I’ve lamented how Atari Games shut down lots of interesting prototypes over their operation because they didn’t perform well on test, or maybe other reasons.
Well other game companies did it too, and one was Mylstar, a.k.a. Gottlieb, the makers of Q*Bert and a number of other classics. I found out about a very interesting little game called Wiz Warz that I’d have loved to have found in a classic arcade (if I had been able to visit many classic arcades back then). Insert Coin has a nice demonstration of it (9½ minutes). It’s kind of like Tempest, but you can fire at any direction into the playfield, and there’s lots of other unique elements too. We’re still in a low effort mode this weekend, so have a look, and speculate about a game that could have been.
Read the subject line, and say to yourself quietly, “No way. What’s the catch?”
There is a catch, of course. There is an art to these kinds of hacks though, and it lies in finding the right catch. The catch that makes the hack possible at all, but seems the least like a cheat.
You can technically “run” Doom on a C64, if you actually run it on a Raspberry Pi plugged into it, that only uses the machine’s video hardware for output. That’s an egregious cheat; Raspberry Pis didn’t exist back in 1983 when the C64 was new.
There are speed-up cartridges for the C64, and you could even implement a co-processor to do much of the hard work of rendering the display for you. That’s also a cheat, although a bit less of one.
One could approach the problem from the other direction, diminishing the scope of the hack until it fits more comfortably in the computer’s capabilities. There are 3D corridor games on the C64; when I was a kid, a tape of software that a co-worker gave to my dad had one, called LABYRINTH, that was written in BASIC. But if it was truly the equal of Wolfenstein 3D it’d have revolutionized the gaming world. It wasn’t, and it didn’t. It generated one of those Wizardry-style mazes, sometimes called “blobbers,” where your perspective is fixed in the center of a grid-based maze. It wasn’t a shooter, it didn’t animate smoothly, and it was a pretty simple algorithm, simple enough that lots of games used it, especially RPGs.
What makes smoothly rendered graphics slow on a C64, indeed on pretty much all home computers at the time? It’s the necessity of using a bitmapped graphics mode. The math of deciding where the corridor vertices and lines go is within the machine’s capability, even at 1 mHz, but writing all those bytes into the C64’s 8K bitmap screen takes a huge amount of time.
It’s why few action games on the Commie used the bitmapped modes. Even if you used a hand-tuned machine code loop to write a single value to every byte in the bitmap, it’d be slow enough that you could visibly watch the screen fill up. If you wanted to actually vary those bytes, such as by rendering walls, it’d take much longer. Even filling the text screen takes so long that it’s difficult to do it in a single video frame, which is why games that feature NES-style full-screen scrolling on the C64 are impressive. (There are tricks to doing it; some of them quite bizarre. Let’s discuss those some other time.)
But you could do what jimo9757 did, and use text characters to simulate the rendering. In fact they did it one better, and used the PETSCII graphics characters for the display. The result is pretty striking! See for yourself in this demo (8 minutes):
Reserving a port of the screen for a status display is itself a bit of a cheat, that cuts down on the number of bytes that must be changed for each screen update, but it’s one that Wolfenstein 3D used too so let’s give it a pass. The walls only have horizontal lines for textures, but it’s not like the original’s were that worthy either. It’s certainly not 60 fps, it’s maybe 15 or 12, but it’s certainly still impressive to see those walls glide by smoothly on a machine with a 1 mHz 6502-class chip.
Since the game uses PETSCII for the maze, this engine can even work on the Commodore’s first home computer, the PET, whose character set was fixed in unchangeable mask ROM. Here’s video of the first-person shooter they made for the PET (3 minutes). I think the graphics, while many would call them primitive, have a fun style to them:
Some days I write explanations of Kirby Air Ride City Trial netplay. Some days I write guides to new web media sites. And some days, I found a silly shooter on Youtube that I feel you have to know about. Guess which today is, boing!
I honestly never got into Touhou-style games, even though I know they’re popular and influential. Maybe I’d like them if I gave them a shot, but there’s so many other things to explore out there, I just haven’t found the time.
That Touhou style, and their tremendous Japaneseness is part of what The Girl From Gunma Kai has going for it. According to its instruction screens, it’s a spinoff from a light novel from 2014, and a sequel to a short tie-in game to that novel. It’s on Steam for $10, which may seem a bit much for a relatively short game that purposely chases the MSX aesthetic, with backgrounds that don’t move smoothly but lurch along character block grid, and with large characters that overwrite the background they appear in front of. But that’s just the kind of thing it is.
