Blog Roundup (2024-10-27)

People posted on their blogs a lot this week! Apologies in advance for this being a long one. If you enjoyed any of these blogs, subscribe to their RSS feed and consider doing your own blog roundups since Google sucks now.

Talkin’ About Old Games

So many folks talked about old games this week that I thought it deserved its own section.

Jefklak’s Codex reviews Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance.

The Genesis Temple goes into the history of the very weird NES game Monster Party.

Badger Trebuchet Diagram No. 17 talks about the old Windows rpg Castle of the Winds.

Final Fantasy VIII Is the Best has been incredible active this last week. I can’t even link to one post because there’s been a ton in the last week. Just go check it out.

Games from the Black Hole praises the Game Boy game Final Fantasy Adventure.

Renga in Blue plays through a text adventure I never heard of, Ship Adventure, from 1982.

The Good Old Days reviews 1996’s Lords of the Realm II.

Dev Logs

Dev logs are the best. I love seeing how people are doing on their games, it allows folks to go into much more details than they could on micro blogging spots, and writing my own has been good motivation for me on my game. Highly recommend doing your own if you’re thinking about it.

David Lindsey Pittman goes into the work he’s doing on Eldritch 2‘s hub spaces and trying to make the game more of an immersive sim.

Meredith Gran is working on the Perfect Tides and talks about writing.

Harris Powell-Smith talks about writing characters for their upcoming interactive fiction game Honor Bound.

Tom talks about making a homebrew game engine for the Dreamcast.

Sarah talks about making a new rpg for the Commodore 64.

Other Stuff

Brianna talks about C++ game engine libs

Prismatic Wasteland has two great posts about playing tabletop rpgs. One is on how to play as a ghost after dying and the other goes into how they let players have vampire characters. Great stuff! Go check out their games.

I keep discovering great music through the Morning Music blog.

The Museum of Screens has an article about how people are porting their old Flash games to Steam.

ghoulnoise has a very lovely post about guitar mods and a few other things.

Indie Tsushin has an interview with ishinoura about the one-dimensional roguelike game Yumeiri.

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation is looking for a new treasurer and tech officer.

Rob talks about the 1994 horror film Pumpkinhead 2. Did you know this also had a really bad FMV FPS? I don’t recommend it!

Not Blogs

Here’s other things I liked this week that aren’t blogs

Thinky Games published a new games database for puzzle and adventure games. I think super specific databases are nice and often catch things the larger and more general ones don’t.

I have gotten really into Answer Phone lately, my friend’s project where he uploads old cassette and answering machine tapes he finds at thrift stores.

Not new, but POINTCLICKING has a lot of nice adventure game fan art.

Blog Roundup (2024-10-20)

It’s another roundup of blog posts I enjoyed reading this last week. If you like these posts, consider subscribing to some of these blog through your RSS feed reader (I use Inoreader and think it’s nice) and consider doing your own roundup since Google Search is busted for discovering new things.

Games

Wraithkal continues doing great work compiling #ScreenshotSaturday posts made on Mastodon.

mojilove talks about the process of translating Operation STEEL on Indie Tsushin.

GB Studio Central published another article in their series on building a Game Boy rpg in GB Studio.

Dante talks about citybuilder design goals. I just really like reading thoughts on citybuilders.

Binary Star Games talks about Phipps23 and worldbuilding in tabletop rpgs.

Gamers with Glasses interviews Adam Vian, creative director of Crow Country.

RSS Feed Readers

I don’t actually like Cory Doctorow, sorry, but I do think people should listen to him when he says you should be using a RSS feed reader. It’s certainly made using the internet a lot more fun for me over the last year.

Crystal talks about RSS feed readers for Linux.

Jared makes a post on rediscovering RSS.

Other Posts

Aura has a very good response to an Ask about enjoying your work.

Katherine Morayati talks about the history of the late 90s network of websites called ChickClick.

