For this perceptive podcast, the YouTube channel Indie Enjoyer reached out to want to chat about covering indie games, and what it’s like to be a Youtuber today who enjoys talking about smaller and underrated games.
Gamefinds: Pac-Man Forever
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
As I write this, I have paused a game of Pac-Man Forever, a freeware Pac-Man update/homage/clone by My Dude Studios available on itch.io, on Round 154. I have spent almost three straight hours of playing it. It’s pretty good, but I’ve been tired of it for the last hour of it. Yet, it keeps going. It keeps going.
It helps to keep the game fresh by adding gimmicks throughout the first 60-or-so levels, but it’s been recycling them for a while now. I’d like to emphasize that I don’t think the game is meant to be easy. I have been playing Pac-Man-style maze games since the original hit unwary US arcades back in 1981. I’ve also played my share of Ms. Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man, Pac-N-Pal, Pac-Mania, Pac-Man Arrangement, Pac-Man 99 (R.I.P.), and all three Pac-Man Championship Edition games, a couple of which I had at one point respectable slots on its scoreboards, or would have if they hadn’t been full of obviously hacked scores. I’ve even written my own Pac-alike, Octropolis, also freeware and on itch.io.
Suffice to say I’m a bit of a Pac-obsessive. Not nearly as much as the great Jamey Pittman, author of the sacred bible of the game, the Pac-Man Dossier. And maybe not as much as PacMania67, of the comments section of the Pac-Man Forever download page. They mention getting slightly further than me at the moment, to Round 163, only stopping when hitting a mazegen bug. I don’t know if I want to play a few more rounds and get to that point. I feel Round 154 sufficiently establishes my bona fides here, I don’t have to be “the best,” whatever that means. That way lies speedruns, and ultimately insanity.
So long as you aren’t trying to finish Pac-Man Forever you’ll have fun, generally. The quirks and gimmicks are mostly good ones, with a couple of irritating exceptions. One gimmick shrouds the maze with tall grass, which sometimes makes it very difficult to spot the last dot on the board, yeah that can go into the garbage, I say. Another one I came to loathe is the jungle board, for whatever reason I can’t read the maze layout as easily in that theme as usual. Pac-Man works best when you can easily tell the shape of the maze and where the remaining dots are, and to play with that makes it into a different, worse, game. Fortunately those gimmicks are relatively rare.
Pac-Man Forever borrows liberally from the whole range of Pac-Games, and other Namco games of the era too, with themes based on Galaga, Dig-Dug, Mappy and even Pac-Man’s sibling Rally-X, which is one of the better themes. The Rally-X boards replace the screen-filling dots with more sporadically placed flags, meaning you don’t have to travel every inch of the board to finish it. Another game that’s borrowed from is one Namco would never touch nowadays, Jr. Pac-Man, which had extra wide mazes, extra Energizers, and big dots worth more points, but that are slow to eat. There’s a reason Jr. Pac-Man isn’t looked on as fondly as Ms. Pac-Man, but its additions work well here.
One aspect of the game I feel I should warn you about. There is a power-up gimmick; when you’ve eaten a number of ghosts in total, a fairy arrives and leaves a powerup on the board, that cycles between one of three choices. If you just gobble it down without paying attention, you will regret it! One of them, the champagne glass, will cause you to lose almost all of your extra lives, converting them all into speed increases. It is easy to get your speed up without having to use this, in fact you can get it up so fast that you may have to collect another powerup, a director’s slate, to slow the game down enough to keep it playable. Most players will eat it at least once just to see what it does, but may not notice all of their extra lives vanishing when they do it. Even if you know it exists, Pac-Man Forever can get so fast that you end up eating it on accident. Its inclusion it a bit head-scratching. Instead of it, maybe get the Sneaker (a speedup), the Fried Egg (increases score bonuses) or especially the Pear (increases Energizer duration).
I know this sounds negative for a game that I ostensibly like. I would say more positive things about it, but three straight hours of it has dried out my brain and depleted my writing style, yet I still have to finish this post before I can go to sleep. If you like Pac-Man, you’ll probably like this, although there is a danger that you’ll play it to distraction as I have. My hope was to get to a level that unlocked the Trog enemies promised on the game’s promo artwork.
In my current state, that’s all I can squeeze out of my brain on this one. I’m off to have nightmares about eating dots and fleeing ghosts. Ta.
Pac-Man Forever (My Dude Studios via itch.io, $0)
Sundry Sunday: The Chaotix Case Files
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I promised yesterday that the next Sundry Sundays were going to be great, and so they are. The official Sonic the Hedgehog Youtube channel, in association with podcast outfit Realm, is releasing a sequence of audio videos featuring the adventures of everyone’s favorite ridiculous video game detective agency, the Chaotix. Why are they called that? Who knows.
Actually I do know, because the three of them were introduced in the 32X game, and one of the few reasons to have gotten a 32X during its short lifespan, Knuckles Chaotix, suggested tagline: “It’s not great, but it is very weird.”
