Alice writes, "Held at BAFTA (195 Piccadilly, London W1J 9LN) Level Up will boast a discussion and celebration of digital storytelling in gaming led by a panel of renowned author-gamers, including academic and children's author Gabrielle Kent, script writer Rhianna Pratchett, and journalist Leigh Alexander." Read the rest
Happytoast made this amazing thing for B3ta's video game art challenge. Someone make it into a real game, plz? Read the rest
MAME, the arcade emulator originally created by Nicola Salmoria 19 years ago, is now comprised entirely of free and open-source software. It's taken a lot of wrangling, reports MAMEDev.org, due to the large number of contributors and interlinked components.
After 19 years, MAME is now available under an OSI-compliant and FSF-approved license! Many thanks to all of the contributors who helped this to go as smoothly as possible!
We have spent the last 10 months trying to contact all people that contributed to MAME as developers and external contributors and get information about desired license. We had limited choice to 3 that people already had dual-license MAME code with.
As a result, a great majority of files (over 90% including core files) are available under the 3-Clause BSD License but project as a whole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPL-2.0+), since it contains code made available under multiple GPL-compatible licenses.
I still remember building a MAME cabinet, someone asking "which game is that?" and having the pleasure of saying "all of them."
Correction: Nicola Salmoria's name was originally misspelled "Salmora." Read the rest
The Book Fair Game is a new open/free title from Matt Finch, a game designer with a residency at the State Library of Queensland, Australia. Read the rest
[[Source unknown]] Read the rest
Tubesockor pokes away at three Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators to play the music from the 1987 Commodore 64 classic game Delta. The original game music is by Rob Hubbard, inspired by Philip Glass's "Koyaanisqatsi" and Pink Floyd's "On the Run." Clips from the game below! (Thanks, UPSO!)
Legendary game series Civilization is 25 years old this year, and Dean Takahashi reports on its long journey from revolutionary god game to a cultural touchstone in its own right.
Few game franchises live to see a 25th anniversary, but Civ, as most gamers and industry folk call it, is thriving. It has 33 million copies in sales to date, including 8 million for its latest, 2010’s Civilization V and its expansions. Meier’s teams at MicroProse and Firaxis have created 66 versions of the game across all platforms, and based on extrapolations from sales on the Steam digital distribution and community platform, the Civ series has been played for more than a billion hours.
Many hours were lost to this game, but my most enduring memory of its early iterations was the fact that city names had a short character limit. I thereby found, as a young teenager, that it honed my creative instincts for devising succinctly offensive city names. This "economy of stupidity" has proven a most valuable skill. Read the rest
The most entertaining chess match you'll watch all year: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley, with the black pieces, takes on a trash-talking, fast-fingered hustler. [via] Read the rest
When a prick on Twitter attacked Gamergate arch-nemesis Brianna Wu's game dev credentials, sneering that her latest game looked "like something that would've been shitcanned on the ps1," Wu proceeded to shred the fool with a masterclass in the technical capabilities of the PS1 and their relationship to Revolution 60, Wu's new game.
Female Video Game Developer Snaps at Twitter Troll, Results Are Fantastic [Mike Dever/Vice] Read the rest
Fabulous Beasts is a new game from indie studio Sensible Object, which combines stacking/balancing (think Jenga) with smart, sensor-enabled blocks that talk to your mobile device as you play the game, creating fun and complex challenges. Read the rest
Last year's AI Video Competition featured Mario Lives! An Adaptive Learning AI Approach for Generating a Living and Conversing Mario Agent, in which researchers from Germany's University of Tübingen explained how they'd modified Super Marion Brothers to turn the characters into adaptive, machine-learning chatterbots that discovered how to play the game together. Read the rest
Creatures Avoiding Planks is a web toy demonstrating natural selection. Wee blobby creatures wander around avoiding floating planks, which kill on touch. If one lives long enough, it reproduces, passing on slight variations of its own movement behavior to the offspring.
The brilliant work of @hardmaru, I can't watch it anymore because I feel so sorry for them. Read the rest
Crowbcat created a Portal setup that had Chell, the game's heroine, trapped between two portals that crushed her. The results were an astounding wonderland of psychedelic visuals Read the rest
It's exciting to get a new game in its pristine box, wrapped in cellophane, begging to be opened. Inside you find the game board, colorful game pieces, cards, and, of course, instructions. Instructions are the worst part of a new game. Reading and rereading the sheet of rules, digesting them, and teaching them to your friends so you can get your game on can be excruciating. And how many practice games do you have to play before you really get it?
Instead of learning how to play someone else's game, how about inventing one of your own? Combine the elements of all those games you've played and loved into your own unique adventure using a board game inventors kit by Board Game Manufacturing. Don't be put off by their site's poor graphics and design. Their product is worth the slog through its eye-crossing pages.
I purchased their Junior Game Inventors Kit. The kit includes everything you need to start building a game: a pre-cut box, a blank folds-to-square game board, paper to cover box and board, nine pawns, a pair of standard dice, a 12-sided numbered die, 56 blank cards, and a bundle of play money. You can also purchase a la carte from a long list of goodies. I added a money tray, a set of ten chipboard blanks, and ten stands to the basic kit. They offer an Advanced Game Board Inventors Kit as well, with a mind-boggling array of pieces.
The components of the kit are sturdy and as good as those in a purchased game. Read the rest
The design perfectly transmutes the cheap minimalist beauty of the classic ZX Spectrum home computer into a unique handheld game console. But does the ZX Vega capture the experience of the early 80's machine?
Indie Retro News reviews it and finds it well-worth your £99, so long as you know what you're getting: a weird British contraption from the early 80s, and only the game-related features of it at that.
Read the restHardcore Speccy fans may have been shouting to have room for expansion but, it's plain to see that this is not what it's about. If you look at this at what it's meant to be, a handheld Speccy to play games on, you can't got far wrong. I agree that you can't beat the original Speccy, the same goes for any original computer but as a pick-up-and-play, it fits perfectly.
