The Flipside of Gaming
A double review of the games Planet Cube: Edge and Sorry We’re Open played with press keys provided by the developer.
0:00 Intro
00:18 Planet Cube: Edge
3:42 Sorry We’re Open
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”
One year after the release of Super Mario Bros., and just five after Donkey Kong. SMB was the game that showed the world that Miyamoto was a game design superstar. Endo designed Tower of Druaga and Xevious for Namco, two games that are still fairly unknown in the U.S. but were extraordinarily influential in Japan.
Endo: Also Wrecking Crew, that game feels great. The graphics are so pretty. And who knew Mario was so strong. I love Mario.
from an interview from Famimaga magazine, Feb 1986, translated by Shmuplations
Miyamoto: When we made Donkey Kong, I dubbed Mario “Mister Video”, and I told everyone how I want him to be used in Nintendo games for many, many years to come. You know, I struggled a bit with his design. In order to show his nose better I gave him a mustache, and to make his running animation easier to understand, I gave him those overalls…
The full interview was translated by the (looks at thesarus) always magnificent Shmuplations, and is up on their site.
Masanobu Endo x Shigeru Miyamoto – 1986 Developer Interview (shmuplations.com)
The narrator has a moderate case of Youtuberitis (symptoms evident: over-gesturing with hands, annoying shtick; absent: ending sentences in an undertone like they were John Cleese playing a TV presenter), but it’s still an interesting and even informative video about making software, and hardware, doing things they really weren’t designed to do.
One piece of the puzzle for getting this insane project working was Linux on Wii; another piece was the fact that the Wii and late versions of Mac OS Classic both use PowerPC processors. It doesn’t work perfectly, but as they say, it’s amazing that the Nintendog talks at all.
The Lego Star Wars games (in fact, almost all of the Lego video properties) are very funny, even though they’re not all made by the came people. The games are made by Traveler’s Tales, the movies by Warner Animation, and the made-for-video productions by at least one separate group. And yet, they all share a certain light-hearted and irreverent sensibility that I find really appealing.
Star Wars has a lot of character deaths, but the Lego games do a good job of making them fun instead of tragic, as befitting their style. In this compilation of scenes from Skywalker Saga, note particularly how Darth Maul “dies”:
All Major Deaths in Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (Youtube, 12 minutes)
Randall Munroe’s popular and (by now) venerable geek webcomic XKCD has been known to make “interactive posts” sometimes, little apps or even games that readers can play with. Lately there’s been two in particular of these, both focused towards space exploration: Gravity, made to promote Munroe’s recent book What If? 2, and Escape Speed, created in celebration of SpaceX’s recent launch, or at least celebrating the idea of it, since its actual fact turned out to not be so great.
Both games are much larger than they seem to be at first, offering a vast amount of void to whoosh around and entertaining planets to find within all that space. Gravity is mostly just for exploration, while Escape Speed is more like an actual game, starting your ship off with very modest capabilities that grow in power as you collect upgrades, which are gray circles with stars on them. You can find at least one upgrade on or near most objects out in space, and sometimes several.
There’s a lot to find, especially in Escape Speed, which also has a lot of minor collectables to locale, which it’ll track between runs. Escape Speed even has a couple of objectives to complate: locating the Hyperdrive, which requires finding out what happened to the map of Boston on Subway Planet, and eventually escaping from the huge crystal sphere that contains the game universe. Both games have enough going on that they have giant pages on the Explain XKCD fan wiki revealing their secrets. In case you can’t be bothered to discover them yourself, here’s the one for Gravity, and here’s the one for Escape Speed.
XKCD 2765 Escape Speed – FAQ
Each indie showcase highlights the many indie games we play here on the channel, if you would like to submit a game for a future one please reach out. All games shown were either press keys or demos.
0:00 Water Logged
00:59 Dungeon Deathball
2:40 Abriss
4:41 Cat Cafe Manager
6:08 Map of Materials
7:36 Catie in Meowmeowland
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”
Another work of Babarageo, Karate Great riffs on Kung Fu, known as Spartan X in Japan in which you have to take down hordes of mooks, and the occasional boss, using karate moves. This revision of the idea gives you only one control, an attack that’s activated by clicking/tapping the game screen. This causes your leggy karate lady to swiftly knock basic opponents right off the screen, and inflict damage on bosses both mini and major. Further, if you can hit four opponents in quick succession, she’ll switch to some gun fu, pulling out a pink pistol and just blasting following opponents. Why doesn’t she use the gun all the time isn’t explained; it only shows up as the fifth through eighth hits of a combo. And if you can get in a ninth hit… well I don’t want to spoil it, but it makes short work of most bosses.
