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.
If you don’t know anything about the computer, it might not seem too interesting. A block-graphics wizard lifts his hat and out comes nine large digits in different colors that then float around the screen.
The more you know about the Commodore 64, though, the more interesting it is. The machine’s graphics chip, the VIC II, is can only display eight hardware sprites at once. Then the sprites cluster together on the same scanline, meaning ordinary multiplexing can’t be happening. Then they drift up into the upper boarder. It demonstrates complete mastery of the hardware, doing a lot of things that simply shouldn’t be possible.
It’s a good exploration of a number of weird C64 graphics tricks: sprite multiplexing of course, opening up the side and top boarders, and making productive use of mysterious graphics that appear off the top of the screen if the boarder is gone. While little code is shown, it’s definitely on the more technical end of things we present here. I’d give it a four out of five on Drebnar’s Geekiness Scale. But if you like learning about obscure tech details of a forty-year-old computer? And who doesn’t? There it is!
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”
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”
How do you reach an impossible score, so high that the counting system malfunctions and vomits up gibberish?
Everyone’s hooked on Balatro, the deck builder where the deck you build is made, not of nonsense cards with wizards on them, but basic types like Aces and Jacks. You start with a deck of 52 cards and try to make an increasingly valuable set of poker hands, but you can get Jokers that change the rules, Tarot cards that let you replace or remove cards from your deck, and can outright buy new cards to put in. Buy you can also mod your cards to be worth more, or multiply your score. You can advance your hands so they’re more valuable, and make secret hands like Five of a Kind.
The ultimate goal of Balatro is to reach 100,000 chips in one round, a goal that seems impossible when the first round sees you struggling to make 300. But 100,000 isn’t the end, it keeps scaling past that in its “Endless Mode” where Ante goal requirements can increase by a factor of 20 or more.
But Endless Mode has an end. Balatro uses Lua’s math routines to handle its goal and chip counters, and if either gets too high it loses track, throws up its hands and calls it “naneinf,” a value that always compares false, and so is useless to get and can’t be reached. This score is so big that written out entirely it’d have over 308 digits.
The channel Balatro University covers many aspects of the game, and they have a new 28-minute video where they explain what the word means (it’s “nan e inf,” or “Not a Number raised to the power of 10 times Infinity”) and the six specific ways to reach it. I’m afraid that people who aren’t already soaked in the details of the game might not get much out of it, it’s made for addicts and uses game terms without explaining them, but it might be interesting to visit that world for a bit, and let the weirdness wash over you.
The weekly showcases highlight the many games we check out on the channel. Games shown are either press keys, demos, or from my collection. Reach out if you would like me to look at your game.
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”
Indie studio Polygon Treehouse (which doesn’t seem related to the news site Polygon) has created a seal for indie devs to use to indicate that no AI-generated assets were used in the construction of their game. This is it:
Polygon Treehouse’s NO GEN AI seal.
Generative AI is a blight upon all the creative industries, but few are affected as keenly as small team game development, which is under constant pressure to produce, and as easily and cheaply as possible.
There is an animus among the clueless game-buying public against “asset flips,” games that use premade resources made by others and obtained in packs or bundles. If I might speak directly to people who do this, ahem:
While you can find egregious examples, sure, generally this attitude harms a lot of indie devs, who often don’t have the personpower or energy to create large amounts of assets themselves. If you’re going to be upset at people who use cheaply-acquired material, then aim your ire toward people who use generative AI, which isn’t sustainable, and cribs off the websites of literally millions of internet users who didn’t consent to their use in its training.
And if, deep in your musty heart, you’re mumbling to yourself that they’re doing this for publicity: sure! I’m glad! Why not? What else can they do to make people aware of this issue, other than not using generative AI themselves? The real power to change things is in the hands of the people who use gen AI (which, if they are, have already indicated they don’t care about the issues involved) and those of consumers who have the option to buy games from them. Which is you. So, don’t do that!
