The Flipside of Gaming
Today is the launch date of Unexplored 2! (Steam) The sequel to one of the more interesting roguelites of recent years, the original simulated a game world with a lot of depth, and played a lot like a real-time version of a classic roguelike with updated graphics.
I did a Q&A with the makers over on Game Developer a couple of months ago! (I can’t seem to find it right now, though….) They also have a dev blog over there if you’re interested in its creation!
So. Um. Have a trailer!
We live in a golden age of game jams, thousands of people every month make little games in absurdly short amounts of times, and surprisingly often those games are even interesting! What that says about the nature of game creation is very interesting, but not the subject here. That would be Godot Wild Jam (itch.io), a monthly themed and judged jam where the thread of continuity is the use of Godot, the amazingly small yet feature-packed free and open source game development system.
Since it’s monthly, and I’m writing this three weeks ahead of time, I don’t really know who’ll win the one currently in the offing. The previous jam as of this writing was won by Stranded on Ice. You can look through all the entries on Godot Wild Jam 44’s itch page, or ALL the entries throughout the jam’s history by browsing through itch’s #godotwildjam tag.
Audacity Games is Activision co-founder, not to mention the creator of Pitfall! and A Boy and His Blob, David Crane, along with former Activision designers Garry and Dan Kitchen. They’re getting back into the games business with a new Atari VCS/2600 title now available, after three years of development: Circus Convoy!
With hardware acceleration, lots of crazy tricks are possible, as demonstrated in the recent post here on homebrew VCS carts. David Crane himself helped pioneer this approach with his seminal Pitfall II: Lost Caverns, whose original VCS version used a special chip to help make possible its many tricks. Well, Circus Convoy is notable in that it doesn’t use such tricks! It doesn’t use “hardware acceleration,” although I presume it still uses tricks like bank switching and additional RAM.
Take a look at the features and play guide pages on their website, and if it looks interesting to you and you still have a working Atari, maybe buy a cart? The prices do seem a bit high for a new VCS game in 2022, with the cheapest offerings at $55-60. But I’m sure there are hardcore VCS enthusiasts out there who are interested.
The long-running Atari fansite AtariAge sells a number of carts that run on classic Atari VCS systems that make it do things you might not expect that system could do. Some of the most impressive of these are remakes of classic arcade games that go far beyond what was possible at the time. A number of these were developed by Champ Games. Here are links to a number of videos showing them off, although sone of the may not currently be in their store:
“Galagon” – Wizard of Wor – Zoo Keeper – Avalanche – Scramble – Super Cobra – Mappy (especially this one!)
A few others, not from Champ Games: Aardvark (Anteater) – Venture Reloaded – Space Rocks (Asteroids) – Star Castle – Pac-Man – Draconian (Bosconian)
Kenta Cho is a brilliant game maker, and he’s come up with a couple of generators that can generatively make short stretches of music, suitable for classic-inspired arcade games.
Short VGM Generator is on itch.io, and works by taking a pre-existing piece of music and attempting to make another piece of a similar style.
The Good Old Game Sound Generator is on GitHub, but for playing around you might be more interested in its Demo page. It takes a bit more effort to make something with it, but it’s a much more flexible tool. I must leave you to your own devices to make something of value, or at least of interest, using it.
The process that let him to create these tools is up on a page he made on dev.to. If you’re interested in generative music you should take a look!
Boundary Break, a YouTube channel that looks into unused and off-limits areas left in game code, did a video on the expanded version of The Stanley Parable, and they managed to get a wonderful bit of in-character dialogue from the game’s narrator.
That’s the hook! The real reason to load it though is Boundary Break does nice work, finding out-of-bounds content in games. Also check out their recent video on Wii Sports, although note there’s an ad as part of the content. Folks gotta eat.
You made it through another week of life in 2022! Here is some video silliness to congratulate you, and encourage you to keep on keepin’ on!
I’m always down for an excuse to link new Homestar Runner content, but this here’s a gaming blog! It’s gotta be about games Mr. Strong Man.
What’s that you say? It is a game? Well fine then, I will gladly accept that flimsy excuse! It’s Marzipan’s Beef Reverser, and it’s on itch.io. You play Only Girl in the Homestarniverse Marzipan as she whips mobile steaks with her Shantae-like hair in a Game Boy setting, sending them careening into a cow skeleton, helping to reconstitute it back into a cow. I’m sure it works that way in real life too. And notice, it’s not a Flash game, it’s an actual Game Boy rom file, playable in your favorite homebrew-capable Game Boyish setting.
And as a special extra, they recorded Strong Bad, in VTuber style, playing through it and unlocking all the bonus extras. It’s a bit slight, but in the grim darkness of the far future, we accept all the H*R stuff we can staff.
A short devlog from RujiK the Comatose about a monster breeding sim they’ve been working on. Dismayed as a kid by the fact that breeding in video games tends to be done according to tables rather than truly from combining the attributes of the parents, they set out to create a procedural version that matched what they expected when they were young. The results seem to be satisfactorily freaky, although, possibly to the dismay of some, we get no renditions of monster mating.
A quick digression. They’re basically redoing what was done in Spore some 14 years ago now. Why is this interesting, while Spore is old hat? My guess it’s that the tech is being put in service of a Pokemon-like game instead of Will Wright’s extremely generic simulationist gameplay.
