Have you ever heard of Cosmic Smash? I’d be shocked if you had. It’s the kind of thing that even I only know about from obsessive reading of obscure game blogs and Youtube videos. It was a Sega arcade game that got a release for the Dreamcast right at the moment the company was getting out of the console business. It had laughably bad timing, and it never made it out of Japan.
Yet, the game has gotten a cult following. You could deride it as merely a futuristic, three-dimensional take on racquetball and Breakout, but it’s one of those games where the style makes all the difference. Here’s some footage of the Dreamcast version:
Why don’t people make games that look like this more often?
Time Extension, one of those blogs that makes good posts so often that I’m tempted to tell you to read it instead, did an article talking with the creator of a spiritual remake called C-Smash VR, released for Playstation VR2 with a license from Sega and the blessing of the game’s original creators. It’s such an obscure game that I’d be surprised if it could be profitable, but we love rooting for underdogs here, even if I have a general antipathy for VR.
The degree to which these games have been changed from the original varies tremendously, from slightly hacks to repurposings to entire other games. In ToME, Angband was used as a base that would be completely rewritten, twice, and turned into something completely separate. Many of these games could have whole articles written about them. I’ve written at least one so far, on Zangband.
Looking through the chart, one can find two great jumping-off points from Angband’s source tree. One is PC Angband 1.3.1, largely because of being the original base of Zangband, and the other is Angband 2.8.3, which was the site of legendary maintainer Ben Harrison’s great cleanup of the code, which made it much easier to create variants than it had been.
Looking at the list, one might get the impression that this list also serves as a timeline, but that would be in error. Some variants would be updated over time, bringing in features from later in Angband’s development, and this chart doesn’t reflect that, and sometimes a game wouldn’t branch off from the newest version of the code. Please keep this in mind when looking through it.
A few interesting finds from the list:
Steamband is a complete reskinning in a kind of Jules Verne pulp steampunk style. It is what we might call a literary game, taking direct inspiration from a particular corpus of stories in the same way as Call of Cthulhu or Gygax era Dungeons & Dragons. In it, you start in a town in the center of the Earth, and try to ascend to the surface. It has some interesting ideas around the theme, but I cannot recommend it wholeheartedly because of its “race” system, which is easy to perceive as actually racist. I think its intent was to present the racial attitudes of the fiction works from which it was derived, which were really terrible, but it comes across, not to mince words, as gross these days.
There are two My Little Pony variants, based off of the “G4” version of the franchise that became meme popular for about 45 minutes of web time. Ponyband, a.k.a. My Little Angband: Dungeons Are Magic, derives from the popular 2.8.3 branch; Anquestria got its basis from the later 3.2.0.
ToME, a fairly popular variant, has the distinction of not only having a living homepage, but is also available on Steam and GoG. It has a free version, but other features are available to paying players. It’s a game that’s changed a great deal over time, starting out as Tales of Middle Earth. Now, little of its Tolkien basis remains, and its name has been retconned into “Tales of Maj’Eyal,” because you gotta have an apostrophe. Its page vaguely gives it an air of being an MMORPG, but I think it’s still a strictly single-player game. It is a game that, judging from comments, there is a great deal to get stuck into, but to my eyes it has a lost the simplicity of its origin, and it’s not an easy game to pick up. It is still under development though, and that is beyond laudatory for a game of its age and lineage.
Ironband is a challenge variant, intended to make the original game even harder. An “ironman” mode, preventing the player from going upstairs, forcing them to descend ever deeper, is part of the base game now. Ironband dates back to 2012, which may be before this mode was added, although I cannot date its inclusion conclusively right now. But whether is or not, by devoting itself to this mode of play, it is free to be completely redesigned around it. So, Ironband has streamlines the game in its service, removing races and classes, and giving the player all of their options at once. After the start of the game, there are no shops at all; everything the player gains after that point must come from the dungeon floor. Because all characters can use all things, there’s much fewer completely useless items. The “stat gain floor” phenomenon, where you have to grind on certain floors to get necessary potions to improve your attributes or risk almost certain death, has also been alleviated. Because dungeon progress is one way, it refreshes the skill points that your abilities require upon entering a new level, which is an interesting play decision: if you run out of SP, you can get them back by advancing a floor, but at the cost of increasing the game’s difficulty, possibly earlier than you’d want.
Bolo is a multiplayer tank game, originally for the BBC Micro but remade for classic Macintosh computers. It was a very popular online kind of game for awhile.
