MetaFilter posts tagged with videogames and games

Hey! It's a bunch of lists we can all agree on!

Navelgazer — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:02:32 -0800

The A.V. Club's Best of the Decade: Films. Performances. Scenes. Bad Movies. Books. Short Story Collections. Comics. Video Games Music. Metal. Electronic Music. Comedy Albums. Television Series. Television Episodes. Reality Series/Competitions. Made-For-TV Movies/Miniseries. Late-Night Comedy/Talk Shows. One-Season Wonders. And the orphans.

"It will cost you a piece of yourself."

jbickers — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:14:13 -0800

Destructoid has posted a full video play-through of the controversial "No Russian" level from the newly released Modern Warfare 2 (warning: possibly disturbing). The level, in which the player is asked to infiltrate a Russian terrorist group and, as a result, take part in a terrorist attack on civilians, has divided gamers and journalists. Destructoid's Brad Rice is disgusted by the level, saying that "what the scene actually does is take the will to fight out of me." Kotaku's Michael McWhertor also hated the scene, saying it "puts the player in a very uncomfortable, disturbingly violent situation that may offend or upset some players." Australian game blogger Jarno Kokko says the developers "crossed a line here and went for the distasteful. It'll put the game into headlines, Grand Theft Auto style, but it may also cause a backlash that harms mature games as a whole." And the timing of the release - days after the incident at Fort Hood, hours before Veterans Day - has not gone unnoticed. On the other side, Simon Brew raises the "games are art" argument, asking "Shall we all just play Tetris, then?" And Destructoid's Jim Sterling counter-points his colleague, saying the scene is a statement "that videogames don't need to invent fantastical worlds of elves and goblins in order to portray violence. It's a statement that videogames can affect emotions and provide stories that don't just entertain, but also shock, surprise and even disturb."

Step 1. Make an utterly fantastic game. Step 3. Profit!

straight — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:24:08 -0800

2D BOY made around $100,000 in a week. That’s $50,000 each for writing a blog post about a game they finished a year ago. By letting people pay whatever they wanted. 2D Boy stirred up a lot of discussion (previously) about game piracy when they used online scoreboard data to estimate an 82% piracy rate for their fantastic indie game World of Goo (previously). For World of Goo's first birthday, they decided to try the Radiohead model and let people buy the game for any price they choose. Now they've released extensive data about the results. Short version? "A huge success," even though the most commonly chosen price was only a penny. Don't miss the excellent analysis in the Rock Paper Shotgun article (that first link), including the comments where one reader has created a chart showing that the bottom 40% of the downloads account for 1.5% of the profit and the top 30% of the downloads account for 83% of the profit.

Artificial Intelligence?

flatluigi — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:24:47 -0800

Hell is Other People "Fight the ghosts of those that have come before by moving in two dimensions and shooting missiles. The fiercer you fight, the harder it shall be for those that come after. How much past can you cope with before you are overwhelmed?"

The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion

Pope Guilty — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:27:26 -0800

Douglas Crockford, who oversaw the porting of Maniac Mansion to the NES, would like for you to know how the game changed in the porting process and why.

Not now James, we're busy

Artw — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:38:40 -0800

Robert Yang on the homophobic response to his Half-Life 2 mod Handle With Care.

Unique HL2 horror mod, Korsakovia

The Devil Tesla — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:18:05 -0800

Korsakovia is a Half Life 2 mod from research driven developer The Chinese Room. It melds the abstract driven story of their previous mod, Dear Esther (previously), with more traditional gameplay. The end result is an equally distinctive horror FPS with minimal narrative cues. Rock, Paper, Shotgun had a nice write up about it. The mod's ModDB page includes a comments section that is a mix of loving adoration and extreme frustration. Korsakovia lack of narrative clues means it's never clear that you are going the right way, and the game has a few bugs. I personally wasn't able to get through without cheating (remember, you have to type "sv_cheats 1" before any of these will work). Consider yourself warned.

Lose/Lose: The Game That Deletes Your Files

Plutor — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:24:07 -0800

"Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the player's computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted." via

This balladry makes me spoony

grobstein — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:27:15 -0800

Final Fantasy IV remix project. This week the videogame music rearrangement site, OCRemix.org, released a new project covering Nobuo Uematsu's soundtrack to FFIV (originally FFII in the US). FFIV's was the first game soundtrack I fell in love with, back in 2nd grade. Maybe you feel the same. The musicians have generally eschewed crowd-pleasing statements of the original's iconic themes, which is . . . bittersweet. Try

this cafe-vibe take on Rydia's theme,
this rhythmically fractured version of the sweet "Welcome to Our Town,"
"Into the Darkness" transposed and remade as "Step into the Light,"
or this slight, anti-triumphal take on the series's traditional victory fanfare.
And here is the "Theme of Love" made up as what sounds like classical guitar.

All FFIV remixes on OCR. All OCR album projects (I recommend the Street Fighter project, which was used for the soundtrack to the "new" game, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix).

Orange Juice. 9 MM Handgun. Butter Knife.

