
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Presented without comment (1 1/2 minutes).
The Flipside of Gaming
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Presented without comment (1 1/2 minutes).
C.B. Brown is a Youtube maker who has a modest, but not huge, following. Three months ago he made a video about an interesting collection of obscure games, and I know just enough about them to know he’s got really good taste. If you’re looking for hidden gems to play, they’re an excellent place to look.
Here’s the collection, which first went up about three months ago and is 20 minutes long. It covers:
C.A. Brown recently made another video with more really solid recommendations in it, but let’s give that video its own focus, in a few days.
It is not my purpose here to steal any of his thunder, but rather, to give you a sense of whether you might want to click through and see what he has to say, and view the gameplay, which I think will give you a much better idea of whether his picks are worth it. A 20 minute video is a considerable investment of time, but he has helpfully marked his video with chapters and links to each game’s section, so it isn’t hard to navigate. Look and see.
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.
A generation of Windows users spent time productively by running Minesweeper, a standard inclusion with Windows from the days of Windows 3.0 through Windows 7, until they decided that it Must Be Monetized, and switched out for a free-to-play, ad-riddled version of the loathed Microsoft Store, just one of thousands of little crappages that have made up, and continue to comprise, the enshittification of tech.
Well, there are other ways to play Minesweeper that don’t require tithing your attention to the marketing department of Microsoft. An open-source version for many platforms is included in Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection, a collection that’s playable for many platforms including web browsers, and which is still one of the great unknown treasures of the internet. (If you’re running Linux, you might be able to find it in your distribution as Mines.) There’s another free version for Linux and Windows called LibreMines that can be found on Git, and KMines for KDE.
In the past week there’s been released on itch.io a fantasy version called Dragonsweeper, which has several interesting innovations. It was inspired by Hojamaka’s Mamono Sweeper (Japanese), as as Hempuli’s Mamono Mower. Hempuli (the creator of Baba Is You and a whole host of Sokoban-inspired puzzles) also made Cavern Sweeper, which I believe I’ve linked to before.
But probably the ultimate in this category is still the 12-year-old Desktop Dungeons, which is commercial but well worth it, and its 3D remake Desktop Dungeons Rewind.
Every game linked here is worth it. To call one out specifically, Desktop Dungeons has great depths that’ll take you many play sessions to uncover.
All of these games involve hidden terrain that hides things that are dangerous, but let you deduce their position using clues in the squares. Many of them let you fight back against those things, if you manage the level of danger you face. Desktop Dungeons changes that a bit by letting you see monsters freely without danger, but also making unrevealed squares themselves a resource that you must manage, since exploring them helps you up and restores your magic, but at the cost of also healing any monsters you’ve wounded without killing them.
Dragonsweeper is current quite the indie darling. It hides both monsters and mines in the unrevealed squares, although the mines are worth 100 threat points each so their numbers can’t be confused with those of the other monsters. It also has special generation quirks for several of the monster types, and once you understand them it makes the game considerably easier (although, like classic Minesweeper, once in a while you’re still forced into guessing).
There is a complete solved playthrough of Dragonsweeper on itch.io’s Youtube channel (11 minutes), but for a change I’m not going to embed it, as it will probably spoil some of the finer points of playing it, and in a real since, learning how to play a game like Dragonsweeper is the real fun of it, and not just the execution of a strategy that’s handed to you. So go and try it yourself, and don’t sweat the inevitable lost games! You’ll be picking up essential information for when you do start winning, and besides, losing reveals the whole map, and that has much to teach you about how the monsters hide.
You do a daily blog, you plan a post for a day, and sometimes it doesn’t work out. It happens. Today’s post was going to be a romhack but it turns out it didn’t meet my fairly high standards for romhacks. I’m really picky about them. It was a Super Mario World hack with a strong and interesting theme, I was excited about writing about it, then there was a long jump that required bouncing off a flying turtle right in the first level, and that was right after a couple of tight jumps out from beneath two Thwomps with Podoboos jumping all around, then when I finally got by it, there was a room where water was unexpectedly instantly lethal, as if it were spikes. I don’t have time for that.
I play these things to write about them, but I played for fun too, and that kind of business I don’t consider fun, and I don’t think you’d enjoy it either. Games are meant to be fun, not excruciating tests.
I won’t give you the name of the hack because it’s one of hundreds that are like that. I have nothing against its creator, artistically it didn’t look bad. It just was a pain to play.
