tim rogers voice I Was a Sierra On-Line Poser smashes keyboard on stage and plays foosball with the keycaps

Like many others who love media history but struggle to get into or make time for certain parts of it, the formative parser-driven adventure games like Wander, Colossal Cave Adventure, and Sierra On-Line's classics like Mystery House have eluded me. But I'm also guilty of just not going for them like a hunter chases flock, or a prospector dives for gold. To have this apathy, despite knowing pretty much all these games are easily playable on Internet Archive, ate at me until recently. Something's clicked—probably just the satisfaction of completing Myst last month after years of never clearing the first island. But that's enough to get me committed to trying these ramshackle first attempts at conjuring immersive worlds on the earliest home computer platforms.

Mission Asteroid had a simple, er, mission: introduce any and all possible Apple II users to the graphic text adventure. Roberta Williams knew this didn't have to be as intricate as her Agatha Christie-esque first game, nor as fanciful as The Wizard and the Princess. A solid, pulp-y "save the Earth!" story could get you used to the studio's text parser, thinking up valid verb combinations, and managing your time and patience wisely. No matter how much this game continues to age like an indescribable beverage, it still fulfills those criteria. That's a nice way of saying this 1980 release had much less bullshit puzzling and navigation than its peers.

What the Williams duo would have called "simple" or "entry-level" then is considered hard to parse today dodges tomatoes after that pun. You've got the usual N-S-E-W compass commands, sure, but also instances of having to enter door rather than just go north through it. The two-word restriction on your interactions becomes painfully clear when trying to do something as straightforward as insert a floppy disk into the mission HQ Apple II. You type take disk, carriage return, and then insert disk (repeat), only for the game to ask where you're inserting this thing. There's no death branch here if you specify the wrong target or anything, just needless busywork compounded by the parser system.

Yet, for all the grief these simplistic parsers give me, there's still the fun of tinkering with what hidden-in-plain-sight options you can type in. All the gizmos in your space rocket can either doom you or take you on a disorienting ride through Earth orbit, controlled only by your type-in commands. Wandering the asteroid itself becomes a tense adventure as you likely know from harsh experience that the air supply's time-limited. Once the game lifts its tutorializing gaze from you, Mission Asteroid feels like an organic interplay between you, the reader asking questions, and the ghost of a game master hiding in the machine. It's easier now to see how Roberta, Ken, and others who'd soon join On-Line Systems could champion this genre framework.

Obviously there's not much to look at in this now, with its rudimentary VersaWriter drawings and lack of sound design. At the end of the day, most of the puzzles are either too simple to satisfy or convoluted enough to irritate me a bit too much. But I can gladly say that Mission Asteroid's an easier way to start playing turn-of-the-'80s graphic text stories than I've been told. It gets you into the necessary frame of mind with relatively little condescending scenarios or design language. The truly brutal riddles and cat's cradles of contemporary text adventures are reduced in scope, tightening up the pace. One gets to have a just-filling-enough time with the genre here before it overstays its welcome, either by avoiding a glut of bad ends or treating the player's time with more respect. I sense and can only speculate that Roberta's need to finish this romp for the holidays, capitalizing on Mystery House's success, left less room for potentially harmful experiments or indulgence.

So it's the definition of mid, yet I can't hold that against this game in retrospect. There's much worse one could try from that era, ranging from Scott Adams' pioneering all-text enigmas to their slapdash imitators on TRS-80 or Commodore PET (take your pick of PC cheaper than the Apple ][+). Given how Mission Asteroid itself avoids some of the amateur mistakes in Mystery House I hear about, I'm not content slapping this with a 2-star and calling it there. Whether or not it's a labor of love on par with Sierra On-Line's adventures soon to come, this little ditty of a day's work blowing up an asteroid punches above its weight class where it counts. Some higher being oughta know we got more than we asked for when Michael Bay's people adapted the premise almost two decades later. Keep it simple, Sierra!

Credit where it's due: at least the Game Boy Camera and SEGA's DreamEye got treated with enough dignity to never suffer a minigame collection this lame.

More credit goes to London Studio for injecting some much-needed, if dated amount of personality where it counts. I'll always fondly remember unpacking this honestly not terrible webcam (Logitech wasn't much better in '03), then loading into the cheeky, very post-Psygnosis tutorial movie explaining how to use the peripheral. Watching what might as well be the queen mother and her clones dancing to stock library disco as the Stanley Parable narrator goodbye-s you is still surreal. I wish the game itself had as much family-friendly anarchy. Part of me wants to argue the inconsistent art direction between minigames brings this closer to WarioWare or a modern game jam, but it's just not there.

With 12 minigames of varying quality on offer, Sony's making a go at matching its competitors in silly gimmickry. A good chunk of the experience revolves around variations on whack-a-mole, or something like those Moorhuhn (Crazy Chicken) shovelware titles you see every now and then. This whole idea of pairing a novel, limited but intriguing add-on console toy with what amounts to a prototype Carnival Games worked at the time. The folks & I had a solid time looking stupid in front of the TV, though my sister stuck mostly to our metal DDR pad since those games had far more substance. Little did we know this would have us wibblin' and wobblin' in the living room some years later—that was Wii Sports, though, which remains far more replayable in 2023.

EyeToy Play is fun enough for what it is, a serviceable pack-in game which took the safe route with proving that this idea could even work. Nintendo's aforementioned handheld lens toy has somehow managed to age better by dint of offering a uniquely lo-fi experience, though. Going from harsh but exotic monochrome games and photo printing to the blurry, often out-of-focus mess EyeToy provides seems a bit underwhelming nowadays. What I really lament, though, is the C-rate Y2K aesthetic dominating this collection. (Half of the game looks like it's recycling unused Psybadek concepts, mashing them up with Gorillaz and other post-Y2K intercontinental mascot designs.) It just reminds me too much of when these developers, a mix of ex-Psygnosis fellas and The Getaway's team, had more creative projects to work on.

Again, this isn't a strictly bad game. Most minigames work properly with the EyeToy in most room settings, and it's a bit amusing to wave your arms around, a kind of bastardized ParaPara Paradise or Samba de Amigo for the new era. Just temper your expectations if you collect one of these square, googly things and stick this in your PS2. I'd personally rather play SEGA Superstars if only for the IP variety and actual Samba de Amigo experience. However, the lack of ambition and increasingly quaint presentation behind this pack-in was kind of the point. If it was too good a free disc to keep playing, would you have bought all those other EyeToy games coming later? Consider how Nintendo fell into that trap later, with Wii Sports & Play offering enough for most owners to just skip out on following minigame collections (or settle for the bargain bin equivalents).

See, this is exactly what Thursday does to an oldhead like me. I get vaguely nostalgic thoughts about what passed muster for party night amusement at the end of elementary school, and then I think harder about what this was actually like. Youngsters have it so much easier in these social media dog days. EyeToy: Play was the offline TikTok dance simulator of its day, cheaper than a ParaPara cab every weekend but not much more advanced than some plastic maracas. Games like this fall through the cracks of half-remembered cringe and convenient historic amnesia—some would say for the better. I just feel sorry for all the UK devs Sony chopped into teams like London Studio, who then had to take any mid project they could get by their corporate sponsor. tl;dr Where the hell's the Wipeout minigame in this set?!

Where does the versus arcade game go after Atari's Pong or Tank? Both games stuck to the ball-and-paddle paradigm in one way or another. Blockade was the solution: turn Etch-A-Sketch into an entropic competition to fill the screen. Negative space becomes the battleground for a duel of wits and reflexes, as either player tries to snake around each other without colliding. Gremlin's "money magnet" of '76 spawned a whole genre of imitators, leading to the modern snake game as popularized on Nokia phones and the Internet.

It's funny how you can't really play the original snake game, despite its outward simplicity and ease of emulation. We think of the genre today as a single-player experience when it started in the realm of 1-on-1 coin munchers. Arcade-goers still desired the kind of simple competitive pleasures Pong had provided, just with a novel game mechanic. From the moment you and your opponent start moving, with no way to stop, there's a clear, immediate tension. You're all walled in, and you've got nowhere to go but closer to your foe.

Pong, Tank, and Spacewar! before them worked because they provided the illusion of an open space you could play in, even if you either stuck to one plane of movement or had limited room for exchanging fire. I think the genius of Blockade comes from dispelling that notion entirely. You're never in any doubt about your opportunities to corner and trick the other player. And you've always got the harsh green borders of the screen to keep you focused, mentally hemmed in by the game. Clash is inevitable in this slowly filling digital world, promising not the freedom of an open space but a ruthless drive to destruction.