Eniko talks about how there is life after Twitter.

I’m still thinking about Cabel Sasser’s talk at XOXO Fest about a giant McDonald’s mural and appreciating things everywhere.

Blog Roundup (2024-10-13)

Another collection of blog posts I liked reading this week. If you like these, consider subscribing to the blogs on your RSS feed reader and doing your own roundup posts if you’ve got a site. Google Search is becoming useless now and this is a way people will find new stuff.

Ben Robbins, the creator of tabletop rpgs like Microscope and Kingdom, tells designers to make the games you want to play.

Dante talks about Memoriapolis, a city builder I never heard of but sounds really cool and possibly addresses some of the issues I have with the genre?

Speaking of city builders, badger trebuchet diagram no. 17 posted about Sim City 3000 vaporwave.

I just like when people talk about what they’ve been into lately and Meredith Gran, creator of Perfect Tides, wrote one of those.

The Fungus Zone explains how it’s the year of the games anthology. I’m possibly biased because mine is listed there and I’m working on another right now, but I agree.

Chuck Jordan (Curse of Monkey Island, Telltale’s Sam and Max) has a nice post reflecting on being out for 20 years on National Coming Out Day.

Damien covers the Bay Area Cohost Wake

Ghoulnoise talks about cooking Çılbır, recipe link included. I never had it before but I think it looks great.

The Museum of Screens discusses the various Flappy Bird controversies.

Amiga Boing Blog is a nice blog covering Amiga games. Although personally, I think if your game is called Moose Drive then it should be more interesting than a generic racing game.

Not Blog Posts but here’s some other things

I liked this piece on RogerEbert.com about Megalopolish, the Joker sequel, and how more directors should be allowed to make potential misfires.

Aftermath wrote about how forums are alive and well, and lists a ton of active ones. Personally I’m kind of “hmmmm” about their hesitance on listing forums related to sexuality but gun forums are ok I guess? But I appreciate the enthusiasm and do think forums are nice. If you like talking about DOS games, then I recommend DOS Game Club and IntFiction.org isn’t bad for Interactive Fiction discussion. Data preservation issues aside, I personally find forums to be a lot less overwhelming than something like Discord and wish we could see more people using them.

Blog Roundup (2024-10-06)

I think I like doing these more on Sunday instead of Monday, so that will be the schedule for now. If you enjoyed these posts, please subscribe to the blogs you like on your RSS feed reader (or start using one if you don’t, I use Inoreader) and consider doing occasional link roundups on your site. Google search is abysmal now and this is kinda the only way people can discover new places.

We got a few Cohost memorial posts this week from Nicky Flowers, Alex Zandra, Aura, Broken Words, and a post here doing a much better collecting other memorial posts.

Renga in Blue goes into the history of GE to talk about the almost lost 1981 text adventure Raspion Adventure.

Mr. Creosote has a list of “The Best C64 Games.” It’s not my list, don’t argue with me.

Zandra put together a list of recommended Mega Man rom hacks.

The Good Old Days reviews a brand new text adventure called Traffic

Austin talks about life as a musician.

Katherine Morayati talks about a bug in Oregon Trail 2.

Debutniverse talks about a Saturday morning cartoon from 1983 that I never heard of called Saturday Supercade.

Sometimes you want to hear someone talking about what makes a killer car movie good. Here’s a review of 1977’s The Car.

The postcard celebrated its birthday and here’s a post talking about an interesting service called postcrossing.

Not blog posts but:

KRITIQAL talks to game dev Kyou System

startmenu has a great review of Halls of Torment and indie game recommendations.

Indie Games+ interviews the designer of Judero.

Blog Roundup (2024-09-29)

I’m not sure when Cohost shuts down posting, other than it being sometime tomorrow, so I’m doing one of these right now before it’s too late. If you enjoy these, please consider doing your own on your blog and subscribing to the blogs you like on your RSS feed reader. Also feel free to leave comments with what you’ve been reading lately.