It had a popular resource page on the internet, called the Bolo Home Page, made by Joseph Lo and and Chris Hwang, that began as a student project and migrated to the site lgm.com. But then that site went down, and its domain was bought by squatters. So it goes.
Well, vga256 on Mastodon has remade the Bolo Home Page out of the records kept by the Internet Archive. A site composed of hundreds of static HTML pages has risen from the ashes, all (well most) links fixed up to point internally, its content restored as much as is possible. The Internet Archive, for all its greatness, frequently misses images and even whole pages, so there are holes in its record.
Still, most of its content remains. For people who wish to learn about this classic piece of electronic entertainment, a collection of hundreds of pages awaits you!
I’ve never played Bolo myself, I don’t know much about it, but some people it seems were very enthusiastic about it. I don’t think gameplay goes obsolete, it just falls into and out of fashion. Maybe this is a sign. Maybe it’s time for the Second Age of Bolo to begin.
Arcade Mermaid is our classic arcade weirdness and obscurity column! Frequently (no promises) we aim to bring you an interesting and odd arcade game to wonder at.
It’s been awhile since the Merm has brought us something weird and fun to look at, and wow, this one’s really weird.
To get us started, you are free to interpret this as either a warning, a promise, or a money-back guarantee, but you should know going in that this is a journey that ends with this upstanding member of the community right here:
Inexpertly cropped out from the background, but it still gets across the essential je ne sais quoi.
They’re a stunner, aren’t they? And they live for the great taste of robots. But let’s start from the beginning.
Hole Land is a shooter, and apparently the only game made by the Spanish company Tecfri. Wikipedia tells us it was only released in Japan, possibly because it came out in 1984, and the arcade scene in the US was falling apart.
Consider for a moment the concept. Hole Land. Land of Holes. Certainly a theme that bears contemplation. It seems that you are an invader to this land, a gaily-colored robot that runs back and forth across the bottom of the screen, that shoots upward at a horde of adorably, and understandably, angry monsters of various sorts, in order to claim it away for things that aren’t monsters, or holes.
The land itself is against you: volcanoes in the background launch rocks at your droid with suspicious accuracy, and the monsters throw bombs down at it. Getting hit by projectiles doesn’t destroy your ‘bot, it just disables it for a few seconds. A little guy runs on-screen to fix your problem and allow you to resume blasting after a short delay. If a rock hits you, it smashes your head down into your torso, and you have to push the fire button rapidly to decrush yourself.
I love the animation on these little guys.
The game consists of three boards, that cycle. In board one, the monsters (called “Silfoos”es and “Xagart”s) all run down from the top of the screen. Because it’s a classic-era arcade game, they have a odd system to their attack: They wind their way down in a curious way, akin to the Centipede, moving all the way to one side, dropping a levels, then taking another horizontal pass.
Level 1
This gives you many opportunities to shoot them, but they’re a little cleverer than the standard video game oppono-target: they duck into the holes repeatedly as they pass, and your shots will miss if they’re in a hole, which is often. They’re also smart enough to stay in a hole if you keep shooting at it while it’s hidden. While they make a horizontal trip across the grid, if you hit the lead monster of a line, it causes the others to reverse direction, which may be good or bad depending on how far they’ve gotten. Unless the wave is almost over: then they progress to the bottom of the grid for a pass, then, as if dissatisfied that you haven’t killed them yet, sprint across one more time without even bothering with the holes.
If, after so many opportunities, you still haven’t fried one of them, it’ll take a run across the screen on your level. Your robot is blessed with the power of jumping, and you must leap over it to avoid losing a life.
Level 2
The problems though are: you’re probably focused on shooting at its associates still falling, or dodging the bombs they throw or rocks from the volcanoes from the top of the screen, or if you’ve been hit you might not be able to jump it. If multiple monsters made it through it might not even be possible to leap over them all. If you don’t make it over a monster, it knocks the robot’s bottom half off, a type of damage your mechanical assistant seems unable to repair, so scratch one life. Helpfully, if you’ve already made it far into the wave when that happens, the game will advance you to the next level as a consolation.
Creatures from Level 2
Those bombs and rocks, from the monsters and volcanoes, are your biggest problems. They fall down with great speed, and bounce around too, and if one hits you when the monsters are low enough on the screen the chances are slim you’ll get repaired before one of them uses your lower half as a kickball. Despite all the chances that the monsters give you to shoot them, Hole Land is a dangerous place, and it took several tries for me to get through even the first three screens.