Today, it all seems a bit quaint. We're many decades separated from Blockade—the progenitor of not just snake games all about managing a depleting space, but the confinement of the fighting game genre too. As fast as this must have seemed in '76, it's laborious and simply dull to play today. Indeed, Gremlin engineer Lane Hauck's creation "wasn't a good game from the standpoint of making money...The industry loved Blockade but the public yawned.". Creators like him recognized the sea change this game proved was feasible, though. It wouldn't be long before Disney's TRON demonstrated how exciting this concept could be. Moreover, Blockade's success with operators showed that Tank was no fluke, that plenty of multiplayer dueling concepts beyond the ball and paddle were not just viable, but desirable.

All in all, I can't really hold much against a game that did well enough to get clones with names like Bigfoot Bonkers. I'd have never grown up chomping down every little dot on my flip-phone LCD screen were it not for this. (Hell, where would Head-On or Pac-Man be if Blockade hadn't paved the way?!) Of their pre-SEGA achievements, Gremlin's original screen filler has earned its place in arcade game history.

Love Is... conceiving your son Milo Casali by artificial insemination, to the chagrin of the Vatican, and announcing this proudly in your comic strip. Love Is... the Casali sons making their own staple of pop media in a similarly simple but unexpected way.

Love Is... the Plutonia Experiment, if I might be so bold. There's nothing but love throughout this entire mapset, a perennial standout among the classic Doom games for reasons debated to this day. For 1996, the mapping designs and concepts employed in PLUTONIA.WAD were avant-garde, yet seem very obvious and simple to modern Doom players. The Casali brothers were done playing by the rules and conventions fellow fan creators were bound to, from overt attempts at realism ("DoomCute" in today's parlage) to prizing adventuring and cheap thrills over exacting endurance tests of skill. For Dario & Milo, it was now or never to challenge, even brutalize their community. A kind of tough love, perhaps.

As a fanmade map pack turned second half of Final Doom, Plutonia serves as a necessary foil to TNT: Evilution's excesses and concessions. The Casalis bros. knew their community maps well, and had already been pushing the possibilities of the pre-source port Doom engine with solo releases like PUNISHER.WAD and BUTCHER.WAD. After id software witnessed their contributions to TNT.WAD—two of the most polished maps in that whole set, Dario's "Pharaoh" and Milo's "Heck"—they met and discussed making a whole new expansion pack to feature in Final Doom. The early maps they showed American McGee quickly became the start for Plutonia, which Dario & Milo had much less time to work on than TeamTNT had for their own mapset.

I could go further into The Plutonia Experiment's history, but Doomworld and Dario's own contributions paint more of the picture already. What you should know on a first playthrough is that one cannot just like this WAD. Nearly everyone I know in the Doom fandom either loves or hates this monument to mid-'90s FPS experimentation. It's more than reasonable to run through Plutonia on a lower difficulty since the maps are well-designed to retain their intensity and skill demands on Hurt Me Plenty at least. But the Casalis built this game as the kind of Japanese game show obstacle course any Doom player in '96 would approach with caution, if not trepidation. There's no remorse, little reprieve, and relatively few dull moments anywhere throughout Plutonia's alienating, jungle-laden mess of arenas, gauntlets, and set-pieces. Tough love indeed.

Not every level hits these marks. I can list some of my own pet-hate experiences, from the very poorly telegraphed "Indiana Jones" invisible bridge in MAP02: Well of Souls, to the cramped teleporting Archvile trap wrecking first-time players in MAP12: Speed. A couple of maps utterly put me off even now, mainly MAP20: The Death Domain (too many gotchas, not enough chances to take cover) or MAP30: Gateway to Hell (another needless tradition, the Icon of Sin finale). Otherwise, that leaves us with thirty difficult but rewarding maps combining Doom II's masterful combat design with more streamlined, less noodly levels to navigate. I think it's a winning combination, even if some 1996 contemporaries like the Memento Mori II mapset showcase prettier or more conceptually ambitious works.

One thing that absolutely works in Plutonia's favor is its difficult but fair approach to most combat scenarios. This is not anything like a Mario kaizo hack or masocore gaming in general. But you'll have every reason to approach fights strategically, using the right weapons and movement at the right time to survive. Both of the brothers prefer small but uniquely lethal combinations of monsters to the giant hordes you see in many popular maps today. Economy of design defines this set in contrast to not just Evilution, but other community-made packs from the time like Memento Mori. A single archvile, a couple revenants, and some cannon fodder imps...put them in a non-trivial space to travel around and you'll have one hell of a battle!

To this end, most maps shower you in higher-tier ammo for those upper-level weapons. Expect to learn the ins and outs of rocket launcher splash damage, or how to efficiently wield the BFG's invisible tracer spread fire. Practice hard enough and you'll get a feel for how to conserve super shotgun ammo as you mow down pinkies, or the basics of redirecting skeleton fireballs into other foes to get them infighting. The Casalis weren't making hard-ass shit for the sake of being hardasses. At a time when speedrunning demos were gaining popularity and the Doom community's skills and metagame were evolving, these two just wanted to gift everyone a bloody chocolate box for Valentine's. True love waits.

Funny thing is, these maps aren't as bizarre or off-putting as one might think, at least when you realize they're clever remixes of id's own levels! It makes sense how, with only several weeks to build and test their vanilla-compatible maps largely by themselves, the Casalis would chop up useful bits from Doom I & II for their own purposes. Milo's MAP21: Slayer is an obvious riff on 'O' of Destruction and other Romero levels, for instance, while Dario's works like MAP08: Realm liberally borrow ideas from Sandy Petersen's oft-maligned creations. This does mean the set can't be as revelatory or unique as it could have, despite some memorable new ideas like the iconic archvile maze in MAP11. Still, there's plenty of clever trope reuse all throughout Plutonia that had few if any contenders in the community back then. We're a decade-and-a-half off from projects like Doom the Way id Did, after all, and these time-saving homages to the original games came in clutch for the project.

Some make this more obvious than others, like the utterly chaotic, classic slaughtermap remix of MAP01: Entryway from Doom II. This new creation, Go 2 It, even seems at odds with the spare monster placement and emphasis on precision attrition Plutonia's advocated for up until now. Hundreds of baddies swarm the bones of an opening stage best known then as the main multiplayer 1v1 map. Yet applying your newfound reflexes and reactions to enemy attacks makes the original slaughter experience not just viable, but fucking brilliant to play. All these funny lil' guys on screen are just going to kill each other anyway if you can juke them into hitting one another. Simple strategies lead to satisfying successes. It's more than just "git gud", as some will profess—more so getting flexible and adapting to scary but beatable challenges as you go.

Without Plutonia, I'm not sure I'd have ever gotten into Doom mapping, let alone a ton of newer fan creations both easier and harder than Final Doom. This feels like a necessary leap in complexity and player demands, one that's often a bit too harsh and formulaic yet well-meaning with how it challenges you. If Doom II proved that id's template was no fluke, and community efforts like Evilution and Memento Mori II showcased the story-/adventure-driven possibilities of new maps, then Plutonia's a necessary course correction for its time. The Casalis loved not just how they could push the engine to its theorized limits, but how they could maximize Romero & Petersen's game design for all its worth. What others see as unfair (which I occasionally agree with), I see as ascetic and utterly focused on avoiding downtime. There's just enough negative space in these maps between encounters to give you a breather, but never too much to bore.

Love Is... a compelling mixture, a chemical reaction that keeps you invested. It might get ugly and wear you down at times, yet it keeps you coming back. Sure it can be painful, as much as life ought not to. But if it helps you grow stronger, more understanding and empathetic, is that such a bad trade? I've had a healthy relationship with The Plutonia Experiment for years now, one which taught me make simple but effective moves in combat, or fun maps for my friends to play. This kind of appreciation takes time and effort; I won't fault anyone if they can't commit to it, and I recognize the privileges one might need to get this far. In the end, I like to think it's all been worth the patience. True love waits.

Shelley Day, Ron Gilbert & co. making a cute 'lil kids adventure dominoes falling Humungous Entertainment co-founder convicted of defrauding bank to buy a dream home next door to Paul Allen

Oh, there's an actual game to talk about here, not just the sad irony of Humungous' downfall. It's just a rather simplistic experience aside from its then innovative take on the edutainment adventure. Most PC DOS & Mac software oriented towards this demographic at the time talked down to kids, rather than taking their wants and fears seriously. No more forced, obviously pedantic lessons you'd snooze through in the computer lab—Putt-Putt has an actual story to tell. And you're right in it with him, from proving your civic responsibility to homing a stray dog. It's a bit problematic in the sense that our purple funky four-wheeler mainly does this to, well, Join the Parade and all, but engaging and meaningful enough for almost any kindergartener. Just ignore how he could be saving lost puppies for its own sake. I got my start with Putt-Putt starting from the lunar sequel, but this felt oh so cozy and familiar in similar ways.

