Liam at Gaming On Linux has some further news about Funko taking down itch.io with a spurious request. Here’s a summary.
Some user created a fanpage for the upcoming Funko Fusion massive crossover game.
Whatever was on it, it triggered some “brand protection” function on a service Funko uses.
It send out complaints to both Itch’s host and DNS registrar.
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.
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?
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)
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!
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.
I found it through Metafilter (here), but it’s simple and fun enough that I felt I could extend its reach by a few more players. Alphabet Soup For Picky Eaters is a logic game, by Daniel Linssen, where you have to find some bit of text that satisfies six different hungry blobs.
In this example, four of the blobs accept the answer. The green one looks upset, but they’re just as satisfied as their friends, they just have Resting Angry Face. The who who aren’t satisfied with this example, are the Blue and Orange blobs.
It’s a very simple game. There’s no randomness; each blob is looking for a specific criteria, and most of the game is figuring out what those are. There is no penalty for wrong guesses, and you’ll have to make some to figure out what the rules are. While there are multiple possible solutions, there is one that is very apt. It’ll probably take you just a few minutes to deduce the requirements then fulfill them.
It won’t take you more than a few minutes to play Marlowe Dobbe‘s Dungeon of Hank, a short and free homebrew Game Boy game made with GB Studio, and it’s not challenging. But it does have a lot of cute cat pictures, and is funny, and that’s enough. It’d probably be enough even without the funny. Cat’s cute, just sayin’. The cat’s name, you should know, is Hank Stuart Bastard. It doesn’t sound like one that T.S. Elliot would bestow, but then, what the heck is a Rumpleteaser anyway?
Ghosttown Pumpkin Festival, a free itch.io game that we reported on last year, has returned! Install it, apply the easy-to-use tools to carve a randomly-generated pumpkin, then upload it to the servers for everyone to look at and vote on! The servers stay up until mid-November, so you have lots of time to construct and show your work. While it’s free, you can spend $2 for a version that will let your ghost avatar wear a hat of their choice.
While you can upload pumpkins whenever, if the festival display fills up you might end up having your pumpkin shunted into an alternate town shard, so if you want more people to behold your work (and despair?), you’ll want to complete your Jack-O-Project soon.
To place your pumps, enter the festival, press Escape to choose the “dimension” you want for it, then explore for a bit with the WASD keys. When you’ve found a good spot for it press Escape again and click the pumpkin icon to select which of your saved creations to place. The spots where your orange gourdfriends can reside show up as gray dots.
Create something cool, and tell us about it here, if you feel like it!
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.
From itch.io’s Youtube account, this barely qualifies as a game, but it’s funny. Surreal. Absurd. Bizarre. But mostly funny. It’s Nip For Speed, and it’s from knackelibang.
You’re riding in a car with an orange cat behind the wheel. Not a cartoony cat, a realistic cat, or at least its low-poly model is kind of realistic. It doesn’t act, or talk, much like a real cat though. There’s also a dog involved.
Content warning: the cat does meet its end, but in a much more cartoony way than the cat’s model. It probably shouldn’t have been behind the wheel anyway.
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.
Found by Varyag on kitsunes.club, this may be the ultimate version of the Pico-8 version of other game phenomenon, not a remake of a classic arcade game but of id Software’s DOOM itself. And it has a great name: POOM. It’s made by freds72 on itch.io, and it’s free to download and play. Its levels are not ports of the original room, unless my memory is faulty, but smaller versions, but the general sense is still there. It even has a good remix of the first level music.
7DRL, the 7-Day RogueLike challenge, is one of the oldest still-going gamejams out there, and still among the most interesting. Every year a number of surprisingly interesting games come out of it. One year, back when @Play was on GameSetWatch, I took it upon myself to look at every game that succeeded at the challenge that year. I think it was 2011? Even though it took weeks, enough time that I vowed I’d never review every game again, even some of the lesser ones had some interesting aspect to them.
This year will undoubtedly add yet more game to that backlog, hooray! That was a sarcastic hooray, I won’t deny it. But it was also, in a sense, an honest one too. More interesting and unique games mean more fun for everyone, fun that doesn’t cost $60 + DLC prices. And making them means more experienced gamedevs making things they like, things that don’t rely on multi-hundred dollar triple-A outlays of cash to realize, and that helps us, very slightly yet perceptibly, reclaim gaming culture from the wash of monotonous big-money content with which we’re all inundated.
It all starts March 2nd, so if you’re interested in participating, get ready to make! And it all ends, mostly, on March 11th, so get ready to play! (I say mostly because technically the challenge isn’t absolutely time-locked. But it’s a good period to aim for and build hype around.)
I think, when you find a blog that’s been around since 2009, and is still being updated somewhat in 2024, that itself is worthy of celebration, and that is the case with brainscraps.net. It’s maintained by May Kasahara, a member of the venerable community webblog Metafilter (where I can also be found posting and commenting as JHarris).
Blogs come and go. Bloggers come and go too; sometimes they lose interest, but sometimes they pass away, such might be the case with oneswellfoop, a.k.a. Craig Wittier. There was a recent Talk post there about the many members who have passed away.
This is not a Metafilter focused blog. I mention all this to say that people’s blogs, and being around to blog, that’s precious, people’s writing is important, it’s a part of them, and I’m happy whenever I encounter it, whether the blog gets 10 readers or a million of them. But it’s nice when people go by there and read them, and I hope that you’ll be inspired to read Brainscripts, and other blogs, and if you don’t already, that you’ll learn to cherish that they exist. They won’t always, their bloggers won’t exist always either. Neither will I, and neither will you. So let’s all enjoy what time we have here left!
