Month: November 2023

Game Finds: Feydome

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.

EDIT: there was a WordPress display glitch that was causing images to overlap the text. I’ve changed the formatting a bit to keep it readable.

There’s hundreds of new games released every day, and there’s no way to can even find out what they all are, let alone try all of them. So there’s an inescapable element of randomness to what meets my eyes, and thus to what I bring to you. It’s useless to ask, “Why did you link to that silly little trifile when Important Game by Known Developer goes without remark?” Our finds are always going to be kind of idiosyncratic.

So it is with this one, Feydome, a slight but fun game made in two weeks for a game jam. It’s a laid-back 3D exploratory experience where you’re a barely-garbed, at first, fairy, searching an eerie abandoned village for clothes to wear. Movement is by WASD, with the Q and E, or else the left and right arrows, rotating the camera. Yes, it’s an exploratory dress-up game!

At the start your fairy is weak and can barely fly at all. You find glowing orbs that each grant a tiny bit more wing stamina, but never enough that you can fly indefinitely. Each orb very slightly extends the amount of flight time, by around one or two frames. So you’re always tied to the ground, but there are a lot of orbs to find, and that extra time adds up.

The fairy can glide if you hold the fly button down, even when out of energy, and if you keep tapping the space bar you can glide much further, which is a huge help. It helps to devote one hand to this, while using the other to move forward.

While you can rotate the camera, you can’t adjust the angle vertically, so you can’t look above or below, and there is no mouselook. The developer says that an expanded version is being made, maybe these control oversights will be addressed in that.

The pieces of clothing, 29 in all, are in weird chattering spheres that are stuck all over to the walls, floors and ceilings. When collected, a sphere stops chattering, which is of great help in tracking down the last few. Clothes go into your Customize Menu. You start out with just a Tied Fiber top and Leaf Panties bottom, but each item you find helps to make your wee friend more presentable in polite society (if there were any in this game).

There are no enemies, and no moving objects besides the fairy. While it’s difficult to get around at first, it’s surprising how even an extra half second of flight time expands their horizons. Mind you, there is no reward for finding all of the clothing. There is no ending; the journey is entirely the point with Feydome. You’re left alone in the abandoned world, you and your wardrobe, until you exit the game. There’s no save function either, but the game’s so short that it can be finished in one sitting anyway. Maybe 40 minutes in all, if you focus on finding everything.

But it’s fun to explore! It’s a satisfying gameplay loop, finding orbs, using the extended flight time to find yet more orbs, and punctuating the process with occasional new clothes. I’m sure this kind of gameplay has been done before, but this is a neat example of it, and it doesn’t cost anything to try.

Feydome (itch.io, $0)

zandravandra’s List Of Mega Man Romhacks

It’s too light to make it an official Romhack Thursday post, but it is Thursday, so…. or rather, it was, yesterday, when this was slated to go originally, except Fully Ramblomatic premiered and I figured I should strike while that iron was hot. This iron, after all, is more malleable at lower temperatures.

Alex Zandra on Mastodon, @zandra@mastodon.social, who is @zandravandra on Cohost, put together a list of her favorite Mega Man romhacks that looks pretty interesting.

The games are (in order through the series): Mega Man Speed Bomber, Rollchan No Constancy, Rollchan At The Tokyo Olympics, Mega Man 4 Voyage, Mega Man 5 Double Jumper, and Rockman 6 Spirit of Hackers. The closest I’ve come to playing any of them was Rockman No Constancy, before Roll was put into it. There are lots of hacks that are difficult even to play, so curated lists of them are very useful!

Alex Zandra’s list of Mega Man Romhacks (cohost.org)

Second Wind and Fully Ramblomatic

So the dust has settled a bit, and now Nick Calendra, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw and a number of other people from The Escapist’s video production department have left that company and started Second Wind, fully creator-owned. And Yahtzee has made his first episode of the replacement for the 16-year-old Zero Punctuation, using the name of his blog, Fully Ramblomatic. The episode covers Alan Wake II, and it’s exactly what you’d expect it to be: profane, insightful and full of obscure references, like using the head of H.P. Lovecraft as part of the “lake of mysterious occult wank” that Alan Wake has lept into.