RobF, of various indie games fame like Death Ray Manta, has started a blog where he reviews the B-movie schlock he’s been watching every night. It’s great. Even as a bad movie enjoyer, I haven’t even heard of most of these.

Meredith Gran, of Octopus Pie and Perfect Tides fame, is doing more posts on her site that give updates on her Perfect Tides sequel and other cool things.

Dante’s post on Star Wars and Star Trek accurately captures my feelings and current relation to both franchises.

erysden has a nice post on the coolness of software rendering

Katherine Morayati talks about a really interesting sounding DOS application from 1991 called lovedos

Priscilla talks about the Conlang they created for the Superbrothers game JETT: The Far Shore

Ben Chandler is working on a new adventure game!

If you’re like me and having second thoughts about using WordPress after all the recent stuff that’s going on with them, this post gives you an option to move to.

Misty has a blog talking about music albums every day and I’ve been discovering cool new stuff to listen to.

Edenwaith talks about how you can implement Steam Achivements in the Mac ports of games made in Adventure Game Student, which may be very relevant to me in the next year.

Wouter has a post on about experiencing old games in new eras.

And here’s some things that I don’t know count as blogs, but are still really cool IMO!

The Imaginary Engine Review has an article about the poetics of endurance and the game OVERWHELM

Paste Magazine has a great article on the underrated Illusion of Gaia

I loved Start Menu’s review of Dread Delusion

Blog Roundup (2024-09-23)

With us now entering the last week of Cohost posting, I’ve been making an effort to follow more blogs and sites through my RSS feed reader. Here are some I would recommend!

Katherine Morayati has bee posting old postcards and the history behind them in postcardposting one and two.

ALOCASIA is a journal queer plant-based writing and issue #10 just came out. They’re free to read but donations are always appreciated.

Ephemeral Enigmas regularly covers older and more obscure video games. This time it’s about Game Boy game Battle Unit Zeoth.

Interactive fiction writer Andrew Plotkin goes into the history of a sea shanty. It’s maybe not safe for work.

I love personal blogs too. This one is a shorter post on the thoughts when getting into blogging.

If you want to see an example of Tosting, posting directly into the RSS feed so the post doesn’t show up on the site, add this site to your RSS feed reader.

Blog Roundup (2024-16-9)

Inspired by this post (I know it mentions my blog but that’s not why I’m linking to it), I thought it would be fun to start doing regular roundups of blog and site posts that I enjoyed. I kinda did these before a while ago but I thought it would be good to do them again now that I’m following so many different blogs through my RSS feed now that Cohost is shutting down. Google search sucks now so the only way people can see cool stuff is from others sharing it. So if you enjoy these posts, subscribe to their RSS feeds through your reader of choice.

Eniko reflects on her history with the Ultima franchise and what it means to her on her personal blog.

The developer of classic Macintosh games like Glider and Glypha goes through his history of abandoned games.

I’ve enjoyed following along with David Lindsey Pittman’s blog updates on the development of Eldritch 2. I was a fan of the first game and this looks good too.

Renga in Blue is a blog devoted to attempting to play through every single adventure game in order of release. The most recent post about is about Dungeon Adventure (1982).

Thanks to Cohost, I’ve become aware of the concept of Rosting. They’re posts directly to the RSS feed, meaning they only show up in the feed of your reader and nowhere else. It’s a lot of fun whenever I see one popping into my feed, like it’s a post just for me. If you’d like to see some, consider subscriber to the inventor(?) of Rosting, Adam Ledoux’s (Bitsy creator) blog, and Nicky Flowers on your RSS feed.

Misty has a very good post about some fonts that were on a floppy disk.

Indie Tsushin has an interview with the developer of Missile Dancer 2.

Gretchen has a post about how the internet is getting worse. Maybe we can all work together to make it a little better and feel less small.