It’s certainly got tons of personality. While you control a flying anime girl who blasts animals, daruma and steam locomotives(?), a large distracting version of that girl resides in the border, dancing to the music. The “dancing” mostly means being horizontally mirrored to the beat, meaning the feathers in her hair swap sides every frame. In the upper-right corner appear descriptions (and English translations) of the various enemies the girl attacks, giving you helpful information on them, like that this one is made of two different-colored sprites, and that one happens to be delicious to eat.
It’s still an entertaining game to watch. Here’s a one-credit playthrough, although it doesn’t earn all the letters in NEPTUNE (a reference to the Neptunia games) so doesn’t get to go on to the secret end stages. It’s 31 minutes long, but if you don’t have an affection for this kind of fare you probably won’t watch it all. A few minutes will give you the idea. (I did watch the whole thing, mind you.)
At the end of the instructions, it says: The game includes a strong homage to the MSX which (creator) HUGA dearly loves, particularly aiming for the cheap rough-around-the-edges vibe of CASIO-made games. Back in the day, there were tons of these unpolished games, and we think there’s room for at least one today. We hope this game sparks a wave of cheap, carefree and delightfully crude games flooding the world—games you can play without overthinking it.
HUGA, you and me both. I love both your style and your affection for that era. May The Girl From Gunma Kai take over the world!
Loadstar was a disk magazine for the Commodore 64 that lasted for 22 years! I’ve been put in charge of organizing its archives. From time to time I’ll present something interesting from its thousands of published items.
Even though I’ve been spending a lot of time working on the Loadstar project, I’m trying not to overwhelm this blog with items related to this Commodore 64 disk magazine. So for the time being I’m restricting myself to weekly Loadstar posts at most. Maybe on Wednesday? How would “Loadstar Lendsday” be as a name? Hm, not great. I’ll work on it.
This week I bring you one of the most polished games Loadstar published, Zorphon by Nick Peck, from issue 39. Here’s some demonstration video I recorded and posted to Youtube (13 minutes):
While he did have a few miscellaneous other items published on its disks, Nick Peck only ever made two games for Loadstar. Both are great, technically impressive, programmed entirely in machine code, and challenging. (The other is Paragon, from Issue 50.)
Zorphon is a space shooter in the vein of Gorf, where each stage offers different gameplay. Zorphon has three stages that loop, although there is an extra one, “Genesis,” that plays before the first loop, that’s only encountered at the beginning of the game.
You have your standard-issue spaceship that’s locked to the bottom of the screen, that can only move left and right, like the ships in Space Invaders, Galaxian and Galaga. This poses special problems in the stage that plays like Centipede: if one of the purple space bugs makes it down to your ship’s level it’s done for, because it’s not possible then to shoot or dodge it at that point, so it’s essential to ensure that doesn’t happen.
I played this game long ago, when it had just appeared in the magazine’s September 1987 issue, and even though it’s a fairly simple game, its quality has stayed with me all these years. There are different ways to represent moving objects on the Commodore 64. The most obvious, and smoothest, way is using its hardware sprites, but there are only eight of them. You could use sprite multiplexing to reuse them as the raster beam traces down the screen, but that poses certain limitations on the graphics and gameplay.
Zorphon instead chooses a different means of representing enemies, it draws them on the character map. That means that the attacking aliens can only be displayed on character grid boundaries, which is a drawback, but it takes the cap off of the number of foes the C64’s VIC-II chip can display. You also get free collision detection: just check the register at memory location $D01E (53278) to see if the sprite that represents the player’s ship comes in contact with any background graphics data. This method means the collision detection is pixel perfect, the flag isn’t set if the sprite overlaps empty portions of a character cell. This isn’t always desirable, but the ship in Zorphon is large and chunky, so mis-detected collisions are unlikely.
Zorphon is, of course, in the archive of Loadstar Compleat that I maintain, although admittedly it is $15 there. You could also play it on the Internet Archive’s emulation of it. That is a “cracked” version though, which I find funny because Loadstar is for the most part not copy-protected. It will offer you unlimited lives, which is also funny since it’s a score attack game, and running out of lives is the only way for it to end. I think Loadstar #39 is also available there somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it easily.
If you decide to try it, by however means, here’s some tips.
