Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

KickStarter Boss Fight Books: books on classic games

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
3eAHnvG.jpg


The turn-based tactical role playing series Jagged Alliance has been sequeled, expanded, modded, optioned, multiplayered, andkickstarted, but the series’ many fans usually point to Jagged Alliance 2 as the high water mark, and one of the finest turn-based video games of all time.

Jagged Alliance 2 brings to the table a wicked sense of humor, simulation-driven character design, a combination of strategic overworld and tactical battles reminiscent of the X-COM series, and a surprisingly deep open-world RPG experience reminiscent of the Ultima or Elder Scrolls games.

Focusing on JA2′s development history and basing his book largely on new personal interviews with the game’s developers, game designer and web technology developer Darius Kazemi delves deep into the legacy of a game that still has much to teach gamers and game-makers 14 years after its release.

Customers who order the ebook will be emailed a link to download a DRM-free copy of the book in all three formats: pdf, mobi, and epub. You can also buy a Kindle-only version from the Kindle Store.

A snippet from Amazon preview, on the author's motivation:

d8v4BeK.png


Looks fun to read, at least he dosen't look pretentious as other so-called games writers.

http://bossfightbooks.com/products/jagged-alliance-2-by-darius-kazemi

DRM-free e-book is $4.95.

The publisher Boss Fight Books also released other books on EarthBound, Chrono Trigger, ZZT, Super Mario Bros. 2, and Galaga.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
It means Amazon Kindle or Apple iBooks, mostly. I don't think any other e-book DRMs are alive and well now.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
http://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...ok-about-an-obscure-90s-computer-game/379181/

Why I Wrote a Book About an Obscure '90s Computer Game
Many forces combine to shepherd a video game from conception to completion, but rarely are they acknowledged.

lead.png


Most popular writing about video games tends to be experiential, focusing on the relationship of the player to the game. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s worth recognizing that video games are often team projects that involve technical, artistic, financial, and managerial coordination. They’re similar to movies in that respect. And if you grab a popular book about a movie off a shelf, it might contain film criticism, but it's just as likely to delve into how the movie got funded, what the production process was like, and the lives of the people who made it.

Popular books about movies acknowledge the materiality of the medium and the many forces that combine to shepherd a film project from conception to completion. We need more of that in video-game writing, and I tried to do that in my most recent book, Jagged Alliance 2, by learning from one of my favorite pieces of writing.

In his 1996 book Aramis, or the Love of Technology, sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour tells the story of Aramis, a real, futuristic French public transit system that had massive financial backing in the 1970s but never got past the prototype phase. It’s a story that should be boring, consisting of government appropriations, Gantt charts, hardware failsafes, scope changes, and variable-reluctance motors. But Latour takes these dry topics and tells a mesmerizing tale blending ethnographic adventure, philosophical manifesto, and hard-boiled detective fiction. He weaves together marketing materials, technical documents, and interviews with engineers, managers, politicians, and money men. He makes bold claims about the process that makes technical projects move from fictional entities to real entities, describes the mechanisms by which they impact society, and posits the only theory of innovation I’ve ever encountered that doesn’t sound like snake oil.

b9a45a13c.jpg

Aramis prototype site in Paris (Smiley Toerist /Wikimedia Commons)

There have been a few books like this about video games. Dreamcast Worlds, by Zoya Street, declares its Latourian influences outright and is required reading for anyone who wants to claim an understanding of how video game consoles succeed or fail. Casey O’Donnell’s forthcoming Developer’s Dilemma is based on years he spent as an embedded ethnographer at video game studios, and reads like an homage to Aramis from its interleaved narrative down to its funky typesetting. But both of these books are derived from their authors’ academic thesis work. This doesn’t diminish the value of the books, but it does make them dense experiences, and a hard sell to your average reader with an interest in games.

So when I was approached by Boss Fight Books in early 2013 with a dream pitch (“write a short book about any video game you want, any way you want”), I immediately knew I wanted to write something inspired by Aramis—filled with interviews and technical details but also broad analysis of where the game fits into the larger culture. I wanted to make something that managed to be approachable not by reducing something to a simple narrative, but by zooming in and out between the lines of code, the individual developer, corporate power structures, industry apparatuses, and cultural institutions.

I had several games in mind, but I settled on an obscure 1999 PC strategy game called Jagged Alliance 2, developed by Sir-tech Canada. Yes, it’s my favorite game, but more importantly it has obscurity working in its favor. Game developers are notoriously secretive; I knew it would be difficult to get them to speak on the record about a popular game, even an old one, doubly so if any of the corporate entities who were involved in its creation were still around and able to file lawsuits.

