incrediblystrangegames

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This excellent blog is about horses in videogames, and only horses in videogames. It’s by a videogame producer and equestrian who is making a videogame about horses. I feel like Frank Cifaldi and Brandon Sheffield did a similar website a million years ago -- maybe it was a Tumblr -- called “games with bears in them” but this is much deeper and really worth reading. 

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In its fifth printing since 2011 is this cartoon-filled book on game programming for the fairly obscure (these days) academic programming language lisp. The author, an MD, also made a Jaguar game.

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Atari is making a Pong RPG and it looks pretty bonkers, in a super good way.

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Doug Jones is running for Senate in Alabama and some enterprising folks made a campaign ad using Dig-Dug as the theme. I like it when games make it in the cultural consciousness enough to be used in political campaigns (see: the “Trump Mains Hanzo” billboard elsewhere on this site which I am too lazy to link to), but even more when they are “B Side” games, which in my opinion Dig Dug is. It’s never had a real sequel in the US (we’ll leave Mr. Driller out of it for now), and despite being a classic arcade game, it’s really never penetrated into the zeitgeist like Ms. Pac-Man or Mario or Space Invaders or Minecraft. 

Also, I guess this makes the weird dragon enemy Roy Moore. He's best known in real life for being removed from office twice (for malfeasance) when he was a supreme court judge in Alabama. Roy Moore is endorsed by such luminaries and intellectual heavyweights as Sarah Palin and that alcoholic-looking old man from breitbart.com who wears two button down shirts over each other at the same time which even I know is a really awful fashion faux-pas. (He also favors khaki chinos which, as a west coaster, I really have no ability to explain from a fashion perspective, because I never finished The Preppy Handbook.) 

Anyway, no need to get into the politics of things, but after careful consideration by our editorial board, Incredibly Strange Games officially endorses Doug Jones based on his affinity for Dig Dug. Oh, heck, you may also be curious to know that Doug Jones also has a history as a successful prosecutor including convicting some high profile thugs from the KKK who murdered four little girls in Alabama with a bomb they placed at a church, and who had dodged prosecution for decades. In our editorial books, that makes Doug Jones a stand up guy.

(OK, I can’t really leave Mr. Driller out of it. Mr Driller is the protagonist of Dig Dug’s son. The guy in Dig Dug is actually named Taizo Hori and Mr. Driller is actually named Susumu Hori. Susumu’s mother, if you believe the internet, which you’re reading right now so you better, is the protagonist of space shooter Baraduke (AKA Alien Sector), although per the lore lords at the MUGEN wiki, she is no longer married to Taizo.)    

I got all worked up last night because I started reading about the gross history of the murderous KKK in Alabama so I forgot to mention that Heather is the one who tipped me off to this piece of importan Dig-Dugania.

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Tetris on a car dashboard

Found on Reddit, there’s a Russian car with a Tetris easter egg. Awesome.

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Last Saturday night we did our first edition of INCREDIBLY STRANGE GAMES LIVE at the Fuse Box, Seattle’s smallest bar! I think we had more consoles set up then they have bar stools, but we had a great turn out of  folks to eat popcorn, drink beer and play Ninja Golf, Um Jammer Lammy (pictured -- Katie killed it), some com-Lynx stuff, Sea Man, and the highlight of the evening Gunbare Neo Poke-Kun, a virtual pet/dude/game maker title for Neo Geo Pocket Color that is straight up one of the strangest videogames ever made by humans. Thanks again to the Fuse Box for letting us set up, and thanks to the normal patrons for taking a break from talking weird motorcycles to talk weird games! We’re going to try to get Tree Surgeon running for our next outing after GDC, also Hi-Ten Bomberman! We should also have our mini-zine game in order -- with stories on all featured games. If you want to bring a game to present, email me! 

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This should be pretty fun. Devs from various Seattle area developers will be there showing off weird games.

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Book Review: Tetris

I picked up this graphic novel retelling of the story of Tetris at Comics Dungeon and it’s pretty rad. With simple straightforward language and a beautiful, spare, two-color art style, author and illustrator Box Brown takes us from Alexi Pajetnov’s early work at the Moscow Academy of Sciences, to the philosophy of play, and even the physiology of the brain, and why Tetris is so addictive. And of course, the amazing business tale of licensing Tetris from the old Soviet Union, which involved lies, deceptions, and multiple companies believing they had the rights to the game simultaneously.

