Originally posted by Tom*
Could you tell me where you got the SF:Eternal Challenge book from? I saw some on eBay a few days ago but can't seem to find them now 
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Just to let people know, ISBNs are confusing. There tends to be a European ISBN and US ISBN these days, despite the fact that, by definition, an ISBN is an International Standard Book Number
Don't even get me started on UPCs and EANs.Comment
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Gaming literature, as whole, is not representative of the medium it covers. Much like the current trend in journalism, everything is all about inclusivity. Rather than covering what is actually happening in a game, instead we are subjected to simplified analysis simply because the author is too lazy/stupid to explain what is really going on. This is painfully skewing coverage on the medium, to the extent that people still don't understand what video gaming actually is (despite it being around for over 20 years). Failure is not a problem, but the journalistic fraternity are seriously ****ing things up.Comment
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Yeah, but describing exactly how a game 'works' when you play it is extemely difficult to pull off in an entertaining way.Originally posted by Cacophanus
I'm thinking about gamefaqs walkthroughs here
Unless there are any good examples? Trigger Happy is the best I can think of, which impressed and annoyed me in equal measure. It had a lot of generalisations too.
I think generalisations are cool, as long as there is an interesting viewpoint or opinion being expressed. Writing about video games is normally preaching to the converted; I don't really need someone to explain to me precisely how a game works when I probably already know. In fact, doesn't that make it less inclusive?Comment
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That's the point though. Analysis is not meant to easy, nor in its execution and communication. The onus is on the individual to do a thorough and, in this case, an entertaining job.Originally posted by Papercut
Generalisations can be useful, but in moderation and with a little thought. As for inclusivity, the more comprehensive the ananlysis the more that other people can understand the subject in question. Communication of an analysis can be undertaken in an elitist fashion, but it is by no means it's fundamental purpose.I think generalisations are cool, as long as there is an interesting viewpoint or opinion being expressed. Writing about video games is normally preaching to the converted; I don't really need someone to explain to me precisely how a game works when I probably already know. In fact, doesn't that make it less inclusive?Comment
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But aren't you a "professional" games journalist too?Originally posted by CacophanusComment
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I am but, unlike other games journalists, I rock.Originally posted by Game BoyComment
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Supercade: A visual History of Videogames 1972-1983 by Van Burnam
Awesome. But, what I really want is a sequel 1983-now.
The First Quarter by Stephen L. Kent. Great read.
Sega Consumer History. Incredible. Has a spreadsheet in the back of every Sega title ever. Would be even better if I read Japanese.
Trigger Happy - thought provoking and interesting.
Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of Videogames by Leonard Herman. Dense and fact-filled, but interesting.
Video Game Bible. Good resource of the neo-classic era.
Digital Press Guide #7 Great resource of the Turbografx and back.
Arcade Fever - Okay read, many good pictures.
Yu Suzuki GameWorks vol 1. The GD-Rom is great.Comment
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The Ultimate History Of Video Games
Trigger Happy
and this doesn't really count, because it's fiction, but it's my absolute favourite book about games.
Lucky Wander Boy
I recommend this book to anyone old enough to have played games like Donkey Kong and Pac Man when they first came out. I can't describe the book without making it sound crap. (I've tried in the past.) So here's a bit of it. Quite a long bit.
THE MICROSURGEON WINNER: A DEAD GRANDMA STORY
Microsurgeon was the last Intellivision game I ever owned; my grandfather bought it for me a few weeksbefore my grandmother got sick. Her illness came as no surprise, given her three-pack-a-day habit. She would stay up until three or four in the morning, smoking and reading in bed, while my grandfather, an early riser, slept soundly in the living room. I?d often heard my mother theorize that her parents, with their divergent lifestyles, would never have stayed together had they gotten married in the age of no-fault divorce. Yet I believe they were happy. It never occurred to them to measure their lives together against some glossy ideal.
After her chronic cough became more persistent, the doctors took X rays and found spots in both her lungs. Further inquiries revealed that the cancer had recently metastasized to her brain, though it had not yet gotten a firm foothold there. They started her on aggressive chemotherapy, and the rest of her body deteriorated along with her tumor cells. There is no need to catalogue the details of this deterioration ? you have seen it for yourself, or you will. I have nothing to add to your current or future memories, no light to shed on them, no meaning or hope to extract. Her sickness was a constant whisper in our house, even when it was not being talked about. In the living room at night, you could hear my mother?s murmuring remorse that she?d done nothing to stop my grandmother?s smoking, or her own for that matter, and the hallway walls would carry her cries of helpless rage through my closed bedroom door.
It took me a while to get around to playing Microsurgeon; I was still infatuated with Astrosmash. When I finally did get around to playing it, I was taken aback by its complexity. Power, brains, antibiotics, tumors, lymph ducts, tapeworms; it was a lot to think about all at once. But I kept at it, fueled by morbid, obsessive tendencies, and finally got the hang of the game with patient #23, a relatively easy save compared to some of the others. She began the game with lungs in critical condition, brain in serious condition, and everything else good or fair. I saved her, barely, doing the absolute minimum necessary to get her brain and lungs up to ?good? or ?fair? while preventing any of the other ?fair? systems from falling ill, and made it out through her eye socket just before my power ran out.
