Jim Stormdancer @mogwai_poet@mastodon.social

And that's why Atari 2600 Adventure is meaningfully an adaptation of Crowther and Woods Adventure. Sure, there's the world/object model, mazes, darkness and light sources, etc., but more importantly, you explore til you find the ending. That was *new*.

In the 70s and early 80s, if you divided games into "play til you lose" arcade games and "explore til you find the ending" journey games, the latter are almost entirely text adventures. And *that's* why they're called "adventure games."

I've said before that the "adventure game" genre is called the "colossal cave game" in a parallel reality, and I still think there's some truth to that, but here's my new theory:

Bitbucket is deleting your Mercurial repositories in June. "This deprecation will enable us to focus on building the best possible experience for our users."

https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-bitbucket

Seriously is this an end run around Content-ID or what? Is it promoting something? E.g. there's someone else's music, in a very different style, tacked onto the end of the album. (Which I didn't notice at first because I stop listening when "Run For Your Life" starts)

Also if you are a Resident Evil fan you should definitely check out the Alone in the a Dark post to read about where Resident Evil game from.

The Digital Antiquarian has been writing impressive early PC game dev history since 2011. There is a lot of good stuff to read there!

https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/

I really enjoyed this thoroughly-researched history of the development of Alone in the Dark.

https://www.filfre.net/2019/08/alone-in-the-dark/

After finding out about the "Berenstain" bears, I would not be in the least surprised that this is what the Beatles actually sounded like the whole time https://youtu.be/5GShV3iBEPk

"A New York couple’s luxurious vacation house in Florida has been taken over by dozens of black vultures that are vomiting and defecating everywhere.

The homeowners blame Katz’s neighbor, a woman who they claim is excessively feeding wildlife. Katz said she has seen the neighbor give bags of dog food and even a roasted chicken to the vultures."

This woman is a superhero.

https://apnews.com/e2f95801db8a4dd39b1b140a4afcfd82

Consensus seems to be that it's furikake, rice seasoning!

Found this on the ground. Should I drink it?

More important Frog Fractions news: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KGwMzNO19w

One thing that's a bummer about being 40 is that I no longer have the kind of friends who want to go with me to Safeway at 1 in the morning to riff on the novelty breakfast products

Wardialler, a Twine game about 80s-era hacking, was (seemingly) made soundtrack-first. I.e., first you make a album of chill moody techno, then make a game that fits that mood to get people interested.

https://nervoustestpilot.itch.io/wardialler

To be clear I'm not talking about C++ specifically, I mean the skill of "here is a language and a code base, I will learn both and then be able to maintain and add to this project."

They couldn't find anyone, internally or externally, who could/wanted to do that. Whether that speaks to their company culture, their hiring practices, or the culture they're hiring out of, I couldn't say. Probably all of the above.

It's emblematic of a tech culture that has no interest or experience in building and maintaining a solid, sustainable ecosystem.

I've often wondered how VC funded companies with thousands of programmers somehow seem to get nearly nothing done.

This post describing how Dropbox gave up on C++ (in part) because their C++ programmers quit and they couldn't figure out how to hire new ones explains a whole lot.

https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2019/08/the-not-so-hidden-cost-of-sharing-code-between-ios-and-android/