Aran’s Bike Trip is an interactive travelogue where you follow along on a bike trip through the Dutch countryside through a series of 360º photos. The game says it’s a short bike trip but it’s about someone riding their bike for two days, which doesn’t feel short to me. This is a game by Sokpop Collective, a small group that has been making a variety of short games for years, but this one is a pretty big stylistic departure from their other games. I think it would be a stretch to say the game has FMV since all you do is look at the panoramic photos of the Dutch countryside while looking at notes from the designer and listening to calming music, but it’s very nice. Sometimes a game can just be an excuse to look at photos of beautiful places in the world. It even inspired me to make a really tiny game about walking on a trail near my home.
Aran’s Bike Trip is available on Steam and Itch.io.
Developer: Taylor McCue Publisher: Taylor McCue Year: 2022 Genre: Visual Novel System: Game Boy
He Fucked the Girl Out of Me is a short Game Boy visual novel created in GB Studio about the developer’s experiences being a transgender sex worker and the trauma that came from doing that work. The player advances the story by walking around different scenes and talking to various characters and is about 40 minutes long.
He Fucked the Girl Out of Me was one of my favorite games of 2022 for many reasons. It’s incredible to see someone put out a semi-autobiographical story like this where where they are so vulnerable. The game uses the limitations of the Game Boy so well and I think the artwork in this game is fantastic. Another thing I loved about it was that it was for a platform created by Nintendo. Even today, Nintendo is known as a company that does not approve of adult queer content on their platforms and I loved seeing someone use one of their consoles to tell a personal story. It’s inspiring seeing retro consoles and computers being used to create experimental games and tell stories that we didn’t see very often in games thirty years ago, when queer games like Caper in the Castro and GayBlade were a rarity.
Unfortunately this is one of the games that has been hit by the Itch.io deindexings, making it harder to find. I know the developer has put it on the Internet Archive and encouraged other people to host downloads of it, but it’s still heartbreaking that queer stories like this are under attack because of pressure by Mastercard and Visa. I hope that one day people will be able to create their art without capitalism trying to stamp it out.
Five Years Old Memories is a short interactive experience where you listen to people in Japan talk about memories they have from when they were about five years old and interacting with animations that play while they talk. It’s very short and only takes about 20 minutes to play through. I’ve played it a few times now, with my most recent playthrough happening because I thought it would be fun to revisit and also get all the achivements, which rewarded me by stumbling upon an element or two that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. The art is fantastic and it’s really cute seeing this storybook-like pictures animating as you listen to their stories. There’s not a whole lot to say about this one other than I really like it and think it’s worth checking out if this sounds appealing to you since it’s only $3.
Five Years Old Memories is available on Steam, Itch.io, and iOS.
Developer: Kemco Publisher: Kemco Year: 1993 Genre: Platformer System: NES
Kid Klown in Night Mayor World is a pretty basic platformer for the NES where an evil magician has kidnapped your clown family and it’s up to you, Kid Klown, to rescue them. You run through level throwing balloons with the only real innovation being that you can also put balloons on the ground and jump on them to give you a big jump, or hold onto a balloon to descend slowly after jumping. It’s all very basic and the game can be completed in about an hour since it’s pretty easy. The only real challenge is on the final level where you have to go through a frustrating maze sequence that feels more like padding than a challenge, since the game gives you many opportunities for extra lives. It’s not an amazing game but I do have a soft spot for it since I completed it as a child without using any cheats, which felt like a pretty rare thing to happen for me due to the difficulty of so many NES games.
So none of that is really that interesting, what I did find interesting was the background of the game. It was originally a Mickey Mouse platformer in Japan and part of the Crazy Castle series, which played very differently and ALSO not a Mickey Mouse game here. In the US it used a Bugs Bunny license. For whatever reason they did not use that license and decided to launch their own IP, Kid Klown. It’s not a terribly interesting IP, you’re a kid who happens to be a clown. Everything about the original Mickey Mouse version sounds much more interesting since occasionally uses music from Disney properties for the game and known Disney characters for the villains instead of brand new enemies that aren’t particularly interesting.
Kemco continued to use the Kid Klown IP in a half assed way where most of the games in the series weren’t even released as Kid Klown games in the US, none of them were platformers like this, and the character was redesigned after this first game as well. There was a runner game for the SNES called Crazy Chase, a second Crazy Chase that only came out in Japan, a Game Boy Color puzzle game that was later released as an entry in the Crazy Castle series here, and a Playstation puzzle game that did come out here but didn’t have the Kid Clown name in the title.
Just overall a very weird history of an IP they owned and sorta tried to push but never did it consistently anywhere.
Kid Klown in Night Mayor World is available for the NES on your favorite rom site.
I already made a post like this on my birthday but it’s Library Card Sign-up Month! If you haven’t already, here’s another reminder to sign up for a library card if you don’t have one. They aren’t just for books! Mine offers movies, cds, comics, board games, video games, and more. Plus it’s a space where you can study and do work and have meetups.
Your local library may also have free digital services you can get through your card. Mine has Kanopy, Hoopla, and Libby (and probably others). Kanopy is a great streaming service for movie and tv that offers things to watch similar to what you would see on the Criterion Channel. Hoopla offers movies, ebooks, and audiobooks. Libby is focused purely on ebooks and audio books. Anyway, libraries are great. They’re a third place that would never be allowed to be created today.
Developer: On-Line Systems Publisher: On-Line Systems Year: 1980 Genre: Adventure System: Apple II
I finally played one of the first graphic adventures (the first I know of but I thought “this”very first” was under debate?) and the first game by Roberta Williams and Sierra and: It’s cute.
Mystery House is a text adventure with very basic line graphics where you are locked in a house with other folks and must find some hidden jewels. You start seeing dead bodies showing up and need to figure out who the murderer is and stop them before it’s too late. The actual design of the game is very basic, as you would expect for an adventure on home computers at this time, and you type in commands to walk around the house, find clues and items, and use them to progress elsewhere. It’s a pretty short game where you restart a few times since it relies on learning through failure a little bit but it’s not as cruel about it as a lot of later adventure games. The biggest thing I actually fought with was the parser. Even though it’s incredibly early in the genre’s lifespan, other text adventures already had better parsers at the time. I also found that the graphics also make the game harder since pure text tells you everything you can interact with, this game needs you to guess what the correct object name is to interact with it. Sometimes it’s also just hard to see what you should be trying to use. The game also features a pretty annoying maze. So maybe not a game I would really recommend to folks for the plot but I still had a fun enough time playing something of historical importance. Renga in Blue has a very good writeup of the game and I definitely liked it more than him, but I agree with all of the criticisms of it.
One of the weirdest parts of the game to me is that there is an optional person you may never see, a grave digger named Joe. You can walk to a graveyard outside of the house (so I guess you aren’t actually locked in?) with six graves dug in the yard. If you walk into one of the graves, he buries you alive. But you don’t actually need to see him or go into the grave to complete the game so I have no idea why this screen exists. You can also stab him and kill him, which seems a bit excessive. But he does try to kill you if given the opportunity so I guess he deserves it? It’s all really weird.
It also got a release in Japan a little bit later with some slightly better graphics. I don’t know how the rest of the game or its parser is.
Anyway, glad I played it. It’s dated and simplistic but it’s also short enough that I think if you’re a little generous with the walkthrough to deal with the clunky parser, you might have some fun with the novelty of playing the first Sierra game.
Mystery House is public domain and available for free to download such as the ScummVM website.
