Wow I love this @muaad, such a great thread…
I’ve been wandering down the strange rabbit hole of
At first I was excited to get this result in a straightforward way because I haven’t really heard much about games made in Thailand. Quickly I then realized that they were a kind of murky business enterprise which played its own role in the surreal “Wii shovelwareverse” inhabited by Phoenix Games etc., who actually put out some of their work in Europe, making for kind of a thrilling twist. As of 2008 they had a slick Flashtastic website with a top-level “Investor Relations” section, suggesting a very commercial organization, but it seems like they started out earlier in the decade as a hobbyistish Windows shareware developer, so I wonder if they originated as like one or two bedroom programmers who ran into a venture capitalist in the midst of the 2000s casual games craze or something like that. They’ve since become defunct with their assets absorbed into an extremely generic holding company called United Power of Asia. It feels like a familiar tale in the game industry although I’m not sure why it’s always like that in the grand cosmic sense.
Some of their games are amazingly obscure for a company as relatively well-documented as they are, such as The Adventure of Squirrel Hero, which lives on almost entirely through its Cutting Room Floor page and a kind of adorable slide deck by someone who might have been one of those hypothetical bedroom developers.
The screenshots in that slide are the only visual evidence I’ve been able to find of this game’s actual gameplay. Ironically, the only audio I’ve come across are four sound effects on the CRF page that were in the binary but not actually used in the game itself.
keepNut02
enemyHit02
enemyHit03
spider
Their games that were released on consoles are slightly better attested-to, I think because of obsessive collectors who want to own every DS action puzzler no matter how dry (why not obsessively collect shareware…?…couldn’t you put it on a flash stick if it matters so much to have physical media…?…the confusion of a lifelong PC gamer I guess). I saw someone on YouTube frustrated about the $500-ish Ebay prices for a PS2 copy of their game Ocean Commander because it was the only PS2 shmup he didn’t already have.
Actually though, at least for me, this brief comment exchange gestures towards something I find a little disappointing about CyberPlanet’s output: none of their games are as truly mystifying as White Van Racer or any of Phoenix’s animated film activity center games like Animal Soccer World, nor as amusingly nothingy as Trixie in Toyland/Ninjabread Man/Rock ‘n’ Roll Adventures/Anubis II. By and large, they’re competently made and seem fine to spend a few minutes on as like free Flash games or something, but generally they don’t appear to push the envelope much in any direction, unintentionally or otherwise. Sometimes I think their graphics are a little bit distinctively cute at least.
