The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games we check out on the channel. Please reach out if you would like to submit a game for a future one. All games shown are either press keys, demos, or games from my own collection.
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 latest installment in my eternal quest to reduce the size of my notes file! Also because a lot of my day yesterday was spent in preparing for a TPUG World of Commodore demonstration of Loadstar Compleat, which I hope to show all of you soon, but meaning that I need something relatively low-effort for today.
2. NESbag, a system for wrapping NES homebrew for immediate play by others without having to set up an emulator yourself, announces two-player support.
5. He uses AI-generated images to provide visual interest, which is usually a strike against a link for me, but I know he means well so I’ll give him a pass this time. Youtuber Lupe Darksnout presents a series on getting video to play on a Commodore 64. (playlist link, 48 videos averaging about 17 minutes each, about 10½ hours in all)
Blippo+ is a game because it’s presented as a game, it was originally presented on the Playdate, and these days games are defined so maximally that anything could be a game. But there is no gameplay in Blippo+, unless you count the random times the signal drifts, a purely artificial event, and you have to adjust various sliders to make the picture clear again.
Blippo+ is more of a unique means of telling a story than a game. I’m brought to mind of Portal, not Valve’s 2007 weird kinetic puzzle-action game, but Activison’s 1986 even weirder storytelling experience, about exploring a planet-wide information system to discover what happened to its missing inhabitants. In both Blippo+ and (older) Portal, all the “gameplay” is in a system of presenting information to the viewer/reader.
There is a story that progresses through a series of updates. On the Playdate it was timelocked, so it was like it was passing in real time. In the new Steam and Switch versions, the story unfolds more at your own pace; after you’ve seen most of one set you can “download” the next “packette” of shows, but also go to previous packettes whenever you feel like it.
I said shows, because Blippo+ presents itself as the television of a distant planet. I have avoided calling it an alien planet, because it’s really a lot like Earth, and while there’s definitely some unexpected elements (a scientist talks to long-dead inhabitants who are brains in jars) most of it you wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen on Earth TV in the early 90s. There’s a self-centered teen show, an exercise program, an entertainment news show that feels like it’s from the MTV of old, a show with a character much like Max Headroom, and many other callbacks to cable television of three decades past. There’s even a scrambled porn channel, although there’s really no porn behind it, other than “Tantric Computing,” which is but video clips of a lady’s hand lovingly fondling old-style computer mice and monitors.
There’s a show about two space-faring cowboys. A claymation kids show. The “Fighting Trillions” series of action movies, of which we only ever see trailers, narrated by a virtual soundlike of the late, great Gary Owens. (All of the shows have really great voice acting!) A D&D-themed trivia gameshow. The weird Julia Child-like cooking show Snacks Come Alive. And more. One of the shows is just different kinds of static. Another is info cards for local programming. The “Tips” channel is, wonderfully, just a sequence of error messages.
It’s all rounded off with a Preview Guide-style program listing channel, and a Ceefax-like information presentation service that’s somehow one of the most affecting parts of the whole package.
Each show, of about 20 in all, is only two minutes long. It’s easy to load it up and watch the entire contents of one or two of the channels, either intently or as background to other things.
It really needs to be experienced to get the idea across. This collection of first week clips on Youtube (11 minutes) that should demonstrate to you what it’s like.
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”
If it’s not the holidays, it certainly is a holiday, at least for those of us in the US. We’re preparing to load up on turkey, or maybe a vegetarian equivalent. We’re occupied with various other things, so please enjoy this report on some games we’ve been playing.
Of course, Kirby Air Riders has been the main thing for me. I just finished the “true ending” of its story mode, Road Trip, a few minutes ago. It’s bombastic and loud, true, but it was nice to see O², Nightmare and Marx as bosses again, and Galactic Nova, from way back in Kirby Super Star, make a return as part of Kirby’s weird lore. For a series originally about beating up a penguin with royal pretensions because he took everyone’s food, Kirby’s certainly killed a lot of Cthulhus.
