The Wii is out now for three months on RetroAchievements and you know what that means... more stats! Take a look at what games have received the most players, beats, and masteries as a whole and over the past month!
Slop...
https://t.co/FH3B5NT59p
Billy Mitchell has shared his thoughts on ‘Regular Show’ in a new tweet:
“F**k Mordecai and Rigby.”
The gamer previously attempted to sue Cartoon Network over an alleged parody portrayal of himself in the series, but the case was unsuccessful.
2️⃣/2️⃣ Filmstrips document how generations of Americans learned, worked, communicated, and understood the world around them. Preserving them means saving a unique historical record before more of it disappears.
Find O'Brien's essay and more in the Vanishing Culture report.
📖 Download & read: https://t.co/TBe7L3Cm7g
🛒 Purchase in print: https://t.co/sqAY6ckFmv
@uncommnephemera #VanishingCulture #FilmPreservation #DigitalPreservation #Archives #CulturalHeritage #InternetArchive #EducationalHistory #MediaHistory
🧵1️⃣/2️⃣ Thousands of educational filmstrips are deteriorating faster than they can be digitized. 🎞️
Archivist Mark O’Brien explains why preserving these overlooked materials has become a race against time and why they remain an invaluable record of 20th century American culture.
📚 Read O’Brien’s essay in VANISHING CULTURE from the Internet Archive.
🔗 https://t.co/TBe7L3Cm7g
Nerd Deep Housecleaning Update:
I still have my original v1.0 Everquest disk. I hardcore raided that game, and I got to see firsthand the future of massive online games be designed, bit by bit, in real time. Everquest was the first MMO that actually functioned well as a game.
World of Warcraft was the giant phenomenon in the genre, but much of the potential pitfalls in MMOs had been stumbled into by Everquest. Everquest pioneered the town/quest hub structure. Instanced raids and dungeons. How to make giant raids (72 characters at one point!) work at all. How to do and not do progression through expansions. How to balance the game at higher levels (including a long, painful health sponge period).
Everquest came at a time when you could really make your players suffer. Death cost you experience. You could lose your corpse and thus all your gear. Advancement was sloooooow. It was cool and exciting at the time, but it's not worth being nostalgic over.
There were so many bit of weird experimentation in this game. Like the super difficult to enter Plane of Mischief that was just full of jokes and weirdness, but you could only enter it at the back of the raid zone. Or the Velious expansion, which ended with an unkillable boss that could only be activated once per server but had so much health that it couldn't be killed. (But then on a new server a bunch of guilds got together and spent a ton of time preparing and actually killed the thing, only to find no loot.)
My favorite bit of old trivia: The endgame zone of the first expansion was called Veeshan's Peak. You had to do a big long quest to get the key to get in. The developers wanted this to be the ultimate scary mega-hardcore dungeon. When you entered, you couldn't walk or teleport out. You had to fight to the end, or use weird tricks with corpses to escape. (This got changed eventually.) This was so wild!
Veeshan's Peak (almost with three other crazy hard places) was also declared a "Customer Service Limited Zone" where Customer Service would only help you in the case of the most gruesome bugs.
I love the idea of a "Customer Service Limited Zone" in an amusing and sadistic way, but I'm not nostalgic for it. Honestly, an analysis of the evolving design of the game and how they discovered and fixed every possible MMO problem would make a truly fascinating book for, like, 8 people.