John Harris's Blog
I write the roguelike column @Play, available here. The first ebook compilation of @Play columns, at over 700 pages and with nearly 70 essays, is avaiable on itch.io and Amazon!
I occasionally contribute to the group video gaming blog Curmudgeon Gamer: http://www.curmudgeongamer.com/ I'm a Metafilter member, username JHarris. I really enjoy the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu, and am a general fan of H.P.Lovecraft. I also like: Mystery Science Theater 3000, Paranoia (the RPG), Paranoia (the state of mind), Nethack, Rogue, Dungeon Crawl, roguelikes in general really, They Might Be Giants, all kinds of video and computer games, especially the works of Atari Games (the arcade company), Greg Johnson, NES-era Rare, the Linux operating system, and many other things really.
Expert Blogs
Posted by
John Harris
on Wed, 13 Nov 2019 10:23:00 EST
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This is an excerpt chapter from the book Level Up: A JRPG Creator's Handbook, available in the current Storybundle, about using non-transitive character and monster powers to design interesting encounters.
Posted by
John Harris
on Mon, 19 Nov 2018 12:24:00 EST
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An interview with ADOM creator Dr. Thomas Biskup, about the game's recent arrival on Steam and various other things, both about it and in general.
Posted by
John Harris
on Thu, 15 Nov 2018 11:13:00 EST
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Interview with Josh Ge, Creator of the sci-fi, robot-focused roguelike Cogmind, about it and many things about its design and creation.
Posted by
John Harris
on Mon, 30 Apr 2018 06:17:00 EDT
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Another excerpt from the VCS book, this one covers the early RPG Dragonstomper, which has some amazing features for 1982! Anyone interested in the early history of CRPGs needs to take a look at it.
Posted by
John Harris
on Mon, 23 Apr 2018 10:02:00 EDT
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This is an excerpt from '21 Unexpected Games to Love For The Atari VCS', available in the current game eBook Storybundle. E.T. gets a lot of crap, but it is possible to enjoy, and it's arguably better than Warshaw's previous hit Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
Posted by
John Harris
on Wed, 18 Apr 2018 04:18:00 EDT
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An excerpt from '21 Unexpected Games to Love For The Atari VCS,' Atari Video Cube doesn't actually work like a real Rubik's Cube. It's a lot more accessible! It's a laid-back kind of puzzle game that Atari originally sold by mail order.
John Harris's Comments
Comment In:
[Blog - 04/23/2018 - 10:02]
Comment In:
[Blog - 03/28/2017 - 09:40]
Like the others have said, ...
Like the others have said, not all hardware that displays sprites supports automatic detection. r n r nWhat graphics hardware does support it, does so because it 's actually simple to provide at that level. When it comes time to draw a pixel, somewhere in the chip is a circuit ...
Comment In:
[News - 04/21/2016 - 06:40]
I am one of the ...
I am one of the least well-heeled game enthusiasts you could ever meet, and I don 't feel screwed if a game goes on sale after I buy it. This is particularly because I almost never buy a game that isn 't on sale. A no sale promise says to ...
Comment In:
[News - 02/19/2016 - 06:42]
A permadeath strategy game like ...
A permadeath strategy game like classic Fire Emblem with scripted characters makes players feel very bad when someone dies, to the extent that most Fire Emblem players, I believe, restart a battle when someone perishes. If the characters are more generic then there isn 't as much of a sting, ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 11/19/2013 - 02:16]
The term roguelike originated in ...
The term roguelike originated in campus computer labs in the 80s to describe a variety of games that were very similar in play style to Rogue. It then evolved to cover/got appropriated to mean games that took Rogue 's lessons of procedurally-generated gameplay to heart. But the term has become ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 04/17/2015 - 02:06]
I thought this was very ...
I thought this was very interesting Thanks for writing it out, there 's so much about SWG that needs to be recorded and remembered, while it still can be.
