In questa rubrica vi segnaliamo articoli che abbiamo trovato interessanti, sfiziosi, gustosi o, insomma, degni di essere menzionati, e che sono più o meno legati ai temi che ci piace trattare su Outcast. Gli articoli non sono necessariamente in italiano, anzi, è tristemente probabile che non lo siano. La periodicità dell’appuntamento potrebbe essere settimanale, ma vai a sapere.

Q&A: Shigeru Miyamoto on 'Mario', 'Minecraft' and Working With Apple (leggi l'articolo su Glixel)
"I do like Minecraft, but really more from the perspective of the fact that I really feel like that's something we should have made. We had actually done a lot of experiments that were similar to that back in the N64 days and we had some designs that were very similar. It's really impressive to me to see how they've been able to take that idea and turn it into a product."

Where do consoles go from here? (leggi l'articolo su Gamesindustry.biz)
While some have speculated that we'll now see new consoles literally every year, mimicking the lightspeed pace at which smartphones get upgraded, the market dynamics for consoles and the impact of new hardware on developers makes that a much more difficult proposition.

The Long, Strange History of Street Fighter and Hip-Hop (leggi l'articolo su Waypoint)
Hip-hop has a unique way of elevating elements of everyday life into new realms of being. Shoes become mission statements. Nicknames become personas. City boroughs become island nations. Ad infinitum. Street Fighter isn't immune to this alchemy, but its relationship with hip-hop is more concrete. Street Fighter isn't just another piece of pop cultural debris that's been picked up and turned into gold. Street Fighter and hip-hop go back.

How a 'Star Wars' Video Game Told the 'Rogue One' Story 20 Years Ago (leggi l'articolo su Glixel)
Dark Forces is deeper and slower. It's the Star Wars galaxy soaked up from ground level, wonders from the big screen surrounding us, not just buzzing the cockpit. Although “wonders” here might not stand up to prolonged scrutiny (there was only so much you could do with the technology at the time) it is remarkable in retrospect just how evocative even a rough approximation of Star Wars managed to be.

What 'Watch Dogs 2' Gets So Right, and So Wrong, About Race (leggi l'articolo su Waypoint)
This mission is just fucking sharp man. It's funny and smart and never feels like a lecture. It's not just gallows humor, it's a specific sort of developed, familiar gallows humor. The sort that gets built when the noose lingers in view, and on the worst days, it feels like it's just a logistical error that it hasn't found you yet.

Rethinking the RPG to make it fun to be the bad guy in Tyranny (leggi l’articolo su Gamasutra)
You may sell the player with a ‘you get to be an evil bully’ promise, but for there to be a source of conflict, there needs to be a mountain of bigger bullies to climb and strive against.

The end of comfortable publisher-journalist relationships will lead to better journalism (leggi l’articolo su Gamesindustry.biz)
Publishers and developers want to control the stories surrounding their games, which makes sense, but that's not necessarily the best thing for readers, for potential players and for the industry itself. It's fair to assume that, left to its own devices, the video game industry, a multi-billion dollar industry, would fall back on what's safe.

The Difference Between Us (leggi l’articolo su Gamesindustry.biz)
Men and women aren't that different. There are average differences between men and women - for example, women tend to be shorter than men - but for the vast majority of psychological traits the overlap is much greater than the difference.

Easter eggs evolved: Why gamers spent 3-years-plus studying GTAV’s Mount Chiliad (leggi l’articolo su Ars Technica)
It's a secret that may be of monumental significance, or that at the very least must involve something really cool: a hidden jetpack, maybe a UFO you can fly, or a super-awesome weapon. Whatever it is, these sleuthing gamers want it. And they won't stop until they either find it or prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the whole thing is one enormous wild goose chase.

Do we Still Think 'Westworld' Was About Video Games? (leggi l’articolo su Glixel)
Big fat spoiler warning for what lies ahead, obviously.

The Story Behind Reviving Obscure Neo Geo Classic 'Windjammers' (leggi l’articolo su Waypoint)
"These games have been made by very talented people at the time, and they're handled very cautiously by their new owners," he said. "You have to respect that. You have to be humble. You can't be like 'Hey, I'm here, I want this, and I'm going to do that, it's going to be awesome. I'm going to kick everyone's ass.' You have to go and say 'Hey, please, I really love your game. I know it by heart. I know it's not easy, but we want to do that because we think people would really love it.'"

Why Some Video Games Are In Danger of Disappearing Forever (leggi l’articolo su Kotaku)
Over time, game data and features literally die. Solid state media used in game cartridges naturally lose their electrical charge, and the ability to store any data. You might love Pokemon Gold and Silver but the internal battery on those carts only lasts about around fifteen years, maximum.

Mr. Robot Killed the Hollywood Hacker (leggi l'articolo su Technology Review)
When hackers hack in Mr. Robot, they talk about it in ways that actual hackers talk about hacking. This kind of dialogue should never have been hard to produce: hacker presentations from Black Hat and Def Con are a click away on YouTube. But Mr. Robot marks the first time a major media company has bothered to make verisimilitude in hacker-speak a priority.

History of the RGB color model (leggi l'articolo su Gamasutra)
Fast forward to the early 1930s. By this time the scientific community had a pretty good idea of the inner workings of the eye (although it would take an additional 20 years before George Wald was able to experimentally verify the presence and workings of rhodopsins in the retinal cones, a discovery which would lead to him sharing the Nobel prize in Medicine in 1967).

The 5 trends that defined the game industry in 2016 (leggi l'articolo su Gamasutra)
2016 was a year marked with fear, disappointment, uncertainty, and dreams of what survival might be like in a post-apocalyptic world…and that’s just talking about the video game industry.

Fumito Ueda: Colossus in the Shadow (leggi l'articolo su Medium)
I wanted to make something that would have more of a lasting impact than a painting. I wanted people to go home and find soil on their shirt or in their hair. That would be memorable art, I thought.

The Sin of Mainstream Videogames (leggi l'articolo su Gamesindustry.biz)
What game creators do need to think about is the context they created around those communities, communities which turned out to be so susceptible to fascist radicalisation. It's not very original to poke fun at the people who shouted "get politics out of my games!" before going back to don the virtual boots of a heavily armoured white US soldier shooting wave after wave of nondescript brown people in a dusty, bombed-out Middle Eastern village - but the failure to recognise that a blind acceptance of the status quo is every bit as political as a challenge to the same status quo isn't the only problem here.