#Try Shareware

[babybinko]

Zach Ward's postal 4 lines make me crack up every time i hear one he recorded that shit in his bathroom!! 😭😭😭

[tangomagnolija]

hello hello hello remember shimejis? yeah we have the good old ones and brother I made them usable for the modern pc because the files we have of them simply are not compatible with the newer versions of java.

No need to install any additional software, just click on the .jar file and let them run wild across your screen [if you do get issues, try installing the newest version of java, its free]. You can also grab them and throw them around at your will. The folder contains: Rokudo Mukuro by Inner-Cass Hibari Kyoya Hibird Xanxus Squalo download here since its a google drive upload I will try my best to slowly update them as I find more (IF i find more OTL) those are absolutely not made by me but rather mostly the japanese khr fanartists of old - however, due to the shareware-ness of a shimeji, i am unable to track the original artists unless the shimejis come from deviantart

[cozzzynook]

Rodimus was born into a royal family. He never knew his carrier and his sire always hated him. One day his sire informs him that he is being married off to Megatron and Soundwave in order to end the war.

Rodimus is upset because he's heard all sorts of horror stories about the Decepticons growing up. He doesn't want to bond with them. His sire gets mad and he learns that his carrier was sent away after his sire found out they give birth with their tanks and that he has the same thing. He is pawning him off to the Decepticons because no one else will take him and it's either them or a brothel.

Learning his own sire thats always hated him sold him off to the Decepticons who were a notorious barbarian and wild kingdom with a history of vicious battle practices and punishments should not have been as much of a surprise as it had been.

Maybe it wasn’t the being sold off that was surprising but the way his sire emptied his tiny chamber with fire like a cleanse and stripped him to a sheer gown cheap shareware wore in the brothels he frequented since getting rid of his carrier, another surprise he had not known, was the surprise.

Being grabbed and stripped down for all to see was shameful and scarring on his processor but for his sire to say he was glad to be rid of him after spitting on his fabrics was a new low even for his sire.

“I’ve finally rid this kingdom of the last filthy tank pest and now good fortune can finally befall us with you gone. First your disease of a carrier that I rid to the wilds and later watched be torn apart by beasts when they came back for you. And now I’m finally rid of you. A stain on my bloodline and kingdom.”

He couldn’t view clearly with the smoke and coolant leaking from his optics as his sire smashed the crate closed and sent him off on a one way shipping container that would later be burned for use by the decepticon faction.

Much like himself.

He could only lay on the wooden planks and sob to himself as he realized he was on a slow shipment to his torment and death. He would suffer a fate of pain much like carrier who’d been discarded like rotten meat in such a delicate state to the literal cyber wolves.

His forehelm kissed the rough crate giving him scratches along his face plates and wood rub as tears and smoke seeped his optics. The pungent scent did little to assuage the change of city to deep wilderness and by the time he stopped mourning over a creator, the only creator, who loved him and risked their life to get to him.

He was at the outskirts of Decepticon territory where the boarding guards grabbed his crate and spoke in a foreign language his processor did not know.

The em field of confusion gave him the impression none knew he was inside and he was correct in his assumptions since most sent the offered conjunx in royal finery with their creator by their side. If he were worthy of such traditions he wouldn’t be here at all and allowed to roam the castles doing as he pleased while training to take over the thrown like the few royal families from his stories allowed their sparklings.

But that was nothing short of a sparkling tale.

This was real.

And his reality was unsealed by clawed servos a few hours later inside what seemed to be a cabin kept warm by a large fire.

He shuttered his optics closed, arms tightening around his exposed nozzles as his stabilizers hiked up to hide his exposed reproductive array. He couldn’t seize the cold shivering and chatter of his denta but he could try blocking out the horrified gasps and sounds of heavy pedes rushing off as tentacles leered above him.

He wasn’t expecting a soft blanket to cover and wrap around him. The warm, delicate, tentacles that lifted him from inside the crate and gently checked him over was also an optic opener.

Deep purple, black with hints of deep blue along with gray entered his bleary optics and the foreign language yet again reached his audials that came into focus.

He didn’t understand what they were saying to one another but he knew the field of disbelief and anger when it burst forth and presented itself in a physical manifestation of clenched servos and he was not ready to mentally handle the torture they would give him.

“Wait! I’ll make it easy! Just please don’t!”

He kept his optics down from meeting glowing red and the black visor that he couldn’t see anything past and tilted his neck cables to show submission. He was shaky in his movements as he forced himself to hold the position and lower the blanket but tentacles stopped him and the fields were hidden from his sensor net.

Rodimus couldn’t comprehend exactly what that meant or what they wanted from him since he knew he was sold for whatever they desired from him and seeing as his sire always spoke of him being nothing more than brothel material he figured his conjunx selling would basically be the same purpose.

“Mistake: anger toward sire. Intention: to have as conjunx, equal conjunx. Slave: you are not.”

The purple and deep blue mechs voice module was deceptively deep and an odd soothing capability that made Rodimus almost believe what he was saying.

“My conjunx is correct. We asked for your servo in conjunx ritus. Not to be sold and treated like this. May we know who did this to you? We shall send word to your kingdom and hunt down the scoundrels who’ve defiled and hurt you as such.”