All of these moves make K-lady pretty overpowered for most of the game! It isn’t until the last couple of stages where you face opponents where just clicking away at the screen rapidly won’t suffice. The last boss, an evil CEO, has an attack that can’t be deflected by the normal means, and will probably stymie you until you come to realize that you have to learn how to trigger the combo-ending move to thwart it.
It’s short but fun, as good web games should be!
Karate Great (web, $0)
This one’s coming to you from some years back. Ginormo Sword, by Babarageo back in 2008, a Flash game that’s playable once again via Ruffle. It is one of a small, but gratifying, genre of games where you start small and just get bigger and bigger and bigger, and part of the fun is just seeing to what extremes the game supports you going.
Games like Dungeons & Dragons pay at least lip service to realism, less so now than its origins, but it’s still there. There are limits, both theoretical and practical, to how far characters can gain levels, can gain statistics, can gain hit points, and that makes sense. For even Superman, when it comes right down to it, is still a roughly humanoid creature of a bit over six feet in height. If he were in the same comic universe as Galactus, it would defy credibility if this vast being were stopped by what to it was an amoeba.
Ginormo Sword is what you get if you peel back these limits, and basically say, if you can earn the cash for it? You can do it. There are limits, but the game goes to ridiculous extremesbefore you run into them. It’s basically an “incremental game,” like a clicker, but in a different format. See for yourself.
Ginormo Sword (browser playable, $0)
The eternal struggle: schools want to give students computers on which to do assignments and participate in remote learning, and students want to use those machines to have fun doing things other than schoolwork.
Fizz over on Metafilter, who regularly makes great gaming posts points us to a Vice article on the conflict, and a Youtube channel of tutorials, made by kids, for kids to use to get past software blockers on school-provided laptops. It shows that school remains a place for kids to learn valuable lessons, just not always the ones that administrators want them to learn, or in the ways they want them to learn them.
I mean, check out how awesome this kid is:
The weekly indie showcase highlights the many games we play here on the channel, if you would like to submit a title please reach out.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Sephonie
3:38 Dopemine Arena
5:12 Backpack Hero
8:08 Astro Ace
9:07 Quijote: Quest for Glory
11:10 Princess Farmer
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”
The Pico-8 is the most popular fantasy game console by a wide margin. We’ve already linked to Josh “cortex” Millard’s Ennuigi, which is notable enough to have its own Wikipedia entry.
Ennuigi was more of an extended joke than a game, though, while Pico-8 Moon Patrol is no joke; it’s substantially harder than the original arcade game, putting you up against harder obstacles earlier. Sometimes it doesn’t feel fair when a flying saucer drops a bomb at such an angle that neither speeding up nor slowing down could have avoided it in time, although it’s possible, in this version, to shoot down the bomb before it strikes you.
Give it a try! This video is my best run to date, getting through the first three sectors:
pahammond’s Moon Patrol for Pico-8 (lexoffle.com)
Phobia on Youtube shows off a ton of glitches in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Right off the bat they mention that, using these glitches, you can basically just win the game at any time by warping inside a cave wall, finding Ganon’s room in the big connected underworld map, then going one screen up from there, but then they go back and demonstrate not only how to do that, but also how to do a ton of other things.
Some interesting facts revealed, besides that all the dungeons and caves are part of a single map, is that the caves count as their own dungeon, the number of keys there is set to -1, a sentinel value used to hide the key display, but which also functions as 255 keys if you ever encounter a locked door, and that all the Big Keys are the same item, just tracked separately for each dungeon. Meaning, if you can get to a dungeon room with the game thinking it’s a cave, you essentially have infinite keys, and finding a Big Key lets you unlock all the big chests while there.
There’s lots of other little details presented in an accessible manner as well, so if this kind of thing is interesting to you, as it is to me, there’s 35 minutes of it there for you on a plate.
Glitches you can do in Zelda: A Link to the Past (Phobia on Youtube, 45 minutes)
