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Rent Video Games
Jun
16
Playing Zork On… A Messageboard?
Category: Retro | 
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Over at Idle Thumbs, they’ve just set up a ‘Text Adventure’ subforum, and indeed, they’ve set up a really neat concept - people can collaboratively play classic Z-machine text adventures on a normal messageboard, thanks to some neat coding.
As the FAQ post explains: “Our resident super computer Ziggy serves up the current move, and […]
Jun
11
We first mentioned Jason Scott’s ‘Get Lamp’ text adventure documentary way back in December 2005, and work on it appears to be proceeding rather well, as a new post on his ASCII blog explains.
He notes: “Obviously, when I make a documentary, I need a lot of help. Among the help is a series of […]
Jun
5
What XOC Did After Super Mario Bros
Category: Retro | Leave a Comment
We’ve previously covered the music releases of Jason ‘Xoc’ Cox, who was responsible for the insanely good ‘SMW’ cover album for Super Mario World, and Alistair Wallis mailed me to update on several of Cox’s neat new projects:
Wallis explains: “Firstly, there’s Cinema 80’s: Music From Nintendo Games Based On 80’s Movies, which he says […]
Jun
2
So, I just hinted at this, but quoting from my Slashdot submission: “Gamasutra is partnering with the IGDA’s Preservation SIG to present in-depth histories of the first ten games voted into the Digital Game Canon, beginning with a history of the 1961 mainframe-based shooter Spacewar, arguably the first ever video game.”
From the article: “Spacewar […]
May
31
Lowood Opens Up On Game Preservation
Category: Retro | Leave a Comment
Via How They Got Game, the Stanford University blog about game preservation and studies, they point out a relatively new Game Face interview with Stanford’s Henry Lowood, the curator for the history of science and technology collections at the school - and it’s got some useful, scholarly thinking about preserving game history in it.
I’ve […]
May
31
MTV News’ Stephen Totilo is off preparing for his wedding now (I know so - his out of office reply told me so!), but before he went, he pinged GSW about video game doc King Of Kong, something that we’ve covered extensively in the past.
Specifically, he notes: “”I suspect the [two MTV News King […]
May
30
Holy Double Retro Round-Up, Batman!
Category: Retro | Leave a Comment
Delighted to note that Jeremy Parish has returned with a double-sized Retro Round-Up over at 1UP, enumerating and dissecting the various Wii, Xbox 360, and various other retro console offerings made over the past fortnight or so.
Many bonus points for one of the most succinct, lyrical descriptions of Actraiser I’ve seen in a while, […]
May
22
Though I’m not as much of a collector as our very own MagWeasel, I’ve been known to hop on eBay from time to time to pick up some gaming magazine memorabilia, even if shipping for all that dead wood is a little bit excessive.
In fact, myself and Gamasutra contributor Jason Dobson recently fought through […]
May
16
Video Games Turn Forty, Party!
Category: Retro | Leave a Comment
Over at 1UP, former GSW columnist Benj Edwards has just had his ‘Videogames Turn 40 Years Old’ feature posted, and it’s an awesomely well-researched look at the history of games, drawing on his interviews with pioneers such as Ralph Baer.
The intro itself is practically lyrical: “In 1967, a bold engineer with a vision led […]
May
13
The Rarest Atari 2600 Games… Evah!
Category: Retro | Leave a Comment
Was poking around the excellent Atari Age the other day, for reasons I forget, and decided to use the site’s search engine to look up the absolute rarest non-prototype Atari 2600 games they list (rated ‘10, Unbelievably Rare’). And there’s some pretty interesting results, of which these are the highlights:
- Music Machine was “…only […]