The indie showcases highlight the many games we play here on the channel. If you would like me to play your game for a future one please reach out. All games shown are either demos or press key submissions.
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”
Indie Retro News reported recently on this cool run-and-gun game made by Division 六 the style of Metal Slug. Here’s a promotional video. Note that some of the sound effects are taken directly from Metal Slug, but are intended as placeholders. The final version should have no outside assets.
We’ve brought up a couple of examples of Commodore PET software lately, which as I keep saying, is interesting because the PET has no way of doing bitmapped graphics, sprites, or even definable characters. Its characters are locked in ROM and cannot be changed. So, it includes a set of multi-purpose characters that was used throughout all the Commodore 8-bit line, even as late as the C64 and C128, which having definable graphics didn’t need these kinds of generic graphics characters, but they were still useful for people who didn’t want to create their own graphics.
The PETSCII characters, as used on the Commodore 64 (image, with some editing, from Wikipedia). The graphics set also includes reverse-video versions of each character.
Back on my Commodore coding days I became very familiar with these characters. I think they’re much more universally-applicable for graphic use than the IBM equivalent, the famous Code Page 437, although that’s mostly because PETSCII doesn’t bother defining supporting so many languages. Code Page 437 also uses a lot of its space for single and double-line versions of box-drawing characters, although on the other hand it doesn’t waste characters defining reverse-video versions of every glyph.
PETSCII has:
A space and reversed space, of course.
Line drawing characters for boxes of course: vertical and horizontal lines, corners, and three- and four-way intersections. There are also curved versions of the corners.
More line-drawing characters for borders.
Still more horizontal and vertical lines, at each pixel position within their box.
With the reverse-video versions, enough characters to effectively do a 80×50 pixel display, as if it had a super low-res mode.
Different thicknesses of horizontal and vertical lines too.
Diagonal lines, and a big ‘X’. Note that on the PET and Vic-20 these lines were all one pixel wide, but on later computers with both better resolution and color graphics they were made thicker, which means diagonal lines have “notches” between character cells.
Other miscellaneous symbols: playing card symbols, filled and hollow balls, and some checkerboards for shading. On the PET and Vic, the shading characters were finer, while on the other 8-bit computers they were made of 2×2 boxes.
There are resources that let you use PETSCII to create old-school computer art, like this PETSCII editor, Petmate and Playscii, and for a bunch of examples of what you can do with it you can browse through the Twitter account PETSCIIBots. And this blog post from 2016 both makes the case for PETSCII as a medium for art and provides some great examples of it.
We love games made for unlikely hardware, and PETSCII Bros. fits that bill like a duck’s dentures. Like we explained in the post about that PET demo from a while ago, the PET didn’t have changeable graphics characters and no bitmap mode at all, and so it wasn’t what we’d consider a games machine. But it did come with a set of interesting graphics characters that, among other things, had a set of 16 characters that let programmers use the screen as a super-low-res 80×50 pixel display.
PETSCII Bros is a PET action game that uses those characters (long called “PETSCII” as a cheeky reference to ASCII) for an actual game, that plays similarly to Nintendo’s classic Mario Bros. arcade game. Of course you’ll need a PET, or an emulator (such as the one that comes with VICE) to play it. Or if you’re just passing interested, you could watch this video to see how it works:
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”
Röq is continuing their explorations of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. They’re getting concerned that there aren’t as many triangles in this one as they were hoping for. There are these stone things that look like the number 9 (“Number 9… number 9…”) but they aren’t the same at all. It seems like it’s a bad idea to eat one, especially. (Spoilers?) Not that Röq is considering eating triangles. Although pizza slices might be considered kind of like triangles. Mmm… triangles.
Speaking of spoilers, there are some minor ones in this post, but nothing huge.
At least try to dodge! I feel bad about smacking you around. Even black bokoblin puts up more of a fight!
The Yiga are pretty hapless in this game. I kind of love them? They definitely know how to have a good time, doing donuts in their underground bases in devices with ridiculous designs, and names like Flamecrusher and Doommachine. They aren’t any more effective than in the first game, and in fact may actually be weaker.
It’s pretty creepy that they choreographed Kohga’s tantrum though.