Rakshasa from UFO 50, screenshot borrowed (because of laziness) from syltefar.com.
Now that my excuse to talk about that again is out of the way, I’ve been playing more of Party House and Rakshasa in UFO 50. I’ve already said enough about Party House, and I’m working on a revision of my strategy guide; Rakshasa is also something that should have some things said about it, a very short, very hard take on Ghosts & Goblins with a spicy Indian flavor. It’s a game that revels in randomness, and it’s easy to get overwhemed if you don’t stay on your toes at all times. I actually think its big gimmick, that you don’t have lives, but instead must complete a minigame when you perish, of escalating difficulty each time, to be one of the less interesting things about it.
Besides that, I’ve been working my way through Dragon Quest III 2D-HD, which has some quite major design differences from the Famicom/NES game from 1988. Lots to say about that too—just, later. (BTW, if you think using em dashes means something is written by an “AI,” well, I won’t have much kind to say to you about that belief. Please read better writers.)
And then there’s Blippo+. (trailer above, 1¾ minutes) Published by Panic, who also published Untitled Goose Game and Thank Goodness You’re Here!, and first released for Panic’s little portable system that could, the Playdate, Blippo is simply a pitch-perfect rememberance of 90s TV, although as experienced on another planet. It has weird indulgent kids TV (“The Boredome”), classic MTV-style news programming (“The Rubber Report”), D&D-themed fantasy gameshows like from the UK (“Quizzard”) and even a scrambled porn channel, not real porn, but with a sexy lady’s hand caressing mice and monitors (“Tantric Computing”). It’s wrapped up in presentation that kind of looks like adjusting a satellite receiver, and all the shows are like one minute long. It’s weird, unexpected and fun, like everything else Panic makes.
Statue’s most recent focus has been Mechabellum, because as they told me, “I like games that trick me into doing math.” I think one could say that all turn-based strategy games are doing math in one form or another. Math is weird that way.
In addition to all the games they play to review on their Youtube channel Game Wisdom, GWBycer has been playing strategy game Phoenix Point, and its mod Terror From the Void. I didn’t know anything about it until I saw his message about it. Lot of strategy floating around in the air, with Air Riders thrown in to cut it with pure chaos.
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 Plush Girls Dozen is a collection of fantasy console games; that’s games for fantasy consoles, not fantasy games for consoles. 10 are for PICO-8, two for TIC-80.
I linked yesterday about an instance of the Gigantes legendary machine battle in Kirby Air Riders City Trial. Here’s a full game of it, from Gigantes’ point of view. (8 minutes) I hope this doesn’t become a frequent thing, it might be fun once in a while but not if every other game turns into a huge boss battle.
(Edit: changed stylization of the name of the system so it’s not all-caps.)
I was sure I had posted about this before, I mean I had to have. It’s such a cool bit of gaming history, never less than a bit obscure, but still, incredibly, has multiple websites devoted to it today. While waiting to binge on Kirby Air Riders, I figured I’d work off some of my indie KARma (heh) with this post about something that could not possibly be more different.
I’m talking about Eamon, an Apple II text adventure/RPG system with ports to other platforms (there was a not much used C64 version, and a PC/MS-DOS version with a bit more uptake), but was biggest on Apple II.
Eamon itself isn’t a single game, but is more like a family of games, each created to a certain specification. The closest thing that Eamon has to being at its center is the Master Disk, which is a character creation tool and a starter adventure. The idea is, you create and customize a character using the Master Disk, which saves your character and allows you to take them into other adventures, written by others.
If you remember me talking about Dungeon (from Loadstar issue #74 and others), it’s the same kind of idea, but from far earlier, and a lot more freeform. Dungeon had creation tools and a game engine. Eamon adventures were BASIC programs written from scratch, that modified the character file. Your in-game surrogate was really at the mercy of whatever horrors the adventure writers had in mind. If you feel a mild chill of existential horror at the idea, that’s because you live after decades of internet culture has trained you to recoil in fear that a software author could do just anything. It requires a degree of trust on the part of the user. Of course, Eamon adventures varied in quality and fairness. You have to expect that even your best characters could get pasted by a level 1,000 Tarrasque right as an adventure begins. Of course, smart people made backups of their character disk; in a chaotic realm like this, it’s a lot less cheating than basic prudence.
