Here is a photo of a light taken a while ago at Great Wolf Lodge in Traverse City, Michigan. When things may be dark, consider the moose to light the way
Here, Have a Moose Light
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September is Library Card Sign-up Month!
If you don’t have a library card, go get one. Libraries are pretty neat and you can often check out things other than books such as movies, music, games, tools, instruments, and more. Plus they can be a space to do work and study, and have meetups.
And if you do already have a library card, feel free to use this post as an excuse to go to your local library today.
Text Adventures Are Still Doing Alright
Even though the general narrative online seems to be that text adventures died with Infocom (which I disagree with for many reasons of course), it’s nice to see that there’s two notable Interactive Fiction and Text Adventure events happening at the same time. The first is that the 32nd Annual IF Comp is now live! There are 71 new interactive fiction entries to play and vote on. Not all of them are pure text adventures but the entries let you know what type of Interactive Fiction it is. I love choice based games as well so this is not an issue for me. It’s also just wild to me that it’s been going on for so long. I always forget that the Post-Infocom Text Adventure era or whatever you called it really did start that early on while folks like Legend were still making text adventures.
The only heads up I’d like to give is that while they put much heavier restrictions on gen AI usage, I believe they do not have anything for code because it would be impossible for them to enforce. While I personally disagree and think it’s worth having anyway, even at least a disclosure requirement, I get it. I’m not going to fill up this post with complaints. Just know that you should dunk your head in a toilet if you use it.
The second Interactive Fiction related item I’d like to mention is that it’s the final week of voting for IntroComp. IntroComp is described as “an annual competition where participants develop excerpts of interactive fiction, gain feedback from audience reactions, and (hopefully!) use this feedback to release a fantastic final product.” Check some games in development out and help some games get made!
And if you’ve never played a text adventure, give it a shot. Many of the Interactive Fiction games on this Interactive Fiction Database list are text adventures and available for free. It’s a bit of a cliche to recommend Lost Pig but it’s a good one! You may also like Bronze, Shade, or Photopia. Just click around and start playing one that sounds interesting to you.
Text adventures: They’re neat!
Obscure Game Blog Challenge Roundup
Last week on my birthday I issued a blog challenge for folks to write about an obscure game of their choice. As the challenge states, what is “obscure” is incredibly subjective and I just wanted folks to pick what they thought was obscure and have fun. I was shocked by how many people decided to participate and decided to do a roundup of all the ones I knew about. If I missed yours, please let me know in the comments. Technically the challenge isn’t over, there’s no end date, if you want to write about an obscure game then go ahead. I had so much fun reading all of these and I hope that you do too.
Let this be a lesson that if it’s your birthday, you can issue a Blog Challenge and people will actually do it. I hope you consider doing your own blog challenge and if you like any of the posts in this roundup, add the blog to your RSS feed reader.
The Blog Posts
This is a post that starts off being about Dragon Strike and an unreleased prototype but goes into how your ttrpg should have some sort of gimmick.
Silas praises the indie horror visual novel Fledgling Manor.
wildweasel writes about the simulator Gazillionaire, which I never played but somehow have a boxed copy of it sitting on my shelf. So maybe it’s time for me to finally open that one up and give it a go.
I love the Heretic and Hexen games so it made me happy that someone else enjoys Heretic 2, which has not been rereleased.
Grayson has launched a blog to write about game and the first post is about Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. Grayson admits that this stretches the definition of obscure but I think it gets a few points for talking about the N64 version of the game, which I believe was exclusive to Blockbuster.
Folks, we got a post about The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time. This game rules and you should all play it. Look at this in-game ad for Cheese Girl! I know the blog post here isn’t as big of a fan of JP3, but I also recommend that one. Love the series!
Pete Davison writes about the racing game Jupiter’s Masterdrive for the Amiga and Atari ST. I’m a big Amiga fan and always love learning about games for it I never heard of before.
SpindleyQ talks about the experience of type-in games, and specifically the game Micropuzzle, for the Commodore Vic-20.
Mono by Binary Zoo is an indie shmup from the 00s, before Steam took off, an era I love to read about. Looks like you can download it from the Internet Archive too.
I knew of the Monster Rancher series but never even knew it had spinoff games like Monster Rancher Hop-A-Bout.
Nikhil Murthy, designer of wonderful games like Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation, has a post about the lost game Who’s That Brown created for the rap group Das Racist.
Odama is a Gamecube game that I remember wanting to really play but never have, but I’m happy to hear that it’s weird and rules.
Operation: Inner Space is a game for Windows 3.1 I never heard of, which is always exciting to learn about, and I also get very excited when a shareware developer from the 90s is still selling that game on their own website.
I saw a few folks posting screenshots from Road Trip Adventure and now I know what the deal with that game is.
I also like when people write about games that are completely average or don’t quite work but still have interesting or good bits in them, so I appreciate this post about Shepherd’s Crossing.
I was so happy to see a post about Shockwave web games, more specifically ones using the Lego license. Shockwave games are a whole thing that I never see anyone talk about these days but I played so many of them.
It’s great when folks write about their memories of playing a dead MMO because even when the files are preserved and the game is still playable, the one thing that can’t be recreated is the experience of playing it at launch, so at least folks can write about what it’s like, such as this post about Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa. I’m not the biggest Richard Garriott fan but I think he’s really interesting.
Weird games that shipped with versions of Windows are another thing I love to read about, so thanks to The Works of Egan for this post on Tinker, a puzzle game I never heard of.
LEMONPOPPYSEEDGAMES has launched a new blog and the first post is about the ttrpg Quest.
I challenged folks to write about very obscure stuff, unfinished prototypes, lost games, etc and this post delivered with Zombie, a game that the author doesn’t even know where the game came from.
And then finally, if I’m going to tell people to write about an obscure game then I suppose I should too. So I wrote about Croustibat, an advert adventure game for fish sticks by the folks that made the Gobliiins adventure games.
And obviously not everyone can drop everything to write about an obscure game so some folks were kind enough to recommend older blog posts they wrote about obscure games.
Goose recommends the GBC game HamTaro: Ham-Hams Unite.
Brown Benign Beast writes about two board games, Situation 4 and Situation 7, as well as a board game design they had in a dream.
Gretchen covers so many obscure games on her Backloggd including Shadowgate 64, which I have played but it was decades ago and now I want to revisit it.
Eli wrote TEN pages for a journal about the Sega CD game SWITCH / PANIC!
Computer Chronicles Revisited covers The Tower of Myraglen, which appeared on on an episode of the show from 1987.
If you like these posts, you may also like The Obscuritory, Ephemeral Enigmas, and Michael Coorlim’s blog.
My Birthday Blog Challenge: Write About An Obscure Game
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
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
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
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
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
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.