What's all this, then?

Ever wanted to comment on an Anatomy of Games article after the post's comments had automatically closed? Feel the need to nitpick or add something? Want to try your own hand at this sort of game analysis? That's what this forum is for. It's a place to comment on the articles on Anatomy of Games, further discuss the specifics of those games, put forth your own theories, or to simply have a set location on the Internet where you can do it yourself with the certainty that others will actually see it.

The DIY forum here is pretty much a free-for-all. Feel free to start new threads for any games you actually want to pursue seriously. Let others know up front if you're OK with them chiming in as well. Collaborate, if you like. Any game is fair play. This is not the same as "Let's Play" since it's not about playing and experience but rather about how the actual design of a game works or fails. Objective, not subjective.

This is also a zero-tolerance zone for bad behavior. Not that I expect this sub-forum to inspire nastiness, but any incivility will be met with bans. Be nice.

Rey at VGMuseum has been pretty awesome about providing screens for these projects, so be sure to check over there if you need something!

Thanks!

Iiiiintersting.....
(strokes goatee)
(twirls mustache)

Coincidentally, I am currently in the middle of (finally) reading the Super Metroid anatomy articles and I was wondering why all of the comment sections were locked. Great timing!

Spam prevention. Any WordPress site that gets even a modest amount of traffic quickly becomes inundated with spam. Leaving the comments open for longer than about two days is just asking for trouble, unfortunately. It occurred to me the other day this this might offer a good workaround.

Can this include analysis on technical elements or is it just focused on design stuff? Like the technical stuff they write about in http://pixeldigest.tumblr.com/ ...sorta.

I literally just found an article today concerning this.

Coincidences are funny things.

Board games OK?

Great idea—I'm looking forward to what might come from this.

Should the thread that started it all be moved here?

I just came in to ask this?

Yeah, I was planning to move that over here.

Seriously, free-for-all. If it's a game, and you want to write about how it works, do it.

Hell, if anyone manages to power through a game or series and wants help turning their articles into a book, I'm happy to offer advice and maybe even storefront space.

At some point I might feel comfortable doing one of these on King's Quest, it'd certainly help me in the process putting together the de-make I'm trying to do of it in Inform...

I suddenly have the urge to do a detailed analysis of all the fundamental flaws in the Palladium tabletop RPG games.

I'm about 99% sure on this one, but just to be completely sure, this is incivility toward other posters, and we can be mean to the games we're dissecting, right?

Yes, but if the designer of that game shows up and starts crying, you have to promise to feel bad about it.

Take this or leave it, but in my experience good critical writing generally comes from approaching even the most flawed work with an open mind and allowing yourself to experience what works well in something broken. That's not to say that there's not a place for good negative criticism, but "I'm going to tear this a new one" is a frequently less productive premise than, "let's look at how this works." (see: Glass Knuckle and Parish's critical game analysis vs. AVGN imitators on you tube)

I'm not saying you two of you are going to take this approach, just throwing it out there, since frequently internet criticism ends up being snarky but not terribly enlightening.

I think there's a good model for how to treat something that doesn't work very well in the Kid Icarus Anatomy.

Yes, definitely!

Hmm, I personally prefer to talk generally about specific game design "effects" rather than referring to a specific game. But good luck! :-)

Superb idea. I'd give it a go, but I'm not sure I could do it justice. Maybe I'll try, if I can think of a game I like enough. (Castle of Illusion for Master System incoming)

Awesome!

Generally speaking, could you add a "next article" button for the older entries for those of us catching up on complete series?

That would be agonizingly time-consuming, and I don't really have the time to give up for consumption. However, I've tried to tag games scrupulously. You can use the tag for a game to break it into its own isolated article stream.

Is there a way to set an emulator to automatically take snapshots every 3 seconds or so, or are people just manually taking snaps?

When I write LPs, I have the A and b buttons mapped to Q and W, and then the Screenshot button to the space bar, so I can easily hit it with my thumb while playing. That's the Octo-Method!

I suppose that wouldn't work so well for games that have more then two buttons, though.

I've been meaning to write a thing about Aria of Sorrow for ages and this is the perfect reason to get back to it.

Humans can't play platforms on a keyboard, Octo.

That's a robot and/or octopus thing.

No worries. I didn't know if it was something that could be done simply at a template level or something. I'll muddle through going back to the index

I noticed it was a bit awkward to read in order too, but I just went and opened a bunch of them in tabs.

e- or you can go one at a time via the index. They work better as discrete articles than as blog entries anyway.

Analysis of Sonic the Hedgehog could stand to go in here, too, maybe?