Something with a little gaming slant- a cross stitch scene from Dark Castle, one of the early classic Mac games. If you played it, you can hear the sound he made when he ran into a wall, in your head forever. 7/10 #NerdStitch
Macintosh turns 40 today, and to celebrate, I wrote about the weirdest and rarest Macs ever made. Read it at Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/macintosh-at-40-the-oddest-and-rarest-macs-ever-built/
I spoke with @shadsy about the Video Game History Foundation's project for a new digital library for gaming magazines and developer documents. https://www.timeextension.com/features/why-the-video-game-history-foundation-is-creating-a-digital-library-of-games-media
You can read about the creation and influence of both in my book The Secret History of Mac Gaming. The publisher has the Expanded Edition on sale today to celebrate the milestone. https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/all-books/products/the-secret-history-of-mac-gaming-expanded-edition
COVID barely gets a mention these days – here’s why that’s a dangerous situation.
"COVID complacency, by governments, the media and the public, is a threat to the overall health of the population, to health services and particularly to those most vulnerable, including older adults and those with pre-existing health conditions."
@darylbaxter @Gmatom Yeah, really just a remarkable team all around — not only the programmers, but also the rest of them too. By the way, I enjoyed the oral history in your book but I wish you'd proofread it more; it can be hard to read at times with all the typographical and syntactical errors.
They had no right getting or even bidding on the contract from Eidos, but they went for it anyway and pretended they were a larger company. (And then they hired @Gmatom to do the porting grunt work, which she smashed out with awesome improvements.) I talked to the founders about this once; it'll be in the second volume of Secret History of Mac Gaming, if that's ever finished.
And also interesting (though very much unsurprising) to note that they pitched it to Crystal Dynamics and were the driving force behind the project.
https://blog.playstation.com/2024/01/16/tomb-raider-i-iii-remastered-ps4-ps5-features-detailed-new-key-art-revealed/
@CodingItWrong That wiki page covers most of the detail, but to offer a more pithy explanation: it's all semantics, as all 3D games are ultimately rendered as a 2D image, but when people say "real" or "true" 3D they usually mean polygonal 3D, where the maps and all objects are stored and manipulated as 3D coordinates -- including the player, enemies, and camera.
Doom looks 3D thanks to its use of billboarding (for sprites) plus ray casting and binary space partitioning (for walls and floors), but you could render it as a top-down maze and it's mechanically the same game. Marathon uses shearing (sliding and scaling on the y axis) to create an optical illusion that you're looking up and down but is also using tricks to present 2D geometry and logic as though it's 3D.
I didn't check out Aerofoil when I first read about it in @MossRC's book, but now I wish I had. It's an attempt to preserve Glider PRO as unchanged as possible on modern systems. And it's free! If you like old Mac games definitely check it out, even if you also have Glider PRO running on original hardware. https://galeforcegames.itch.io/aerofoil
Video: The origin of Mario like you've never heard it before. Even if you think you know the Donkey Kong story, you don't.
Please share this wherever you can think to, and consider supporting my research on Patreon.
https://www.acriticalhit.com/hidden-influences-mario-how-popeye-game-became-donkey-kong/
