I picked this up. Current favorites are Pingolf, Caramel Caramel, Seaside Drive, and Magic Garden. They really caught the magic of playing NES games you’ve never heard of and which feel impossible, but in a deliberate and polished way. Obvious comparison to Action 52 (which, I mean, duh). Incredible work.
Made me remember that I made a game for that Action 52 jam on TIGS that went nowhere when the artist got addicted to TF2. Slashers is on my itch.io page in case anyone is curious. It is esoteric and punishing and only has like 2 or 3 levels.
I recall playing Mortol and Waldorf’s Journey at PAX 2017, but I haven’t played them here yet.
Sampled some games for about an hour:
Barbuta (01) - Utterly inscrutable MSX-y search action game. Walking two tiles to the right at the start gives you the most perfect introduction to a videogame. I found no cash and no items I could collect. I’ve seen 20 rooms. I have no idea how to progress. 10/10
Caramel Caramel (24) - My wife picked this once because the little radish thing on the cover looked cute. I played it for 3 minutes. The basic gameplay is bizarrely inscrutable for a shmup.
Ninpek (03) - Nice little ninja platforming shmup. I got 7350 points on my best run. It’s neat.
Pilot Quest (44) - Oh heavens no it’s an idle game. I spent half an hour on this piece of junk. Despite several attempts, I have no idea how or where to gain a reasonable amount of resources in the field segments to justify the ROI. 0/10 I can’t wait to come back to this after the game generates a week’s worth of resources for me. (Also the description says this is an LX-III game?)
Divers (27) - I love the atmosphere of this deep-sea RPG thing, but I think I might be allergic to the game itself. It’s another game with a resource economy (destroy all economies).
I watched this vid that detailed all 50 of the games and uhh yeah I don’t know… some of them seem interesting (like the RPGs) but like the Famicom library is already weird as fuck. I think I’d rather just play Otaku no Seiza for free! Maybe what I really want is the WarioWare version of UFO 50.
Did not expect to be…grinding out an idle/survival game loop with Pilot Quest
By having a lenient (?) continue system Rakshasa seems to scratch this weird itch I have for the beautiful, abrasive FM-sounding Karnov and Bonze Adventure that I love watching videos of but am too intimidated to actually play.
Golfaria (Eagle / Hole-in-one). I got to that game and progressed no further, fully sucked in, to a hole, in the ground, where I found a check point. Golf physics, traversal, cuteness, you do “runs” to try to get further than last time. No real direction, figure it out. Love figuring it out.
UFO 50 reminds me of buying a fist full of NES games at the flea market and checking them out.
the first game I played was “Magic Garden,” which is a snakelike with some really clever little tweaks, and I’m terrible at it, and even though I’ve checked out 4 of the other games, I just keep coming back to Magic Garden, becuase I have yet to crack beyond the last place on the high score board and i have an overpowering need to Do Better than that
on the basis of this game and the few minutes of the others I played: 5 stars. A+. 10/10. Game of the year.
Mini & Max (45): The first one I happened to pick and so far still my favorite. Mini & her dog Max are stuck in a storage room and decide to shrink themselves to tiny sizes to stave off boredom. What seems at first like a light children’s platformer gradually reveals itself to be about the rise and fall of tiny alien civilizations, their cosmologies and factional disputes. The vast microscopic wildernesses are procedurally generated while points of interest are hand-designed.
Magic Garden (05): Like many others I was drawn to this cute arcade action-puzzler. It’s a deceptively modern design in that the enemy blobs have a “look-toward” sprite for ~2 seconds before they move in a direction, so it’s always your fault when you die. Also the win condition is to save 200 blobs with no multiplier, whereas the scoring condition has a multiplier and includes killing enemy blobs, so it offers 2 different styles of play to get good at: always keeping the board as clean as possible, and allowing it get messy to the edge of your skill and then doing a “big bang” cleanup.
Lords of Diskonia (32): This game is what? I’m sorry I was hoping to play a nice vanilla tactics game I can’t get into this weird shit at the moment. Moving on,
Mortol (06): It’s like Lemmings with more direct control and even more edgelordy. Your little guys are brave idiots willing to kill themselves to save the other little guys. Has a spaceship and skyscrapers in the background and a gothic hell landscape in the foreground. Seems extremely difficult, the first level went on much longer than I expected.
Mortol II (32): My second-favorite so far. It’s a gothic party exploration platformer like Astalon! There’s one large scrolling map to explore that doesn’t reset in any way when you die. So any progress you made, be it enemies killed or even damaged or pulled into a different location, all remain as is after death. You have exactly 100 lives and when you run out it’s game over you have to start over from scratch. I completed maybe half of the map on my first 1-hour playthrough.
Where it connects to the previous Mortol is each class has an extra-strong “sacrifice” action in addition to their normal attack. You have to use this sometimes, and other situations can be solved with either sacrifices or normal attacks but you’ll actually end up losing more lives if you try to do it with normal attacks. 100 lives is not that many for how large the map and you will absolutely run out if you use either too many or too few sacrifices.
Game doesn’t let you keep playing further when you win so you really do have to gamble big if you want a high score, you can’t just play conservatively for like 8 hours like you could on most real early-1980s arcade games. Like I said, deceptively modern game design
something i find very interesting about games is the specific and often unpredictable shapes they take as mastery approaches its zenith. that phenomenon you mentioned; myriad games in which you can’t maximize score without untenable tedium; it bums me out.
A mutual of mine for a long time, from the TIGS days, posted this.
Later in the thread they said that it shouldn’t put anyone off buying the game, since Derek is rich already and there’s other lovely indie people who worked on out, but I think it’s worth spreading the word about.
christ, why are there so many of these fucking people in the indie game space? like I know the depressing answer is because there are so many of these people everywhere, there’s nothing special about games, but I’m just so tired of it.
