Games Archive
Motion blur, when it’s not caused by slow LCD pixel transitions, is caused by “the persistence of an image on the retina, as our eyes track movement on-screen,” as Nvidia explains it. Prior improvements in display tech, like variable rate refresh, Ultra Low Motion Blur, and Variable Overdrive have helped with the hardware causes of this deficiency. The eyes and their object permanence, however, can only be addressed by strobing a monitor’s backlight. You can’t just set that light blinking, however. Variable strobing frequencies causes flicker, and timing the strobe to the monitor refresh rate—itself also tied to the graphics card output—was tricky. Nvidia says it has solved that issue with its G-Sync Pulsar tech, employing “a novel algorithm” in “synergizing” its variable refresh smoothing and monitor pulsing. The result is that pixels are transitioned from one color to another at a rate that reduces motion blur and pixel ghosting. Kevin Purdy for Ars Technica Cool technology, of course, but also another attempt by Nvidia to put Nvidia-specific chips inside monitors to cash in on royalties and tie people to Nvidia GPUs. Their previous attempt – G-Sync – was eventually thwarted, but they’re clearly trying again.
The controller, which was created in collaboration with disabled gaming groups such as AbleGamers, Stack-Up, and SpecialEffect, has a unique circular design. The controller comes with a number of different button caps, along with three stick caps that can be changed out to suit the specific needs of the gamer. The controller itself is also designed to rest on a flat surface for players that would require that kind of feature. John Callaham at Neowin Microsoft has a similar product as well, and it’s great that disabled people who want to play games are being taken so much more seriously these days. Excellent work from both console giants.
As 2023 draws to a close—and as we start to finalize our Game of the Year contenders—I really should be catching up on the embarrassingly long list of great recent releases that I haven’t put enough time into this year. Instead, over the last few days, I’ve found myself once again hooked on a simple, addictive, and utterly unique Japanese Windows freeware game from the late ’90s that, until recently, I thought I had lost forever. Pendulumania is a cult classic in the truest sense of the word: Few people have heard of it, even in hardcore gaming circles, but those who have experienced it tend to have very fond memories of it. And while I shared those memories, it wasn’t until this week that I’ve been able to share my effusive praise for a game whose name and playable executable had eluded me for well over a decade. What a great story.
Ironically, the second commercial game that Microsoft published, after Microsoft Adventure in 1979, was an attempt at a sports game sim. It was called Microsoft Olympic Decathlon, and like Microsoft Adventure, it was first launched as a TRS-80 PC game, this time in 1980. Microsoft has so many unexpected products in its long history.
We talked about Zork yesterday, and how the code for interpreters for the game was found and published on Github. Today we have a blog post detailing how to actually use one of these interpreters, the one for the PDP-11. Ok so what or where to do this?! First you need SIMH or any other good PDP-11 emulator, a copy of RT-11, and of course the source to the interpreter oddly enough named PDP11.ZIP. Just keep in mind that this is NOT a pk-zip file, it’s a text file. It’s Macro-11 assembler source. And it goes on from there. This is using an emulator, but if you’re lucky enough to have a real PDP-11 you can probably get all of this running, too.
Jason Scott posted the source code for all the Infocom games in 2019. This was pretty awesome. Everybody who is interested in that stuff cheered, and now it’s part of the common knowledge of Infocom. If you’re researching the history of those games, or want to study their design, you can dig in. So the game source was big news. Infocom’s interpreter source, however, remained obscure. This was the game-playing software for each platform: the Apple 2 interpreter, the Commodore 64 interpreter, and so on. A particular Infocom game release (“Zork 3 for the C64”, say) was a floppy containing the C64 interpreter and the Zork-3 game file. Boot the floppy, the interpreter starts up; it loads the game data and the game begins. The code for the interpreter, however, was never released as open source – until now. Andrew Plotkin posted all of the code on Github, followed later by an additional code dump by David Fillmore.
Will SteamOS ever become generally available straight from Valve, instead of the community builds you can try out right now? “We’re hoping soon, though, it is very high on our list, and we want to make SteamOS more widely available. We’ll probably start with making it more available to other handhelds with a similar gamepad style controller. And then further beyond that, to more arbitrary devices. I think that the biggest thing is just, you know, driver support and making sure that it can work on whatever PC it happens to land on. Because right now, it’s very, very tuned for Steam Deck.” Valve also just unveiled a new and updated Steam Deck, with an OLED display, more efficient processor, and a few other nips and tucks, including making the devices easier to repair, not harder – made available for the same price as the previous model it replaces.
Cities: Skylines 2 like its predecessor is made in Unity, which means the game can be decompiled and inspected quite easily using any .NET decompiler. I used JetBrains dotPeek which has a decent Visual Studio -like UI with a large variety of search and analysis options. However static analysis doesn’t really tell us anything concrete about the rendering performance of the game. To analyze what’s going with rendering I used Renderdoc, an open source graphics debugger which has saved my bacon with some of my previous GPU-y personal projects. An incredibly detailed look at just what’s going on under the hood to make the new Cities: Skylines 2 behave so poorly.
Frasier Fantasy is a loving tribute to the show, “Frasier,” in turn-based RPG form. Filled with Easter Eggs and callbacks, this is the game for anyone wondering if Eddie ever blinked first. Yes, a fan-made Game Boy Color game where you play as Frasier Crane. I can’t believe someone went through the arduous process of making this, but I’m glad they did. This is absolutely brilliant.