Gilbert's goals of empowering young players and avoiding condescension already show results here. The game opens with an effortless "tutorial" where Putt-Putt awakens at home and gets to toy around in the garage. It's here where you first encounter the studio's famous "click points", where seemingly mundane set dressing comes to life as you click around. Even the diegetic HUD, Putt-Putt's dashboard, has its own easter eggs, encouraging you to try interacting with anything on screen. From simple animations to complex multi-step interactions, these click points evolved from similar examples in earlier LucasArts and Cyan Worlds adventures, now used to intuitively advance the player's story by giving them a toybox of sorts.

That's really what saves this from a lower rating, as the plot is as basic and A-to-B as a Junior Adventure gets. Mowing lawns makes up the bulk of any challenge you'll find, and the puzzles couldn't be more elementary if they tried. Figuring out where to go and how to get the needed key items takes no time at all, for better or worse. This makes it a nice one-sitting game for its age group, no doubt. But the sequels add more interesting questing, click points, story sequences, etc. that Joins the Parade sorely lacks. It's the blueprint they'd all quickly surpass. I can't really poo-poo this adventure as such, nor can I rate it higher.

Can we at least talk about how uncanny Putt-Putt and his world looks in these first two MS-DOS entries? Pixel-era Humungous games had a lot of art jank, especially when characters look at the camera. Putt-Putt's proportions and facial expressions run the gamut from mildly off-model to humorously off-putting (pun intended). Some like to joke about him making a serial killer face here and in Goes to the Moon—I can totally see it. But that's also a charming reminder of the studio's beginnings, a bit before they moved to high-quality art and animation with Freddi Fish and their Windows 9x-era Junior Adventures.

What Myst did for the adult multimedia games market, Putt-Putt achieved for multimedia kids' games. This was an important step into the public eye for similar works like The Manhole, and a masterfully dialed-down, less lethal take on the point-and-click adventure during the genre's heyday. I just wish I could get more out of it nowadays, but that's what happens when you're used to the excellence of Pajama Sam or Spy Fox. Things only got more ambitious for the Junior Adventures in a short span of time, and it wasn't long before the parade left Putt-Putt's original story far behind.

It's the laborer's code, an allegiance to classist logic hiding behind the veneer of a machine. Who's to say you can't pull these blocks other than the rules of the game? These walls and obstacles entrap you, make you feel the claustrophobia that comes with poverty and exploitation. Surrounding these microscopic tasks are naught but void—just the fraught acceptance of capitalism's encompassing reality. Here's a gallery of A-to-Z state machines one yearns to find freedom from, yet masks the possibilities of other, better worlds beyond the transactional paradigm. A purgatory wrapped in darkness, and the only clear way forward is toiling under this system for eternity.

Even then, the original Sokoban is more than it seems. One of the final puzzles tasks you with moving blocks in a seemingly impossible way. That is, until you accidentally push through a wall, destroying a piece of it which lets you finally manipulate the block stack without failure. All future official versions of the 1982 classic would ditch this element. After all, it sounds frustrating to need to discover or know this completely un-telegraphed mechanic, doesn't it? Kind of like how your boss refuses to explain the finer details of your job, or even how to complete a seemingly simple yet elusive task? I can only imagine how the warehouse keeper must feel, hopelessly exhausting every possibility except the most absurd, contradictory one that never worked before. And it doesn't feel like an accomplishment, or a stroke of genius. You either know because someone finally told you, or you accidentally fell into success instead.

Hiroyuki Imabayashi was a retail clerk at the time he got his first computer, a Sharp MZ borrowed from a friend. The games he subsequently played on his later PC-8001 and PC-88 units, as well as an imported Apple II, inspired him to make a little game of his own, reflecting what he saw in his environment. What possessed a well-read, movie-loving record store salesman to make one of the great early pro-labor digital puzzlers? I'd like to ask him myself, though I suspect he'll answer with something like "I never thought about it that deeply". We're all so ingrained in this system of the world that we can feel its pressure and imposition as we grow ("coming of age" indeed), even if we can't always articulate that sensation. Sokoban, with all its elementary yet convoluted mind-twisters, inspires what must have seemed like a revolution in video games as introspection.

It's no surprise to me that Imabayashi soon spent way more time writing and designing graphic text adventures, most often the kinds of pulpy mysteries he grew up with. He still relies on the perennial success of Sokoban's design concept for his livelihood, but in doing so has found time and space in life to just be. What he'd created from a working man's understanding of his favorite childhood card games had forever altered game design for a post-modern era. How does one surpass that? So he moved laterally, handing the reigns of commercial ambition to others at the studio he started in Takarazuka. And Thinking Rabbit certainly did experiment, yet the founder and his co-workers now work for Falcon Co., having sold their company and IPs to a former contractor following the Japan's economic and investment stagnation in the '90s. What keeps them going is, of course, a certain block-pushing Ship of Theseus most often starring some wide-eyed young man trying to buy a car or woo his love, among other bootstraps window dressing.

While Imabayashi's adventure games gained a notable following for years to come, his debut game has long since evolved beyond what he'd been able to match. Why work to reinvent that which will forever morph to other designers' wills, or just slot into myriads of other frameworks as shown by creations like Baba is You? Yet for all the appreciation Imabayashi's earned for his post-Sokoban legacy, the software which freed him has ironically trapped his image in amber. Block puzzles in video games are just too useful and universal—so the death of the author continues. I can go on my mobile app storefront of choice and find a seemingly endless number of Sokoban clones, many from first-time developers learning to code games. There's a whole cottage industry of bedroom coders building off what this once fanciful PC-8801 experiment started. And he knows all too well what it's done for him and shackled him to in the process.

I suppose this florid look at a generally self-explanatory media artifact isn't helping much. Then again, my lack of Japanese language skills makes it hard to dig into Thinking Rabbit's adventures without duress. Sokoban has become a staple of gaming across the world, spanning ages before and after its origins. We're as familiar with its principles, iterations, and insinuations as we are with backgammon or chess! And just as those pastimes silently teach lessons and etiquette pertaining to the social-economic structures birthing them, Sokoban too reflects its environment. This game ran on everything, in even more forms than Doom. It arguably had a predecessor in Nob Yoshigahara's Rush Hour puzzle, and even the lowliest of early digital handhelds like Epoch's Game Pocket Computer featured the block pusher. Ubiquity both made and destroyed Sokoban as an essential distillation of logic challenges previously fragmented across many arcade, computer, and board games the world over.

Takurazuka's greatest software creation gave players the illusion of control over time-space puzzles previously meant to eat quarters in game centers. It transferred the traditions of puzzle boxes and transfixing toys into binary. And from this black box of restrictions, revelations, and repetition comes the final realization: Sokoban invokes a wager of faith for or against capitalist reality. Those who succeed in unraveling or merely memorizing these menial tasks can feel at least a little vindicated. Those who fail will quickly realize the futility and fruitlessness of labor you give but can never keep, even if they eventually succeed under the circumstances. Everyone who's ever complained about "unfun" box pushing in a Zelda game could relate to this. All those who criticized and/or continue to lambast the likes of Papers, Please should consider the power of games as simple as this to provoke praxis in this festering world.

Maybe the most actionable thoughts Sokoban leads to now are playing a different, more fun and accessible game. We're so accustomed to what this PC-88 classic offers, and binds us to, that it's nothing worth investing time in. In this sense, Imabayashi's folly has become the kind of effortless un-game or anti-game others try too hard to sell us on. There's nothing glamorous, fantastic, or conventionally laudable about pure, unadorned Sokoban. It's too good at what it does, meaning its spiritual successors must imagine more creative, more engrossing variations on its themes. Hell, the whole idea of Baba is You can basically boil down to "what if we challenged the player to make a new Sokoban game in every single level?". Sokoban transcended its mere game-ness long ago; today it's both a platform and a bad example to follow. More than most "classic" games, this one has morphed into an idol of ludological dreams, nightmares, and ambitions subservient to the possible. Sisyphus would be proud.

For all the ramblings and minutiae I could go on about, I think you should try the original Sokoban and come to your own conclusions. The PC-88 game and its ports certainly show their age, but also how timeless they remain. Without factoring all of what Sokoban was, is, and will be into any discussion of Japanese PC software and beyond, any history of puzzle genres and tropes will be incomplete. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Frank Welker & Jason Marsden goof off as Lennie & George on cartoon-ium for a couple hours and some folks just loathe this game? I'd hate to be y'all.

Usually I wouldn't hesitate to give this a flat 2-and-a-half stars rating. It's a blatantly unfinished, underbaked game based on a promising concept that's hard to do right. Think back to A Boy and His Blob, or another finicky partner-based puzzle platformer with loads of personality. When cute and/or funny characters chafe against a mediocre or simply bad game loop, that's enough of a put-off to get the whole genre condemned. (Ironic, given how the Floigan's property could actually be condemned, what with spiders on the lot and a blue-blooded realtor swooping in to snag the joint.) So it's unsurprising that Floigan Bros. has become the object of ridicule, both light and serious, in today's retro streaming landscape. So I'm gonna be a bit nice to this doomed duo, the Stolar-approved console mascots no one wanted.

