The Commodore 64 was, for its time, quite a wonder, an inexpensive home computer with 64K of RAM and excellent for its time graphics and sound capabilities. Sadly, it came with one of the more limited versions of Microsoft BASIC out there.
Microsoft BASIC had its strengths, but many of them were not a good match for its hardware. The C64 had no commands to take advantage of any of its terrific features. To do nearly anything on the machine besides PRINTing and manipulating data, you had to refer to a small number of cryptic-yet-essential commands: POKE for putting values into arbitrary memory addresses, PEEK for reading values out of them, READ and DATA to read in lists of numbers representing machine language routines, and SYS to activate them.
And getting the values to do those things required obtaining and poring over manuals and the venerable C64 Programmer’s Reference Guide. Even then, Microsoft BASIC was notably slow, especially when doing work with numbers, due to its dogged insistence of converting all values, including integers, into floating point before doing any math on them. So while BASIC supported integers, which required less memory to store, actually slowed the machine down due to the need to convert to and from floating point whenever an operation needed to be performed on them. This doesn’t even begin to get into the many inefficiencies of being an interpreted language.
Vision BASIC, an upcoming commercial compiled language for the Commodore 64, looks to remedy many of these faults. The above video is a nearly 40-minute explainer and demonstration of the system. It requires the purchase of a memory expansion unit in order to be used on a physical machine, but it can produce executable code that can be run on a stock C64 as it came out of the box.
It’s not free, and at $59 for the basic package it may seem a little high for a system for developing software on a 40-year-old computer, but that price includes the software on floppy disk and a USB drive. It’s certainly capable, and runs much faster than many other compiled languages on the system. It’s definitely something to look into for people looking to make games on the system without digging deep into assembly, and if you have a desire to do that it has a built-in assembler for producing in-line machine code too! It is an intriguing new option for Commodore development.
I’m a big fan of the work of Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster, who regularly finds the most interesting things to write about. Where she finds the time or energy I really don’t know. Maybe she eats batteries.
TwinBee began as kind of the sibling game of Gradius, and had a similar, if somewhat less prominent, development in the years following its birth. It started as a kind of clone of Namco’s Xevious, which, as Jeremy Parish reminds us, was a lot more popular, and influential, in Japan than it was here.
TwinBee brought a number of advancements over Xevious: fun cartoony graphics, catchy music, two-player simultaneous co-op play, and, a thing that was very new to video games at the time, a powerup system. Not just picking up icons to increase capability either, but a skill-based system that involved juggling Bells with your shots until they changed color. It was a kind of counterpart to Gradius‘ more strategic system, but both games let players pick which abilities they wanted without just letting them jump right to full power.
TwinBee got three sequels on Famicom, including the game’s only official release in the US (other than a couple of Wii Virtual Console releases much later), renamed to Stinger. And all was well, for a little while.
Then, Konami decided that what TwinBee needed was a reboot, long, long before such things became ubiquitous. They restaged the setting to some time after the original games, and introduced teenage cousins Light and Pastel, and the infant Mint, to be the new pilots of the TwinBee ships. They kicked off this period with the arcade game Detana! TwinBee, which ramped all of the things that were special about the original arcade game way, way up.
TwinBee is one of those hidden bits of classic Konami lore that you have to know about to understand why people are fond of that period of the company’s history. It’s a far cry from the modern-day pachinko purveyor. Particularly WinBee pilot Pastel was a very popular character at the time, spawning a mini industry of products devoted to her.
Konami experimented with a number of alternate genres for TwinBee around this time. The best-known of these in the west is probably Rainbow Bell Adventure, a Sonic-style platformer for the Super Famicom/SNES that did see release in Europe, although in a degraded form. RBA is its own kettle of worms that we’ll probably talk about some other time. What matters to us is another of these experiments, and the subject of Kimimi’s article, TwinBee RPG, a self-insert kind of game thing, along the lines of the Game Boy Grandia game, or, on television, Captain N: The Game Master in the US, or Bug tte Honey in Japan.
These are all properties where one or more audience surrogate characters are warped through their television into Video Game World, and have Adventures. Indeed, the isekai style has long been with us. (Can flat-screens can serve as portals to gameworld, or does it have to be CRTs? You should probably check your TV’s settings for portal compatibility.)