That game had absolutely nothing to do with detectives. I think the detective angle was added with the lore behind Sonic Heroes. From then on, they’ve popped up at random times, usually being pretty hapless. But all three of them are adorable, even and especially Vector the Crocodile, and mean well.
So for now there’s three things having to do with the Chaotix Case Files, a trailer (2 minutes):
…an introductory Episode 0 (9½ minutes):
…and a full Episode 1 (26 minutes).
And here is a link to it as a podcast. They’re roughly of a Saturday Morning Cartoon level of maturity, which I should be clear, is absolutely perfect for these guys, so pour a bowl of Trix, inundate that vessel with milk, and let the part of you that’s still ten years old listen in and enjoy it.
They even got Rebecca Sugar, creator and runner of Steven Universe, to write their theme song!
Everyone Is Normal About Princess Daisy
The subject of this post is Elie D’s 13 minute video about one of the mascot characters in Nintendo’s Mario universe thing. Here:
I could launch immediately into a tirade that people shouldn’t invest self-worth into what amounts to, not just a cartoon character, but a corporate-owned cartoon character.
But I don’t really want to? Despite everything we still don’t have as much female representation in gaming than we should have. The Mario character lineup still skews about 90% male. These are characters that people embody within a game, there should be more girls. (Also, why are three of them princesses?)
Overall this is a pretty silly topic for a non-Sunday post, but I have something unexpectedly great for each of the next two upcoming Sundays, so I wanted to squeeze this in while the squeezing was hot.
WAIT I DIDNT MEAN
Recovered Games and Data from the Sega Channel
I’m a bit late to the trough on this one, but it’s worth calling back to the Video Game History Foundation’s recent release of over 100 ROMs and other data from the Sega Channel, that short-lived service that allowed subscribers with a model peripheral to play downloaded games over a cable TV line. It was kind of like a terrestrial version of Nintendo’s Satellaview service, but also one that wasn’t locked to Japan.
Some of these games were never released outside of the Sega Channel, and the VGHF also has unreleased prototypes for public perusal through their own archived collection and an association with Gaming Alexandria. Two particular finds are a hitherto undiscovered variant of a Garfield game and a Genesis Flintstones game that, at a glance, seems to be based off of the John Goodman movie. An abandoned project also in the collection is a Sega Genesis web browser, which would have been quite a thing to see back then. Notably, Gaming Alexandria’s torrent of the complete data is only 147 megabytes, which isn’t such a large download all told.
The VGCF prepared a 58-minute promo video for their project here, with commercials and other content that are, ah, very nineties in style.
As an aside, I was shocked to see the company General Instrument come up early in this video. Weren’t those the people who made chips for pre-VCS dedicated game consoles back in the 70s? As it turns out, yes they were (PDF link)!
All the 3-Up Moons in Super Mario World
Did you know there are seven of them? Really! Super Mario World has way more moons than you need to win the game, by a large margin, but it still feels special to find one of these secret collectables.
MarMax Gaming points out all their locations in this video (10 minutes). There’s not a huge numbers of reasons to get them all, Super Mario World practically throws extra lives at you, but you still might want to know how to find them. Well, this is how. Here:
The Frantic Fisherman from Compute’s Gazette
There was once a time when Compute’s Gazette, the Commodore 64 type-in magazine, was nearly the center of the computing world.
An important source of low-cost computer software from the age before the internet, Compute’s Gazette distributed a variety of software, including a couple of games each issue. They also distributed Speedscript, an important early word processor, which was one of their biggest hits. But for kids, the games were the most important thing.
The C64 Appreciation Society recently typed in the early CG game The Frantic Fisherman, and made a fifteen minute video demonstrating the process and the game. Remember, while you could order a 5¼” disk with all of an issues programs on it, most people who wanted to use them had to sit down in front of their machine and type on line after line of code. It often took hours, and even with error checking software like The Automatic Proofreader and MLX to help, the danger of typos was great.
The Frantic Fisherman is not a terrific game. It’s really simple, just a matter of moving your fisherperson to the right place and either swinging your club or raising your umbrella. You can select the speed, but it doesn’t get faster naturally as you play. But it’s a good demonstration of what magazine type-in games from the time were like. Take a look, and travel back in time.
About Arcade Game Startup Displays
I was just thinking a few days ago, It’s been quite some time since we’ve heard from Retro Game Mechanics Explained. In fact, looking at their channel, it’s been eight months since their last deep dive into video game internals, their terrific (if somewhat dry) look into how Super Mario Bros. 2 stores and constructs its levels (1h40m!), drawing their tiles directly into a bank of work RAM specially included in the cartridge for that purpose.
Yesterday they broke their silence with an examination of the startup routines of arcade Galaxian, Teddy Boy, Joust 2, Pac-Man and Super Pac-Man. It’s “only” 41 minutes, but it’s hugely informative of the necessities of how and why arcades games go about arcading:
I will summarize. The main task an arcade machine must do upon startup is test as much of the hardware as it is able and confirm that it’s operational. The main part of this is testing the various memory types comprising the machine’s storage systems: audio, video and work RAM, and program and graphics ROM. Not just to test them, but to stop operation and alert the operator if something is awry. The garbage often shown on-screen on powerup is a direct result of writing and reading 0s and 1s to and fr0m every bit in the video RAM. The system must also check the contents of the ROM, which is usually done by adding all the values in each bank and comparing them to a known total, literally called a “checksum.”
