The Flipside of Gaming
This is a double indie game review of two different kinds of platforming with Solar Ash and It’s a Wrap, played with a retail key and press key respectively.
0:00 Intro
00:17 Solar Ash
5:34 It’s a Wrap
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 indie showcases cover the many games we play for my Wednesday night streams and I’m always looking for games to check out for future ones. All games shown are either press keys or demo submissions.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Trifox
2:07 The Entropy Centre
4:30 Grid Force: Mask of the Goddess
6:43 Whateverland
8:49 Fabular: Once Upon a Spacetime
11:40 Chess Survivors
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”
For this Perceptive Podcast, I sat down with RPG designer Kasey Ozymy to talk about working in RPG Maker and designing Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass. We discuss RPG design and making something that stands out from the rest of the pack. For the final part of our talk, we focused on the Kickstarter for his next game: Hymn to the Earless God, and what makes that one different.
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 a video review of the game Pseudoregalia played with a retail key.
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 feel like I should adopt some standard way to inform people which items are links to other sites (with minor commentary attached) and which are significant longform items of our own creation.
Suffice to say this is the former category. I didn’t write this history of Kid Pix: Craig Hickman wrote it, back around 2013. And he also created the original version of that program too. And it was terrific. Here is the link.
What was Kid Pix? It was a paint program for early Macintosh models that was very well-received, and is very fondly remembered. It had a powerful UI but was still, neverthless, aimed at kids. Think of it as a more fun version of MacPaint. I refuse to stay in my lane regarding entertaining uses of computers, but perhaps of more interest to what I’d think are our usual readers, it had a similar concept to the art module of Mario Paint, but came out at least a couple of years earlier.
I especially like how he described the original Macintosh UI as having “a consistent and enlightened vision behind it,” which I’m not sure can be said of Macs today, or really of the products of any major software company. That’s just my opinion, mind you.
Did you know there is a Javascript re-implementation of an older version of Kid Pix? Here!
Kid Pix – The Early Years (red-green-blue.com)
The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many indie games we play here on the channel, if you would like to submit a game for a future one please reach out.
0:00 Intro
00:14 There is No Light
2:13 Taiji
5:10 Rodents Rewind
6:16 Real Tales From the Grave: Maleficium
7:50 The Plague Doctor of Wippra
9:05 Time Melters
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’s been months now since I announced my plans to release some project involving LOADSTAR, a 17-year computer magazine on disk, either here or on itch.io, or both. I’m still working on them.
In the meantime, I present this, a packaged-up release of Dungeon on itch.io, a complete old-school RPG gaming system for the Commdore 64, as it was released on the disk magazine LOADSTAR back in 1990.
Written by David Caruso II, Dungeon is a way of creating adventures for others to play, and a system of creating, maintaining and playing characters in those adventures. It was kind of a throwback even in 1990 (the SNES was released that year), but it definitely has charm, and an old-school kind of appeal.
You start out on the Guild screen, where you create a character from one of five fantasy races, then venture out on adventures stored on floppy disks, which in this release are provided as C64 1541 disk images. Fight monsters to earn experience points, find the object of the quest and then return to the Guild by the exit to have the chance to advance in experience level. If your character dies they’ll be revived, but only up to two times! If something happens and you don’t make it back, but don’t die either, your character will be marked as “GONE,” meaning they’re stuck in limbo until they make it back to the Guild on their own!
Your character advances in level between adventures, but they don’t get to keep any items they found on their journey. If they advance in level however, they get to permanently improve two of their stats. Getting to the maximum score of 25 grants them a special ability, but it’s really hard to get there!
This presentation of Dungeon is being made with the permission of Fender Tucker, owner and former Managing Editor of LOADSTAR. It isn’t free, but for $5 you get the Dungeon system and five pre-made adventures for it, culled from the 240+ issues of LOADSTAR. I include a stock copy of the open-source Commodore 64 emulator VICE, configured for playing Dungeon. (If $5 is too much for you, rumor has it Loadstar issues can be found online elsewhere. Dungeon was first published on issue #74.)
If you want to know more about it, I have constructed this 40-page PDF of documentation on Dungeon, from the disks of LOADSTAR in 1990, along with the instructions for the adventures and further notes on playing it from me. Here:
(file size: 2.6 MB)
The document refers to an itch.io release, that’s what I’m currently working on. Late in the document there are some spoilers for a particularly difficult adventure using the system.
Dungeon was created by someone named David Caruso II. Neither I nor long-time LOADSTAR managing editor Fender Tucker knows what became of him. I have what is almost certainly an old address for him. It’s been 33 years, and I suspect that Dungeon itself is a couple of years older than that, so it’s possible that Caruso has passed away by now. If he hasn’t, though, I’d like to talk with him. I think (hope?) he’d appreciate that people are still thinking about his creation even now.
