Two Slices of Indie Platformers Review

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

Demoscene: La Linea

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)!

Indie Game Showcase For 3/15/24

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

Homebrew Atari 7800 Arcade Ports

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)

Double the Great Games With Super Mombo Quest and Dave the Diver

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

Sundry Sunday: Professor Item Explains How To Care For Peepy

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.

Indie Interview With Lee Easson and Odd Infinitum

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.

Indie Showcase 3/5/24

Each indie showcase highlights the many games we play here on the stream and I’m always looking for submissions for future episodes.

0:00 Intro
00:14 Kilta
3:21 Rail Route: the Story of Jozic
5:26 Maggie the Magnet
6:45 Panic Mode
8:59 Star Valor
10:50 Lost Twins 2

Gamefinds: Nip For Speed

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.

From itch.io’s Youtube account, this barely qualifies as a game, but it’s funny. Surreal. Absurd. Bizarre. But mostly funny. It’s Nip For Speed, and it’s from knackelibang.

You’re riding in a car with an orange cat behind the wheel. Not a cartoony cat, a realistic cat, or at least its low-poly model is kind of realistic. It doesn’t act, or talk, much like a real cat though. There’s also a dog involved.

Content warning: the cat does meet its end, but in a much more cartoony way than the cat’s model. It probably shouldn’t have been behind the wheel anyway.

Nip For Speed (itch.io, Web and Windows, $0)

Dread Templar and HROT Reviews

For this double indie game review, I’m taking a look at Dread Templar and HROT, both played with press keys provided by the developers.

0:00 Intro
00:17 Dread Templar
4:38 HROT

Gamefinds: POOM

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.

Found by Varyag on kitsunes.club, this may be the ultimate version of the Pico-8 version of other game phenomenon, not a remake of a classic arcade game but of id Software’s DOOM itself. And it has a great name: POOM. It’s made by freds72 on itch.io, and it’s free to download and play. Its levels are not ports of the original room, unless my memory is faulty, but smaller versions, but the general sense is still there. It even has a good remix of the first level music.

It’s a really good name