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.
retro games
Welp, Started a Gubble Fan Site
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?
BioMenace Remastered thoughts
Developer: Rigel Gameworks
Publisher: Rigel Gameworks
Year: 2025
Genre: Platformer
System: Windows
BioMenace Remastered is a very recent rerelease of the shareware classic BioMenace, which adds lots of graphics customization options and updates, and a brand new 4th episode of levels. You play as Snake Logan, a man with a mullet and mustache who must stop an evil scientist from destroying the world or something like that. It’s not the most important plot. All you need to know is that you are a guy with a sweet mullet who needs to rescue a hostage on each level and then leave. Sometimes you fight a boss. And it’s great. It’s not even a game I had much nostalgia for, my memories of the game at release were my dad struggling to get the shareware to work on our computer for some reason. The game holds up surprisingly well though, especially compared to some of the other shareware games from that era that I have nostalgia for but may be harder for me to recommend to others.
There’s not really much more to say about the actual gameplay. It’s all very straightforward but I think it feels good running around and shooting at monsters. There’s a demo on Steam so if you find it enjoyable, the rest of the game is more of that. I mentioned before that I really liked the Crystal Caves remaster and even though this is by different devs, this feels like it builds on that and the Secret Agent remaster by offering even more graphics customization options as well as the extra episode and level builder that seems to be expected from these. If you want to play with the original graphics you certainly can, but the game’s new modern mode looked great to me and I actually stuck with that for most of the time. It even lets you enable and disabled various bits so if you want to play with the original art but in widescreen mode, you can! I believe these devs did a Duke Nukem remaster or rerelease for the Evercade that may have similar options, but I don’t own one so I can’t speak for that.
The additional episode 4 is great. It introduces a lot of new little level design tricks that keep it feeling fresh the entire time and the levels are a bit larger in scope so it takes more time to play through than the original three episodes. There’s a fun little cameo by someone from another shareware game that made me so happy when I saw it.
Anyway, that’s all I have to say about this one. I think the game holds up and this seems like the ideal way of remastering these old shareware platformers. I hope it does well and we keep getting more of them. I know they exist for Crystal Caves, Secret Agent, and Monsters Bash (these being all by Emberheart), with one for Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure on the way, but I’ll keep playing more of them if they’re as good as the ones we’ve already got.
BioMenace Remastered is available on Steam
Crystal Caves HD thoughts
Developer: Emberheart Games
Publisher: Apogee Games
Year: 2020
Genre: Platformer
System: Windows
Crystal Caves HD is a remaster of the 1991 shareware game by Apogee where you play as Mylo Steamwitz, a miner in outer space, trying to become rich. The platformer has you going through levels and grabbing all the crystals in each one while trying to avoid various monsters and traps. There’s also a puzzle element as you have to carefully plan the use of the timed power ups in the level to reach certain areas and the order that you’ll unlock doors and activate platforms. I used to play the original version quite a bit as a kid so it was nice to see this rerelease happen. Emberheart has done a few of them at this point, with Secret Agent and Monster Bash being the other two Apogee remasters they’ve done. I’ve previously played through the Secret Agent one and enjoyed that quite a bit, and the gameplay and additions in this remaster are very similar.
The remaster adds more color and smoother animation to the original game, music, an entire new episode of levels, and a level creator. I can see the argument for the additional colors removing some charm from the original game but I think it looks nice. The music is fine too but if I did have any criticisms of this remaster I think it’s that the music almost sounds more like something on an older video game console rather than a PC game from this era. This is a very minor gripe though. I think the new levels are very solid and feel like a good continuation of the previous three episodes, and the level editor seems to have been embraced by a very active community with the developer still adding stuff years later.
I’m very possibly too nostalgia poisoned to accurately assess this game but I think it holds up pretty well and Emberheart has done a wonderful job with the remaster, just like they did with Secret Agent. If I had any complaints about the game, not the remaster, it’s that it becomes tedious to marathon the game and it’s why I very slowly played this over a year, but it’s still pleasant to play in short bursts. The developer has also done a remaster of Monster Bash, another Apogee shareware game I loved. I haven’t played it yet but the reception on Steam seems to be very positive and I’m sure it’s great if it’s anything like the other two they’ve done. I haven’t finished it yet but Emberheart also developed the fps Wizordum, which kinda feels like if Catacomb 3D had kept being iterated on instead of ID moving on to Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. If you’re a retro FPS fan, I highly recommend it. There’s also an upcoming remaster of BioMenace that is not by this developer but looks amazing, with it having lots of features I wish this had, like the ability to switch between the old and new graphics. Give the demo a try if you have fond memories of the original.
