Author: mpklamerus

Indie Game Roundup (Sept. 27, 2024)

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Well, this is the last roundup I’m doing before Cohost becomes read-only, so if you’ve enjoyed these consider subscribing to my RSS feed? I’ve still got a backlog of games to post about but if there’s something cool you’ve (or a friend) worked on, please let me know either on social media or in the comments here. Or even just comment on this post with what you’ve been playing lately, indie or not, I always love to hear that too.

purple bug sitting in a floatation device and the text says good night egg bug

With Cohost winding down, some people have started to make games and toys featuring its mascot Eggbug. You can find some in this collection on Itch.io but I’m sure there’s plenty of other games too, like this game and this eggbug creation tool.

Speaking of Cohost, people there keep talking about how great Crypt Worlds (Itch.io) is. I haven’t played it yet but the devs have been making free games for a long time and it sounds like they could really use the support right now, so consider picking it up.

I’m not a racing person but Golden Lap (Steam) seems like a fun management game from the people who brought you Art of Rally.

Parking Garage Rally Circuit (Steam) looks like a Sega Saturn-ish inspired arcade racing game and the reviews for it have been very positive so far.

screenshot of a little purple kobold and a dragon sitting on a nest in a jail cell
Gurk in Trouble

Ramón Wilhelm made a free point-and-click adventure game a while ago that I really enjoyed called Yip Quest, and he’s back at it again with another kobold adventure game called Gurk in Trouble (Itch.io). It’s free and playable in the browser too.

It was part of the $108 Adventure Game Challenge game jam, which got a bunch of entries. Consider checking those out on Itch.

person running in a rundown hallway and there's a text parser
Terminal City

There were also some really interesting adventure games that were made for the PowerJam3 game jam back in August too (see, big backlog of things to post). These games (Itch.io) were made using the PowerQuest plugin for Unity. PowerQuest is a tool just for making point-and-click adventures and kinda sorta feels like Adventure Game Studio from my limited experience with both. The one that seemed to get the most attention was Terminal City, a game that plays like an endless runner but with a text parser, but check them all out.

two people standing in front of a hospital and the man saying "This hospital is strangely silent for a medical facility"
Devil’s Hideout

Devil’s Hideout (Steam/Itch.io) came out earlier this month if you’re looking for horror point-and-click adventures. I’m a big fan of Cosmic Void’s games and this is another great one.

first person view of a gun shooting at some bugs and a big worm
Exophobia

Exophobia (Steam) is a retro-looking FPS that was released back in July that I enjoyed even despite some of my exhaustion of the retro FPS revival that’s happening (partially because they just look and don’t feel retro). This one is kind of a mix of early FPS like Wolfenstein 3D and Catacomb 3D and Metroid-style exploration games.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading!

Random CompUSA Link Dump

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The process of copying over all my posts from Cohost before the shutdown continues, here’s some more things you might like to look at. You can find more of these posts here.

This blog contains a few photos of a CompUSA store.

Here is a short YouTube video of people buying Windows 95 on launch day at CompUSA and Egghead Software.

And here is a random photo of the kids section at a CompUSA. I think I just grabbed this from a google image search

the kids section of CompUSA that has a sign saying Comp Kids and looks like a short and planet

What I’m Up To (2024-09-25)

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Busy week here! After a rough start with the kids getting a cold at the beginning of the week, I’ve actually got a lot done.

The big thing I’ve been annoying about on social media this week is my wall of buttons that link to other pages. People from Cohost have been getting really into having button links since the site shuts down in less than a week and everyone is getting into personal pages since we want to continue long posting but not go to Tumblr, which I had deleted after they got into AI scraping and their CEO has repeatedly screwed up in a variety of ways. It’s been a lot of fun adding them and I encourage everyone to make a button for their site and let me know about it so I can include it.

The other exciting thing, which I can’t really say much about yet, is that Mystery Project is really taking off this week and I’m learning everything I can about Adventure Game Studio so I can make a game in that. I have also started working on art for it. It should be revealed in 2-3 months and is actually a very tiny project, but exciting to me.

The Great Album Project (2024-09-24)

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My journey to listen to every record I have continues!

cover of the album King's Chill vol. 2, featuring an old desktop computer by some music equipment

Dr. Pete Larson: Field Drift 2 (2023, Bandcamp)
For some reason I thought this was going to be field recordings but it’s actually minimalist electronic music. I think it’s pretty great. It was created by Dr. Pete Larson, a local musician in Ann Arbor. I got this one for free when I bought a different record and got this as an unexpected bonus.

Various Artists: Dropchord sountrack (2013, Bandcamp)
Soundtrack for a now unavailable game. I remember enjoying the game and this is a nice soundtrack that fits it. It’s just a solid compilation of noisy, danceable electronic music with maybe a small dubstep influence to it as well since it was published in 2013.

