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.
Unexpectedly today SquareEnix not only announced but released a remake of the first Mystery Dungeon game, plus the first of the new Rifftrax Experiment episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 hit theaters, so it’s been a full day on top of recovering from DragonCon.
But I just noticed that Roger Dodger over on Metafilter posted a link to a daily cryptogram puzzle, and that seems like the kind of thing all of you may enjoy, maybe long enough to tide you over to tomorrow.
Cryptograms are a pretty old concept, taking the old idea of a Caesar cypher, a code where each letter throughout a message is replaced with a different letter consistently throughout the whole code, and making it into a puzzle. Although true Caesar cyphers shift the letters down the alpha instead of arbitrarily as in most cryptograms. By default punctuation and spaces are revealed from the start, but if you like your puzzles extra hard you can disable even these helps.
If you want a few tips?
Single letters are probably A, or once in a while I.
Every word is bound to have at least one A, E, I, O, U or possibly Y.
The most common three-letter word is, of course, THE.
There are only so many two-letter words likely to appear in a puzzle like this.
Double letters are great for narrowing things down. Also be on the lookout for possible plurals.
Well another DragonCon is done for the year. I currently sit in the Westin, a high class hotel I ordinarily could never afford, here after the con has concluded only by the grace of a roomshare, a bunch of people who chip in for a room together, an arrangement I think is ordinarily against the rules, but hotels put up with because it ultimately gets them more business for a thing like DragonCon.
DragonCon bills itself as “the largest multi-genre and pop culture convention in the world.” That may seem artfully put, and it may be, but DC casts a very wide net of subjects. A few examples, it hosts an “Apocalypse Rising” track of world-ending fiction, a Military Sci-Fi track in addition to tracks for general sci-fi, Star Trek and Star Wars, a Digital Media track, a British culture and media track, Anime and general animation tracks, a puppetry track that’s a lot of fun, and much more.
DragonCon crosses with this blog’s umbrella via the Video Gaming track and associated events, including two arcades, a console gaming space, and (though it takes a bit of exploration to find) a couple of installations of Artemis Cosmos, formerly known at the Artemis Starship Bridge Simulator.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is not directly involved, but has a relationship with Electronic Frontier Georgia, and they maintain a small but informative presence there. Yet while there is are fair number of game-related activites there DragonCon is not generally thought of as one of the big video gaming conventions, in a field containing the PAXes, or even Southern Fried Gaming Expo, which takes place in the same city a month earlier, and has hundreds of video arcade and pinball machines.
This was the 40th anniversary of the convention, which had 80,000 attendees in 2017, and fills five hotels and multiple floors of two other buildings besides. This year they hosted Richard Garriott, a.k.a. Lord British, who was involved in multiple panels. Garriott was in fact a guest at the first DragonCon back in 1987, and has returned occaisionally since. I met him at one of his panels, and he said he’d answer my questions via email. I haven’t written them yet, and when he sees the kinds of things I ask he may have second thoughts about it. We’ll see.
Stephen Seitz once again ran his multiple Gamecube gaming panels at night, where people could pop in to play video games like Smash Bros. Melee and the original Kirby Air Ride, set up to play using the Gamecube’s little-used LAN mode. Air Ride is starting to look a little long in the tooth now, finally, that a greatly expanded sequel is out for the Switch 2, but the original is still very playable.
The two arcades at DragonCon this year, as in recent years, were the retro-themed Joystick Gamebar, serving alcoholic drinks and classic arcade games and pinballs, and Save Points mostly Japanese lineup. Of the two I enjoyed Joystick’s more this time. Arcade games at cons often end up a little cursed; for example, the Twilight Zone machine never felt like its flippers lined up well with ramp shots, and the upper flipper was a bit weak making it hard to hit the important Piano shot.
The best-playing pin at Joystick this year was White Water, a classic Williams machine with high risk/high reward play. At one point I had the Grand Champion score on the machine at 524 million, although I got edged out later on. I got to show off Ed Boon’s secret “EJB” menu in Mortal Kombat II a few times to interested players. A few other great games there this time were Joust, Gauntletn Atari Tetris, NBA JAM, Donkey Kong, Frogger and multiple Pac games.
