The Flipside of Gaming
Today is the launch date of Unexplored 2! (Steam) The sequel to one of the more interesting roguelites of recent years, the original simulated a game world with a lot of depth, and played a lot like a real-time version of a classic roguelike with updated graphics.
I did a Q&A with the makers over on Game Developer a couple of months ago! (I can’t seem to find it right now, though….) They also have a dev blog over there if you’re interested in its creation!
So. Um. Have a trailer!
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Sal Romano at Gematsu has the top 30 sales data from Mat 16-22, and Alana Hauges at NintendoLife notes that the top 10 games are all Switch titles! In fact, 27 of the top 30 are Switch titles! The top seller is Nintendo Switch Sports. The three holdouts are Konami’s eBASEBALL Powerful Pro Baseball 2022 on PS4, FromSoftware’s Elden Ring on PS4, and SIE’s Horizon Forbidden West on PS5.
Arsenijs Picugins writes that one of the winners of Hackaday Prize 2022 is an ultra-tiny Python-hosting LCD game unit, called the PewPew LCD. The project is hosted at hackaday.io. I’m not quite sure how you get one; it looks like you might have to source parts yourself, or maybe order a kit from somewhere. Still, they look like very interesting little devices!
Also on Hackday, Robin Kearey tells us of a project intended to drive XY-based monitors like oscilloscopes and arcade vector monitors, and can interface with AdvanceMAME to provide a display for classic vector games like Asteroids and Tempest!
Back at NintendoLife, Kate Gray has a thoughtful article about using games to promote mental health. They speak to two representatives of the non-profit Take This, which is devoted to decreasing stigma and increasing support for mental health in games.
Also from NintendoLife, Liam Doolan report of a bug in the Nintendo Switch Online version of Kirby 64 that can softlock the game in some circumstances.
An interesting thing about blog posts is when the title on the page is different from the title in the header. Thus we can see that an alternate title of David Grossman’s article for Inverse, “You need to play the most overlooked horror game of all time on Switch ASAP,” is “You need to play the most Castlevania game on Switch ASAP.” Kind of gives the game away? The game in question is Castlevania Bloodlines, BTW.
Jarop of NintendoEverything relays word from the producers of Triangle Strategy, by way of Japanese site 4Gamer, that the art used in the game cost more to create than you might think. Which, I mean, what else are they going to say? “LOL creating the graphics was really cheap and super easy too!” The quote:
It’s probably worth noting that it costs more than you’d think. In that respect, it’s a good match for the titles want out of Square Enix. There might not be much to gain from other companies copying it.
Tomoya Asano
Sure thing, got it.
We live in a golden age of game jams, thousands of people every month make little games in absurdly short amounts of times, and surprisingly often those games are even interesting! What that says about the nature of game creation is very interesting, but not the subject here. That would be Godot Wild Jam (itch.io), a monthly themed and judged jam where the thread of continuity is the use of Godot, the amazingly small yet feature-packed free and open source game development system.
Since it’s monthly, and I’m writing this three weeks ahead of time, I don’t really know who’ll win the one currently in the offing. The previous jam as of this writing was won by Stranded on Ice. You can look through all the entries on Godot Wild Jam 44’s itch page, or ALL the entries throughout the jam’s history by browsing through itch’s #godotwildjam tag.
From the site: “Definition: A gaming dark pattern is something that is deliberately added to a game to cause an unwanted negative experience for the player with a positive outcome for the game developer.”
I remember when I was first writing about roguelikes at late, lamented GameSetWatch, it was right around the time of the rise of mobile gaming. It would bring video games to a whole under-served audience, and it did! It would become industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and it did that too! And it would all do it fairly, taking nothing from poor players while granting extra perks to wealthy ones who would just pay them a little money, a microtransaction*, to justify their outlay, and, well….
Mobile games are fun, and many of them are inexpensive, at least at first. But frequently, and especially with the whole “free to play” genre, they are full of tricks to try to get you to shell out cash for advantages. A certain nominal fee might be appropriate, but most aren’t in it for a simply nominal fee. Interesting and/or important features will turn out to be locked behind the “premium currency,” which at first seems plentiful but before long turns very scarce unless you pony up with the cash money dollas.
These games want to find themselves a few big whales to be their sugar parents, and at times it seems that they are the true audiences that they chase, with us ordinary plebs left to soak our heads. It’s a lucre-seeking design style that has become synonymous with an entire genre, and it could be argued has done real harm to the whole field of mobile gaming.