Consider, though, how much this game just doesn't care whether you like, dislike, love, or hate it. Sometimes you just need Two Men. They're two himbos, they're loony, and they'll do what they want. Yes, their flaws are strong, but their irreverence is stronger. They've been critically neglected for over 22 years. Of course there have been bugs and jank, but they always come to terms with their differences because games like this comes once in a console's lifetime. By playing Floigan Bros. you will receive not just the Marx Brothers-ness of their antics, but the weirdness of the game's history as well. no apologies for the copypasta

Knowing anything, the game's original creator, ex-Bubsy voice actor Brian Silva, has too many horror stories about getting it into production. Floigan Bros. started life as an ill-fated attempt to recreate the glory days of Laurel & Hardy or the Three Stooges for a modern gamer audience. Accolade did some pre-production for it as a PlayStation game to release in 1996, but that company's decline led to the game's hiatus until SEGA & Visual Concepts picked up Silva's pitch. Mind you, the latter studio mainly created the Dreamcast's best known sports games, from NFL 2K to Ooga Booga (yeah, that's a stretch, but online minigames can get competitive!). Back in the 16-bit console era, though, VC had done a couple of their own puzzly, platformer-y games with mixed success. Them working on this previously abandoned Marx Brothers-esque pastiche wasn't so out of place after all. The original 1995 design document showed a lot of confidence already.

Just one look at that nutty cover art, and what you can actually do in this piece of interactive media, seems beyond belief. It's half puzzle platformer, half minigame collection, all with a coat of cheesy, unironic '40s Hollywood ham and humor. Hoigle & Moigle would fit right into a Termite Terrace parody of the popular comedy double-acts from that period. And the Of Mice and Men comparison is hardly unfounded. Moigle's soft spot for woodland critters isn't far removed from Lennie's fatal love for bunnies. There's something of a dark undercurrent at play here, from the Rocky & Bullwinkle-esque villainy threatening the brothers, to the uncanny spiders you teach Moigle to finally ground-pound despite his fears.

Kooky jokes and jukes define Hoigle & Moigle's daily life. The minigames and emotion system both play into the characters' expressiveness, and I almost always have a smile or sensible chuckle at what they're doing. Sure, most of this game's simple and easy to blaze through, almost simplistic with its riddles and sidekick manipulation. And the brownie points grind needed just to teach Moigle critical skills pads out the runtime more than I'd like. But it makes for a quaint pick-up-and-play experience which perfectly fits what the developers went for. I also get a kick out of chasing down magpies, screwing with Moigle's pathfinding during tag, and the musical transitions tied to his changing moods.

Realistically, this game's release was always a long shot. It took the efforts of Visual Concept's skeleton crew, led by Andy Ashcraft (War of the Monsters, PS2) and help from ex-Sonic designer Hirokazu Yasuhara, to get this out late in the Dreamcast's life. And while this technically pioneered or at least promised the episodic game format we know today, it only ever received a smattering of minor DLC add-ons which didn't see the light of day until last decade! This arguably might have done better if SEGA promoted it to an enhanced XBOX release, but having that last-minute platform exclusive clearly mattered more. This all explains the game's relative lack of content and playtime vs. what you would have payed back in the day. DC owners probably overlooked the price-to-value ratio just because any exclusive this interesting was worth the money then, though.

Obscure as it is, Floigan Bros. continues to entice and beguile all but the most hardy of classic game fans. Jerma, WayneRadioTV, and other streamers can't help but poke and prod at the game for a bemused audience. The few speedrunners I've seen playing this have their own commentary on it, often pointing out the somewhat buggy, janky programming you'll notice. For me, this remains one of the most interesting examples of SEGA's swan song ambitions. It hails from a time when the Dreamcast hosted all kinds of design experiments, from the successful (Shenmue, Jet Set Radio) to the forgotten (Headhunter, OutTrigger). Something told me there was more to this game than most would consider, given its "mid"-ness. I vaguely recall browsing the original SEGA website for it, confused by the classic American film humor and references but intrigued regardless.

What's one to do when an adventure in game development this unusual has so little coverage outside of memes? I had my own solution back in high school (Fall 2011, start of my junior year). After learning about designer Andy Ashcraft's role in fleshing out and finishing Floigan Bros., I e-mailed him some questions and thankfully got a considerate reply. Silva's been interviewed about the game recently, but I'd like to ask Yasuhara and other ex-devs some questions before compiling these primary comments into a fully-fledged retrospective. What I learned from Ashcraft alone tells me how much of a labor of love this game became.

Likely because Yasuhara came into the project very late, Ashcraft didn't have a lot to share about working with him, other than having a strong working relationship. Visual Concepts mainly started making the game back in '97, led by studio head Scott Patterson and a newly-recruited Ashcraft. The first problem they encountered was how to naturally integrate everything about Moigle into an accessible game loop. As I learned in the email chain, the big galoot had to be "somewhat unpredictable and be able to (or seem to) make decisions on his own about what to do and when to do it". On the other hand, VC considered how Moigle needed to "know what the player is wanting to do at all times, especially in tight life-or-death situations". They swiftly abandoned the do-or-die part, going for a less stressful set of puzzles and sequences which players could better manage.

In every part of the game's environments, the devs placed "distraction points" that Moigle responds to, a veritable sheep to your shepherd. It's easy for players to notice how the chatty, scheming cat-tagonist laps up Moigle's attention when nearby. Same goes for the aforementioned spiders, being one of the few entities strong enough to wreck his mood. Tweaking all these fragile variables, often with only one programmer available due to VC focusing on sports games (and talented staff leaving for greener pastures), greatly delayed production. It's a small miracle the game came out at all, even as Ashcraft and then Yasuhara had plenty of time to design it. Production woes aside, the former designer still considers this project an early triumph in building a game around a relatively natural, lively AI character dynamics...better than contemporaries like Daikatana, anyway.

Nothing like this existed on consoles at the time. Even the PlayStation port of the original Creatures wouldn't release until 2002, so almost a year after. Sure, you could argue that Chao raising in the Sonic Adventure games was close enough, but combining a learning AI with simple but elaborate world-puzzle progression was no mean feat. It's debatable how fun this actually is as a concept, but I'm far from deeming this as odd shovelware the way some do. Floigan Bros. has a lot of body and soul you can still experience, even without the historic context (though that helps!). Its mini-games are short enough to never get on my nerves—most are at least a little fun—and the junkyard possesses a palpable sekaikan, that lived-in verisimilitude which brings this beyond mere slapstick. This could have aged a bit better graphically, but the excellent animations and Jazz Age soundtrack feels like an early go at what games like Cuphead have accomplished recently. Tons to appreciate, overall.

Give the Floigan Bros. experience a shot, people! Maybe I'm a lot softer towards this than I should be, and I won't argue against anyone pointing out the jank or how it feels like a misbegotten Amiga-era oddity. But it still feels like too many rush to judge this one as harshly as I've seen. Few vaporware games emerge from their pupa into anything this polished, especially towards the end of a troubled console's lifecycle. Even fewer tackle a style of humor and homage this unattractive yet admirable, then or now. There's still a lot of room in the indie space for throwback Depression-era comedy games, something Floigan Bros. doesn't exactly nail either. The game's just too funny, replayable, and earnest for me to rag on, and we're still discovering neat parts of it today, from developer histories to previously-lost DLC. It's a relevant part of not just the Dreamcast's legacy, but the tales behind many decorated game developers. Plus it's got Fred from Scooby-Doo playing one of his all-time great Scrimblo roles, so what's not to love?

Fuck, maybe I'm just Floigan pilled after all.

The only wizarding Legacy I've been playing this year, and a much better use of coin than a certain transphobic, anti-Semitic dumpster fire released today.

1980 saw an observable increase in Dungeons & Dragon's influence on arcade game design, mainly among U.S. developers. Berzerk is the best-known example of this for anyone who's dabbled in the Golden Age classics, but I think Wizard of Wor qualifies too. It helped popularize the maze chase genre alongside Pac-Man, but also adds fantasy stylings and a very Gygax-ian bestiary to shoot down. With limited lives + an AI rival to finish off, each round's got lots of action and chances to whiff or vanquish the opposition.

Of course, you've also got an early co-op multiplayer mode, which lets you and a buddy gun down the monsters in tandem. It's cute how your extra lives are represented as reserve troops, lining up like pinball, er, balls waiting to get launched into the fray. There's not much complexity to the game loop as my description would imply, but it's enough to keep me invested for multiple waves of claustrophobic shootouts. Later levels add the usual harder, faster, baddies with more ways to screw yourself over, all while a speech-synthesized emcee taunts you from the peanut gallery.