Save Point’s arcade tends to skew heavily towards Japanese rhythm and fighting games, some of them recent, which aren’t my favorite types so I don’t have a great deal to say about them. In previous years they brought out the Japan-only arcade version of Rhythm Heaven, Sega’s weird Cosmic Smash, a Point Blank sequel and, most interesting of all, Rainbow Bombergirl. The most interesting games there this time out were Sega’s Monkey Ball (the predecessor of the console Super Monkey Ball series), a Japanese Tetris game, the original Space Invaders, a sped-up Ms. Pac-Man and, in the arcade area, Bally’s classic World Cup ’93.
Next year my plan is to volunteer in the board gaming and RPG tracks. I hope that I get in for, while I know a number of money saving tricks, DragonCon gets more expensive for me to attend every year. Here are some photos from this year’s convention, with commentary.
From Mortal Kombat II’s EJB MenuWorld Cup Soccer ’94The ever-charming Richard “Lord British” Garriott, after his talk about his plans for reviving Ultima once he, due to a quirk of copyright law, wrests control of it away from Electronic Arts.Monkey Ball! They also had The Typing of the Dead, but it wasn’t nearly as well-localized as the English Dreamcast version, and all the text was Romanized Japanese words.The banner for the Joystick Gamebar, posted on the outside of its temporary location in a defunct Benihana.BE ADVISE! ESTROOM FOR TRONS ONLY!
The internet has been around in one form or other since the 1960s, but we can date the creation of the first web browser to Christmas Day, 1990. But there have been other services upon the internet, and although people don’t mention this nearly as often as they once did, they deserve to be recognized separately. The internet is not the Web.
Some of these services, which actually began off the internet itself, as features on private networks, are MUDs, or “Multi-User Dungeons,” the first form of what are now called MMORPGs. And one type of these is the graphical MUD, where you don’t have just a parser and a text crawl telling you your surroundings and what’s happening, but you can see your character and what lies around them.
To my knowledge the first graphical MUD is not a settled question. Here are a few early MUDs and MUD-like worlds: Habitat, Club Caribe, Isle of Kesmai, Neverwinter Nights (the AOL version). Before all of these though there were the multiplayer dungeons on ancient PLATO systems, which were frequently presented graphically. Some later graphical worlds include Worldsaway, The Palace, Ultima Online, the oft-forgotten Sims Online, Runescape, Legends of Kesmai, Everquest, Second Life, World of Warcraft (of course), Conan Exiles, Glitch, and a slew of other titles. Now I think it’s safe to say there have been more forgotten online graphical worlds than remembered. Some of these forgotten games were even popular. Who remembers Asheron’s Call? Dark Age of Camelot? City of Heroes? The answer: a cadre of former members who retain fond memories of it, even after Capitalism demanded that the world they once lived in sink beneath the cold waves.
One of these worlds was, and still is, called Nexus.tk. While Nexus continues to survive through the years, a while ago a number of players splintered off from it and started a new game along its lines, Chronicles of Samhan, which is now open for a “soft launch.” A friend-of-the-blog, the worthy Statue, is interested is involved in its running, and they care very deeply about it, and if they care, we care too. Here is a screenshot:
It has purposely pixel art-ish graphics, a tile-based game world, monsters to fight, items to earn and levels to gain. Right now there aren’t many players, but that itself is a point of interest, a way to get in early and gain wealth and stature when the competition is low. I know that Chronicles of Samhan is run on a shoestring budget, completely on the backs and out of the wallets of a handful of hobbyists. They are unlikely to go corporate and enshittify it to hell, and these days that’s another point in its favor.
There have been many of these worlds, hundreds of them, and there’ll probably be hundreds more before this Internet grinds to a halt. I think everyone should try a few of them. Joining up is free, so as I often say, why not give it a try?
A few images showing off the fairly large regions to explore:
A portion, zoomed out, of the town of Seasong and nearly areasA portion of the Marvel Mines
We linked to videos in PKBeats’ long Smash Bros trivia series recently, but while perusing some other things they’ve uploaded this came up (18 minutes), and frogdarnit, it was too interesting to let pass. You could also load the video starting directly at the start of the discussion, almost three minutes in. Text info below.
Here’s the gist. In the Smash Bros. series, Mr. Game & Watch has a move called Judge, where he holds up a sign with a number from 1 to 9, and depending on the number one of nine different effects can happen, with possibilities like dropping food, producing a fire effect, damaging G&W himself, or, if a 9 comes up, executing an extremely powerful attack like a slightly weaker version of the game’s famous Home Run Bat item, that usually KOs an opponent.