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Gavin Lane of Nintendo Life: Playnote gets a Flipnote Studio-style art app.
Jay Peters of The Verge, also on Playnote. Its makers wonder if its seasonal distribution model will be appreciated by purchasers of its becranked yellow joybox.
Ollie Reynolds of Nintendo Life: UbiSoft to shut down server support for a number of older titles.
Florence Ion (cool name!) of Gizmodo: Google Play is getting data safety settings.
Ollie Reynolds of Nintendo Life, again: Lego to release a huge new Super Mario set.
Thomas Whitehead of Nintendo Life (lot of items from them today): Game Freak to offer employees option of four-day workweek. Awesome!
Wes Finlon of PC Gamer: Moneyfarm Square-Enix unveils a new $11,600 statue of Terra from Final Fantasy VI riding Magitech armor that caused series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi to basically go WTF. Remember, back when he designed the first game in the series, Square was facing issues whether their little game development operation could survive.
“Master Blaster,” if that is their name, at Sora News 24, on Sega trying to bring eSports into Japanese high schools with a Puyo Puyo Boot Camp. “Listen up maggots, you’re going to spend the next hour setting up combos and fighting Draco Centauros until you get it right and I don’t want no backtalk or I’ll bust you down to facing Nohoho again!”
Rhys Wood of TechRadar: An Elden Ring demake for Game Boy is in the works.
Luke Plunkett of Kotaku: Super Mario movie delayed, Miyamoto promises it’ll be worth the wait. Aww, it’s just like that apocryphal quote often attributed to him. This reporter is overjoyed, the last one ended on that cliffhanger, Daisy was back from Dinohattan and needed Mario and Luigi’s help again, no doubt because of some scheme hatched by Koopa. I wonder how they’ll manage to bring Dennis Hopper back from the dead to reprise his role?
Alana Hauges, also from Nintendo Life: Sega plans to delist classic games from some platforms (but not Switch) in anticipation of the release of Sonic Origins.
And Ryan Dinsdale of IGN tells us Sony is creating a game preservation team, of which this reporter can only say, IT’S ABOUT FREAKING TIME.
It’s almost a tradition by this point, to take some preexisting game and give it the roguelike treatment. We’ve seen MetroidRL, CastlevaniaRL, MegamanRL, ZeldaRL and others. Those in this list were all made by Slashie, a prolific developer in this sphere.
Well, his most recent experiment in this mode is SpelunkyRL, taking concepts that Spelunkly itself borrowed from roguelikes and borrowing them right back. What the game gains is a strong emphasis on situations and using what’s at hand. You only have five health points, and they don’t heal naturally. Most enemies move only every other turn, but if you attack them they get a counter-attack. You have a gun with six bullets that does high damage, but it’s a good idea to save your shots for when they might be needed.
You can pick up pots, corpses and even stunned enemies, which don’t go into your inventory, but remain in hand and can be thrown at attackers. Instead of food, there’s a “DooM” counter to keep you moving. There are also altars for sacrificing enemies to Kali, which work in a NetHack/ADOM kind of style. And there’s even some atmospheric music and sound effects so you don’t have to smack bats and snakes in silence.
It is an interesting thing to play around with, and on subsequent games you can start with alternate character classes Rogue (extra health and bow) or Tourist (bad at fighting but has a camera and 2000-gold line of credit). It will be a reasonably entertaining use of your time, I’d say.
Patrick Klepek for Vice, about Melon Han-Tani releasing the player movement code for his game Sephone.
Sam Machkovech for for Ars Technica, reviewing geometry puzzle game Tandis.
Alana Hauges of NintendoLife on the forthcoming Zero Tolerance Collection, which includes an unreleased sequel to the original Mega Drive/Genesis game.
Alana Hauges also informs us of preorders for a vinyl release of Ace Attorney music.
Keema Waterfield for Wired writing about playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild with her five-year-old daughter.
Ryan McCaffrey on IGN tells us about an upcoming RPG, Arto, with a very interesting look to it.
Stephen Totilo, Axios, on the return of Ken and Rebecca Williams, founders of Sierra On-Line from years ago, and their attempt at a comeback.
Polygon’s Nicole Carpenter: 22 Games To Look Forward To In 2022. They are: The Garden Path, Venba, Citizen Sleeper, Call Me Cera, Dordogne, Serial Cleaners, Frank And Drake, Chinatown Detective Agency, Spirit Swap: Lowfi Beats To Match-3 To, Mothmen 1966, A Shiba Story, Validate: Struggling Singles In Your Area, Super Space Club, She Dreams Elsewhere, Hindsight, Norco, Terra Nil, Card Shark, Bear And Breakfast, Afterlove EP, Silt, and Thirsty Suitors. Descriptions and videos are in the article!
Looking back over their history, and forward to that Metaverse thing Zuckerberg things is something new and ground breaking, is Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse. That’s from an Atlantic newsletter. You might be interested in New World Notes, a long-running blog covering Second Life. They linked to an old Daily Show with Jon Stewart piece “covering” Second Life.
Group recreates New York City in Minecraft, part of a project to reconstruct the whole damn world.
Polygon’s Ben Betoli looks into the Playdate‘s crank control.