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My Birthday Blog Challenge: Write About An Obscure Game

~ mpklamerus ~ 14 Comments

It is my birthday today so I am issuing a blog challenge. That is something you are allowed to do on your birthday. My challenge is to write a blog post about an obscure game, whether it’s a video game, board game, tabletop rpg, LARP, whatever, that you just do not see folks talking about online or easily findable documentation. No Substacks! Also you will not be graded on how obscure it is, don’t worry. If someone sees your post and says “That’s not obscure!” then they can get punched in the face. It’s just for fun. Doesn’t have to be a positive post about the game either, maybe it wasn’t very good. I just think it would be nice to see more documentation online of games rarely discussed and maybe someone will discover a cool new game they never discovered before.

If you’re struggling to think of an obscure game, consider a lost browser game or MUD you’ve played that no one can find, maybe an advert game, maybe it’s a mod, or something you played as a playtesting meetup that you can no longer find. If you do actually write a blog post because of this challenge, feel free to link to it in the comments.

If you do not have a blog, consider starting one. They’re a lot of fun and it’s nice having your own space on the internet. You could start with Neocities or Bear Blog.

The Playdate Store is Just Depressing Now

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A while back, Panic made a big announcement that they were banning games that used generative ai art, music, text or story elements. This was nice to hear since so many other stores for digital games allowed it. However, they were fine with it for code as long as you disclosed it, which is bizarre situation since it doesn’t magically use less energy for code and isn’t built more ethically. I had once asked them why they had a different policy and their response was essentially “Well, you can still filter those games out,” which didn’t answer my question.

I considered this a huge disappointment since the Playdate store positioned itself so strongly on caring about craft. Fast forward to today and now the Playdate Catalog announcement threads on Mastodon and Bluesky consist of games that use genAI. In the most recent thread, 3 out of 4 new games used genAI. In the thread before that, all 3 games used genAI. Frankly it has killed my interest in the Playdate platform and I assume this is the case for others because I very rarely hear about others talking about the Playdate. It’s a huge shame because folks were so excited about the Playdate when it was first released, but now it’s just another platform with endless amounts of slop.

Game Devs, Stop Using AI Shit Even for Coding

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I’ve said it before on here but fucking knock it off. Yes, even for coding. I’m crabby about it because a dev did a long winded post about how they know it’s bad but they want to keep using it so they’re gonna. I dunno, I think that if AI is stealing my shit and polluting communities, that’s kinda the end of that debate. No need to find the nuance there. Stop fucking using it. Don’t @ me with how everything causes pollution these days, LLMs use an extreme amount of energy for a thing no one fucking needs.

New Bundle To Support Game Workers Launches

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As everyone at this point knows, the games industry is in an incredibly rough spot right now and thousands have lost their jobs and are looking for work. A new bundle has launched on Itch.io to try to help some of those folks out. The Game industry hardship fund is a bundle that you can buy for $10 or more and 100+ games. I won’t go through the bundle and highlight my favorites but there’s a lot of great works in here and I highly recommend picking the bundle up.

Thimbleweed Park 2 Announced, Blog Launched

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Ron Gilbert has just announced Thimbleweed Park 2, which you can already wishlist on Steam. I’m excited! I was a fan of the original game and I’m always happy to see Ron working on a new adventure game with the folks that made the first game.

As part of the announcement, you can also follow the development blog here. The post has a lot more details about what platforms the game will be on, if there will be a Kickstarter (no), and why (it’s already funded). I recommend checking the post out if you’re interested and adding the blog to your RSS feed reader. I think the thing I’m most looking forward to about the game is that both Thimbleweed Park 1 and Return to Monkey Island brought nice quality of life improvements to point-and-click adventures that the rest of the folks in the community adopted. Many got brought over to the engine I use, Adventure Game Studio, too. I also just like all the folks that worked on TWP 1 and that last Monkey Island so it’s always nice to see them continuing to work on games.

Cyan Gives a Peek at Canceled Myst Prototype and Other Myst News

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Cyan’s Mysterium convention is happening right now, which means all the Myst-related announcements are happening. The biggest one was a look at a prototype in the Myst universe that they were shopping around but never got funded. Project Anglerfish was going to be a first-person adventure game set in the universe but not a direct sequel and it’s absolutely killing me it didn’t get funded. A more horror leaning first person puzzle game right after Blue Prince won so many accolades seems like a slam dunk but no one was interested in funding it. I’m assuming it’s not something a Kickstarter would fund but I would happily throw money at it if they had one. Take a look

Alright, well with that painful news out of the way there was some good news too. It sounds like they’re still working on a game set in that universe, just not that one. The Myst books are getting reprints too. You can read about all of that and more on their website.