Here’s an extra, the first stage music to Detana! TwinBee, in all its amazing catchiness, composed by Michiru Yamane, who also wrote the music for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night:
Today is the launch date of Unexplored 2! (Steam) The sequel to one of the more interesting roguelites of recent years, the original simulated a game world with a lot of depth, and played a lot like a real-time version of a classic roguelike with updated graphics.
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Sal Romano at Gematsu has the top 30 sales data from Mat 16-22, and Alana Hauges at NintendoLife notes that the top 10 games are all Switch titles! In fact, 27 of the top 30 are Switch titles! The top seller is Nintendo Switch Sports. The three holdouts are Konami’s eBASEBALL Powerful Pro Baseball 2022 on PS4, FromSoftware’s Elden Ring on PS4, and SIE’s Horizon Forbidden West on PS5.
Back at NintendoLife, Kate Gray has a thoughtful article about using games to promote mental health. They speak to two representatives of the non-profit Take This, which is devoted to decreasing stigma and increasing support for mental health in games.
An interesting thing about blog posts is when the title on the page is different from the title in the header. Thus we can see that an alternate title of David Grossman’s article for Inverse, “You need to play the most overlooked horror game of all time on Switch ASAP,” is “You need to play the most Castlevania game on Switch ASAP.” Kind of gives the game away? The game in question is Castlevania Bloodlines, BTW.
It’s probably worth noting that it costs more than you’d think. In that respect, it’s a good match for the titles want out of Square Enix. There might not be much to gain from other companies copying it.
We live in a golden age of game jams, thousands of people every month make little games in absurdly short amounts of times, and surprisingly often those games are even interesting! What that says about the nature of game creation is very interesting, but not the subject here. That would be Godot Wild Jam (itch.io), a monthly themed and judged jam where the thread of continuity is the use of Godot, the amazingly small yet feature-packed free and open source game development system.
Since it’s monthly, and I’m writing this three weeks ahead of time, I don’t really know who’ll win the one currently in the offing. The previous jam as of this writing was won by Stranded on Ice. You can look through all the entries on Godot Wild Jam 44’s itch page, or ALL the entries throughout the jam’s history by browsing through itch’s #godotwildjam tag.
From the site: “Definition: A gaming dark pattern is something that is deliberately added to a game to cause an unwanted negative experience for the player with a positive outcome for the game developer.”
I remember when I was first writing about roguelikes at late, lamented GameSetWatch, it was right around the time of the rise of mobile gaming. It would bring video games to a whole under-served audience, and it did! It would become industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and it did that too! And it would all do it fairly, taking nothing from poor players while granting extra perks to wealthy ones who would just pay them a little money, a microtransaction*, to justify their outlay, and, well….
Mobile games are fun, and many of them are inexpensive, at least at first. But frequently, and especially with the whole “free to play” genre, they are full of tricks to try to get you to shell out cash for advantages. A certain nominal fee might be appropriate, but most aren’t in it for a simply nominal fee. Interesting and/or important features will turn out to be locked behind the “premium currency,” which at first seems plentiful but before long turns very scarce unless you pony up with the cash money dollas.
These games want to find themselves a few big whales to be their sugar parents, and at times it seems that they are the true audiences that they chase, with us ordinary plebs left to soak our heads. It’s a lucre-seeking design style that has become synonymous with an entire genre, and it could be argued has done real harm to the whole field of mobile gaming.
Everyone needs to earn a living, but it rankles to be used as the bricks on their road to their pot of gold, especially when the necessity of that premium currency is obscured at the start of the game. DarkPattern.games lays out how these games try to get their fingers into your wallet, and points an accusing finger at those titles that rely on these tricks.
It also points the way to games that don’t. They may cost a bit more up-front, but at least you won’t be nagged repeatedly during your time with them to give them just a little more cash, just a little more, that’s all they need, just a little more cash man, they can stop any time, any time they want….