Eschew the generative AI trend! Help prevent a future full of content slop! Don’t roll over and accept it! Tell the awful moneymen of the field this is wrong! (Not all, but so many of them are men.) And don’t forget about your stance the moment a game in a series you really like uses it for assets. This is about something bigger than games-yes, such things exist. Open your damned eyes. Things are moving around you, and they’re making the world worse, for artists, for you, for everyone. You don’t have to accept it.
And tell others! You don’t have to become loud and annoying about it. (Unless you really want to, join our team!) A quiet word of support, a positive comment on a thread, in the aggregate it can make a difference, but only if lots of people do it.
There, that’s said. Don’t forget now! I don’t bring up these issues often here, there are so many other fun and interesting things to show you. We’ll move on, for now….
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”
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 love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
This one’s another of Paul Hammond’s series of classic arcade games recreated in Pico-something. Most of these have been in Pico-8, but today’s find uses its more-powerful successor, Picotron. To us end users though, the result isn’t that different.
Wor Games is a remake of Bally’s classic arcade game Wizard of Wor, probably the most popular game made for its Astrocade-based hardware, interesting for being an early framebuffer-based game when memory was very expensive, instead of tile-based, and as a consequence only having four colors: black, blue, yellow and red. Wor Games largely holds true to that, but adds a couple of extra colors.
Both Wizard of Wor and Wor Games are shoot-or-be-shot maze games. Wizard of War could be played either by one player or by two co-op (although players could easily blast each other). Wor Games played in one-player mode adds a computer-played helper. The helper does a good job of killing the monsters. It doesn’t try to kill the human player, but neither does it make an effort to avoid shooting them, so be wary of accidental shots.
Each maze has a number of monsters, and more spawn in over time. Blue monsters are relatively slow, yellow ones faster, and red ones faster still. All three kinds can shoot at you, but the higher-difficulty monsters have much faster reactions to your presence. Monsters move randomly in large part, but usually make an effort to stay out of your line of fire. This forces you to move in closer, and they’re never more dangerous than when they’re just around a corner from you, and randomly decide to pounce on you from the side.
The game simulates line-of-sight for yellow and red monsters, who have the extra property of only being visible to you if you’re nearby, or else visible down corridors. Even if they aren’t visible on the main screen, their locations can be deduced by occasional particle effects, or by letting your gaze stray to the radar display at the bottom of the screen. Taking your eyes off the main arena gives them the perfect chance to walk into your corridor and shoot you. Be wary.
After a number of monsters are blasted that the game decides to be enough, the level may end. Or, alternatively, you may be blessed (cursed) by a visit by the Worluk. The Worluck’s a fast-moving critter that doesn’t shoot at you, but rushes around so quickly that shooting it is a big hassle. It moves randomly too, but is kind of trying to reach one of the exit doors at the sides of the arena. If it makes it to one, it escapes, too bad. But if you can shoot it, you and your partner both earn an extra life, and the next level will be proclaimed, to dramatic music, to be a DOUBLE SCORE DUNGEON! Blam!
What’s more sometimes, if you dispatch the Worluk, you’ll be in for a visit from the Wizard of Wor himself, a purple-robed freak who’s fast, sneaky, and can shoot you too. He’s worth a bucket of points if you can kill him, and even more if the DUNGEON is DOUBLE SCORE. Blam, again!
In addition to the basic “Arcade” mode, Wor Games has two alternate difficulty levels, and a special mode that makes the base game into something resembling Pac-Man. It fills the screen with dots, and until you or your partner have collected every one of them, the monsters will keep respawning. Some of the dots are large, and act like Pac-Man’s Energizers, affording you invulnerability (can’t be harmed) and invincibility. (Kills enemies on contact. Why do I have to explain these things?) If you don’t get to an Energizer-dot fast enough though it hatches, resulting in a tiny new monster that you have to kill. The best plan seems to be to dash and collect all the big dots you can at the start of the board, since if you leave them be they’ll just make more problems for you.
