Fighting Censorship of Games on Itch.io and Steam

If folks weren’t aware, Steam and Itch.io have been delisting adult games on their stores due to pressure from Mastercard and Visa. This has impacted many games, even games that are not porn but just have adult themes. That said, even if it just impacted erotica it would still be bad, because I think people should have access to that too. Fortunately, it seems like there is a way to fight back and help out game developers. People have been calling Mastercard, VISA, and Stripe to complain and it seems like it’s starting to work. It will take days of doing this to make a change though, so here are places you can call to complain and take up their phonelines and costing them time and money in the process until they ease off Itch.io and Steam.

If you’re able to help out, here is a page listing phone numbers you can call and petitions to sign. It sounds like some folks at Mastercard and VISA are telling people to email instead but please keep calling. Emails just allow them to filter out things they don’t want and phone calls clog up the phone lines.

Blaugust Plans

No indie game roundup today. Was caught off guard by all the Itch adult games stuff (and also just schoolwork tbh) and will probably talk about that later if I have anything interesting to say about it about than it sucks and makes me sad. Blaugust is coming up, the month long challenge where folks try to do a blog post every day (even short ones are fine), and I had been thinking quite a while about how I was going to have posts about FMV games every day. Even scheduled a few. Then all the adult games stuff happened with itch and I think the rest of the month will be me finally uploading all the games I’ve made to here and talking about them a little bit, and highlighting some adult games for visibility. That seems fine!

Happy 40th Birthday to the Amiga

Apparently the Amiga computer turns 40 today! It was first computer I used and what we had in our household when I was born so I have a lot of fond memories of it and playing games on there with my dad. It’s nice to see that it still has a very active game dev scene for it and you can find lots of great games for the platform on Itch.io. Amiga emulation is a little bit of a headache which understandably keeps a few people from checking it out, but I think it’s worth pushing through it and giving the games a lot. There’s a lot of weird stuff on there like everything by Bill Williams, the Psygnosis stuff looks really nice, and it’s got some nice versions of old adventure games like the early Sierra games and Infocom’s The Lurking Horror.

PBS Passport

After the defunding of public media happened here, I subscribed to my local Detroit PBS station’s Passport streaming service that people have been recommending on social and this thing is alright! It’s just $5 a month for a bunch of things that are probably exciting to only me. I didn’t realize that it had so many local Detroit shows for streaming, including talks at the Michigan Theater going back to 2015. I recently watched the Pet Shop Boys: Dreamworld concert, which I thought was great. I also started watching British mystery shows, since I guess that’s something you have to do if you have access to PBS.

Anyway, good service. I also supported my Detroit NPR. I sure wish we could just tax rich people to pay for this stuff.

Tex Murphy: Mouselook Edition

Someone has patched in mouselook controls to Under a Killing Moon! If you’ve ever played the original game, you know that it has kind of a goofy control scheme. I love the game but it takes some time to get used to and can sometimes make it tricky to recommend to people. The post below includes a video of what the patch does and it looks great, but also incredibly weird if you’ve played the original game. But again, probably also a big improvement on what it had before. Nice job!

I got sick of the bonkers control scheme in Tex Murphy: Under a Killing Moon and patched in mouselook + WASD.(This footage looks shocking if you've suffered through the normal velocity-based mouse controls, honest!)github.com/moralrecordi…

moralrecordings (@moralrecordings.bsky.social) 2025-07-20T14:50:19.474Z

Blog Roundup (July 20, 2025)

Outdoor Concert Summer continued last night with me seeing Yo La Tengo on the front lawn of the Detroit Institute of Arts last night. It was great! I only kinda sorta know their stuff but they played all my favorite stuff by them and I loved it, aside from the rain during the last few songs. Even aside from the whole pandemic thing, I don’t know if I can really do indoor concerts anymore. They’re just kind of a pain and I just prefer being able to move around more freely and I can hear better too. I think I’m just getting old. Here’s some things I liked reading. Use a RSS feed reader and tell your friends.

Video Games

Last week Steam started banning porn games due to pressure from Mastercard and Visa and this was stupid. No Escape has a post about it. It turns out there was also a post about it on Waypoint as well by Ana Valens. I have gigantic issues with the new Waypoint and haven’t been reading it, but it turns out it didn’t matter because Ana has said on bluesky that Vice just deleted the writing about it anyway. If you want to read the archive about it, you can do so here.

I’m glad Uppercut is back and posting articles again. Here’s one about Slay the Princess

Wraithkal keeps doing nice #ScreenshotSaturday roundups of posts on Mastodon.