So instead, have a 2017 interview on Atari Compendium, with long-time Atari Games programmer Michael Albaugh. It’s all text, but I’ve been meaning to ease up on the number of Youtube videos I link. Don’t worry, I’m still going to bring you tons of them, because for worse or even worse, there’s a lot of gaming content there, and Google certainly likes pointing me to it, may them and their “AI Summaries” boil in oil.
Albaugh played the original commercial arcade game Computer Space in a Sears department store in 1974, soon after joined with Atari Inc. while Nolan Bushnell was still at the helm, and stuck with them through to 2000, just a few years before WMS shut them down. The first game he wrote code for was Pool Shark, a black-and-white machine released soon after Tank 8. His last (according to MobyGames) was Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, and support on San Francisco Rush: 2049! He worked on Atari Football, Marble Madness and Rampart. In games, there are very few careers longer than that, and I’m glad that he is telling his story.
I’d like especially to point out his concluding statement:
Cliche, but it went from a craft with small, tight groups, like a local theater company, to more like Hollywood, with giant teams and management structure that would make the Pentagon swoon. And of course a real hit-driven, cautious agenda. In short, no thanks. There are still interesting things going in the demo scene, indie games, and interactive fiction, though.
Interview with Michael Albaugh (www.ataricompendium.com)
Back when Nintendo was a little freer about licensing their games and characters out to other companies, Hudson Soft released for Japanese home computers a strange variation of Mario Bros. (different from their strange variation of Super Mario Bros.), called Punch Ball Mario Bros. It’s pretty strange.
An example of its strangeness, recently pointed out on Bluesky by Mario obscurities blog Supper Mario Broth, and boosted by Ars Technica’s Kyle Orland. It turns a simple scenario in which two plumbers try to clear pests out of a sewer into the story of humankind’s rise as a tool-using species. Image from Supper Mario Broth and text pasted from the Mario Wiki. Check this out!
いつの頃だろうか、人類が道具を持つようになったのは……。初めは動物
の骨、石のかけらを利用した単純なものであった。人類は英知をふるい、道 具を改良していった。それが、火を使い、風を利用し、そして今では原子力 をも駆使し、高度な文明を築き始めたのである。 だが、ある一方ではまだ石を利用しているだけの人々もいるのである。彼 らはどのようにして獲物をとり、外敵から身を守るのであろうか。彼らは強 力なジャンプ力と石の玉を持っているだけである。それをうまく利用し、彼 らの身を守って欲しい。 ここに、そういった人々のうちの2人を紹介しよう。そう、彼らの名前は マリオとルイージ。彼らが高度な文明を身につけるのはいつになるのだろうか。
At some point, humans gained the ability to use tools… At first, they were simple things using the bones of animals and fragments of rock. Using their wisdom, humans improved their tools. Harnessing fire, wind, and nowadays even atomic energy, they began to build up a sophisticated culture.
On the other hand, however, there are people who still only use stone. How do they catch game and defend themselves from outsiders? Using only their strong jumping power and stone spheres. They use those skillfully to defend themselves.
Here, we introduce two such people. It seems their names are Mario and Luigi. Will they ever learn about sophisticated culture?
Will Mario and Luigi ever learn about sophisticated culture, or are they the same as the lowly, technology-hating hedgehog, bandicoot, and bone-headed caveman? Time will tell.
The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games I check out, and please reach out if you would like me to cover your’s. All games shown are either press keys or demo plays of indie games.
0:00 Intro
0:14 Astronimo
1:43 Yeetus
2:47 Roots of Yggrdrasil
5:25 Sticky Business
6:17 Ludde
7:33 Kapital Punishment 22XX
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”
Here’s something unusual around these parts, a comparison, from Sega Lord X, between different home ports of Sega’s Virtua Racing arcade game (19 minutes).
Virtua Racing was released to arcades at a time when polygonal racing titles were the province of Namco and Atari Games, and it was pretty astounding at the time. The efforts to make hope ports of it were largely noble efforts. The arcade game got its 30fps render rate by using a bunch of powerful (and expensive) hardware. The Genesis version cost $100, and used a Super FX-like custom co-processor, but even then could only get up to 15fps.
The star of contemporary efforts has to be the 32X version, which almost compares to the Saturn version, which wasn’t developed by Sega. It doesn’t surpass the Saturn release, but it’s competent. Here’s a side-by-side comparison (7 1/2 minutes). It’s kind of hard to believe the Genesis is producing the footage on the left side of the video, even if it is being heavily supported.
In arcades, Virtua Racing, while released in different models and cabinets, was the only game by that name that Sega would make, although the Daytona and Sega GT series would hold aloft the waving polygonal banner. More recently a decent 60fps port was made by M2 for the Nintendo Switch as part of the Sega Ages series.