The following day, my mother took my grandmother to Presbyterian St. Luke?s Hospital for a checkup, where the doctor told her that the chemo was working. Her cancer had not retreated, but it had not advanced either. My mother seemed hopeful, which lifted my father?s spirits, and mine. Making the connections I could hardly expect anyone else to make, I retreated to the basement for more Microsurgeon, hitting Reset on the Intellivision until it delivered patient #23. As I got better at the game, I was able to bring all of #23?s systems up to good condition, and once a body region was in good shape, it stayed that way and never got bad again. In Microsurgeon, health was forever. Once, when my mother came down to check on me as I sat cross-legged on my orange vinyl cushion, I told her what I was doing.
"I?m killing Grammy?s tumor cells," I said.
Thinking I was being metaphorical, she kissed me on the head.
I refused to go to summer camp that year. I had work to do. My resolve was such that my parents saw little point in denying me what might be my last summer in my grandmother?s company. One day on the patio of her condo, after swearing her to secrecy, I told my grandmother what I was doing with the game on her behalf, explaining the whole thing to her in my disjointed way. She squeezed me weakly to her side and looked out over Lake Michigan, the wind sending ripples through the top of her terrycloth turban. I think she believed me.
"Thank you," she said as she lit up a cigarette.
She would occasionally smoke in my presence, having exacted from me a standing promise not to tell anyone. Though I knew this was not a thing for her to be doing, I never asked her to stop; it only made me work harder at Microsurgeon. Even after all systems were good, I continued to blast away at pathogens, paying special attention to lung and brain tumors. I would not leave the body of patient #23 until all traces of disease had been eradicated.
In spite of her stolen cigarette moments, my grandmother?s cancer began to recede. The doctors, my parents, her friends ? none of them could conceal their surprise. I had to fake mine. She began to venture out, holding onto my grandfather?s arm as he led her to their usual table at Barnum & Bagel deli. We even took her to a movie, An Officer and a Gentleman, I think it was. It nearly bored me to death, but she didn?t cough once.
Then, a week before school started, the Intellivision broke.
Its bronzed top panels would often get very hot after a few hours? continuous play, but I ignored the warning signs. Four hours into a Microsurgeon session, some piece of circuitry inside the console apparently melted down, and it would not play a single game. Nearly breathless, I took the machine into the furnace room, opened the toolbox and began to unscrew the bottom to see if I could solve the problem myself. I might have had a chance ? I owned a soldering iron and I knew how to use it from the few Heath kit home electronics projects I?d done ? but my mother walked in while I was dismantling the machine and made me put it back together again, prey to irrational fears of my electrocution.
The mustached man at Archon TV & Electronics was out of new Intellivisions. He suggested I consider a Colecovision system, the Next Big Thing that had hit stores that summer. Misunderstanding the source of my disproportionate distress, my mother offered to buy me one on the spot, but I was adamant: I needed an Intellivision. I needed this Intellivision. The property or aura in this machine that had yoked my grandmother?s fate to that of patient #23 might be absent from a new one, and I could not risk that. Intellivision might have been verging on obsolescence, but I had to protect what was truly valuable against the encroaching demands of absolute modernity. The Archon salesman shrugged, and told me he?d have to send it back to Mattel Electronics. It turns out Mattel Electronics was on its last legs and therefore probably not a good place to send anything important, but I was unaware of this at the time.
While I waited for Mattel to complete the repairs, my grandmother?s health deteriorated in step with the weather. She stopped going out, and the smell of death blew into her dim bedroom from upwind in time. I do not know how I recognized it, but I did, and with it came the first taste of the helplessness that had seasoned my mother?s life for months. I could not look my grandmother in the eye.
My parents stopped taking me to see her, and got her a full time nurse from Belize. Soon, they got the nurse a bottle of morphine sulfate and an eyedropper. At home, they tried to maintain an air of normality, but slow death took a grinding toll on everyone, my mother especially. Every phone call raised a sickening mixture of dread and relief that she tried to neutralize with Pepto Bismol. When Archon TV & Electronics called to tell me my Intellivision was in, however, neither she nor my father was home.
I put on my gym shoes and ran to Archon myself along the Edens expressway. It was a mile away, nearly enough to render a chubby, sedentary eleven-year-old unconscious, but I made it, paid the man most of the allowance money I?d saved over the past few months, and trudged back home with the Intellivision under my arm.
I was very thirsty, but I went straight to the basement without water and summoned up patient #23. I killed every wrong thing in that body, every tumor cell, every pernicious virus, every spark of the malicious world, I played and played without regard for score or status, and maybe it was a glitch in the programming or maybe it was something else, but the game lasted far longer than it should have. My power readout stopped declining, and the tumors stopped appearing all together. The game gave up.