While Berzerk has the more obvious emphasis on clearing or skipping through successive randomized mazes for its dungeon crawling feel, Wizard of Wor has a more compelling distillation of early DRPG battling for arcades. The tighter spaces and seconds-till-confrontation aspect makes for better pacing, and the presentation's quite a bit nicer thanks to added speech and visual flourishes. It's one of those easily overlooked, maybe less influential/notable but arguably more entertaining turn-of-the-'80s arcade romps. Nutting one-upped the competition simply by making this a co-op experience, but every little detail beyond that adds up. And the titular Wizard counts as one of the first bosses in video games, right alongside the fortress from Phoenix that same year.

Give this a go if you haven't yet already! I'd stick to the arcade original found in various Midway collections, but the PC ports look decent as well. Whichever one you go with, it's gotta be better and more replayable than Unspoken TERF Game this season.

Polemic for a once uncertain future of indie JRPG-adjacent creations. The scrapbook acerbic, playing in the same mud it slings. Baudelaire imbues and narrates this dirge with an overpowering thesis: "unshackle yourselves from the entropy of tradition, lest it affix your form to creative insolvency". Even Dracula's taking lessons in this brave new world (and sharing the boof!!). BBC Radiophonic library music plays off an ever-morphic realm of irreverence, accompanying the idolatry of and tribute to the RPG Maker sub-culture of old.

It's also just fucking dumb, but in surprisingly funny ways. thecatamites finds such glee in devising and sharing spoonerisms of JRPG design language, one example being the intentionally overcomplicated combat verbiage. I'd be surprised if anyone went into this expecting a focus on battles anyway, but the game quickly tells you to let go of that notion entirely. Like the irony of horror games getting scarier when you have usable weapons that highlight your nakedness without them, Space Funeral's vestigial JRPG-ness contrasts harshly with the rest of the ludonarrative essay. It's much funnier when the game earnestly tries to do classic-style boss fights while you directly mock them via the Mystery action or using insta-win items like bibles and old movies. Couple that with increasingly absurd dialogues and other self-indulgement for a fun time.

Others have gone more in-depth about the messaging behind this game and subsequent works by thecatamites. It's as invested in critiquing the likes of Laxius Power as much as it approaches the creative process from a Plato-vs-Heraclitus dialectic. Think of Ovid, an exile in many ways but most prominently for his poetic deviance. A similar kind of ire-meets-reverence flows through Space Funeral as it did ages ago in the Metamorphoses, criticizing as much as it homages. Comparing him to Ovid is a little ridiculous (if I had to guess, he'd call this whole laborious review silly), of course. But there's clear themes behind the craziness on display.

What elevates this experience for me is how it avoids any simple binaries. Chaos of experimentation vs. order of convention is the major theme here, of course, but it doesn't forget there's a world beyond that. Amidst contemporaries like OFF and Earthbound Halloween Hack, this hour-long corrupted pantomime still has character hiding within it. Sometimes you just wanna chill with dancing death mummies, or turn into a fish on the overworld for daring to be happy. All the game's a stage, and its players and NPCs merely figures.

So, next time when I try some truly ancient RPG Maker games from the '90s, I'll be grateful to know just how much the international community canon and aspirations have evolved. ASCII's amateur development tools have gotten us this far, presaging the rise of similar suites and deviations for visual novel creators. This first playthrough reminded me a lot of OMGWTFOTL, but now including all kinds of authorial touches, integrity, and story through form that was once lacking. All this under the guise of such anarchy! It's just an incredible, bloody mess of a game.

An invitation to takehata's Cards Goetia, trapped in forking paths known only to the old ones. Tread carefully and curate your arcana wisely. At the end lies no mere relief, but the cessation of a nightmare, precipitated by loss. Reality fragments into haze, distortion, and sepia dreams. We're almost beyond the realms of vaporwave or mere "aestheticccccc" here, travelers.

Majin and Sacrificial Girl mainly exists as an interactive art gallery for this baffling, Bosch-ian bestiary, having you fight deeper into the tunnels to meet more of them. Honestly, you could just admire the title screen and leave satisfied. Three funny-looking guys, a world of white noise here and beyond the dungeon walls, and the sense that you're entering a realm of boundless, incomprehensible fantasy. I love this part, and it's definitely what takehata's most proud to display. There's not a whole lot of worthwhile game beyond this point, though it's far from bad. But the execution's lacking in key areas, from generally buggy performance to multiple admissions of defeat in designing this deck-builder.

Others have started on this little freeware exercise's failings, but I'll lead with what it's best at: the audiovisual immersion. Past the potentially iconic opening scene, you'll find rich contrasts between a claustrophobic, Wizardry-esque stone maze and the abstract battle screens you jump into. Like better-known examples such as Signalis or World of Horror, Majin uses a heavy amount of dithering and other post-processing tricks to create this grainy, fragile world you crawl through. The lines of things wobble incessantly, the colors oscillate in and out of certainty, and the barebones user interface juxtaposes with how vividly animated these demons are. takehata chose a spare but fitting set of noveau orchestral pieces to accompany battles, and the brief bits of lore you get on each floor are enough to contextualize your adventure.

This also gets some points with me for being a very easy deck-builder in a sea of brutal challenges. Granted, that's because you can't ever die and can save anywhere at any time. The author wants you to meet every odd thing he's designed in this phantasmagorical zoo, so it makes sense that finding, managing, and using cards is as fast and painless to retry as it is. Battles often boil down to "is my RNG good or bad?", but rarely go too long to become dull or frustrating. The card selection itself is very typical for the fantasy-themed games in this genre, so set your expectations accordingly.

What I'd give for better pacing, though! You spend so much time on each floor not to get more cards or something else important, but to increase your health. Because takehata tied the groovy mushroom man's HP service to what currency you get in fights, you're pretty much fighting everything you see. I even found myself grinding for a few minutes before the final boss just to afford one last useful boost. This means seeing a lot of the same few enemies in a game that frankly has less of them than you'd hope. This means Majin fails at facilitating an effortless trip through takehata's creations, with a playable but minimally competent DRPG deck-builder taking up more of your time.

In key ways, this feels like a mid-1990s Mac/Windows 3.1 hybrid adventure gone wrong. I'd rather be hopping from screen to screen, toying with each setpiece and little puzzle knowing I'd get further invested with all these monsters and their uncanny, uncomfortable universe. Instead I'm stuck in a bog-standard labyrinth, using predictable genre mechanics that only artificially elongate my playthrough. And because the combat balance itself is more than a bit busted, I can't really appreciate that system on its own terms either.

So it's weird how this game defies aesthetic trends with its unique not-too-retro multimedia stylings, then rigidly conforms to a current indie trope-set which only hurts it. I'm not saying this could only work as an adventure without explicit fail-states, but that would be the quickest way for me to enjoy it more. It's annoying to juggle thoughts of "these entities are so baffling and intriguing" and "why couldn't the dungeons and combat be as imaginative?". So, while I can recommend this to anyone wanting a more modern take on the mid-'90s low-res, highly-abstract aesthetics that Haruhiko Shono and others mastered, that's about it.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Feb. 7 – Feb. 14, 2023

The definite article, or it would be if the mythical, swiftly deleted m199h PLATO game was as stat-heavy as alumni remember. All these old mainframe games ran the risk of removal and erasure, even programs we recognize now as essential in the history of interactive media. Like the souls of doomed adventurers lost in the dark, the most accessible of '60s and '70s computer video software lived and died on the whims of plucky creators vs. system operators and their bosses trying to maintain their services. Students at colleges using the now obsolete PLATO educational network and timesharing infrastructure made amazing time-wasters under these conditions. From them we got pivotal text-and-image pioneers in genres ranging from space sims to, of course, role-playing adventures.

The Dungeon, or pedit5 as it's known, was the first fully-featured dungeon crawling computerized role-playing game, made less than a year after the first edition of TSR's Dungeons & Dragons. You can play it today thanks to cyber, a modern PLATO emulator and network with pre-made demo user logins for anyone who'd like to try PLATO software. So I decided to get some quality time with the close ancestors of games like Beneath Apple Manor, Akalabeth, Rogue, and then the Ultima & Wizardry pantheons leading into today.

