Games

Last week I posted about my guilty collection of unplayed games in Digital Hoarding: Gaming Edition. In short, I have a ton of games I’ve bought over the years and never played, even once. I set myself an internal goal to play more of the games I already have, and reign in my game purchasing.

I used the dynamic collection feature of Steam to show me the unplayed games, sorted by their steam review score. The idea being I want to play games that are actually likely to be fun. I don’t doubt I have very many good games, but I bet I have the odd stinker in there too. Might as well start at the top.

Just days after blogging about My Crowdfunding Stats, I’ve broken my “no crowdfunding” streak of near 18-months by backing something small, but delightful!

Last night a tweet by Tom Brinton crossed my desk. Tom is creating a notebook in which every page is a procedurally generated portable dungeon crawler. The campaign is called “Tiny Paper Dungeons” and it runs until 2nd February 2021.

Tom has previously made a project in a similar vein called NUTRI-TRACK. Collectively these are “Paper Apps”, which I find engaging. Yes, I totally get that these are “just” pre-printed pads, I get it. But I love the whole concept of single purpose analog devices which drag us away from “smart” things now and then.

Another in a series of “I have identified a problem here!”. I appear have quite a few video games. More than I can probably play in my time left on Earth. Let’s set aside all the retro games I have for a moment, and consider only the ones that run on my primary computer, a PC. To be clear, I’m only talking about ’native’ games.

Aside: I hate the word ’native’ in this context, because what’s native? A ZX Spectrum game running under an emulator isn’t native to the PC, is it? Shattered Pixel Dungeon is written in Java though, and that bytecode isn’t native to my Intel i7 CPU. Theme Hospital running under DOSBox isn’t native either, but wait, it’s DOS, so it is PC native. Does anyone even write video games in 80x86 assembler these days? :)

On 11th July 2012, the Ouya burst onto the scene via popular crowdfunding site - Kickstarter. It was billed as “A New Kind of Video Game Console” which sold for $99/£99 at launch. It was essentially an Nvidia Tegra 3 based ARM System on Chip crammed into a tiny box which sat under / near your TV and was operated with supplied bluetooth game controllers. They far exceeded the target of $950,000, reaching $8,596,474, setting some high expectations among the backers and interested onlookers.