Still going through Twitter and Cohost posts for my CompStoreVisuals account and reposting them here since that’s more permanent. I saw that the site for The Computer Store in Mobile, Alabama is down (tcs360.com) and there hasn’t been a facebook post in a few years, so I’m assuming the store is gone now. So I suppose enjoy these pictures of the dog and as a record of a place that’s no longer around.
I’m not sure when Cohost shuts down posting, other than it being sometime tomorrow, so I’m doing one of these right now before it’s too late. If you enjoy these, please consider doing your own on your blog and subscribing to the blogs you like on your RSS feed reader. Also feel free to leave comments with what you’ve been reading lately.
RobF, of various indie games fame like Death Ray Manta, has started a blog where he reviews the B-movie schlock he’s been watching every night. It’s great. Even as a bad movie enjoyer, I haven’t even heard of most of these.
Meredith Gran, of Octopus Pie and Perfect Tides fame, is doing more posts on her site that give updates on her Perfect Tides sequel and other cool things.
Dante’s post on Star Wars and Star Trek accurately captures my feelings and current relation to both franchises.
erysden has a nice post on the coolness of software rendering
Katherine Morayati talks about a really interesting sounding DOS application from 1991 called lovedos
Priscilla talks about the Conlang they created for the Superbrothers game JETT: The Far Shore
Ben Chandler is working on a new adventure game!
If you’re like me and having second thoughts about using WordPress after all the recent stuff that’s going on with them, this post gives you an option to move to.
Misty has a blog talking about music albums every day and I’ve been discovering cool new stuff to listen to.
Edenwaith talks about how you can implement Steam Achivements in the Mac ports of games made in Adventure Game Student, which may be very relevant to me in the next year.
Wouter has a post on about experiencing old games in new eras.
And here’s some things that I don’t know count as blogs, but are still really cool IMO!
The Imaginary Engine Review has an article about the poetics of endurance and the game OVERWHELM
Paste Magazine has a great article on the underrated Illusion of Gaia
I loved Start Menu’s review of Dread Delusion
Well, this is the last roundup I’m doing before Cohost becomes read-only, so if you’ve enjoyed these consider subscribing to my RSS feed? I’ve still got a backlog of games to post about but if there’s something cool you’ve (or a friend) worked on, please let me know either on social media or in the comments here. Or even just comment on this post with what you’ve been playing lately, indie or not, I always love to hear that too.
With Cohost winding down, some people have started to make games and toys featuring its mascot Eggbug. You can find some in this collection on Itch.io but I’m sure there’s plenty of other games too, like this game and this eggbug creation tool.
Speaking of Cohost, people there keep talking about how great Crypt Worlds (Itch.io) is. I haven’t played it yet but the devs have been making free games for a long time and it sounds like they could really use the support right now, so consider picking it up.
I’m not a racing person but Golden Lap (Steam) seems like a fun management game from the people who brought you Art of Rally.
Parking Garage Rally Circuit (Steam) looks like a Sega Saturn-ish inspired arcade racing game and the reviews for it have been very positive so far.
Ramón Wilhelm made a free point-and-click adventure game a while ago that I really enjoyed called Yip Quest, and he’s back at it again with another kobold adventure game called Gurk in Trouble (Itch.io). It’s free and playable in the browser too.
It was part of the $108 Adventure Game Challenge game jam, which got a bunch of entries. Consider checking those out on Itch.
There were also some really interesting adventure games that were made for the PowerJam3 game jam back in August too (see, big backlog of things to post). These games (Itch.io) were made using the PowerQuest plugin for Unity. PowerQuest is a tool just for making point-and-click adventures and kinda sorta feels like Adventure Game Studio from my limited experience with both. The one that seemed to get the most attention was Terminal City, a game that plays like an endless runner but with a text parser, but check them all out.
Devil’s Hideout (Steam/Itch.io) came out earlier this month if you’re looking for horror point-and-click adventures. I’m a big fan of Cosmic Void’s games and this is another great one.
Exophobia (Steam) is a retro-looking FPS that was released back in July that I enjoyed even despite some of my exhaustion of the retro FPS revival that’s happening (partially because they just look and don’t feel retro). This one is kind of a mix of early FPS like Wolfenstein 3D and Catacomb 3D and Metroid-style exploration games.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading!
The process of copying over all my posts from Cohost before the shutdown continues, here’s some more things you might like to look at. You can find more of these posts here.
This blog contains a few photos of a CompUSA store.
Here is a short YouTube video of people buying Windows 95 on launch day at CompUSA and Egghead Software.
And here is a random photo of the kids section at a CompUSA. I think I just grabbed this from a google image search
Busy week here! After a rough start with the kids getting a cold at the beginning of the week, I’ve actually got a lot done.
The big thing I’ve been annoying about on social media this week is my wall of buttons that link to other pages. People from Cohost have been getting really into having button links since the site shuts down in less than a week and everyone is getting into personal pages since we want to continue long posting but not go to Tumblr, which I had deleted after they got into AI scraping and their CEO has repeatedly screwed up in a variety of ways. It’s been a lot of fun adding them and I encourage everyone to make a button for their site and let me know about it so I can include it.