Physical Media for PC Games Still Exists

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As people love to do on the Internet, I saw someone saying that no one is doing physical media for computer games anymore and we need to go back to it. Well good news, they do!

Indiepocalypse has their videogame tape market where you can get neat little indie games in cassette tape cases. It’s all DRM-free and you get the game on a USB stick. Take a look!

Photo of an Indiepocalypse collection and HITM3 in cassette tape cases

Well I think it’s pretty neat anyway. There’s are a few options for selling the tapes, including the online store or doing it yourself, if you are interested. Consider it if you are an indie dev because I will probably want to buy your game. If you do want to pursue this but do it on your own, Andrew (the Indiepocalypse guy) also lists his email if you just want to know the process and steps he takes to sell these. He doesn’t want to gatekeep the information and just wants to see more stuff like this out there.

There’s other folks selling physical copies of pc games too, your Kickstarters and what not. Plenty of folks selling new games for old computers in boxed copies too. I just wanted to highlight this because I think it’s cool and follows the usual rule of video games where if someone is posting “this doesn’t exist anymore!” it probably does and they’re not curious enough to seek it out and support it.

Help Needed For Finding the Earliest Known Queer Game

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Recently I wrote about Caper in the Castro, what is often described as the earliest known queer game, but it turns out that there may be games older than that and the internet needs you (yes, you!) to help. Jason Scott from The Internet Archive recently made a post on Bluesky asking for help tracking down two queer games that may or may not have been released.

OK, let's start the search.Adrienne Shaw is on the lookout for two titles of early LGBTQ software that predate Caper in the Castro. One is called VAPOR PALACE. The other features Tom of Finland art but has no discovered name yet. The search is on – if you know more details or… have a copy? ping.

— Jason Scott (@textfiles.com) 2026-07-04T00:17:54.128Z

The thread goes into more detail. The VAPOR PALACE game may have been released since it looks like a few classifieds were placed for it.

If you know where this game can be found or any leads, please reach out to Adrienne Shaw so we can hopefully track this game down and consider sharing your findings online so we can all help too.

I Love That My Library Has a Newspaper

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I’m so glad that my local library in Plymouth, Michigan has a free print newspaper that I can support and have mailed to my house. It has lots of local news, along with other fun bits like teenagers reviewing media they enjoy. Living in a suburb means that there really isn’t a local news source, other than the Detroit Free Press I guess, because all the other sources of local news like websites run by one or two folks and Facebook groups generally seem to be right wing and have a strong nimby influence as well. I’m not happy about the digital part being on Substack for many reasons but maybe I can nudge them away from that and towards something like Ghost. At least they offer a print subscription (here you go if you want very local news) where none of the revenue goes to Substack.

Even though it’s a Democrat run city, Plymouth has a big nimby problem and even a recent article in the library’s paper about a transit millage was seen by some folks in the local Democrat Facebook group as being too friendly to public transit because they don’t want to pay taxes on it and got mad. These same folks got mad about the possibility of more housing being built too. If you live in the metro Detroit area, please vote for better transit. I have been in Chicago recently and a better world is possible.

It’s probably for the best that my actual local library isn’t on social media I use because can you imagine how annoying I would be to them? I already ping other local libraries on bluesky too much to talk about how much I like them.

Anyway, newspapers can be neat and so are libraries. It’s such a relief having even one local newspaper that isn’t weird about the idea of people supporting LGBTQ folks. I wish libraries didn’t have to be such a load bearing pillar in having a bearable society but here we are.

The other print newsletter I subscribe to is The Floral Observer. While it is printed in Detroit, it’s not as hyper local and I think would appeal more to folks outside of the metro Detroit area. It’s just a nice newsletter about nature and plants and features writing and comics I enjoy. They’re also always taking free submissions for classified ads and have event had one printed for the game collective I run. Consider giving them a look and seeing who in your area is doing a newspaper or writing you can support.

A New Games Webring, Warp Point, Launches!

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Wes Fenlon, writer for PC Gamer and Read Only Memo, launched a web portal for games blogs that I think is really neat and I think people should consider submitting their sites to it. It’s called Warp Point and I think the design is very spiffy. It has categories for different types of games blogs and people are making little 88×31 link buttons for it which is something longtime readers know I love. I need to make the time to replace some of the links on my Links page with the images. Something else I really love about the site is the webring widget everyone can include, which selects 3 random sites from the webring to display each time it loads.

The front page features recent posts from blogs too, encouraging people to check out other blogs. It’s really everything I could want in a webring page and I highly encourage folks with games blogs (which includes game dev) to submit theirs. I’m hoping this inspires folks to make their own. I’d love to see something similar to this for ttrpgs, although this may already exist and I’m just not aware.

My site is on here (very happy that I was asked to submit it) so it will be amusing if anyone who followed the blog for Video Games gets confused when I post about libraries or incredibly local stuff.