* “Microtransaction” is one of those terms that causes my blood pressure to rise. Who now remembers that the term was originally coined to mean payments of a dime or less, maybe even less than a penny, such as to pay for access to a news article? Now we’re beset with paywalls, the things microtransactions were supposed to save us from, while the term has been appropriated by all these sharks? I mean to tell you, it makes all my neurons sparkle with a communist glimmer.
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Let’s sort these by site:
NintendoLife
Alana Hauges:
Playable Build Of Cancelled N64 Game ‘SimCopter 64‘ Discovered. It was reported on Reddit, and the buyer was 707northbayer. They’ve expressed interest in having it dumped and preserved, yay! The game was developed with the prospect of it being able to share data with an also-canned N64 version of SimCity. While it looks a little different, in play it is said to be very similar to the PC version made by Maxis.
Nintendo Switch Getting Major 2022 Game Late. It’s Lord of the Rings: Gollum. Again, no need to be coy about the title. Sheesh! Article also contains the mandatory description of what The Lord of the Rings is, as if that knowledge hasn’t been inescapable for over a decade now.
Ars Technica
Kyle Orland:
Are we on the verge of an 8K resolution breakthrough in gaming? Oh please no. There are 8K TVs already on the market, but they cost like $30,000. At least one TV maker is planning 8K console support, at a resolution of 7680×4320. Won’t this quadruple display lag? Why even bother if you don’t have a gigantic screen? You humans will be the death of me.
Henry Stockdale: Review of Kao the Kangaroo. It’s a modern remake of a Dreamcast-exclusive platformer in the N64 style. It’s rated 7/10, called “refreshingly straightforward,” and is available for PS5, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox X & S, Switch and PC. It can be completed in about 7-8 hours, similar in length to other indie 3D platformers like A Hat in Time. Pretty nice!
Rebekah Valentine: Valve Responds to #SaveTF2, Says It’s Working on Improvements. SaveTF2 is a Twitter hashtag of people complaining that the Team Fortress 2 online play experience has been ruined by prevalent bots. They have a point. Valve actually responded to it, surprising many including me. It is one of the few times they’ve acknowledge the long-lived team combat game since 2020. To think the source of hundreds of memes would be left to decay to this extent. I mean, it’s not like Valve is releasing many other games at the moment.
Nintendo
From an unknown writer, their Ask the Developer series talkes to the developers of Nintendo Switch Sports. Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4
And the rest….
Eurogamer’s Ishraq Subhan: Reggie Fils-Aimé believes games industry “woefully behind” in embracing diversity. Two bits from the article: “For me as a Black man with my particular skin tone, hair, curls and everything else, it’s difficult to make a character look like me, and it shouldn’t be.” Fils-Aimé used an annecdote of his first E3 debut for Nintendo, where he was mistaken for security because he was a tall Black man in a suit.
Video Games Chronicle’s Andy Robinson: Sony’s classic PlayStation games on PS Plus appear to be 50hz – even in non-PAL regions. First party PS1 games, and a few 3rd party titles, available as part of the PlayStation Plus service appear to be based on their PAL versions, running at slower framerates. The reason the slower versions were used could be related to their language options, which would make supporting these games in multiple territories simpler. So far the games are only available in Asian markets, leaving it uncertain if this issue will affect games released in other territories.
Roguelikeliteish stuff:
The Verge’s Ash Parrish: No Man’s Sky’s newest expedition turns it into a roguelike. The update’s called “Leviathan.” In this case “roguelike” it means it has permadeath, resetting progress after death, but with some elements contributing to persistant progression between attempts.
And finally, GoNintendo’s rawmeatcowboy informs us that PAC-MAN Museum+ replaces multiple members of PAC-MAN’s family. Pac-Jr. replaced with Pac-Boy! Little Pac-Baby replaced with Pac-Sis! Dogpac Chomp Chomp replaced with “Pac-Buddy!” The reason probably being Namco doesn’t completely own the rights to some of these characters, and doesn’t want to license them. Particularly, GCC created Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man Jr., Bally/Midway created Baby Pac-Man, and Hanna-Barbera created Chomp Chomp. Professor Pac remains, probably because Namco doesn’t realize the character was created for a Bally/Midway game!
It’s Sunday again! Congratulations for making it to this late day and week.
