I won’t post about it every time I do it but occasionally I volunteer at my local library and I did it again today. I started doing it because I thought it would be good to get some experience at a library while in grad school but while I remain on the fence about continuing that, I think I’ll keep volunteering at the library as long as I don’t have a job at one. It’s just been a good way to interact with people since I normally spend the day in my basement programming for work, and it turns out that people are usually nice to you when you are helping them do something for free. Today there was a thing for local groups to have tables and that’s where I learned (getting real local to Metro Detroit here) there was a local amateur radio club as well as a YIMBY group. While I don’t have any radio experience, it’s very cool to see and maybe I’ll try to listen? Quite a few gardening and pollinator groups too. I sometimes help out with my local environmental restoration group too because of course that’s something I’d like to see, but it’s also just good exercise and a way to learn about plants.
Anyway, if you’re able to, consider volunteering for a local thing. You get to meet neighbors and at least for me it’s generally been a good time. I suspect there’s quite a bit more frustration when it’s helping a political group, those are important too, but if you don’t have the energy for that, even just doing….something…can be nice. When I got home I looked at Blue Sky and immediately took psychic damage so if you want another reason, it keeps you from looking at your phone for a bit too.
Looks like I did a post on stuff I liked reading in the Summer, so here’s another one. Books? They’re good! I’m not listing everything I read because I decided to log even the chapter books I read to my kids on Storygraph, and it would be incredibly tedious for people to look at that. I don’t have amazing taste in books by any means but maybe you’ll find a new book or two to check out from your local library. This list is not ranked by any means, just the order I read them last year and the links generally go to Bookshop.org or another place where you can buy it.
Hardcore Gaming 101 Digest Vol. 8: The Bride of Retro Horror – Hardcore Gaming 101 has put out a lot of good books on retro games. This one was a follow up to a previous digest on horror games, which I would also recommend if that’s your thing. The link goes to Itch.io but I think there’s print versions of all their books on Amazon.
Peter & Ernesto: The Lost Sloths – Graham Annable, who I know from the Puzzle Agent games but has done lots of animation and won an Oscar, has put out a few Peter & Ernesto books. They’re comics about two sloths, very cute and I like reading them with my kids. The link goes to his site where you can buy a signed copy.
The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds – A book about the band KLF. Can’t recommend it enough if you’re a fan and maybe even if you don’t listen to them but are a big music history nerd. I think this was recommended to me by Ste Pickford on Bluesky, which I would suppose would make sense because I don’t know if there’s many Americans recommending me books about the KLF. That said, I actually did listen to the audiobook for this through my local library using the Hoopla app, so there’s dozens of us in the US that like KLF.
Vagabond: A Memoir – Tim Curry wrote a memoir! And it’s good! I listened to the audiobook for this one. I cannot imagine how difficult it was for him to read this after becoming disabled from a stroke, but it was nice to hear his voice. I also actually thought it was fun that he wouldn’t talk about any relationships he has been in other than Miss Piggy during Muppet Treasure Island. I was also very surprised that he briefly mentions video game work. Mostly just to say that he doesn’t understand them but thought acting in front of a green screen was fun. But still, didn’t expect to hear him say the words “Red Alert 3”
Spread Me – I read a bunch of books by Sarah Gailey and this novella was another good one. Basically The Thing but more horny.
More Bugs – Em Reed of DOMINO CLUB fame (idk man, had to work in a Domino Club reference in this post) also has a book. I think I referred to it as erotic body horror on social media along with Spread me, which is not entirely accurate, but there’s still body stuff. Very surreal but I think it also captures the weirdness of living in a small town in the midwest. This review sucks but the book is very good! It’s not actually like Gregg Araki’s Nowhere (a film I love) and I think there’s way more empathy for the characters, but it did remind me of it. I got the ebook for this one but a print version is available.
Anyway, books are good! Make a goal to read at least a couple this year.
I know that 9/10 it’s just people forgetting to update their Itch pages but if you have a link on there going to Twitter, now would be a very good time to remove it especially since it’s gone from “the nazi bar” to “the nazi bar generating CSAM content.” Dunno, if you still need X, the CSAM site where no one can view your posts without being logged in and the algorithm is constantly fucking with everything anyway, to promote your stuff then that seems like a skill issue. I also think Discords should ban links to X like they would with 4Chan and other places like that.
I know some people technically have accounts that they haven’t posted to in years but I don’t think it’s a bad idea to just outright delete those either.
Hope that you all have been having a good and relaxing holiday season. Mine has been a bit weird this year but there’s been some good parts. I got to make a very short Playdate game with my 6 and 8 year olds and that’s now available for free. They did the design and writing and I helped with the coding and art. It’s my first Playdate game so even though it’s very small in scope, I still learned a lot. We used Pulp, their version of Bitsy, and I think their ideas pushed me to learn a little more than I would have if I just made a tiny thing by myself. As you can imagine, a game by a 6 and 8 year old may not be the most focused thing but I still think it’s cool and it made me really happy to make something with them. Without getting too mushy, I’ll just say I love them and their little brother very much.
