Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Gaming Links

Chris Clarke sent me a link to an excellent article about Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer. It's an installment of John Harris's @play column over at GameSetWatch.

The new issue of The Escapist has a ton of interesting articles. My favorite is Kieron Gillen's profile of Mucky Foot. I will always maintain that Startopia was one of the most underrated games ever made.

There's also a profile of David Jaffe and Heartland by N. Evan Van Zelfden, and an article by Erin Hoffman titled Cyberpunked: The Fall of Black9.

Alex Corvino sent me a link to Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Take a look:
From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" — a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

It's pretty amazing, and the discussion in the comment section (which seems to include most of the mentioned principals) is just as interesting.

Here's a link from George Paci that should strike a chord in Starcraft fans: Bot Fight. Here's an excerpt:
About a month ago I wrote a Starcraft scenario which allowed you to observe a game between AI players. I’ve been curious about the quirks in the Starcraft AI and I’ve wanted a chance to see them do their thing in a deterministic environment. I learned some surprising things about this ten-year-old gem. While the races themselves are very nearly balanced in the hands of humans, it turns out the AI is a lot better at using some races compared to others.

As a last note, there's apparently a sequel in development for Majesty, which would also be on my list of most underrated games ever made. Thanks to Lenard Burgess for the tip, and you can read about it here.

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