A highlight of the Games Done Quick speedrunning marathons at roughly six months apart each year is AGDQ’s “Awful Block,” of memorably bad games, and SGDQ’s “Silly Block,” of extremely weird, mostly-indie games. SGDQ has just wrapped up, so let’s take a look back at Silly Block this year.
The plot hangs together slightly better than DEEEER Simulator, but it’s largely the same kind of thing, bizarre settings and happenings within a physics engine, only this time you’re a drunken Italian man instead of a “deer.”
This one is actually a race between two players, in a cart racing game made with silly carts, in a mode where half the racers are driving one way around the track, and the rest drive the other way. (The race isn’t directly between them on the same tracks; they’re both playing their own systems. They’re racing in more of a speedrun fashion.)
A side-scrolling brawler where you beat up weird thugs and robots that drop food, which you then make meals with. The ingredients you choose determines which stat boosts you receive! It’s less zany than the previous games, if that’s the way your tastes (heh) lead.
“Imagine a game in the Baywatch extended universe where there’s a talking boat and Hulk Hogan is deus ex machina.” Actually the last episode of the 1994 TV show Thunder in Paradise converted, kind of, into a game for the Phillips CD-i. Most of the run is just video footage, but it was a really goofy TV show.
Ah, this one is, somehow, not an indie title! Published by Titus for the original PlayStation, and with music from the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, Incredible Crisis is a minigame collection where success at the games helps to avert ridiculous dangers to one of four members of a family.
If the algorithms that drive the ad servers of social media sites have you pegged as a casual gamer, you will be given a little window into a world of madness. Searching for “mobile game ads youtube” will turn up a fair number of YouPotatoes pointing at that madness and saying, “Look! Isn’t it crazy! How can that be allowed!”
Those kinds of videos themselves are their own exploitative little world, but they have a point. One such video recently made the Blue (that’s what Metafilter users call their main site), and it’s a prime example of both worlds, accurately calling out a lot of mobile gaming ads for being batshit insane, while also having the dismissive, hyper-edited, sound-effect-laden style all too illustrative of the problems with YouTube’s own engagement algorithms. It’s a crappy thing, making fun of a very crappy thing.
Edit: Here’s the video itself, which might be useful, it’s about 13 minutes long:
The thread is interesting, arguably more interesting than the video. Two MeFi users currently in the industry had a conversation there, and after a somewhat rancorous beginning, it was fairly civil by internet standards. Jilder is a writer in the mobile games space, and Ryvar works as a dev in more traditional computer gaming.
Here are some selected quotes:
[…]the ads aren’t aimed at children. Children don’t have money. The game developers want whale tier players – so people who can drop thousands of dollars a year on a game without blinking. There is a whole industry dedicated to building games to find and catch these sorts of players and the game developers are very much not interested in children – the ethics of that not withstanding, the legal implications are expensive.
[…]boy, hes got no idea how wild ads can get if he’s only seeing the Dude Ads. Lily’s Garden ads are a whole ass thing all on their own and one of the grande dames of the genre, along with Merge Mansion, which is I suspect the game Alison mentions above. Merge Mansion’s most recent crop of ads full on have Oscar Award winner Kathy Bates starring as sketchy grandma Ursula (which, I must stress, are basically a tv mystery series only very loosely connected to the game).
Jilder (same comment)
The basic model for mobile game profitability is to release several dozen lightly reskinned clones of the exact same game and invest continued development into the handful that attract a sustainable population of whales. It’s grift, all the way down.
When mobile exploded the market and dropped financial barrier to entry by an order of magnitude, both game dev and game consumer culture were considerably thinner on the ground and even the best things to come out of the resulting environment (Genshin Impact, Lineage 2 Revolution) are still exploitative as shit. […] Part of the reason devs and gamers alike fucking hate Diablo Immortal is that it’s an extremely public beachhead for the tentacles of pure capitalist greed into a culture that has until now been moderately successful at keeping this avalanche of bullshit at bay.
All competitive online gaming has a pay-to-win element, it’s just not easily seen a lot of the time – it’s just that you pay for a decent gaming rig, and in my case you pay for having a decent internet connection. Like I’m in Australia, so lol how’s my ping bruh?
But the gatekeeping around AAA rated gaming is huge – gamergate bros are just the most visible manifestation […]. As I mentioned in my first comment here, I’m a middle aged woman, so you know, I’ve been dealing with gatekeeping shit around gaming my entire gaming career.