Since you survived to this point, let’s relax and look at a couple of episodes of Unskippable, venerable web comedy group LoadingReadyRun’s riff project of video game cutscenes, formerly published on The Escapist.
There are 198 of these in the playlist, so let’s just do a couple for now. Above is the opening of everyone’s favorite embodiment of suffering, Dark Souls.
Probably because of the litigious propensities of gigantic megalithic corporations, their mocking of the cutscenes of the Kingdom Hearts games are not on the list. Since Unskippable is no longer hosted from The Escapist’s site itself, these are survived only by the random uploads of fans. One of those is here, for the HD release of Kingdom Hearts, in all of its manifest ridiculousness:
Audacity Games is Activision co-founder, not to mention the creator of Pitfall! and A Boy and His Blob, David Crane, along with former Activision designers Garry and Dan Kitchen. They’re getting back into the games business with a new Atari VCS/2600 title now available, after three years of development: Circus Convoy!
With hardware acceleration, lots of crazy tricks are possible, as demonstrated in the recent post here on homebrew VCS carts. David Crane himself helped pioneer this approach with his seminal Pitfall II: Lost Caverns, whose original VCS version used a special chip to help make possible its many tricks. Well, Circus Convoy is notable in that it doesn’t use such tricks! It doesn’t use “hardware acceleration,” although I presume it still uses tricks like bank switching and additional RAM.
Take a look at the features and play guide pages on their website, and if it looks interesting to you and you still have a working Atari, maybe buy a cart? The prices do seem a bit high for a new VCS game in 2022, with the cheapest offerings at $55-60. But I’m sure there are hardcore VCS enthusiasts out there who are interested.
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Scott Hayden at Road To VR notes that a VR roguelike called “OUTLIER,” all-caps, has been cancelled, with a reason given that might seem unusual: they overestimated demand. They also say that they underestimated the complexity of the roguelike genre, which I can certainly sympathize with. It’s being remove from the Steam store. People who bought the game on Steam Early Access can either keep it or ask for a refund. I wonder if someday having a notable delisted project in your Steam library might be seen as a mark of status, in some circles?
And long-time Boinger David Pescovitz presents a demo for a failed 1982 educational technology program with the name Wired In, that entertaining in its early 80s way. It has clips of Bill Murray providing some entertaining moments, and a tongue-in-cheek PSA from Lily Tomlin about the dangers of Pac-Man addiction.
Grog‘s subtitle is “The Reimagined Original Roguelike Game,” which sounds like it could have been an abandoned acronym. It’s made by Dr. Thomas Biskup, creator of the classic roguelike game ADOM, who played Rogue on an old PDP at Roguelike Celebration back in 2018. Your default name is Brak, which is probably a reference to the creation of fantasy author John Jakes, but it’s possible to amuse oneself by imagining Zorak’s pal traipsing cluelessly through the dungeon. “Oh, man!”
Grog‘s presentation is purposely old-school, a gray console window with ASCII characters for graphics. While it’s similar to Rogue, it has some interesting differences. It doesn’t support diagonal movement or attacks, for one. There’s 25 levels, with two kinds of enemies introduced with each new floor, we might call them a strong one, with powerful combat ability, and a tricky one, with a way to give you troubles in other ways. Secret doors are automatically searched for as you move.
The movement keys are WASD, traditional for DOOM, not the hjkl set derived from vi. The wait key is the space bar, and period is to wait until fully healed, so if you’re used to waiting with period and paging with space, you might want to consider changing your habits. To use stairs, use the ‘r’ key. Lots of items are used by pressing ‘u’ or ‘f’. Press ? for other keys and information.
The game asks you for your name, gender (while it defaults to male, you can enter any text!) and type (like, species). The game’s set up so that if you enter the same thing at all of these prompts, your character will generate the same way, deterministically.
Grog’s level builder is similar to Rogue’s, but it’s not limited to a 3×3 grid of rooms.
One thing about Grog that’s mentioned on its page is the game actually gets more difficult the more times you play. When a character dies, they may show up as a ghost on later runs, making things more difficult for you, and also when a monster defeats a player character they may get promoted into a unique individual, with added power and a name, that can show up on later plays! This customizes your copy of the game to an extent as you play.