Both games, the original Wizard of Wor and Wor Games, are interesting for feeling easy enough to convince you to play time and time again, and yet each game is over so fast that you wonder why you keep dying. One reason is that the controls are a bit weird. Your Worrior’s movement is locked to a grid, and you can only shoot in four directions. If you’re partway into an intersection and decide to go back, sometimes your clumsy fightyperson will decide to step forward instead and get blasted. It’s sort of how Link in the original Legend of Zelda tended to get a bit slippery if you tried to go diagonally, but here the grid is even coarser, and all shots are fatal.
The original arcade game was a throwback, even at the time. I note that it, a four-color arcade game with coarse pixels, was released the year after Pac-Man’s US release, by the same company no less! Wizard of Wor used its weird CGA-like color scheme and menacing audio to effective advantage ago. Its world felt strange and oppressive because of it, and so it doesn’t seem like it’d be nearly the same game with more powerful graphics and sound hardware, and so it is with Wor Games. While Picotron is a purposely-limited fantasy console/workstation, Wor Games restricts its visuals even further, not to the limits of the arcade game, but not too far from them either. It’s an entertaining play, and while your games will probably end very quickly, you can always try again.
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 love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
A generation of Windows users spent time productively by running Minesweeper, a standard inclusion with Windows from the days of Windows 3.0 through Windows 7, until they decided that it Must Be Monetized, and switched out for a free-to-play, ad-riddled version of the loathed Microsoft Store, just one of thousands of little crappages that have made up, and continue to comprise, the enshittification of tech.
Mines, from Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection
Well, there are other ways to play Minesweeper that don’t require tithing your attention to the marketing department of Microsoft. An open-source version for many platforms is included in Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection, a collection that’s playable for many platforms including web browsers, and which is still one of the great unknown treasures of the internet. (If you’re running Linux, you might be able to find it in your distribution as Mines.) There’s another free version for Linux and Windows called LibreMines that can be found on Git, and KMines for KDE.
Dragonsweeper
In the past week there’s been released on itch.io a fantasy version called Dragonsweeper, which has several interesting innovations. It was inspired by Hojamaka’s Mamono Sweeper (Japanese), as as Hempuli’s Mamono Mower. Hempuli (the creator of Baba Is You and a whole host of Sokoban-inspired puzzles) also made Cavern Sweeper, which I believe I’ve linked to before.
But probably the ultimate in this category is still the 12-year-old Desktop Dungeons, which is commercial but well worth it, and its 3D remake Desktop Dungeons Rewind.
Desktop Dungeons Rewind
Every game linked here is worth it. To call one out specifically, Desktop Dungeons has great depths that’ll take you many play sessions to uncover.
All of these games involve hidden terrain that hides things that are dangerous, but let you deduce their position using clues in the squares. Many of them let you fight back against those things, if you manage the level of danger you face. Desktop Dungeons changes that a bit by letting you see monsters freely without danger, but also making unrevealed squares themselves a resource that you must manage, since exploring them helps you up and restores your magic, but at the cost of also healing any monsters you’ve wounded without killing them.
Dragonsweeper is current quite the indie darling. It hides both monsters and mines in the unrevealed squares, although the mines are worth 100 threat points each so their numbers can’t be confused with those of the other monsters. It also has special generation quirks for several of the monster types, and once you understand them it makes the game considerably easier (although, like classic Minesweeper, once in a while you’re still forced into guessing).
There is a complete solved playthrough of Dragonsweeper on itch.io’s Youtube channel (11 minutes), but for a change I’m not going to embed it, as it will probably spoil some of the finer points of playing it, and in a real since, learning how to play a game like Dragonsweeper is the real fun of it, and not just the execution of a strategy that’s handed to you. So go and try it yourself, and don’t sweat the inevitable lost games! You’ll be picking up essential information for when you do start winning, and besides, losing reveals the whole map, and that has much to teach you about how the monsters hide.
The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games I check out, and please reach out if you would like me to cover your’s. All games shown are either press keys or demo plays of indie games.
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”