Building a character, or just choosing one of the legacy adventurers saved on cyber1, takes relatively little effort. It's nice to play with a cleaned-up, simplified form of the original D&D's character creation framework, needing only a few stats and some items to get started. pedit5, like most PLATO games preserved today, has a short, fairly usable manual you can consult before playing. It's not long before your stick-figure spelunker gets dropped into a series of eventful corridors, wireframe-thin as they are.

pedit5's main problems come from a mix of simplistic mechanics and the inability to escape death. Luck is definitely not on anyone's side here, except the monsters who will jump you and unceremoniously win or die. Combat's entirely automated past your decision to flee or fight, and more attention goes to finding secret doors and using spells out of battle. This auto-combat system is a kind of handwaving—designer Rusty Rutherford's way of saying he couldn't adapt the tabletop game's encounter mechanics. (It's also possible he just didn't have time to, being a student and having to evade PLATO's sys-ops while coding the game in a public channel.) Still, it's very unsatisfying to win a few scuffles, then get downed by the last monster you expect, only to try this non-randomized set of dungeon floors again.

There's still a good enough base here that later PLATO RPGs, mainly dnd and pedit5's successor orthanc, would use to great effect. As is, Rutherford's game was the spark others needed to try out TSR's revolutionary story-wargame system and make their own versions to play and share. This mirrored the tabletop market's own reactions to D&D, with competitors like Tunnels & Trolls + RuneQuest arriving not long. Graduates from the US Midwest who'd sunk their years into PLATO projects like this would themselves make games for the first wave of personal computers. Ever wonder how we got from scrappy little rulebooks to the likes of Final Fantasy? It all comes back to works like The Dungeon.

Shout-outs to whoever made the Spock character, among other pop culture personas you can choose to play. You don't see any of this reflected in the game's graphics, though they're nice and pristine compared to anything the initial batch of Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore PET games could offer. Give pedit5 a try, or its improved sequel orthanc, but don't feel obligated to clear The Dungeon. I'm more interested in getting to the bottom of other PLATO classics, anyway.

Or, as my backronym addled brain would tell me: Truly Hard, Early eXceptional DOS-era Evil Robodungeon. 1 mecha, 2 transformations, 15 complex levels, and infinite loops. Better start jetting and blasting.

Thexder was to PC-88 what Super Mario Bros. was to NES. Game Arts hit the motherlode when releasing their debut, a PC-88 action dungeon-crawler modeled after Atari's vector game Major Havoc. 1985 saw a major upswing in adoption of the PC-88, then NEC's beefiest 8-bit home computer. (Hey, guess which platform isn't associated with Thexder on IGDB yet? That's right, the one it was originally made for! Go team! /seething) With a new upgraded model on the horizon, these ex-ASCII programmers formed Game Arts with hopes of making an arcade classic for the home player. Hibiki Godai and Satoshi Uesaka's final game ended up becoming the PC-88's killer app, selling the faster mkIISR models in droves.

Suffice to say, both Square and Sierra On-Line were impressed enough to make their own ports, the former to MSX and Famicom while the latter brought Thexder overseas to IBM-compatible PCs. The DOS port thankfully rebalances the often harsh difficulty of the original. You take less damage and have an easier time collecting health & power-ups, that's for sure. While Thexder '85 is quite fun and beatable, it's also as brutal as you'd expect for an early foray into multi-stage mecha action with stats and memorization. Game Arts clearly wanted their players to clear at least the first loop, but it's tough going until you know some secrets and enemy patterns. I've beaten the DOS version a couple times now, so try that first if you want a faithful but accessible experience.

The whole appeal of Thexder comes from its mech-to-plane dynamics, where you swap between forms to use either the former's auto-targeting laser or the latter's speed and smaller size. Both modes let you navigate each techno-industrial maze while eliminating hordes of varied enemies, plus nabbing repair pick-ups along the way. Early stages ease you into the mechanics about as well as Nintendo's own games from the time, all before changing scenery and heading into caves full of nastiness. I always get a palpable sense of "where the hell is this mission taking me?" the closer I get to the end, even knowing the few boss encounters due to arrive. Having to weigh tradeoffs between your forms, plus carefully proceeding through hazardous areas you may or may not know, adds a satisfying tension to Game Arts' labyrinths. It may be a ruthless one to start with, but clearing it remains fulfilling, like defeating the Tower of Druaga which players would have been familiar with at the time.

It's awesome to see how effectively the team adapted Major Havoc into a richer adventure. The evolution from 1984's few screens' worth of level design, to Thexder having 4x that amount a level on average…games were improving so damn fast in that era. What might seem quaint or downright hostile was innovative back then, and shows its cleverness even today.

With a catchy musical theme and colorful, fluid scrolling visuals at a time when the PC-88 lent itself best to static adventure and sim./strategy titles, Thexder stood out. It proved that talented developers could squeeze anything out of NEC's hobbyist system, from intense arcade-style titles like this to more elaborate sagas like Ys or Uncharted Waters. And it gave new system owners the meaty, multi-playthrough software they needed at a time when Nintendo's Famicom and the arcades were far eclipsing Japanese PC games in immediate appeal. The era of simplistic, monochrome PC-8001 games was out; the FM-synth wielding, level-scrolling PC-88 releases were coming hard and fast. Game Arts led the charge with Thexder, Cuby Panic, and Silpheed, all of which earned their classic status in the midst of the J-PC gaming golden age.

Proof of what? The most charming, accessible yet busted, facile and creatively compromised Link to the Past ROM-hack you've ever imagined? That's Gunple and then some. If there's ever an iceberg meme for "seemingly innocuous but critically bizarre video games", this will rest near the bottom.

There's more angles to analyzing this bemusing ride of a Zelda-meets-Commando experiment than you'd think. (I also see the Zombies Ate My Neighbors! resemblance, but this calls to mind more arcade-y faire.) We've got, what, around 5 hours of fast-paced action adventuring with standout themes, politics, odd designs, and rehashed yonkoma comedy? The latter's all the handiwork of Gunple's key artist, Isami Nakagawa, a mangaka specializing in four-panel gag comics since the turn of the 1990s. His success with Kuma no Putaro, serialized in Big Comic Spirits from '89 to '95, is likely why Lenar worked with him on Gunple. The game's story is rich with recycled tropes, meta-humor, and a general irreverence the artist is familiar with. And it's that slightness, that refuge in audacity at its own expense, that both saves and curtails this game.

Everything starts out quite innocuous. You've got a meteor crash landing on a small frontier island, somehow not absolutely destroying it given the speed and size of impact. None of the villagers care. Then an alien outlaw emerges, transforming the local fauna, flora, and lore-a into monsters of his own design. Now the Western-style colonists are shook, unable to fight back. How the turn tables! Except you play from the viewpoint of a boy-turned-deputy, tasked with stopping this big bad by the same space sheriff that body-snatches him. Oooooooooooookay, that's just a little off-putting. But it's also a convenient framing device on Lenar's part, allowing them to spare the kid any real trauma or growth while you get to cosplay as a murderhobo in cowboy's clothing.

The game loop is simple but effective for what it's trying to do. You stock up on key items and skills in town, get a basic progress hint from the sheriff, explore the overworld until you find the right dungeon, beat it, and return home to claim your bounty. Rinse and repeat until endgame. Character advancement's just as predictable, with static weapon upgrades in dungeons and health boosts either tucked away on the overworld or rewarded for beating bosses a la Zelda. Anyone hoping this has the same amount of elegant, varied progression you find in LTTP should lower their expectations. Repetition sets in rather quickly. It's an early sign of the game's rushed production colliding with clearly larger ambitions from a developer known most charitably for contract game production. (The less we talk about Bird Week or Deadly Towers, the better.)

Gunple's overworld itself isn't on par with a detailed Zelda or Metroidvania, not that I'd necessarily want that. Navigation is quite painless, as is finding the few secrets off the beaten path. The game's nice enough to hand you a very detailed world map right at the start, too, with only one required location sneakily hidden behind the "Map" label itself. Lenar managed to tuck some areas and items behind skill-locked blockers, like deep water zones you can only traverse with a late-game snorkel. But you're also blatantly denied entry to the northeast by a self-described Blocking Ghost, only passable once you buy a crucifix in town. Exploring this frontier island may not bring much, yet I think it's got a joie de vivre the game would otherwise sorely miss.

You do get a larger roster of skills as the game progresses, from boulder-breaking punches to rapid-fire gun spam. No alien powers, though. Space Sheriff Zero may have all the skill and know-how of our nemesis Demi, but he's strictly playing to the lone-ranger playbook with this boy. And only one villager ever learns that this isn't the boy suddenly whupping Demiseed ass, but a visitor from beyond. Finally, there's an interesting lives system, where treasures chests and high scores at the ends of dungeons will give you a second chance. That's all on top of infinite continues. Did I mention this Zelda clone has a scoring system?!

It's wild to me because this feels much less like a score attack experience and more like a speedrunning one. Because completing each dungeon triggers a summary where you're awarded a higher rank (and score) based on how fast you cleared that part of the game, it makes sense to play quick. But collecting dungeon treasures while preserving your healthbar adds to that, and you get extra 1ups in turn. It's far from complex, but a somewhat clever way to reward swift play. Much of Gunple's fun comes from the strong pacing this structure allows, alongside good controls via shoulder strafing and 8-way ranged attacks. Hopping between town and dungeon rarely feels tedious due to the well-designed aboveground map, and there's always that "one more room!" feeling once you're actually underground.

