Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Everyone loves Stardew Valley, and its engaging and quirky denizens! Whether it’s alcoholic bus driver Pam, or horny mayor Lewis, or Pierre the Capitalist, or the evil corporation you can let take over the town, or that one person who’s like that. Sure, you know, that one!
Many of the personable and mathematically romanceable characters of Stardew Valley can be spotted in Emmanomia‘s STARDEW VALLEY ANIMATION (3 minutes). Here:
This is a review of Magenta Horizon played with a press key. After I recorded this review, the developer updated the tutorial with a new version, but I have not had a chance to go back and play through it.
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”
Games From Scratch is a prolific Youtube channel dedicated to helping solo and small team gamedevs with tutorials and tools. They really do post frequently, so if I linked to everything they made it’d overwhelm the blog, but it’s been a while since I referred to them, and they just made a nice omnibus video of free tools. There is a sponsored section in it, but if that kind of thing bothers you I suggest using the browser extension SponsorBlock, which shows time-wasting sections on the Youtube timeline in different colors.
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”
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”
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 weekly showcases highlight the many indie games we play here on the channel. If you want me (Josh Bycer) to look at your game for a future one please reach out.
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”
It got by me this year, but the now 20-year-old 7 Day Roguelike Challenge, a gamejam where people try to construct a complete roguelike within a week’s time, finished up Saturday.
Not only has it been around a long time, but a number of games have come out of it that went on to greater things. Jupiter Hell got its start as a 7DRL project called DoomRL. The amazing Jeff Lait has made a ton of 7DRLs, and many of them have some awesome twist, like a game where you can make portals, but where the portals result in the world through them being rotated and possibly allowing you to get mixed up!
Jeff Lait’s Jacob’s Matrix
There’s regular several very interesting games in the challenge each year! Its itch.io page is here. This year’s theme was, simply, “roguelike,” and 819 people have joined it so far! I can’t wait to see what they’ve made!
Mat Sephton, aka gingerbeardman (Mastodon, Bluesky), creator of a GotY Playdate game, spent some time tracking down the origins of MaBoShi, aka Maboshi’s Arcade, one of the most unique and distinctive independently-made WiiWare games. He blogged about it back in 2013 (anna anthropydid so too back then). Since then there have been DS and iOS remakes of the games, although they all lack a special gimmick of the WiiWare version.
(Aside: did you know that I believe very strongly in the power of hyperlinks? You should too!)
The arcade hosts three games, and they all would have been terrific on their own. My favorite is the Snake variant, a genuinely novel take on the concept and the one I’ve gotten the furthest in. But the cool thing about the Wii version is that up to three players can play at one. Each plays their own games and has independent progression, but intriguingly, their games are not entirely separate. Things that one player does in their game can affect, either positively or negatively, the events in adjacent games. Even if you don’t play with other people, random attract mode games will start up on adjacent screens, and provide a bit of variety to your game.
All three games are demonstrated, on Wii, in the following video (18m). Just watching it makes me want to dig out the Wii U where my own bought copy of the game lives and play another round of Square.
(That’s plural for Balatro, a Latin word for buffoon.)
Funny, I thought I had made a post about this, but it doesn’t seem to have saved. Well, I’ll try it again.
Everyone knows Balatro now right? It’s won several awards, and was nominated for a handful of others. It was also developed entirely by one person, LocalThunk, who, gasp and shock, seems to be a decent person. And it was written in Lua for the LÖVE framework.
What’s more, there’s now several ports of Balatro for unexpected platforms. I presume they aren’t all entirely faithful to the original, but it’s fun to see how others iterate upon the theme.
Oh wow, for the Commodore PET, and before you ask, this is the best that system can do, it had no color, only beeps for sound and its graphics were locked in ROM:
The Playstation Vita and Apple Watch also have ports, with varying degrees of fidelity to the original. Note that the PET and Apple Watch versions don’t appear to be public yet, and may never be. The Watch one particularly looks difficult to play.
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 demoscene is a rich source of awesome, and at times ridiculous, imagery and sounds. Once in a while we sift through it to find things to entertain you with.
If you don’t know anything about the computer, it might not seem too interesting. A block-graphics wizard lifts his hat and out comes nine large digits in different colors that then float around the screen.
The more you know about the Commodore 64, though, the more interesting it is. The machine’s graphics chip, the VIC II, is can only display eight hardware sprites at once. Then the sprites cluster together on the same scanline, meaning ordinary multiplexing can’t be happening. Then they drift up into the upper boarder. It demonstrates complete mastery of the hardware, doing a lot of things that simply shouldn’t be possible.
It’s a good exploration of a number of weird C64 graphics tricks: sprite multiplexing of course, opening up the side and top boarders, and making productive use of mysterious graphics that appear off the top of the screen if the boarder is gone. While little code is shown, it’s definitely on the more technical end of things we present here. I’d give it a four out of five on Drebnar’s Geekiness Scale. But if you like learning about obscure tech details of a forty-year-old computer? And who doesn’t? There it is!