It’s all still Ben Yahtzee, which isn’t entirely to my tastes, but other than a couple of missteps through the years he’s generally been a good egg, or so I’ve been given to understand. I’m on board with things that increases the viability of creator-controlled media at least, so I wish them well.

Mappy on Pico8

What pushes a game past the notability barrier, that makes it interesting enough for me to post it here? Classic arcade game remakes are always a good sign. Items for the Pico8 fantasy console are also a strong positive factor. These two elements combined well make it a must-post.

Especially when the game is Mappy. A great game from Pac-Man-era Namco, simple rules but, while surprisingly difficult, a little strategy can get you a long way in. Still, true mastery needs a lot more than that.

This Pico8 version is a good remake, although quite a bit harder. Guide Mappy of the Micro Police through each mansion, stealing back the ill-gotten gains of kitty-cat gang. Unlike many policepeople, Mappy is an entirely non-violent actor, and actually never arrests anyone; he just takes back their loot. And for their part, while the Mewkies and Goro (“Boss the Big Bit”) do knock Mappy out of they catch him, later media seems to indicate that neither side bears any real antipathy for the other. They’re just doing their jobs.

The thing that makes Mappy unique is its trampolines. While on a trampoline you cannot be hurt by the cats, but three bounces on the same one without stopping causes it to break. When you get off the trampoline it’s easy to get caught unless you use the doors as a defensive tool. Pressing the button (X in this Pico8 version) opens the closest door in front of you-you don’t even have to be near it. It swings out in the direction of its doorknob, and knocks out any cat near it on that side for a few seconds, allowing you to pass by. The light-colored doors also house the powerful Microwave, not here a cooking tool but a multicolored beam that launches out and sweeps cats it hits out of the level for a few needed seconds.

This remake of Mappy restores the Japanese name for Goro, “Nyamco,” a pun on the arcade company’s name with a cat angle: “Nyan” is Japanese onomatopoeia for “meow.” You’ll find that while supposed-boss Nyamco is as aimless as he ever was, wandering each level mostly randomly and hiding behind loot, the Mewkies are tenacious chasers, and here will quickly corner you if you don’t have a good plan. Even with its higher difficulty it’s a lovely port, and it’s free to play too!

Mappy for Pico8 (itch.io,x` $0)

Next Fest Indie Showcase 11/12/23

More of my favorites from the first Nextfest of 2023.

Here are the contents, each section is about two minutes in length:

Dice Folk – No Creeps Were Harmed TD – Devil’s Dive – Boomerang Jack – Dystobel – Ugly – Cosmic: A Journey Among Shadows – Lil’ Guardsman – The Master’s Pupil – Ratopia – Rad Survivor – Cardbob

WIZARDReplaY

Wizardry used to be the most popular computer game in the world.

It has fallen on hard times recently. Creators SirTech released the terrific Wizardry 8 but then almost immediately closed up. The name is currently owned by a Japanese developer, who make games in the classic style but they’re still quite different, chasing old ghosts instead of trying to adapt the idea for new generations.

A full examination of Wizardry will have to wait for another time, but until then there’s a repackaging of the original Apple II versions available from the Total Replay folks. It’s made to run off of a ProDOS-formatted hard drive, words that themselves form a fearsome incantation, but you can still play it emulated. And should!

It includes an update of the original Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, plus the successor scenarios Night of Diamonds and Legacy of Llylgamin, plus five fan-made scenarios. It also includes WizPlus, a character editor, but diehards won’t use that. It’s cheating!

