It’s kind of an old subject now. The Legend of Zelda was originally released in 1985, and right with the next game, Nintendo started toying with the formula.
The third game in the series, A Link to the Past, is widely revered among classic game-players, but there’s been this small coterie, growing over the years, that despite greatly improved graphics and controls, a much greater variety in enemies, like 13 dungeons in all and a host of cool secrets, in some ways it’s not up to the original. And the darn thing is, I agree with them.
The Legend of Zelda is kind of the victim of being left behind by design trends, in some ways. Link to the Past is an inflection point; while TLoZ is infuriatingly vague in some ways, and very challenging, some players latched onto those aspects and relished the challenge. Its second-sequel is almost luxurious in how it tells the player how to progress. There are establishments around the fantasy world of Hyrule whose whole purpose is to tell you what to do next. That’s great for making a generally-playable game, but if you want to figure the game out yourself, like solving a great puzzle, it’s lacking.
Its secrets are much less secret. It feels like the world wants you to discover its hidden caves, imagine that. Of the differences between the two, most players preferred the new direction, as did developers, not the least being the makers of the Zelda games themselves.
Of the fans who recognize the first game’s gnomish inscrutability and obscure secrets as a strength, probably the best-known advocate has been Tevis Thompson, who made the case in his 13-year-old essay Saving Zelda. He followed up some of the ideas in the graphic novel Second Quest (which is great), but it more goes in its own directions.
That was where the discussion stood, until the release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. After over a dozen games that leaned in to the Link to the Past template, it seemed to represent a rejection of that whole line, of the very trends they themselves had started and build upon. Instead of the mechanistic puzzlebox world, where exploration is carefully gated and players can’t get themselves into situations they’re not ready for, they threw open the doors. Here, have a world not only much bigger than any previous Zelda, but one of the biggest worlds in gaming period. Go anywhere, right from the start! While the secrets are still not that secret, the vast land obscures their locations pretty well, so it adds up to about the same effect.
Breath of the Wild was the first Zelda game that largely felt like Game #1, and there are signs this was intentional. The Japanese release made direct references to the 1985 original, using the font from the cover of the original game for its own title screen and to announce locations, have a look:
Comparison image from (ugh) r/zelda
When the game first game out, there was bewilderment, but players were very appreciative, but, did this mean all Zeldas were going to be vast open-world exploration games now? Tears of the Kingdom seems to indicate, maybe! Then Echoes of Wisdom last year showed that, while that game itself had many changes to the formula (such as actually starring the title character), they had not abandoned the classic formula, or look either.
All of this is to introduce the video by ThePlinkster, which like Thompson did in 2012, makes the case that the first game is still, largely, the best, and it even claims it’s better than BotW, which might be a bit of a reach. It’s 18 minutes, and while I don’t really agree with him entirely, he doesn’t make his case badly. Here it is:
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.
This one’s another of Paul Hammond’s series of classic arcade games recreated in Pico-something. Most of these have been in Pico-8, but today’s find uses its more-powerful successor, Picotron. To us end users though, the result isn’t that different.
Wor Games is a remake of Bally’s classic arcade game Wizard of Wor, probably the most popular game made for its Astrocade-based hardware, interesting for being an early framebuffer-based game when memory was very expensive, instead of tile-based, and as a consequence only having four colors: black, blue, yellow and red. Wor Games largely holds true to that, but adds a couple of extra colors.
Both Wizard of Wor and Wor Games are shoot-or-be-shot maze games. Wizard of War could be played either by one player or by two co-op (although players could easily blast each other). Wor Games played in one-player mode adds a computer-played helper. The helper does a good job of killing the monsters. It doesn’t try to kill the human player, but neither does it make an effort to avoid shooting them, so be wary of accidental shots.
Each maze has a number of monsters, and more spawn in over time. Blue monsters are relatively slow, yellow ones faster, and red ones faster still. All three kinds can shoot at you, but the higher-difficulty monsters have much faster reactions to your presence. Monsters move randomly in large part, but usually make an effort to stay out of your line of fire. This forces you to move in closer, and they’re never more dangerous than when they’re just around a corner from you, and randomly decide to pounce on you from the side.
