The Flipside of Gaming
A video review of Supraland Six Inches Under played with a gamespass 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”
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Prepare to get the Balatro music stuck in your head all over again, but with the Mother 3 “soundfont,” a word that I’m not thrilled with. I don’t hate it, it’s just that there’s already good ways to refer to that concept, like “instrument set.” Ah. Oh well. Anyway. Here it is. (4 minutes – wait, the Balatro music is only four minutes long?)
This one isn’t really obscure I think, but it’s amazing, and if I can do my part to help spread the word I’m happy to do so. UFO 50 ($25 on Steam, with other platforms on the way) is a collection of 50 8-bit styled games from Mossmouth, the creator and publisher of Spelunky, although they’re made by all kinds of people.
When you hear “50 games,” you might come to think of it as, 50 little games, but that’s not the case. UFO 50 contains 50 full games, including one in the JRPG genre that could take many hours to finish. It seeks to emulate the experience of putting a pirate multicart into a game console, except none of these games are pirated. It’s a super-abundant collection of fun, and what’s more, the word is that there’s not a single dud in the group, there really is something here for everyone.
Like with Baldur’s Gate III, there’s so much here that it feels like they might be stretching out what’s expected from a relatively small amount of money. My suggestion is, get it, but don’t feel like everyone has to give you 50 full-sized games for $25 in the future. It’s a one-off, wonderful for what it is, but an anomaly.
With 50 games included, it can be difficult to tell where to start! If you let itt sit on the game selection screen, it’ll play demos of the games, which might give some direction to your exploration. By default, the games are listed according to release date in the collection’s fictional chronology, so generally they’ll get more complex later on in the list. Xanagear reviewed every game in UFO 50, in 50 minutes natch:
I haven’t had the chance to get into any of this yet, but a particular game I want to point to is Valbrace, which is a first-person dungeon exploration game, with Crossed Swords-like action combat!
The promised JRPG is Grimstone, which has a western theme, and one of your potential characters (you pick your party at the start) is a dog!
UFO 50 deserves a lot more words than I can give it right now. There may be more to come on it later….
UFO 50 (Steam, $25)
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 another of those games that’s remade in Pico8, and in the process becomes subtly different, not necessarily better, but not worse either. It’s Make-Ten, and it’s free on itch.io.
This time it’s not an arcade game. The remake is of a mobile and web game called Fruit Box. I’ve only tried the web version and, in this case, I think the Pico8 version is better. The UI is a lot easier to use for its only action, drawing boxes around numbers. The original uses a generic rectangular box, while the Pico8 version snaps the lines to the number grid, which works much better for me. Also the numbers are colored according to value, which helps readability a lot.
I’m sorry, I should explain what I’m talking about!
It’s one of those simple yet addicting games. You’re given a random field of digits from 1 to 9. You’re given a couple of minutes to draw rectangles around sets of numbers that up to 10. When you do, you get one point per digit you remove (which is a difference from the original), and those digits disappear from the board.
Obviously, pairs of numbers that add up to 10 are relatively easy to find. Any pair of 5s, for instance, can be immediately cleared. Each game usually starts with clearing away any quick pairs. Removed pairs make space to connect further digits. Empty spaces have no number value, and make it easier to clear more than two numbers at once. Some examples of common larger sets to surround (of course they can be in any order): 4-3-3, 1-2-3-4, 7-1-2, 5-3-2, 6-2-2 and 4-4-2. The tricky part is connecting two numbers in the corners of a box, when other digits get in the way, adding unwanted values to the sum.
The most valuable digit is 1, since they fit into the most possible combinations.
While Make-Ten is not a game for perfectionists, as it’s probable that most fields cannot be fully cleared, the game does let you keep playing after time concludes, which is an advantage it has over Fruit Box. It doesn’t count points after the time bar runs out, but it can be interesting to see how much of the board you can complete.
Make-Ten is really simple and has very little fuss about it. It plays quickly, and then it’s over. It’s a nice game for quick sessions. It was written in 500 characters of code, and doesn’t offer any progression or metagame. After two minutes, which begin the moment the game starts, there isn’t even a prompt to play again. To have another go, press Enter and choose to Reset Cart, or just close the window if you’re done.
Make-Ten (itch.io, by pancelor, $0)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It isn’t always easy finding things for this weekly feature. Sometimes it’s backed up a month, sometimes though something gets scheduled just a couple of days after it premieres, and I have to scrape the barrel a bit. But not this time. Oh no.
