The Flipside of Gaming
This is a double review of Spilled! and Pilo and the Holobook both played with press keys.
00:00 Intro
00:13 Spilled!
2:27 Pilo and the Holobook
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”
Jed’s Journey is a fun little Zelda-like game for the Commodore 64. If you weren’t a Loadstar subscriber around 1993 or so, you’ve probably never heard of it. It’s one of the many programs from Loadstar’s 22-year run, which I’ve put up for sale (with permission of J&F Publishing’s co-owner Fender Tucker) on itch.io, but the disk can also be found on the Internet Archive. (We talked about making Loadstar available to people back last month, here.)
Jed lost drawing straws with his villager friends, and so it’s up to him to do something about all the monsters infesting his world. The monsters move quickly and randomly, so fighting them is a mix of reflexes, strategy and luck. Clear a screen and you get rewarded with coins, and possibly a potion that you can save for later. The potion colors are green for health, blue for invisibility, yellow to be teleported back to the starting point, and red to clear all the monsters from the screen.
Jed’s world is pretty big. If you explore for a bit, you’ll find treasure rooms with lots of money inside, a place to pay for healing, buyable weapon upgrades and keys for purchase. It’s not known at the moment if there is a way to win at Jed’s Journey, but the fact that the locked doors must be leading somewhere important suggests that there is. To even have a chance of reaching the end, if it exists, you should make a map of the world, and I mean by hand.
Jed’s Journey makes use of a hardware trick, seen in some sprite-based video chips, to get free collision detection. When the C64’s VIC-II is drawing sprites on screen, if two of them would be drawn on the same pixel, it’ll note a collision between them, and note this fact in a register. There are quirks to this system though. On the C64, this is pixel-based collision detection, not using hit boxes, which might mean occasional misses for players used to hitbox detection. Only two of the possible three colors in a multicolor sprite set off the collision detection. And the collisions only register which sprites are colliding, not what they were colliding with, which sometimes means, when you kill one beast, two others that were touching each other onscreen elsewhere will also be considered slain.
Will someone finally finish Jed’s Journey after all these years? Will it be you? If you try it, please let us know!
The indie showcases highlight the many indie games we play on the channel (Game Wisdom) and feature a mix of demos, games bought, and press key submissions.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Crown of Pain
2:46 Sulfur
6:01 Our Adventurer Guild
7:45 Alien Boom Boom
8:46 Galaia
10:13 Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure
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 indie showcases show off the many games we check out on the channel and I’m (Josh Bycer) always looking for submitted games to try.
00:00 Intro
00:14 Sentry
2:33 The Last Humblebee
3:57 Vellum
6:39 Ufouria The Saga 2
8:50 Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom
10:34 Lakeside
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 final, and bonus episode, of my (Josh Bycer) favorite demos from Steam Next Fest February 2025 edition.
00:00 Intro
00:26 Cantaloupe Chronicle
01:54 Kaya’s Prophecy
4:25 Opus Cortex
5:28 Touhou: the Unreachable Oneiroborder
6:50 Blasted Dice
8:45 Katanaut
10:44 Artis Impact
11:52 Fumehead
14:21 Starless Abyss
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”
We’re just one more part left for my (Josh Bycer‘s) best of Steam Next Fest February 2025 showcase.
00:00 Intro
00:22 As We Descend
3:28 Olaf the Boozer
4:52 Zombieville USA 3D
6:00 Which Way Up: Galaxy Games
7:00 Seekers of Eclipse
8:50 Wanderstop
10:59 Inkborn
12:16 Muffles’ Life Sentence
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 part of my (Josh Bycer’s) coverage of Next Fest 2025 February edition. (Editor’s note: I’ve been working through a backlog of these review posts; this one was made three months ago!)
00:00 Intro
00:15 Vilde
1:08 Mountain Boy
1:55 Grand Shooter
3:14 Ghost Hand
4:18 Mecha Knights Legends
5:35 Kejora
7:03 Tilemancer Dungeon
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”
This is part 7 of my (Josh Bycer‘s) look at Steam Next Fest February 2025 edition.
