The bespoke emulator DREAMM has now reached version 4.0! DREAMM is an emulator focused entirely on games from Lucasfilm Games/Lucasarts. “Why would I use this instead of ScummVM?” you may ask, well, this includes tons of stuff that aren’t adventure games like Jedi Knight, X-Wing, Tie Fighter, and that sort of stuff. It’s also more focused on emulating the games to play how they did at release, with the original menus and not the various other tweaks that ScummVM makes. It’s all by Aaron Giles, who worked at Lucasarts back in the day, doing a lot of porting work, and I guess a modified version of this was used in the recent Rayman release.
The big update this time is support for some late 90s Lucasarts games, all the Lucas Learning stuff, and Monopoly Star Wars and Willow, which I don’t believe were published by Lucasarts but are obviously connected to that world. Monopoly Star Wars is not a great game but I did play it quite a bit at the time. The Lucas Learning stuff is interesting because none of it is available today and DroidWorks, a neat 3D game where you build a droid and walk through levels solving puzzles, has been a massive headache to get working on modern computers for a long time. The other ones in here that I’ve played before are The Gungan Frontier, which is basically a sim game with the Gungans from Episode 1 and Pit Droids, which is kind of a Lemmings/Chu Chu Rocket-like.
Anyway, it’s really neat that this exists and it’s completely free. You can check out all the games it supports here.
After feeling depressed about the US starting yet another pointless war, I tried to take my mind off things by going to the Detroit Institute of Arts. If you didn’t know, residents of Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb can get in for free because of the millage we’ve passed.
Every time I go, I love to see the murals in Rivera Court by Diego Rivera. This is just part of one wall of four. Love that some of the most famous art in the city is by a Communist. You can read more about it here and it’s very funny that they had a plaque about him in the 50s denouncing his politics.
My oldest has been into Egyptian history lately so we looked at the Egyptian art they had.
They’re still remodeling the museum so they put a lot of the more known works together in a smaller exhibit such as their Van Gogh paintings.
They had a really nice exhibit that I was happy to see before it wraps up soon.
It was a little surprising to see a photo from a concert I’ve been to. Maybe this means I’m getting old. There’s also a dvd of this concert and I make a brief appearance for a few seconds while Iggy Pop stands next to me and sings.
It looks like I missed the Gays Eating Garlic Bread at the Park by about a year.
The day ended with me eating Ethiopian food at Detroit Shipping Company.
Maybe not the most exciting post for some folks but not all of them can be about video games. If you’ve got one or two near you, maybe visit some of your local museums and relax for a bit.
I was really excited that Gobliins 6 recently came out on Steam and Itch and wrote way too many words about why I love it on the No Escape forums. So I’m doing the normal thing and expanding on that post even more. If you haven’t played the Gobliiins series, it’s a weird French point-and-click adventure game in a series that started in 1991. The rest of this post will be about why I think the series is interesting and some of the quirks but the TLDR is: it’s good! You don’t need to play previous entries.
Gobliiins screenshot from MobyGames
Anyway, it’s a series where you control a group of goblins that you switch between to solve puzzles. The entries vary on how many you play as at a time, and it’s technically an adventure game but they typically follow a level-based format where you have some specific goal and you solve puzzles to accomplish that goal before you move onto the next level. The original three games were created by Coktel Vision and designed by Pierre Gilhodes and Muriel Tramis. Muriel has a FASCINATING career. She’s known as the first Black woman video game designer and many of her games are focused on anti-colonialism or erotica. The Gobliiins series is not about either, but Pierre and Muriel did eventually do a game called The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, which has all the goofy humor of the Gobliiins games but is anti-colonialist. It’s a weird game but I love it. Most people in the US who know of these games probably know about them because Sierra bought Coktel Vision and published their games here. They even renamed the third game to Goblins Quest 3, to make it sound more like King’s Quest/Police Quest/Space Quest, which is so goofy to me since it’s this bonkers French game but there you go.
Gobliins 2 screenshot from MobyGames
Eventually Coktel Vision was closed and Pierre and Muriel split off to do their own things. I don’t think they ever had a falling out because they mention each other a bit in interviews and he did art for her book. I think they were just tired of games. Then in 2009 Pierre got the rights to the IP and made Gobliiins 4, which is…..ehhh. The 3D art is not amazing and it takes a long time to really get going, but it’s there I guess. My understanding is that the game improves quite a bit in the second half of the game. You cannot buy this one anywhere today and it’s abandonware. Muriel got a special thanks in this and I think consulted a little but wasn’t really involved.
Goblins 3 screenshot from MobyGames
And then in 2023 he did a Kickstarter campaign to fund Gobliiins 5, which was made in Adventure Game Studio and has 2D art again. It’s great. It’s a return to form for the series and even with the janky setup (it’s split into four launchers because it was a solo project by an older guy learning a new game engine), it was a treat for fans. You can now get this on Steam and Itch.io. This repeated again two years later with another crowdfunding campaign for 6, which just came out this week. It was nice to see Muriel Tramis come back for this one to help with puzzle design and I hope this means she is back to making games again.
Gobliiins 4 screenshot from MyAbandonware
So what are the quirks with the series? Well, every entry in the series has a different number of i’s in the title based on the number of goblins you rotate between. So Gobliiins 1 has you switching between 3 characters, Gobliins 2 has two goblins, and Goblins 3 just has the one but you occasionally have other characters you play as anyway. Gobliiins 4 and 5 are sequels to the first game and have you playing as the three characters from the first game again and Gobliins 6 is a direct sequel to 2, where you play as the two characters from that one. Despite all this weird lore stuff, it doesn’t really matter. It’s just people walking around doing puzzles and goofy slapstick stuff happens.