(wave wave) “I see, so the Einstein-Bose condensate is effectively a fifth state of matter, I understand perfectly now!”
Link can say so much with a wave and a shrug. He must have taken mime classes or something.
And now, the musical stylings of Marot the Zora:
“Hm hm-hmm… Hum hm-hmm… yay!”
I don’t know why I fixate on fish lady’s song, but I do. I’m glad it’s the same between games.
The Pants of Doom! Don’t ask why they’re dark though, you, uh, you don’t want to know.Someone tell Sega, Nintendo ripped off their title!
Rauru, our benefactor from the ancient past, has, uh, a questionable sense of humor:
EDIT: For some reason, this video has gotten over 300,000 views on Youtube. Wow.
What purpose does this serve? And this is a bit of a spoiler, but….
Why do we even have to do shrine puzzles this time? In Breath of the Wild there was the sense that the Sheikah monks were training Link up to face the Calamity, but these shrines, that suddenly appeared right on cue, we know that Rauru made them, and that he knows who they’re for. Link’s already a hero. Rauru knows it, Zelda went back in time and told him. “Seals the darkness” my Hylian ass, the shrines exist to give Link the orbs he needs to heal up from Ganondorf’s mummy attacking him at the start of the game, and he’s still the only person who can enter them. If you know already he’s the Chosen One, there’s no reason to make him jump though hoops. Just hand over the round sparkly, he has a realm to save.
Don’t get me started on why Link have to give them to the goddess statues to get healed. What do they get out of it? Why does Link have to serve as middle-elf? This magical economy, it makes no sense.
The title is no joke, a couple of crazy people RetroGL and JoneGG, are actually doing it, and while they’re close to a final release you can also download a current alpha for free, with manual, from links in the description on their Youtube demonstration video:
It’s a great example of playing to a system’s strengths (surprisingly large sprites and a legendary sound chip) while downplaying its limitations (only eight sprites, low multicolor resolution, 16 colors, a controller with only one button). It’s much better than the arcade porters of the system’s heyday would have accomplished. I mean, just look at it! On the Commodore 128, they even plan to implement stage scrolling!
I’m not sure how it works internally, but given that it’s being distributed as a CRT file and not a disk image, my guess is on physical hardware it’d rely on a physical cartridge for expanded, bank-switched ROM space. It’s a trick that’s being used more often, like how Champ Games uses it for their Atari 2600 ports of classic arcade games.
Warning: slightly NSFW for depiction of sheep birth.
You’re watching the video and it seems like standard 90s kids whimsy and then woah did that sheep just come out of its mother?
What are the Dazzeloids? They’re characters created by Rodney Alan Greenblat, the character designer of Parappa the Rapper! They were made for a multimedia Playstation game released in 1994, two years before Parappa. I call it a game, but it seems more to have been one of those early multimedia products that’s mostly video clips given a loose connecting story, only in Dazzeloids case, the clips are very weird. The Dazzeloids (not Dazzleoids, as you might expect) have as their mission the liberation of minds and use creativity as a tool to that end. It’s all very nineties kids TV. The Dazzeloids are very obscure now, and don’t even appear on Rodney’s website, which is kind of a shame.
Does Lammy wear Stinkabod merchandise?
All of the Dazzeloids have a dream sequence on the disk that introduces them and tells you what they’re like, and the video above is the one for Stinkabod the Sheep, who might be the character on Lammy’s shirt. The video is very weird, but engaging, and definitely a Rodney Greenblat creation. The characters are of the same style as Parappa, and it doesn’t seem impossible that Stinkabod and his friends could exist in the same world.
Rodney’s creations are a bit more popular in Japan than in the U.S., where Parappa got an anime series and a line of merchandise. While you’re diving down this internet rabbit hole, you might also check out Rodney Greenblat’s personal site Whimsyload!
Sadly, it seems the struggle to update Blaseball for a new era was too much effort and not enough income to keep The Game Band, the game’s creator and maintainer, going with it, and they’ve made the decision to end it.
It’s a shame, but it could be that it was something of its time. It got started during the big lockdown period of COVID (as opposed to the long haul, pretend-it’s-not-happening period we’re currently in), when everyone was obsessing over this strange fake horror-themed baseball sim and Animal Crossing New Horizons.