The second board is similar to the first. The monsters are “Kiles” and “Morfos” for some reason. The screen is a lot darker, making it harder to see the monsters and the bombs that fall down.
Level 3
But then comes the third board, where the game changes up a lot. Now the grid of holes is gone, replaced by a few scattered openings, but dominated by a big imposing crater at the top of the screen. There’s some more new monsters, “Microons,” and some unnamed colleagues that I assume are also Microonian. They don’t hide in the holes, but instead parade around the screen in Galaga-like patterns, giving you a good chance to plug them as they pass by.
Sometimes they run straight down at you on their last pass, to try to overwhelm your gun before you can incinerate their monsterly asses.
Monsterly ass
On this level there are also little rat creatures that hide in the holes, waiting for the end of the level where the run in from the wings for their one pass at tearing up your droid. And there are spiders that hang down from threads, that can’t be shot, and will hold your robot in place for a few seconds if they touch you.
But all this is just in preparation for the main event: their boss.
Ladies, gentlemen and enbies, the MAIN EVENT
In 1984 boss monsters were not yet in vogue, yet Hole Land certainly has a memorable one.
It’s not named in the game’s intro. I have put some effort into trying to come up with a suitable name. I thought of Testicules, rhymes with Hercules, but it looks like it’d be pronounced like “molecules.” Gonad Man is a possibility, but it’s obviously not a man; it may not even be male, technically, but Gonad Person doesn’t have the same ring. Scrotor has already been used by Mystery Science Theater 3000. As a brainstorming exercise, and for your own entertainment, I invite you to come up with your own name for this globular goblin.
Whatever its name, once it has emerged from its Hole, the fight is on. It advances straight down, slowly. Your job is to shoot out its jagged, pointy teeth, one by one. It feels like it takes multiple hits each, but in fact each tooth takes only one shot. It just has to hit it dead on; shots that don’t strike a tooth right in its middle have no effect. You also must knock out all of its lower teeth, every one, before any hits to upper teeth will register.
While you’re blasting away, it’s ominously stomping its way down towards you, KA-WUMP KA-WUMP, following your movements with its bloodshot eyes, and throwing rocks from its hands. It’s aim isn’t good, it can only really throw straight down or at specific angles to the left and right, but it can throw from either hand, and as it gets menacingly closer its rocks get harder to avoid. Hits don’t damage or destroy your robot, but they do knock it away, making you have to scramble back over to get in more shots, but likely getting back just in time to be hit by the next rock.
If it gets all the way down, it stomps to the side to catch your robot, then it eats it, its hands working with the effort of crunching it to bits:
NOM NOM NOM NOM
But the best part is if you succeed in shooting out all of its teeth. While your robot jumps around in inane joy, your now toothless foe sits, defeated and sad. While it might be a grotesque testicle monster from out of a giant hole in the ground, it’s gracious in failure and acknowledges your accomplishment, with a synthesized voice no less. Civility is not dead in Hole Land!
Here is my playthrough, if you’re curious what this all looks like in action:
Better yet, you could have a look at this video from classic gaming Youtuber Zerst, who hosts plays of lots of obscure and bizarre old arcade games and whose channel was where I first found out about it, and who made it through all five difficulty levels. There is no ending other than the Congratulations screen at the end of each level; it probably cycles endlessly from there.
I don’t know if I could add much more about it than this. It’s very hard, it’s difficult knocking out all of the boss monster’s teeth before it eats you, and on later levels the volcanoes’ rock deluge is incessant. But they really don’t make them like this any more. The time window for the making of this kind of crazy arcade game was pitifully short. Even relatively simple games take so much time and person-power to construct that, unless one’s just doing it as a hobby, willfully chasing bizarre concepts will probably turn away most of the gaming public, and that’s a shame.
Well, that’s all on this one. I bid you all a fond farewell, coming from the Land of Holes!
News flash: there is one UmJammer Lammy Now arcade machine remaining in the world!
News flash: by the way, there used to be an UmJammer Lammy arcade machine!
The news of both comes to us from the account of Youtuber UnEricYockey (12 minutes), in the form of a short documentary on the game’s history and, due to poor performance on location test, what is probably its sole surviving unit:
We recently posted about Rodney Greenblat’s early obscure Playstation title Dazzeloids, made a year or two before his and Nana-On Sha’s breakout hit Parappa the Rapper. Parappa became something of a media franchise, spawning a much-overdue sequel on the Playstation 4 and an anime series. UmJammer Lammy was Parappa’s original sequel, that brought the same kind of call-and-response gameplay to guitars.
