Gamefinds: ioBaseball Demo, Fusion of Balatro and Blaseball

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.

Blaseball had its horrors, but how could you not love a world where heaven is overseen by this happy creature?

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

Two Bloody Good Indie Games

This is a double preview of Coven and Tarnished Blood, Coven was played with a retail key, Tarnished was played with a press key. Both games are in early access and what you see may not represent the current version.

0:00 Intro
00:17 Coven
4:23 Tarnished Blood

Amazing Next Fest Demos

This is part 6 of my favorite demos from next fest 2024.

0:00 Intro
00:20 Stonemachia
2:41 Letalis
4:34 Wild Woods
5:57 Strategem Lost
7:52 Everwarder
10:16 Bioweaver
12:16 Mother’s Sword
13:55 Unless
15:20 Break the Line
17:17 Heritage: A Dragon’s Tale
18:47 VinDefiant

original streams parts 1 and 2 .

SNES Mice on the NES, and how both systems read their controllers

As it turns out, as explained by the below video (here’s a direct link, 10 minutes long), the NES and SNES have very similar control setups. Both controller ports have seven lines, and both read them using a shift register that can be used to read arbitrary numbers of buttons. The SNES basically just has more buttons to read.

Due to this, there’s homebrew NES software that’s made to use the SNES mouse, and even emulators that will convert your PC’s mouse into simulated SNES mouse signals, which will be fed into the emulated NES and the software running thereon. (It isn’t all buttons, but it sends the displacement as a binary number.)

The video comes to us from the account of CutterCross, who’s making CrossPaint, an NES art program that uses the SNES mouse. A demo can be gotten from itch.io.

Next Fest Showcase Part 5

This is part 5 of my favorite demos from next fest 2024 October edition.

0:00 Intro
00:17 Spirit X Strike
4:22 Juice
5:21 Wings of Endless
6:49 Rivals of Aether II
8:23 Popucom
10:32 Hordes of Hunger
12:40 Silly Polly Beast
14:06 Glitch Dungeon Crystal
15:30 Pest Apocalypse

Original streams: Part 1, Part 2

Gamefinds: GAR-TYPE

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 a new year, and probably going to be an exceedingly crappy one, so let’s at least start it out with something amazing and wonderful. For while it’s a world where millions of people make extremely stupid decisions, it’s also one where some people work diligently to make bafflingly detailed works of art like Lumpy Touch‘s GAR-TYPE, the R-Type/Saturday Morning cartoon crossover you didn’t know you’d love. CW: pixelated cartoon gore, but that sounds worse than it is.

To reuse my Metafilter description: Help ace fighter JON STARBUCKLE, stationed on the USS ACRES, pilot the GAR-TYPE D to destroy GORESTAR, a planet-eating threat, with your choice of three different weapons: Ravioli, Macaroni or Spaghetti.

There’s so many genius touches in this, like the signs for Italian restaurants in the first level, or the name of the Lasagna Base, or the unexpected boss of the second level. It vividly realizes the aesthetic of the anime-influenced Japanese shooter. Even if it’s too difficult for you (and it might be too difficult for me), you can enjoy the trailer and playthrough video below for a tour of its ridiculous action.

Here’s that trailer (1 minute):

And the playthrough video (19m):

GAR-TYPE — Newgrounds, itch.io ($0, Unity: HTML5, Windows & Mac)

Best Demos of Next Fest Part 3

Part 3 of my coverage of Steam Next Fest 2024 October edition of indie game demos.

0:00 Intro
00:20 Somber Echoes
2:36 Diesel Dome Oil & Blood
4:31 Rift of the Necrodancer
5:34 System Purge: Hollow Point
6:59 Symphonia
8:34 To Kill a God
10:15 Carnival Massacre
12:08 Super Dash

Best Demos From Next Fest Part 2

This is part 2 of my favorite demos from Steam Next Fest October 2024.