I’m sure in the decades to come people will look back fondly at that time, as a moment when we could afford to be so focused on a small number of particular cultural monoliths instead of our regular diffuse fixations. Maybe a moment such as that will come again someday. But it’s not now, and Blaseball has ended.
It’s worth noting what a cultural phenomenon Blaseball was for awhile. They made a number of Youtube videos for the second era of the “splort,” called The Blaseball Roundup, that are worth watching for their own sake. And the Seattle Garages was a seriously good band that arose out of Blaseball’s pandemic enthusiasm.
For this developer interview on the Perceptive Podcast, I caught up with Nicholas McDonnell from Samurai Punk to talk about the studio celebrating its 9-year anniversary, how they have grown over time, and its next project Killbug.
Due to OBS issues, the audio and video are not properly syncing, unfortunately.
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”
That excellent blog The Digital Antiquarian has three posts so far in a history of 3D graphics, starting from the likes of Doom and Quake and so far going as far as 3DFX.
“By the middle years of the decade, with the limitations of working with canned video clips becoming all too plain, interactive movies were beginning to look like a severe case of the emperor’s new clothes. The games industry therefore shifted its hopeful gaze to another approach, one that would prove a much more lasting transformation in the way games were made. This 3D Revolution did have one point of similarity with the mooted and then abandoned meeting of Silicon Valley and Hollywood: it too was driven by algorithms, implemented first in software and then in hardware.
It was different, however, in that the entire industry looked to one man to lead it into its algorithmic 3D future. That man’s name was John Carmack.”
“Born in Salt Lake City in 1924, (Dave) Evans was a physicist by training and an electrical engineer by inclination, who found his way to the highest rungs of computing research by way of the aviation industry. By the early 1960s, he was at the University of California, Berkeley, where he did important work in the field of time-sharing, taking the first step toward the democratization of computing by making it possible for multiple people to use one of the ultra-expensive big computers of the day at the same time, each of them accessing it through a separate dumb terminal. During this same period, Evans befriended one Ivan Sutherland, who deserves perhaps more than any other person the title of Father of Computer Graphics as we know them today.”
“Among these, of course, was the tardy 3Dfx. The first Voodoo cards appeared late, seemingly hopelessly so: well into the fall of 1996. Nor did they have the prestige and distribution muscle of a partner like Creative Labs behind them: the first two Voodoo boards rather came from smaller firms by the names of Diamond and Orchid. They sold for $300, putting them well up at the pricey end of the market — and, unlike all of the competition’s cards, these required you to have another, 2D-graphics card in your computer as well. For all of these reasons, they seemed easy enough to dismiss as overpriced white elephants at first blush. But that impression lasted only until you got a look at them in action. The Voodoo cards came complete with a list of features that none of the competition could come close to matching in the aggregate: bilinear filtering, trilinear MIP-mapping, alpha blending, fog effects, accelerated light sources. If you don’t know what those terms mean, rest assured that they made games look better and play faster than anything else on the market. This was amply demonstrated by those first Voodoo boards’ pack-in title, an otherwise rather undistinguished, typical-of-its-time shooter called Hellbender. In its new incarnation, it suddenly looked stunning.”
Waxy points us to a post on the blog The History Of How We Play (at thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com, natch) explaining the practice of arcade game developers putting their initials on the default vanity boards of arcade machines, as some small way of getting their names into a public piece of software they had created, at a time when many companies tried to keep that knowledge secret. As the article says, this process slowly receded, as both arcade games relied less on high score chasing for their appeal, and as arcade games began to get actual credit sequences for players to see.
A few of their many screenshots:
Missile Command. Dave Theurer’s star shined so brightly for awhile. Missile Command was a framebuffer game, which explains how the initials could be out of alignment with the letters of “HIGH SCORES” above them.The two main people responsible for creating Centipede aren’t even at the top of the list, DCB is Dona Bailey (one of the very few woman’s names on the list) and ED is Ed Logg.Atari’s Quantum was created at GCC by Betty Tylko, one of the other woman’s names. The fancy cursive “Betty” is because Quantum, being a vector trackball game, let you use it to draw your name into the first place score, something that would never happen today because some people would not be able to resist drawing a dong.