Everyone needs to earn a living, but it rankles to be used as the bricks on their road to their pot of gold, especially when the necessity of that premium currency is obscured at the start of the game. DarkPattern.games lays out how these games try to get their fingers into your wallet, and points an accusing finger at those titles that rely on these tricks.
It also points the way to games that don’t. They may cost a bit more up-front, but at least you won’t be nagged repeatedly during your time with them to give them just a little more cash, just a little more, that’s all they need, just a little more cash man, they can stop any time, any time they want….
darkpattern.games (via cosmic owl on Metafilter)
* “Microtransaction” is one of those terms that causes my blood pressure to rise. Who now remembers that the term was originally coined to mean payments of a dime or less, maybe even less than a penny, such as to pay for access to a news article? Now we’re beset with paywalls, the things microtransactions were supposed to save us from, while the term has been appropriated by all these sharks? I mean to tell you, it makes all my neurons sparkle with a communist glimmer.
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Let’s sort these by site:
Alana Hauges:
Playable Build Of Cancelled N64 Game ‘SimCopter 64‘ Discovered. It was reported on Reddit, and the buyer was 707northbayer. They’ve expressed interest in having it dumped and preserved, yay! The game was developed with the prospect of it being able to share data with an also-canned N64 version of SimCity. While it looks a little different, in play it is said to be very similar to the PC version made by Maxis.
This N64 ROM Hack Turns Zelda: Ocarina Of Time Into A New Star Fox Adventures. The hack was created by a modder called Zel, and is titled Star Fox Conquest. It has a trailer on YouTube. Here’s Zel’s Twitter feed.
Liam Doolan:
Nintendo Expands Its Switch Online SNES And NES Service With Three More Titles. They are Congo’s Caper (SNES), Rival Turf (SNES) and Pinball (NES). Moving on!
Tyler Fischer:
Xbox Users Can Buy Controversial Xbox 360 Game Again After 12 Years. It’s Sonic ’06. The game is Sonic ’06! Why hide it? The article would probably get more hits if the headline wasn’t coy about it.
Nintendo Switch Getting Major 2022 Game Late. It’s Lord of the Rings: Gollum. Again, no need to be coy about the title. Sheesh! Article also contains the mandatory description of what The Lord of the Rings is, as if that knowledge hasn’t been inescapable for over a decade now.
Kyle Orland:
Are we on the verge of an 8K resolution breakthrough in gaming? Oh please no. There are 8K TVs already on the market, but they cost like $30,000. At least one TV maker is planning 8K console support, at a resolution of 7680×4320. Won’t this quadruple display lag? Why even bother if you don’t have a gigantic screen? You humans will be the death of me.
After 30 years, the world can now play the lost Marble Madness II. Familiar news to our readers! The article contains comments from Frank Cifaldi and Jason Scott saying the game isn’t good, which we greatly disagree with, but oh well.
Henry Stockdale: Review of Kao the Kangaroo. It’s a modern remake of a Dreamcast-exclusive platformer in the N64 style. It’s rated 7/10, called “refreshingly straightforward,” and is available for PS5, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox X & S, Switch and PC. It can be completed in about 7-8 hours, similar in length to other indie 3D platformers like A Hat in Time. Pretty nice!
Rebekah Valentine: Valve Responds to #SaveTF2, Says It’s Working on Improvements. SaveTF2 is a Twitter hashtag of people complaining that the Team Fortress 2 online play experience has been ruined by prevalent bots. They have a point. Valve actually responded to it, surprising many including me. It is one of the few times they’ve acknowledge the long-lived team combat game since 2020. To think the source of hundreds of memes would be left to decay to this extent. I mean, it’s not like Valve is releasing many other games at the moment.
From an unknown writer, their Ask the Developer series talkes to the developers of Nintendo Switch Sports. Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4
Eurogamer’s Ishraq Subhan: Reggie Fils-Aimé believes games industry “woefully behind” in embracing diversity. Two bits from the article: “For me as a Black man with my particular skin tone, hair, curls and everything else, it’s difficult to make a character look like me, and it shouldn’t be.” Fils-Aimé used an annecdote of his first E3 debut for Nintendo, where he was mistaken for security because he was a tall Black man in a suit.
Engadget’s D. Hardawar: Niantic’s Campfire app will finally let Pokémon Go players chat together. It’s about time.
Tom’s Hardware’s Ash Hill: Raspberry Pi Drives Custom Retro Gaming CRT TV. While HDTVs have their strengths, for reducing input lag, nothing beats a CRT.
The Twitter project thread.
