[quote]
Seven years ago, Shawn McCleskey, a dealer of rare video games, trading cards, and vintage machine guns in Memphis, Tennessee, made one of the biggest sales of his career. It unfolded like a Robert Ludlum novel. A man calling himself Wolf wired McCleskey fifty-five thousand dollars, then showed up a few days later at Memphis International Airport carrying a metallic briefcase. The two men met in the crowded arrivals hall and, after a brief stop at a local Chinese restaurant, proceeded to McCleskey’s house, where Wolf inspected the merchandise—a pair of video games released in 1996 for the Neo Geo, a Japanese-made console. Satisfied with each game’s condition and authenticity, Wolf opened his briefcase, which had been specially designed to house the foot-long cartridges, and locked them inside. “It was as if the deal was for a bag of diamonds,” McCleskey told me recently.[/quote]
It’s an awesome article and I love reading about the retro collector scene. I admit I am a bit of a collector myself, though limited in storage space, budget and, to be honest, the degree of insanity that compels people to chase these games from garage sale to pawn shop to estate sale. But there is always that little thrill when you come across a hidden gem - kind of its own little Indiana Jones feeling, finding something that no one can really understand the value of, but yourself.
Mahesak Puttirungsriwong can afford to spend $200k on a Neo Geo collection in Thailand. I’m not investigating a damn thing about him. I’m pretty sure he can afford to pay people to hunt me for his amusement.
If you know any serious collectors, you probably also know that they will drop serious coin to follow their passion. Like, burn down their life kind of money. That a guy who really should know better dropped $200K over a few years is not a big stretch.
As a follow-up to last year’s kerfuffle over Counter-Strike gambling, Valve is clamping down on Team Fortress 2 gambling sites by denying them Steam data.
[quote]
In July of last year we outlined our position on gambling web sites, specifically noting that Valve has no business relationship with these sites. At that time we also began blocking many CSGO gambling accounts. You can view the original post here.
More recently, some gambling web sites started leveraging TF2 items. Today we began the process of blocking TF2 gambling accounts as well. We recommend you don’t trade with these sites.[/quote]
[quote]
It’s Valentine’s Day, and for some of us that means curling up on the couch for an intimate night with a beloved game. Maybe you’ll use this sacred day to stuff chalky candy hearts in your mouth and revisit your favorite love interest. Perhaps you will be lulled to sleep by Garrus Vakarian’s sultry musings about calibrations.
The perfect end to a perfect day.
But cruel fate dealt us a raw deal. There are many NPCs who will neither kiss, flirt, nor fuck your avatar. What is to be done?
Let’s take a moment to put on some smooth jazz and remember all the NPCs that remain off-limits to our horny hearts. Here are some of the Polygon staff’s favorite non-romanceable NPCs.[/quote]
At the end of the year, Microsoft will still own Xbox and Windows and whatever happens will make just a little difference (a dent maybe). And then it will be next year again…
I mean, even Valve was able to virtually stop making video games, and they’re a much smaller company.
Problem is, I’d bet my left testicle that Trump thinks anyone that wants to play or build video games instead of go to the moon or, preferably, build (military) rockets is a Loser.
“You talk to kids today and they don’t want to go to the moon or make rockets, they want to build video games,” Gallagher said. “We are the aspirational career path for the youth today.”
There is something a bit depressing about this and I say that as a gamer who has been gaming for 25 years and never built a rocket :)
I hate that line too. Why would we want our children to dream of making video games instead of going to the moon? It’s great kids have all sorts of dreams but when we say the sky is the limit… and then it wasn’t that’s still remarkable.
That piece just makes the entire industry sound incredible vain and self congratulatory.
The destruction of net neutrality means ISP’s will be hostile to new services, and by definition every videogame is a new service. ISP will be slow to migrate to IPv6, will use crappy version of NAT to extend IPv4 even beyond the dead date, this means ISP routers dynamically asigning ports. This means videogames failing for unknowm reasons. Good lucky having ISP fixing a bug for your game. Maybe ISP’s may start asking money to get some ports open. Like “Dear Blizzard, to continue working with Concast pay us money or we close the port of server browser for Overwatch”.
Chaos on the internet is going to fucking damage videogames.