Mint Mile: Roughrider (2024, Bandcamp)
The latest and best (imo) album by them. Tim Midyett’s (most famous for Silkworm) current band. I think they’re great

The Fall: The Frenz Experiment (1988, YouTube)
I don’t actually have that many The Fall records and this was a pickup I got about half a year ago. I really enjoyed this one. The reviews for this one were positive but I saw one or two that think the band went on autopilot for this one. I can maybe see that for one or two of the songs but it also has some of their most well known songs like Victoria and Hit the North, two of my favorites.

Various Artists, produced by Space Quest Historian: King’s Chill Vol. 2 (2021, Bandcamp)
A collection of chill and electronic covers (remixes?) of songs from the King’s Quest series. To be honest, I don’t actually know a lot of songs on this one that well since a lot are from KQ 5 and 8, which I haven’t played in a long time, but I still think it’s pretty great.

Mary Timony: Untame the Tiger (2024, Bandcamp)
I really only know Mary’s stuff in her heavier rock bands like Ex Hex, Wild Flag, and Helium but the songwriting in here is excellent. I’ve have one of her solo albums from 20 years ago, but even that has a very different sound. This almost has more of a country sound in parts. I think it’s cool that all of her bands and solo work are all under the Rock genre but still have very different sounds.

Blog Roundup (2024-09-23)

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With us now entering the last week of Cohost posting, I’ve been making an effort to follow more blogs and sites through my RSS feed reader. Here are some I would recommend!

Katherine Morayati has bee posting old postcards and the history behind them in postcardposting one and two.

ALOCASIA is a journal queer plant-based writing and issue #10 just came out. They’re free to read but donations are always appreciated.

Ephemeral Enigmas regularly covers older and more obscure video games. This time it’s about Game Boy game Battle Unit Zeoth.

Interactive fiction writer Andrew Plotkin goes into the history of a sea shanty. It’s maybe not safe for work.

I love personal blogs too. This one is a shorter post on the thoughts when getting into blogging.

If you want to see an example of Tosting, posting directly into the RSS feed so the post doesn’t show up on the site, add this site to your RSS feed reader.

Indie Game Roundup (Sept. 20, 2024)

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Moved these to Friday because it felt weird doing them on Monday. Anyway, video games. So much has come out in the last two weeks and I cannot play it all so I’m just going to breeze through it. Multiple things I’ve been waiting a long time for too. The last month has been ridiculous.

UFO 50 (Steam) is probably the big one. Everyone probably knows about this one but it’s nice seeing it finally come out and being so well received too.

TTRPGs for Accessible Gaming Charity Bundle (Itch) will let you buy a bunch of TTRPGs for $10 or more and the money goes to charity.

isometric view of a town by the water

Judero (Steam) is another one I’ve been waiting for a long time too. Action rpg with stop-motion art is so laser targeted towards my interests.

I was a big Void Bastards fan so it’s really nice to see the devs do a spiritual sequel with a western theme with Wild Bastards (Steam).

Every version of the Videotome engine results in some cool interactive fiction games so I’m happy we now have a new version (Itch.io) that adds some dating sim inspired functionality.

The new remaster of the first Broken Sword game (Steam) looks pretty snazzy.

a black and white desktop resembling the macintosh

EyeOS (Itch.io) combines two of my favorite things, fake OS desktops and games made in Decker.

retro pixel man standing in a fork in a path

We got two King’s Quest fan games recently! One is a demake (site) of the classic King’s Quest 6 and it’s really well done and a fan project that took many years for the dev to create.

cartoon man standing in the woods outside of a tree home

It Takes Two to Tangle (site) is a fan game sequel to the game King’s Quest 7. It does an incredible job emulating the art style from that game and feels like an evolution of the mid-90s style of Sierra point-and-click adventures, which I’ve always been a fan of. The production values for this game, which I believe was mostly by one developer but had a small time outside of it, is astonishing.

Computer Store Photo Dump: Scrubbin’ Bubbles

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Since Cohost has now been confirmed to be winding down and will be read only until the end of the year before shutting down, I will start posting here (hopefully almost daily) with all the stuff that I posted on the CompStoreVisuals account there. I think most, if not all, of this should already be on the Mastodon account but I wanted to have something more permanent for the photos and videos I’m posting. Apologies for what will feel like computer store spam for a while. The “Thoughts on Cohost” post will arrive eventually (TLDR: Not a perfect site but I’m sad) but until then, enjoy?

This photo is one I actually took a long time ago on my phone. The place is now gone.

Sign for Scrubbin Bubbles
Westland, Michigan, United States

a sign saying Scrubbing Bubbles Coin Laundry Tanning & Computer Cafe

What I’m Up To (2024-09-18)

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Last week I did a check-in post and here I am, doing another one. Here’s what’s going on in my life:

  • I mentioned last week that I paused all my game dev projects because of potential contract game dev work coming up and good news, it’s here! I can’t talk about it yet but I am cramming as much GB Studio knowledge as possible and it’s very exciting. It’s not a big project at all but I think it will be fun.
  • This weekend I got to volunteer with Friends of the Rouge to replace a bunch of boring grass near me with a rain garden that will be good for pollinators and reduce runoff. It was a great experience but the workout kicked my butt and I’m finally healing from that. But if you’re feeling down about the world, go volunteer at a thing! It helped me a lot anyway.
  • I’m going to attempt to listen to my entire record collection and my previous blog post is about that.