Kotaku’s Isaiah Colbert: Upcoming One Piece JRPG Will Have Classic Turn-Based Combat, instead of the usual musou gameplay, or, alternatively, Breath of the Wild-style play. Coming out for PC, PS4, PS5 and Xbox Series X & S.
BoingBoing’s founder, Mark Frauenfelder: Bad Writer is “the most depressingly realistic writer’s life simulation I ever experienced” Well that certainly is a ringing endorsement! It’s an indie game created by Paul Jesup, available on itch for $3.99.
Video Games Chronicle’s Andy Robinson: Sony’s classic PlayStation games on PS Plus appear to be 50hz – even in non-PAL regions. First party PS1 games, and a few 3rd party titles, available as part of the PlayStation Plus service appear to be based on their PAL versions, running at slower framerates.
The reason the slower versions were used could be related to their language options, which would make supporting these games in multiple territories simpler. So far the games are only available in Asian markets, leaving it uncertain if this issue will affect games released in other territories.
Roguelikeliteish stuff:
The Verge’s Ash Parrish: No Man’s Sky’s newest expedition turns it into a roguelike. The update’s called “Leviathan.” In this case “roguelike” it means it has permadeath, resetting progress after death, but with some elements contributing to persistant progression between attempts.
Rock Paper Shotgun’s Alice O’Connor: This cool roguelike mockup looks like screenshots printed in an old magazine. Images are not of a real game, but are instead computer mockups created to show off a Blender shader. They’re cool though! You supply the shader an image, and it makes it look like it was originally printed in a magazine. It’s pay-what-you-want on itch.io!
And finally, GoNintendo’s rawmeatcowboy informs us that PAC-MAN Museum+ replaces multiple members of PAC-MAN’s family. Pac-Jr. replaced with Pac-Boy! Little Pac-Baby replaced with Pac-Sis! Dogpac Chomp Chomp replaced with “Pac-Buddy!” The reason probably being Namco doesn’t completely own the rights to some of these characters, and doesn’t want to license them. Particularly, GCC created Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man Jr., Bally/Midway created Baby Pac-Man, and Hanna-Barbera created Chomp Chomp. Professor Pac remains, probably because Namco doesn’t realize the character was created for a Bally/Midway game!
It’s Sunday again! Congratulations for making it to this late day and week.
Since you survived to this point, let’s relax and look at a couple of episodes of Unskippable, venerable web comedy group LoadingReadyRun’s riff project of video game cutscenes, formerly published on The Escapist.
There are 198 of these in the playlist, so let’s just do a couple for now. Above is the opening of everyone’s favorite embodiment of suffering, Dark Souls.
Probably because of the litigious propensities of gigantic megalithic corporations, their mocking of the cutscenes of the Kingdom Hearts games are not on the list. Since Unskippable is no longer hosted from The Escapist’s site itself, these are survived only by the random uploads of fans. One of those is here, for the HD release of Kingdom Hearts, in all of its manifest ridiculousness:
Rogue Legacy is the game that popularized what would become the sub-genre known as “roguelite” — the idea of having a focus on persistence as progression in a roguelike. Since its release, the roguelike and lite genres have blown up across the board. With all these new flavors, Rogue Legacy 2 has recently left early access and now asks the question: can the original roguelite show these newcomers some new tricks?
The basic gameplay of the original returns with a new story. A Kingdom has fallen to a mysterious corruption, the guardians have been taken over by a strange force, and you once again sign away your life and your descendants to Charon to figure out what’s going on. The upgraded visuals are impressive, with improved lighting that makes everything pop.
If you missed the first one, the progression of the game comes in the form of your estate/castle. Gold, earned by killing enemies and finding treasure chests can be used after a run to add additions to your castle. These additions become progressively more expensive, but they will unlock new classes, raise stats, add new quality of life features, and more.
In runs, you can find blueprints that can be used to acquire new equipment pieces with a set bonus for wearing them all. Unlike the first game, your major improvements this time come in the form of heirlooms that are placed in each biome. Once unlocked, they stay active for the rest of the game. Runes, that offer passive bonuses, are still locked to completing a variety of puzzles and mini challenges throughout the world. A new unlock is in the form of “scars” which are bonus challenges whose resources can be used to unlock additional features and boost your stats even higher. The roguelite nature of Rogue Legacy 2 is on full display, and I can just see people attempting level 1 challenges or “low level” runs.
A new resource “resolve” acts as a reserve used to equip relics that provide a variety of passive bonuses that can be found in a run. Once your resolve gets less than 100, further drains will reduce your max health. These relics can be worth it and with the right ones can easily break a run.