Dizzy from thirst, brow salty with dried sweat, I stumbled upstairs with the Microsurgeon cartridge in hand to find my mother and father entering from the garage with my grandfather. Grammy was dead. When they told me, I fainted.
After I came to, drank some water and assured them I was okay, they took me to see my grandmother one last time. She was just a thing now, an object that could no longer pretend to be otherwise because it could no longer tell itself otherwise. Although I had to work up my courage to touch her hand, it was cool to the touch, not at all unpleasant. As her body dropped to room temperature, and my mother cried, and my heavily sedated grandfather slumped listlessly in a chair, I remember exactly what went through my mind. There were three things, in this order:
1) When I was six or seven, back before my fascination with the mysteries of the natural world was bludgeoned to death by a 7th grade science teacher, even before video games, I would often sit for hours gazing into books on dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals, pouring over their lush painterly reenactments of primeval drama, thinking about my own death. Not what would happen to me after I died ? I thought about what would happen to everything else. For the first time in years, I revisited the post-Adam scenario. The situation was thus:
I was the linchpin in the machine of forward-moving time, the only thing that kept it together and propelled it through a fierce storm of regression. When I finally drew my last breath, the storm would sweep time up in its back-blowing gusts, causing fern-heavy rainforests to explode through the lawns and concrete and asphalt, toppling the homes and shops and even the skyscrapers downtown. Saber-toothed tigers would come to prowl through those forests, nostrils flaring after a whiff of mastodon blood, and there would be no defense against them. Everything would keep going backward, through the triceratops and anklyosaurus to the trilobite and beyond. There was a gap in my knowledge of a few billion years between the illustrated dinosaur book and the illustrated astronomy book, but I knew where it would all end up: in a featureless freezing vacuum punctuated by swirling masses of super-heated gases. These were the changes that my death would precipitate. I shared this information with no one.
2) While thinking about the things I?d known from childhood, my thoughts moved naturally to my secret knowledge of God?s true appearance. From the age of three or four, I had known he was not the conventional white-bearded Ineffable, or the burning bush they told us about in Sunday school at Temple Solel, or the guy nailed to the cross downtown at the Art Institute, though I found those depictions of the crucifixion entertaining.
No, God looked exactly like George Reeves, the barrel-chested, beer-gutted, ill-starred star of the 1950s Superman TV series, wearing the chunky black glasses of his Clark Kent incarnation. He wore a green and yellow court jester?s costume, the kind with little bells on the ends of its three-pointed hat, and rode a donkey so small that God had to hunch over and lift his legs to rest on its mane so they wouldn?t drag along the ground. The poor donkey was a third of his size. It was one small donkey. Though I no longer believe in God per se, I still know this image carries some deeper truth.
3) I thought about the Microsurgeon cartridge in my pocket. I knew its effect had been real. I still know it. For no good reason I could ever fathom, it had become a fulcrum point between opposing sides of the screen where leverage could be exerted from one side to the other. If the Intellivision had been fixed sooner ? a week, a day, an hour ? I could have saved her.Comment
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Sadly my only Gaming book is the Flight Simulator Co-Pilot written in 1986 so its a bit out of date.Comment
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I have
Trigger Happy, Steven Poole
High Score, Demaria Willson
Arcade Fever, John Sellers
1000 Game heros, Taschen press - Great art work
Ultimate history, Kent
Game on show book and the two mgs art books.
One I`m trying to find is Joystick Nation by J.C. Herz but it`s out of print I`ve tried Amazon uk and us with no joy any one have any ideas or a second hand copy for sale?Comment
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Thanks The Guppy, you've made my day. Leads me to wonder whether gamers do actually think along the same paths and in what forms videogame culture expresses itself as part of our everday reality.Originally posted by The Guppy
And I'll be buying this book.Comment
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On my shelves, I have:
SUPERCADE A VISUAL HISTORY OF THE VIDEOGAME AGE 1971-1984
HIGH SCORE THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC GAMES
RE:PLAY ULTIMATE GAMES GRAPHICS
THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO VIDEOGAMES
ELECTRONIC PLASTIC
POSTMORTEMS FROM GAME DEVELOPER
PHOENIX THE FALL & RISE OF VIDEOGAMES
THE FIRST QUARTER-A 25 YR HISTORY OF VIDEO GAMES
GAME ON THE HISTORY & CULTURE OF VIDEOGAMES
TRIGGER HAPPY
GAME OVER
ARCADE FEVER
MASTERS OF DOOMComment
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Can't believe no one's mentioned Revolutionaries at Sony: The Making of the Sony Playstation and The Visionaries Who Conquered The World of Video Games
If you want to read about the birth of the Playstation, Ken Kutaragi's role and how Sony conquered the games industry, then it's a must-read
Bit pro-Sony but (from the title) what do you expect?
Linky: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...glance&s=booksComment
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Could you elaborate on how you found that one, The Glider? 'Cause it's sorta on my shopping list.Originally posted by The GliderComment
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