The number that appears, and so the effect product, for the most part seems random, and a good thing too with Number 9’s immense power. Judge never executes the same move twice in a row, so if a 9 wasn’t the last result produced, you have a ⅛th chance to get it the next time… usually.
It had been noticed by some that, in certain circumstances, Judge produces a 9 result much more often, like half the time, but the details of the phenomenon were not fully known. Through sheer bloody-minded experimentation, PKBeats found out that the result is largely due to whether Mr. G&W is behind in scoring, and not just behind, but far behind. I’ll let the video give the precise lowdown, but in essence Mr. Game & Watch must have half or less of lives (sorry, “stocks” in Smash lingo) remaining compared to his opponent, and there must be 30 seconds or less left in the match.
So: it’s yet another catch-up mechanic, a way for G&W to clear opponents rapidly if it looks like he’s going to lose. Since it only comes into play at the end of a match, it almost never can make a difference though unless G&W is on his last life, and his opponent has two lives left. In that scenario G&W has a good chance of getting off a 9 and taking off a stock immediately… putting both characters on their last stock, and now G&W has to run up his opponent’s percent in the short remaining time without the increased Judge 9 chances. Doesn’t seem too useful, but then if it were actually useful, someone out there would probably have built a strategy off of it, so I guess it’s for the best that it’s so infrequent.
We’re approaching DragonCon again in a few days, meaning my time is going to be taken up with wandering around and probably playing more of Bombergirl in their game room. So for the next week it’s low effort posts to make our demanding once-daily schedule. Here we go!
NeoGamer on Youtube has an entertaining, not to mention loooong, video with short clips from 200 strange games they’ve played in their channel. (1 hour 27 minutes) Right off the bat they start out weird, and they don’t let up. Please consume responsibly.
The C64 Appreciation Society has two videos on works by Access Software, which got its start making Commodore 64 games. Their first product was an interesting wargame called Beach-Head. It followed an interconnected mini-game structure, where your success at each game determined how many ships would survive to make it to the beach, which gave the player more chances to make it through an obstacle gauntlet and destroy the weak points on the enemy fortress. Beach-Head was particularly known for its graphics and its excellent sound design. In this video on Beach-Head (27 minutes), The C64 Appreciation Society plays through the game, showing off strategy and explaining its history along the way.
Access Software made other games, and would eventually begin the Tex Murphy series, but unquestionably their greatest legacy was their line golf sims, which began on the C66 with Leaderboard Golf (16 minutes). They’d move on eventually to making PC golf games, especially the Links series, which were so well-regarded that Microsoft bought the company specifically to make more golf games.
Eventually their work on computer golf would result in the formation of a subsidiary called TruGolf that made golf simulators, consisting of a huge screen and set of sensors that detects how you swing clubs and shows you your ball’s flight afterward, in a kind of deluxe version of Wii Sports Golf. Although Access would be eventually sold to Take-Two and is now no more, TruGolf survives to this day, and now they make simulators for other sports than golf, such as bowling and baseball.
Again, a Kickstarter for a sequel to General Chaos. I frankly can’t believe this is happening. It’s a sequel to a little-known, yet brilliant, Genesis/Mega Drive combat game with serious developer star power behind it. How did this get started? Are there other people in the world who love General Chaos as much as I do? Perhaps even more than I do? The prospect makes me wonder.
Promo image for Major Snafu, from the Kickstarter page.
General Chaos was the product of a couple of ex-Midway developers, and creators of some of their most iconoclastic hits, Brian Colin and Jeff Nauman. They were the creators of Rampage, one of the standouts of the Silver Age of arcades, and the basis of a certain popular movie. They tend to dwell in the shadow of the likes of Ed Boon and John Tobias, creators of Mortal Kombat, and Mark Turmell of NBA Jam and NFL Blitz. Yet there’s a strong argument that could be made that NBA Jam wouldn’t have existed without the similar-in-play Arch Rivals from the same company, which was from Colin and Nauman.