Indie Hell Zone has good things to say on Puzzmo. I don’t do the NYT crossword puzzle but I keep hearing this proposed as a nice alternative to that.

Harris Powell-Smith has an advice column for writing interactive fiction.

Tech

I don’t even use Notion but I think Dante has sold me on using Obsidian. I just kinda have a jumble of Google Docs, which seems like a bad idea. I’ve already been pulling away from using Gmail and have a Fastmail account, which I really like.

Dev Logs

Andrew Plotkin wrote about Hadean Lands (great IF game) being in a Boston indies bundle on Steam and I think more people should just get involved with their local dev community and do stuff like this.

I really like Julia’s Crimson Gazette, her newsletter about the games she’s been working on and I think it’s worth subscribing to. It mentions Chance’s Lucky Escape, which I blogged about here and think it’s worth picking up if you have a Playdate.

Cyningstan has posted an update about releasing a new roguelike for DOS. I got to playtest it and while I’m bad at these types of games, I think it’s really good. It’s not a fault of the game, which I found very easy to pickup and start playing, plus it’s free.

Game Showcases at Libraries

I’ve already brought it up a few times before on social media but I’m going to do it again because it’s always been a good time for me. I think game devs should do more with their local libraries. They’re always up for having people use their spaces. Specifically I mean organizing a games showcase/expo of local games. It’s a great way to get eyes on it from people who will never see it on social media and don’t pay to go to games conventions, which is most people. They’re also free!

The Ann Arbor District Library has done a couple conventions and they’ve always been a great time for both video game devs and tabletop rpg designers. I don’t know if it’s an environment where adventure games or interactive fiction would do better but maybe? It can’t be worse than trying to demo your game at a loud convention. I also just think that people should collaborate with libraries more because they rock and always deserve more love.

Personal Databases

Two sites I follow in my RSS feed reader are Jefklak’s Codex and The Good Old Days. Both are websites where one person or a couple people just review games as they play them. It’s usually older stuff but with the occasional new game or tabletop game sprinkled in there. I just really like the idea of having your own personal database of game reviews, instead of using something like Backloggd, and something I’ve been thinking about a lot as I’ve been leaning on posting my reviews and thoughts here more instead of a social media site where it gets compiled with reviews by other folks I don’t know. Maybe it’s something I’ll build out someday as I keep doing more posts. Just for myself, because I think it’s fun looking at stuff I previously played and seeing what I was thinking at the time.

Have Yourself a One Page Dungeon

I was looking through old images I uploaded to Mastodon and saw that I had uploaded a one page dungeon at one point. Since I want it stored somewhere a little more permanent, here you go. Feel free to do whatever you want with it (aside AI crap please), it’s public domain. I don’t think it really makes sense to put on Itch. It’s just a little thing I made a few years ago with water colors. I should do more of these. Not because I’m great at it but I have fun doing watercolor painting for myself.

view of a pretty straightforward dungeon for tabletop rpgs called In the Hall of the Slime King, it has some halls and a couple rooms, each in a different color

Commodore Has Been Bought Again

In case you missed it, the Commodore computer brand has been bought again, this time by a YouTuber. You can watch the whole bizarre thing here if you want. I saw some people on social media being excited about this I’m not even sure what you can do with what he bought. He got a bunch of trademarks and some people from the original run of Commodore as advisors, with the argument that if you get all this stuff, it does become the original company again and does it? Unless you can jump back in time and start manufacturing computers in a world where most people don’t have them, I still don’t see the point of what any of this is other than the opportunity to be an IP landlord. They spent all their money buying the brand so there isn’t really anything left to actually do something with it. But I guess this is the kind of thing the retro gaming community loves to get excited about, the tiniest possibility that a brand will continue to have its name on things. It doesn’t matter that it won’t be anything people actually want, it will still be alive. I guess this is why a lot of adventure game folks were willing to cheer on the acquisition of Activision by Microsoft. Didn’t matter how much of a disaster it would be, maybe Microsoft would be more willing to do something with old Sierra and Infocom properties (they aren’t).

It’s also just hard to get excited about that announcement when it’s filled with AI generated slop and the inclusion of disgraced actor and repeated sexual harasser Thomas Middleditch as an investor and member of the board. I would simply not include an incredibly problematic in my announcement video or let them have anything to do with my company!

My dream scenario that will probably never happen is that the retro gaming community buys the rights to obscure things that aren’t available today and have very little financial value, and makes them public domain instead of being IP landlords. Why aren’t we pooling our money together to buy the rights to Dot Gobbler and Pyst? They belong to the people.