Support Rebecca Heineman’s GoFundMe
I was originally going to do an indie game roundup but don’t really have the energy for it today. I’d just like to encourage people to donate to Rebecca Heineman’s GoFundMe. It was originally setup to help cover the cost of fighting cancer but is now for covering hospice and funeral costs. She’s done so much for other folks in video games and has always been very generous with her time so please consider donating if you can. If you’re curious about what she’s worked on, MobyGames has listed plenty of her credits but I’m pretty sure there’s quite a few that aren’t on there.
Well, Never Mind on RetroAchievements Then
About a month and a half ago I made a post about how I just learned about RetroAchievements and how it was a fun thing to use when revisiting old games. Well, hmmmm, I’m now deleting my account. It has just been discovered by folks that the site has a bit of a Nazi problem, which kills any interest I had in using the site so I put in my account deletion request, which apparently takes them two weeks to process. The quote retweets list other examples of the site’s moderation team not really caring about what users do. They can say as many times as they want that they’re neutral and just care about preservation but folks, they’re adding achievements to video games and that’s it. They can do whatever they want. You don’t need to add achievements to a far right rom hack.
Oh well, one less account for me to think about I guess and I can go back to not using RetroArch.
EDIT: They’ve since put out an apology and stated the right right rom hack won’t be added to the site which is good. I’m still probably going to let my account delete itself because I don’t really need to keep doing achievements for old games anyway, but I’ve got two weeks to think about it and see if they do anything else I guess.
Ween: The Prophecy thoughts
Developer: Coktel Vision
Publisher: Coktel Vision
Year: 1992
Genre: Adventure
System: DOS
To be a fan of French DOS games is knowing that mechanically the game may not be the tightest thing, but it could be weird enough and take enough swings to be worth it. Some of my favorite games are French DOS games and include: Alone in the Dark, Little Big Adventure, Lost Eden, and The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble. I’m a huge fan of Coktel Vision so it was unfortunate that I mostly found Ween: The Prophecy to be a frustrating experience.
The game has a plot about you stopping an evil wizard, but it’s mostly an excuse for you to move to various rooms, in an almost puzzle room level-based format, and solve the various inventory puzzles before moving on to the next room. This is one of those games that quickly wraps up with a block of text when you beat the final puzzle. Unfortunately I frequently found these puzzles to rely heavily on moon logic or sometimes broken, which meant mostly doing trial and error and trying every item on everything, or just pulling up a walkthrough because I got tired of the sluggish response from every action. I took notes while playing and there’s many instances where I just did not understand what was happening in the game or instances of me trying an action, checking a walkthrough to see that I was doing the right action, but was just not trying it enough times for it to actually work. The entire game consists of these inventory puzzles so the game quickly became a huge slog to play. There are one or two points where there are multiple solutions, but those were the only clever bits in the game’s design.
Even worse than a game consisting of trial and error puzzles is that the game tells you that you had a bad idea, or that your character is getting frustrated, or something isn’t working. It’s aggressively hostile in a genre called Point-And-Click Adventure, where you often just want to click on something to get a description or to see what happens. Instead of either of those things happening though, you are just scolded. It’s immensely frustrating to play an adventure game where you are actually discouraged from clicking on things. I wasn’t even trying to solve a puzzle. It is just common practice to play around in an environment and click around but this is a game that does not want you to do that. I suppose to the game’s credit, I didn’t come across any softlocks.
It’s so frustrating that the game is so unfun to play because the parts surrounding it are nice. Like just about every other Coktel Vision game, I like the art and music. Charles Callet does a fantastic job on the soundtrack like he did on every other game he worked on. There’s also some really weird FMV in here that other people online seemed to find disturbing but I liked how weird it was. The weirdness is why I usually play French DOS games.
So unfortunately, I can’t really recommend this game. I generally love Coktel Vision’s games, even when the gameplay is a bit clunky like in Inca, because there’s usually a lot of really interesting stuff going on and the game has something to say. Ween: The Prophecy just does not have enough to justify playing through the game.
Ween: The Prophecy is not available for sale anywhere but is probably on your favorite abandonware site and playable through ScummVM.
