Theory

[icycalm]

About a year or so ago aderack began writing this column for Play Magazine called romeo_check_fail. I became interested in it because in an insert credit thread he mentioned that he sometimes wondered what I would think about it. Since Play didn't post these essays on their site, and since I don't read the magazine, I couldn't tell him. However, now that he has started to post these essays on his personal website, I figured I might as well take a look and see what's up with them:

http://www.aderack.com/rcf/

I am currently reading the first one. Feel free to check them out and post your opinions here.

[icycalm]

:(

I am not sure he would really want to know what I think of it.

[icycalm]

Granted, compared to 1985 we've got some new verbs in our vocabulary, and -- thanks in part to shoulder buttons -- some adverbs.

:(

How do we fix the bottleneck? I'm not that clever.

Yeah, that's about what I was thinking.

It's really depressing some times. I really like aderack. I could tear apart every paragraph of his to the point where even he might decide to leave writing and try some other hobby: gardening perhaps. But it's really hard to do this when I like the person. And the most frustrating thing is that I realize that, no matter what I tell him, he will never understand what is going on. He obsesses about this concept "love", and goes on and on about it, and how games must become about love, and caring, and stuff like that; but if one was to try to explain to him that love is lust to dominate -- and games are already about that! -- and that "caring", i.e. altruism, which is what he THINKS that love is, is in fact not even a remotely intelligible concept, but an idiocy, a piece of gross naivety, he would not even be able to process it.

And so we get these tidy little columns, which explain nothing and lead nowhere.

[icycalm]

Videogames serve to communicate ideas -- granted as does, on some level, all else we do. Yet as a language, that is their explicit purpose. It is why they exist.

There is simply no helping him. Games exist to communicate ideas. And telephones exist to exercise our muscles. And pigs exist to fly. And blah blah blah here is another utterly incoherent column for your rubbish little magazine.

[icycalm]

http://www.aderack.com/journal/2010/01/the-nephew-set/

If I were to give someone a Famiclone or one of those NES handhelds, and… let’s say ten, fifteen, twenty games, which games should I choose? Here’s my current list:

Zelda 1,
Super Mario Bros. 2,
Simon’s Quest,
River City Ransom,
Life Force,
Tetris,
Dragon Warrior,
Mega Man 2, and
Blaster Master all need to be on there.

Runners-up include:

Balloon Fight,
Jackal,
Goonies II,
Bionic Commando,
DuckTales,
Ninja Gaiden II,
Solomon’s Key,
Rygar,
Sky Kid,
Wizards & Warriors,
Marble Madness, and
Lode Runner.

NGJ taste in games -- twenty years on still stuck in the 90's...