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Tag: video games

  • Thanking is an action applying to one visible thing

    "Thanking is an action applying to one visible thing." is a literal line in the source code of one of my favourite video games, blackle mori observes.

    Read more (253 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 27 September, 2026
  • Edited Champ'd Up screenshot showing the battle for The Champion of Editing Videogame Metadata, pitting Friendly Dan against Hacker Dan.

    Things Champ'd Up thinks are uniquely American

    When I play Jackbox Games with my friends, I enable the 'filter US-centric content'. But what does that actually do? Let's swiftly do a bit of easy reverse-engineering on one of my favourite games in the series, Champ'd Up, and find out... what the developer thinks "US-centric" means!

    Read more - about 5 minutes (1125 words)

    • Article
    • posted 19 September, 2026
  • Goal: get Claude to change the "Add to Cart" button to blue; do not let it change anything else.

    Opusfived

    Miloลก Novoviฤ‡'s experimental interactive fiction is a silly (but with a grain of truth!) simulation of what it feels like to attempt to use vibe-coding to make small, simple, isolated changes to an established codebase. Go play it!

    Read more (68 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 11 September, 2026
  • CSS or BS game in progress. The player is asked to declare whether 'view-timeline-name' is a real CSS property or made-up.

    CSS or BS

    Keith Cirkel's made a game where you have to identify if something is a CSS property or a convincing fake. How's your CSS knowledge?

    Read more (85 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 14 May, 2026
  • Paper-based sketch showing an 'unwinnable' deck of 'five suit' FlopFlop, formed by stacking the cards in a strict reverse order to make it as hard as possible.

    FlipFlop Solitaire's Deck-Generation Secret

    I enjoy a mobile game called FlipFlop Solitaire, which provides a few thousand pre-seeded decks that are guaranteed "winnable". This blew my mind for a little while - how can you be sure that these shuffles are all winnable? But then I worked out a way to achieve exactly that result... by thinking in reverse!

    Read more - about 7 minutes (1458 words)

    • Article
    • posted 18 April, 2026
  • Exhibition space showing wall-mounted cabinet controls for three retro video games, from the header of Mike Cook's original article.

    Letting Games Die

    Inspired by Mike Cook's argument that old video games should be allowed to die, I was inspired to jot down some of my own thoughts and experiences in the area of video game preservation.

    Read more - about 6 minutes (1191 words)

    • Article
    • 1 comment
    • posted 6 April, 2026
  • Screenshot showing a desk with a gamepad, mouse, and with an open notepad with the handwritten instructions 1. Answer Game, 2. Identify Game, 3. Consult Compendium, 4. Help Caller!!

    Hint Line 93

    Hint Line 93 is an amazing interactive exhibit about the experience of working on a computer games hint line. It's a deeply-researched, immersive, and clever piece of art... and even though the real experience is in a Australian museum, you can play an approximation of it via the Web. Awesome.

    Read more (363 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 18 March, 2026
  • Dan, a white man with blue hair, sits in a cluttered office, a finger to his lips as he's deep in thought, reading a red book titled 'Top Ten Games You Can Play In Your Own Head By Yourself'.

    Ten Weird Games

    This blog post's been sitting incomplete in my drafts since last decade. I think it's finally time to share with you... ten weird games (and game adjacent media) you should see.

    Read more - about 12 minutes (2826 words)

    • Article
    • 2 comments
    • posted 12 March, 2026
  • Screenshot of a game of snake: a medium-sized blue snake explores amongst several smaller purple snakes

    snakes.run: rendering 100M pixels a second over ssh

    I'd been speculating for the last month or so what Nolen Royalty had been working on recently that had required such high-performance out of the SSH protocol, but now we know: it's massively multiplayer snake.

    Read more (338 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 27 February, 2026
  • Rebels in the Sky

    I feel like I'm reading a lot about SSH lately and how it can be used for exotic and unusual tasks. Tarpitting's fun, of course, but really what inspires me is all these dinky projects like ssh tiny.christmas that subvert the usual authentication-then-terminal flow that you expect when you connect to an SSH server.

    Read more (279 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 10 February, 2026
  • I've had my itch.io account for about six years; I think I first created it to buy a copy of We Are But Worms: A One Word RPG. I've since made several purchases, donations, reviews, and comments, but never really used my account as a "creator".

    I changed that today when I realised that there was nothing to stop me re-publishing games like DNDle and Axe Feather 2021 via my itch.io profile as well as on their current homes (and on GitHub, I suppose). For some folks, itch.io's discovery features might be the best way for them to discover worthwhile content weird stuff like this.

    I might republish some other "things" I've made on itch.io too. It's not like there haven't been lots of them over the years!

    • Note
    • posted 5 February, 2026
  • Screenshot from Pornhub showing Dan Q's profile (0 subscribers, 1,000,000,000 videos watched)'s 'all achievements' page, listing all available achievements.

    Gamified... Pornography?

    When the Online Safety Act came into effect, I considered writing a blog post investigating exactly how difficult it made it to access Pornhub. But it turned out to be boringly easy (it's not NOW, of course!), so I didn't. So here's a different discovery I made about the site...

    Read more - about 7 minutes (1543 words)

    • Article
    • 2 comments
    • posted 4 February, 2026
  • Screenshot from OutRun (1986), showing a red Ferrari Testarossa down the centre of a six-lane beachside highway at 293kph.

    Nostalgia, Music, and Computers

    It turns out that I get nostalgic about technology in the same way as I get nostalgic about music. Here's some things that take me right back to being nine, eleven, thirteen and fifteen years old.

    Read more - about 9 minutes (2019 words)

    • Article
    • with an accompanying podcast
    • posted 15 January, 2026
  • Two Chain Words boards: squares with letters around the sides and a criss-crossing line webbing its way across them to spell a series of word crocodiles. The first reads 'GROOMS SOURS SOBER', scoring 77 for a 'very hard' target of 55. The second reads 'BUT TWATS SEND DAY', scoring 51 for a 'medium' target of 72.

    Chain Words

    I've been enjoying playing Chain Words, from eclectech, intermittently, since it came out in November. If you've not given it a go yet, and you like a word game that's a bit different, you should try it!

    Read more (61 words)

    • Repost
    • posted 13 January, 2026
  • As part of my efforts to reclaim the living room from the children, I'm building a new gaming PC for the playroom. She's called Bee, and - thanks to the absolute insanity that is The Tower 300 case from Thermaltake - she's one of the most bonkers PC cases I've ever worked in.

    Full image of On a desk cluttered with computer parts, a partially-built PC stands in an irregular-hexagonal prism shaped case with vented yellow sides and a three-pane angled glass front.
    Alt

    On a desk cluttered with computer parts, a partially-built PC stands in an irregular-hexagonal prism shaped case with vented yellow sides and a three-pane angled glass front.

    • Note
    • 1 comment
    • posted 8 January, 2026

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