The Flipside of Gaming
My latest double review is up for today with Phantom Abyss and Go Mecha Ball, two great action-filled games. Both played with press keys.
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”
My video review for today is on the Plucky Squire — a beautiful action-adventure game for anyone looking for a light read.
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”
This is a double review of Iron Meat and Alruna and the Necro-Industrialists both played with press keys.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Iron Meat
2:54 Alruna and the Necro-Industrialists
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”
He mentions that it’s possible that he might dust off the channel from time to time, but that he feels it has accomplished its mission. Here it is (46 minutes):
To remind everyone: Sakurai is the famed creator of Kirby, Meteos and Smash Bros. In the video, he relates the surprising fact that no only did he write out nearly every script, 256 in all, before the first episode even aired, but he also filmed them all in advance too! That’s why he looks older in this video: it’s the first time he’s been before the camera, with just three exceptions, since it started. The video, in fact, is mostly about how the series itself was made, which as it turns out was done without a camera crew, and in a residence of his too, outside of a recording studio and without soundproofing, so production had to pause if am ambulance drove by outside, and couldn’t happen at all if it was raining.
I have no doubt that these videos will be an important document in the coming years, not just as a guide to making video games, but also preserving the processes of current-day game development, and the words and thoughts off one of the foremost game designers of our age. BTW, note the split second of Rogue at 18:58!
The video has always had a feel like maybe Nintendo was helping out with it, but as it turns out, other than approving the use of their game footage, they weren’t greatly involved. The similar feel may be due to the use to HIKE, a.k.a. QBIST, a production company that Nintendo also uses for some of their videos.
To close this out, I’ll link a short bit from earlier on, at a mere 2 1/2 minutes, the video about Sakurai’s cat, Fukurashi. Meow, or perhaps, nya!
For this supersized indie showcase, I took a look at all 50 games from UFO 50.
Editor’s note: This was filed last month, but I didn’t notice it! Please enjoy, presuming you haven’t heard too much UFO 50 yet.
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”
It won’t take you more than a few minutes to play Marlowe Dobbe‘s Dungeon of Hank, a short and free homebrew Game Boy game made with GB Studio, and it’s not challenging. But it does have a lot of cute cat pictures, and is funny, and that’s enough. It’d probably be enough even without the funny. Cat’s cute, just sayin’. The cat’s name, you should know, is Hank Stuart Bastard. It doesn’t sound like one that T.S. Elliot would bestow, but then, what the heck is a Rumpleteaser anyway?
Dungeon of Hank (itch.io, free)
Starting this Saturday at noon US Eastern time (9 AM Pacific, 5 PM Greenwich, 7 PM CEST) is Roguelike Celebration 2024! I’m presenting half an hour on the Mystery Dungeon games this year, at 3:15 PM Pacific/6:15 Eastern/11:15 Greenwich/1:15 AM Sunday CEST. Whew, the roundness of the Earth makes it difficult to express times!
It’s being held entirely online again this year, and offers a fun social space to explore that’s kind of like a MUD! Roguelike Celebration’s schedule is here, and you can get tickets for $30 for the whole event here. They usually set aside some free tickets for people who can’t afford the fee, although you might have to check around to find them.
Roguelike Celebration is nominally about roguelikes and procedural generation, but I think it’s interesting from a wide variety of gaming perspectives, and every year I find several talks that are incredibly interesting. Past years have offered presentations from people who worked on games as diverse as Kingdom of Loathing and Blaseball. Here are the talks being offered this year:
The weekly indie game showcases highlight the games we cover here on the channel. All games shown are either press keys or demo suggestions.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Steamworld Build
3:23 Gunhead
6:13 Step By Step
7:36 Limo’s Lair
9:25 Wizordum
11:03 Ratopia
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”
Along the lines of our link to Chris Person’s Surviving Forums post on Aftermath, here’s another post that’s only tangentially related to gaming, but is very relevant to there being more things to post about later. It’s Blake Watson’s free web book about making your own web pages and sites! I also posted it to Metafilter, where people seem to like it very much!
I feel like it’s another instance of what ajroach42, the founder of New Ellijay TV, describes as planning for scalability resulting on making doing basic things too hard to do. Web site construction gets mired in a maze of components and frameworks, that purport to make it easier, but static sites are really easy enough to make without them. There’s really not a lot you have to learn to make a basic website, or even a complex one, if it doesn’t need a lot of interactivity. And that also makes your site much more future proof!
Websites made in 1991 are still as readable today as they were when they were first made. But sites made with Java, or Flash? Flash needs Ruffle, and the result is buggy, and Java is completely gone now. How will React.js fare in 30 years? What if you don’t keep your libraries updated to reflect changing Javascript execution engines?
HTML for People (flat website and proud of it)
Chris Person on Aftermath (a site that, to warn you, sometimes blocks articles behind paywalls) gives us a big list of web forums that still exist, and are even popular, today. There’s many categories there, but indeed gaming is one of them. We have a vested interest in the survival of as many non-social-media sites as possible, so here is the whole list of gaming boards from the article:
That’s a lot! There’s a lo more links there too, including a big list of technology and compute forums. By all means, click through, to the article, for more!
My latest game review is for Xanadu Next, a bit of an old school ARPG that was solid throughout.
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”
We’re on UFO 50 kick here, there’s so many nice games in there, and of such a wide variety. And that starts right off with the first game in the set, Barbuta, a simple but mysterious platformer.
Barbuta is made in an old school style, and it’s rough, although short. You get seven lives, instead of the one a really old game might give you, but there are no continues. The very first screen contains a death trap. It’s the kind that you won’t fall for more than once, but it teaches an important lesson: pay attention to the terrain. Anything that looks unusual, different from its surroundings, could be important, or deadly.
Rather than tell you of my findings, which might not be too useful since, while I’ve gotten some ways in, I haven’t finished it yet, I present a Youtube walkthrough from sylvie (32 minues). If you just need a nudge you could just watch a few minutes, until you find something that gets you unstuck. That’s my recommendation, anyway.
