No Continues is new project for the OLL off-season: a radio show based on the videogame equivalent of a book club. Yes, that’s a little unwieldy and in the future perhaps we’ll be able to shorten it to ‘Game Club’. For now I want to make sure everyone’s on the same page. Or level. Mixed metaphors.

The concept is simple. Each week, half-a-dozen people or more from the No Continues team gather at One Life Left’s Resonance FM studio to discuss three interesting, thematically linked videogames. At the end of the episode next week’s games are revealed and the cycle continues.

The theme for this Monday’s show is ‘Mazes’. Your homework:

Pac-man (Namco, 1980)
Play it here.

Doom (iD, 1993)
Play it here.

Passage (Jason Rohrer, 2007)
Play it here.
(You’ll need to download and install this one.)

Notes:
Those seeking the a completely faithful Doom or Pac-man experience may seek out original code / emulation via MAME and play that way; the links here represent something of a compromise, as close to the original as possible while retaining accessibility for those who know little about games.

Extra Credit:
1. Ms Pac-man, various console versions of Pac-man, Pac-man Championship Edition
2. 3D Monster Maze, Further versions of Doom, Half-Life and other first-person shooters
3. All of Rohrer’s work, linked from his homepage

It’s also always worth reading the Wikipedia page for each game (but — of course — only after you’ve played them).

No Continues is broadcast on Monday evenings between 7pm and 8pm on Resonance 104.4FM across London, UK, and streamed live at www.resonancefm.com. It takes the shape of an informal group discussion that includes people who make games, people who play games, people who write about games and people who have no idea what games are. The idea, just as with One Life Left, is to talk around the subject and to discover something.

One final note. This is a community project so please play along with us. If you want to record your progress you can use the comments section below, or just listen live to our discussion on Monday evening at 7pm and contribute in the usual ways: by emailing us, tweeting at us or on our live chat site.

See you on Monday,

Ste

PS If you’d like to listen to not-intended-for-podcast Episode 0, in which some of the No Continues group decide on the format, someone has bootlegged it here. The next episodes will be podcast on the One Life Left Stream; if you’re not subscribing to that you can do that for free via our RSS feed or on iTunes (if you’d rather search for us in the store you can do that too).