To explain Wizardry in summary, it took the ideas of early Dungeons & Dragons and adapted them to a dungeon exploration simulation with the same kind of theoretical basis. In D&D, if a character dies and there’s no way to revive it, it’s gone: no backsies. And sometimes revivals fail, and the character is gone anyway. And the dungeon in a genuinely treacherous place. If your party wipes, to even try to revive them, you have to create a new party of adventures, take them in, find the deceased party’s corpses in the dungeon, and either use magic to revive them there or drag them back to town to have the Temple of Cant do it.

If this sounds forbidding to current sensibilities, it certainly is! But that’s the point. Because of it, it’s about as close as you can get to traditional RP-gaming as you can get on a computer, even more so that official D&D products. Roguelikes come close, but since you only play as a single character in most of them they still don’t quite fit that electronic bill.

Wizard Replay (Apple II, Internet Archive)

Sundry Sunday: Cooking With Louie #2

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

A few weeks back we posted a fun stop-motion animation of Louie, the hunger-driven sidekick and alternate leader character from the game Pikmin 2, hosting a cooking show in which he tried to prepare a Bulbear for eating. It didn’t go well, because Bulbears in Pikmin 2 spontaneously come back to life if not harvested quickly. Oops!

Well sponsors Hocotate Freight didn’t learn their lesson, and there’s now a second episode of Cooking With Louie. Word of advice: it’s best not to use live alien lifeforms as your method of roasting the dish.

Pixelfont

Pixelfont is a neat web tool that will take an image you provide, laid out in the proper format (which you have some control over, like character width and height) and will turn it into a pixel TrueType font for you to use! The gamedev applications of this should be obvious.

This isn’t the first free online font-building tool of this nature. The classic in the field is Fontstruct, which can also produce pixels that aren’t square, and can even extend outside of their cells, but also shows ads (although unobtrusive ones) and doesn’t let you import an image. Still, both are rather of use, or at least are fun to play with!

Pixelfont – Fontstruct

Figuring Out Kakariko Village’s Unemployment Rate

MiyaTRT figured it out. Karariko’s Unemployment Rate. In both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

You might disagree with their methodology. Like in BotW he declares that Paya is unemployed even though she is obviously training to become village leader after Impa retires. But it’s still an entertaining video, and probably will tell you some things about Chicken Town’s NPCs that you didn’t know before, like that in BotW one of the townsfolk stamps on one of their neighbors crops at night!

Kakariko Village Has A 6.03% Unemployment Rate (Youtube, 7 minutes)

The Complete Script of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

Not only is it everything in the game, including unused dialogue, but it’s not a text file on Pastebin, GameFAQs or Github, but on its own website, at dialoguetree.net! This means, when its domain expires, it’ll be gone from the web. Maybe the Internet Archive can rescue it….

If you’re not familiar with it, Thousand-Year Door is widely regarded as the best of the Paper Mario games. Not only does it update the game system of the original Paper Mario with all kinds of new ideas, but it has a fairly brilliant story given its having to work with Mario lore, and it has hilarious writing and memorable characters. Super Paper Mario, that followed it, has its charms, but a somewhat lesser story. And after SPM, it seems Nintendo decided that they weren’t fond of the branching-off of Mario lore that the Paper Mario games was doing, so games after that didn’t have as much of their own continuity.

This is the game where Mario joins a pro wrestling federation as “The Great Gonzales,” where he solves a murder mystery on a train (with a particular NPC who is slightly menacing somehow!), and has one of the best uses of Luigi from among all the Mario games: while you’re on your journey to rescue Peach, it turns out that Luigi is on his own weird adventure, in the “Waffle Kingdom,” that you only find out about from talking with him. Luigi his own crazy partners that accompany him, who have their own opinions about his adventure. Here is the page on dialoguetree.net that lists that part of the script–needless to say, it is spoilers, and if you plan on playing TYD you probably should experience it there first.

Dialogue Tree, Home of Game Scripts (although so far only Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door)

Escapist Collapse and Aftermath

“Hey, remember me?”

