The Flipside of Gaming
This is a double indie game review of Batboy and Strayed Lights done with press keys provided by the developers. If you would like me to look at your game for a future review, please reach out.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Batboy
5:18 Strayed Lights
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”
The weekly indie showcases highlight all the game we play here submitted by developers or indie game demos. If you would like to submit a game for a future stream/video, please reach out.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Super Ember Kaboom
1:55 Kombinera
3:36 Mago
5:34 Blacken Slash
7:01 Tokoyo: The Tower of Perpetuity
10:20 The Dark Heart of Balor
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”
…and neither do I.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
By the way, I made this post while sitting in Peachtree Center in Atlanta the Wednesday before DragonCon 2023! Hello! These posts will probably be somewhat low effort, but they’re still coming! It beats being back home in Brunswick, GA this weekend where Hurricane Idalia is smacking things around!
I Don’t Care For Freddy FazBear (45 seconds)
For this perceptive podcast I spoke with the designer of Horace: Paul Helman. We talked about how the development of the game went and the challenges of fine-tuning the various elements of it.
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 The Forest Catherdral and 24 Killers both played with press keys provided by the developers.
0:00 Intro
00:16 The Forest Cathedral
4:13 24 Killers
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”
The weekly indie showcases highlight the games we check out for each Wednesday night stream. All games played were either press keys or demo submissions. If you would like to submit a game for a future showcase, please reach out.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Mango Mischief
1:20 20 Minutes Til Dawn
4:26 Blade Brigade
7:25 Draft of Darkness
10:16 Video Game Fables
12:30 Kokoro Ultimate
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”
For this perceptive podcast, I sat down with Sinister Design’s Craig Stern to catch up about RPG design and his latest game Together in Battle. We talked about adding more relationship and character development to an SRPG without taking away the player’s control or tactics.
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”
Every time Homestar Runner releases something new, it’s cause for celebration. They’ve been doing this for 23 years, and that’s not counting the original Mario Paint thing with the characters they made, long ago, that kicked off their merry legacy. Even though the days of them updating weekly and Strong Bad popping off sarcastic answers to emails left, right and center are long gone, every few months another new thing comes out of the Brothers Chaps’ content grinder, and we love that kind of sausage.
Of course making free stuff doesn’t pay the bills, and Adobe Creative Cloud is hella expensive these days, so much of their more recent stüf takes the form of little paid projects, like the Trogdor board game. So it is with this, a quite nifty collection of three point-and-click adventures. One of them came from their website long ago, but it’s now remade in that Unity thingy. it’s joined by two completely new games, and the three of them have better animation and full voice acting now! All are full of the wit and fun that Homestar Runner-branded contentTM has long been known for.
I managed to finish it in a night, but it was a very entertaining night! This thing is packed full of more jokes and character even than the Telltale series they did back in the Wii days. It’s amazing how many obscure interactions have unique voice lines, so be sure to try everything, and using everything on everything else.
Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate, on Steam and itch.io (Windows and Mac, $8)
A double indie game review featuring OTXO (played with a press key) and Cassette Beasts (played with a retail key)
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’s just a pointer to a useful site today. OpenGameArt has been around since at least 2009, a place where people can upload game assets they’ve created and make them available to developers, with a variety of licenses. Back in 2013 I used music from it for my own Gamemaker game Octropolis, properly credited of course.
Games made with freely-available resources sometimes get a bad rep, but they can be invaluable for small-team and single developer projects, or anyone trying to get their project off the ground.
For this perceptive podcast, I spoke with Nathan Haddock from Lateralis Heavy Industries who developed the game OTXO. We spoke about the kind of action design Nathan wanted to focus on and balancing the high-speed play with the roguelike elements.
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”
Dani Bunten’s classic economic simulation M.U.L.E. is one of the all-time greats, still fairly obscure even among people who know and talk about video and computer games, but hugely influential. Wikipedia tells us that Shigeru Miyamoto considers it an influence on the Pikmin games (although other than in theme I really don’t see it).
There are three current ways to play M.U.L.E. One is Planet M.U.L.E., an official port sponsored by Ozark Softscape, which is several years old, and I was certain I had posted here about before. It’s a proper update with new graphics and a lot of character. A thing about M.U.L.E. is that the original versions were intricately designed in a lot of ways, not just in game rules but the little details. The way the phase ending noise speeds up, the exact difficulty of catching a Wampus, the speeds with which players walk through terrain, the many details of auctions, even the time it takes to outfit a mule and leave/enter town, it’s all finely calculated. You can tell that Dani cared deeply about the game, and it’s a polished as any game I’ve ever seen, and that’s the old 8-bit computer versions. Planet M.U.L.E. isn’t as polished, but it’s still very nice, and you can tell its makers thought hard about it. It offers both local and online play.
Sadly, Planet M.U.L.E. seems to be on life support. While games can still be played, and the automated best player posts still go up on its blog, it’s not gotten an update in years, and it’s even possible they’ve lost the source code.
One legacy of Planet M.U.L.E. is a wonderful Youtube video they made that explains the game and how to play. It’s a great introduction:
M.U.L.E. Returns was a mobile port. It has a website, that’s still around, but apparently none of those versions are available. It’s got a page for a Steam version, but it’s not available despite the original game being released in 2013. The site claims it may come back some day, but it cannot be purchased currently.
Then there’s the new roboanimal on the block, M.U.L.E. Online, which is on itch.io for a very reasonable $5. It has the blessing of Ozark Softscape, and is a near match for the Atari 800 version. You won’t get any improved graphics or sound here, but you will get a game that copies the original very closely, which is perfectly fine in my opinion. It offers local single and multiplayer, as well as internet-based online play. They also promote a board game version of M.U.L.E, which I’ve long wanted to try!
Or there’s emulation. Back in college I played M.U.L.E. with roommates via an Atari 800 emulator burnt to a Dreamcast disk, a great way to play if you have the system, controllers and means to construct the disk because the Dreamcast has four controller ports. (M.U.L.E. is by far at its best when you have four people playing.) The Commdore 64 and IBM PC versions were also made by Dani and the others at Ozark Softscape. The C64 port is close to the Atari 8-bit version. I don’t know about the DOS PC version. I can say that the NES version made by Mindscape is a terrible version, while sadly possibly the most-played because of the great popularity of the NES. If you tried that version and wondered what the fuss is about, you should seek out the Atari 8-bit version and play it before writing off the game entirely.
World Of Mule is a fansite dedicated to M.U.L.E. in all its forms. For its 40th anniversary, they’ve published a long retrospective on the game, its history and the new versions. (That’s where the above image comes from.) It’s a fitting tribute to one of the most influential computer games ever made.
Long ago, on primordial wiki-like site everything2.com, I personally wrote a long examination and play guide to M.U.L.E. While my writing style back then was pretty crazy, I think the information holds up. If you have an interest, you may want to take a look.
Planet Mule ($0, Windows, Mac and Linux)
M.U.L.E. Returns (versions currently unavailable)
M.U.L.E. Online (itch.io, Windows, Mac and Linux, $5)
World of M.U.L.E. (carpeludum.com)
M.U.L.E. The Board Game (boardgamegeek item page)
