Hacker News with Generative AI: Video Games

We need a better term for GenAI output – "slop" is too benign (rockpapershotgun.com)
Earlier this month, Snail Games put out a widely and justifiably clowned-on genAI trailer for Ark: Survival Evolved's Aquatica DLC.
An Ode to the Game Boy Advance (brainbaking.com)
In March 2001, Nintendo introduced an advanced portable model to the gaming market with the release of the Game Boy Advance (GBA, codenamed Advanced Game Boy or AGB). Equipped with a modernized 32-bit ARM CPU running at twice the speed of the Game Boy Color (GBC), this small device was more than capable of playing SNES-like games—still at the price of only two AA batteries.
Veloren – Voxel action-adventure role-playing (veloren.net)
Veloren is an action-adventure role-playing game set in a vast fantasy world.
Ship of Harkinian (wikipedia.org)
Ship of Harkinian is an unofficial open source port of the 1998 Nintendo 64 video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time that runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, macOS, Wii U, and Nintendo Switch.
A decompilation and port of Sonic Advance 2-a GameBoy Advance game written in C (github.com/SAT-R)
⚠️ This project is not completed and still under active development
Chrono Trigger Still Blows Me Away 30 Years Later (kotaku.com)
Occasionally the stars align and a once-in-a-generation group of creatives come together to make something spectacular and ahead of its time. That’s how Chrono Trigger was made, an RPG for the SNES that came out 30 years ago this week and still blows me away.
Why Anthropic's Claude still hasn't beaten Pokémon (arstechnica.com)
In recent months, the AI industry's biggest boosters have started converging on a public expectation that we're on the verge of “artificial general intelligence” (AGI)—virtual agents that can match or surpass "human-level" understanding and performance on most cognitive tasks.
The game designer playing through his own psyche (newyorker.com)
A little more than a decade ago, the video-game designer Davey Wreden experienced a crippling success.
Ultima III for the Vic-20 (wordpress.com)
VIC 20 Ultima III is a faithful conversion of the original C-64 version. All game logic is included as-is. VIC 20 specific graphics and sound routines were created from scratch. The 16×16 pixel tile graphics from the C-64 version were carefully adapted to 8×16 resolution, flat-pixel tiles on the VIC 20.
Technicalities of Homeworld 2 Backgrounds (simonschreibt.de)
Little things that made Amiga great (datagubbe.se)
To most people, the Amiga is probably synonymous with the Amiga 500 and that machine was, above all, a video game: something into which you plonked 3.5" floppy disks that transported you to strange, wonderful worlds and hours of fun.
Bonobo genius Kanzi, who could understand English and play Minecraft, dies at 44 (livescience.com)
EU take action to protect children from harmful practices in video games (europa.eu)
The CRPG Renaissance, Part 5: Fallout 2 and Baldur's Gate (filfre.net)
The CRPG Renaissance, Part 5: Fallout 2 and Baldur's Gate (filfre.net)
EU to take action to protect children from harmful practices in video games (europa.eu)
Magical Instant Bullets (militaryrealism.blog)
Welcome back, my new and regular readers alike. I’m doubling down on Unreal Tournament this week, following on from last week’s discussion of the Flak Cannon. If you need to get up to speed on Unreal Tournament (UT) you should read my previous posts on the game: Firstly on the Rocket Launcher, then the Flak Cannon. Today we’ll examine the Sniper Rifle with our usual pedantic criticism.
ByteCraft: Generating video games and animations through bytes (emygervais.github.io)
Imagine a world where you can write a prompt describing a video game or animation that you want, and a fully fledged executable file comes out. We take the first attempt at this crazy goal by training a model to generate the bytes of video games and animations!
Video game workers in North America now have an industry-wide union (engadget.com)
There’s now an industry-wide union for video game workers in the US and Canada.
In 1997, Age of Empires was just coming out. My job was to design a new RTS game (twitter.com)
Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.
Trauma treatment: Playing Tetris increased hippocampal volume in PTSD patients (nlm.nih.gov)
Recent work has provided evidence for the utility of the visuospatial video game Tetris as an early therapeutic intervention for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).1–3 Holmes and colleagues have shown that playing Tetris directly after trauma exposure can reduce subsequent intrusive memories of the traumatic event, and they have demonstrated the efficacy of this “cognitive vaccine” in both experimental1 and real-world settings.2–4
The Tragic Downfall of the Video Game Console (rz01.org)
My definition of a video game console is the following: A video game console is a highly specialised device designed for the consumption of video games that is connected to a TV. It has the option of connecting one or more game controllers, does not need a keyboard and does not require an internet connection. It is affordable, easy to operate, immediately ready for use and comes with just enough software to play games bought as modules or optical discs.
Canadian Devs Are Backing Out of Attending GDC (wired.com)
Amid deteriorating relations between the US and Canada, many Canadian video game developers are opting not to travel to San Francisco for next week’s Game Developers Conference.
Implementing "Tennis for Two" using op amps (2024) (qiqitori.com)
“Tennis for Two” is the name given to an early video game implemented on an analog computer. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_for_Two and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_video_games for more information on the game itself. This post documents the construction of a “Tennis for Two”-like game using op amps.
Commodore 64 vertical parallax scrolling with source code (youtube.com)
Super Mario Bros 3 completed in 0.32 seconds, or 19 frames (2021) (tasvideos.org)
This is the absolute pinnacle of technical TASing in my mind, the idea of having so much power over a single game that it's over literally before your hand even moves from the NES's power button.
Copyright and the Demo Scene (datagubbe.se)
Being eight years old and not speaking any English whatsoever meant that my early understanding of Amiga games was somewhat patchy. Nevertheless, some things will make an impression no matter what. Take German cracking group Unit A's 1988 cracktro for the flight simulator Interceptor, for example.
It's not cheating if you write the video game solver yourself (robertheaton.com)
My wife and two little boys sometimes go on trips to see friends or family for whom my presence isn’t strictly required.
How to Beat NES Mario in 5 Microseconds [video] (youtube.com)
Lego says it wants to start to bring video game development in-house (videogameschronicle.com)
The Lego Group is bringing its video game development efforts in-house.