It’s a fine explainer, even if they didn’t cover my personal favorite game startup, that of Twinbee and Gradius with the Bubble Memory system . The storage media of the game was unreliable unless it had physically warmed up, so when turned on it would play music while the game was making itself presentable, known fondly as the Morning Music. I posted about this way back in 2022! Here it is again. It would be an excellent tune to set a wake-up alarm on a cellphone. Just saying.
Why “Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis” for GBA is Bad
Indie Game Showcase For 1/26/26
The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games we check out on the (Game Wisdom) channel. Please reach out if you would like to submit a game for a future one. All games shown are either press keys, demos, or games from my own collection.
00:00 Intro
00:14 Dobbel Dungeon
1:58 Entanglement
3:43 Parry Nightmare
5:07 Extreme Evolution Drive to Divinity
6:46 Ultros
9:09 Sniper Killer
Sundry Sunday: Earthbound Flying Man Animation Collaboration
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
This one’s an intersection between two weird and highly idiosyncratic cultural phenomena. (6 minutes) Please attend.
Earthbound is, of course, the classic SNES JRPG, known in Japan as Mother 2, created by Shigesato Itoi. It has my vote for the greatest JRPG of all, for while it isn’t as popular as Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, it has a knockout story, full of wit and detail. Mother is one of the very few video game series that, I think, transcends its medium, and becomes something great, not great in the since of being better than good, but in the sense of profundity, and yet at the same time it isn’t pretentious at all, it’s light and funny and whimsical but also deep and dark and terrifying. It’s easy to play and lots of fun too. I’ve heard it described, I think it was by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, as Peanuts Fights the Cthulhu Mythos, and that begins to get to it.
Animation collaborations are, of course, a thing where a bunch of people get together to make an animation together, each taking one small part of the whole. Not only do they not attempt to maintain a consistent art style, that’s in fact the last thing they try to do. Each clip is wildly different from the others, and that’s the point, the clash of styles making the whole surreal and surprising.
Both of these come together, in this piece that animates a portion Earthbound where the player is accompanied by the Flying Men, and I guess I have to explain that too.
So in a place near the end of the game your protagonist Ness visits the realm of Magicant, a bizarre realm created from the depths of his own mind. It is full of dangerous monsters, culminating in an artifact called Ness’s Nightmare, a powerful enemy that can wipe Ness out if the dice don’t roll his way.
Ness is also alone for this segment, except for the aid of the Flying Men, who call themselves Ness’s courage, helpful bird people who tag along with Ness, providing both muscle and extra hit points. But while they are strong and useful, they are not invulnerable. There are five Flying Men, and they join Ness one at a time. If one of them runs out of HP it dies, and in the house where they live, one of them is replaced by a tombstone. If you go back and recruit another one, and he also dies, then another tombstone appears. The dialogue from the successive Flying Men becomes less happy and more desperate as their numbers decrease, until finally they’re all gone, and Ness is left to finish the area alone.
This is just one example of the many wonderful ideas in Earthbound, as a unique a video game as there ever has been.
The animation that’s this week’s subject is a collaboration between many people, set to the Flying Men’s theme song, which is never actually heard in its entirety within the game. The music heard comes from a soundtrack album.
I won’t pretend it’s very comprehensible to those who’ve never played the game. Sometimes Earthbound fanwork, unlike the game, gets obtuse and navel-gazey, and difficult to understand to those not drenched in the lore. This one’s a bit like that. But maybe it’ll spark something in you, anyway. The music’s nice at least!
That’s what I have for you today. See you tomorrow!
Gamefinds: Urjo
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
A second webgame in a row, Urjo is a logic puzzle game about choosing which of each space in a grid should be red or blue, with the following conditions:
1. Every row and column must contain the same number of red and blue spaces.
2. Every numbered space must have the same number of spaces touching it (in the eight spaces around it) as its color.
3. No two adjacent rows or columns can have the same sequence of colors. In practice this is the most subtle rule. It doesn’t always come into play, but if it does it’ll probably be the breakthrough you’ll need to pull off a solve.
Every puzzle has a unique solution. It is similar in style to another web puzzle called 0h h1, but a major difference in presentation is that Urjo is watching as you try to solve it, and won’t let you make incorrect moves. Instead, it counts up all your mistakes and scores you on how well you did. You have an overall rating that goes up as you both complete puzzles with fewer errors and faster times than other solvers. This can be annoying (it’s easy to click the wrong size of a circle on accident), and it pushes you to try to solve them faster than you may feel comfortable, which may also cause inadvertent mistakes.
The software will try to give you puzzles just past your skill level, and I can verify that they get very difficult. If you make mistakes it’ll offer to give you some pointers. Myself I ignore those tips; but I can see how some people might find them useful.
Urjo (web, free)