Class diversity has been given a facelift with more classes, more special powers, and of course, more whacky traits. The traits were a big part of the original’s charm, with characters having traits that affect their run but can also earn you more gold for taking them.
Everything about Rogue Legacy 2 brings back the charm of the original, but it also brings back the issues I had as well.
Of the variety of action roguelikes I’ve played, both Rogue Legacies feel the most inconsistent in terms of movement and combat for several reasons.
While it may not look like it, there are aspects of bullet hell in both games in how you must dodge attacks. Many enemies can launch all varieties of projectiles at you, some that track, some that can go through walls, etc. One of the biggest annoyances with the game is the lack of standardized alerts about oncoming attacks.
Some attacks the game will warn you that the enemy is about to do them, others they won’t. The same goes for incoming projectiles off-screen — some of them the game will let you know, other times you’ll get hit with no warning. It becomes very frustrating when you are trying to keep track of things and you can have three different projectiles and no way to tell how they behave. You have no invincibility frames while dashing (only one class gets an I-frame dodge), and it’s very common to have a situation where dodging one attack puts you right in front of another.
The enemy physics is one of the most frustrating aspects of the game, to the point that I’m glad that there is an assist option to disable damage when coming in contact. Many classes have attacks that don’t push the enemy back when you hit them. This can lead to issues of enemies that you’re trying to attack, and they just fly or dash straight into you and do damage. For classes that can crit off dash attacks, it is far too risky to use this move on the later areas as you’re increasing the chance of you taking more damage.
Since enemies don’t respond to attacks, you can dodge all their projectiles, get into melee range and start hitting, and they’ll launch an attack with no tell and hit you without any means of dodging. Many of my deaths came from situations where it felt like the game was just not giving me a way to succeed — rooms where projectiles come from all angles, with enemies of varying tells, that all hit like a truck if I run into them or their attacks. I found that range attacks can break the difficulty in a lot of the later areas simply by not having to try and duck and weave around projectiles while trying to hit enemies.
Rogue Legacy 2 is certainly a roguelite and is by far one of the most grind-heavy out there. Every form of progression will take time to gather the necessary resources to upgrade. As with the first game, the general positioning and difficulty of the biomes don’t change, which means that your best way of grinding resources is to always go to the hardest area you can in order to maximize the gold you find. Just like with the first game, and with roguelites in general, you’re going to have a lot of throwaway runs that are just there to grind resources before having your “serious runs.”
The biggest hurdle to progress much like the first game is just how tanky the bosses are. Expect to spend a lot of minutes dodging the same patterns as you whittle down their health bars. A new feature that allows you to gain bonus damage requires you to hunt down clues in each biome. Damage is the most important stat, as killing enemies fast prevents them from firing back at you obviously. Because the cost of all upgrades gets progressively more expensive as you spend, it’s very easy to make things harder for you by getting upgrades that aren’t directly helping you but increasing the cost of everything else (the game has been patched with a recommended upgrade path). For people who do finish the game, there is an extensive array of post-game content and progressive difficulty if you really want to keep the rogue-lite-ness going.
Rogue Legacy 2 is the bigger, better-looking version of the first game. If you enjoyed the first game through and through, this is certainly more to love. If you were hoping for some refinements to the design and pain points, then this action family tree simulator still has some thorns to deal with. This is still the quintessential roguelite on the market and a must-play for fans of the original.
This was played with a press key provided by the publisher
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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”
Audacity Games is Activision co-founder, not to mention the creator of Pitfall! and A Boy and His Blob, David Crane, along with former Activision designers Garry and Dan Kitchen. They’re getting back into the games business with a new Atari VCS/2600 title now available, after three years of development: Circus Convoy!
With hardware acceleration, lots of crazy tricks are possible, as demonstrated in the recent post here on homebrew VCS carts. David Crane himself helped pioneer this approach with his seminal Pitfall II: Lost Caverns, whose original VCS version used a special chip to help make possible its many tricks. Well, Circus Convoy is notable in that it doesn’t use such tricks! It doesn’t use “hardware acceleration,” although I presume it still uses tricks like bank switching and additional RAM.
Take a look at the features and play guide pages on their website, and if it looks interesting to you and you still have a working Atari, maybe buy a cart? The prices do seem a bit high for a new VCS game in 2022, with the cheapest offerings at $55-60. But I’m sure there are hardcore VCS enthusiasts out there who are interested.
Not a bad start to our little endeavor! Here’s to many more!
