Doing a bit of blog maintenance while putting off actual work, it appears that, rather than being swallowed up by the gaping maul of the interwubs, the lost Link Roundup from a couple of weeks ago was actually saved and buried in my draft posts. No idea how, or why it ended up in a place I couldn’t see it, but I suppose some questions are best left unanswered. Links can be found below the jump for the curious.

Stephen Totilo encounters an moral dilemma in an unexpected place: Nintendo’s turn-based strategy game Fire Emblem for the Wii. I haven’t played this latest installment yet – the earlier portable games for the GBA were fun, but sort of paled next to Advance Wars – but I may need to look into getting it. The idea of having you to fight not only former allies but allies you’ve spent time playing as is intriguing; it’s the sort of thing that can either elevate a game into something truly special or become immensely frustrating. Totilo’s way of handling it is rather inspired, and kudos to the designers for leaving room for it too happen in.

Bill Harris on his typically great blog, Dubious Quality, lays out his ideas for saving the text sim. Despite fantastic recent entries like Dwarf Fortress, the text sim is a dying genre, with the once-proud herds of fans that roamed the prairies reduced to a mere handful of diehards. While the blame is largely (and to a degree, fairly) placed at the feet of the rise of graphical games, a large portion of the lack of interest comes from the things being so damn hard to use. As interest continues to die down, the only people left developing text sims are the same people playing them. This sort of design-by-Orosboros causes a number of problems, the chief of which being the lack of consideration for new players. The result is control interfaces requiring a Rosetta stone to make sense of and gobs of important data that has to be hunted for with no easy way of accessing it. Harris’ ideas for simplifying things will most likely fall on deaf ears, but they’re well worth reading. I still have no idea what the guy does for a living other than running an awesome blog, but his notes here point to a keen understanding of interface design.

Speaking of potential problems involving fans turned developers, Rock Paper Shotgun interviewed indie-dev Vince D. Weller on his soon-to-be-released game The Age of Decadence. Weller is clearly angry about a great number of things, particularly what he considers the dumbing down of games since the glory days of Fallout and, erm, other turn-based RPGs that behave exactly like the game he’s working on. While he gets points for enthusiasm, his oft-stated position of anybody not wanting to play the sort of games he enjoys being a mouth-breathing idiot of the highest order gets tired very, very quickly. I’m all for people taking the initiative to create the sort of games they see as lacking in the market, but Weller’s approach appears so introverted (and again, angry) that it’s hard to imagine Decadence leading a resurgence of stat-heavy RPGs. But then, as his game sounds a bit more complex than what I’m interested in playing, I’m clearly a gibbering moron. So what do I know?

And lastly, Lara Crigger’s piece for Gamers With Jobs entitled “Coming Home” is a genuinely lovely walk down a memory lane paved in memory cards. Any one with a history of gaming probably has their own memories and moments they connect with certain games – one of the clearest I have is an inability to hear ‘For No One’ by the Beatles without thinking of Psychonauts, and vice versa. What are yours?

Filed under: link roundup