If you’re a parent with kids that like video games, consider making a game with them too. We all had fun making this Playdate game and it’s just a blast listening to them coming up with ideas for stories, whether it’s for games, seeing the comics they make, and everything else they do. My oldest already has an idea for a short point-and-click adventure starring a comic book character she made up a few years ago and I’m always excited to see what they do next.
For some reason I got a little crabby yesterday that people were only recommending indie games on Steam yesterday, which is kinda silly, but it did lead to me doing a recommendation thread on Bluesky of games on sale on Itch that I enjoy. It’s a flawed thread because I didn’t recommend any ttrpgs but I’m going to list the recommendations here as well because they’re good and worth a look. Some aren’t even on Steam and others give you a Steam key. It’s not that I hate Steam, even if I do have issues with it, I just get frustrated by people not being curious about what else it outside of it.
First I want to recommend Indiepocalypse, a monthly anthology zine featuring many experimental indie games every month! I’ve mentioned it on a blog a billion times but I’m going to keep doing it because I think they’re doing amazing work curating indie games that I would never find otherwise.
Liberation is a space sim inspired by early classic like Elite and shows like Blake’s 7, and has a great sense of humor. It’s very easy to pick up and play too, which is often the issue I bump into with a lot of modern open world space sims.
Minerva’s Labyrinth is a first-person turn based dungeon crawler with nice pixel art and great combat system. Again, I’ve mentioned this one a few times before (probably a pattern you’ll see in this post quite a bit) but I’ll keep doing it until it somehow becomes a smash hit that pulls in millions of dollars for the dev.
Inspector Waffles is a point-and-click adventure where you play as a cat detective investigating a murder. I really like the way this game uses clues to question folks at crime scenes. The Game Boy Color prequel is also on Itch. I don’t know if you get the rom if you buy that one on Steam but you do on Itch. I also recently learned that one got ported to the Playdate.
Manglepaw is a first person adventure game with art inspired by early 90’s 3D art. I love the game looks. It’s also available in Indiepocalypse #26
Cyclopean: The Great Abyss is a rpg inspired by early crpg classics like Ultima, with an overworld map when you explore the world and first-person dungeon crawling when you enter a dungeon. The dev has made a few rpgs at this point and they’re all on sale right now. Islands of the Caliph is another one I enjoyed.
Snoik! is just a very good Snake-like game for the Playdate, with a neat mechanic where you can weave in and out of the snake by switching layers. Itch has a lot of great games for the Playdate for sale.
If you like VVVVVV or Super Hexagon, consider checking out Terry’s Other Games, a compilation of various smaller games Terry Cavanagh has made. Comes with a Steam key
CorgiSpace is a very nice collection of 13 PICO-8 games by Adam Saltsman and published by Finji, each offering a unique mechanic. The Itch version also gives you the .p8 files to run in whatever you use for PICO-8 files.
Melon Head is an incredibly weird point-and-click adventure game featuring stellar EGA-inspired artwork. I love it
Hylics is another weird one. It’s a rpg and it’s doing kind of a stop motion aesthetic thing for the art that I really like. It got a sequel and that’s on sale as well.
VIDEOVERSE is a visual novel inspired by early internet forums and the Miiverse stuff on the Wii U. Comes with a Steam key. I’ve found that it’s been a very good introductory VN for a few folks.
The Crimson Diamond is a point-and-click adventure inspired by the Sierra classic The Colonel’s Bequest. I love that it uses a text parser and the artwork is fantastic.
Cosmic Void has made many great adventure games but I will recommend Devil’s Hideout, a very creepy first person adventure.
Spirit Swap combines visual novels with match 3 puzzle games. I think it brings some great innovations to the match 3 genre and I love the art and soundtrack in this game as well
I can’t recommend the Midnight Scenes series enough. It’s an anthology series of horror point and click adventures and each one can be played in a single sitting.
Super Video Golf is a solid golf game with tons of features and an early 90s 3D aesthetic I really enjoy. I hate real life golf for many reasons but like a good video game about golf. Comes with a Steam key.
There is not a game in recent memory that does the Super Mario Bros 3 style platformer better than Kitsune Tails.
Rainbow Laser Disco Dungeon is a kinda sorta Berzerk like, at least in how you move from room to room, twin stick shooter combined with a rhythm game. Comes with a Steam key too!
co-open is a very nice first person adventure game about a child’s first time going grocery shopping alone.
Again, some of these are repeats from the recent Itch recommendation thread but they’re worth another shoutout.