Super Castlevania IV thoughts
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Year: 1991
Genre: Platformer
System: SNES
I just did my regular playthrough of Super Castlevania IV for the Halloween season. This used to be a yearly tradition for me but it’s been a while since I’ve play it so it was nice to revisit it. This time I did it through the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, which includes a lot of the early games. I suspect that anything I say in this post has been repeated a billion times better by other folks but it’s still a lovely game. It’s always been one of my favorites in the series, with some of my favorite bits of it being the directional whipping and the jazzy soundtrack. Neither seems to really come up in later entries and that’s a shame. I know Mode 7 effects only make sense on a SNES but you know what? Later games should have had those too.
I’ve always been fascinated by this being a loose remake of the first game but still being labeled the fourth game of the series. It feels like something we probably wouldn’t see today with a lot of this stuff being more standardized. At the very least it feels different from how the industry does remakes today.
If I did have any complaints about the game, it’s that I personally feel like it starts to become a slog once you get to the castle. The game moves so quickly up until then and it has a wonderful variety of environments but then you get to the castle and the variety seems to drop and there’s a big difficulty spike. It remains this way for a few levels and then I think the level design becomes a lot more interesting again towards the end. It’s still a fantastic game though and the one I probably go to if I want to recommend a level-Castlevania game, partially because I haven’t played that many that aren’t on a Nintendo console.
Super Castlevania IV is part of the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, available on Switch, XBox, Playstation 4, and Windows.
The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse thoughts
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Year: 1992
Genre: Platformer
System: SNES
The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse is platformer where you play a Mickey Mouse and must save Pluto after he’s been kidnapped by Emperor Pete (Spoiler: The whole thing is a dream). You do all your standard platforming stuff while going through a variety of environments. The main gimmick in this one is that you get a new type of power in each new area. I had played this one a long time ago and thought it would be fun to revisit and…..eh…..it’s fine. I thought I would have enjoyed it more since I have such a soft spot for this era of Capcom games but I often found myself getting frustrated by how finnicky the controls felt to me and the hit boxes on some of the bosses, which ended up being my least favorite part of the game. I was surprised by all of this because I remember it being a fairly short game back in the day, which must have warped in my mind to it being easy. Although I probably did play it on easy mode back in the day instead of at a harder difficulty.
Anyway, sometimes you revisit a game from your childhood and it ends up being merely ok. At least all the art and music is great and what I would expect from an early 90s Capcom game. The game eventually got a rerelease on the GBA where you can also play as Minnie and I believe this version also adds some mini games, but I don’t think there’s any way to play the game today.
The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse has not been rereleased and is available on your favorite emulation site.
Kid Klown in Night Mayor World
Developer: Kemco
Publisher: Kemco
Year: 1993
Genre: Platformer
System: NES
Kid Klown in Night Mayor World is a pretty basic platformer for the NES where an evil magician has kidnapped your clown family and it’s up to you, Kid Klown, to rescue them. You run through level throwing balloons with the only real innovation being that you can also put balloons on the ground and jump on them to give you a big jump, or hold onto a balloon to descend slowly after jumping. It’s all very basic and the game can be completed in about an hour since it’s pretty easy. The only real challenge is on the final level where you have to go through a frustrating maze sequence that feels more like padding than a challenge, since the game gives you many opportunities for extra lives. It’s not an amazing game but I do have a soft spot for it since I completed it as a child without using any cheats, which felt like a pretty rare thing to happen for me due to the difficulty of so many NES games.
So none of that is really that interesting, what I did find interesting was the background of the game. It was originally a Mickey Mouse platformer in Japan and part of the Crazy Castle series, which played very differently and ALSO not a Mickey Mouse game here. In the US it used a Bugs Bunny license. For whatever reason they did not use that license and decided to launch their own IP, Kid Klown. It’s not a terribly interesting IP, you’re a kid who happens to be a clown. Everything about the original Mickey Mouse version sounds much more interesting since occasionally uses music from Disney properties for the game and known Disney characters for the villains instead of brand new enemies that aren’t particularly interesting.
Kemco continued to use the Kid Klown IP in a half assed way where most of the games in the series weren’t even released as Kid Klown games in the US, none of them were platformers like this, and the character was redesigned after this first game as well. There was a runner game for the SNES called Crazy Chase, a second Crazy Chase that only came out in Japan, a Game Boy Color puzzle game that was later released as an entry in the Crazy Castle series here, and a Playstation puzzle game that did come out here but didn’t have the Kid Clown name in the title.
Just overall a very weird history of an IP they owned and sorta tried to push but never did it consistently anywhere.
Kid Klown in Night Mayor World is available for the NES on your favorite rom site.