Author: mpklamerus

Big Myst Online Update Available Now

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

EDIT: Turns out the update is actually live now

It looks like a massive update is coming to Myst Online tomorrow.

screenshot from Cyan's facebook saying Tomorrow is URU's 20th anniversary! Can you believe it?! Neither can we. Just in time for the celebration is the latest fan update to MOULa (Myst Online re-imagined as an MMO set in the vast, explorable universe of Myst)! It includes a new D'ni area, new audio for the intro with a new voice-over by Rand Miller, updates to six fan ages, and more surprises! Visit https://mystonline.com/ to learn more.

If you thought this MMO was dead, or never even knew about it, I don’t blame you. Uru came out in 2003 and while it did alright critically, it was a big commercial flop and nearly killed Cyan. The online portion of the game was quickly shut down and was unplayable until Gametap paid to revive the game and have Cyan create new content for it. Eventually this ended too and Myst Online was shutdown again until Cyan brought it back again for free on their own servers, which are kept up by donations. It was essentially the same game as the one at the end of Gametap’s run, static and no new content, until a few years ago when Cyan started adding fan content. While it will never be a massively popular game, it does receive regular updates now and seems to be getting a big one tomorrow. I’m not sure if this will include the Descent Expansion update that has been in development for a long time, which uses content from Myst 5.

If you’re a Myst fan but have never played Myst Online, give it a shot! It’s a bit clunky and dated, but I think it still looks nice for a game from 2003 and there hasn’t really been anything like it since then. Plus you can play it entirely for free here.

Indie Game Roundup (Nov. 10, 2023)

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment
Screenshot from Roman Sands RE:Build showing people hanging out in a bar and the design having a Y2K aesthetic

Here’s some various bits of indie game news and releases that I found exciting this week.

A new version of Risk of Rain is out! I loved the original game and put so many hours into it. The sequel was well designed but wasn’t for me so it’s exciting to see this version revisited.

A new Indiepocalypse was also released. I will continue posting about this every time they’re released since every issue has cool games.

The Playdate is a very cool little thing and it’s nice we’re still getting regular updates showing off new games and other neat things.

Celestial Bodies is a new TTRPG looking for additional funding to make improvements and it looks like a nice space game.

Spritewrench has released a demo for Sunken Stones, a pirate-themed puzzle survivor-like with roguelike elements. I was a big fan of their previous game On the Peril of Parrots and think this is worth a look too.

As an occasional TTRPG designer, I’ll get a lot of ideas for games that I want to make but just don’t have the time for or ever figure out a way to make it, so it’s always really nice when someone make a game about something you’re thinking about, and probably much better than whatever I would have designed. Record Shop is a solo ttrpg about one of my favorite things, digging through the stacks of records at a record shop.

Gobliins 6 has been announced and I’m very excited.

A demo for Roman Sands RE:Build has been released and it looks incredible. I haven’t played it yet but I was a big Paratopic fan so I’ll have to make time for it soon.

Thirsty Suitors is out! This is one of the games I was most excited for this year and I will be buying it as soon as I can afford to. The reviews have been positive and I hope it does very well.

College Radio

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

I was listening to the University of Michigan’s radio station doing their weekly local music show last night and if you have a local college or public radio station, consider checking them out and supporting them if you don’t already. I discover so much more through the curation at radio stations I like than through algorithms.

Some of the stations I like are listed below and can be listened to online:
WCBN, University of Michigan’s radio station as mentioned above. There’s a lot of great local music that’s highlighted and a nice variety of other stuff too.

WPRB-FM in Princeton, especially their yearly Christmas marathon hosted by one DJ over 25 hours. I’ve discovered a lot great music local to New Jersey as well.

KEXP in Seattle has a lot of great live performances and I like their morning show.

WFMU in New Jersey is where some of my favorite shows like The Best Show got their start.

Gobliins 6 Officially Announced

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

Gobliins 6 has been officially announced through this Facebook post, with it looking like a crowdfunding campaign planned for the beginning of next year. An extremely brief preview of it was shown in an interview a few months ago and seems to feature the two characters from Gobliins 2, explaining why there’s only two I’s in the title this time.

This is very exciting news for me since I thought Gobliiins 5 was a very nice revival and the thought of getting a new Gobliiins game every other year seems very nice.

I’m the Computer Man

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes credited as a commercial for Macs, this was a video created by the Mac IT department at Good Humor’s advertising agency. The video itself is a parody of a parody. Scatman was a hit song in the 90s, leading to a commercial parody by the Good Humor ice cream company, leading to the video I’m posting about today.