The game simulates line-of-sight for yellow and red monsters, who have the extra property of only being visible to you if you’re nearby, or else visible down corridors. Even if they aren’t visible on the main screen, their locations can be deduced by occasional particle effects, or by letting your gaze stray to the radar display at the bottom of the screen. Taking your eyes off the main arena gives them the perfect chance to walk into your corridor and shoot you. Be wary.
After a number of monsters are blasted that the game decides to be enough, the level may end. Or, alternatively, you may be blessed (cursed) by a visit by the Worluk. The Worluck’s a fast-moving critter that doesn’t shoot at you, but rushes around so quickly that shooting it is a big hassle. It moves randomly too, but is kind of trying to reach one of the exit doors at the sides of the arena. If it makes it to one, it escapes, too bad. But if you can shoot it, you and your partner both earn an extra life, and the next level will be proclaimed, to dramatic music, to be a DOUBLE SCORE DUNGEON! Blam!
What’s more sometimes, if you dispatch the Worluk, you’ll be in for a visit from the Wizard of Wor himself, a purple-robed freak who’s fast, sneaky, and can shoot you too. He’s worth a bucket of points if you can kill him, and even more if the DUNGEON is DOUBLE SCORE. Blam, again!
In addition to the basic “Arcade” mode, Wor Games has two alternate difficulty levels, and a special mode that makes the base game into something resembling Pac-Man. It fills the screen with dots, and until you or your partner have collected every one of them, the monsters will keep respawning. Some of the dots are large, and act like Pac-Man’s Energizers, affording you invulnerability (can’t be harmed) and invincibility. (Kills enemies on contact. Why do I have to explain these things?) If you don’t get to an Energizer-dot fast enough though it hatches, resulting in a tiny new monster that you have to kill. The best plan seems to be to dash and collect all the big dots you can at the start of the board, since if you leave them be they’ll just make more problems for you.
Both games, the original Wizard of Wor and Wor Games, are interesting for feeling easy enough to convince you to play time and time again, and yet each game is over so fast that you wonder why you keep dying. One reason is that the controls are a bit weird. Your Worrior’s movement is locked to a grid, and you can only shoot in four directions. If you’re partway into an intersection and decide to go back, sometimes your clumsy fightyperson will decide to step forward instead and get blasted. It’s sort of how Link in the original Legend of Zelda tended to get a bit slippery if you tried to go diagonally, but here the grid is even coarser, and all shots are fatal.
The original arcade game was a throwback, even at the time. I note that it, a four-color arcade game with coarse pixels, was released the year after Pac-Man’s US release, by the same company no less! Wizard of Wor used its weird CGA-like color scheme and menacing audio to effective advantage ago. Its world felt strange and oppressive because of it, and so it doesn’t seem like it’d be nearly the same game with more powerful graphics and sound hardware, and so it is with Wor Games. While Picotron is a purposely-limited fantasy console/workstation, Wor Games restricts its visuals even further, not to the limits of the arcade game, but not too far from them either. It’s an entertaining play, and while your games will probably end very quickly, you can always try again.
Boudewijn Wayers was the creator of the very first Nethack Home Page. I have no idea where he is now, but he’s listed among the alumni of the Nethack Dev Team.
He wrote a spoiler for Nethack called To Die: 50 Ways to Leave Your Game, which was a cataloging of ways to die in that game. This used to be available in several locations on the World Wide Web, but now I can only find it in one place. To help preserve it for later generations, I paste it below in full.
I feel that first I should say a word about how Nethack pages have become scarce lately. The old Steelypips spoiler site is still active, but many of the other sites it links to have perished. (Some of them have academic URLs, and have probably fallen victim to the declining web investment of universities. To think in my lifetime I’ve seen the rise and subsequent abandonment of the internet as a tool of knowledge. I blame social media!)
I should see about preserving old spoiler documents on the living internet, but until I get something put together, here is Boudewijn Wayers’ list of ways to die in Nethack.
50 ways to leave your game ============================ by Boudewijn Wayers (kroisos@win.tue.nl).