I suspect that if you’re reading this post then it’s likely that you already have a website but if not, consider making 2026 the Year of the Personal Website. Or maybe your site or blog has been inactive for a bit, think about doing some more posts on there. Even a little thing on Neocities works. It’s just nice to have a home base on the internet that you don’t have to deal with social media mods or randos popping into every post, and if something goes wrong with your host, you just move it elsewhere.
I also just like following personal blogs on bear blog with my RSS feed reader. More people should consider getting back into RSS, where it’s much easier to see posts on your favorite websites instead of expecting it to pass in your feed on social media and frequently missing stuff because you weren’t refreshing Instagram/Bluesky/Mastodon/whatever at the right time. I suspect mailing lists are probably also very valuable to game devs trying to promote stuff but I can’t really vouch for that one.
I think it’s also just fun to see what old posts still get traffic. My most popular posts on here are very old ones about how to play the late 90s MMO Asheron’s Call today, ttrpgs based on video games, and the late 90s Microsoft puzzle game Pandora’s Box. It’s more useful and permanent than an unwieldy thread of posts on bluesky or mastodon too, where you would have to refresh it for anyone to even come across it again.
Anyway, that concludes my regular “Make a website” post. Obviously a lot of bias comes from being a little older and preferring how I probably misremember The Old Internet, but it’s also just nice to push back on the internet becoming smaller and I value communication through comments on posts and emails more than getting likes and retweets.
There’s a trend happening on bluesky that came from The Game Awards discourse where someone said if you post “play more indie games” then you need to also post 50 indie game recommendations. I assume this was because the person was tired of the performative posts just vaguely gesturing at indie games. But it worked. People have actually been posting indie game recommendations. However, because I cannot be a normal person, I got annoyed that people were only linking to games on Steam. I posted a list of 50 recommendations on Bluesky but thought I would do the list here as well, where it’s a lot more readable and I can add some nice screenshots. There’s probably a fun theme I could have done instead like 50 Amiga or ZX Spectrum games, or adventure games, but here’s a batch of 50 games I liked and maybe you’ll feel compelled to do a post recommending indie games.
Landlord Quest – Short point-and-click adventure game where you can see a landlord eat shit. Buying on Itch gives you files to run in ScummVM on everything
DOSember Game Jam – Did you know a game jam just wrapped up where we got 39 brand new games for DOS? So many great games here
SANTA SACK – Tom Hall, of Commander Keen/Doom/Anachronox fame, does so much for the PICO-8 community on Itch, organizes game jams, and makes a Christmas game ever year. This one is an arcade game where you catch presents and avoid coal.
The Round-about Orchard – Julia Minamata, creator of the amazing adventure game The Crimson Diamond, made a fan game for Over The Garden Wall along with people that worked on the show.
Minerva Labyrinth – Just a really good first person dungeon crawler!
Egg by Terry Cavanagh – The best platformer where you play as an egg. Eat shit Dizzy
Everything by DOMINO CLUB – An anonymous game dev collective. No one is doing more interesting experimental games than them
Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation – An incredibly interesting take on the 4X genre, like an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist take on Civilization
Eulogy for Nonno – Very funny short adventure game where you delivery flowers to a home and are mistaken for a long lost cousin and must escape
Maura & Ash – Nice, short queer point-and-click adventure set in space and runs in DOS
FALLSTRUKTUR – Free first-person platformer where you must make your way down a giant structure. Very challenging
The Chambers Beneath – Challenging but easy to pick up roguelike for DOS, available for pay-what-you-want
Neon Hearts City – Cyberpunk point-and-click detective adventure with nice pixel art. I actually wrote more about this one here.
Root Bear – An arcade game for the Playdate where you pour root beer for bears. My kids love it!
Atuel – A free surreal documentary game about the environment with beautiful art. Wrote more about it here.
Billy Masters Was Right – A pay-what-you-want point and click adventure with Maniac Mansion-inspired art and a story inspired by The Burbs. Wrote more here.
You Are Generative AI – Twine game where you are a Generative AI consuming power and being useless
CorgiSpace – An excellent collection of PICO-8 games by Adam Saltsman
Mixed Feelings – A ttrpg with mechanics based around making playlists
Type Help – An excellent deduction adventure game made in Twine
Spirit Swap – A Match 3 combined with a queer visual novel. I like the spells/powers you can use during the Match 3 part too. Fantastic soundtrack. Wrote more here.
A Short Hike – Everyone knows this one but my oldest loves it so much
The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival – Same author as A Short Hike. You must play this in October. It’s a small Halloween MMO and I had so much fun playing it with my kids
Frogsong – Very cute action adventure game where you play as a frog
Kitsune Tails – Amazing Super Mario Bros 3-like platformer!