The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games we play on stream and if you would like me to check out your game, please reach out. All games played are either demos or press key submissions.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Decline’s Drops
2:26 Beacon Pines
4:10 No Place For Bravery
5:55 Fortune’s Run
7:53 Squad 51 vs. The Flying Saucers
10:57 Turbo Kid
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 a video review of My Friendly Neighborhood played with a press key provided by the developer.
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 don’t remember, did a bundle with this theme happen before? It sounds familiar. Of course this is not intended to be an advertisement, I’m just getting the word out.
$8 gets you 374 items on itch.io, which is, of course, an amazing deal. 213 of them are computer games, and 103 of them are physical games, where what you get are rules and you construct the game yourself, and the rest are miscellaneous items like soundtracks and game assets.
When I get one of these bundles, I largely end up playing only play two or three things from it, but I feel like the option of playing so many things is what I’m buying, that and helping out a good cause. A standout in this bundle, right up there at the top, is Adam Gryu’s A Short Hike. I also spot Bleed 2, Anodyne and They Bleed Pixels.
I think it could be argued that the ultimate benefit of these bundles, while positive, is ultimately to help make up for the failures of our nations to fucking do something about it themselves, or even helping cause it in the first place. But it is something, after all!
We like promoting small indie projects we think are keen, and among those is the work of Keith Burgun. Way back in the @Play guys he made the wonderful (and sadly very difficult to play these days) cartoon roguelike 100 Rogues, and more recently he made the great quasi-roguelike Auro, which can still be gotten on Steam.
Lately he’s been experimenting with more physical kinds of games, and he has a Kickstarter going for a deckbuilding game called Spellstorm!
It’s an asymmetric game, with eight characters who each play differently from each other. And if you want to try before backing, there’s already a module available for it for Tabletop Simulator (it is here), and you can download a free PDF copy of the rules for more info.
As of this reporting the Kickstarter’s just gotten underway with 27 days to go, and is approaching halfway to its goal already. $40 gets you a complete copy of the game, and $60 gets you it another another clever little game Keith made called Dragon Bridge.
Why not give it a glance over, and good luck to you Keith!
I am frankly amazed that this is happening, that the company now calling itself Atari seems to be on a streak of good, or at least interesting, decisions, but in addition to releasing Atari 50 and buying Digital Eclipse, they’re making updated versions of classic Atari (and Stern) arcade games, and an upcoming release of theirs is a personal favorite of mine: Food Fight!
It isn’t even their only recent sequel to it they’ve made; another would be the also-upcoming FPS Food Fight: Culinary Combat for the (current) VCS. But that seems to be an inspired-by game with cartoony 3D graphics; this looks much closer to the arcade original, and made by people with a deep love for it.
I don’t know what’s inspired their warming up this particular old property, but Food Fight was a fine game that was sabotaged mostly by the classic US arcade crash. Charley Chuck is a kid out to eat a giant ice cream cone before it melts, but out to stop him are four chefs. Scattered through each level though are piles of food that can be thrown, by either Charley or the chefs.
Like the cone that’s Charley’s goal, the original Food Fight drips with character. There are so many clever touches, especially for a game from 1983. Charley’s large eyes look in the direction he moves; the analog joystick registers many more directions than the standard digital 8-way joysticks in common use at the time. The named chefs have different personalities, along similar lines as Pac-Man’s ghosts. Each kind of food has different properties when thrown. Charley smiles when things are going well, and bears a more neutral expression when they aren’t. Charley can bring along one piece of food from a previous level. If a particularly clever move is pulled off, the game will call for an instant replay. The level select screen lists a flavor for each ice cream cone, with higher levels having dual flavors.
This is how Food Fight played in arcades (7 minutes):
The new game supports up to four players around a cocktail table form factor, in a last-kid-standing scenario. Instead of just flinging food at the chefs, the other players are also viable targets.
The original Food Fight was one of the last arcade projects of early independent game developer GCC, who designed games for other companies to publish. They also made Ms. Pac-Man and Quantum, and they also designed the Atari 7800 console and many of the arcade ports that were made for it.
Here’s is Arcade Heroes’ post on Food Fight Frenzy. Arcade Heroes also did a nine minute video talking about the game’s creation, and the changing climate at Atari that resulted in its creation being greenlit, and that shows off the gameplay, which looks very faithful to the original!
People who want to hear quite a bit more about this upcoming release can watch/listen to episode 140 of the Youtube/podcast series Indie Arcade Wave (36 minutes).