Just saw on Metafilter that The Escapist has fired Nick Calandra, who helped revive the site after they threw their lot in on the side of Gamergate during that whole fiasco. In summary, it took a huge amount of effort and good will on their part to recover, and that they did was largely because of Calandra, and long-time Escapist video maker Ben Croshaw, a.k.a. Yahtzee, the maker of the 16-year-running Zero Punctuation. Croshaw has left the site too, which is difficult for him because The Escapist owns the rights to ZP. I think he’ll probably bounce back from it, ZP is nothing without Crowshaw, seeing as how it’s inextricably tied up with his voice, editing, art style and sense of humor, all of that is a lot more recognizable than the name “Zero Punctuation,” and it’s all him, but it does mean having to start from scratch without a link from the old site, just hoping that his fanbase can locate him again.

(On Metafilter, people are mentioning that Croshaw was one of the voices both-sides-ing Gamergate, which is something I had not been aware of when I linked to him here in the past. I do think people are allowed to change, although I haven’t seen him say anything about it since. Mind you, his general style isn’t hugely appealing to me, so I probably still won’t be linking to him that much in the future.)

The word is that Calandra is taking Croshaw and possibly other people and may end up “doing a Defector,” start an independent site with the evicted/departing talent. Getting creators out from under the thumb of having to give up control in order to chase startup money is good, generally, and I wish them well on that.

“Aftermath” in the title doesn’t refer to the aftermath of the collapse of The Escapist, but to a separate thing that some people from Kotaku have started, for similar reasons to the Defector. In fact even moreso, since Kotaku is owned by the people who own Deadspin. Luke Plunkett, who I’ve linked to before, is among them.

Lately we’ve put Kent Drebnar’s news recap feature here on hold, on the grounds that it’s a lot of work for relatively little reader interest, but maybe we should revive it, with an emphasis on these new gaming outlets? It is a thought. Among the Aquatic Life Sizes of gaming journalism Set Side B weighs in at a mere Guppy, but supposedly any link helps increase Google ranking.

However, I am still concerned. There’s almost always something to be concerned about in this internet age, after all. My biggest worry about a proliferation of gaming sites is that many of them are going to go with hard paywalls. This is understandable, people gotta eat after all, but there are only so many dollars out there for these places to chase, and proportionately very few of them are in my pocket. I know that I feel strong qualms about linking to articles that most of my readers won’t be able to read.

Update: the name of the new venture is Second Wind. They already have a Patreon, a Youtube channel and a Twitch channel. They say they’ll be hosting a livestream today at Noon US Eastern with information on their plans. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that they will be successful! Here’s a link to the stream, for when it goes live.

Chrontendo 63!

Dr. Sparkle has come through once again with the 63rd edition of Chrontendo! It’s the third we’ve linked to from Set Side B (even if, for a while, we incorrectly labeled the previous one as #68, oops).

The games covered by this one are:

Knight Move (Japan only): A puzzle game involving landing a chess knight trying to land on a target square. Apparently this got a later release on PC by Spectrum Holobyte. Wikipedia tells us that the “A. Pazhitonov” listed as the creator on the Famicom version’s title screen is Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris. I cannot speak to that fact’s veracity, but it seems plausible enough. Pajitnov later would be hired by Microsoft to make puzzle games for them around the Windows XP era.

Lamentable US cover art of The Mafat Conspiracy (image from MobyGames)

The Mafat Conspiracy: the sequel to Golgo 13! The US release does its Japanese manga source material a great disservice by not having the grim face of protagonist Duke Togo visible anywhere on the front of the box, instead using extremely generic cover art. In play, it’s very similar to a slightly more competent version of the original, just with a different scenario.

Disney Adventures in the Magic Kingdom: Another of those Capcom Disney games, a glorified minigame collection, and probably the worst of the bunch! We’re a mile away from Ducktales here. As if to confirm the player’s low expectations, trivia questions are part of the game.

Solstice: Isometric platformer of the style well-known around that time in the UK, a very difficult yet respectable exploration game, and probably the best game in this episode. I prefer its SNES sequel Equinox, programmed by the Pickford Brothers, which has a highly distinctive look.

