The Flipside of Gaming
This is a double indie game review of Forza Polpo and Doomblade, both played with press keys provided by the developer.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Forza Polpo
7:38 Doomblade
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 demoscene is a rich source of awesome, and at times ridiculous, imagery and sounds. Once in a while we sift through it to find things to entertain you with.
Demos aren’t necessarily out to wow you by pushing a computer’s hardware to its absolute limits. Sometimes one will just present something that was obviously (to people who understand the platform) challenging to do, but is fun for its own sake.
La Linea is a series of short films made for television created by Italian animator Osvaldo Cavandoli. They may be familiar to 80s kids who watched a show called The Great Space Coaster, as they were in regular rotation as segments on that show. They feature an expressive and excitable character, known as “Mr. Linea,” who speaks gibberish and has a variety of adventures, despite the fact that he and his world are represented (with some cheating) as contortions of a single horizontal line. The character often speaks to the off-screen animator, asking for various items, devices and, occasionally, other characters to interact with. Every cartoon ends with the main character falling off or through the line in some way. Some of them are collected on Youtube. Here is an example (2 1/2 minutes):
In 2002, the demogroup Breeze made a tribute to Cavandoli’s work in the form of a full-length La Linea cartoon running on a Commodore 64. It doesn’t have the distinctive music or the gibberish, and there’s no photorealistic hand that reaches in to draw parts of the scene, but the style is otherwise faithful to the original. It is a remake of La Linea #10. Please, enjoy (3 1/2 minutes)!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
How surprising is it that nothing related to Silvagunner has yet appeared in these electric pages? Their reaction to “7 Grand Dad,” a Chinese bootleg of The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino and Hoppy that replaces Fred Flintstone’s face with that of Mario brought the fanbase a lot of joy that, truthfully, I cannot say much about, because I am not a regular follower of Silvagunner.
But a number of people did collaborate to create this “ending” to the game, which is amazingly full of references.
The URL makes it seem like it’s going to be entirely devoted to that specific classic arcade game, but lately it’s concerned itself with two other topics, both pretty interesting. Here’s a link to the site, for ease of access.
Most of the posts by weight recently have concerned the lawsuit by Billy Mitchell to force Twin Galaxies to retain his scores in Donkey Kong, which as the evidence mounts up against him, much of it recounted on the blog, became increasingly unlikely to prevail. According to the blog, there are several major discrepancies in the footage he provided of his scores, that made it evident that they were produced in MAME, which for various reasons disqualifies them for the category he was aiming for. That evidence is recounted on this subpage, but among the most telling is that Donkey Kong’s software draws its levels in a way that interacts with the CRT redraw to produce, on arcade hardware, a couple of frames where the boards are incompletely drawn in a distinctive way, that is not evident in Mitchell’s tapes.
By this point Mitchell’s name seems to be mud in classic gaming circles, so presumably coverage of this topic is nearing its end on their blog. That’s probably for the best, as their other major beat is covering gaming challenges that Twin Galaxies offers bounties on, like escaping Midgar in FFVII without using Materia, or getting as many Gold Skulltulas as a player can in Ocarina of Time without taking damage. That’s the kind of gaming geekery we can get behind!
The weekly indie game showcases highlight all the indie games we play here on the channel. Games shown were either demos or press key submissions.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Classic Sport Driving
1:36 Voltage High Society
3:35 Blastronaut
5:59 Garlic
8:16 Spellbook Demonslayers
10:53 Mech Shuffle
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”
Displaced Gamers’ excellent Being The Code series on Youtube looks into what causes Nintendo’s NES Tetris to crash at really really high levels, over level 150. In the process, it goes through how that game displays and adds scores together. Have a look (22 minutes)!
Just a quick post today, last year user PacManPlus made available free downloads of some of their Atari 7800 remakes of arcade games. For people who aren’t in the scene this might be of limited interest, but these games were formerly sold commercially on AtariAge’s website and not generally available for free. Atari 7800 emulation is, of course, easily available in RetroArch, but this page on the EmuGen Wiki lists some standalone emulators.
One of the included games is a game that is very rarely ported, Baby Pac-Man, because it contains a significant pinball component. The pinball physics in the remake are uncommonly good! The Youtube account The Atari Network reviewed it with gameplay video so you can see for yourself:
Baby Pac-Man isn’t the only game in the collection, but its especially notable. I haven’t even had a chance to look at the others yet, but there’s some interesting titles in there.
The remakes were originally sold commercially on cartridges, but they were recently delisted and removed from sale, so PacManPlus was kind enough to make them available for anyone to download and play. I for one appreciate his kind generosity!
PacManPlus’ Atari 7800 Arcade Ports (atariage.com)
This is a double review of Super Mombo Quest and Dave the Diver, both played with retail keys.
0:00 Intro
00:15 Super Mombo Quest
4:30 Dave the Diver
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”
‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.
It’s the shortest @Play column ever!
What is happening here? This is the newest Mystery Dungeon game, Shiren the Wander: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island. It’s actually a great deal of fun, a sharply-designed entry in the long-running classic roguelike series.
This isn’t “roguelike” like half the games on Steam. This is a true roguelike, even if it doesn’t have ASCII graphics: a turn-based RPG with substantial randomized elements, that demands that you live (or not) by your tactics, strategy and wits. I don’t begrudge others appropriation of the term, but it does mean I have to now use the qualifier classic when I want to discuss the old style. Really, it’s better to call games not in the original style roguelite.
