The Flipside of Gaming
This is a double indie game review of Three Minutes To Eight and Slay the Princess, 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”
Each indie showcase highlights the many games we play here on stream, and if you would like to submit a game for a future one please reach out.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Curse of Eternity
01:35 WizardChess
3:43 Ardenfall
5:11 Sippin Hot Blickety Block…
6:34 Crafty Survivors
8:27 Bad Writer
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 news comes to us by way of Apple cracker 4am’s Mastodon account. Wheeler Dealers was a cassette release, a format not as well understood as the Apple II floppy disk formats, but it’s playable on its Internet Archive page.
Its title screen gives it a copyright date of 1978, making it only slightly younger than the Atari VCS/2600. Wheeler Dealers was the first published game by M.U.L.E. creator Dani Bunten. Designed for four players, it came with a special controller to allow four players to participate in auctions on an equal footing. If played in an emulator, they often have settings to allow the buttons to be remapped to joystick directions, and from there to specific keyboard buttons.
It’s a stock trading game, written in BASIC, and much less polished than M.U.L.E. would be. It barely has graphics and has no single-player mode. I find it hard to control in the IA’s web-based Apple emulator. Basic stock trading games seem really simple these days. I think Wheeler Dealers (or “Wheeler Dealer$,” according to the title screen) is mostly interesting these days has a herald for M.U.L.E., which I find holds up really well to current-day tastes. Dani’s real-time auction mechanism would be honed to a fine edge in M.U.L.E., which to this day is probably still the best multiplayer auction mechanism in any game.
Dani Bunten left us long ago now, back in 1998, but her absence is still keenly felt. One of her last projects was a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive port update of M.U.L.E., which was infamously scuttled when publisher Electronic Arts insisted, as a condition of publishing, a mechanism by which players could directly attack other players with weapons. It is far from the only terrible action that EA would be responsible for, but it’s certainly one of the worst.
Our weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games we play here on the channel, if you would like to submit a game for a future one please reach out. Most games shown are press key submissions and demos.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Ghost Song
3:18 Broken Pieces
5:16 A Sleeper’s Quest: A Labyrinth to Thee
7:10 Stars in the Trash
8:20 Kells
10:11 Seasons
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”
Hempuli is the brilliant creator of the rule-breaking-and-making puzzle game Baba Is You. That is not the subject of this post, but I couldn’t recommend it more highly.
No, the post’s subject is a series of things they’ve made since. Yes, I said things. I said it and I meant it!
They’re all: (free|wonderful|insane|playable in browser|available on itch.io). There’s twenty-three of them, and they’re all ludicrous ruminations on the idea of Sokoban. We’ve posted about Hempuli’s improbable series of Sokolikes before, but they keep making them, and so now there’s 23.
The basic rules are: there are blocks, and you can push them. If all the Xs on the level have blocks on them at the same time, the flag activates, but it stays active only while every X is occupied. If the flag is active, you can step on it to complete the puzzle.
But there are also buttons. If all the buttons of a given color have boxes (or players) on them at the same time, then certain gates in the puzzle open. Some puzzles have water. Don’t step in that. Boxes will usually float on top of water though.
In (nearly) all the puzzles, the arrow keys move your little Sokoperson, the R key resets the current puzzle, and the Z key reverses your last move. Keep pressing Z to keep going back, until you reach the puzzle’s start state.
Those are the basic rules, but don’t be surprised if they’re upturned in some of these games. Hempuli is diabolical, and sometimes the basics don’t apply, or are turned on their head in unexpected ways.
In Mountris, some of the blocks you push are Tetris shapes, that move as a single unit. Think carefully about the implications of that.
One interesting thing about these games generally is how they often break one of the central rules of Sokoban, that you can’t push two or more blocks at a time. In many of Hempuli’s variants you can, but in some of them you can only do it in certain circumstances.
As I review these games in order, I’m struck by how they keep getting stranger. Evidently the process of making Baba Is You disconnected some important limiter in Hempuli’s brain, and so now they’ve become a portal, spewing forth constant matter from the Elemental Plane of Puzzles. Weep for them… but also, enjoy the results of that, both now and almost certainly in the future.
This is a double indie game review of two different kinds of platforming with Solar Ash and It’s a Wrap, played with a retail key and press key respectively.
0:00 Intro
00:17 Solar Ash
5:34 It’s a Wrap
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 indie showcases cover the many games we play for my Wednesday night streams and I’m always looking for games to check out for future ones. All games shown are either press keys or demo submissions.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Trifox
2:07 The Entropy Centre
4:30 Grid Force: Mask of the Goddess
6:43 Whateverland
8:49 Fabular: Once Upon a Spacetime
11:40 Chess Survivors
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 RPG designer Kasey Ozymy to talk about working in RPG Maker and designing Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass. We discuss RPG design and making something that stands out from the rest of the pack. For the final part of our talk, we focused on the Kickstarter for his next game: Hymn to the Earless God, and what makes that one different.
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”
Our Weekly showcases look at the many indie games we play here on the channel. If you would like to submit a game for a future one please reach out.
0:00 Intro
00:14 The Pinball Wizard
2:40 Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum
5:04 Worm Slayer
6:51 Somber
9:00 SuperTotalCarnage
10:36 Heartworm
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 video review of the game Pseudoregalia 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”
I feel like I should adopt some standard way to inform people which items are links to other sites (with minor commentary attached) and which are significant longform items of our own creation.
Suffice to say this is the former category. I didn’t write this history of Kid Pix: Craig Hickman wrote it, back around 2013. And he also created the original version of that program too. And it was terrific. Here is the link.
What was Kid Pix? It was a paint program for early Macintosh models that was very well-received, and is very fondly remembered. It had a powerful UI but was still, neverthless, aimed at kids. Think of it as a more fun version of MacPaint. I refuse to stay in my lane regarding entertaining uses of computers, but perhaps of more interest to what I’d think are our usual readers, it had a similar concept to the art module of Mario Paint, but came out at least a couple of years earlier.
I especially like how he described the original Macintosh UI as having “a consistent and enlightened vision behind it,” which I’m not sure can be said of Macs today, or really of the products of any major software company. That’s just my opinion, mind you.
Did you know there is a Javascript re-implementation of an older version of Kid Pix? Here!
Kid Pix – The Early Years (red-green-blue.com)
After a long day in the data mines, it’s certainly nice to come home, walk over to the movie shelf, select a movie to watch, then put it into my movie player of choice: an Atari 2600. A demonstration (40 seconds):
Moviecart’s actually been around, judging by the date on that video demonstration, for at least three years now, but is currently accepting preorders for $25. The video only uses half the screen, and has glitches and distracting horizontal and vertical lines running through it, but at they say, it’s amazing that the dog talks at all. Or in this case, that the dog can display roughly arbitrary video and sound, two things the Atari usually finds it impossible to pull off.
How is it done? With custom hardware, certainly, but even granting that there’s only so much that can be done with the VCS/2600’s display chip, the restrictive funnel through which the cart’s video must be squeezed.
After that, getting all that data to the screen is done through presenting it to the VCS/2600’s address space at the absolute limit of the system’s ability to use it. The real work is done by a processor on the Moviecart’s board, which handles reading a specially-encoded video file on a Micro SD card and doing all of the work in getting it ready for the screen, so the VCS’s 6507 processor has to do as little as possible itself.
Moviecart, from lodefmode (github)