All the stages of Zorphon are made more challenging by your ship’s limited firepower, having only one shot onscreen at a time. If you miss your shot you’ll have to wait until the other one exits the screen to try again, and that can take two or three whole seconds. Getting into a rhythm of shooting at monsters helps a lot, especially in the first stage, which is all about finding that rhythm.
The bouncing enemies phase of the first level, Genesis. Until you figure out how to clear all of them, you’ll be stuck cycling between Genesis’ two phases.
The first stage, Genesis, has two phases. The first end when you shoot enough of the red TIE-Fighter enemies, but to finish the second you must destroy all of the blue bouncing aliens within a limited number of passes. If you don’t get all of them in time, they’ll completely replenish, and if you fail at it again you’ll be sent back to the TIE-fighter phase!
The blue bouncing enemies are really hard to hit. I find it’s best to hang out at the left side of the screen and shoot the ones there. Every time they pass by, they distribute themselves again, and there will always be an enemy on the left side unless there’s only one left (which will move to the center of the screen).
Since Genesis cycles until you pass it, one way to get a good score is to purposely repeat it, letting the blue enemies reset and then fighting the TIE-fighter phase again. Once you know the patterns Genesis isn’t very hard, and can be easily farmed for points. It’s not a very exciting way to play though.
The Challenge stage, which is pretty hard!
The second stage, Challenge, will be the end for many players. It’s the Centipede-like stage, but your shots do nothing to the mushrooms! Many of the enemies wipe out mushrooms when they pass over them, which will help you out a lot.
To finish Challenge, you must wipe out two complete waves of centipede aliens, and a few pairs of segments that come in between them. After the second wave spawns, clear the stage of centipede segments and you’ll progress.
The third stage, Attack, is even harder!
The third stage, Attack, is really tough, and made harder by the fact that it’s so hard to get to it that you can’t practice it easily! Maybe getting better at it is a use for that infinite lives cheat on the Internet Archive version? Maybe! To finish it, I think you have to shoot enough of the bouncing asterisk enemies to pass it. Look out for the exploding bombs dropped by the flying saucers that come in from the side!
I don’t know remember if I’ve ever finished Attack and gotten to the last stage, but I seem to remember seeing a full loop at some point so I think I have. See if you can do it.
The Commodore 64 has many great games, but it tends to be best suited for computer-style games. When you compare it to the NES, for instance, it’s usually for Japanese-made action games. In Japan, hundreds of programmers had the Famicom boom to get better at the platform, and the system itself has an entire off-screen area of the screen to use as a scroll buffer. The C64 only had eight pixels of scroll buffer. There were scrolling games on the C64, even fast ones (I point to Andrew Braybrook’s Uridium and Paradroid that show the Commodore at its scrolling best), but it’s just a fact that the Famicom/NES was just better at it, and it was a time when there were lots of scrolling games coming in out of arcades.
I would like to highlight a particular case where the C64 acquits itself fairly well: its version of Konami’s Salamander, a.k.a. Life Force in some territories.
There’s a ton of scrolling C64 games that don’t hold up well. Take Strider, for instance. It tries to be a lot more like the arcade game than the NES version, I’ll give it that, but at the cost of all of its bosses, most of its speed, and it doesn’t even end very well, it just stops, feeding the player a line about having passed a test. Urk! If you want to see what I mean, have a look (11 minutes), but frankly why would you want to?
Here’s C64 Strider, but if you’re played the arcade version it’ll only make you sad.
There are good arcade, and arcade-style, games on the platform, and when they’re done well they can make the platform, quite literally, sing–the C64 has a terrific sound synthesizer chip. Ghosts & Goblins is often held aloft as a good example of a good C64 conversion, but although it has an iconic song, it only has one song, it’s not the classic tune from the arcade game, and it’s only got four levels. It plays a lot more smoothly than the NES version (7 minutes), but c’mon, Micronics made that one.
It runs at a good frame rate, has a great and spooky tune, and it manages to load four levels into the C64’s RAM at once, but it’s missing the last two levels and its two major bosses. And yet, it’s still a technical feat on the C64. BTW, there’s a 2015 port of GnG to the Commie (download) that’s better than the NES version in just about every way.
The C64 version of Life Force also only has four levels, but they’re very remarkable levels, impressively like the arcade game. It has a different tune for each stage! They actually sound like the arcade game! And one of the levels is the “Prominence Stage,” the most eye-catching part of the arcade and NES games, and it holds up (11 minutes), the flaming solar surfaces are animated, and the solar flares are just as deadly as in the other versions. It even exceeds the NES version in a couple of ways: your ship tops out at three Options instead of the NES’s two, and the Ripple and Laser beams are impressively flicker-free, since they’re drawn with background tiles, a feat the NES has trouble duplicating due to its background tile drawing limitations.