So sort of a busy week but at the same time, not a lot to talk about either. But I’m doing well and excited to work on things I can’t talk about for a few months! Here’s photos of the rain garden in Plymouth.

Rain garden extending between a pickleball court and baseball field
Rain garden next to a pickleball court

The Great Album Project (2024-09-17)

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album cover for Same Eyes's album "parties to end" that shows a collage of photos including a city skyline, a radio tower, and a woman's face with another eye pasted over it

Inspired by the Aaron Giles page where he talks about ripping his entire cd collection, I have decided to listen to every record (and CDs and Bandcamp purchases) and give tiny blurbs on them. I’ll do these posts on a weekly basis so they won’t get overwhelming and people can just skip them. Collecting records for 15 years and marrying someone who also collects them means I have a pretty decently sized music collection in my basement, with a lot of records I haven’t heard in a long time or have never listened to. I can’t imagine this will be interesting to most people but it will be a lot of fun for me since I listen to a ton of music while programming or after work anyway. Plus maybe it will help people find new music to listen to. I actually already ripped all my CDs earlier this year so I’m not getting to those yet. Most of these reviews will have links to Bandcamp pages as well. I’m also working on a page where all of these reviews will be listed.

His Name is Alive: How Ghosts Affect Relations 1990-1993 (2024, Bandcamp)
This preorder actually arrived a bit early so I got to listen to it on vinyl before I can listen my download of it. An incredible box set containing 3 albums I love, along with some bonus tracks and booklet. The remasters sound fantastic and I can’t recommend these albums enough to people who are a fan of the dream pop/shoegaze sound that a lot of 4AD bands had at the time. It will never be weird to me that these albums were being recorded almost directly behind my childhood home while I was a kid. The main person behind this band, Warren Defever, apparently lived grew up here and then bought the home from his parents to use as a studio up until the mid 90s and I was just riding my bike by it every day. Weird! All 3 albums are great but I think my ranking of them is 1. Livonia 2. Mouth by Mouth 3. Home is in Your Head. Livonia is the first album released and named after the city where I grew up. It probably has the the most experimental sound, with the albums drifting to a more radio friendly sound with Mouth by Mouth sounding the most approachable to me.

Jean-Michel Jarre: Magnetic Fields (1981, YouTube)
I’m not an expert on him by any means and he definitely has more famous albums, but this is still a good one IMO. Just some nice electronic bleeps and bloops. It sounds more poppy and dance than I would expect from him, but again, I’ve only heard a tiny bit of his work (the Oxygene albums).

Love Spirals Downwards: Flux (1998, Bandcamp)
I feel like with the resurgence of Y2K nostalgia, especially among Gen Z folks, this seems like an album that they would be really into. This drum & bass and ambient album was released in 1998 but the version I listened to is the vinyl rerelease that came out in 2024. I think the rerelease sounds great. City Moon is the first song I heard by LSD so it will always have a soft spot for it, but I think all the songs on here are solid. To be honest, I don’t actually know the band’s discography that well outside of this and their compilation Temporal. I should probably listen to more of them since I like these two releases and have a lot of nostalgia for this era of music. I’m linking to the vinyl rerelease but there’s also a deluxe digital edition on Bandcamp that has a lot of bonus tracks. The vinyl release also features an essay and thoughts about the album too.

Mint Mile: The Bliss Point (2016, Bandcamp)
I believe this is the first EP by Tim Midyett’s band Mint Mile. Tim is more famous for being a member of Silkworm, but I really like this band too. This was not the first album I heard by them, but I think it’s a good intro for anyone curious. It’s just a very good and straightforward rock album consisting of 4 songs, maybe with the tiniest bit of a country sound in some songs

Same Eyes: “Parties to End” (2021, Bandcamp)
A synth pop/dark wave band from Ann Arbor, Michigan. I think it’s an enjoyable collection of songs if you’re a fan of 80s new wave bands. I hesitate to call it synth pop since it’s a little darker, but I think there’s also an element of cheese that makes me want to associate them with that genre too. Even though it’s clearly inspired by a lot of classic new wave/dark wave bands, I still think they have their own sound. It’s not like when a vaporwave band is just copying the same sounds as many other vaporwave bands and ends up sounding like “generic 80s synth song” (I know that’s not all vaporwave btw). Lots of Michigan connections with this album too. I discovered them through my local NPR station, local musician legend Fred Thomas helped record the album, and Warren Defever from local band His Name is Alive mastered the album at Third Man Records in Detroit

Blogging on the Phone

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People on the blogosphere right now are talking about how you should post on your blog through the phone. They’re even reblogging posts saying you should post from your phone. Well I’m here to draw the line in the sand and say I will NEVER post from my phone. In fact, maybe I’ll post exclusively from my desktop computer. I don’t care if this starts discourse, I will never use my cellular phone to make a blog post.

Here is a picture of my cat

a photo of a cat looking up at you with big eyes and expecting a snack