The Flipside of Gaming
This is a double review of #blud and Void Sols, both played with press keys.
0:00 Intro
00:18 #blud
4:08 Void Sols
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 for the adventure games The Night is Grey and Prim, both played with press keys provided by the developers.
0:00 Intro
00:14 The Night is Grey
4:33 Prim
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.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Terracards
2:26 Lucky Mayor
4:09 Aetheris
6:22 Rogue Labyrinth
7:57 Alien Frontier
9:14 Zero Sievert
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:
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….
The indie showcases highlight the many games we check out on (Josh Bycer’s) channel, games shown are either demos or press key submissions.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Verses of Enchantment
1:41 Stopdead
3:44 Garbage Crew
4:46 Jello
6:12 Guardians of Holme
8:18 Reaver
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”
A double review of two of the stranger games I’ve seen in 2024. Both games were played with press keys while doing IGF judging.
0:00 Intro
00:21 Judero
3:17 Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity
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.
Wor Games (by Paul Hammond on itch.io, $0)
Every year, I put together a video list of my favorite games categorized by genres that I’ll be posting over here, starting with platformers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
0:00 Intro
0:14 Astronimo
1:43 Yeetus
2:47 Roots of Yggrdrasil
5:25 Sticky Business
6:17 Ludde
7:33 Kapital Punishment 22XX
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.
It’s been over a year now since Blaseball, beloved highlight of the pandemic lockdown, set its multiple suns for the last time. Its malevolent spinning peanut god ceased its ranting, and its guardian angel squid put away its concessions. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the blaseball tag here might fill you in. (We love tags! Explore them a bit and you’ll find strange and unusual things.)
In summary: for nearly three years, from June 2020 to June 2023, a small plucky company called The Game Band simulated games of a strange, horror-themed variation of baseball, and allowed users to bet fake money on the outcomes. The synthetic players pitched, batted, fielded, were incinerated, became reincarnated, went undercover, escaped via secret passages and fought gods like that huge spinning peanut and the concept of money itself. It wasn’t bad for a simulation that players could never directly influence: the closest they could come was by spending their hoarded fake wealth on votes to change the rules and edit the players and teams.
In its time it inspired a vast wiki (unaffiliated with Fandom, thank the Squid), an official podcast, a stats reference site, a news network, both official and unofficial explainer videos, a huge pile of fan art, pretend trading cards, and a terrific band. It was probably impossible to keep going indefinitely, but it was nice while it lasted. I’m not the only one who fondly remembers it: the site Just Baseball published a ringing remembrance last year. Here’s that squid again, one more time, for I never get tired of seeing this animation.
So now there’s a big superfluous-L-shaped hole in our hearts. There have been attempts by others to fill the Infinite Siesta, but none of them have nearly the panache or popularity of the original. This concludes this explanation, but no doubt I’ll be doing it all again in a year or two. Moving on.
So, what is this new thing that might fill the void left by Blaseball? ioBaseball is a very new project that combines Blaseball’s play sim with Balatro’s deck building. It sounds like a cooked-up Buzzword Stew, but even in its very early prototype form there are some interesting ideas there.
ioBaseball is so early-on that the site proclaims that it’s only a demo, and I believe them. Currently the whole game runs in your browser, and log-ins aren’t supported yet. It only saves the play state at the beginning of each game day, so be wary of browsing away from the page accidentally. It doesn’t look like it was made to provide indefinite play as it stands, but it’s worth exploring for a little while.
The game begins with a collection of teams and their players. As with Blaseball before it, none of these teams or players are “yours,” and you have no control over any of them. In Blaseball you could adopt a team as your “favorite,” and a player as your “idol,” and get rewards according to how well they did. That is replaced here with a system of trading cards.
The main types are Slugger cards and Pitcher cards, each representing a specific player in the league, and Team cards. Each card gives you a number of one of three colors of “magic points” whenever its depicted character/team does something positive. This means that buying trading cards is making an investment, like buying stock for dividends.
Slugger cards give you “blue” magic points, shown as water drops, when its player gets a hit that puts them on base. Pitcher cards give you “red” magic points, with a fire icon, on its player striking out a batter. And, Team cards earn “green” magic points, little cacti, upon that team scoring a run. You’re free to buy any cards you want, up to your hand size limit, so you aren’t limited to just players on the teams you have cards for, but the different kinds of cards cost different amounts of gamecash (not real money, but instead fake gold pieces), and pay out different amounts of MP. Pitcher cards are by far the most expensive, at 10 gold each, but a good pitcher can be a reliable earner of red MP throughout a whole game.