Overall the book is great. Artistically, Brown uses very stylized graphics, so your focus is on the story and the people, not the details of the hardware or software. It’s also very accurate -- I only caught a couple of very minor goofs (GB supports 4 shades of gray, not 8, stuff like that), and they didn’t detract from the story or give me pause.

The book is very much the official, canonical, Henk Rogers story of Tetris, with Atari and Nakajima cast as illegitimate pretenders to the Tetris license. Of course, this is the version that is supported by legal findings, but I would have liked a little more exploration of whether or not Nintendo intended the NES (known as the Family Computer in Japan) to be a full computer, which might have made Atari’s claim to the license to the game valid. (I admit a lot of my interest in this subject is colored by hearing a long description of the Atari side of the story directly from Ed Logg, who created Tengen Tetris for Atari!)

That’s a minor quibble about a settled issue. There’s more than enough drama (and tragedy) in the story of Tetris without re-weighing the merits of the Atari/Nintendo court case, and Brown does a great job of bringing one of the most fascinating videogame stories -- both creatively and commercially -- to life in this graphic novel. Bottom line: This is well worth picking up! I hope Brown makes The Games People Play into an ongoing series, too -- there are so many great behind the scenes stories in games that still need to be told.

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I was looking through the archives and I realized I never posted a pic for the release party we didn’t have for ISG 2 back in 2010. I guess now it can be told we only had 45 copies of Ninja Golf on hand...

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Space Invaders Bowling

On a scale of one to even, I don’t.

I’m not really sure what that means, but I saw it on Reddit one time, and it kind of sprang to mind when I saw Space Invaders Bowling peeking out of my stocking on Christmas morning. I like Space Invaders, I like bowling, and I like weird little physical versions of videogames, so I was pretty excited when I got this.

In the box is a neat little full color manual, a spinner, a Space Invaders Bowling Disk (It lights up!) and ten bas-relief Invader panels. I used Photoshop to enhance the contrast in the next pic so you can see the Space Invaders logo on the disk -- it’s pretty cool.

There’s also a plastic play mat in there. Now, I don’t care if you’re lying on your grandparents living room floor playing with some plastic ToySmith dinosaurs, or setting up a videogame bowling tie-in stocking stuffer on your workbench downstairs, a plastic play mat is pretty much a guarantee that you’re about to have a good time.

Here’s the play mat in all its glory. Like I said, the manual is really nicely done, and has lots of fun facts about the classic arcade game, as well as the rules for this bowling game. There are single-player and two-player options. Single player is basically bowling -- knock down Invaders and score. Two player is much more interesting. One person spins the spinner and can move the Invaders towards the home area. If they get there, it’s game over for Earth. It’s challenging and a little strategic because you can split up the moves, creating difficult split shots for the Defender. It’s also surprising just how menacing bowling can feel when the pins are able to fight back...

Ready for a game. The disk is lit up in this pic but my camera couldn’t really deal with it, sorry.

Overall Space Invaders Bowling is a surprisingly fun game. I think I prefer this kind of bowling twist to a more literal conversion like Tetris Tower 3D. I also wish I was in the meeting when whoever at Running Press was like “We got the Space Invaders license... let’s do a bowling game!”

I got this for Christmas so of course, I have no real idea where Santa got it, but I am pretty sure he picked it up at Barnes and Noble for $12.95.

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In 2008 Foundation 9 Entertainment, where I used to work, worked with iam8bit to put out an album of Christmas chiptunes. It was a really fun project -- in a limited edition of 1024 discs in metallic sleeve that has become a sought after collector's item. Doctor Octoroc's rendition of We Three Kings is one of my favorite cuts from the record. You can buy (and listen to) Doctor Octoroc's full Christmas album at that link.