00:00 Intro
00:18 Leftovers KO
1:28 Once Upon a Puppet
3:19 Demon Dust
5:02 Nice Day for Fishing
6:23 Skin Deep
7:54 Electro Bop Boxing League
9:30 Is this Seat Taken?
10:50 Water Maid
12:03 Upstream
13:16 The Alpinist
14:51 Spellbrew Express
16:10 Red Rocket Defencism
17:15 Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3
18:48 Hypogea
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”
This is part 6 of my (Josh Bycer‘s) favorite demos from Steam Next Fest February 2025.
00:00 Intro
00:13 Liliac 0
01:07 Aethermancer
3:02 Doloc Town
4:35 Dungeon Warfare 3
5:47 Knightica
7:13 Star Fire
8:41 The Electrifying Incident
10:08 Faun Town
12:17 Tower Wizard
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 imagine some people look at this blog and think something like, “what the hell is its audience?” People who follow indie gaming, retro stuff, classic computer software, weird gaming videos? Should anyone be interested in all of that?
I answer, YES. It’s all important. I vouch for all of it. I want to cast a light into all of the corridors of video, computer, even electronic gaming! I regret that I only have the time and energy for one post a day! Everyone should know of these things!
One of those things is old computer magazines, and the example of those that I have the most contact with is Loadstar, the Commodore 64 disk magazine that lasted for 22 years and 250 issues.
I mentioned Loadstar lately, and the itch.io page I’ve put up distributing, with the permission of its owners, their archives 243 issues of its archives, plus many extras.
A lot of my time the past few weeks has been spend on the “Loadstar Project.” I’m working on an expanded edition of Loadstar Compleat, to make it much more accessible to people who don’t play around with computer emulators as a matter of course. Yes, I understand they exist!
I envision a custom-written program, offering lists of highlights from among the long halls of its archives. What are you interested in? Arcade-style games? Puzzles? Animations? Music? Art? Reviews of old software? Editorials from a bygone age? Dedicated lists of all of these things. You’ll be able to scroll through and pick something to try. One click brings up its instructions. Another starts it up immediately in VICE. Have a favorite author? Many of Loadstar’s most prominent creators will (if I have my way) have their own lists. With literally hundreds of items in each category, that will keep you going for a good long while.
There’s many technical barriers to making this work, but they are coming down, slowly, one after another. Here is what the menu looks like at this second:
There’s a long way to go. I have to reverse engineer the compression used for text files in later issues, for one thing. I have to finish entering the data for early issues before their Presenter system settled into a single file format. There’s tons of issues left to add to the system, preferably using automatic tools because there’s literally thousands of items here. And yes, the menu system looks really plain right now, and could stand some sprucing up.
I continue to push at the boulder. Sadly the world contains many distractions, and I have other things I need to do with my time. You’re reading one of them right now. But maybe it’ll all come together. Let’s keep our many varied appendages crossed.
I also want to shout out to the Reverend Dave Moorman, Loadstar’s last editor, who oversaw the magazine from issue #200 to #249. He graciously gave me permission to include his range of issues in the compilation, and they’ll be joining their siblings soon! He also has a book on Amazon: The Most Marvelous Machine: A History and Explanation of Computers in General and the Commodore 64 in Particular. If you bought a copy there, there’s no referral code on that link, I won’t see a cent of it, but I’m sure he’d appreciate it! Think it over?
This is part 5 of my (Josh Bycer’s) indie showcase of the best Next Fest demos from February 2025.
00:00 Intro
00:16 DeadWire
2:00 Gnomes
3:33 Nitro Gen Omega
4:57 Beyond the Ice Palace 2
6:35 Blightstone
8:02 Geargrit
9:50 Scarlet: City of Devils
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”
This is part 4 of our demo coverage of February 2025 Steam next fest.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Mashina
1:06 Roots Devour
2:57 Rift Riff
4:22 Kill the Music
5:29 Wild Growth
6:33 Conquest Dark
7:55 Machine Mind
9:01 Bad Cheese
9:52 Centum
11:03 Nordhold
12:17 Cauldron
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”