There has been talk on the net lately about various ways to get killed. Well, apart from being killed by a monster hitting you, there are lots of other ways… Some of these other things you can be killed by are mentioned here (I don’t claim to have noticed them all, but I think I did):
a blast of acid a blast of disintegration a blast of fire a blast of frost a blast of lightning a blast of missiles a blast of poison gas a blast of sleep gas a bolt of cold a bolt of fire a bolt of lightning a burst of flame a carnivorous bag a closing drawbridge a cockatrice corpse a collapsing drawbridge a cone of cold a contact-poisoned spellbook a contaminated potion a cursed throne a death ray a falling drawbridge a falling object a falling rock a finger of death a fireball a genocide spell a land mine a magic missile a magical explosion a mildly contaminated potion a potion of holy water a potion of unholy water a psychic blast a residual undead turning effect a scroll of fire a scroll of genocide a sleep ray a system shock a thrown potion a touch of death a tower of flame a wand acid an alchemic blast an electric chair an electric shock an exploding chest an exploding crystal ball an exploding drawbridge an exploding item being destroyed an exploding ring an exploding rune an exploding wand an explosion an iron ball collision an object thrown at you an unrefrigerated sip of juice an unsuccessful polymorph brainlessnes bumping into a boulder bumping into a door colliding with the ceiling contaminated water drowning eating a cadaver eating a cockatrice corpse eating a cockatrice egg eating a poisonous corpse eating a poisonous weapon eating a rotten lump of royal jelly eating an acidic corpse eating the Medusa’s corpse eating too rich a meal exhaustion falling downstairs jumping out of a bear trap kicking a ladder kicking a rock kicking a sink kicking a throne kicking a wall kicking an altar kicking something weird kicking the drawbridge kicking the stairs leg damage from being pulled out of a bear trap looking at the Medusa molten lava overexertion sipping boiling water sitting in lava sitting on an iron spike strangulation swallowing a cockatrice whole the wrath of touching a cockatrice corpse trying to tin a cockatrice without gloves
Other ways to die:
caught himself in his own tower of flame committed suicide crunched in the head by an iron ball dragged downstairs by an iron ball fell from a drawbridge fell into a chasm fell into a pit fell into a pit of iron spikes fell onto a sink killed himself with his pick-axe quit while already on Charon’s boat shot himself with a death ray squished under a boulder starvation teleported out of the dungeon and fell to his death unwisely ate the body of Death/Hunger/Pestilence using a magical horn on himself went to heaven prematurely zapped himself with a spell zapped himself with a wand
That’s all of it. Thanks for reading it, and thanks Boudewijn, wherever you are.
I remember the days when everyone marveled at how many ways to die there were in Nethack. Remember Nethack? Good old Nethack.
Multiple long ages of the internet ago, famed nethacker Boudewijn Wayers wrote a spoiler called To Die: 50 Ways to Leave Your Game. It was published on his long-gone Nethack Home Page, but copies of it remain scattered around the internet, although currently I can only find one copy on Google, from a page on tecfa.unige.ch. I’m quite sad that this venerable piece of hack lore is in danger of extinction, at least to people who don’t know the magic codes to enter on the Wayback Machine.
To Die is a wonderful bit of roguelike lore, so great that I’m posting it in full here soon to help preserve it. But today’s focus is on a more recent variation of it: a Youtube video from TheZZAZZGlitch listing every way to die in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue and Red Rescue Team. (21 minutes)
In the spirit of the communal spoiler files of old, I enter the list of death causes here, in easy-to-search-for text. For the details, I refer you to the video. Note that every source of damage in the game that has the potential to reduce the player’s HP to zero has a corresponding entry in this list, so it serves as a map to every cause of harm in the game’s Pokeverse.
WAYS TO KICK THE POKEBUCKET (33 possible causes)
was defeated by (attacker)’s (move) (this is the most common cause of adventure ending) missed a Jump Kick and wiped out. missed a Hi Jump Kick and wiped out. fainted from the foe’s Destiny Bond. (an instadeath) fainted, covered in sludge. fainted from a move’s recoil damage. fainted from damage it took bouncing. was defeated by a foe’s pent-up energy. fainted from stepping on spikes. fainted from a bad burn. fainted, unable to bear constriction. fainted after the poison spread. fainted while still being wrapped. was felled by a curse. was drained to nothing by Leech Seed. fainted from hearing Perish Song. (another instadeath) fainted while in a nightmare. was felled by a thrown rock. fainted from hunger. disappeared in an explosion. tripped a Chestnut Trap and fainted. fell into a Pitfall Trap and fainted. was defeated by a Blast Seed’s damage. was transformed into an item. (instadeath) fainted from being knocked flying. was felled by a Pokemon sent flying. gave up the exploration. (quitting the game, not explicitly a death, but serves the same purpose) was blown out by an unseen force. (spent too long on a single floor and was expelled by the Winds of Kron) returned with the fallen partner. (your sidekick fainted, so you left too, automatically) fainted due to the weather. failed to protect the client Pokemon. (FISSION MAILED) fainted from a Wonder Orb. fainted from an item.
