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Why Roller Coaster Tycoon works best as a simulation
Roller Coaster Tycoon is a fun simulation about building and managing theme parks, but if you carry its gameplay into real life, as in this fan video, it gets a little disturbing.
Rachel Helps
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BioWare cofounders retire, move onto beer, other projects
BioWare co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk announced their retirement today on the BioWare blog. The studio’s first big success was the Baldur’s Gate franchise, followed by Neverwinter Nights, and, later, the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises. Muzyka plans to invest and mentor other entrep
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What Bowser and Sonic are doing in a Disney movie
Disney’s upcoming film Wreck-It Ralph has a lot of trademarked characters in it. In his interview with Total Film, producer Clark Spencer gives a behind-the-scenes look at the process of getting the necessary permissions. Rich [Moore, director] and I went to E3, and pitched the movie to all the dif
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A beautiful exploration of Choose Your Own Adventure story paths
While we’re on the subject: Graphic designer Christian Swinehart has created a remarkable website about Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books, or “game books.” His graphical representations of the branching storylines are beautiful in their own right, and teach lessons about how “branched” a storyl
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Choose your own adventure, from the comfort of your browser
Remember Choose Your Own Adventure novels? They were great. But flipping to the exact right page was hard to do without spoiling some other part of the story. Thanks to hyperlinked texts, these stories no longer suffer from that problem. If you’ve ever thought of writing a choose-your-own-adventure
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Inside the BioWare writers’ studio
BioWare, creators of the beloved Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, is known perhaps more than anything for the quality of its writing. The Border House interviewed BioWare writer Ann Lemay. We work in an open-floor office, each in four-desk units with semi-clear dividers that afford some privacy, b
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What should it mean to be a gamer?
All too often, the word “gamer” seems to describe a personality in its entirety. One’s gaming identity is somehow divorced from all the other aspects of one’s personality. Adam Ruch at Kotaku AU fights against this assumption. By being a gamer, I do not stop being a man, a university lecturer, a med
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FTL is the space game that makes you forget all about exploring space
The new indie spaceship management game FTL involves a lot of, well, managing, and not a lot of space exploration. Rampant Coyote of Rampant Games found the game full of emergent narrative, with some surprising solutions to the problem of putting out fires. The focus of the game is not on space – it
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The nostalgia buying cycle in videogames
Retro gamers will be familiar with the following cycle: you order a game online, you wistfully remember how awesome it was, the package arrives, and you have no desire to play it. This happened to me last time I stopped at GoG and bought Dungeon Keeper. Damien McFerran describes the problem at Eurog
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Pac-Man: "like Kafka wrote a Lovecraft story."
The webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal retells Pac-Man in the mode of surrealist existential horror.
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Dating and fish collecting, finally together in the same game
Everyone knows that there aren’t enough games set in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by fish people. That all changes with Sealark, a kind of varation on Harvest Moon, with daily fishing taking the place of farming. Expect it in July 2013.
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Enchant U actually about enchanting him.
Confession: I am a huge fan of simulation games. There’s something about building up my stats over time and then being able to win the harvest cooking contest that I love. It’s kind of a niche genre, so I was a little surprised to see Enchant U, a stat-building wizard boarding school simulation for