastiques : 40 ans d’aventures dont vous êtes le héros: a French language story about the Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks, which as it turns out still gets reprints, and spiritual successors. So enjoy, and see you in October.

It's been a while since the last update, and fans probably want to know what's happening around here. There are three big items this month:

• started work on a web port of Tipsy Turtle, and promptly set it aside, but will pick it up again before too long, promise!
• resumed getting rid of tags, and moved more articles to the main site — a slow process, but it's getting there;
• last but not least, added some more old links to the archive section.

Otherwise it's still relatively slow because summer, but at this pace there's probably going to be a link roundup on time mid-September, so see you then!

Link roundups are funny. With vacation season still in full beat, activity picked up again. No theme this time, just a few links from July:

• making your own engine: a survey of the landscape
• Square Enix summons Meteor, launches its NFT project
• ‘Moria’ creator Robert Alan Koeneke has died aged 64 (via Slashdot)
• AMD and Nvidia leaks show we are drunk on power, and the hangover is going to be brutal

And a couple more from August:

• D&D's oddball space setting Spelljammer returns, with flying whales and dead gods
• Book Excerpt: Warren Davis explains how video digitizers paved the way for Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam

No comments either way. Next one... probably in September.