ScummVM Ported to Javascript
Phil Nelson Day of the Tentacle, Maniac Mansion, LOOM, Indiana Jones, Monkey Island, all of the classics now playable in HTML5. The audio is Firefox-only for now, but this is damned impressive. And cool.
Oryx Design Lab
The creator of the previously-linked (and awesome) lo-fi fantasy tile set has opened a store for making / selling licenses for new ones. I applaud this. Make money on your art.
DuckTales Remastered announced by Capcom
It will launch this summer for $14.99 on PlayStation Network, 1200 Microsoft Points on Xbox Live Arcade and $15 on the Wii U eShop.
DuckTales is a beloved NES game from an era when almost every licensed title was completely awful. Don’t fuck this up, Capcom.
Pure Folly, Miss Poly(gon)
Games journalism, punk rock, and SimCity:
It seems like people—for some reason—were waiting on Polygon to call the industry out on its crap. Polygon, that Microsoft-sponsored, humourless, 70s prog rock supergroup of games journalism. Expecting any kind of populist uproar from Polygon is like expecting One Direction to vilify the X Factor culture that spawned them – they’re entirely within the system, with no interest in existing outside of it. Probably the only thing you needed to know in order to be sure that Polygon was never going to change the world of games journalism was that they could afford to make a multi-part documentary trumpeting all the ways they were going to change the world of games journalism.
Polygon pretty much pissed any credibility they had left down their leg with SimCity. They acted like PR flacks. Rock, Paper, Shotgun just did what they usually do: journalism.
Compiled list of suggestions and bug reports to report to Maxis for SimCity
A Reddit mega-thread on what appears to be a really broken game, and not just the DRM.
NESpad
An NES gamepad library for Arduino.
One use of this is to allow your Arduino access to the status of 8 buttons (up, down, left, right, A, B, START, SELECT) using only 3 digital pins (for STROBE/LATCH, CLOCK, DATA).
3 pins is a tall order on my Arduino Uno, but for the new Due it’s a drop in the bucket. It supposedly works with the Freedom Stick, too. Wireless Arduino NES Remote here I come.
Testing Websites in Game Console Browsers
Anna Debenham for A List Apart:
We can’t tailor experiences for every possible use case on every device, but we can use what we know about console web browsing to build a better overall experience. Like we’ve done by designing with mobile in mind, considering how a site could be used on a console can have a knock-on effect of making it easier to use overall.
Posting links to stuff like this is why I still keep a blog.
Play the Original Spelunky in HTML5
Darius Kazemi used the newest version of GameMaker to port the game to HTML5/Javascript. No sound yet, but totally playable and pretty cool. I’ll have to revisit GameMaker myself soon.
Open Source Game Console OUYA on Kickstarter
Raising a pretty impressive (approx) $1k per minute right now, getting close to 1/4 of their $950,000 goal with 29 days left to go. That the console is Android-based gives me pause, because… Android, but at the same time, something needs to shake up the home console scene and this might be it.
RogueBasin’s Roguelike Tutorial for Lua
Looks like a really neat little guide for getting started making a Roguelike game. Lua’s a very efficient scripting engine and interfaces with C, so it’s well-known and well-used in the video games industry.
Suspicious Developments Manifesto
After eight years as a games journalist and two as a part time developer, I have decided what I think of games: I like them. I’ve also figured out some of the reasons I like them, some of the reasons I sometimes don’t, and which of these things I really care about.
I’m far enough through making my own game, Gunpoint, to get a feel for which of these things I can actually do. But I’m still new at this. A lot of them are things I figured out during development, and Gunpoint itself doesn’t reflect them all. So this is a mission statement: a way for me to be specific and public about what I’d like to do in games, and how I plan to do it.
MESS in a browser!
A project attempting to port the MESS emulation framework to JavaScript. This is noble work.
How Deep Can You Dig Dug?
Don Hodges fixes Dig Dug’s kill screen. Either you’re interested in someone fixing a 20+ year-old video game’s biggest bug, or you aren’t.
BrowserQuest
An HTML5-based massively multiplayer game using WebSockets. I’ve been wishing for something like this to exist for years now.
Tim Schafer & Ron Gilbert Discuss Adventure Games
I can’t really put into words how happy this made me feel today.
Official Minecraft LEGO
In which Minecraft comes full circle. My friends and I have long referred to Minecraft as “Grown-up LEGOs” and now it’s regular LEGOs, too.