Gobliiins 5 screenshot from Steam
If I were to recommend a game in the series to folks, I’d probably say to start with 3 or 5, depending on if you want something old school or not. It’s very hard to recommend 1 because it’s the only one with health meters where you lose health every time your characters get hit, which is when all the funny stuff happens, and uses a password system. The health system gets dropped with the second game and from here on, the goblins can get beat up as much as you want. The puzzle design gets better with each entry too, which 3 having much better puzzles than 2. The other weird quirk with the old ones is that people generally prefer the floppy disk versions over the cd-rom ones, because the music changed and people don’t care for it as much (I think it’s fine either way). You can pick up the original trilogy on GOG, which features both the floppy disk and cd-rom versions of the games.
Gobliins 6
Anyway, this is way too many words about a weird series of French games but I like my weird French DOS games so there you go.
I’ve mentioned it before but The Bloggies is a very, very low stakes and silly competition that some folks in the indie ttrpg community do where they take some of the best blog posts that have been nominated by that community and pit them against each other in a vote. No one takes it seriously and it’s just a fun excuse to revist blog posts. I’ve been having fun following along and now you can too. Check out all the links, read the ones that sound interesting to you, and vote if you feel like it.
I just realized I had a lot of sources I cycle between for abandonware games and thought it should be something to share, since this is just a blog and not a real games website, and I can post whatever I want. Abandonware, software that is no longer easily available because it is not sold anywhere by the publisher, is frequently a thing in games unfortunately and it doesn’t help that a lot of people just define it as “well this thing is old, so I can put it up for download even if it’s still for sale” which isn’t how preservation works! Anyway, here’s some sites I like that put care into what they upload, update them to work on modern versions of Windows, and take down the downloads if they get rereleased.
The Collection Chamber is the one I look at the most. It’s updated on a monthly basis and has a wide variety of stuff, with a focus on 90s games for Windows that you cannot easily run in DOSBox. It has so many games from the multimedia era that I find fascinating.
Zomb’s Lair has not been updated in a long time but hosts a lot of 90s computer games packaged for modern Windows as well. One of the most interesting ones to me is VNC: Virtual Nightclub, which was apparently an adventure game by the folks that made Burn: Cycle and was sold only through the Sci-Fi Channel phone line, so it was incredibly hard to find anything about it for a long time. I need to do a longer writeup on it sometime. It’s not “good” but it’s a fascinating time capsule of how we viewed the internet and virtual reality at the time.
Mr. Abandonware has organized a collection on the Internet Archive of DOS games packaged to run on modern windows, and it includes a lot of major games. lt’s kind of wild how many games that were commercial and critical hits just aren’t available for sale anywhere.
SentienceSnakes164 has a collection on the Internet Archive as well of games packaged to run on modern versions of Windows. This is more focused on 00s era games, mostly licensed ones that have been pulled from sale, but there’s some oddballs like early Monolith stuff and lesser known FPS like KISS: Psycho Circus.
There’s probably another post in me where I highlight freeware remakes of retro games, but I do want to give a shoutout to this one of Lode Runner: The Mad Monks’ Revenge. This was a game by Sierra that I really liked at the time and this remake adds likes of nice quality of life features.
Finally, MyAbandonware is a fascinating site to watch. It’s just constantly uploading stuff I never heard of. While it’s not focused on updating games to work on modern versions of Windows, they occasionally provide an update. This isn’t a criticism, no one could reasonably update all the games this site uploads.
That’s all I’ve got for this post. Feel free to add others in the comments as long as they aren’t uploading games that are still being sold.
Generally not a fan of linking to MLive but they have a post up about how multiple parents of Ypsilanti students were taken by immigration enforcement on Tuesday. So if you live in the area, be aware and get involved if you can. Despite what mainstream outlets are reporting, they have not pulled out of Minneapolis either and the fight continues. Abolish ICE is the bare minimum of what needs to happen.
Started making a silly little thing last night and put it on Itch. It’s just a goofy little generator for making ideas for games inspired by 80’s British computer games. Like it says on the page description, I’m poking fun at them but I do have a sincere love for that era of games (well maybe not Dizzy) and I like making my little generators so I thought to try making one in Twine. It’s obviously very early in development and I’m planning on making it look nicer as well as continuing to build on it so it can generate more ideas, but wanted to get it out there before I get distracted by something else. I’ll eventually put it here too because I like the idea of all my games also being hosted here in case something were to happen to Itch.
I should probably be working on my weekly indie game roundup post, maybe tomorrow, but instead I started a fansite for the 90s puzzle game Gubble. I thought of doing some kind of very specific fansite for a relatively obscure game for a long time now, at one point I wanted to do one for Pyst, but the Critical Distance fansite jam finally nudged me into starting one. It’s obviously a work in progress. Lots of pages aren’t done yet and I’ll continue adding more to the ones that I’ve already made. It turns out there’s lots I have to say about Gubble. But I’m going to keep it incredibly minimalist. It’s been fun toying with something only using extremely basic HTML and a tiny bit of CSS, and I’m going to keep it that way. Maybe you’ll consider making a fansite too?
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.