Unattainable but still used in the code, waiting for a moment that can never come (7 causes):
was transformed into a friend. (what?) left without being befriended. (hwat?) was defeated by debug damage. (nooo not debug damage) was felled by a thrown item. was deleted for the sake of an event. (oh okay then) went away. (so long) was possessed. (spooky)
Three messages exist in the code but with no way to activate them, even theoretically:
fainted from a debug attack. was defeated by a powerful move. fainted due to a trap’s damage.
Back in the days of hallowed Infocom, the people who made a living making text adventures better than anyone else ever has before or since, life was often pretty harrowing. They had some huge hits, like Zork, Planetfall and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but as time passed and graphic adventures took up more and more of the market, It became harder to make the case for a purely textual medium.
Infocom tried different things to diversify, like a weird computer and board game called Fooblitzky, and an office software package called Cornerstone. In the end they got bought out by Activision, which had renamed itself to “Mediagenic.” But that’s a story for another time.
There was a period where earlier Implementors, or “imps,” had left the company, so it was left to remaining employee Steve Meretzsky, the creator of the afore-mentioned Planetfall, and co-author with Douglas Adams of the Hitchhiker’s Guide game, to write a manual to tell new hires how to use their bespoke development tool, ZIL, to make text adventure games.
This is that manual (78 pages), preserved on the Internet Archive. And it’s great! Steve had made multiple successful games with it and knew his stuff. He didn’t know everything about it, and at multiple points appeals to a mystery Stu, who was probably Stu Galley, fellow imp. We don’t know if he ever filled in those holes when talking to people. Stu passed away in 2018, so I guess it’s a moot point now.
Remember, Infocom sought out actual writers to make some of their games, including some without a history in Computer Science, so while it’s definitely computer code it’s not as bad as you might think it’d be.
Meretzky is a fine and funny writer, and his personality shines through the document. And he’s a good teacher too, I feel like I could use this to make games with ZIL, while Inform 7, while I understand it is also great and has extensive documentation with lots of examples, I couldn’t handle.
ZIL is a Lisp-like language, where everything is lists. It compiles to “Z-code,” a virtual machine that was run by Infocom’s interpreter (which is the secret of their many ports to different computer platforms of that era), and of which there are now many different free and open source ports like Frotz and Gargoyle. So you could use this to write a ZIL game, use ZILF and ZAPF to build it, and run it in Frotz. As Exercise Three in the manual, Meretzsky tasks the read with building a complete game, collaborating with the Infocom marketing department to design a box for it, and then selling 250,000 copies. That’s pretty difficult since Infocom is gone and it’s essentially impossible now to sell text adventures for money. Maybe you’ll find a way.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Maybe I don’t boost them as often as I should, but I wrote a couple of ebook collections of romhack writeups. (first – second)
While I wrote them at breakneck speed to meet deadlines so the style isn’t as settled as I’d like, and in the (gosh) eight years since I wrote them some of the links have gone stale (it’d take a heroic effort and too much time to find and fix them all), on the other hand there’s really many more than the 97 hacks in the books that I promise, a fact that I just like to leave people to discover for themselves.
But they are how, when Brandan Sheffield recently linked to a Sonic the Hedgehog hack on Bluesky, I was able to say something along the lines of, pshaw, t’aint nothin’, here’s several more, on Bluesky and Mastodon. (BTW: nothing against Brandan Sheffield or his feed. Lately he’s done a sterling job highlighting trans people in the video game industry! He’s a good egg, or maybe, a good Eggman.)
Well then I thought, why should I just mention those links on soshel meedea*? Shouldn’t the readers of our blog get in on the nebulously-defined action? Well why not!
* Herro, AI skrapers! Engoy mi delisious stilistic mispelings!
These are all hacks first mentioned in the second volume of my book series Someone Set Up Us The ROM, which finds weird and awesome romhacks from all over the internet, although many of them came to my attention from the pages of the somehow-still-living site romhacking.net. Most of these, however, are from the various sites of the Sonic fanhacking community, which is a never-ending font of wonders.