The dungeon depicted is Heart of Serpentcoil Island, the traditional end megadungeon that most Mystery Dungeon games have. After finishing the “main” dungeon, and playing a lot of extra bonus dungeons that each show off a specific element of the game’s engine, there’s the megadungeon: a 99-level gauntlet of terror where you enter at level 1. None of the items you’ve collected throughout the rest of the game will help you here. You must start from scratch with just a riceball. You don’t even have a weapon or a shield to begin with: everything you have, you must find along the way.
The game doesn’t pull many punches in this dungeon, as you can see. At experience level 1, every space in a room (other than the entrances: that’s a secret tip for you!) could contain a game-ending trap. The only consolation is that they’re really quite rare! I was exceptionally unlucky in this run.
Additionally, the uses of many of the items, the scrolls, grasses, pots, bracelets and incense found in the dungeon, are unknown: their effects must be discovered, through means both blatant and subtle, for yourself. Some of them will be essential to your survival, let alone success; others, like the Ill-fated Seed, you really want to avoid using.
It’s a ludicrous test of knowledge and skill, and a fitting capstone to the game. If the experience shown in the video seems like it might put you off, at least it shows conclusively that the game isn’t taking it easy on you. If you win, and it can be won, it’s a great accomplishment. I’m still working on this one myself; I’ll let you know how it goes.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
This one comes from a fairly deep subculture that I can’t completely explain here, partly because I don’t understand it all myself. I feel like there is something in the origin of creator/website/video maker/memester/online shop itemLabel, some necessary context, that I don’t yet know. But they make fun videos, one of them intrudes upon our territory, and I need something for today’s post. Full steam ahead!
Here is what I can tell you. Peepy is a heavily memeable plush toy, that its makers insist, probably for safety and legal reasons, is a piece of art not a plush toy. It looks kind of like a fluffy peanut with googly eyes and a round beak. Like this:
There are a variety of style of Peepys (Peepies?). Peepy is one of a number of character toys artworks sold by itemLabel that are kind of friends to each other? Or not? The videos seem to indicate that they are part of a shared universe, but don’t actually create much of a shared lore. Explanations I’ve seen say that they’re written to suggest a shared lore without there actually being one, in a sense that people familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos will immediately understand: any solid connections are left for the viewer to invent.
Peepy and acquaintances are the subject of posts on itemLabel’s Youtube account, TikTok account, Instagram account, and Twitter account (link purposely omitted). The only two solid things we know about Peepy’s place, within the greater Peepiverse, are that Peepy loves to eat peanuts (makes sense, they are what they eat) and to commit crimes (wait what?). Its description on the characters page of itemLabel’s website reads: “A peepy thrives in the shadows, using its wit to stun enemies. Its ability to steal may surprise you. It loves peanuts and will commit any heinous act to get them.” This description belongs to a creature that, I remind you, looks like this:
But let’s set all of this aside and concern ourselves with the burning question: how does one care for a Peepy? To our rescue comes Professor Item! Professor Item tells us about Peepy’s habits and feeding through a video where he lives in what seems to be a portable gaming system like a Nintendo DS. In fact, he looks a fair bit like a 3D version of the Professor from the cult classic game Contact by Grasshopper Interactive, and has a similar kind of personality.
Without further ado, here is Professor Item to explain how Peepies are to be provided for:
Don’t have enough Peepy in your life? It’s not game-related, but let’s relax the rules slightly this once. Here is their theme song, written and sung by Japanese musician Emamouse:
And here is the incredibly trippy animation Peepy’s Secret, which features several other of itemLabel’s characters. If you can understand the words you have better ears than me.
It’s a bit upsetting to see that MobyGames is going a bit more for-profit, and now offers a trail Pro membership account. Usually this kind of move means fewer features and a degraded experience for those not sending in their dimes. The trial rate is $5 a month, which seems both high ($60 a year?) and low (how much revenue will this bring in given the small number of people with a paying need for MobyGames information?).
MobyGames has long been a useful resource for game research and images, but was recently bought by Atari, which is not the same as the old Atari, although as time passes that distinction becomes slowly less relevant? The company calling itself Activision has slightly more continuity with the Activision that was founded by ex-Atari developers to sell VCS/2600 games, but very little of it remains I’m sure, and they passed through a phase where they had renamed themselves Mediagenic, which worked out badly. The CEO that pulled Activision out of their nosedive, as it turns out, is Bobby Kotlick. There’s a name that’s been in the news lately and on which I will not comment at this time!
So, it seems inescapable that Atari is behind this move by MobyGames, to try to get the site to pay for itself. I honestly don’t think there’s much of a market for these features unless they make the site downright painful to use for free users, and how many people are willing to pay for full MobyGames access? When people (myself included!) contributed to MobyGames all those years, did they know they were merely building up Value for later Purchase? Will this turn into yet another Gracenote situation? Does anyone now remember what Gracenote did?
Well, this is speculation on my part. Nothing necessarily means MobyGames will soon be ruined. But it is a pattern that’s happened many times before, so let us keep our eyes open. At the very least, it seems like a ripe opportunity for someone to create a new game cataloging site. Me? No no, it can’t be me, I’m sorry, my brain is too full of things, and I have this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side….
For this perceptive podcast, I interviewed self-taught indie developer Lee Easson about working on his first game Odd Infinitum. We discussed what it’s like to learn game dev today and how that has changed over the years and the challenges it brings to indie developers.
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”