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Kevin Wong’s Flight Sim

So a few years ago Gary Whitta and Mike Mika and I were talking and we came up with an awesome film idea: Routine Flight. Basically it’s like a ‘70s disaster flick, you start with this 737 with various ensemble characters getting on – the couple trying to re-spark their relationship, a little girl and her mom going to be reunited with her father who’s just back from the war, a retiring pilot on his last flight, a tired businessman who’s getting too old for this shit, the haunted looking guy who may or may not be a terrorist, maybe some kind of teen love connection couple who get randomly seated next to each other. Maybe a soccer team too, it depends on the final budget, 

Presented in real time through a 90 minute flight from San Francisco to San Diego, a lot of stuff builds up – dramatic music, terrorist guy getting up to the to the bathroom a lot, very suspiciously,as we get more involved with the characters -- teen love connection couple starting to talk, etc. It pretty much writes itself. We also see menace: A shot of a short circuit slowly building inside a closed wire run in the baggage compartment. Of course, nothing happens. We see the short circuit develop and we follow it in a great CG scene, certain we’re moments from disaster, when what actually happens is tired businessman’s seat back video screen goes out. A stewardess taps it a couple of times and apologies, but he says it’s no big deal and pulls out his Kindle. Moments like this keep happening -- we called them gags and we had about 50 or 60 built up over the course of one or two lunches at Emeryville’s legendary Doyle Street Cafe. Anyway of course eventually the plane lands and everyone deplanes and the movie ends. Because it’s a routine flight.

We had some good ideas for the sequel, Routine Flight: Return Trip, and even figured out how we’d take the franchise over the shark (Routine Flight III: Road Trip -- to be fair to Mike and Gary, I think this might have just been me.). Alas, despite how awesome this all sounds, Routine Flight never even got to the treatment stage.

Gary went on to be an actually famous screen writer, and Mike and I still toil in the game industry, with our only joint cinematographic output to date being our completed screenplay for DAY OF THE ICEBERG (like us on Facebook!) which remains unproduced, despite having what many people consider the best Golden Gate Bridge destruction sequence ever conceived for a disaster film. And roles written explicitly for John Gibson, Gabe Swarr and Tony Mora.

Anyway, if we had made Routine Flight, Kevin Wong’s Flight Sim could easily have been the movie tie in game. You’re sitting in an airliner window seat watching procedurally generated terrain (it looks a lot like the Grapevine region of SoCal) scroll by from about 20,000 feet. That’s it. I think it’s kind of got stylized graphics, but it may just be that I’m running it on a really crappy laptop, I can’t really tell. Camera controls on the mouse feel good, but an option to put your seat back tray down would be pretty cool – that may be coming via DLC or in a sequel. For now though, it’s a pretty contemplative way to spend a little while, especially if you haven’t flown in to LA lately. Tension does arise when the procedurally generated mountains get a little too close to the plane (which does happen), but luckily there’s no collision detection with the terrain, so nothing can really threaten this routine flight.

There are other ways to get the game, but I got it as part of a sweet 150-game bundle, called A Good Bundle which is raising money for the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. If you want to support those causes or just get some sweet games, you can get it for about another week as of this writing. They’re trying to push you to donate $20 to get the goods, but I couldn’t see paying less than $30. I probably should have paid $50 or $60. IDK. Now I feel cheap.

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IDK what's weirder, an election ad that uses game talk and frames Donald Trump as a selfish team killer, or the fact that the Wall Street Journal has an article explaining what "Trump mains Hanzo" means. Read more here: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/10/17/trump-mains-hanzo-a-super-pac-runs-ad-targeting-florida-videogamers/ Anyway the ad was run by the guys who do Cards Against Humanity.  

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Strange way to play Q*Bert?

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Buck Bumble, UbiSoft, N64. I actually don't know how strange this is, because no one ever got past the title screen music...

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Vans X Nintendo 8-Bit collab incoming this summer! There’s nothing that strange about this, but I like the subtlety of some of the patterns vs the usual Marioana style (there’s not a slavish recreation of Mario 1-1 in sight!). That 8-bit stripe and the DK one are most dope IMHO.  No word yet on the rumored Eswic X Animal Crossing collab...

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Spotted by @mikejmika is this neat draft PITFALL Lego set, presented at Lego Ideas. You can see more images (and typos) at https://ideas.lego.com/projects/120720