The Flipside of Gaming
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 showcase, please reach out.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Astral Ascent
2:52 The Last Sunshine Rekindled
5:49 Lila’s Sky Ark
8:30 LootRiver
11:31 Beneath Oresa
14:53 Riftbound
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”
I got a treat for you people today, a genuine treasure of the internet, a collection of forty computer-generated puzzles of wide-ranging types, from Sudoku (called “Solo” because of trademarks) to Minesweeper. And they’re not only all open source and free, they’re free for many platforms. Not all the puzzles are yet available for all platforms, but it’s continually being worked on, with new puzzles added from time to time. It has been for nineteen years; when it got started it only had five puzzle types. It’s one of the best things out there, and I’m amazed it’s not better known generally.
I can’t overstate what a wonder this collection is. All the puzzles are their own executable, if you don’t just play them on the web anyway. Each one of these puzzles offers many hours of happy puzzling. My own favorites are Loopy, Slant, Bridges, Dominosa, Galaxies, Net and Untangle. Most of the puzzles are of a type that should be familiar to fans of the Japanese puzzle magazine Nikoli, but they’re all randomly generated, and playable on multiple difficulty levels.
If the name Simon Tatham sounds familiar, he’s the guy who also created and maintains the popular networking tool PuTTY.
Here’s the links, all of these are free:
Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection main site, which has implementations for Java, Javascript and Windows
Here’s some other HTML implementations
For iOS on the Apple App Store
In the Debian and Ubuntu package repositories (and it should be available in your own distribution’s repository, too)
And here it is for Windows again, but distributed through Chocolatey
This is a store page review of Spellbook Demonslayers for our show Indie Inquiries. If you would like us to review your store page in a future show, please reach out.
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”
Helper Wesley on Youtube is making a Binding Of Isaac-style randomized twin stick shooter called Spent Shells, and published it on Newgrounds. It’s on itch.io too. It got about 35,000 plays and an award from the site, which is nice. It also got ripped off and put on a bunch of other sites, which wasn’t. But things seem to be going well with it.
Wesley put up a video with his experiences with its popularity and his attempts to monetize it. It’s only ten minutes, and it’s got a lot of useful information for things to do that might help out your own project, if that’s the kind of thing you do, or just an interesting look at an experience most of us won’t even have.
I Published My Roguelike Game – Dealing With The Aftermath (Youtube, 10 minutes)
Word from Tomorrow Corporation, which isn’t exactly the producers of World of Goo but is like half of them, maybe two-thirds? Anyway, they announced that a Remastered Edition of the game, with greater resolution, is out on Steam, GoG, the Epic Store, and even directly from its maker 2D Boy. For mobile platforms, it’s also coming to Netflix’s games plan. Why is Netflix into games again? No matter, they are, and they’re covered in Goo!
But along with that, the bigger news is that, for now at least, this is the only way to play the Remastered version on mobile. It’s a Netflix exclusive! Even bigger, and sadder, news: the original World of Goo has been delisted from the mobile app stores, on May 11th. If you want to play with Goo on your phone and you don’t already own it, and don’t have Netflix, you can’t get it there now. People who already purchased it on those stores will still have access to it.
I wish I had found this news before it was removed; the notice was posted on May 5th. It’s sad that World of Goo is becoming less available now, it was an important early indie hit from way back, fifteen years ago, in 2008. The Wiiware version was particularly great and made excellent use of the Wii Remote’s pointer. It’s not only an important piece of gaming history, but it’s still a terrific game. The Sign Painter lives!
The Remastered Edition of World of Goo is coming to iOS and Android via Netflix
With Tears of the Kingdom released soon, some people have been speculating, based on leaks, that it and Breath of the Wild actually take place on the “downfall” timeline of Hyrule, the very first games to follow chronologically from the two NES Zelda games.
It’s a good time to revisit one of the weirder, and unexpectedly well-made, fangames out there, a FPS re-envisioning of Zelda II. This was originally release to the internet in 2010, but it turns out its creator Mike Johnston updated it back in 2019, to include some of the initial overworld areas of the original game. He included a couple of shops too, which are not in the NES Zelda II game, so the player can get a few aids to make the game easier. Have a look at some of these screenshots:
Sadly Johnston is a bit dismayed by Nintendo’s absurdly litigious defense of its oh-so-sacred properties, even if they are pushing 40 years old now, and has no plans to continue working on his project. I can’t blame him, and am glad for what he’s given us. Thanks Mike!
Zelda II FPS (browser playable, $0, requires Unity)
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”
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 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”
