I haven’t really messed with it because I’m not sure how far I’d get by guessing. It feels like I’m waiting for some explicit hint by the game on how to use it.
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Watch the credits on games you clear, they usually include one or more codes, I got a couple of codes for that house party deck building game, one of which just lets me input the seed used for scenarios in that game. I haven’t tested the other yet
There’s also one code that you can find in the history description of a game. It follows the format of two four letter words separated by a dash, which is how you’ll recognize it
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I was able to actually get something by guessing “HELP-0000” purely off the dome.
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There are now multiple things involving the terminal I now know about.
I think only one of which was the thing me and some other girls found last night.
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Played through Pingolf twice last night, first getting a +35 then getting +18. I was doing really well for the first few holes in my second playthrough (staying equal to or under par) l, but started bungling some of the later ones. I can see myself replaying this a few times.
As for Cyber Owls, it’s a conceptually funny riff on TMNT and multi-genre NES games, but I’m not enamored with it. The character designs are in an uncanny valley between a corporate mandate for coolness and employee indifference to the concept, but in a way that feels intentional (the line reads on the voice clips also capture this vibe).
The sub-games themselves felt very jack-of-all-trades. You got an awkward action platformer, a Cabal-like with awkward controls, Metal Gear-lite, and a vehicular shmup. Also, instead of having lives, when you die there’s a DROD-like minigame where you have to rescue your captured character. Maybe I’m just bad at them, but none of these minigames enthused me.
You can pretend the Game Over scene leads into Avianos.
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pingolf is a fav of mine. i keep playing it trying to get that number to go down.
cyberowls is close to the bottom of my list – its focus on minigames feels antithetical to the rest of the collection. its ideas are spread too thin and they’re very generic implementations of each genre without much innovation.
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maybe cyberowls is one of the lesser games because it’s the last chronologically from the fictional company that made the games - so it’s the final straw that bankrupted them. or it’s the final game they pieced together quickly while the lights were about to turn off. anyway i don’t know if that’s really why certain games are where they are but it’s fun to think about anyway
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yeah, I forget which one reminded me of like bio force ape or zen intergalactic ninja, but some of them are definitely trying to be trashier than others
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I’m trying not to spoil exactly why and how you find but there is a lot of background in the game as to what was going on with the company, and specifically Cyber Owls.
(Although I’m still trying to piece together the last few clues since this game is also an iceburgvania)
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yeah. I can understand/appreciate why they put something like cyber owls in the collection, but compared to a lot of other examples of this kind of corpo-art from the late NES era (Battletoads & Double Dragon, Bucky O’Hare, Zen: Intergalactic Ninja), it doesn’t compare very favorably in terms of spectacle or polish.
If they really had to cram its constituent 5 games into 1, imho they did it backwards. The DROD-like bits should have been the central focus, with the minigames being actiony Archon-like spice (no idea how workable this would be in practice)
Like ella said though, I wouldn’t be surprised if the game’s lower quality was somewhat intentional. I figure that the real world authors wanted to make a mascot-team game like this, so they chose a few of their less promising prototypes to stitch together, with the in-universe justification probably being something like the company forcing 5 separate projects together in a last ditch effort to get a system-seller out the door (just a guess).
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Planet Zoldath definitely struck me as being pretty trashy. feels like one of the most random rushed NES games in terms of sensibility. there are tbh a lot of others that just feel more like tigsource-era indie games to me (Waldorf’s Journey being a big example), but that one felt believably like a game that was contracted out to a Micronics type company and made on the cheap for the NES.
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Yeah like, Big Bell race is filler, in universe and in game, but it’s the first appearance of Isobel and she’s important in a few other games, especially Camponella 2.
I love the meta implications of that, and @Closed pointed out in a discord call that it sort of felt like Pilot Quest emphasizes being pilot being incompetent helpless, and Isobell being skilled and resourceful. Yet pilot is the main character, almost like it was a corporate mandate.
But even then, Pilot Quest feels more like a sequel to Campanella 2 than Campanella 3 does, which also implies something.
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Also: Vainger has the least overtly to do with the shared universe of anything but is tied to the metaplot more closely than it seems.
There are also elements like it in Mini and Max.