I picked pico-8 as the engine simply because I know I work better with constraints and the limited size and capabilities of it would ensure I would not attempt perfection since I know I do not have the skills to reach it anyway. I have been a professional developer for 10+ years so code syntax is not my biggest issue, but knowing how to architect things, deal with the art and sound. By sticking within what pico-8 provides I thought I could achieve this, where I had previously failed with tools like Game Maker. Pico-8 really seems like a great first experience with game development.
In court documents from the FTC vs Microsoft case, Google Stadia’s former product lead Dov Zimring was called to discuss the cloud gaming platform and competition in the gaming space. This led to several comments on why Stadia couldn’t compete in the industry from Google’s own point-of-view. Exactly what you expected: lack of players led to a lack of games, which led to an even bigger lack of players, and so on. What surprises me most is not that this happened – but the fact they were surprised by this? I mean, getting a foothold in the gaming industry is incredibly hard, and requires you to be 110% in, and for the long haul at that. You have to be in all the way for the long term – anything less and you might as well not even try. I am baffled that nobody at Google was like – if we do this, we have to commit to at least ten years of perseverance, through lean times with few subscribers and massive investments and losses, only to recoup them later once the ball starts rolling. Consoles are sold at a loss for a reason.
But now I can say, unequivocally, if you’re starting a new game project, do not use Unity. If you started a project 4 months ago, it’s worth switching to something else. Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted. What has happened? Across the last few years, as John Riccitiello has taken over the company, the engine has made a steady decline into bizarre business models surrounding an engine with unmaintained features and erratic stability. Unity is imploding in on itself, and it’s very sad to see.
The person doing that maintenance, as well as making sure that about 70 of the best known indie games from the same era keep running, is Ethan Lee. He’s not as well known as Fez’s developer Phil Fish, who was also the subject of the documentary Indie Game: The Movie, but this week Lee started publicly marketing the service he’s been quietly providing for over 11 years: maintenance of older games. Usually, when video game publishers talk about revisiting older games they talk about “remasters,” lavish reproductions that not only make them playable, but update their graphics or make them more modern in some way. Lee chose the word “maintenance” intentionally to describe what he does. Doing the lord’s work.
Liam Dawe at GamingOnLinux looks back at the release of Valve’s Proton, five years ago today. Proton just makes a lot of sense. It didn’t take long for Valve to expand Proton to go initially from a few select Valve-approved titles, to being able to run anything we choose to try with it. From there, Linux gaming just seemingly exploded. And then eventually we saw why Valve made Proton with the Steam Deck announcement coming less than three years later in July 2021. Proton is one of the biggest things to happen to desktop Linux and PC gaming in general. It cannot be overstated just what it has done to the gaming market – people expect new games to just work on Linux now, and developers have to answer questions about it and promise support sooner rather than later. From big, defining titles like Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3, down to the countless small indie titles – Proton and thus Linux support for games has been normalised. PC gaming is no longer a Windows-only thing, and that benefits all of us.
Microsoft has announced that on 29 July, 2024, the Xbox 360 Store on the Xbox 360 and the Xbox 360 Marketplace on the web will close their doors. For once, one of these service or online store shutdowns is actually being handled well, as Microsoft states: This change will not affect your ability to play Xbox 360 games or DLC you have already purchased. Xbox 360 game content previously purchased will still be available to play , not only the Xbox 360 console but also Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S devices via backward compatibility. While it doesn’t mention downloading existing content you own, several other reports state this is possible. If so, this would make it the fairest way to shut down a service like this. On a related personal note, I should really order a replacement disc drive for my venerable Xbox 360 – an original one, still working other than the broken drive! – and fix it back up. I’ve got a huge collection of 360 games I want to keep being able to play.
I have been reading Doom Guy by John Romero. It is an excellent book which I highly recommend. In the ninth chapter, John describes being hit by lightning upon seeing Adaptive Tile Refresh (ATS). That made me realize I never took the time to understand how this crucial piece of tech powers the Commander Keen (CK) series. During my research I was surprised to learn that ATS only powered the first CK trilogy. The second trilogy turned out to use something far better. I’ve played all the Commander Keen games as a child over and over again, but being quite young at the time (I’m from 1984, so do the math), it never dawned on me just how much of a technological marvel these games really were.
Ubisoft has confirmed that it is temporarily suspending accounts it deems to be “inactive”, preventing players from accessing their game libraries. Players are then sent an email informing them that their suspended account will be deleted in 30 days unless they click the “Cancel Account Closure” link. Modern gaming.
USA readers may wonder why I was waiting for the release of a game already published. While Street Fighter II made it to the Super Famicom on June 10, 1992 in Japan and July 15, 1992 in North America, France had to wait until December 17, 1992 to get a PAL version. As I waited, I saw ads in French magazines offering imported cartridges of my Holy Graal. To make them work on a European Super Nintendo, one had to buy an adapter. The combo cost almost as much as the console (595F + 199F vs 1290F). Needless to say I couldn’t afford it. But I always wondered how Nintendo seemingly controlled the regions and how tinkerers had managed to circumvent that protection. A detailed look at how the 10NES sysyem worked.
This ports DoomGeneric NTNative to kernel-mode driver environment. This is bonkers.
Liam Dawe at GamingOnLinux: Well, the results are here. In the USA the FTC was trying to block Microsoft from acquiring Activision Blizzard but Microsoft has won the fight. Now Microsoft are one big step closer to actually properly closing the deal, and a rather big consolidation of the gaming industry given how big Activision Blizzard are. I haven’t been keeping up with this case very much, but if history’s anything to go by, any form of consolidation at this scale tends to work out worse for consumers and the market.