0:00 Intro
00:17 Antonblast
2:06 The Spirit of the Samurai
3:41 Zefyr a Thief’s Melody 
5:20 Trash Goblin
6:17 Ari Buktu and the Anytime Elevator
7:47 Lovish
9:01 Windblown
10:43 Senseless

Caves of Qud Intro Videos

Caves of Qud, after over a decade of development, finally reached a 1.0 release and has, for now at least, become the toast of the more-enlightened gaming internet. Of course there will people who will look at its time-based graphics and look down on it, and go back to their games of Call of World of Fortnight Among Us Craft Duty League. But if you’re here, then there’s a good chance that you get what’s special about roguelikes. And not just roguelikes, but classic roguelikes: heavily randomized, turn- and tile-based, and challenging. Hence, Caves of Qud.

Honestly, the roguelike scene is so large now that no one person could reasonably be expected to keep track of all of it. But there is no need to; others hold aloft that particular torch. Here’s a couple of videos, then, on getting started in Caves of Qud.

Publisher Kitfox Games (who also publish the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress) sponsored a video with “Getting Started” right in its title. Here it is (18 minutes):

It contains information on the different modes, the best starting location for beginners (Joppa), basic controls, navigating around the starting town, how to get around the world map (reminiscent of Alphaman!), how to spend kill points, how to read things, how to examine Artifacts, how to experiment with things (even if it gets you killed sometimes), how to steal things, performing the water ritual, and some combat tips.

Another, slightly longer at 24 minutes, intro video is by Rogue Rat:

It covers ranged weapons, the town of Joppa, Truekin, what to do when you get lost, some different skills to learn, gaining levels from giving books to a specific NPC, using its Crawl-type Autoexplore feature and other topics. Rogue Rat did a longer, more basic, intro video (34m) last year that went over many of the same topics as the first video here.

Best Demos of Steam Next Fest (Oct 2024)

This is the first part of our mega showcase from Next Fest October 2024 edition.

0:00 Intro
00:28 Mohrta
2:51 Aokaki
4:31 Second Essence
6:28 Tearscape
8:20 Cyclopean
9:29 Splintered
11:43 Kilaflow
13:47 Tenebris Somnia
15:54 The Book of Buja
17:07 Widget Inc
18:42 Journey to Incrementalia

Funko vs Itch Update

Liam at Gaming On Linux has some further news about Funko taking down itch.io with a spurious request. Here’s a summary.

  1. Some user created a fanpage for the upcoming Funko Fusion massive crossover game.
  2. Whatever was on it, it triggered some “brand protection” function on a service Funko uses.
  3. It send out complaints to both Itch’s host and DNS registrar.
  4. Itch founder Leaf disabled the account and removed the page and notified both entities. The host nodded and closed the matter; the DNS company, however, never replied.
  5. After a time, the registrar automatically disabled Itch’s domain name, making it impossible to load the site unless you knew its IP address, and who uses those anymore amirite?
  6. Itch, unable to get their registrar to respond to them, posted about the matter on social media, which turned up the heat enough that the problem got fixed pretty quickly after that.

Two weird things. First, Leaf’s mother got social media messages about the problem, for unknown reasons. And Funko posted an artfully-worded statement that claimed it was a mistake without actually apologizing.

The message that Leaf’s Mom sent to Leaf about the issue. She seems like a pretty cool lady. (Image from Gaming on Linux)

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itch.io is Down

EDIT: It appears that itch.io is back up now! It should never have been taken down, but that was still fairly quick response, I suppose.

Disappointing internet news. According to their Bluesky feed, itch.io, beloved indie gaming sales and distribution site, host to countless games both free and paid, and constantly linked to from this site and many others, is down, and the reason is Funko Pops.

These! These horrible dead-eyed non-biodegradable landfill-destined things, littering stores across the US! They’re why we can’t have itch.io! (Image from Amazon)

The text of the thing I refuse to call a “skeet”:

@itch.io has been taken down by Funko of “Funko Pop” because they use some trash “AI Powered” Brand Protection Software called Brand Shield that created some bogus Phishing report to our registrar, iwantmyname, who ignored our response and just disabled the domain

So not only do we have Funko to blame for their DNS record not resolving, but also the relentless scourge of AI! Sure, the world sucks right now. But how does it feel, knowing that if you bought one of these creepy pseudo-cute bits of pop cultural detritus, that you indirectly supported this action?

This is late-breaking news as of this writing, so the situation might change rapidly. Or, it may not. It’s a good reason not to buy Funko items in any case!