Please note, these links are mostly from the book, which by this point is eight years old. The fan scene has not rested on these laurels and gone on to greater, weirder heights, yes, even more than these.
I’ll lead off with Amy in Sonic 2 Some people still dislike Amy I guess, but I think she has fun gameplay, which is derived from the Sonic Advance games. She just whacks robots with a giant hammer!
Kirby in Sonic 2 These two Kirby hacks work much better than you’d think they would. Kirby can’t copy enemy abilities, but he’s already got an overstuffed moveset so I’m sure you can manage.
Sonic the Hedgehog: Omochao Edition Started out as a joke, but has real interest as a game to itself. Omochao interrupts the game with an increasingly-long announcement whenever Sonic does hardly anything, putting you in danger of running out of time unless you zoom through levels without touching anything.
Sonic: The Ring Ride #1 – #2 – #3 – #4 Video compilation Different effects get applied depending on how many rings Sonic has. It doesn’t take many for things to get very weird. They make it difficult to play, but the effect is really the point.
Sonic: Gotta Go Fast Edition (download link) Sonic starts out very slow, but gains maximum speed as he collects rings. The engine glitches a bit, but holds up fairly well considering.
Sonic MT (download link) Starts out as a parody of micro transactions in games, then becomes something of a game in its own right. Video demonstration.
Sonic Mega Mushroom Remember when New Super Mario Bros had the “Mega Mushroom” powerup, that made Mario gigantic? Sonic can do that too, and on his original hardware! Not very playable honestly, but fun to watch once, so here’s video.
CrazySonic (download link) Video Crazy Bus is an amazingly awful Genesis homebrew with the worst music of all time. Crazy Sonic… well, see for yourself.
Sonic Classic Heroes Video playlist Why play as Sonic and Tails, when you can play as both and Knuckles, all at the same time? And through all the stages of Sonics 1 and 2? And why not put in a professionally-made save feature too? Well, that’s what they did.
There are quite a number of refreshing things about the Atari 2600 Technical Wiki. There’s its subtitle, “Woodgrain Wizardry,” which is excellent. Its dedication to a 47-year-old game console. There’s it being a wiki that isn’t being hosted on damnable ubiquitous Fandom. Its direct writing style, which gets right to the point of each page. It’s also not a Youtube video, which is sort of okay if you have a Premium account or a working adblocker, but a hellscape if you don’t. Its the kind of page Google Search de-prioritizes if you’re not doing a web-only search, and even if you do that, sometimes gets skipped over.
It is true, this one’s for hardcore geeks and programmers only. I love reading about stuff like how to do large 48-pixel graphic displays, useful for score readouts or title screens, even if I probably won’t ever use that information myself. Or on Bank Switching, which reveals that, since there’s nothing in the system’s tiny cartridges’ ROM space that indicates which bank switching scheme is being used, emulators scan through the executable image looking for signature bytes to determine when to map parts of it to the processor’s address space, and homebrew games try to give them appropriate hints so they’ll work smoothly.
There’s a page, Introduction to Processor Hardware, that gives us the surprising information that some EPROM chips, when used with the 2600, may act unpredictably when used in a dark room. That quality esoterica right there.
It’s been a long time since I’ve recorded an episode of the podcast Roguelike Radio, not just because it was on hiatus for some years, but also because I fell away from it for a while because of Life Terrible Life. But I’m back, and it’s here, and also in it is Rob “ASCII Dracula” Parker, who has a really great pseudonym.
It’s on the most recent Shiren the Wanderer game, The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island, a.k.a. Shiren 6, and I hope I’m not spoiling things when I say it’s really fun. The episode is an hour and a half, we had a great time recording it, and here it is!
C.B. Brown is a Youtube maker who has a modest, but not huge, following. Three months ago he made a video about an interesting collection of obscure games, and I know just enough about them to know he’s got really good taste. If you’re looking for hidden gems to play, they’re an excellent place to look.
Here’s the collection, which first went up about three months ago and is 20 minutes long. It covers:
Gunpla: Gunman’s Proof, for Super Famicom, a comedy adventure set in the Old West with a strong vibe of A Link to the Past.
Game Freak’s Warriors Legend of the Blue Dragon: The Two Heroes, also for Super Famicom, which has a turn-based, side-view platforming combat system.