Is it equal to the NES version? Well… I can’t say that it is. And the Famicom version lets you have three Options, so the C64 version loses ground there too. But look at it! For the levels it has, the C64 really does its best to match the arcade. (If you’re surprised that the second level is different, the Famicom/NES puts the vertical mountain level there; the C64 sticks more closely to the arcade game, where the second stage is an asteroid belt.)
So even though the C64 port is about as good as you can expect from a 1983 computer with only eight hardware sprites, the Famicom/NES port is also great. Oh well, C64 users can content themselves to having a much better version of M.U.L.E., the NES version stinks.
The video refers to a shorter video (19 minutes) by Zarithya, who solved some particular technical issues that made the 16-player game possible. If you’re in the mood for the full journey watch the above video; if you want less of your day consumed, try this one:
The gist: Faceball 2000 was a console (and portable) recreation of an Atari ST game called Midi Maze. Midi Maze was probably the first true FPS. Faceball 2000 got releases for multiple platforms, but the first, and most impressive technically, is probably the Gameboy version.
Developer Xanth Software F/X had a 16-player version of Gameboy Faceball working internally with special cables. Nintendo wanted them to support their new four-player adapter, but the mode that allowed for 16 players with the rigged cables was left in (it still works with an ordinary Gameboy link cable, jut limited to two players), although the devs noted in a 2005 interview that they had only managed to test it with up to 10 players.
Zarithya managed to figure out a way to play it with higher player counts with minimal extra hardware, and also discovered, and fixed, a bug that made 16-player games impossible with the code as released. It’s a pretty accessible explanation, you can probably understand it without much of a technical background.
That’s the main point; for the full story, the videos above are available. Enjoy, if you have the time!
Found by long-term MeFite Going To Maine, DOOM: The Gallery Experience is a DOOM mod that changes out all of its various elements for museum equivalents. Ammo becomes drinks from among Wine, Beer, Gin or “Watr”; Health has become Cash (which you can spend in the gift shop) and Armor becomes Cheese. (You still pick them up like powerups, though.) And there’s still secret passages to find. The map is generally the same as that as the first level from the shareware game, although the demons have been moved out and replaced with objets d’art, all of which can be examined for information on the work.
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 a new year, and probably going to be an exceedingly crappy one, so let’s at least start it out with something amazing and wonderful. For while it’s a world where millions of people make extremely stupid decisions, it’s also one where some people work diligently to make bafflingly detailed works of art like Lumpy Touch‘s GAR-TYPE, the R-Type/Saturday Morning cartoon crossover you didn’t know you’d love. CW: pixelated cartoon gore, but that sounds worse than it is.
To reuse my Metafilter description: Help ace fighter JON STARBUCKLE, stationed on the USS ACRES, pilot the GAR-TYPE D to destroy GORESTAR, a planet-eating threat, with your choice of three different weapons: Ravioli, Macaroni or Spaghetti.
There’s so many genius touches in this, like the signs for Italian restaurants in the first level, or the name of the Lasagna Base, or the unexpected boss of the second level. It vividly realizes the aesthetic of the anime-influenced Japanese shooter. Even if it’s too difficult for you (and it might be too difficult for me), you can enjoy the trailer and playthrough video below for a tour of its ridiculous action.
Kimimi the Game-Eating She-Monster recently covered Moero Twinbee, known in the US as Stinger in one of Konami’s few attempts to establish their cute-em-up series in foreign territories. I think Twinbee is a terrific name for a game of this type, so it puzzles me why they insist on renaming it. In addition to “Stinger,” in Europe they retitled the arcade game Detana! Twinbee to Bells & Whistles, where the bells may fit but the whistles sure don’t.
(A warning if you play this one and are sensitive to flashing images, there is a violently flashing effect right before the bosses that won’t treat you very well, I’m afraid.)
Here it is. The first NES game I ever beat.
Her article is ostensibly the subject of this post, and I’ll try not to repeat points that she makes. Stinger holds a place in my heart, if not a prominent one then still one at all, after all it has blood to pump. It was the first NES game I ever beat! If memory holds correctly the second one was The Legend of Zelda, which is kind of fitting: Stinger is easier than it looks, so it builds confidence, while Zelda is harder. (It took me months, mostly from being stuck finding the entrance to Level 7 in the Second Quest.)