In addition to Arch Rivals and Rampage, Colin and Nauman worked on Spy Hunder, Xenophobe and Pigskin 621 AD, before leaving Midway and striking out on their own under the banner of Game Refuge. And that’s where they made General Chaos for the Genesis, published by Electronic Arts. And hey, Game Refuge still exists, while Midway is currently a locked cabinet full of IP somewhere in a basement of either Warner Bros. Entertainment, or the company currently called “Light & Wonder,” (I don’t know Pete I don’t think I buy it) but contains such multitudes as “Scientific Games,” “Autotote Corporation,” “Shuffle Master,” “WMS Industries,” “Bally,” or even other totemic brands that once saw better days. These days they mostly sell to casinos, may they speedily pass on their way to hell.
General Chaos isn’t one of their best known titles, but it has a certain something. It’s a cartoony, comedic take on deadly warfare. The Kickstarter calls it a predecessor of the real-time strategy genre, and there is some of that there certainly, but truthfully General Chaos is something entirely unique. It’s an intrinsically two-sided battlefield action combat game where the warzone is made of single screens, and where each player controls a team of five soliders with different abilities (with one exception I’ll mention in a bit). In action it feels a bit like Mattel’s classic tank combat games Armor Battle for the Intellivision and Armor Ambush for the Atari 2600, in that a single player must command multiple units, but with much more depth.
Gameplay from General Chaos. This and all following screenshots are from Mobygames.
There is also quite a bit of General Chaos essence in Team Fortress 2, even though it’s not an FPS, for both its comical, satirical atmosphere and its array of characters which each have substantial differences from each other. There are gunners, rocket launchers, grenadiers, flame throwers and dynamite chuckers. Most of the time characters are controlled indirectly: control a cursor to point at a location and press the B button to send your current character to it. C changes characters, and A tells all your units to fire their weapons. They automatically pick their targets.
Hand-to-hand combat
When opposing soldiers get near each other the battle pauses and they engage in hand-to-hand battle, in the form of a simple fighting game. Combatants who are knocked down can be revived by pointing at them with the cursor and pressing A to call in one of a limited number of Medics. Characters who fall too often will eventually turn into a pile of bones and vanish. Additional Medic uses can be found on the battlefield, and are also awarded for reaching certain point totals.
General Chaos Commando team battle
As an alternative playstyle, a side can choose to field a pair of Commandos. If one player is using Commandos they must divide their attention between them, but two players can also play co-op with a Commando apiece. Commandos don’t use the indirect method of control, and instead control directly. This can make them much more effective warriors, but comes at the cost of only being two people to a squad, instead of a full team of five. Commandos can call in Medics too, but must reach their teammate in person to do so.
There are lots of worthy games from the 16-bit era that didn’t receive their due, and while I don’t know how well it sold, General Chaos always struck me as a bit of a sleeper hit. Video game genres were already becoming locked-down, and Electronic Arts was already showing signs of abandoning their reputation for nurturing talent and becoming the grotesque behemoth they are today. I’m surprised they don’t outright own the rights to General Chaos, but it appears they do not, or maybe Game Refuge bought it back from them.
The Kickstarter page makes it clear that Colin and Neuman have spent a lot of time thinking about how their classic wargame could be improved. There are more characters planned, more control options, between battle upgrades and most interesting of all, the ability to “go commando” and take direct control of any unit on your side. Home turf battles come with extra units on a given side, “expendables” that have limited abilities but help to give defenders a slight edge. There’s an array of stretch goals, with an especially interesting one at $200k: an arcade version. I think General Chaos was always destined for the arcade, and now it may finally happen.
So if all of this seems interesting to you, please consider supporting their project. Because war is a deadly serious business, so the best thing any of us can do is to laugh at it.
In case you saw AsumSaus’ name atop yesterday’s post and assuming it was going to be some great bit of Smash Bros. nonsense, but then was disappointed when it turned out to be World of Warcraft and Dark Souls (phooey!), here’s the beginning of PKBeat’s series where they’re in the middle of giving you the lowdown on every one of Smash Bros. Ultimate’s many Assist Trophies.
Just some of interesting facts revealed about Assist Trophies:
Some Assist Trophy characters have their own HP, and if players deplete it with attacks they can even be KOed with a strong enough attack. This earns the defeating player a point, although it doesn’t cost the player who picked up the trophy a point.
Usually the owning player can’t attack their own trophys, but if the trophy has started glowing, a state they get into when very low on health, the trophy will actually become vulnerable to attacks even by the player who collected it. This is so they can earn the point before another player earns it.
