The Flipside of Gaming
It’s been up for five days now but is at over 300,000 views, the owner of the Youtube account Newbie Indie Game Dev performed a six-day scrape of the Steam catalog back in October, and not only made a video of interesting observations, but even opened a Github project where you can download CSV files of their data. I predict that certain people will find this information very useful, or interesting, or valuable. Maybe you’re one of them?
The video (11 minutes):
This is the first part of our mega showcase from Next Fest October 2024 edition.
0:00 Intro
00:28 Mohrta
2:51 Aokaki
4:31 Second Essence
6:28 Tearscape
8:20 Cyclopean
9:29 Splintered
11:43 Kilaflow
13:47 Tenebris Somnia
15:54 The Book of Buja
17:07 Widget Inc
18:42 Journey to Incrementalia
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”
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
(I decided to get some use out of the old news roundup post template for this item.)
News comes from Ars Technica‘s Kevin Purdy, and was announced on Sega’s website, a large number of items will be removed from Steam and all the major console storefronts with the end of the year, although as Ars points out, the Playstation and Switch storefronts are only seeing the Sega Classics Collection removed. Steam is seeing the most removals. Items on the Nintendo Switch online compilation will not be affected. Nothing removed will disappear from your library of online purchases (unlike what happened with Oxenfree on itch.io when it was picked up by Netflix), so if you want to play these items, in this form, later, buy them now, and you’ll “always” be able to download them again later. (Always deserves scare quotes because nothing online is forever, but you’ll be able to play them some while later at least.)
Why are they being removed? Purdy speculates that, like how Sonic the Hedgehog titles were removed in advance of the release of Sonic Origins, there’s probably some new collection of Sega classics in the works that these items will be a part of, or maybe they plan on bundling a bunch of them with a Yakuza game or something.
Sega’s website lists them all, but the great majority of them are Genesis titles, along with Nights Into Dreams for Saturn, and Crazy Taxi, Space Channel 5 Part 2, and the Dreamcast Collection, originally for Dreamcast of course. I personally recommend Crazy Taxi, of course.
This one isn’t really obscure I think, but it’s amazing, and if I can do my part to help spread the word I’m happy to do so. UFO 50 ($25 on Steam, with other platforms on the way) is a collection of 50 8-bit styled games from Mossmouth, the creator and publisher of Spelunky, although they’re made by all kinds of people.
When you hear “50 games,” you might come to think of it as, 50 little games, but that’s not the case. UFO 50 contains 50 full games, including one in the JRPG genre that could take many hours to finish. It seeks to emulate the experience of putting a pirate multicart into a game console, except none of these games are pirated. It’s a super-abundant collection of fun, and what’s more, the word is that there’s not a single dud in the group, there really is something here for everyone.
Like with Baldur’s Gate III, there’s so much here that it feels like they might be stretching out what’s expected from a relatively small amount of money. My suggestion is, get it, but don’t feel like everyone has to give you 50 full-sized games for $25 in the future. It’s a one-off, wonderful for what it is, but an anomaly.
With 50 games included, it can be difficult to tell where to start! If you let itt sit on the game selection screen, it’ll play demos of the games, which might give some direction to your exploration. By default, the games are listed according to release date in the collection’s fictional chronology, so generally they’ll get more complex later on in the list. Xanagear reviewed every game in UFO 50, in 50 minutes natch:
I haven’t had the chance to get into any of this yet, but a particular game I want to point to is Valbrace, which is a first-person dungeon exploration game, with Crossed Swords-like action combat!
The promised JRPG is Grimstone, which has a western theme, and one of your potential characters (you pick your party at the start) is a dog!
UFO 50 deserves a lot more words than I can give it right now. There may be more to come on it later….
UFO 50 (Steam, $25)
4D Golf, from CodeParade, responsible for the similarly mind-bending Hyperbolica, is amazing because it doesn’t cheat. It provides a genuine 4D-world in which to play the game of golf in. Not in the sense that time is a fourth dimension; time passes in this four-dimensional world too. It basically asks, what if our normal world were four-dimensional. And had a mini-putt course in it. So, here is the release trailer on Youtube:
The trailer has an especially intriguing aspect to it because it promises a big feature that hasn’t been revealed publicly yet outside the release of the game. To find out what it is one will just have to buy and play the game to find out… or read the comments, where a couple of people have spoiled it. It’s possibly best that they did though, because it suggests that 4D Golf is even more amazing than it seems at first.
4D Golf (Steam, $20)
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 fair amount has been said about Suika Game, an inexpensive and addictive Switch game that has players dropping fruit into a physics-enabled bin. Two fruit of the same type that touch immediately merge into a larger fruit, and the goal is to join them together like this until you create a mighty Watermelon. You can keep going at that point, although with one of those majestic spheres in the bin it won’t be much longer before one or more fruits extends up out of the bin, which brings the game to an end.