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Scott Hayden at Road To VR notes that a VR roguelike called “OUTLIER,” all-caps, has been cancelled, with a reason given that might seem unusual: they overestimated demand. They also say that they underestimated the complexity of the roguelike genre, which I can certainly sympathize with. It’s being remove from the Steam store. People who bought the game on Steam Early Access can either keep it or ask for a refund. I wonder if someday having a notable delisted project in your Steam library might be seen as a mark of status, in some circles?
Over on BoingBoing (they still exist!) there’s a couple of interesting posts. By Popkin, there’s a video from a Nintendo arcade game from 1976 called Sky Hawk, that used 16mm film footage of remote-controlled fighter planes to provide targets for players to hit! It was a shooting-gallery kind of game, where the whole game is hitting targets. Here’s the video on YouTube.
And long-time Boinger David Pescovitz presents a demo for a failed 1982 educational technology program with the name Wired In, that entertaining in its early 80s way. It has clips of Bill Murray providing some entertaining moments, and a tongue-in-cheek PSA from Lily Tomlin about the dangers of Pac-Man addiction.
Steve Hogarly at Rock Paper Shotgun appreciates My Time At Sandrock for PC, a “wild west” town simulation game. Yes, Stardew Valley is mentioned.
At The Chozo Project (which doesn’t seem to be overtly Metroid-themed), Zach Lindermann reviews the Sega Nomad, a portable system that’s capable of playing Genesis games, a mere 25 years after its release.
Claire Jackson over at Kotaku talks about the refreshing repairability of the Steam Deck.
Okay, this one requires a little explanation. There’s a community on the internet. What’s it about? Generally speaking, nearly anything, but this one is devoted to constructing homebrew “cyberdecks,” (Reddit link) self-contained portable computers whose design brings to mind cyberpunk fiction. Liliputing’s Brad Linder presents one that uses for its internals the guts of a Framework modular laptop.
Ryan Dinsdale at IGN reports that Jonathan Jacque-Belletête of Eidos Montréal noted that their studio had for a time been working on Final Fantasy XV, before Square-Enix decided to return the project to its Japanese studios.
Stuart Gipp at NintendoLife presents us with a history of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle video games on Nintendo systems.
And, the website High Five For has a number of lists of 25 games on various system that they consider to still be interesting now, years after their obsolescence: NES – SNES – PS1 – Genesis/Mega Drive – Game Boy Advance – TurboGrafx 16/PC Engine.
Grog‘s subtitle is “The Reimagined Original Roguelike Game,” which sounds like it could have been an abandoned acronym. It’s made by Dr. Thomas Biskup, creator of the classic roguelike game ADOM, who played Rogue on an old PDP at Roguelike Celebration back in 2018. Your default name is Brak, which is probably a reference to the creation of fantasy author John Jakes, but it’s possible to amuse oneself by imagining Zorak’s pal traipsing cluelessly through the dungeon. “Oh, man!”
Grog‘s presentation is purposely old-school, a gray console window with ASCII characters for graphics. While it’s similar to Rogue, it has some interesting differences. It doesn’t support diagonal movement or attacks, for one. There’s 25 levels, with two kinds of enemies introduced with each new floor, we might call them a strong one, with powerful combat ability, and a tricky one, with a way to give you troubles in other ways. Secret doors are automatically searched for as you move.
The movement keys are WASD, traditional for DOOM, not the hjkl set derived from vi. The wait key is the space bar, and period is to wait until fully healed, so if you’re used to waiting with period and paging with space, you might want to consider changing your habits. To use stairs, use the ‘r’ key. Lots of items are used by pressing ‘u’ or ‘f’. Press ? for other keys and information.
The game asks you for your name, gender (while it defaults to male, you can enter any text!) and type (like, species). The game’s set up so that if you enter the same thing at all of these prompts, your character will generate the same way, deterministically.
Grog’s level builder is similar to Rogue’s, but it’s not limited to a 3×3 grid of rooms.
One thing about Grog that’s mentioned on its page is the game actually gets more difficult the more times you play. When a character dies, they may show up as a ghost on later runs, making things more difficult for you, and also when a monster defeats a player character they may get promoted into a unique individual, with added power and a name, that can show up on later plays! This customizes your copy of the game to an extent as you play.
Grog: The Reimagined Original Roguelike Game ($0)
Note, the download is hosted from Dropbox, which is notorious for rate limiting, so if you can’t get it immediately, maybe try another day.
Each indie dev showcase highlights the developer-submitted games and demos we check out for our Wednesday night streams. If you would like to submit a game for a future one please reach out.
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”