Pay no mind to the glitch at the top of the screen, being in the NES’ “overscan area” it’s usually not visible when played on a real TV.
In Japan, Moero Twinbee was not only a Famicom Disk System game but one that supported up to three players (P3 used a controller plugged into the expansion port). The US ROM version only allows two players, which realistically probably makes for a better game anyway. Even with a single player, once you get the five-way shot powerup it’s easy to fill the screen with so many bullets that you don’t actually see many enemies.
Stinger has really fun bosses! The manual says this character is “Willie the Watermelon-Head,” but she’s obviously presenting as a girl, and the watermelon’s not her head, it’s her whole body!
Kimimi recounts much of what makes Moero Twinbee/Stinger different both from other shoot-em-ups and from other Twinbee games: the bell powerup system that’s Twinbee’s trademark, and the side-scrolling stages that are unique in its series. The side-view levels are particularly interesting, not only because the game both begins and ends with one, but because it completely changes the gameplay in a couple of significant ways.
You see Twinbee is a variation upon the theme of Namco’s Xevious, complete with its bomb button to attack ground-based installations, and that depends on its overhead perspective. But Moero’s side-scrolling levels ditch it completely: in those, and only those, the Bees fire arcing bombs along with their main shots, with the same button, and it’s those that can hit ground targets at the bottom of the screen. The bomb button is repurposed to fire hearts, a different special weapon that only works on bells.
One of the vertical-scroll, overhead-view stages, using the classic Xevious-style bombs. BTW, don’t pick up the L or R powerups, they give you a side-shot but, like the Double in many Gradius games, it comes at the expense of half of your forward shots. They’ll just get you killed, and other than by dying there’s no way to get rid of one if you pick it up!
Oh those bells, them and all their tintinnabulations. If you’ve never played Twinbee, but have played one of the Cotton games, you already know how they work. Some targets (usually clouds in the Twinbee games) release colored powerup objects. They rapidly fall down towards the bottom of the screen, but they can be kept in play by shooting them, bouncing them up. As you shoot them, every few hits it changes color, and different colored bells award different powerups. I like powerup systems like this and the Gradius system, and consider them superior to the standard icon-based setup from Salamander and practically every other shmup. You get to decide which powerups you want, possibly to activate them just when you need them, but you still have to use skill and judgement to get the ones you need when you need them, whereas games with set powerup locations force you to choose between what you have and what you’re given.
This is the boss of Stage 3. Believe it or don’t, this murderous spigot is called Fang.
Hearts get fired from your ship upward in the side-view stages. It’s a lot harder to hit bells when they’re falling vertically past your horizontally-moving shots, instead of when both bells and bullets move vertically, and the hearts are meant to make up for that, but they’re so useless that it’s a much better strategy, in practice, to just get up close and pepper them with shots up close. The best powerup is the force field, which grants you several free hits (and doesn’t summon the wave of shield-weakening egg enemies from the first game), but it’s also the one that takes the most bell hits to earn. Another thing to aim for is just collecting the default yellow bells, which award no powerups, but every one you collect without letting a bell fall off-screen rapidly earns you more points, up to 10,000 points each after collecting just four yellow bell in a row. It only requires 100,000 points for an extra life, then additionals every 200,000, up to about 900,000 or so. 10,000 points per bell is such a huge bonus that, once you’re good with your powerup state, gigantic scores aren’t too hard to reach, and there’s three extra lives right in the first stage anyway.
This is Stage 6, the next-to-last. The final level is entirely in space so it’s not that interesting to look at. Get that Star! It’s the only five-way shot in the game!
The Twinbee games have always had interesting bosses, which helps to distract from the fact that, up to Detana! (the fourth Twinbee game, and the second in the arcade) most of the other targets are just popcorn enemies. When you just get started playing Moero Twinbee, it’s not uncommon to rule through the game with 3- or 5-way shot, the best powerups you can get from the ground targets, then get demolished by a boss you don’t yet know how to beat and then, reduced to single shots, either have your game end right there, or barely get in the last few shots against the boss and then get inundated by the popcorn enemies in the next level.