I promised links to websites. Here they are.
There’s Eamon Remastered, which is a web-based recreation with many recreations of classic games. With it, you can create a character which is saved to the website, then put it through the options on the Master Disk, and then can send them through the adventures, without having to get an emulator working or anything. If you just want to try it, that’s probably the best.
First off, you should probably try the Eamon Remastered web-base recreation, which has a fair number of adventures to play. Here is its manual.
After you create your character (if you’re playing the Apple II original, make sure to follow directions in town, as the game is positively gleeful about killing newly-made characters), you’ll want to buy a weapon and some armor. Advancement in Eamon is not of the level-based D&D style, instead characters advance by doing. When you attack with a weapon, you might improve in your ability to use it. When you’re struck by an attack, you might improve in your use of armor. It lacks the “dopamine hit” (I hate that term) of gaining a level, but I think this is quite a more realisticm, and dare I say, better, method of character advancement. It’s more like the Runequest/Call of Cthulhu/Basic Role-Playing system, where most of a character’s ability is encoded within a number of individual skills. Though it’s a lot more gradual, it also means that characters are a lot more individual.
When you play it, you’ll find that it works basically like Infocom adventures did. Since each Eamon game is a program to itself, things could work very differently between them, but I think most of them tried to adhere to some shared conventions.
The “Beginners Cave” adventure is the intended first experience with EAMON. It provides you with some basic treasure, opponents and advancement. It is quite possible for a new character to die there, so treat this adventure with care. I found that there’s some quirks. “take [item]” tends not to work; “get [item],” however, does. “attack [monster]” can be used to attack in melee. There is a button, by the input box, that you can click for a list of available commands.
I don’t know if this is true of every adventure, but to get away from a battle you’re currently in, it won’t do to move out of it, if you don’t want to fight you should use the “flee” command, although monsters can follow you anyway if they choose. Flee sends you to the previous room you were in. If the monster that was menacing you chooses to follow, then I don’t know what else to do than just keep attacking and hope for the best.
I don’t have a lot of experience with Eamon myself, so I must leave you to your own devices for furthering your adventuring career. Good luck!
Warning: while the creator says it isn’t sponsored, there is a distracting review segment over two minutes long. You can just sit through it, try to skip past it manually, or you might try the open-and-crowdsourced browser extension SponsorBlock, which shows segments like that one on the Youtube timeline in green.
Presented largely as a curiosity, but an entertaining one. An itch.io user named The Great Foohachi went through the trouble of converting background and character graphics from beloved SNES Squaresoft JRPG Chrono Trigger to Gameboy format, and from there put them to work as window dressing for a fairly rudimentary single-player Othello clone, a.k.a. Reversi, using GB Studio, which is rapidly becoming a go-to tool for this kind of monkeyshine. I would expect that 90% of the 256K ROM space goes into the art, which is really only there to give it some prologue cutscenes.
How does it play? Once you get to the game portion, fairly slowly, but it works. I played a round on Normal difficulty and won pretty easily. The thing to remember is, try to look ahead a move or two, don’t set up your opponent for huge moves, and if possible don’t let your opponent get a corner spot, while trying all you can to get them yourself.
Here’s a few screenshots. P.S. If you try this, you’ll want to turn the sound off.
This bit of dialogue should give you some idea of how seriously this is taken.It’s a nice conversion of the SNES game’s graphics at least.
You can’t play as Robo because he’s the opponent, natch.
Othello Trigger (by The Great Foohatchi, Gameboy ROM on itch.io, $0)
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’ve got a huge backlog of things to post about, so once a week I’m going to just dump a few of them into a post, preferably on a Monday without much discussion of the contents, just to get them out of my notes. I figured I’d do a new pixel art banner for this idea later, for now let’s get to the links!