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i just spoiled myself on the gist of the metanarrative stuff (i didn’t feel like going on an easter egg hunt (ironic, yes)), and while i’m not sure what exactly i expected (kept seeing the word “creepypasta” thrown around thoughtlessly), what’s actually there is a lot more mundance and melancholy than i was expecting — earnest ruminations on loss, corporate politics, archival work, and (obviously) nostalgia (especially nostalgia grounded in people vs. nostalgia as commodity fetishism)
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played some Velgress. can’t believe ojiro fumoto would rip off the award winning hack “da crumblah” available exclusively on metroid construction
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Someone told me an update made Porgy less punishing, but I just tried it again and I can’t tell what’s different but I still don’t find it fun to play at all. But it still looks so much like a game I’d enjoy, which is what makes it all the more annoying.
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This collection reconfirmed that I no longer have much patience for a certain type of difficulty in games anymore, and this is from someone who got really into Spelunky and Downwell back when they released! Just haven’t got the time for climbing any more metaphorical mountains in games, have enough of those to worry about in real life!! Luckily it’s not all bad news: there’s three of the games so far that I am particularly into…
Mooncat
I started off by trying each game out in “chronological” order and this was the first one that really absorbed my attention. Really liked the sparseness of its presentation and striking colour choices. The music immediately sets a tone completely different from the other games up to that point that’s… almost melancholic? I’m a bit of a fiend for unusual movement controls in games so this was right up my alley as soon as it started. Was a little disappointed once it sunk in that it was just gonna be a series of platform challenges until the end. I was more interested in the world and its strange implications. The main character you control seems like that awkward evolutionary midpoint between fish and mammal (the screen showing them dreaming of/remembering fish almost seems to suggest this??) which makes the confusing movement controls appropriate in a way. The water levels even felt easier to control by comparison!
I eventually left this one to try out some of the other games but ended up coming back to it later on the strength of its atmosphere alone. Was relieved to find it was relatively short to complete but still a bit bitter its overall structure didn’t end up being as interesting to me as all the other bits. Still glad to have played it even just for those parts though. The image of Mooncat in the womb as discordant, distorted notes play really stays with you…
Waldorf's Journey
This one initially overwhelmed me a bit because I didn’t get much of a sense of its scale. The sky feels endless when you begin for the first time but it’s actually surprisingly short. Also ashamed to admit my initial impulse was to continuously send poor Waldorf flying, like a golf ball, into the immediate right of the screen at full speed… and often to his peril 
Thank god it was all a dream…
Once I got a handle on making small increments forward, little by little, I started to get a better sense of the controls overall. I also started to notice the little sign posts that feed you ominous sounding messages… In the end this felt like the perfect length. Short and sweet. Made restarting and repeating earlier parts feel less like a chore. Enjoyed the simple storytelling and the dreamlike atmosphere as well. The way the weather and sky changes adds to the foreboding sense of progress towards the unknown. The drifty soundtrack feels right too. May try for the cherry just because I wouldn’t mind revisiting it again 
Rail Heist
Lemme tell you I mostly detest westerns… but I must admit Rail Heist is a funny game. It does that kind of comedy-of-errors thing that Spelunky did but I feel like this one’s a lot more approachable. It’s level-based and each level is relatively small so victory always feels within reach. That being said, bungling things by getting shot by lawmen and goofily bouncing off screen is almost always just as entertaining to me as successfully getting away with all the money.
Something about the mix between realtime and turn-based mechanics makes it neither overly strategic or too reflex-based to play. I always felt like I was just winging things and coming up with a plan on the fly, regularly being surprised by how different things interacted with one another and the strange wealth of actions at my disposal. I think knowing there’s only 20 levels helps to not make it feel like too much of a herculean task to complete. It’s nice just jumping into a single level every now and then and trying different silly ideas and then giggling at the results… Looking forward to returning to it!
As for the other games, I’ve been a little luke-warm on what I’ve tried so far… Can’t help shake the feeling that they’re a little too slavishly dedicated to evoking other pre-existing retro/indie games. I find it far more interesting when people use those limitations or framing to try something a bit different, ending up with a game that wouldn’t otherwise exist. We’ll see though! This may all change suddenly when I discover that I’m actually a secret “Block-Koala-head” or something… Stranger things have happened!!
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I Had kinda the opposite experience? My reaction to the collection is was that the majority of them are games that have influences from older games, but do very different things in practice. I was so relieved they weren’t just retreads of old games.
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Yeah, having played dozens and probably hundreds of indie games paying “homage” to the era this game is playing with, I’ve been fascinated by just how many new ideas and interpretations there seem to me. Some of it really feels to me like “alternate possibilities” stuff.
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