The other exciting thing, which I can’t really say much about yet, is that Mystery Project is really taking off this week and I’m learning everything I can about Adventure Game Studio so I can make a game in that. I have also started working on art for it. It should be revealed in 2-3 months and is actually a very tiny project, but exciting to me.
My journey to listen to every record I have continues!
Dr. Pete Larson: Field Drift 2 (2023, Bandcamp)
For some reason I thought this was going to be field recordings but it’s actually minimalist electronic music. I think it’s pretty great. It was created by Dr. Pete Larson, a local musician in Ann Arbor. I got this one for free when I bought a different record and got this as an unexpected bonus.
Various Artists: Dropchord sountrack (2013, Bandcamp)
Soundtrack for a now unavailable game. I remember enjoying the game and this is a nice soundtrack that fits it. It’s just a solid compilation of noisy, danceable electronic music with maybe a small dubstep influence to it as well since it was published in 2013.
Mint Mile: Roughrider (2024, Bandcamp)
The latest and best (imo) album by them. Tim Midyett’s (most famous for Silkworm) current band. I think they’re great
The Fall: The Frenz Experiment (1988, YouTube)
I don’t actually have that many The Fall records and this was a pickup I got about half a year ago. I really enjoyed this one. The reviews for this one were positive but I saw one or two that think the band went on autopilot for this one. I can maybe see that for one or two of the songs but it also has some of their most well known songs like Victoria and Hit the North, two of my favorites.
Various Artists, produced by Space Quest Historian: King’s Chill Vol. 2 (2021, Bandcamp)
A collection of chill and electronic covers (remixes?) of songs from the King’s Quest series. To be honest, I don’t actually know a lot of songs on this one that well since a lot are from KQ 5 and 8, which I haven’t played in a long time, but I still think it’s pretty great.
Mary Timony: Untame the Tiger (2024, Bandcamp)
I really only know Mary’s stuff in her heavier rock bands like Ex Hex, Wild Flag, and Helium but the songwriting in here is excellent. I’ve have one of her solo albums from 20 years ago, but even that has a very different sound. This almost has more of a country sound in parts. I think it’s cool that all of her bands and solo work are all under the Rock genre but still have very different sounds.
With us now entering the last week of Cohost posting, I’ve been making an effort to follow more blogs and sites through my RSS feed reader. Here are some I would recommend!
Katherine Morayati has bee posting old postcards and the history behind them in postcardposting one and two.
ALOCASIA is a journal queer plant-based writing and issue #10 just came out. They’re free to read but donations are always appreciated.
Ephemeral Enigmas regularly covers older and more obscure video games. This time it’s about Game Boy game Battle Unit Zeoth.
Interactive fiction writer Andrew Plotkin goes into the history of a sea shanty. It’s maybe not safe for work.
I love personal blogs too. This one is a shorter post on the thoughts when getting into blogging.
If you want to see an example of Tosting, posting directly into the RSS feed so the post doesn’t show up on the site, add this site to your RSS feed reader.
Moved these to Friday because it felt weird doing them on Monday. Anyway, video games. So much has come out in the last two weeks and I cannot play it all so I’m just going to breeze through it. Multiple things I’ve been waiting a long time for too. The last month has been ridiculous.
UFO 50 (Steam) is probably the big one. Everyone probably knows about this one but it’s nice seeing it finally come out and being so well received too.
TTRPGs for Accessible Gaming Charity Bundle (Itch) will let you buy a bunch of TTRPGs for $10 or more and the money goes to charity.
Judero (Steam) is another one I’ve been waiting for a long time too. Action rpg with stop-motion art is so laser targeted towards my interests.
I was a big Void Bastards fan so it’s really nice to see the devs do a spiritual sequel with a western theme with Wild Bastards (Steam).
Every version of the Videotome engine results in some cool interactive fiction games so I’m happy we now have a new version (Itch.io) that adds some dating sim inspired functionality.
The new remaster of the first Broken Sword game (Steam) looks pretty snazzy.
EyeOS (Itch.io) combines two of my favorite things, fake OS desktops and games made in Decker.
We got two King’s Quest fan games recently! One is a demake (site) of the classic King’s Quest 6 and it’s really well done and a fan project that took many years for the dev to create.
It Takes Two to Tangle (site) is a fan game sequel to the game King’s Quest 7. It does an incredible job emulating the art style from that game and feels like an evolution of the mid-90s style of Sierra point-and-click adventures, which I’ve always been a fan of. The production values for this game, which I believe was mostly by one developer but had a small time outside of it, is astonishing.
Since Cohost has now been confirmed to be winding down and will be read only until the end of the year before shutting down, I will start posting here (hopefully almost daily) with all the stuff that I posted on the CompStoreVisuals account there. I think most, if not all, of this should already be on the Mastodon account but I wanted to have something more permanent for the photos and videos I’m posting. Apologies for what will feel like computer store spam for a while. The “Thoughts on Cohost” post will arrive eventually (TLDR: Not a perfect site but I’m sad) but until then, enjoy?
This photo is one I actually took a long time ago on my phone. The place is now gone.
Sign for Scrubbin Bubbles
Westland, Michigan, United States
Last week I did a check-in post and here I am, doing another one. Here’s what’s going on in my life:
So sort of a busy week but at the same time, not a lot to talk about either. But I’m doing well and excited to work on things I can’t talk about for a few months! Here’s photos of the rain garden in Plymouth.