Cool Papa Bell — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:45:31 -0800

Living with First-Person Shooter Disease (SLYT)

THERES NO TIME

Potomac Avenue — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:08:56 -0800

Flash Friday Funtime: Steamshovel Harry Gives new meaning to the term "timesink." With music by MetaFilters own Brad Sucks. via

"It's a Secret to Everybody"

empath — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:26:00 -0800

"It's a secret to everybody" -- an unbelievably comprehensive blog post about the etymologies of the names of famous (and not-so-famous) video game characters.

Our insect is in another casserole

artifarce — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:28:25 -0800

Sure you consider yourself a retro 8-bit gaming geek, but have you played Udon Boy in Ramen Land, or Kung Fu Psycho Rider? Don't feel bad, they're from Japanese culture store Meteor's annual Famicase, an exhibition of imaginary games.

Remember that time you microwaved a hamster in Maniac Mansion...?

Navelgazer — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 08:03:27 -0800

The Memory Card, dissecting great moments in the history of gaming, including the return of Baby Metroid, instinctual player-choices in Ico, Lucca's family history in Crono-Trigger, and even soaking the damn letter in StarTropics.

Before everything, there was PLATO

WolfDaddy — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:29:57 -0800

Touch screen. Awesome graphics. Online community. No, I'm not talking about the latest handheld device to hit the market, I'm talking about Control Data's PLATO system. PLATO People. Preservation efforts. Empire.

Beautiful, beautiful, just beautiful

gwint — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 14:10:46 -0800

Lunar Lander 3D in 5k

Hey little sister what have you done

Artw — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:17:27 -0800

There's something in the sea... and it has a big drill for an arm.

Wandering lonely as a cloud-gamer.

permafrost — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 06:33:45 -0800

Beta-registration has already started for Onlive, a revolutionary cloud-gaming service that promises to put an end to costly PC hardware upgrades, videogame piracy and the entire console industy and game retail sectors. There's just one small problem: it can't possibly work.

Video Games, One Moment At A Time

flatluigi — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:19:41 -0800

Moments _{A small blog by Mister Raroo}

Vintage Game Club plays Chrono Trigger

grobstein — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:53:20 -0800

Good morning, Crono! (Cf.) Starting this Friday, the Vintage Game Club will play through the RPG classic Chrono Trigger, a game beloved and praised but perhaps not well understood. The discussion is beginning here (little substance so far). (Chrono Trigger was published for SNES and Playstation, and is available in a new Nintendo DS port.) The Vintage Game Club is an online discussion group dedicated to playing through and understanding true classics of video games. It is a project of Professor Michael Abbott (great glossy-style profile) and Metafilter's own danb (and some other dudes). Chrono Trigger is the VGC's fifth game. You can find archived discussions for the first four on the forums:

Beyond Good and Evil (warning game has deceptive title)
Oddworld: Abe's Oddyssey
Deus Ex (these discussions are really interesting; see e.g.)
Grim Fandango

Dude, I never made it to this screen before!

Miko — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:19:34 -0800

The niftiest thing at Coin Op World? The mp3 files of Classic Arcade Sounds. "We recorded our video game experiences from 1982 until 1988 in a variety of locations on the east coast. Most of the recordings come from Ithaca, NY, Albany, NY and Ocean City, MD. Other locations include Lancaster, PA, Falmouth, MA, Rehoboth Beach, DE and Key West, FL. Luckily I stored all fourteen audio tapes in a safe place and rediscovered them when I moved the rest of my stuff out of my parents house in 1997. In the last several years I digitized these nostalgic recordings to preserve and share them."

"Will you still need me? / Will you still feed me?"

bardic — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 06:10:35 -0800

"What were arcades like?"

Quake Live

Plutor — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:07:05 -0800

Prepare to feel old: Quake III Arena came out nearly ten years ago. Prepare to feel young again: Quake Live can be played in your browser for free. The long-anticipated beta opened to the public yesterday. John Carmack says that they hope to be improving and polishing the game for the next decade. It only works in Windows with either IE or Firefox, although they promise Linux, Mac, Safari, and Opera support will follow shortly. Prepare for a wait, there's a bit of a line to login (better than crashing the servers, I guess).

Waka-waka-waka

JHarris — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:15:34 -0800

The Pac-Man Dossier is an extremely detailed description of the game logic of arcade Pac-Man. It explains why, once in a while, monsters will harmlessly pass through Pac-Man. It explains why they won't go up through the tunnels above the monster box. It explains why occasionally, after losing a life, monsters will refuse to leave the box. It explains when and why Blinky becomes Cruise Elroy, and why sometimes Pinky gets confused and loses track of Pac-Man. It even explains, as far as the player can continue to play, what to do on the kill screen. It is awesome. Previously....

relaxed, free and without worry

zabuni — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:46:10 -0800

Noby Noby Boy is out! What is Noby Noby Boy? The creator speaks: "At this stage, it's too early for me to sum up this game in one word." Why was it made? "Seriously, I don’t know. When I figure it out, I’ll share it on this blog." A bit more cogent explanation follows: Noby Noby Boy is a PS3 downloadable game from noted Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi where the players "control a pink worm with feet named BOY, and move, eat objects to stretch your stomach, jump to any height you choose, and stretch lengthwise by pulling yourself in opposite directions, ". The goal is the game is well..."absolutely nothing at all".