The history of this unexpected Flappy Bird-like phenomenon is laid out in an article in the Japan Times. Until recently the game was exclusive to the Japanese eShop, although that needn’t actually a barrier. People from any territory can create eShop accounts for any other, and play all their purchases on the same Switch, but now I notice that Suika Game is even on the U.S. shop. And of course, as often happens when a simple and elegant game blows up out of nowhere, a horde of imitators has arisen, which a quick Googling will reveal. I count six free web versions just on a quick perusal of the search results.
But what might actually be better than Suika Game is the Pico-8 recreation of it, Cosmic Collapse.
Cosmic Collapse is more expensive than Suika Game, but that just means it’s $5 instead of $3. Instead of happy fruit, you merge together planets. They go up in size from Pluto (an honorary planet), through Mercury, Mars, Venus, Earth, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and then Sol herself. If you’re wondering, all planets are presented without rings. If joining two suns causes anything to happen I don’t know. (In the comments on the itch.io project, the developer says that there are objects beyond the Sun.)
Cosmic Collapse could be played just like the original, but it adds some extra features. Scoring is modified by a simple combo system: successive planets merged due to one drop have their points multiplied, encouraging the planning of sequences. And, at certain score awards, you’re granted a missile that can be used to destroy any one object in the bin. Used judiciously, it can allow your game lengths, and scores, to greatly increase. My highest so far is nearly 15,000.
The biggest advantages it has over Suika Game is in the polish and the physics. The many web clones tend to play like they were hacked together in an afternoon, but even the original is clearly a low-effort production, right down to its generic, non-looping music. The celestial orbs in Cosmic Collapse bounce around in a lively manner after merging in ways that take some practice to master, and even the smaller planets have their uses. The tiniest of space rocks, dropped at the right spot, can be just what you need to knock two other planets apart from each other, or separate one from the wall of the bin. You see? Pluto’s good for something after all!
Both Suika Game and Cosmic Collapse suffer from a certain unfairness. You don’t get to control the order in which fruit or planets get dropped into the bin. It’s been observed that even a lot of skill and practice can only get you so far if the orb-selection dice don’t roll favorably for you. The best advice I can offer, in the early game, is to try to sort the circles in size from one side of the bin to the other, which at least will make it easier to find a good place to drop things. Also in Cosmic Collapse, keeping the surface of the bin as low as you can helps a lot, since the propulsive force of the spheres, especially the smallest ones, is increased the further it falls, and that can be a marvelous prod to shaking up a static bin.
Cosmic Collapse (itch.io and Steam, $5)
I heard everyone here likes indie games.
The games in this video:
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”
Every time Homestar Runner releases something new, it’s cause for celebration. They’ve been doing this for 23 years, and that’s not counting the original Mario Paint thing with the characters they made, long ago, that kicked off their merry legacy. Even though the days of them updating weekly and Strong Bad popping off sarcastic answers to emails left, right and center are long gone, every few months another new thing comes out of the Brothers Chaps’ content grinder, and we love that kind of sausage.
Of course making free stuff doesn’t pay the bills, and Adobe Creative Cloud is hella expensive these days, so much of their more recent stüf takes the form of little paid projects, like the Trogdor board game. So it is with this, a quite nifty collection of three point-and-click adventures. One of them came from their website long ago, but it’s now remade in that Unity thingy. it’s joined by two completely new games, and the three of them have better animation and full voice acting now! All are full of the wit and fun that Homestar Runner-branded contentTM has long been known for.
I managed to finish it in a night, but it was a very entertaining night! This thing is packed full of more jokes and character even than the Telltale series they did back in the Wii days. It’s amazing how many obscure interactions have unique voice lines, so be sure to try everything, and using everything on everything else.
Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate, on Steam and itch.io (Windows and Mac, $8)
They’re not out yet, but the Brothers Chaps, creators, maintainers, and sometimes even makers of Homestar Runner stuff, have some remakes of their old Dangeresque Flash games in the works, now with updated (in some cases completed in the first place) content, and full voice acting! Have some strong & bad Strong Bad:
Nothing says awesome earlyweb goodness like Homestar Runner, even though technically he’da say “awesome eallyweb goodness,” because he doesn’t do Rs too well. Here’s the itch.io page, where it’s still listed as only “in development.” Looks like (we’re gonna have to jump) it’s set for Steam as well!
It must seem like we have the indie gaming spaces hooked up into our very veins here, but truthfully it’s very easy for games with even a lot of buzz to slip through our greedy fingers. So it is with Pizza Tower (Steam), an extremely cartoony and entertaining platformer heavily influenced by Wario Land 4 (3h,22m). All kinds of people have been praising it, and saying that it does basically nothing wrong.
Here’s Polygon raving about it:
Take a good look at it. The loose animation is actually perfect, which it should be because the game took five years to make. The pixel art has way too many frames. The music jams so much. All of its jokes are funny. It even parodies Five Nights at Freddy’s throughout one level with jumpscares.