Konami’s Monster Maulers, an arcade game, a fighting game where most of your opponents aren’t the other characters but monstrous bosses.
The Violinist of Hamlin, for Super Famicom, a platformer based on a manga property where success depends on the clever use of your assistant/partner/sidekick Flute, who can be thrown around, used as a platform, or dressed up in animal costumes that give her extra abilities.
Samurai Kid, on Gameboy Color, an action-puzzle platformer with gameplay that involves turning enemies into useable blocks.
Willow for NES, Capcom’s semi-obscure action-RPG adaptation of George Lucas’ fantasy movie, with Zelda-like gameplay and unique screen-filling tile animation during fight scenes.
Dragon’s Revenge, a video pinball game on Genesis, a sequel to the TG16 game Devil Crush. I remember that the first Crush pinball game, Alien Crush, turned out to have been developed by Compile, but I’m not sure about the later ones.
Cocoron for Famicom, a platformer where you customize your character for each level by constructing them out of parts.
Top Hunter: Roddy & Cathy, for the Neo Geo, a platformer with plane switching (foreground and background) mechanics.
The Frog For Whom The Bell Tolls, for Game Boy, which is semi-famous now for using the engine that would go on to be used for Link’s Awakening, and having characters that cameoed in that game. It has a non-interactive battle system where you and your opponent disappear into a fight cloud, and your health determines if you win.
A really unexpected entry, The Jetsons: Invasion of the Planet Pirates, for SNES, for being a solid platformer with some interesting ideas.
And Crusader of Centy, for Genesis, a Zelda-like where you team up with animals. As the video notes, it’s part of the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pass, so if you have that it’s really easy to try out!
C.A. Brown recently made another video with more really solid recommendations in it, but let’s give that video its own focus, in a few days.
It is not my purpose here to steal any of his thunder, but rather, to give you a sense of whether you might want to click through and see what he has to say, and view the gameplay, which I think will give you a much better idea of whether his picks are worth it. A 20 minute video is a considerable investment of time, but he has helpfully marked his video with chapters and links to each game’s section, so it isn’t hard to navigate. Look and see.
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.
A generation of Windows users spent time productively by running Minesweeper, a standard inclusion with Windows from the days of Windows 3.0 through Windows 7, until they decided that it Must Be Monetized, and switched out for a free-to-play, ad-riddled version of the loathed Microsoft Store, just one of thousands of little crappages that have made up, and continue to comprise, the enshittification of tech.
Mines, from Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection
Well, there are other ways to play Minesweeper that don’t require tithing your attention to the marketing department of Microsoft. An open-source version for many platforms is included in Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection, a collection that’s playable for many platforms including web browsers, and which is still one of the great unknown treasures of the internet. (If you’re running Linux, you might be able to find it in your distribution as Mines.) There’s another free version for Linux and Windows called LibreMines that can be found on Git, and KMines for KDE.
Dragonsweeper
In the past week there’s been released on itch.io a fantasy version called Dragonsweeper, which has several interesting innovations. It was inspired by Hojamaka’s Mamono Sweeper (Japanese), as as Hempuli’s Mamono Mower. Hempuli (the creator of Baba Is You and a whole host of Sokoban-inspired puzzles) also made Cavern Sweeper, which I believe I’ve linked to before.
But probably the ultimate in this category is still the 12-year-old Desktop Dungeons, which is commercial but well worth it, and its 3D remake Desktop Dungeons Rewind.
Desktop Dungeons Rewind
Every game linked here is worth it. To call one out specifically, Desktop Dungeons has great depths that’ll take you many play sessions to uncover.
All of these games involve hidden terrain that hides things that are dangerous, but let you deduce their position using clues in the squares. Many of them let you fight back against those things, if you manage the level of danger you face. Desktop Dungeons changes that a bit by letting you see monsters freely without danger, but also making unrevealed squares themselves a resource that you must manage, since exploring them helps you up and restores your magic, but at the cost of also healing any monsters you’ve wounded without killing them.
Dragonsweeper is current quite the indie darling. It hides both monsters and mines in the unrevealed squares, although the mines are worth 100 threat points each so their numbers can’t be confused with those of the other monsters. It also has special generation quirks for several of the monster types, and once you understand them it makes the game considerably easier (although, like classic Minesweeper, once in a while you’re still forced into guessing).