Remember Untitled Goose Game? Seven years ago I made a Metafilter post about the first WIP promo video, but the game itself is only five years old. Since its 2019 release, there’s been celebratory essays, philosophy essays, desktop toys, a very popular “review” from videogamedunkey, and more wonderful articles and reviews from, among other places, the New Yorker and The Guardian.
Back in 2021, developer House House considered making an animated series about the Goose and its village. Nothing came of it, but they did make a four-minute proof-of-concept animation, and it’s wonderful. Please allow your day to be brightened, and moistened, once again, by the Goose:
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.
The title is a little mysterious. What is a Klex, and why is it named Blob? Or is Blobbing something that one does to a Klex?
As it turns out, Klex is a kittycat! A black cat, that looks, a bit, like a black blob that moves around. Klex is the name, Blob is what it is. I can ignore the order of the nouns in the title for cuteness factor.
Cat games are springing up in greater numbers. All spiritual descendants of their great ancestor Neko, more lately you play as the cat. Maybe Stray was what kicked them off, but more recently there was the wonderful Little Kitty, Big City. (I interviewed its creators over on Game Developer!)
Blog the Klex is a demo for another cat game, currently being worked on by Sigma Unit. It’s free at itch.io. It’s being worked on by a much smaller team, and there isn’t a lot to do in the demo, but it shows a terrific sense of whimsy. Klex is adorable, and plays differently from the unnamed kitty in LKBC. LKBC is quite a vertical game, with a lot of climbing around, but Klex mostly runs on the ground with some jumping.
Klex’s animation is “procedural,” meaning in this case that the game figures out where their front paws go, and the rest of the cat follows from that. As Klex runs, there’s a jingling, like of a jingle ball rolling along, that perfectly follows their foorsteps. It’s a case where the sum is greater than the parts: the cat’s head, eyes huge, staying perfectly level, while their paws move in a flurry beneath them, jingling away. It’s very cute. Then you hold the Dash button down, and it gets cuter. You have to experience it to understand. You should. Also, Klex is more apt to squeeze themselves into narrow spaces than the cat in KLBC, and has a very cat-like ability to walk on narrow ledges. They also have an uncat-like ability to turn themself into a bouncy ball. Maybe Klex is part Samus.
The game itself, as it currently is, is brief, a sequence of areas where it’s left to you to figure out how to progress. Like LKBC there is nothing that can harm the cat. The worst that can happen is you fall off of a roof, and the game voids you out and puts you back on the rooftop. (I don’t know why you can even fall off; there’s a lot of invisible walls around to keep you on track. Maybe they have later plans for those street areas.)
Most of it is straightforward, but there are a couple of places where you might get stuck, until you realize you can grab some moving objects by holding down the Interact button. Once you know that you shouldn’t have much trouble. You’ll know the demo is over because you’ll get a screen of credits.
Please give Blob the Klex a try! And enjoy a few screenshots:
Blob the Klex Demo (itch.io, $0)
The weekly indie showcases look at a variety of indie games that were submitted and I’m always looking for more games to check out.
00:00 Intro
00:15 Power of Ten
2:04 Welcome to Empyreum
3:28 Alien Slayers
4:44 Rainworld/Rainworld Downpour DLC
6:50 We are the Caretakers
9:08 Mahokenshi
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 trick was discovered a scant few days ago in Balatro that will outright tell you what the top card on your deck is, it’s been in the game since the original demo release, and its an intentional inclusion by the game’s creator.
One of the many Jokers you can obtain in the game is Misprint. (See right) Misprint’s function is to add a random number from 0 to 23 to the hand’s “Mult,” the chip value it’ll earn. It displays this, amusingly, as glitched description text that changes, and occasionally displays random, apparently garbled text.
Well as it turns out, it’s not random text at all. It’s a code that tells you what the card on top of your deck is! It’s the rank of the card (2-14 for its rank) and its suit (H for Hearts, etc.)!
Balatro is unusually devoid of other deck-peeking abilities. While there’s abilities that affect chips, Mult, Mult-multipliers, money, Tarot cards, Spectral cards and lots more, and you can at any time review what possible cards might be waiting in your deck, nothing will absolutely tell you what’s waiting for your next hand. And you don’t even have to have this Joker in play to use it, which is good, because it’s not great in many circumstances. If you go to the card’s spot in the Collection (provided it’s been gained at least once) and look at its description there, it still works! It’s been noted that it’ll even reveal the hidden identity of Stone Cards, which have their original values obscured by a layer of rock.