Its hero, the amusingly-named Peppino Spaghetti, isn’t Wario, but has his own vibe. He looks like he might have an aneurysm at any second. But like Wario he’s mostly invincible when he’s not fighting a boss. In normal levels enemies may slow him down, or cause him to lose points, or even give him temporary abilities, but they can’t stop him. He has a wide variety of moves to get him through the game world that you’ll have to completely master by the end.
The biggest point in common with Wario Land 4 is the escape sequences. Each of the game’s levels has a place in it where you have to destroy a pillar, which starts a timer and forces you to go back through the level you just passed with some minor differences. You can fail here if you don’t make it out in time. In order to get the highest rank on a stage, the vaunted “P” rating, you have to escape perfectly, without breaking your combo, and find all the treasures… and also escape twice within the time limit, by going through a 2nd Lap portal at the exit that takes you back to the beginning!
It’s already gotten a lot of people talking about it in terms like Game of the Year, and I’m sure it’ll be a prominent run at SGDQ 2023! Have a trailer:
Pizza Tower (Steam, $19.99)
Please pardon our lack of a romhack review this week. It’s not always easy to find a good hack to review out of the tens of thousands that are floating around out there. In the meantime, classic remakes are kind of like romhacks, right?
Those who have been following us for the (gosh) nearly one year we’ve been in operation will have picked up on the fact that we love classic Atari. Especially we love classic Atari prototypes. In my humble opinion, Atari treated the output of their stable of brilliant creators with almost a dismissive attitude.
Developers would make a game completely from scratch, spend months working on every aspect of it, handtooling the assembly code, sometimes for hardware platforms that were created specifically to run it, devote their lives for a time to this project, test it in-house, get reactions, modify it, get it running, get approval to make cabinets and put it out on location test, then have all that work get destroyed. Oh well! Back to the drawing board. That’s what happened to AKKA ARRH.
The only record of all of that effort might end up being those few prototype cabinets put out on test and in the hands of the original developers, and the files in the Atari archives, which were pretty much left out to rot when the company was shut down, and would have been lost to us except for a few people who searched their dumpsters looking to preserve them.
Because of the value of those tiny number of cabinets, collectors guard them zealously, which puts them at cross purposes with the people trying to release the files and get them working in MAME. Two such stories lately have been the prototype for Marble Madness II, which we talked about last year, and AKKA ARRH. (Which, I think, is still one of the best game names I’ve ever heard. It’s fun to say!)
AKKA ARRH’s history is a long story. Long lost except for a few cabinets, somehow, we’re still not sure how, the code got dumped and leaked on the internet. However it happened, that event seems to have uncorked the bubble, with rights-holder Atari (not the same company as the old Atari) commissioning a full remake from Llamasoft and Jeff Minter, the creator of Tempest 2000 and probably the person best keeping alive the spirit of classic arcade gaming.
Minter’s remake of AKKA ARRH is now on Steam. It’s kinda pricey at $19.99, but it looks g r e a t, as you should be able to tell from the trailer below. An emulation of the original arcade game is also in the Atari 50th Anniversary Celebration package from Digital Eclipse, available on Steam and lots of other platforms, which costs more but also gets you many more games, and documentaries and flyers and lots of other plat*.
Seeing that little TM symbol after the logo is oddly heartening. It’s so nice to see this game given a full release, even if only digitally. It’s been a long journey. Welcome home, AKKA ARRH.
* Lately I’ve been chafing against the limits of language. Please excuse my made-up words, I’m kind of sick of having to turn to the same old synonyms, once again, at the moment. You should know what I mean by context here.
Team Fortress 2, Valve’s infamous hat simulator, is, amazingly enough, still popular. Eons after it went free-to-play, years after it saw its last content update, many players had assumed it was, as far as new content went, dead.
Yet, people keep playing it. Following, arguably creating, the “games as service” concept, it seems somehow fitting that its makers might be turning their attention back to it right around the time that the industry generally seems to be reconsidering whether it works as a concept for most games. And so Valve has put out a call for community content to be included in an upcoming large-scale update. People got so excited over it that Valve said:
So, as reported by Kotaku, PC Gamer, and no doubt over half of the gaming internet by now, they’ve walked back their claims a bit. But it’s still a lot more movement than the game has seen lately.
How long has Team Fortress 2 been at it? It was included in the Orange Box for Xbox 360, along Half-Life 2 and the original Portal, a used copy of which is currently resting on the shelf of the donations shop of my local public library. (I’d get it but I don’t have a 360!) It’s been out for sixteen years. It was released in 2007, in that dusty age pre-Obama. The meme culture around it, bolstered by the game’s cartoony presentation and sponsorship for several years of the Saxxy Awards, helped establish, for better or worse, the tone of gamer humor. One of its most beloved actors, Rick May, the voice of Soldier (also Peppy Hare and Andross in Star Fox), passed away in 2020.
I’ve played some TF2 back in the day, I’m with it, I’m “hip.” I think I may have even scored a point once!