The first bell powerup in the sequence, blue, is Speed-Up, and unlike Gradius where too much speed will kill you extra dead, it’s mostly beneficial in Stinger, because you can’t crash into the terrain and you’ll probably have a force field anyway. With at least 3-Way shot, a couple of Speedups and the force field, the only real danger is the harder bosses and your force field running out. The blue-white flashing force field bells don’t appear if you already have one, and you’ll probably run out in the middle of Stage 6, where the game finally rolls up its sleeves and gets to punching. If you can then somehow build up another blue-white bell (it takes exactly 25 hits on a bell to make one), you have a chance at finishing the game. Like many Konami games at the time, Stinger continues indefinitely, loop after loop, and it gets slightly harder each time.
I forget what this boss is called, but it’s especially notable for being a lite version of classic Salamander boss Tetran, a.k.a. Intruder
Konami made three Twinbee games for the NES; the first was a remake of the arcade original; this was the second; and the third, Poko Poko Daimaou, I think is inferior. They form a trilogy; then for the fourth game, Detana! Twinbee, it was rebooted, keeping the Bees’ creator Professor Cinnamon but bequeathing them to his grandnephew, grandson and granddaughter Light, Mint and Pastel, whose popularity would soon outstrip the originals, especially Pastel who became quite a phenomenon. Detana was followed up by Pop’n Twinbee and Rainbow Bell Adventures on Super Famicom, Twinbee Yahho in arcades, and a handful of anime OAVs.
Pastel: early crush of many a Japanese kid, and her ship Winbee. I emphasize, Pastel is not in this game, although Winbee is Player 2.
In this video from four years ago, top-level Galaga player Jordan Dorrington gives us advice for how to get far into the venerable arcade classic.
Some of the tips given:
On the first level, enemies never shoot as they enter. Shoot as many of the bugs as you can as they enter the screen.
Boss Galagas never try to capture your ship if there’s only one remaining.
On the first two Challenging Stages, if a double ship is positioned exactly in the center of the screen, you can stay there to shoot the bugs fairly easily and get an easy Perfect.
Starting from Stage 4, some extra will be among the ones that will swoop around entering formation, and will leave the attacking ranks to rush you.
After the first three stages, the game settles into a pattern of four stages. The first three stages of each set have distinct patterns, followed by a Challenging Stage.
The first stage in each set of four has the bugs entering in two mirrored processions from the sides of the screen. The second stage has them entering from one side in double rows. On the third stage they enter from the side in one long string.
Galaga kill screens are difficulty dependent. There’s a game-ending screen on difficulty levels (or “ranks”) A and C. The other difficulty levels loop and continue indefinitely
Basic strategy for cleaning up the remaining bugs is to start at one edge of the screen, and as they fly down at your ship, to move towards the other side a tiny bit at a time, to avoid the shots coming at you, and shooting to eliminate as many of the bugs as you can in the process.
If you survive a long time on a single wave, there’s a well-documented bug in the code that causes the enemies to shoot less and less, and eventually cease firing completely. In casual play that’s great, but Twin Galaxies rules are that you cannot take advantage of this bug intentionally.
If you get really good at Galaga, it’s best to play as Player 2, as the first player’s score rolls over after six digits, but the second player’s score records seven digits.
The game’s difficulty stops increasing at Stage 31.
If you’re playing on a difficulty without a kill screen, after Stage 255 you’ll progress to Stage 0. It throws many players off in that the bugs travel at the slowest speed, but their shots are extremely rapid.
The hardest part of the game is recovering from losing a double ship. The game is much harder in single ship play.
Wurm: Journey to the Center of the Earth is a Famicom/NES title with a lot of ambition, perhaps too much. Over on his self-named blog Kid Fenris posted a long article on it back in March. It makes it seem a lot more interesting than it otherwise would! We at Set Side B love experiments, successful or failed, and Wurm certainly was one, with shooter, side-scrolling platformer, first-person boss fights and even some visual novel elements. And protagonist lady named “Moby” is searching for her boyfriend named “Ziggy.”
Green-haired Moby wears the kind of outfit you could only find in something inspired by 80s anime.
The post mentions that designer Shouichi Yoshikawa, a.k.a. “Angela,” has an interview up at GDRI. It also mentions that Angela used to have a site devoted to their game, which while gone now has a backup on the Wayback Machine! Sadly the promised English version of the site never materialized.
Also–Kid Fenris mentions he once wrote about Wurm on GameSetWatch. My old stomping grounds!
For this podcast I did, we took a look at the Shooter genre focusing on the 2010’s, when more RPGs elements were added to shooters and the rise of the “Role Playing Shooter”.
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”
