Monthly Archives: March 2006

Learning C through BASIC?

While trying to think of ways to make learning the C programming language a less frustrating experience, I was struck recently with the idea of writing a complete tutorial on C entirely from the viewpoint of writing games. I’d be teaching pure ISO standard C, so that means I’d have to stick with text-based games. Still, doable.

Anyway, thinking about this made me remember a set of C books (BASIC Computer Games and More BASIC Computer Games) that I used to check out all the time from the Sacramento Belle Cooledge Library when I was a kid (it was at a completely different location back then, FWIW). These were books filled with nothing but listings of BASIC source code for hundreds of text-based games.

So I did a quick search for these books, to see if I could still find them somewhere, and lo, to my surprise, their complete contents can be found at AtariArchives.org!

Continue reading →

The Day I Questioned

Okay. Something weightier.

I was raised to believe that the Bible is the Word of God, and is inerrant, infallible. I’d run across difficult passages, but there was always at least a plausible explanation to make it believable.

So about a year ago, I’m reading along in Luke, and I come across the following passage: Continue reading →

Too Many Bad Games

Well. Not exactly the most glorious of first posts… but I wanted to put this down somewhere before I forget it.

There are too many bad games. The fact is, most games suck. It’s the greatest danger to the future of this business. There’s a real danger of an Atari 2600 episode here, given the oversupply of poor quality content, followed by consumers abandoning the platform.

Mitch Lasky, Senior VP of mobile

I found this quote through slashdot -> Next Generation.

I posted it here because it really follows what I’ve been thinking for a while now: and that is that decent-quality games are becoming more and more rare. I think, given the context of the article, Mr Lasky is speaking specifically of mobile gaming; but I feel that the same could be said of the current gaming industry in general. I’m waiting longer and longer for my next “fix”, and becoming more and more disappointed with the offerings.

Shadow of the Colossus (PS2) was, truly, a deep gust of fresh air. It sets in contrast the great many other games of the same year that are woefully lacking.