Of course, when lives are abundant and fail states so rare, the economy hardly means much. Maxing out that 9999 rupee pou—sorry, dollar pouch also only factors into one mid-game dungeon that doesn't make a huge dent in it with paywalls. And since your main gun's ammo never runs out (so you never have to pay for more), why bother with all these optional power-up weapons you learn to use across the playthrough? A big problem with Gunple's combat is that you always want to strafe—after all, that's the best way to avoid enemy fire. (Ducking's also an option, but enemy hitboxes are jank enough to make it too risky should they glomp you while prone.) Most of the extra weapons keep you stationary while firing, making the flamethrower supreme among them. And even that armament fails to keep up with the fully upgraded pistol you get soon after. It doesn't help that you middling kinaesthetic feedback during fights, especially during boss battles where wimpy animations and sound effects make it seem like you aren't hitting a weak point or doing any damage.

Shoutouts to Robaton, this game's equivalent of Epona. It's nice to play an LTTP-like where you actually have a cool, relevant mount that even plays a story role. As another alien trapped in an earthling's form—this time a goofy, highly expressive horse—Robaton's the beating heart of this game's comedy. He goes from a trapped buffoon of a space sheriff to your only rescue at Demi's lair, after all. And he's the fastest way to get around the overworld…when you can rent his services. Enemies drop carrots which, upon pick-up, summons him to the screen. He's not just speedy, but a way to one-hit-KO any enemy, at least until the equine power-up wears off and you're back to walking. I certainly didn't have much trouble one-shotting enemies by late-game, yet this power-up felt most useful of them all whenever I got stuck in the dungeon-crawling doldrums.

Couple all this with competent but uninspired enemy variety and you've got a pleasant but overly easy and tiresome few hours of C-rate Smash TV. Dungeons themselves lack any notable puzzles, except in the form of dodging puzzles involving bats or unkillable entities. Drops like health hearts and power-ups come from every other enemy you down, and treasure chests couldn't be more obvious everywhere you go. I think Gunple would be a legit great choice for anyone new to 2D Zelda-like action adventures, but it's much less satisfying if you know even a few of those games' tropes. Only a couple of boss fights have patterns I'd consider threatening or simply interesting; the hitboxes on many attacks are a bit jank and misshapen, too. Most of the time I'm just barreling through copy-paste rooms and corridors with nary a fight, having some fun zipping by. I suppose your kid's fast jog and overpowered arsenal remedies things.

What can't be remedied, or easily explained, is this game's wildly vacillating tone and presentation. It goes from super-deformed frolicking among green hills and dusty canyons to your own dad abusing you up because you want to leave home and defeat the evil. We have these wild-west aliens running the plot, from the space sheriff possessing the protagonist to Demi corrupting this island's indigenous everything into your opposition. Though many of the NPCs have enough dialogue across the game to give me a sensible chuckle or two, it never gets that cute or amusing like EarthBound before it. As other reviews point out, there's a shallowness to the trope use, slapstick, and stereotyping used here which gets under your skin after an hour or two. It's hard to shake the feeling that Gunple's just action-packed Mother 2 fastened onto a Link to the Past weaving pattern.

Hardest to shake off would be the golliwogs. These foes, the first bandit baddies you meet and defeat, look so much like ye olde Mr. Popo or a classic minstrel doll that it leaves a strong first impression. Not a good one, might I add. You also fight tomahawk-throwing, Indigenous American-looking soldiers very late in the game, yet I'm torn on what that's actually suggesting. The wrench this game's story throws in its importation of White America-borne racial pejoratives is that Demi, the villain, is outright said to be creating, brainwashing, or working with everyone you fight. As such, it's left to interpretation whether the golliwog cowboys are, in fact, just some kind of life or matter he's morphed into a form familiar and threatening enough to the Western villagers he's encroaching on. Same goes with the tomahawk guys, who resemble the idols and statuary in their ancient abandoned tower on the edge of this world.

You see this kind of design and narrative which feels offensive at first, but then just frustratingly ambiguous all over the game. Another example: the martial artist monkeys in the northwestern tower, matching the dungeon's bosses in theme but also prompting other questions. Where these simians a fully-fledged society of their own before Demi and his Demiseed gang arrived? Did they make the tower to begin with? Have they always had these skills and smarts, or was that just the antagonist's own invention, using his tech wizardry to fashion monkeys into sentient apes? I ask all this because the game tries to go for a sort of environmental lore at one key junction in the plot: the ghost town.

This once-inhabited colony, clearly resembling your own village in scope and culture, now houses an army of the undead. Given their hostility towards you and their bosses' allegiance to Demi, I'd wager the evil alien awoke the spirits of the deceased (who all died on the surface, as if from an acute plague) to harness their disquiet. So, in the process of defeating Demi and his posse, you're inevitably returning the island to a peaceful, sustainable status quo, both for your village and the larger ecosystem. Gunple suggests that these distorted stereotypes of native things you're fighting are going to be better off once your quest's over. I don't think I'm stretching with this interpretation so much as the game simply cannot decide whether or not it's going to be clever with its lore, and how that plays into the story's themes.

Rather than actively pushing a white man's burden at the expense of all those outside the white village's purview, Gunple just seems to make a mockery of it all. If there's any critique or praise of imperialism happening in the background, it's mostly coming from the Demiseeds' transformation of this island into a colorful wasteland. And if doing a little tomb raiding for 1UPs helps you save the village from destruction, what's to say that isn't a better alternative? Sure, it's all way too frivolous to mean much of anything, but I disagree with interpretations of this as subliminal Manifest Destiny apologia.

(Except the whole Lara Croft-style looting of archaeological artifacts from dungeons, namely the aforementioned towers. They only end up as score points, but for whom? The space police keeping track of all this? Not like the villagers care—they're just happy to inflate your wallet for clearing a bounty on each boss.)

The child-beating and damsel-in-distress moments are more damning to me, especially since they happen at key turns in the game's plot. Gunple paints your hero's journey as a test of manhood, a lightly patriarchal "man's gotta do what he must" story echoing the classic western media that artist Nakagawa was familiar with in the manga sphere. And for all the spoofs and cast's laughing at you, the most amusing thing is how easy this game portrays your rite of passage. Hell, it pokes fun at itself, with most of the village slack-jawed in awe at this kid mercilessly gunning down a whole range of bosses and bestiary. Only the obligatory childhood sweetheart realizes and learns to her dismay who's really behind the heroics. This makes for a cute happy ending after all the chaos, but the aftertaste is foul.

Despite all my prior critique, I managed to have fun playing Gunman's Proof in one go. A lot of that comes down to generally excellent audiovisuals, from the lavishly animated main characters to richly illustrated landscapes. Sure, many of the dungeons are basically copying Link to the Past's presentation, but they also try different types of decoration and art stylings than Lenar's inspiration. At the very least, having such a nice backdrop makes traveling the world pleasing despite other hang-ups. Many bosses and enemies also have appealing, fantastical designs and animations, specifically guys like Ghost Suzuki (who you fight twice) and Baron Alps (whose hubris contrasts with him losing his pants) wielding their bevy of gizmos and secret weapons. The art budget here exceeds what time and resources the team had for making a more coherent game elsewhere.

Same goes for the music, which is surprisingly great! I really wish Gunple had any credits screen at all so I could learn who wrote and/or programmed the soundtrack. Plenty of tracks evoke the island's history and surroundings, while others create moods of adventure or sheer menace. In this Strange World, the dulcet tones of home mix well with a galloping hoedown across the land.

For as chaotically mid as the game is, Gunple: Gunman's Proof is, well, proof that the whole can exceed its parts. Definitely approach this one with a grain of salt, but if you find the game loop enjoyable, don't hesitate to surrender to its whims for a while. I think it's decent enough for the 5-hour runtime, even if I'll very likely never replay it. This gave me such a wickedly up-and-down ride that I can't recommend it in good conscience, but maybe you'll get a kick out of this. Others have pointed out worse ways to spend a few hours than an inconsistent Zelda-clone turned run 'n' gun. At least there's some cool tokusatsu-style villain interactions, and fun easter eggs like the developers apologizing to you when trying to open a chest upon Robato.

But above all, I believe this game would be perfect ROM-hack material for any intrepid 6502 coders out there! It hints at such a better game that I can't help but wonder what we'd get from its assets and mechanics today. A remake could turn this from an entertaining but misguided story of heroics into a more complex Western reckoning with the frontier's past and future. Dungeons could get new, simple puzzles and other set-pieces for variety, plus a tangible use for that scoring system beyond 1UPs. The late-game difficulty sorely needs a boost, as do your power-up weapons and moveset in general. And removing the golliwogs + other problematic content in favor of appropriate but less offensive material would help so much. I'd give a yeehaw for any of that!