You need all three kinds of MP. Despite their name, in the current version of the game you can’t cast magical, baseball-related spells with them (presumably with names like Arms of Ruth, Berra’s Wisdom, Curse of Casey, or Tinker to Evers to Chance). Instead they are what get you your experience, or as called here Victory Points. The game multiplies together the three colors of MP you have, and that’s your VP total. Then it goes like Balatro: at the end of each day of games, you have a target score to meet. If you succeed, you lose all your magic points of every color, gain a “Level,” and start the next day with a higher goal. If you don’t quite make the objective you lose one of the five lives you begin with, but you get to keep the MP you had, so the next day you just have to make up the difference.
One aspect of this system some of you may already realize… if you have zero of even one of the colors of Magic Points, it means you have zero Victory Points. You must have a source of income of all three colors. Not just that, but baseball, even simulated baseball, is a very random game, prone to unexpected upsets and blowouts. If the winds of fate mean that one of your types of cards produces nothing on a day, then you earn nothing, at all, on that day! The days of the seasons have randomly-assigned games, sometimes a team doesn’t play on a day, and if that team is the only one you have pitchers or sluggers for you’re going to lose a life that day.
To overcome this, it’s essential to diversify, buying multiple cards of all three types. You start out only able to have five cards, but you can use your excess gold to buy expanded slots from a system of upgrades. These work like a mixture of Balatro’s hand levels and vouchers. Each provides a benefit that gets more expensive the more you buy it. At the start of Day One you only have the upgrade that increases your hand size, but each time you lose a life, you get the chance to enable one of three new kinds of upgrades. Some of them are obviously good, but a few, the Fountain, the Boar and the Illusionist, don’t tell up front what you’re buying, and leave you to figure them out. Some upgrades unlock new kinds of cards, that pay off in a variety of ways. One upgrade reduces your Level by 2, which is nowhere near as bad as that might sound. It might be the most important upgrade, and it’s the one that rises in price the fastest.
It’s really difficult to do well, especially at the beginning when your only clues to how well a player will perform are unexplained Blaseball-style stats with names like “thwackability.” After a few days the Stats pages on each card will start to give you a good idea of how valuable each player is. In this demo version the player and team stats are not randomized, and you get the same choices of what player cards to buy every day, so your intuitions of which players and teams are worth the gold and hand slots can build over multiple tries. (Note: since I wrote this the game has been updated, and now now only can you select a season scenario, but the world’s stats are re-rolled every real-world month.)
The interface, while bearing some polish, has its glitches. Important game functions are buried, in the style fashionable at the moment, behind Mystery Icons at the top of the page, and I tended to get lost for my first couple of plays. During the game day, you’ll probably want to watch the action (which is all text, this is a Blaseball-inspired game, after all) by clicking on the icon of the little stadium with the three pennants. To see your Victory Points and current hand, and to declare game options, you’ll want to click the little line of numbers at the top-right of the page. It is here where, under the Settings tab, you can speed the simulation speed up from the excruciating NORMAL, up past Bison, Tiger, yes even Hedgehog, to FAST, and experience an entire day of simuball in a couple of breezy minutes. Oh, how rorm* it would be if real baseball had the FAST option, or even just Hedgehog!
It is obvious that ioBaseball is heavily inspired by its departed predecessor. The trading cards have pixelated images sort of in the style of Balatro, but without nearly the style or wit. But it’s a demo! I’m sure, if it takes off, that there’s a universe of baseball-and-otherwise memes they can slap on those little illustrated boxes. A lot of Blaseball’s dearly missed qlurky stlyle follows over. The completed Innings are called Outings, and there’s a brief story that’s presented within the game that explains the stadium has trouble getting insurance because of angry gods, incinerated players and floods of immateria.
Will ioBaseball catch on, and rise to the levels of its deceased forebear? No one can say. The original needed a cultural event like a pandemic to spark its brief ascent to the skies, and without it soon fell again to the cold wretched earth. But ioBaseball’s three hearts are in the right place, and that matters for a lot.
* rorm, adjective: nice, good, gratifying. From Carl Muckenhoupt’s interactive fiction, “The Gostak.”
ioBaseball (web, $0) – ioBaseball’s Discord invite
