Ideas for interesting articles?
 

Everyone is invited to throw some ideas into this topic.
My ideas:

A VERSUS article (already written one) where a modern and an old game are put side to side. Compare the two, explain what made the old game so good, check to see how the modern game has changed (in approach, not just the technological improvements), etc.

A "longplay" article where someone writes about his/her experiences with a favorite game which (s)he has played for a long time. (This was actually an old idea of mine that inspired a similar article in PC Gamer UK magazine - seems all my complaining to them that they needed some retro content paid off :p ). In any case, it would be perfect for AT.

Interviews: this will be harder and take more work but we *could* hunt down developers of old games. Since I bet a lot of these old developers have pursued other jobs since then, it might be possible to hunt them down. We don't have to go for the big guns like Ron Gilbert or Romero but we can go for the underdog developers. Al Lowe for example. This would simply mean sending them a list of questions for them to answer.

A retro hardware article: this is an interesting bit. Hardware has changed so much since then and it would be nice to write about the changes. For example, compare CGA to VGA/SVGA (with plenty of screenshots) and about what changes it's brought about. Or about soundcards - from PC speaker to Adlib to Sound Blaster. Or even monitors, printers, mice, keyboards, CD drives, floppy drives, etc. Not just the boring technical side but especially the human side: stories about your first sound card, about when you first used a mouse, etc.

Funny screenshots: Well it's obvious: make or find funny moments in games or write captions for screenshots.

Any more ideas? Shoot!

Statistics about Abandonia: How many posts have been in the chatbox or the forum? Who are the top 10 chatters? How many bots people visit Abandonia everyday? ; etc...

Multi-Shot!: Articles about old mutliplayer games and how to play them today.

Good game, bad Movie: Reviews about movies that were based on popular games.

I don't think anyone cares about the top 10 chatters :hihihi:... but the other ideas are good! Especially the Good game, bad Movie one :) ... although there were some movies made from games that were extremely popular (Mortal Kombat)

An idea of my own -

Troubleshooting Section: Have an informative step-by-step section to help people get the games running perfectly. As well as inform of any oddities or anomalies that they would need to know, for example: Keen Dreams not having any music, or Abandoned Places needing a SAVE folder inside the main directory or you can't play past the character selection screen (not many people know this). Stuff like that.

Humour section with various weird quotes from the forum (often completely out of context).

As for Romero being a big shot or whatever, he's really very reachable guy. Thats the reason his name popped up years ago when this project started.

Anyway, I got ideas too, and dont gimme any "Abandonware/PC games only" crap.

Console corner
Self-explanatory. If were doing a gaming mag, I want console games in too.

Once upon a time, in the arcade...
Stuff about old arcade games.

"Other" computers
Yes. Commodore 64, Amiga 500, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum and such go here.

I would love to promise to do some stuff, but Im currently getting lot of pressure from both school and theater. If I support, its probably a comic or an article.

@Tomekk: Not necessarily all the games have bad movies. Street Fighter and Hitman for example. Maybe vise versa?

I have an idea for the versus article, you know, make it have some sorta flashy title like "SHOWDOWN" or sumfin, with some sort of wrestling style mood like thingy......

Speakign of which, i got something on Fallout and Fallout 3 I need to write.

Freeloaders
Freeware gaming, nuff said.

Mods and modding
For articles on any particularly noteworthy mods / fan-patches / total conversions. If there are any people with particular experience in the field, some articles on the actual task of modifying old / creating new content can also be placed there.

And I second TC's idea about console gaming.

The ideas are of consoles and old computers are great :) How naming the article about the old PCs to "OldWare".

@TC: I never saw the Street Fighter movie. I saw the 1st Mortal Kombat movie, that was quite fun. MK: Annihilation was probably the cheesiest and worst fighting movie I ever saw... But the Hitman movie was a F***ing Piece of S***. It was nothing like the Hitman games, and the actor was nothing like Hitman, it was horrible to look at.

Okay, I'm not too sure about adding too much technical stuff because people tend to prefer forums and sites for that, where they can cut & paste text.

Still, plenty of ideas I like:

- Multi-Shot: I like old multi player games being covered but "how to make them work now" may take up too much space and make things too technical. I know that, using Dosbox, it would take at least two pages to go through all the steps, make sure people got the same version, add a troubleshoot section, etc. Suggestion: we could make a topic where people can ask questions about how to run the game and we can put the guide on the forum as well. The actual article could then freely talk about the game itself and include stories, past experiences, mods, etc.

- Good game, bad movie: I'd actually just drop the good & bad. There aren't many movies based on games and even less so on PC games so it would mean you'd run out of material much too quickly. There are a load of games being based on movies, however, and the articles could take a look at how well the movies were translated to a game.

- Forum quotes: good idea but I'd keep this to a single page tops. The "funny screenshots" idea above would have been limited to one or two per issue as well - better a few good ones than to drown them in mediocrity ;).

- Freeloader: a single page review about one good freeware game. One each issue.


And TC: I don't mind having a console/arcade corner of a page or 3 as long as the rest remains PC games only. I especially would like PC games and console/arcade games to be compared from time to time. Also, some game series only had a few games released on PC. Take the Dizzy collection. In fact, dibs on an article about Dizzy and its many console/PC games ;).

About the modding: while I like the idea, very few abandonware games really had a lot of modding capabilities sadly enough. Doom, Duke, Quake and a few more games left and right but most games had hacks instead of mods back then. It might be hard to find enough examples to use

Mods, hacks... however you name it, it's the same thing - taking a game and changing it to fit your idea.

Both the quotes, humour and screenshots could share the same page. Gives a nice size limit.

Comic
The comic idea has been brought up before. Not sure if TheBard is still up to it or not.