Each indie showcase highlights the many indie games we play here on the channel, if you would like to submit a game for a future one please reach out. All games shown were either press keys or demos.
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”
The eternal struggle: schools want to give students computers on which to do assignments and participate in remote learning, and students want to use those machines to have fun doing things other than schoolwork.
Fizz over on Metafilter, who regularly makes great gaming posts points us to a Vice article on the conflict, and a Youtube channel of tutorials, made by kids, for kids to use to get past software blockers on school-provided laptops. It shows that school remains a place for kids to learn valuable lessons, just not always the ones that administrators want them to learn, or in the ways they want them to learn them.
It’s 11 years old now but still as ringing and fun as when it was new. If you’ve never before encountered the video tale of the afterlife journey of the shirtless mayor of Metro City from Final Fight, here you go! If you have seen it before then why not have a second look?
For this episode of indie inquiries, we’re taking a look at the steam store page for Supernova. If you would like us to review your store page in the future, please reach out.
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”
I’ve been trying lately to take it easy on the Youtube posts, but in this age of the internet they seem unavoidable. This one though, I think is unquestionably worth it, a six-minute video of the illustrator of classic Final Fantasy games (whose work mostly came through in monster images and manual art) doing a piece for the cover of the CD soundtrack in preparation for Cuphead’s Japanese release. The early moments of the video are preliminary sketches that show them getting used to the characters; the work he settles on is a Final Fantasy-esque interpretation of Cuphead and friends (and enemy). Thanks to NoxAeternum to finding this and posting it to Metafilter!
Playing the Super Mario Bros. theme live with a variety of instruments has been an internet video staple for a couple decades now. Here it is with accordion and a harp-like instrument called a bandura:
Thanks to Kevin Rothrock for finding this, and to Maks for finding it on Youtube!
Pringus McDingus brings us another well-animated bit, this time with Sonic characters instead of the usual Mario characters, animated to sound clips from Community. It’s fun!
St1ka is an interesting Youtuber from Portugal who often covers the Brazilian gaming beats. I should link to him more often when he does videos on his standard beat, as the gaming scenes outside of the US, Europe and Japan don’t get nearly as much exposure as they should.
This time though he is looking at retro gaming with a more general focus, pointing out interesting titles from decades past. They’re not making nearly as many 8-bit titles as they used to, so finding a cool old game you’ve never tried is almost as good as if they were making them now!
The games covered are:
Konami’s Getsu Fuuma Den, Japanese horror for the Famicom,
Rod Land, a single-screen arcade platformer with a good Famicom port,
Kickmaster, a deep combat action game for the NES,
Lunar: Walking School for Game Gear, a Game Arts-produced spinoff JRPG of the main Lunar series that doesn’t have much to do with its origin, and has a happy slice-of-life anime feel,
Psychic World for the Sega Master System, a neglected platformer where you pick up magic-like powers as you progress, which got a Game Gear port with unexpected differences, and both deriving from a Japan-only MSX version with its own differences,
Power Blade and Power Blade 2 for the NES, and the Japanese version of the first one, Power Blazer, stylish action platformers akin to Mega Man, but staring an Arnold Schwarzenegger clone who wields boomerangs, except in Japan where you play as a serious-looking little kid,
Cave Noire, a roguelite game for Game Boy that I’ve written about in the past, and personally vouch for,
Daikatana for Game Boy Color, a 2D and rather improved version of the infamous 3D PC game,
Power Strike II for the SMS, or its Game Gear remake that’s completely different, but they’re Compile shooters so you know they’re going to be awesome, and really you can’t go wrong with any Power Strike/Aleste game, or ZANAC or The Guardian Legend on NES come to mention it,
Queen Fighters 2000, a bootleg game for Gameboy Color that outright cribs the style from Gals Fighter for NeoGeo Pocket Color, but also includes a bunch of random characters from other properties for the hell of it, since being a bootleg game anyway why not,
Aliens Neoplasma is a 2019 release for the Spectrum that makes excellent use of that system’s graphical quirks to increase the game’s atmosphere,
the action RPG Dark Arms for the NeoGeo Pocket Color,
early survival RPG Survival Kids for the Game Boy Color,
Phantis, a cross-genre sci-fi game for the Spectrum,
Shatterhand for the NES, which feels inspired by Batman on the same system, and
Kabuki Quantum Fighter, also for the NES, which also seems inspired by Batman in its play style, and was also developed by Hal Laboratory.
It’s been about five months since we looked back at Jon Bois’ Breaking Madden’s Super Bowl game where they set one team up to maximum stats, the other team at minimum stats, and just ran up the score. They found out that Madden 2013 stopped counting score at 255 points. Counting manually, at around 1,500 the game called a penalty on a play that wasn’t run, and the instant replay presented the most frightening image a sports video game has ever generated, the Football Fetus:
Soak that one up for your nightmares.
They stored a team’s score in a single byte in 2013! It was a striking example of how EA Sports, without competition for decades, basically views Madden as a no-effort money printer. Licensed NFL football is either Madden or nothing. What are you going to do, play with no-namers? Pshaw!
