If you want to read about gaming when you’re not gaming, StoryBundle has you sorted for books.
The latest StoryBundle – titled Video Game Bundle 4.0 – offers seven books, six magazine issues, and two albums, for the price of $3 USD or over – although you won’t get all of them unless you pay at least $12.
If you pay between $3 and $11, you’ll get your e-hands on Michael P. Williams’ full-length analysis of RPG classic Chrono Trigger, Zoya Street’s Delay: Paying Attention to Energy Mechanics which looks at social games design, In Play: Tales from the Gaming Netherworld in which Neils Clark tells anecdotes that look at why games matter, Morgan Ramsey’s Gamers at Work which features a lot of interviews with 18 gaming luminaries, and Colin Campbell’s Piranha Frenzy, a fictional look at the seedy side of games journalism.
On the other hand, if you pay $12 or over, you’ll get a lot more. Jeremy Parish’s The Anatomy of Super Mario Vol. 1 looks at the design of one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world, while Anna Anthropy’s ZZT examines the 1991 text-based top-down adventure/game creation tool. You’ll grab six issues of Five out of Ten magazine in the compilation #1-6: Year One Reloaded + Change. You’ll also get two albums – Brave World’s WORLD 1-2 and WORLD 1-2: Encore – which have rather a lot of lauded game musicians (those who worked on Journey, Ninja Gaiden, Silent Hill, and Mega Man) working with OST remixers.
The music is available in both .FLAC and .MP3, and the books are available in multiple formats and can be easily shunted onto, say, a Kindle.
I haven’t read any of these yet, so I can’t actually comment on whether they’re worth your money, but I’m interested enough that I’ll be picking up a bundle. If you want to do the same, you can hit up StoryBundle over here.
Also, the cover to the Chrono Trigger book made me laugh. Top marks for that.