Jagged Alliance 2 was developed during an inflection point in the history of game development. In 1997, when the team began working, the industry was transitioning from 2D graphics to 3D graphics. Video-game publishing was already big business, but the old mom-and-pop publishers like Sir-tech Canada were still holding on. The workforce was mature enough that there were lots of seasoned professionals, yet in many ways the industry still didn’t know what it wanted to be—a publisher might still commit a million dollars to an experiment, because who knew what would be successful?

As a result, Jagged Alliance 2 felt like a holdover from a bygone era even on the day of its release, an experimental 2D oddball amidst an increasingly homogenous group of 3D first person shooters. I expected that when I interviewed the developers that these tensions would be present when we talked about the business of game development. But I was surprised, and delighted, to discover that these tensions permeated every layer of the game, from deals with retailers down to letters from avid fans.

For example, series creator Ian Currie was the producer and a co-designer, in addition to being development director of Sir-tech Canada. At a modern big-budget game studio it’s unheard of for a single person to fill all three of these roles. But during this transitional period, it was acceptable to play with project budgets in the millions while playing loose with conventional development wisdom.

Typically it’s the job of the production department to keep the design department in check, as design is often concerned with trying to add more features while production is concerned with trying to make the game ship on time and on budget. When the producer and designer are the same person, there is nobody truly empowered to say no.

Given this, it’s not surprising that one of the game’s developers talks about Sir-tech as a place where “projects [took] four or five years instead of two or three years.” It’s also not surprising that the game is full of tiny features that would have been cut in a modern project. For example, when an enemy is gunned down, their body lingers forever. You can come back to an old battlefield after 30 days and find the corpses right where you left them, often with animated buzzards feasting on the remains. Each of the 60 playable characters in the game has their own custom reaction to this grisly sight, suited to their individual personality.

It is in details like this, whether in the construction of a technical artifact like the French public transit system at the heart of Latour’s Aramis or a strategy game from the 1990s, that we see the texture of how people and machines produce everything around us. It reminds us not just that the world is human-made, but also that specific historical and technical contexts opened imaginations or constrained possibilities.

I tried to write a video game book that emulates Aramis, and while it can’t hold a candle to the original, I’m incredibly happy with the results. I hope this helps other video-game writers see that a book that addresses the economic, technical, and material conditions of a video game’s creation doesn’t have to be a dry textbook affair.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
:necro:

They're doing Kickstarter for the second round of books: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gabedurham/boss-fight-books-season-2

  • A book about Spelunky by the designer himself.
  • A book about BioWare's D&D epic Baldur's Gate II.
  • A book about the most infamous unlicensed game of the NES era, Bible Adventures.
  • A book about Metal Gear Solid from the brother/sister duo behind Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'?
  • A book about World of Warcraft featuring new interviews from WoW developers.
  • And a new book about... any game you choose.

Well, only book that interests me is the Spelunky book by the designer himself, so I'll back $5 later today for getting one book.
 

Helly

Translating for brofists
Patron
Joined
Dec 16, 2011
Messages
2,176
Location
変態の地獄、Rance様と
Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
  • A book about Metal Gear Solid from the brother/sister duo behind Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'?
:dead:

Metal Gear Solid
by Ashly and Anthony Burch
The only problem: Ashly and Anthony grew up but their all-time favorite video game didn't. After nearly two decades, Metal Gear Solid's once-innovative stealth mechanics seem outdated, the cutscenes have lost some of their action movie punch, and the game's treatment of women is often out of touch. Witness a celebration/takedown of this landmark game with the combination of insight and hilarity that Ashly and Anthony have made their careers on.
A japanese game with a somewhat "out of touch" treatment of woman (although the series gave us woman like The Boss) ? It cannot stand !
:prosper:
 

Jason Liang

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2014
Messages
8,336
Location
Crait
I'm pretty interested in reading the Jagged Alliance 2 book and the Baldur's Gate 2 book.

I am currently reading David Kushner's Masters of Doom. He also recently wrote a book about Gary Gygax.
 

FreshCorpse

Arbiter
Patron
Joined
Aug 23, 2016
Messages
692
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming!
Well, once I reached puberty Metal Gear Solid didn't hold the same interest for me either. The plot is a joke, the backtracking is longer than the actual game (and for part of it they remove the guards, meaning the core game mechanic is gone) and it was made in those early days of 3D when all the textures look like they're part of an acid trip. Only part that still stands up are the bosses which I still think are really good.
 

Bocian

Arcane
Joined
Jul 8, 2017
Messages
1,912
I want a book about Grimoire.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom