My rewatch of the 1st Doctor era continues. Here’s what I watched (and listened to!) this week
Edge of Destruction It’s fine. It’s really ambitious to have a more psychological story this early on but even at the story only being 2 episodes it feels a little long. Plus the odd character behavior is never really explained that well. Still, from what I recall it’s kinda the only Tardis only story from the original series? Or at least one of the very few?
Marco Polo Obviously watched the reconstruction since all the episodes are missing. I know this is supposed to be a hidden gem but oof, couldn’t get past the yellow face for some of the characters. It would only be worse if we had the actual footage.It’s fascinating that the Doctor really isn’t in this one much and even William Russell seemed to be annoyed by this from reading about the production. It’s also wild that this story takes place over months instead of just a few days like most Doctor Who stories.
Really impressed with the reconstruction quality though, including having the actor who played Marco Polo doing an intro for the story as an older version of the character. Marco Polo is a jerk.
I guess I would recommend the novelization though? The story itself is fine.
Doctor Who: The Companion Chronicles – Quinnis My first Big Finish story as part of the rewatch! I’ve listened to a lot of them before but as part of my rewatch I’m trying to listen to any along the way that would slot in nicely with where I’m at in the rewatch. So I picked Quinnis, a story in their Companion Chronicles line which is sorta in-between an audio book and radio drama. It’s narrated by the actress who played Susan so she acts her lines out and there’s also special effects, but narrates other parts. I thought it would make sense to listen to a prequel set before the series starts but it’s being told after Doctors 1-8 and references stuff at the beginning of the story that came up during with the 8th Doctor’s era like Susan’s son so I guess I goofed on this one. Ah well.
The production is nice and it’s a decent story. It also does a good job of staying true to that version of the Doctor and Susan. It’s not a groundbreaking story but a fun enough one off and has better pacing than a lot of 1st Doctor stories. I just wish it wasn’t referencing other Big Finish stuff. There’s probably other 1st doctor audio stories I would recommend over this, there’s some I’m really looking forward to listening to in my library, but it’s a fun story and pretty cheap too so why not. Only an hour long too.
Well, it’s Friday so here’s a bunch of recent games and games-related events that I thought were pretty cool. If you recently released something that you want included, always feel free to send me an email or message me on social media (see About page) to let me know it’s out.
The Queer Games Festival The Queer Games Festival just announced its shortlist for the year, meaning you can check out a great collection of games right here.
DEAD END Holiday Demo I really like holiday themed versions of video games and AERIFORM just released a Christmas version of their top-down Metal Gear-inspired stealth game DEAD END.
Screenshot from pareidolia in █▄██▄▄
pareidolia in █▄██▄▄ Created for Yuri Game Jam 2023, it’s a game where you design and dressup an angel and walk around a city. Really cool art style and it sounds like it will continue to get updates too.
Holiday Bundles A couple of indie game bundles have recently launched. For the price of a AAA game you could get almost two hundred instead through the Christmas Indie Game Bundle and the Holiday Indie Super Bundle.
New Games from Michigan Tech University Students Husky Game Development, the game making club at Michigan Tech University, released their games for the semester. You can play games like Iridos, Monstrous, and more on their Itch page.
Bahnsen Knights
Bahnsen Knights LCB Game Studio just launched their latest visual novel on Steam. All of their games have an incredibly cool art style and something creepy going on, this one being about a religious cult. So consider checking that out if that’s your thing.
Polygon’s Favorite TTRPGs of 2023 Polygon just put out their list of the best ttrpgs they played this year and there’s some really nice stuff. If you’re looking to try something that isn’t D&D or just want to find out what you possibly missed, check the list out. It features a nice variety of tabletop rpgs.
Here’s a bunch of recent blog and website posts that I really enjoyed. I doubt this is a thing I’ll be doing every week. There’s just been so many posts I’ve enjoyed lately and didn’t know where to talk about it. As usually, these are places I follow through Inoreader, a free RSS feed reader for the web, and I think they’re worth adding to your RSS feed reader of choice.
Indie Tsushin has a nice interview with Japanese indie game developer HesoRider.
Bobbins’ Olde Tomb Of Videogames has another post highlighting great games this week. The highlight for me was the Joust remake since I feel the need to play every version of Joust that I can find.
If you’re looking for Christmas themed games to play this month, there’s quite a few point-and-click adventures that are a good fit.
Watch Over Christmas I already mentioned this one in my winter games post but Watch Over Christmas is a nice one to check out if you’re looking for a family friend adventure game. It’s a longer game but not too difficult, features nice 2D art, and has quality of life features like hotspot highlighting.
Last Christmas Last Christmas is a darker, short adventure game where you are playing Frankie and have to prepare Christmas for his girlfriend at a cabin and features multiple endings. The original version of the game was created for Adventure Jam 2022 but has been expanded into a full game. Make sure to read the content warnings on the Steam page before picking it up.
Azazel’s Christmas Fable Azazel’s Christmas Fable is a comedic game inspired by 90’s adventures. You play as Azazel, an imp, and must track down the “source of joy” originating from the North Pole and destroy it. It’s a really charming and cute retro-looking adventure game that’s pretty family friendly. The game isn’t too long, but not too short either, and it has some fun post-game material where you can spend time looking for collectibles and talking various characters from the game.
Lake – Season’s Greetings Season’s Greetings is a DLC prequel to the game Lake. You play as a mail carrier that explores a town set in the 80s and talks to various people living there while delivering the mail. I was a big fan of Lake and its relaxed pace and looking forward to revisiting the game in this DLC.
Parsely: Kringle Krisis If you’re looking for something a little different, this Christmas version of the Parsely series has players going through a text adventure in tabletop rpg form by having one player be the parser and give responses to the commands the other players are giving.
Since I do a weekly roundup of indie games I get excited about and have seen a couple people express frustration at discovering new stuff, I thought I would list all the ways I hear about new games. In no way is this meant to be the “best way” to find them, it’s just my current process. Hopefully you’ll discover a couple of neat things from it and add it to whatever you do to discover cool games. Please don’t get mad if I left your thing out, this was all off the top of my head and there’s way better uses of everyone’s time that being mad at a blog post. But if you do know of other neat things, please leave them in the comments so I can follow along too!
Every once in a while there’s discourse online about indie games coverage and how there’s not enough people talking about them on sites but there really are a lot of places putting in the work and covering them despite it often meaning that the page gets less views than if they were to talk about the big releases. So if you’re one of those people, actually support the places doing the work! Share their posts when they cover indie games on social media and discord channels and if you can afford to, give them money on ko-fi or patreon. They can’t keep covering these games if their articles and videos just go into a void.
Blogs
Blogs are still alive and well in 2023! Every morning I check my RSS feed reader to see what people have posted in the last day. It beats the hell out of constantly checking social media to make sure nothing has been missed too. I use Inoreader, which is a free online reader that tracks what I’ve read no matter what machine I use.
Bobbins’ Olde Tomb Of Videogames is a weekly indie game roundup with more of a focus on arcade games and remakes of retro stuff but it covers it all really. It’s incredible stuff and is what inspired me to pick up my regular blogging about indie games again after taking a break from it.
Indie Tsushin is a blog focused on indie games from Japan. It regularly posts about games I never heard of and also has a lot of great interviews with game developers. Lots of great videos by them playing these games too!
Podcasts
Indie Mixtape is a podcast where the host Ty and a guest discuss what indie games they’ve played lately. The episodes are about 30-60 minutes long and cover a variety of games. It was originally a part of the site Uppercut, which I dearly miss, but I’m glad that Ty is keeping the podcast going. It’s available wherever you download podcasts.
Party of One is a tabletop rpg podcast where the host Jeff and a guest sit down to play a tabletop rpg in one session. The show dumped Dungeons & Dragons a while ago for much better games and it’s truly the best place to discover indie ttrpgs. I can’t imagine people have time to listen to every episode, but consider looking through previous episodes and checking out the ones where the games sound interesting.
It’s also very likely that there’s a podcast or two for your favorite genre of games. Since I am an adventure game enjoyer, I’ve discovered a lot of great games through the Adventure Games Podcast over the years. The show highlights a lot of great indie point-and-click adventure games and interviews with the people who made them. I don’t really follow strategy games much anymore but Three Moves Ahead is a show that has been covering them regularly for over a decade now.
Social Media
Even after deleting my Twitter account, I still find social media to be a great place to hear about various games. There’s game devs across all the places I use (Mastodon/Bluesky/Instagram/Tumblr/Cohost) so it doesn’t feel like I’m missing anything by not using Twitter anymore. And if a dev is only posting on Twitter/X, which is now a far right hate fest, we’re probably better off not being aware of them anyway. Obviously your mileage may vary on this one since social media is incredibly exhausting and most people probably only have the capacity to be on one or two platforms.
One account I’ve enjoyed following is Indie Games of Cohost, which is an account that regularly posts about recently released indie games and interviews with game devs. I believe you can follow Cohost accounts using a RSS feed reader but I’m not completely sure about that so you’ll have to dig for that answer.
Discord has also been a place where I’ve heard about many games. Obviously it’s not for everyone and it’s barely even for me, but I’m in a few game dev communities for people local to me and this has been the only way I’ve heard about the games being made in my area. There’s plenty of general indie game focused discord channels too.
Indiepocalypse
I’ve posted about it so many times now but Indiepocalypse has been a great way for me to discover games and developers I would never hear about at bigger games outlets. It’s a monthly compilation zine with 10 games per issue. Even if you cannot afford to buy any issues, the Itch pages for each issue list all the games and link to the developer pages. There is also a podcast called Indiepocalypse Radio where the host talks to different game devs every week.
Itch.io
Obviously an indie games store is going to be a way I hear about new games, but the best way I’ve discovered games through there has actually been by following lots of game devs and then regularly checking the feed. The feed will show me anytime a dev has published a new game, and it also shows me when they rate a game 5 stars or add a game to a collection. I can then check the collection to see what games are similar to it.
Video
Of course there are people on YouTube and Twitch that play indie games. I don’t follow as many as I should but two that I enjoy following are LotusLovesLotus on Twitch and Dirigitive on YouTube. Both are great folks that have introduced me to a lot of cool games and don’t have the stereotypical Twitch streamer energy where they yell a lot, which I am not into.
So that’s everything I do at the moment to discover new games, or at least what I can think of. Let me know of other neat outlets in the comments!
One of my favorite Christmas traditions in my adult life has been tuning into Jon Solomon’s 25 hour Christmas music marathon. Jon Solomon, a DJ at WPRB in Princeton, New Jersey hosts a 25 hour every Christmas Eve where he plays a mix of random stuff including a 42 minute version of little drummer boy and 30 minute blocks of x-mas themed Ramones, Misfits, and The Fall parodies. There’s also bands that record songs for the marathon now so it’s not all cursed music. He’s been doing it about 30 years now. Here’s some of the songs from last year but there’s new ones every year
He also has a Hanukkah Show every year. This year it’s tonight on 103.3 fm WPRB from 5-8 pm ET. You can also listen online here.
If you’re looking for more stuff, here’s some of the music I’ve picked up on Bandcamp over the last few years.
Some bands have made songs for the marathon in previous years, this includes this nice song by Outer World called Arc & Bow, which kinda has a slight shoegazey sound to it.
Low’s Christmas album is an all-time classic. It’s a mix of covers and new songs that capture some of the bittersweet feelings that people can have at this time of year.
And finally, while there is a shorter version on Bandcamp, I must recommend the 42 minute version of Little Drummer Boy by Lindstrom. It’s part of the 25 hour Christmas music marathon so I listen to it every year and has also become an important part of Christmas for me.
A bunch of various retro gaming related things happened that I thought were worth posting about so instead of creating a dozen posts, here they are.
In addition to announced that Jeff Minter collection last week, Digital Eclipse also added 12 more games to their Atari 50 collection for free. It’s been fantastic seeing the company doing so much fantastic stuff this last year.
The MSX game Illusion City is getting an English translation. It’s still in the testing phase before release but it looks great.
The Video Game History Foundation released a video yesterday showing the levels that never made it into Sonic 2. They’ve been showing off great stuff every day this month in order to raise funds so if you’re into games preservation, consider supporting them by clicking the donation link in the video.
Footage from the game Habitat has been found! Habitat was an online game created by Lucasfilm Games/Lucasarts in the mid 80s. There really wasn’t much footage or screenshots from it until now. This post goes into detail about how the footage was found but if you want to start watching it, you can do so here. The other parts have also been uploaded to the channel. If you’d like to play the game, it’s actually been relaunched as NeoHabitat and available for free.
Jennell Jaquays, most famously know as the designer of the D&D modules Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia as well as her work on computer games like Age of Empires and Quake 2/3, has a GoFundMe to help pay for the medical costs she has while recovering from her illness. Consider supporting it if you can afford to do so.
The 1997 game DemonStar just got a rerelease on Steam with a bunch of new features. I never played it before but it’s by the same designer as Raptor: Call of the Shadows and I liked that so I guess I should play this too? The reviews so far seem pretty positive. The rerelease was created by the original designer, which is always fun to see. I know that a rerelease of Raptor is being worked on right now by the same person and even has a teaser.
My rewatch of Doctor Who continued with The Daleks, the second serial consisting of 7 episodes. I watched the original Black & White version since I generally don’t enjoy colorized things but I’ll probably go back and watch it at some point.
I thought it held up very well! It was fun watching how much they really nailed the Daleks in their first story and how little they’ve changed since then, other than becoming stronger and having better special effects. It fits the story though, they had just barely survived a war and were in the process of rebuilding. The Doctor is still an asshole at this point, with the whole story kicking off basically because he wanted to explore so he deliberately sabotaged the Tardis so they couldn’t leave. I know it’s all intentional and that he eventually becomes good but I was surprised at how quickly Barbara was willing to sacrifice the Thals to leave the planet, oof. At least Ian and Susan knew it was ethically terrible. Not that the Thals are amazing either. They seem like a pretty sexist society but it beats being robot Nazis I suppose. I don’t really think it was intentional though and it’s more from the story just being a product of the 60’s.
Not really many huge complaints about this story. It has some issues with pacing, especially towards the end, but I think it’s a pretty solid one to recommend from the Hartnell era. He still continues to flub his lines since they couldn’t do retakes but he’s fun to watch. Next up for me is Edge of Destruction and if I recall correctly, some of the reconstructions after that? I would like to go through all the stories, even if it means watching animated and fan reconstructions or just listening to the audio since it seems like the audio dramas and new show will occasionally reference them.
Speaking of, I also watched the third and final special for this year, The Giggle. I won’t put any spoilers here so I’ll just say that I thought it was silly fun. I’m not really completely sold on that regeneration scene and twist, but it was a lot of fun seeing an old companion come back, I thought Neil Patrick Harris was very good as the villain, and I absolutely cannot wait to see some stories with 15. I loved what he did in this episode and the trailer for the upcoming Christmas special makes it look like a lot of fun.
Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the release of Doom, one of my favorite games. A lot of neat Doom related events happened.
There was a reunion of John Carmack and John Romero where they reflected on the game. You can watch that on Twitch.
John Romero’s megawad SIGIL got a sequel. You can download both for free here but there’s also an option to purchase a version with new music as well.
Screenshot from Eviternity II of the map Quetzalcoatl by Dragonfly
The megawad Evilternity also got a surprise sequel that contains 36 maps. As the page states, DSDA Doom and GZDoom are both good ways to play these new maps.
If you’re looking for more Doom to play even after all that, there’s the 2023 Cacowards, which highlight great maps and mods that came out this year.
