This week I'm joined by distinguished designer and id co-founder Tom Hall. In this first 20 mins or so of a 60+ minute interview, we chat about Tom's Kickstarter project Worlds of Wander. An ambitious platform game creator tool, WoW has unfortunately not done well, raising only $45,000 of a $400,000 goal. Tom's obviously disappointed and bit disheartened, but we still have a good chat about platform gaming in general and some of Tom's picks for exemplars that aspiring designers should study.

Download the mp4.

Occasionally, I like to go off topic here at Armchair Arcade and use this valuable platform to discuss other subjects. In this case, I'd like to discuss a video a Facebook friend of mine posted, or, more correctly, reshared, which you can see here, and which I've also embedded at the end of this blog post. It's a popular video on Facebook (and apparently, elsewhere), with close to 80,000 likes, 466,000 shares, and 465 comments as I write this. The titles is, "This video will CHANGE your life." A lofty and tantalizing statement, certainly, but the question is, will it?

Check out part 2 of 4 of the Portuguese translation of our Spacewar! (1962) bonus chapter from our 2009 book, Vintage Games: An Insider Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time. Don't forget that Vintage Games is available in its original English language version at Amazon and other fine retailers in both print and ebook variations, as well as in an Italian language version, found here. As a reminder, Matt Barton and I are also hard at work on a new entry in the Vintage Games series focused on the great platforms that powered those great games, Vintage Game Consoles: An Inside Look at Apple, Atari, Commodore, Nintendo, and the Greatest Gaming Platforms of All Time, for release later this year. Enjoy!

DualShock 4Though some were no doubt disappointed in Sony's PS4 announcement for every reason from general ennui with the whole videogame thing to a passionate allegiance to a competing platform, I fail to see how any real videogame enthusiast can come away anything but impressed at the promise of it all. The keyword of course is "promise," since everything sounds great on paper, but we don't really know how much will be executed how soon (and how well), nor did we have an actual appearance by the apparently camera-shy console itself. You can find many summaries of what Sony did unveil online, including a good one by PlayStation Universe, but I'll try to cover some of the high level highlights.

How do you define nostalgia? This is what it means to me. I am actually from the 4-bit generation as my first cartridge based system was the Odyssey2 / Videopac and that actually had an 4-bit CPU the Intel 4040!

Read more below...

Check out part 1 of 4 of the Portuguese translation of our Spacewar! (1962) bonus chapter from our 2009 book, Vintage Games: An Insider Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time. It looks like Juan Castro did a nice job and I'm looking forward to future installments. Don't forget that Vintage Games is available in its original English language version at Amazon and other fine retailers in both print and ebook variations, as well as in an Italian language version, found here. As a reminder, Matt Barton and I are also hard at work on a new entry in the Vintage Games series focused on the great platforms that powered those great games, Vintage Game Consoles: An Inside Look at Apple, Atari, Commodore, Nintendo, and the Greatest Gaming Platforms of All Time, for release later this year. Enjoy!

Mr. Agustin Cordes of Argentina is back this week to tell us about his Asylum kickstarter. In brief, he's trying to raise $100,666 to fund the last bit of development for what looks like an awesome "node-based" 3D graphical adventure. Unlike (ahem) other Kickstarters, he's got a working prototype (the "Interactive Teaser"). Josh Mandel is voicing the main character--and doing a fantastic job, of course. You might remember my interviews with him back in October of 2011. Anyway, enjoy the vid, and please pledge to Agustin's kickstarter quickly if you want that gorgeous boxed copy.

Download the mp4.

Cloak and Dagger - a cool dual stick video game created by Atari back in 1984. It is closely tied into a movie with the same name:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087065/
(Cloak & Dagger is a 1984 film directed by Richard Franklin starring Henry Thomas, Dabney Coleman and Michael Murphy. It is a remake of the 1949 film The Window. It was originally released in a double feature with The Last Starfighter on July 13, 1984 and then released separately on August 10, 1984.)

It was supposed to be released on the Atari 5200 but due to the video game crash that never happened. A cool bit of information about this game can be found over at AtariHQ:
http://www.atarihq.com/5200/5200faq/02_06.html

My Nintendo Wii U (2013)I've been quiet on the blog front of late as I've been focused on writing three new books for 2013 (and hopefully do what I can to help get the documentary out as well). However, with the latest NPD figures for videogame consoles being dissected across the Web-o-sphere, and Sony likely firing the next salvo for next generation platforms with their upcoming PlayStation-centric announcement (and Microsoft to follow soon thereafter), I thought this would a good time to break my silence and chime in with my perspective on the current videogame-centric happenings.

First off, it's clearly not looking good for pure videogame stuff with three lackluster hardware launches in a row: 3DS, Vita, and Wii U. The 3DS recovered sufficiently with a dramatic price cut that was very much against Nintendo's previous corporate policies that discouraged losing money on hardware, which allowed it enough time to hold out for the software situation to pick up. While it will never reach the sales heights of the blockbuster DS, considering how much competition both direct and indirect there is now versus then, it should still end up selling quite well when it has run through its complete lifecycle.