How does this affect the game? Well I’m going to go out on a limb and say, not as much as you’d think? It only reveals one card, and doesn’t say anything about its Enhancement, Edition or Seal. If you have more than one of a card, it’ll just tell you its rank and suit. That can still be used to deduce other properties of a card (if your only Red-Sealed Glass card is a 7 of Hearts, it’s a giveaway if Misprint reports a 7H) but it’ll require some setup, which is like nearly every other aspect of the game. It does slightly help you make specific hands, but even the best games of Balatro eventually run afoul of its ruthless ante scaling.
Every Set Side B post needs a link to a Youtube video, right? Here’s a breathless two minute one from BelenosBear explaining the trick:
Of particular note, Balatro University says they’ve known about this all along (18 seconds):
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 continually amazing what people manage to make within the modest resources of the Pico8 fantasy console virtual machine. This time it’s a decent demake of 2DBOY’s World of Goo, by VirtuaVirtue!
The objective is the same as the original: drag goo balls to build structures, to try to reach the pipe, which will then suck away all the excess goo balls on your construction. If you have enough left over, you win and get to move to the next level.
It’s quite challenging, it gets harder much faster than the original game. The physics of the goo constructions is much wobblier and bouncier than WoG, and goo balls don’t stick to walls here, so you’ll have to spend more goo balls on balances and counterweights. But it’s certainly not a bad thing to play around with for free!
World of Goo Demake for Pico8 (itch.io, $0)
This is a review of Robo Quest played with a press key by the developer.
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 thing about Spelunky 64, a reimplementation of Spelunky on the Commodore 64, that gets me is how smooth the scrolling is. Smooth multi-directional scrolling isn’t easy to do on the C64 without hardware assistance, but here it handles it without apparent problem. Here is a 7-minute demonstration from Just Jamie:
It’s not the only obstacle Paul Koller (PaulKo64) had in making this surprisingly faithful recreation. It contents itself with the basic Atari-style joystick, with a single overloaded button. So up is used for jumping, tapping the button attacks, holding the button uses an item, down+button takes out a bomb, and up+button places a rope. It’s not perfect, and you have to be really careful in shops, but it doesn’t work badly.
BastichB 64K has an interview with its developer on Youtube (7 1/2 minutes):
Here is a complete playthrough (28 minutes):
Spelunky 64 is on itch.io for $3. To play it, you’ll need a Commodore 64 emulator, or a physical C64 and a way to get the game image onto a disk.
It’s a long one today folks. To mark the release of the mobile version of poker-based time sink Balatro, let’s sit back, for two hours and 42 minutes, and watch Balatro University plot their way through the first eight antes of a game:
The video says it’s part 1 of 2, and ends after the nominal win, but the game doesn’t end there. If you want to watch the rest of the game, it’ll take another two hours and 27 minutes of your time, to get to Ante 18.
High-level Balatro is a game of extremely big numbers, and Ante 18’s requirements are along the lines of 5.53130, which in regular notation is 5,531,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Be still my beating heart! If you just want to jump to where the game starts to get insane, try this link to a moment a little into that video.
So if you don’t want to watch five hours of video but still wan to know something of what’s going on? First off they use a lot of Purple Seals. Every time a Purple Seal card is discarded you receive a random consumable Tarot card. Tarot cards have a bunch of uses. Two of them give you money, but most of them give you some way to modify your deck. Particularly, Strength lets you increase the rank of two cards, Hanged Man lets you destroy two cards, and Death lets you turn one card into a copy of a different one.
With enough Tarot cards you can perform potent crimes against power, like turning your entire deck into a single type of card! That not only makes some poker hands, like Four of a Kind, or the secret hand Flush Five, really easy to make, but it lets you exploit certain Jokers that operate on a different card each round. These Jokers always pick one of the cards in your deck at random, but if you only have one type of card, they have to pick that one!
The most valuable kind of Joker for the long haul is one that gives you multiple Mult Multipliers, and to retrigger those multipliers. A Glass card multiplies your Mult by 2; a Glass card with a Red Seal multiplies it by 2 twice; other Jokers that retrigger cards multiply it by 2 more times.
It sounds fairly simple written out here, but setting up this system is where the skill lies. While I observe that the real game of Balatro isn’t merely in performing these ludicrous offenses to mathematics, but in figuring our how to do them, watching a really high-level player smash through its strictures and rules might give you some ideas for improving your own game, even if you don’t follow Balatro University’s techniques exactly.
