(Part 3) Top products from r/Gaming4Gamers

Johan Huizinga's work is pretty foundational to the philosophical underpinnings of games.

Man, Play, and Games is another significant work that predates video gaming.

On a less academic level, Inside Game Design is a book of interviews with several studios of varying success on the game design process and how it adapts from game to game.

These titles might be pretty fringe to what you're looking for, but I can recommend some web pages that provide more easily digested, general interest material that would be helpful to you. I also know of a number of relevant academic journals, if that is of interest to you.

This afternoon: Torchlight II with Synergies Mod, farming those two final legendary set pieces in Derinkuyu.

Shortly after dinner, introducing a friend to Archer with the Archer drinking game. (I mean, it's a game, right?)

Finally, after dying from exactly one episode, we'll be having board game night with friends. I'm guessing we'll be playing Shadow Hunters with cards we made ourselves, but I'm hoping that we play something different, like Splendor or City of Thieves with draft picking.

The two most interesting books I've read on video games have been Tristan Donovan's fascinating history of the medium, "Replay: The History of Video Games". It is a very in-depth history that gets down into a lot of nitty gritty stuff about the birth of video games and stays very in-depth up until about the late 90s when it starts to go big picture. Still a great read.

If you're looking for something that's more of a critical piece, I'd suggest Brendan Keogh's close reading of Spec Ops: The Line, "Killing is Harmless". It's an incredible way to enhance your playthrough of what is already an incredibly emotional game. Keogh breaks down everything from the allusions to literature and film to the significance of scripted events in the game. The only advice I have is if you haven't played the game before and you try and read along as you play the game you do get hit with some spoilers as Keogh assumes you've finished the game when you're reading the book. Still def worth your time though.

I'm liking my Creative Fatal1ty headset, I'm hearing impaired so sound quality really doesn't affect me unless it's NOTICEABLY bad. I find this headset to be comfortable on my head and it works out pretty well. Also so I don't have to keep swapping between speaker and headset, I also purchased one of these to swap between the two with just a button press.

Not a very popular book, but I would pick Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Half the book takes place inside of a computer game that is eerily similar to Second Life (eerily because the book came out in the late '80s), with a lot of action packed scenes in both the computer game and the "real life" bits. So it would kind of play like, "Yo, dawg, I heard you like video games so I put a video game inside a video game so you can play a video game while you play a video game".

Check out the book 1,001 Video Games to Play Before You Die - it covers a mix of noteworthy and excellent titles from the 1970s forward across a wide mix of platforms.

While the list transcends PC content, it's worth noting that owning a gaming PC also means you own an extremely high end emulation platform. This makes playing older titles from any console a reality.

My recommendations:

Sennheiser HD 280 PRO Headphones

Audio-Technica ATR-4750 Ominidirectional Computer Desk Condenser Microphone

TOTAL roughly $130 CDN

I've owned the pair of of Sennheiser listed, the desk mic I have not. Mics are less important for gaming but if this is a concern best to consider a condenser mic. Don't overthink with the mic IMO. Just find something that runs off USB.

Here's a few books I can recommend

The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon--The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World
https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-History-Video-Games-Pokemon/dp/0761536434

Up Up Down Down Left WRITE: The Freelance Guide to Video Game Journalism
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0989533506/ref=pd_aw_fbt_14_img_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=MSPBR3N4XXNTK22E7VBG

Critical Path: How to Review Videogames for a Living
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/098514372X/ref=pd_aw_fbt_14_img_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=MSPBR3N4XXNTK22E7VBG

The Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual
https://www.amazon.com/Videogame-Style-Guide-Reference-Manual/dp/1430313056

Hope that helps!

Good luck finding Ico at a reasonable price. Here's one without a box on Amazon.

I had a real hard time finding a PS2 copy of Ico at a decent price. Finally found it at a used game store for $30 a couple years ago. The HD update of Shadow and Ico on PS3 came out shortly after for nearly the same price I paid for Ico.

Mercury was my favorite game on PSP. Looks like it's available cheap, too.

You can get a VGA out for an Xbox 360.

http://www.amazon.com/Xbox-360-VGA-HD-AV-Cable/dp/B000B6MLTG/ref=pd_sxp_grid_pt_1_1

Then a simple DVI converter if your display doesn't have a VGA input.

I used one of these and it worked great. Xbox will actually output to your displays native resolution too.

The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia is meant to be the definitive source for now.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Legend-Zelda-Hyrule-Historia/dp/1616550414/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376268902&sr=8-1&keywords=zelda+timeline

Check out Ian Bogost's How To Do Things with Video Games and Jane McGonigol's Reality is Broken. Both books revolve around exactually what you ask for.

http://www.amazon.com/Lord-Rings-Two-Towers-GameCube/dp/B00007E1OC/ref=sr_1_1?s=videogames&ie=UTF8&qid=1372971722&sr=1-1&keywords=the+two+towers+gamecube

Hurry up, they only got one of those left!

Was it "Zap!" ?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0007XWBBQ?pc_redir=1407413975&robot_redir=1

I haven't played it myself yet but I heard there is some nice summary without leaving any context on amazon...

I just got the MegaMan Anniversary Collection for like $13 and it has all of the main games for NES, 7 from Snes, 8 from PSX, and the Power Battle arcade games. I can't imagine playing them with a touch screen, but the Anniversary Collection has sooooo much content for so cheap it's ridiculous!

>I'm hoping we can get a law to pass later down the line.

IP law is corrupt and is never going to be non corrupt, capitalism is not compatable with rule of law. You do not live in a democracy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYFxtNgOeiI

Book:

http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf

Before I begin your brain does not reason nor see reality as it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

Manufacturing consent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU56Rv0OXM

https://vimeo.com/39566117

Testing theories of representative government

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

US distribution of wealth

https://imgur.com/a/FShfb

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

What goes down in the US goes down in all capitalist western states, they all follow the same model of "politics as show" where the public has no input if you look at the research.
From war is a racket:

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil Interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10]

"War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23]

"The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24]

General Butler is especially trenchant when he looks at post-war casualties. He writes with great emotion about the thousands of traumatised soldiers, many of who lose their minds and are penned like animals until they die, and he notes that in his time, returning veterans are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who stayed home.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865