The trophy with the highest health is Mother Brain, with a base health of 120 HP.
“Base health,” what’s that? Assist Trophys that have health get more health the more players are in the game! This goes up to twice their usual health if there’s eight players.
A good number of trophies have health, and can be attacked, than you’d might think. For example, in the trophy of Color TV Game 15, an early Pong-clone Nintendo made in 1977, the paddles are vulnerable to attack. Each has only 15 HP, but the trophy is defeated if either paddle is defeated.
The Starman trophy, if it’s defeated, displays the SMAAAAASH!! message from Earthbound!
Each Assist Trophy has a list of stages is can’t appear on. Very few trophies can appear on absolutely any stage. One of them is Lyn from Fire Emblem.
There are even trophies that get blocked by Omega or Battlefield versions of certain stages. Usually these are trophies that reside in the background in some way, like Midna or the Moon from Majora’s Mask.
Each Assist Trophy also has a list of items, and other Assist Trophies, that it disables, that can’t generate while it’s active, and alternatively, if that item or trophy currently exists in the world, that prevent it from appearing.
Referring to that last point, “existing” can mean many things. Like, an item held in Isabelle’s pocket still exists in the world, and so will block all the items that can’t generate while it’s instantiated almost indefinitely.
AsumSaus is probably best known for their Smash Bros. Melee videos, and it was they who made the terrific video (54 minutes) about aMSa, the Yoshi player who won major tournaments. And hey, we linked to that back in 2023.
They’ve been diversifying a bit since, and their most recent video is on alternative communication in games. (21 minutes) How so alternative? As in, ways to talk to players without talking to them, either via speech or direct text.
They give a few examples. The first is when Blizzard changed the /spit emote so that it couldn’t be used to specify someone to spit on, when players used that means to express disgust over people who bought a $70 paid mount. The second is the piecemeal phrase building system used to leave environment messages for people in Souls games, also known as template messages. And third, canned messages from Smash-style and modded Smash games.
I could link the things that everyone already knows about, that people in that wretched hive they call Reddit have already linked five times, that have blown up on social media, that there’s already a Youtuber or two making snide comments about. I mean, I’ve linked stuff like that before, pretty often really. They aren’t hard to find.
But I’d much rather link something interesting that’s basically unknown. Help spread the word about it! The only problem there is, how do you find that stuff in the first place? It’s a bit of a chicken-or-David-Egger. I think that’s what you’d call it, sure.
So when I saw someone I follow on Bluesky wrote out nearly every Nintendo video game property, including those that appeared on niche platforms like Virtual Boy and Satellaview, primarily so they could boldface the ones that have arrived on Nintendo Music, I had to run directly here to link to it.
The beginning of a long list
I don’t vouch for its total accuracy, but it still could be a useful resource. In fact I know there are some things that are missing, like their early arcade games Sheriff or Radar Scope, just for starters. But if the idea is to present things that realistically could present soundtracks included in Nintendo Music, it’s a pretty good list.
Dwarf Fortress has always been a game about failure. It’s right there in its motto, “Losing is fun!” It’s a game where you just muddle through, doing what you can, learning as you go, and your games slowly, on the average, get longer and longer the more you play. It’s not that there aren’t guides and tutorials already out there, but the kind of game it is, it halfway feels like they rob something of the player. While I can understand not wanting to start from zero, the sooner the player learns that failure is the end mode of fortresses, the more they’ll understand that the intended way to play is to be audacious.
But which kinds of failure are the most fun? After spending several minutes setting up your expedition getting eaten by wild animals immediately off the wagon is a harsh start to play, especially if it happens repeatedly. Fortress destruction via dragon is scary, but it’s also hilarious; everyone dying on the surface before even digging your first warren is less auspicious.
Dwarf Fortess recently celebrated its 20th birthday, and in celebration Kitfox Games, its Steam publisher, has released a new official beginners video, made by BlindiRL. (34 minutes) It is a good way to move your fortress endings more towards the entertaining end of the scale.
And I’d like to point out, at the end of the video, we’re told that ending a fortress doesn’t quite mean it has to be a failure. If you decide to “finish” a fortress, but then start a new fortress in the same world and of the same faction, then it’s possible for your old dwarfs to decide to emigrate to it. This is something I’ve never tried myself, but it’s a good reason to keep playing in the same world, as you continue to write the saga of your game.