And so another game nearly too simple to deserve my ravings races off into the sunset. Here's to the next highly questionable but fascinating game of its, uh, caliber.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Jan. 31 – Feb. 6, 2023

ok 3 2 1 let's jam waggles to Cowboy Bebop as I light up the doobie and duel 'em

You have Kee Games to thank for gaming's original tank controls. I mean, it's in the name. But more than that, Steve Bristow's simpler take on the 1-on-1 vehicular combat of Spacewar! would end up saving Atari. Pong may have started that company's rise to fame, but the Pong market crash around the turn of 1974, plus the successful but loss-leading Gran Trak 10, put Bushnell & Dabney's venture on thin ice. The upstart, rockstar company that had made video games a fad almost met its demise, if not for the efforts of the affiliated company Bristow worked at.

Though technically a subsidiary of Atari, Kee Games had unique management and technical staff, such as experienced coin-op techie Bristow. They profited off of Pong clones while even Atari's originals couldn't, making waves in regions where Atari couldn't distribute. And then Tank happened. It quickly grew in popularity at trade shows and location tests, soon displacing the ailing Pong-likes that had flooded arcade and jukebox venues over the last year and a half. Atari's own Gran Trak 10, a revolution in arcade gaming, struggled to compete. What was so different this time?

Obviously this was and remains a very simple action game. You use two sticks to rotate or move back and forth, much like operating any construction or military treaded vehicle. But like Gran Trak, you weren't just shooting at the other player on an almost entirely black screen. The "course", or maze in Tank's case, let players strategize and tactically move towards and around each other. You could play mind games and take risky shots like never before, not even in then complex faire like Quadrapong. Just as fighting games today each have a meta, Bristow's game encouraged a similar kind of community learning and one-upmanship far beyond mere table tennis. The more complex controls didn't throw arcade-goers off—if anything, that added sense of realism or simulation made it more approachable.

In turn, Tank had finally achieved the "Spacewar! for the public" dream that Pitts & Tuck, Syzygy/Nutting, and then Atari had sought. Kee Games would sell more than a hundred thousand boards and cabinets through 1974 and beyond. Because Atari owned them with 90% company stock, this provided a financial and commercial boon. Tank and Gran Trak would, in tandem, prove that video games were more than a transient trend—coin-op businesses could expect these contraptions to improve, invent, and immerse their customers well beyond Pong.

Tank and its iterative sequels were so foundational for Atari & Kee Games that it would later influence their first multi-game cartridge console. The Atari VCS specifically borrows its iconic joystick design from a Tank II mini-console prototype, and an expanded port of Tank dubbed Combat was the main pack-in launch title alongside the system in 1977. While this may be as rudimentary as vehicular dueling has ever been, even compared to its space-borne predecessors, Tank's earned its place in arcade & video game history.

On today's episode of Georama: turban boy loots cool knives, Goro jobs again, the town NIMBYs residents complain about some missing orbs (wait, that's Jak), a gun-toting moon rabbit breaks the game in half, literal "dark Cloud" dumps his backstory all in the final dungeon, and the player runs out of water or weapon health again!

Just a day in the life of Level-5's debut game, a less-than-clever but earnest homage to ActRaiser & other mid-'90s alternative ARPGs and dungeon-crawlers. I keep reading reviews from others who bounce off due to awkward controls, even more awkward mechanics, and truly awkward moments in the story and progression further in. But I think it's that awkwardness which set my expectations to a reasonable level. You're not getting a polished experience here, not in the slightest. This was an experiment, a way for ex-Riverhill Soft veterans to dip their feet in a genre their former employers shied away from. And ever since, Dark Cloud's hung over them, looming in the distance as a reminder of when Level-5 made standalone adventures. They've been chasing media-mix behemoths like Inazuma Eleven, Yokai Watch, and Megaton Musashi since the HD era, but I wish they'd consider making something quaint like this title again.

That said, I don't blame anyone for jumping straight to the sequel, even considering its own jank. A journey around the world rebuilding towns and people's lives sounds great, but you spend most of your time in randomly generated dungeons, dealing with combat and item/equipment management. The game's enemies usually aren't hard to deal with, having just one or two predictable attacks. It's things like weapon deterioration, imperfect hitboxes, and certain dungeon floors forcing you to use a subpar character (ex. Goro…) which sully the fun. At least you get more than enough consumables for repairing your gear or haste-ing through levels. For all its rough bits, the crawling-fighting loop here is competent enough, and often bite-sized in a way that makes it easy to return to at any time.

Dark Cloud shines with its Georama system, where you use the Cool Orbs found in dungeons to rebuild whichever town they correspond to. This means not just placing buildings and land features in ways that make sense, but re- enabling the lives and schedules of others. Norune Village at the beginning sums this up very well, as any opening part of a game should. Talking with each and every villager you rescue from purgatory gives usable hints on how to improve their homes and hearth. Get things wrong and you suffer consequences, such as Gaffer falling from his ladder and only selling a limited shop inventory if you don't add items in order. Maximizing your ratings with each Georama section involves a rewarding loop of conversing with everyone to find that right balance, then scouring the premises for bonus item chests you get from higher ratings. I wish you didn't have some key moments tied to gimmicky quick-time rhythm games, but at least those are over quick.

Much like ActRaiser back in the day, Level-5's game thrives on the symbiosis between two game loops—one consumptive and one creative—with dungeon crawling playing into world creation and then back. Neither part of the game's that complex or involving on their own, but mesh so well in the midst of a playthrough. This works great for most of the game, but then the last two areas (Moon and Gallery of Time) sag in quality by misusing the dynamic. At the same time you're doing more, harder levels testing your character/weapon builds and inventory, the Georama segments get very linear and predictable. What before offered an illusion of a customizable, in-depth experience becomes more obvious, more repetitive. Now sure, I love to upgrade and evolve weapons in this game, but that system works best in service to tangible progress. As mentioned, awkward elements are easier to forgive when the story's active, the world's offering something new, and the end's somewhere in sight.

That leads me to another glaring issue: Dark Cloud's story is comically backloaded, to the detriment of earlier, better designed sequences like Matataki and Queens. It's already a simple tragic tale of an antihero's love interrupted, leading to even greater calamity across time. But shoving the majority of that larger narrative into the final dungeon reeks of "we had to rush this part, sorry!". Until then, you're left with a rather generic "defeat the Dark Genie" plot which gets stuck in the background until Muska Lacka. By contrast, Dark Cloud 2 does a way better job of revealing and twisting the main plot from start to finish, albeit via some more blockbuster tropes and framing. The prequel's so much more about atmosphere and light character interactions up until the last stretch. Again, it's less that the story's bad, more that it's needlessly thin and tangential to what you're doing for most of your playthrough. (What I've heard of the studio's following non-Dragon Quest games tells me Akihiro Hino still doesn't know how to write a rock-solid story or world, honestly.)

However, atmosphere is one way this game rises above that problem. Part of this might just come down to my own nostalgia, having played the game multiple times since the late 2000s, but it's just so charming. Dark Cloud's visual design takes a refreshing turn away from ye olde JRPG stylings, starting with the Weird West village Toan's from. The generally colorful, decently detailed town areas give life to their more sparsely constructed dungeons, both through architecture and NPC designs/dialogue. Tomohito Nishiura offers the first of many great Level-5 soundtracks, with its simple and clean arrangement of melodious multi-genre tunes. I could listen to tracks for locales like the Wise Owl Wood, Shipwreck, Matataki Village, or Queens all day. The user interface shows its age in terms of usability—far from bad, far from ideal—but it's easy enough to navigate and has a comfortable leather-and-parchment feel too. Cozy's an accurate word for this game in general, even during its darkest story moments (some unnerving enemies aside).

If you haven't tried either Dark Cloud game, I'd recommend at least trying this one before moving on to the sequel. It's definitely not as polished, expansive, or impressive, but the original's elegance and much shorter time to completion make it a closer contest. Beating the game lets you play through a very tricky bonus dungeon, ideal for testing out your super-weapons and enjoying that excellent ambiance. Both series entries are available on recent PlayStation systems and can emulate very well. Overall, I'd have a fun time replaying this right now, assuming I didn't have bigger priorities in my backlog. So many of the aspects that define Level-5's better-known, more recent games appear here in a primordial form. At the very least, it's a strong launch-period PS2 release which is worth experience both in that context and on its own merits.

P.S. Make sure to level Ruby towards the back half of the game. The final boss is weak to certain elements which are best targeted using either her magic or the right magic-infused weapon with Xiao or Osmond. Regardless, don't skimp on ranged combat!