I listen to a lot of podcasts, because I can listen while making art for the diorama-based game I am working on. I discovered the podcast Imaginary Advice because MetaFilter linked to its episode on the SNES game A Christmas Carol. That’s a game that doesn’t exist – Ross Sutherland just made it up, and then recorded a whole podcast episode about it. The episode doesn’t acknowledge, at any point, that the game is fake. It’s hilarious.

Sometimes I can’t tell whether something is a joke or not. I couldn’t tell whether Semantle was a joke until I started getting fan mail. And speaking of podcasts, apparently I’m not the only one with this problem. I just heard on 99% Invisible that when Tez Okano pitched Sega on Segagaga, one of the last Dreamcast games, the execs thought his entire pitch was a joke, so he had to pitch it again.

I’m not as good a writer as Ross Sutherland. That’s why a lot of people didn’t see the humor in my post about the (fictional) 1989 Blue Prince, and thought I meant to actually fool people. Fooling people was really an accident – I just put in a little bit too much work on the visuals. Actually, I meant the commentary as a serious critique: Blue Prince has a very high busywork-to-puzzle ratio, and this is its weakest point (also see my previous note on gambling; Blue Prince literally has slot machines, and it’s sometimes optimal to use them). But there is a lot of puzzle there too – several people assumed that the floppy disk flipping bit referred to one specific room in the actual Blue Prince. Nope. I hadn’t gotten to that area at the time I wrote the post, and I still haven’t solved that puzzle. Instead, I was inspired by learning about Karateka’s upside-down disk Easter egg on Lateral. Yep, another podcast.

Sometimes I feel like I’m wasting my time listening to all these podcasts, but I was heartened to see that Adrian Tchaikovsky mentioned that his Philosopher Tyrants series was inspired by Empire and Revolutions. It’s among Tchaikovsky’s best work, and I can’t wait for the next one. And nobody can accuse Tchaikovsky of unproductivity. To bring it full-circle, science fiction also inspires podcasts; after ten seasons on actual historical revolutions, and after a two-year hiatus, the Revolutions podcast returned with a season on the Martian Revolution of 2247, presented totally straight-faced.

Two more notes that didn’t fit anywhere else:

1. I actually used cool-retro-term, not RetroArch, which is why the font isn’t quite right. I thought about using RetroArch but it looked like it was good to be a hassle to get an Apple II running, plus then I would have had to maybe write Applesoft BASIC. Anyway, I decided to settle for good enough. So that’s why the font isn’t quite historically accurate.

2. I really enjoyed reading Egypt Urnash’s IF-style Blue Prince scene. I did consider whether an IF Blue Prince would be better, but I think seeing the map is really useful, and while you could incorporate a map into an IF game (as Counterfeit Monkey does), it sort of strains the medium a bit.