UmJammer Lammy starred Lammy, an insecure young lamb and front-woman for the band Milkcan, who becomes a rock goddess when a guitar is in her hands. Play structure is similar to Parappa, giving the player a series of increasingly unlikely situations that they have to escape somehow by playing music: a dream, putting out a fire, taking care of babies, flying an airplane, making a chainsaw sculpture, and escaping Hell itself (or, getting off an island, in overseas versions), before ending with the most dire situation of all: a public performance in front of a stadium full of people. Yikes! You can do it Lammy!
Production values were a bit less than Parappa, but Lammy and her friends were, indeed are, still engaging and wonderful, and the PS1 game is worth giving a try if you’re at all a fan of Parappa and his world. You can play as Parappa in an unlockable mode after you win, and all of the game’s tracks were mixed as funky remakes! Sadly I can tell you that Parappa’s lines had nowhere near as much flow as they did in his first game, but speaking as one of the few US players who bought a copy of UmJammer Lammy, jamming with her is a great time.
That should be enough information on Lammy’s game. But, how did UmJammerLammy Now come about? The video tells us that the Namco System 12 arcade board is pretty much an original Playstation in an arcade format, and Namco wanted to get some games in Japanese arcades quickly to compete with Konami’s rhythm game dominance.
While the gameplay of the arcade version is similar to the PS1 edition, there are some notable differences, including a surprising number of extra cutscenes featuring the various business ventures of Joe Chin, the antagonist of Parappa the Rapper. The arcade game has been dumped for preservation purposes, and all of its cutscenes are demonstrated in a Youtube video, also on UmEricYockey’s channel (23 minutes):
There’s so much weird Parappa lore in this weird and obscure arcade game! And Lammy’s crippling social anxiety truly makes her a heroine for our age.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
In memory of Blaseball, that awesome star that burned brightly for less than three years, it seems like so much longer. An animatic from the time of its height, about players seeing the future and choosing to get incinerated by the Rogue Umpires so they could come back to play against and beat The Shelled One’s Pods. If none of that makes sense to you I’m sorry, it’s too late to understand, all you can do now is enjoy.
I don’t see as many fan shrine sites as I used to. Old ones have died out or, in the best case, gone into archive mode, and new ones aren’t replacing them as quickly, or at least don’t seem to be. It could be I don’t search for them as often, or Google not surfacing them as much-not only has the quality of its search degraded markedly over the past decade, but for whatever reason its results seems much more focused on answering questions and selling things. Google also seems a lot more like to give you links from big sites, instead of small web sites made by individuals.
That’s why I was please to find 6th Division Den, a site focused on Metal Slug that the Wayback Machine suggests was founded as recently as 2018. I didn’t find it through Google, but as the host of the official site of the game from yesterday’s post, Aqua Ippan.
Much of the site’s content is devoted to creating pixel art and on getting the images out of the games, but it has a lot of examples to go by. And the site itself looks great! I don’t see many sites like this anymore, but I’m glad they can still be found from time to time.
Indie Retro News reported recently on this cool run-and-gun game made by Division 六 the style of Metal Slug. Here’s a promotional video. Note that some of the sound effects are taken directly from Metal Slug, but are intended as placeholders. The final version should have no outside assets.
We love games made for unlikely hardware, and PETSCII Bros. fits that bill like a duck’s dentures. Like we explained in the post about that PET demo from a while ago, the PET didn’t have changeable graphics characters and no bitmap mode at all, and so it wasn’t what we’d consider a games machine. But it did come with a set of interesting graphics characters that, among other things, had a set of 16 characters that let programmers use the screen as a super-low-res 80×50 pixel display.
PETSCII Bros is a PET action game that uses those characters (long called “PETSCII” as a cheeky reference to ASCII) for an actual game, that plays similarly to Nintendo’s classic Mario Bros. arcade game. Of course you’ll need a PET, or an emulator (such as the one that comes with VICE) to play it. Or if you’re just passing interested, you could watch this video to see how it works:
Röq is continuing their explorations of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. They’re getting concerned that there aren’t as many triangles in this one as they were hoping for. There are these stone things that look like the number 9 (“Number 9… number 9…”) but they aren’t the same at all. It seems like it’s a bad idea to eat one, especially. (Spoilers?) Not that Röq is considering eating triangles. Although pizza slices might be considered kind of like triangles. Mmm… triangles.