From Reddit:
“The original Scat Man song came out in 1994. Then Good Humor used in their famous commercial in 1996. Then the Mac IT department at Good Humor’s advertising agency (McCann-Erickson) created this parody video in 1997 for their company party. The ‘Computer Man’ was their head of McCann-Erickson’s Mac IT department, hence the digs at Windows 95. It wasn’t a real commercial that was aired on TV which is why there is no company contact information at the end of the commercial.

The reason the IT department at McCann-Erickson made this parody video is because the Good Humor commercial was very successful for their the company, so it was the kind of thing they’d joke around about at the company party. And of course they already had access to all of the music assets and talent they needed to record the parody song.”

Game Conventions

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

With a major narrative game convention happening now where an organizer got angry with people asking for a mask mandate, just a reminder that any convention could do one and protect people from covid and other things if they really wanted to. Smaller conventions like Narrascope, Protospiel, and my local zine fest do them, larger conventions like PAX did them when they cared. So it’s possible for a convention of any size to have one and if you won’t do it because your team can’t enforce one, what makes you think that you can enforce any other safety rules and should have the convention in the first place?

The Plex Server Rabbit Hole

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

If this blog has been quiet lately, it’s basically because I got really into building a Plex server for streaming my collection of movies/tv/music. It all basically kicked off because of the Bandcamp fiasco and realizing that I should probably have all this stuff backed up. I already had a few SSDs from my dad, who no longer wanted them, so I bought a docking station and started throwing stuff on there. Realizing I had a lot of room leftover, I then started ripping my entire cd collection. Seeing that I still had a ton of room after that, I’ve start putting my film and tv collection together, mostly from ripping my dvd and bluray collection, something I’ll probably be doing for quite a while.

While most of the media on my server had come from my physical collection, I was surprised at how many various places digitally I had accumulated music from. Sources include Bandcamp, Amazon, Itch, Humble, iTunes, Steam, and GOG since I listen to a lot of video game music as well. I also had some movies digitally from various kickstarters I had backed, that brief period when GOG tried selling films, as well as that period where comedians were selling DRM free specials for $5. This seems to have died out, which is a shame because I really enjoyed having DRM free movies. There aren’t really many places where you can pick up DRM free copies of films and tv shows but I did stumble across a few places like Rifftrax, Drafthouse Films, Internet Archive for public domain films, Found Footage Festival, and Vimeo.

I’m not really sure what comes next for the server. Probably buying larger hard drives, but I don’t think I’ll have a machine just for the media server since this is just for my home. It’s still been a fun project though and a nice way to revisit my physical media collection.

Indie Game Roundup (Nov. 3, 2023)

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a bunch of recent games I’ve enjoyed lately and other neat stuff

We got a new batch of Domino Club games! Domino Club is an anonymous collective of game developers creating games for jams for the last couple of years. Every jam provides a bunch of interesting experimental games and I recommend checking out the other jams too.

The Games for Gaza bundle is still going! Get a ton of great games and help some people out.

A new Click Or Treat bundle is out. I was lucky enough to be in the one last year with a bunch of great games and this one has a new batch of great games for the season.

Schloss der Wölfe is a short, free horror-themed World War II FPS by David Lindsey Pittman, who has made some great games like Neon Struct and Eldritch.

A new Choicebeat is out! Choicebeat is a free zine covering interactive fiction, adventure games, and other narrative focused games.

There is a new Super Rare Mixtape focused on indie horror games.

The new Indie Tsushin for October covers a bunch of indie games from Japan and features a lot of interviews as well.

karyogenesys is a short atmospheric walking sim with light puzzle elements with a style inspired by the first System Shock. It is now available for pre-order with a launch planned for early next year.

A Kickstarter has launched for the adventure game Brain Hotel: Remodeled. The game is designed by Mark Darin, who worked at Telltale and made indie adventure games like the Nick Bounty series

Emulating LucasArts Games With DREAMM

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

While ScummVM is the go-to emulator for LucasArts adventure games these days, there’s another one people should consider using. DREAMM is an emulator focused on LucasArts games that relies on low-level emulation instead of reverse engineering, providing a more accurate emulation of these games over ScummVM. The emulator was created by Aaron Giles, who previously worked at LucasArts and created many of the Mac ports for their games. You can hear him discuss the emulator here.

In addition to it providing more accurate emulation for LucasArts adventure games, having a focus on LucasArts games means it supports a lot of games ScummVM never will, like Yoda Stories, Rebel Assault 2, and Mortimer and the Riddles of the Medallion. You can view the complete list of games it supports here.