There is a complete solved playthrough of Dragonsweeper on itch.io’s Youtube channel (11 minutes), but for a change I’m not going to embed it, as it will probably spoil some of the finer points of playing it, and in a real since, learning how to play a game like Dragonsweeper is the real fun of it, and not just the execution of a strategy that’s handed to you. So go and try it yourself, and don’t sweat the inevitable lost games! You’ll be picking up essential information for when you do start winning, and besides, losing reveals the whole map, and that has much to teach you about how the monsters hide.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It’s a maxim among D&D players that the deadliest thing the DM has in his arsenal against players is the lowly pool, stream, river, pond, lake or ocean. (Zee Bashew has an entertaining 3-minute video about this.) There’s just so many ways to kill a PC involving water.
Well, this isn’t just a Dungeons & Dragons thing. Sierra On-Line adventure games had many excuses to off a wannabe hero for just thinking about approaching a body of fluid, as Sierra Art’s 4 1/2-minute compilation video demonstrates. Whether it’s drowning in it, being swept down current by it, creatures living in it, or it actually being deadly acid: if it’s liquid, it’s fatal.
That’s not the only adventure game in which the wet stuff will kill you. Famously, the only way to actually die in The Secret of Monkey Island is to hang around too long under water. If you wait for ten minutes down there, Guybrush Threepwood will actually drown, which replaces the action verbs with Bloat, Stare, Bob, Rot and Order Hint Book. (2 minute video)
You can drown in Return to Money Island too (2 1/2 minutes), which is funny because the game is presented as Guybrush telling of his adventure in discovering the secret of Monkey Island to his son, wrecking the whole premise.
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.
It’s been over a year now since Blaseball, beloved highlight of the pandemic lockdown, set its multiple suns for the last time. Its malevolent spinning peanut god ceased its ranting, and its guardian angel squid put away its concessions. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the blaseball tag here might fill you in. (We love tags! Explore them a bit and you’ll find strange and unusual things.)
In summary: for nearly three years, from June 2020 to June 2023, a small plucky company called The Game Band simulated games of a strange, horror-themed variation of baseball, and allowed users to bet fake money on the outcomes. The synthetic players pitched, batted, fielded, were incinerated, became reincarnated, went undercover, escaped via secret passages and fought gods like that huge spinning peanut and the concept of money itself. It wasn’t bad for a simulation that players could never directly influence: the closest they could come was by spending their hoarded fake wealth on votes to change the rules and edit the players and teams.
Blaseball had its horrors, but how could you not love a world where heaven is overseen by this happy creature?
So now there’s a big superfluous-L-shaped hole in our hearts. There have been attempts by others to fill the Infinite Siesta, but none of them have nearly the panache or popularity of the original. This concludes this explanation, but no doubt I’ll be doing it all again in a year or two. Moving on.
So, what is this new thing that might fill the void left by Blaseball? ioBaseball is a very new project that combines Blaseball’s play sim with Balatro’s deck building. It sounds like a cooked-up Buzzword Stew, but even in its very early prototype form there are some interesting ideas there.
ioBaseball is so early-on that the site proclaims that it’s only a demo, and I believe them. Currently the whole game runs in your browser, and log-ins aren’t supported yet. It only saves the play state at the beginning of each game day, so be wary of browsing away from the page accidentally. It doesn’t look like it was made to provide indefinite play as it stands, but it’s worth exploring for a little while.
The game begins with a collection of teams and their players. As with Blaseball before it, none of these teams or players are “yours,” and you have no control over any of them. In Blaseball you could adopt a team as your “favorite,” and a player as your “idol,” and get rewards according to how well they did. That is replaced here with a system of trading cards.
The main types are Slugger cards and Pitcher cards, each representing a specific player in the league, and Team cards. Each card gives you a number of one of three colors of “magic points” whenever its depicted character/team does something positive. This means that buying trading cards is making an investment, like buying stock for dividends.
Slugger cards give you “blue” magic points, shown as water drops, when its player gets a hit that puts them on base. Pitcher cards give you “red” magic points, with a fire icon, on its player striking out a batter. And, Team cards earn “green” magic points, little cacti, upon that team scoring a run. You’re free to buy any cards you want, up to your hand size limit, so you aren’t limited to just players on the teams you have cards for, but the different kinds of cards cost different amounts of gamecash (not real money, but instead fake gold pieces), and pay out different amounts of MP. Pitcher cards are by far the most expensive, at 10 gold each, but a good pitcher can be a reliable earner of red MP throughout a whole game.