Dragonsweeper – Took over my life at the beginning of the year. Great combination of dungeon crawling and Minesweeper
KIDNAME: ICEBOY – Incredible parody of Sierra’s Codename:Iceman and other games by Jim Walls
Stair Quest – Another great parody of Sierra games. An intentionally frustrating game where you navigate stairs. Also has a Winter Edition of the game
Alone on a Journey – Trilogy of solo ttrpgs focused on exploration that were influential to me. Wrote more here.
VIDEOVERSE – Beautiful visual novel inspired by the Wii online community stuff
Enclosure 3-D – Remake of an adventure game inspired Sierra classics and the 3D engine presents that retro art style in a really interesting way
Midnight Scenes – Looooove the Midnight Scenes series. Anthology horror series with each game being playable in one sitting. Wrote more here.
He Fucked the Girl Out Me – Short visual novel about being a sex worker and trauma for the Game Boy. Wrote more here.
Hunger – Another influential solo ttrpgs where you are a vampire. Uses a really neat blackjack-inspired mechanic. Also has a companion game called Thirst. More about it here.
Dinocar – Very cute ttrpg where you build a city for dinosaurs driving cars. Loved playing it with my kids
Parsely – If you are a text adventure fan and want a similar experience with friends, check this out. One player is the “parser” and the rest say commands to solve the adventure
Songs for the Dusk – Great Forged in the Dark ttrpg where the players try to build a better future
Co-open – Really nice game about a child’s first time buying groceries on their own
Cartomancy Anthology – Another influential one. An anthology of games inspired by tarot cards
I hope this helps you find something new on Itch.io!
Despite the Industry moving on from DOS decades ago, Itch.io has an incredibly active community of folks making games for DOS, that folks to play on their retro computers and emulators. DOSember, the annual streaming event on Twitch where people play DOS games, just wrapped up their first DOS game jam on Itch.io. The jam received 39 submissions, which I think is a fantastic number of new games for something the games industry and tech world decided was “dead” decades ago. There’s a lot of fantastic stuff in there for you all to play with. They’re all free but if a game is taking donations, consider tossing a dollar or two to the games you like and consider streaming them.
Europa Panic
If that wasn’t enough, there’s been DOS games being published on Itch before that. THP put together a list of DOS games made for jams I hosted and there’s so many good games in here. There’s a few paid games as well that I think are worth supporting. THP also made this free DOS demo disc, like in the old days of shareware. Go check the list and demo disc out!
Did you know the original version of SkiFree isn’t actually a DOS game? It’s true!
Finally, there’s plenty more for you to check out on Itch. Poke around the site and check out tags such as the msdos and DOS tags and games like The Aching and Hibernated 1. You’ll find many more DOS games to play and enjoy!
Today I remodeled the Cool Site Zone part of the site, where I had a giant wall of buttons linking to various sites, and made it a more traditional list of links. The buttons are still there, but now have a lot more context so it’s a bit more useful and hopefully less overwhelming. The more traditional links part of the site is still very outdated and I’ll be continuing to work so it matches more closely to what I have in my RSS feed reader so if you thought I followed your site and don’t see it there, that’s probably why. But I’m making this post so maybe folks can let me know that do in fact have a little 88×31 button I can add to my page.
Quest 64 has become kind of an ironic internet meme but here’s the thing, I remember getting that game when it came out and actually enjoying it a lot at the time. I don’t even complete that many RPGs but that’s one of them. This led me to start thinking about other weird things I thought about video games as a kid. Obviously most of these will be goofy since I was a child but I do remember thinking that it was a mistake for everything to keep moving away from 2D to 3D graphics and dangit, I was right. Unfortunately I had a N64 and not a Playstation at the time, or else I could have kept rolling with 2D games for quite a bit. Anyway, here’s some random thoughts that no one was asking for:
There’s a few games like Quest 64 and Gubble (I’m guilty of pushing this one) that have become a joke on the internet but I actually played both when they came out and had fun. Not even fun in the sense of not knowing that a game could be bad but it’s what you were stuck with so you may as well make the most of it, I just liked them.
For some reason I was very jealous that TurboGrafx owners had Bonk’s Adventure despite having access to plenty of great games on pc and Nintendo consoles.
Was also jealous that Philips CD-i owners got those Zelda games, even after I played two of them at CompUSA.
Was very impressed with how Bug! looked on the Sega Saturn. That was the game I was focused on for that platform and was sad my computer wasn’t powerful enough to run the demo on the pc.
Mortal Kombat was too violent for me but Doom was perfectly fine.
Couldn’t get enough of pre-rendered graphics in games. Thought Donkey Kong Country was the best looking thing ever and thought this box art for Kyrandia 3 was Very Good, Actually.
Games with lots of cds filled with fmv were better than games with less cds. In fact, graphics were never going to get better than fmv so why bother with other stuff.