The vibe of Solstice’s print ad is like “we’re gonna make a porno”

The Last Starfighter: This is secretly a renamed port of the Commodore 64 classic Uridium! A little of the bloom is off the rose here, if only because high speed scrolling of the kind you see here is so common on the NES, yet so difficult to accomplish on the Commie. The C64’s distinctive look was heavily influenced by that system’s limitations: it takes some serious programming effort to get the C64 to be able to scroll significant screen data in a frame, enough so that, to do it, you basically have to leave color memory unchanged, since it can’t be relocated like tile definitions can. The NES can do scrolling much more easily than the Commodore 64, and had been doing very colorful fast-scrolling games like the Super Mario series for years, yet the game kept the same nearly-monochrome look as the C64 game. That’s why Uridium got such acclaim in the UK, because scrolling games like it were unknown on the system at the time, while the NES had support for it in the hardware, so it didn’t have nearly the same impact.

Captain Skyhawk: The main things I remember about this, a game which I’ve played and beaten, is it was made by Rare, and that Dave Barry once wrote a column about how much his kid dearly wanted a copy of this game. Dr. Sparkle is pretty hard on this one too, and I think for good reason. This is clearly a game intended to be in the River Raid style, but with elevation. It could have been done as a quasi-flight sim, with targets you have to duck beneath or fly over, but in its design the elevation barely matters, and instead it’s a lot more like a standard vertical shooter. The enemies don’t even cast shadows! Helicopters or ground vehicles alike can be shot if if they were on the same plane. It would have done better if it had either gone all-in on the elevation, maybe tying it to the player’s speed, and having fewer yet smarter enemies that also had elevation; either that, or taking out the elevation completely and making it into a 2D shooter more like Zanac or Raiden. Rare at that time understood the NES hardware better than most developers, and was more than capable technically of going with either approach. But they didn’t.

Then after you have Afterburner-style dogfighting levels, then the point where most players threw down the controller in disgust, when they’re asked to align and dock with a rotating space station. It all resembles a tech demo at Rare that Milton Bradley decided to try to make a few bucks off of selling as a game.

This even made it into the US release

Mechanized Attack: It’s another military-themed SNK action game, like Ikari Warriors, Guerilla War, Iron Tank or P.O.W. This one’s a light gun shooter. The game is most notable for having a debug mode, accessible by a code, with pixelated female nudity. This connects with reports of sexism in the Japanese game industry at the time (link found on Kid Fenris’ blog). The full salacious details of the cheat are up at The Cutting Room Floor.

Horrifying Palamedes box art (image from Wikipedia)

Hatris: Another game designed by Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov, it’s also nowhere near as iconic as Tetris was, but as time has shown us, very little else is. I get the play mixed up with that of Nintendo’s Yoshi puzzle game, perhaps for good reason. Turns out there was an arcade version of this!

Palamedes: Another Tetris-ish generative piece-laying puzzle game, this one with a dice theme. And there was an arcade version of this too!

Hiryu No Ken III: 5 Nin No Ryuu Senshi: Only released in Japan. Dr. Sparkle is quick to let us know right off this isn’t the “Fist of the North Star” Ken, but the Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll Ken. These games are a bit more simulationist (in a sense) in their depiction of martial arts than most beat ’em ups.

SD Hero Soukessen: Taose! Aku No Gundan: Also Japan-only, second in a long series of “super deformed” (basically meaning big headed, small bodied humanoid figures depicted in a cutesy kind of way) robot fighting games. The robots (and tokusatsu characters) are licensed from a variety of media, making this a massive crossover media series that could be seen as an inspiration for the hulking monstrosity that Super Smash Bros. has become. Properties that I recognized from the video are Kamen Raider, Gundam and Ultraman. This one has a fan translation patch.

Chrontendo 63 (Youtube, 1 hour 18 minutes)