Breaking Madden is like ten years old now, and the rights situation hasn’t changed. EA Sports continues to squat possessively on its golden football egg, with no end in sight. But Breaking Madden made some internet waves in the time since. Maybe they’ve gotten their development act together? Maybe?
In the time since then SBNation has switched these kinds of things that they do to Youtube videos, and rebranded them as Secret Base. Jon Bois has become quite the Youtube sensation there in the time since, making a lot of very well-regarded internet documentaries.
One of the Secret Base subseries is called the Fumble Dimension, which is a similar kind of attempt to break sports video games, just in video. About 11 months ago they (mostly Jon’s associate Kofie) again took a hammer to the most recent Madden, 22 at that point, and tried to run up the scoreboard. This time though they did themselves. No, they didn’t try to win against an inferior team. They played a team to lose, against a team set at maximum AI, and tried to let the computer score as much as possible. Here it is (23 minutes).
The good news is, the score no longer ceases to count after 255 points. The score is free to rise up over 1,000. The game’s final score broke 1,700, and didn’t break 2,000 only because Kofie was feeling hugely bored playing terribly on purpose for play after excruciating play. They theorize that 7,000 may well be popular with optimal sub-optimal performance, but they leave that demazing feat to some other intrepid failure.
But while they have wisely decided to store player scores in more than one byte now, there were several other hints that Madden 22 is just as haphazardly constructed as Madden 13 was. Players would try to run off the field, held back only by the walls of the stadium. The announcers announced a lengthening series of safeties each as the “second safety of the game.” And while the score counted correctly, an assortment of player stats were scored increasingly inaccurately as the self-induced drubbing continued, some dipping into the negative as they grew, a sure sign of uncapped signed values.
When I posted on Breaking Madden, I took the opportunity to diatribize about the decay of the Madden games, and how the series should either be given renewed resources or the license just be allowed to pass to other hands. I won’t bore you with yet more harping on the point now, I’ll just say, please NFL, hand your license over to someone who actually seems to care.
Between those two worthy video conflagrations they produced a video that is rather in our backyard, a one hour, 24 minute vid-essay on who World of Warcraft became a place where playing sub-optimally isn’t just frowned upon, but came to be seen as anti-social. If you’re interested in the social aspects of MMORPGs, It’s worth devoting an eleventh of a day’s waking hours to!
What’s really interesting here is something I’ve been worried about with older video and computer games for a while. Games that manage to still be popular over a lot period get focused on, dissected, sometimes disassembled, and laid out so that they have no secrets. Their audience both focuses on them, and both seeks out ways to play them better, and reasons to play them better.
That’s where speedrunning comes from, and that’s the thing-what’s happening in WoW is just what’s happening to classic gaming in general. It’s become a degraded form of play, almost, to come to a game completely new. I’ve bought into this too, occasionally leaving a message on a Youtube video of someone playing sub-optimally giving a couple of helpful tips. Really though there’s no need. If they wanted to do that, the avenues are available to them. There’s already plenty of people trying to play, say, Castlevania III in the best possible way.
World of Warcraft is 19 years old now, and even has an entire official alternate version that duplicates the game experience from launch. During that time the expert-level strategies that were discovered by players after long observation and practice have become ubiquitous lore. Even if you’ve never read a FAQ or watched a tutorial video, just from hearing other players talk about the game and watching them, a lot of it will seep in.
As a result, not only can’t a long-time player go back to how they experienced the game at launch, because they know too much, but even new players can’t, because the community around them is filled by those players who know that much.
There’s lots to think about here. Especially if you’ve played World of Warcraft before, but also if you haven’t. (I haven’t!) Also note that the video is consciously patterned after Jon Bois’s videos for SBNation and Secret Base. Here in 2023, that’s a comforting reference.
PannenKoel2012 is the Super Mario 64 enthusiast (that’s the only word I can think of that matches) who has been working on reducing the number of A button presses needed to finish the game. They haven’t gotten it down to zero yet, and likely never will, but by resorting to increasingly extreme measures they continue to figure out ways to get it down. I think they’ve been working at this project for over 12 years; the oldest video on their Youtube account is that old.
Of arguably more interest than their quest, though, is its interesting byproducts, which is a series of Youtube videos, on both their main channel and alternate channel UncommentatedPannen, which not only explain how their many subtle and effective stratagems work, but also a number of aspects of how Super Mario 64’s engine works, and even basic principles of computer science. These videos are so in-depth that they have their own wiki to track the concepts they use, to explain turns like Parallel Universe (PU) and Pedro Spot.
When I say they return, it’s not that they ever left, but it’d been a while since they had a solid explainer. Now they have one, it has spoken narration instead of the text that marks many of the best videos, and the production values have even increased a bit:
In this video, a clever way to manipulate the pendulums in Tick Tock Clock to crash the game after 39 1/2 days of playing also takes into its sweep an excellent explanation of many of the systems compilers use to represent numbers and their limitations.