The Gripe Monster lives in a cave on the premises, and hates everything. In its mind, nothing has ever been great, but it always used to be better. It has demanded the opportunity to vent its three spleens here every once in a while. We have agreed, in order to shut it up, and so long as it confines its rantings to occasional Sunday evenings. Take it away, Gripey!
Don’t call me Gripey!
Rarr! I am the Gripe Monster! Fear me! I will talk your ear off if given the opportunity! Do you know how much a doctor charges to reattach an ear? And you can’t sue me for injury, judges think I don’t exist!
But I do exist! I’m not just a piece of pixel art! And I am displeased. This time the object of my formidable ire is a dumb listicle!
In particular my woeful focus is fixed upon an article on a website, titled 10 Games You Probably Didn’t Know Started As Arcade Games! It makes my bile boil, and my blood clog! It upsets all of my monsterly fluids!
Three of the series listed are Tetris, Super Mario Bros., and “Space Wars!” This article, it makes me breathe FIRE! None of these series started in arcades! It doesn’t even get the original name of Space War right! My sensibilities are agitated! They cannot even claim defense due to Mario starting in Donkey Kong, for they list that as a separate series!
I do blame the author, for my anger is indiscriminate, but my wrath is tempered with the understanding that writing is difficult and research is time-consuming, although the histories of these series are by no means secret! Much more, I blame the site that let it pass without question. Grar, I say! Grar and grar again! I swipe at it with my mighty claws, and I bite it with my awful tusks!
If you do not wish to suffer my wrath in the future, please edit your articles with greater care! And get off my lawn!
Management wishes to express that we bear no ill-will towards either the author or the site, although the points Gripey brings up are technically accurate. Mistakes happen!
It’s Sunday once again! You crossed, not a finish line, but a significant leg of the race. You deserve a reward. Here is one.
Orson Welles’ hilarious high-brow yet earthy tone, presented both as actual quotes and adapted, twice, have made the rounds lately. (Note: Welles had wide-ranging opinions of various degrees of cultural suitability, and so his posthumous imitators imagine he would now.) Here is a video of a pixel Orson Welles (no word on if he is also pixelated) trash talking various game characters. He is especially dismissive of Cool Spot.
Our indie showcases highlight the many dev-submitted games and demos we play here on the channel. Please get in touch if you would like to submit a game.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Friday night at SGDQ 2022 the TAS Block show demonstrated something special. After a recording of a Portal 2 run that predictably demolished that game, they moved on to a rather more esoteric show.
In past shows, TAS Bot has some off some pretty ridiculous sights, using something called Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE). Essentially, using certain well-understood exploits, the runner (usually, but not always, a set of scripted inputs) writes a sequence of instructions into the machine’s RAM, and then transfers the code execution to that sequence, allowing for “arbitrary behavior,” meaning, almost anything that can be written into that RAM. TAS Bot at AGDQ 2014 wrote Pong into memory during a run of Super Mario World and ran it (6 minutes):
This technique has also been used to run a variant of Flappy Bird, and even a bona fide hex editor into the save RAM of Super Mario World, without even needing scripts, entirely by a human player. But this is beside the point.
There’s several of these videos, which I leave it to you to search out. They’re pretty easy to find on YouTube with the search terms “games done quick” and “tasbot”.
The point of this post is to bring you news of how players finally “obtained” the Triforce in Ocarina of Time after 23 years. The video of the show has yet to be uploaded to YouTube (it has been since I wrote this! scroll to the end), but until it shows up, Retro Game Mechanics EX has a video explaining how it was done (34 minutes):
Our policy to only link each site once per news post sometimes produces difficulties. This time our Nintendo Life post is by Ollie Reynolds, about the news that Zelda: Wind Waker was at first going to have a playable theremin. The news ultimately comes from a Do You Know Gaming video, which also mentions that Nintendo design guru Shigeru Miyamoto hated Wind Waker‘s cel-shaded art style at first, which in retrospect is one of the aspects of the game that’s held up the best:
I saw on Metafilter a post from The corpse in the library (an unfortunate user name in context) that the popular streamer has passed away. Technoblade is one of the few channels to have reached over a billion views. He is remembered for his playing skill and his friendly rivalry with fellow Minecraft Youtuber Dream.
