Great piece on the conflict between archivists and video game publishers to preserve the old games they don’t feel like selling any more. The issue’s particularly relevant now because Nintendo is shutting down their Wii U and 3DS stores. If the corporations get their way (and so far they’re seeming to), a lot of gaming history will be lost.
Thought this was cool! 16yo students created a game played with voice commands to teach their language, Arrernte š
Wordle is a simple word game, played in the browser, that is the major fad on social media at time of writing (January 2022).
As this NYT article describes, Wordle was created by Josh Wardle, who was aiming to create a simple word game that’d entertain his partner. She had input too, going through the initial list of 12,000 words to filter out ā¦
Kingdom of Loathing is a largely text-based browser RPG, started in 2003 by Zack Johnson (“Jick”). It started out as something of a satire of RPGs, and has largely kept its irreverent, reference-based humour to this day, but it’s also a mechanically interesting turn-based RPG in its own right where basically you try to optimise your use of various limited ā¦
For my latest foray into idle/incremental games, today I started playing Forge & Fortune . It’s like an idle RPG, so your “passive accumulation” goes towards equipping your heroes for battle. So far I like it well enough, although I kind of wish there was a bit more story/lore š
It’s been a bit quiet here on the blogging front recently and part of that is that I’ve been playing a few different browser games, and finding some of my time consumed by that instead. I think browser games have definitely declined in popularity since their peak (probably related to the rise of smartphones, and people playing casual games on those instead) but I still like them, as ā¦
This is likely to be of interest mainly to people of a certain generation (that is, late Millennials/early Gen Z) but among Neopetsā small remaining playerbase there’s serious anger at the moment over the decision (apparently undertaken by Neopetsā parent holding company) to partner with cryptobros and start this new Neopets NFT project. Leading fansite Jellyneo explains what’s going on, and why people are so pissed off, well.
Overall, people are suspicious that this is something of a last-ditch moneygrab before the parent company shuts down the long-neglected and currently half-broken Neopets website for good. Personally, to indulge the nostalgia I have for Neopets in the Good Old Days (that’s circa 2005) I made a user account on Neopets Classic , which is an ongoing fan project to reĀcreĀate the site with the vibe it had at that time (except without ads, and swearing is allowed, lmao ā I laughed so hard when literally the first secret avatar I unlocked read āI NEVER FUCKING LEARNED HOW TO READ.ā). Copyright is a bitch but honestly, I think it’s fan projects like this one which have the potential to be satisfying in a way that the “real” website is unlikely to ever be again.
Note also: an effort to archive as much fanwork as possible from the almost 1,000 editions of the Neopian Times.
Vivian bought himself a new second-hand Nintendo Wii. While Gidget here has kept him under strict supervision, he’s been enjoying kicking back with The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time while he has a few days off work between his old job and his new š
Without question, one of my favourite genres of game is the humble turn-based RPG. In the main, it’s not a very fashionable genre these days,1 and I’ve even seen some people argue that the fact that it ever existed at all was only as a “compromise”. Early gaming consoles didn’t have good enough hardware for action RPGs to work ā only by separating out all the battle ā¦
Neopets is a browser game and a franchise, the core part of which is based around having and taking care of virtual pets. It was founded in 1999 by Adam Powell & Donna Williams, and grew rapidly to become one of the most-visited sites on the internet.
Neopets was a pretty major part of my childhood (late primary school years) and with the sheer amount of stuff the site offered, it gave me the ā¦
Jessica Smith is a left-wing feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; sheās also very interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.