Speaking of spoilers, there are some minor ones in this post, but nothing huge.
At least try to dodge! I feel bad about smacking you around. Even black bokoblin puts up more of a fight!
The Yiga are pretty hapless in this game. I kind of love them? They definitely know how to have a good time, doing donuts in their underground bases in devices with ridiculous designs, and names like Flamecrusher and Doommachine. They aren’t any more effective than in the first game, and in fact may actually be weaker.
It’s pretty creepy that they choreographed Kohga’s tantrum though.
(wave wave) “I see, so the Einstein-Bose condensate is effectively a fifth state of matter, I understand perfectly now!”
Link can say so much with a wave and a shrug. He must have taken mime classes or something.
And now, the musical stylings of Marot the Zora:
“Hm hm-hmm… Hum hm-hmm… yay!”
I don’t know why I fixate on fish lady’s song, but I do. I’m glad it’s the same between games.
The Pants of Doom! Don’t ask why they’re dark though, you, uh, you don’t want to know.Someone tell Sega, Nintendo ripped off their title!
Rauru, our benefactor from the ancient past, has, uh, a questionable sense of humor:
EDIT: For some reason, this video has gotten over 300,000 views on Youtube. Wow.
What purpose does this serve? And this is a bit of a spoiler, but….
Why do we even have to do shrine puzzles this time? In Breath of the Wild there was the sense that the Sheikah monks were training Link up to face the Calamity, but these shrines, that suddenly appeared right on cue, we know that Rauru made them, and that he knows who they’re for. Link’s already a hero. Rauru knows it, Zelda went back in time and told him. “Seals the darkness” my Hylian ass, the shrines exist to give Link the orbs he needs to heal up from Ganondorf’s mummy attacking him at the start of the game, and he’s still the only person who can enter them. If you know already he’s the Chosen One, there’s no reason to make him jump though hoops. Just hand over the round sparkly, he has a realm to save.
Don’t get me started on why Link have to give them to the goddess statues to get healed. What do they get out of it? Why does Link have to serve as middle-elf? This magical economy, it makes no sense.
Warning: slightly NSFW for depiction of sheep birth.
You’re watching the video and it seems like standard 90s kids whimsy and then woah did that sheep just come out of its mother?
What are the Dazzeloids? They’re characters created by Rodney Alan Greenblat, the character designer of Parappa the Rapper! They were made for a multimedia Playstation game released in 1994, two years before Parappa. I call it a game, but it seems more to have been one of those early multimedia products that’s mostly video clips given a loose connecting story, only in Dazzeloids case, the clips are very weird. The Dazzeloids (not Dazzleoids, as you might expect) have as their mission the liberation of minds and use creativity as a tool to that end. It’s all very nineties kids TV. The Dazzeloids are very obscure now, and don’t even appear on Rodney’s website, which is kind of a shame.
Does Lammy wear Stinkabod merchandise?
All of the Dazzeloids have a dream sequence on the disk that introduces them and tells you what they’re like, and the video above is the one for Stinkabod the Sheep, who might be the character on Lammy’s shirt. The video is very weird, but engaging, and definitely a Rodney Greenblat creation. The characters are of the same style as Parappa, and it doesn’t seem impossible that Stinkabod and his friends could exist in the same world.
Rodney’s creations are a bit more popular in Japan than in the U.S., where Parappa got an anime series and a line of merchandise. While you’re diving down this internet rabbit hole, you might also check out Rodney Greenblat’s personal site Whimsyload!
Sadly, it seems the struggle to update Blaseball for a new era was too much effort and not enough income to keep The Game Band, the game’s creator and maintainer, going with it, and they’ve made the decision to end it.
It’s a shame, but it could be that it was something of its time. It got started during the big lockdown period of COVID (as opposed to the long haul, pretend-it’s-not-happening period we’re currently in), when everyone was obsessing over this strange fake horror-themed baseball sim and Animal Crossing New Horizons.
I’m sure in the decades to come people will look back fondly at that time, as a moment when we could afford to be so focused on a small number of particular cultural monoliths instead of our regular diffuse fixations. Maybe a moment such as that will come again someday. But it’s not now, and Blaseball has ended.
It’s worth noting what a cultural phenomenon Blaseball was for awhile. They made a number of Youtube videos for the second era of the “splort,” called The Blaseball Roundup, that are worth watching for their own sake. And the Seattle Garages was a seriously good band that arose out of Blaseball’s pandemic enthusiasm.