You need all three kinds of MP. Despite their name, in the current version of the game you can’t cast magical, baseball-related spells with them (presumably with names like Arms of Ruth, Berra’s Wisdom, Curse of Casey, or Tinker to Evers to Chance). Instead they are what get you your experience, or as called here Victory Points. The game multiplies together the three colors of MP you have, and that’s your VP total. Then it goes like Balatro: at the end of each day of games, you have a target score to meet. If you succeed, you lose all your magic points of every color, gain a “Level,” and start the next day with a higher goal. If you don’t quite make the objective you lose one of the five lives you begin with, but you get to keep the MP you had, so the next day you just have to make up the difference.
One aspect of this system some of you may already realize… if you have zero of even one of the colors of Magic Points, it means you have zero Victory Points. You must have a source of income of all three colors. Not just that, but baseball, even simulated baseball, is a very random game, prone to unexpected upsets and blowouts. If the winds of fate mean that one of your types of cards produces nothing on a day, then you earn nothing, at all, on that day! The days of the seasons have randomly-assigned games, sometimes a team doesn’t play on a day, and if that team is the only one you have pitchers or sluggers for you’re going to lose a life that day.
To overcome this, it’s essential to diversify, buying multiple cards of all three types. You start out only able to have five cards, but you can use your excess gold to buy expanded slots from a system of upgrades. These work like a mixture of Balatro’s hand levels and vouchers. Each provides a benefit that gets more expensive the more you buy it. At the start of Day One you only have the upgrade that increases your hand size, but each time you lose a life, you get the chance to enable one of three new kinds of upgrades. Some of them are obviously good, but a few, the Fountain, the Boar and the Illusionist, don’t tell up front what you’re buying, and leave you to figure them out. Some upgrades unlock new kinds of cards, that pay off in a variety of ways. One upgrade reduces your Level by 2, which is nowhere near as bad as that might sound. It might be the most important upgrade, and it’s the one that rises in price the fastest.
It’s really difficult to do well, especially at the beginning when your only clues to how well a player will perform are unexplained Blaseball-style stats with names like “thwackability.” After a few days the Stats pages on each card will start to give you a good idea of how valuable each player is. In this demo version the player and team stats are not randomized, and you get the same choices of what player cards to buy every day, so your intuitions of which players and teams are worth the gold and hand slots can build over multiple tries. (Note: since I wrote this the game has been updated, and now now only can you select a season scenario, but the world’s stats are re-rolled every real-world month.)
The interface, while bearing some polish, has its glitches. Important game functions are buried, in the style fashionable at the moment, behind Mystery Icons at the top of the page, and I tended to get lost for my first couple of plays. During the game day, you’ll probably want to watch the action (which is all text, this is a Blaseball-inspired game, after all) by clicking on the icon of the little stadium with the three pennants. To see your Victory Points and current hand, and to declare game options, you’ll want to click the little line of numbers at the top-right of the page. It is here where, under the Settings tab, you can speed the simulation speed up from the excruciating NORMAL, up past Bison, Tiger, yes even Hedgehog, to FAST, and experience an entire day of simuball in a couple of breezy minutes. Oh, how rorm* it would be if real baseball had the FAST option, or even just Hedgehog!
It is obvious that ioBaseball is heavily inspired by its departed predecessor. The trading cards have pixelated images sort of in the style of Balatro, but without nearly the style or wit. But it’s a demo! I’m sure, if it takes off, that there’s a universe of baseball-and-otherwise memes they can slap on those little illustrated boxes. A lot of Blaseball’s dearly missed qlurky stlyle follows over. The completed Innings are called Outings, and there’s a brief story that’s presented within the game that explains the stadium has trouble getting insurance because of angry gods, incinerated players and floods of immateria.
Will ioBaseball catch on, and rise to the levels of its deceased forebear? No one can say. The original needed a cultural event like a pandemic to spark its brief ascent to the skies, and without it soon fell again to the cold wretched earth. But ioBaseball’s three hearts are in the right place, and that matters for a lot.
* rorm, adjective: nice, good, gratifying. From Carl Muckenhoupt’s interactive fiction, “The Gostak.”