A few days we linked to Cosmic Collapse, a Pico-8 Suika Game clone that, I claim, is better than the original, or its many many other clones. Its graphics are less cloying, its music is much better, its physics are livelier which adds a greater element of skill, and it has missiles awarded at different score levels that can be used to destroy individual planets.
Cosmic Collapse’s bin is slightly smaller than Suika Game’s, and to compensate a bit for that its “winning” “planet,” The Sun, is only the 10th item in the game, unlike of Suika Game’s Watermelon, which is the 11th of its orbular objects. Nether game really ends at that point, it’s the kind of game that continues until you lose, but it serves as a thematic success point.
But as it turns out, as revealed by a comment by creator Johan Peltz on its itch.io page, Cosmic Collapse has two levels beyond sun. The first is a rather striking animated Black Hole object! After a lot of playing I finally managed to get to it. Here is a screenshot:
Pretty neat! The comment from the game’s creator mentions that there is a level past it, but that they don’t think it’s possible to reach. I don’t think it is either: to get to the Black Hole you have to have two Suns, and to get to that you have to have one Sun plus one Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Earth, Mars, Mercury and Pluto. (I think it’s Pluto. What would it be if it wasn’t Pluto? Ceres?)
So, to get to the last object, you’d have to have a Black Hole plus a Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Earth, Mars, Mercury and assumed-Pluto, which probably won’t all fit in one bin. My guess is it’s a guest appearance by some galaxy or something. Maybe someone can look at the game’s resources and find out what.
In addition to playing to get to Sun/Black Hole/Whatever Follows, it’s also possible to play Cosmic Collapse for score. The best way I’ve found to do that is to use missiles to destroy the largest objects when it becomes evident that you can’t do anything more with them. My highest score is nearly 15K. Indefinite play doesn’t seem quite possible, as missile awards come less frequently at higher scores, but it’s still fun to see how high one can get. (That’s not meant as a drug-inspired euphemism. Or a Donkey Kong-inspired one, either.)
Addendum: After writing this, I managed to get to Black Hole again, and got video of what it looks like in motion, which is pretty cool:
I recently made a Metafilter post with the title Exploring the BABA IS YOUNIVERSE. Having used that pun here already I can’t well put it up again, but the links in the article are good ones, so I figured I’d present them here too, with a few extras. All of these, plus more, are on Hempuli’s (Arvi Teikari’s) itch.io page. Everything here is free and for Windows, unless otherwise noted.
Baba Files Taxes is a very silly game, but Baba’s world is an appealingly silly one anyway, and there is a little gameplay there in trying to duplicate Baba’s signature as closely as possible.
It’s-a Me is a purer platformer, starring the confusingly-named Me from the Baba games. It seems pretty standard at first, until you discover what the run and jump buttons were assigned to. I hope you’re careful with your fingers….
Keke in the Caves of Peril is also a Baba-Youniverse game, that evidentlly takes more than a little inspiration from Boulder Dash.
Stumblehill
The “gravity-changing platformer” Once In Space 2022, which gets pretty tricky pretty quickly.
Stumblehill is a platformer, with striking graphics, where the controls are purposely a little harder to master than your basic example of the form.
Baba Friend
Baba Friend is a little desktop buddy/toy who wanders around your computer’s screen while you do other things. It’s much like the classic computer amusement Neko!
Rude Chess is another Sokoban variant: some of the pieces you have to move are chess pieces, which shift according to their movement rules when pushed. The rude part applies because, if a piece has a choice of squares to move to, it always tries to pick one that doesn’t lead towards a destination square!
Rude Chess
There’s more too, that I only fail to list here because of time-related reasons, including some physical games and a screensaver. Go on and explore their itch page, it’s brilliant!
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.
Another game jam entry, Róger Goulart’s Ghost Hunter is a short and silly game about a young lady who loves ghosts, maybe a bit more than she should.
Here are some opening screens:
Take a moment to enjoy this screen.They may have a point.And a new unholy quest begins.
Most of it is a kind of guessing game. Each of three cemeteries has tombstones arranged around it. You go to each one and dig it up with your Shovel of Resurrection. If it’s a friendly ghost, then it emerges and you get one credit towards your quota. If it’s a cursed tomb however, an angry ghost comes out and chases you for a bit. If it catches you, you take a point of damage.
How do you tell the difference? Well, usually you can’t. But there are these orange tombstones placed around each level, and when you dig one of those up you get a random powerup for a short time. (Usually: once in a while you’ll find an angry ghost in one instead, but that’s rare.) One of the powerups shows you whether a tomb has a friendly or angry spirit in store. Other powerups slow angry ghosts, disguise you so they don’t chase you, refill your health or make you walk fast for a short time.
Level 2 has periodically appearing sludge ghosts that must be destroyed by digging up waterspouts to block them. Level 3 has annoying bat enemies that must be avoided, and a higher quota than the other levels.
My tips:
When you stop digging up a grave in the middle of the process, the digging you did before isn’t forgotten. You can sneak in a little extra digging when running from angry ghosts this way.
You tend to lose a whole letter grade at the end of a level from taking damage, so be safe.
The best powerup is the one that reveals the cursed graves. When you get one, I suggest just wandering around for a bit, looking for the mean ghosts, and remembering where they are so you can dig up friends in piece.
Spoilers for the ending are after the download link!