The command and seething yet restrained emotions that swam in the other mechs vox told Rodimus this was the leader of the decepticons who lead his armies to ruin the cities and kingdoms that dare stood in his way. This was the kings conjunx who stood right by his side and conquered in equal just as he did.

This was the pair his sire sold him to.

Two mechs he couldn’t hope to defend himself from no matter the kind words they try to imply nor the care they show now…they were mechs in power just as his sire…one wrong move…

“I can freshen myself and become presentable. There is no need to worry or concern. I am fine.”

“You are most certainly not,” the king burst forth.

The purple mech held out a quiet servo to the king and took a clip step closer making Rodimus vents hitch.

“Wash racks: in need of. First aid: inside as well. Come: it will help.”

The slender mech used his tentacles to tighter around his frame and lift him further as he carried him easily to the wash racks that looked beautiful and cleaner than the rooms of his old kingdom. Not dirtied by polluted metals or filth. Carved, smoothed and crafted along with the earth and holed with warmth.

It made him less anxious as a solvent was ran and he was quietly directed to where everything was located before being given a key that locked the room from the inside and he was left in private where he stared at the closed door for a klik too long then rushed to lock it and stand with his back plates to it. Gaze searching for a way out only to stutter his vents with each realization that hit him.

He didn’t know where he was.

This could be a trick.

He could be surrounded.

His sire would not take him back.

He was all alone with no currency, no farming skills and no trade skills nor craftsmanship.

He was slagged and stuck here.

‘Frag,’ he sobbed outwardly, as he slid to the floor, balling up to hold himself just as he once did in the kingdom as a sparkling when locked in the dungeons.

‘Frag!’

He did not hear the quiet that rung out his sobs nor the promise made between two kings to destroy the rule of Rodimus’s sire who sold off his own creation when they only wanted his servo and spark after being graced with his kindness all those years ago.

[mychlapci]

Hmmm maybe someone else starts trying to flirt with ageswap prowl? Someone more around his own age. His relationship with the twin and the rest of high command is kept strictly hidden after all, they don't want to paint more of a target on his back.

Prowl harshly rejects anyone who flirts with him, of course. But that gets him a reputation of being hard to get, a pretty little ice queen who has a rumored soft side (thanks to the pile of cute plushies on his bed)

The twins react... Poorly when they see it in person. Prowl's their cute little mechling, he shouldn't have pathetic worthless mechs trying to get in his panels, or trying to touch his doorwings... High command knows how to treat him like he should be, these younger mechs wouldn't be able to give Prowl what he needs.

Still they can't claim him publicly, they already had a close call when he was caught by the constructicons! It was lucky they ended up just fucking him and he was able to escape before soundwave got to him. They'll have to find another way to get all those young bots to leave him alone. Something permanent, and obvious...

Prowl steps into their room and is knocked off his feet, sideswipe is fucking up into his valve before he can react, followed by sunstreaker as soon as he's wet enough. They're both so serious, barely taking the time to mock him or anything, instead growling about making sure everyone knows their prowl belongs to someone. It doesn't matter how many times prowl overloads, or how many times either of the twin do, they just keep going and going.

You can, after all, short out a baffle if the carriers spark gets too overcharged. And between sideswipe and sunstreaker they've got plenty of charge to fill prowl with! When Prowls twin baby bump starts showing early in his pregnancy, all those worthless mechs scatter, just like the twins wanted

AAAA yes you get it. Sunny and Sides are so possessive of him, they can’t stand it that the cadets don't know who he belongs to… This is somehow the most subtle way they can tell everyone that their little trainee is theirs, no one else’s.

Once Prowl is growing a little starting bump, everyone will know he’s got a passionate little boyfriend somewhere… Or maybe they’ll think he’s just some dumb little shareware, got himself knocked up by some lowlife… mhmm

[octopuscityblues]

We're glad to be part of the Tiny Teams festival along with so many awesome games! Check it out:

Try our demo and review it, add our immoral edutainment shareware to your wishlist, follow us on Steam, or share the word! Everything helps!

[theoceanoasis]

Hot rod desperate to get his sparkling to safety joins the decepticons who aren’t the monsters autobots made them out to be. They’re monsters made of circumstance not born monsters

Before the destruction of Nyon he'd been at a bar when he met someone. He didn't know they were the Decepticons third in command. They were handsome and charming. Both of them looking to relieve some tension.

Going back to his room the two of them interfaced and it was amazing. The best he'd ever had. He thought Soundwave would leave right after but he stayed the night. Letting him snuggle against him which he appreciated. Hating it when his partner left him right after. It always made him feel like he was nothing but shareware and for the next few days he'd feel dirty no matter how much he cleaned himself.

It was a few days after Soundwave had left that he started to feel symptoms. At first it had been easy to brush them off and then Nyon happened and he forgot all about it. So overcome with grief he barely noticed.

The Decepticons at the time had offered him a place amongst their ranks, but he refused. He wanted to stay where he was and join his people in death.

But something stopped him and that was the little spark somehow still flickering in his chest. The last sparkling of Nyon.

He couldn't get rid of it. He owed it to the people of Nyon to raise his sparkling and teach them the traditions of his home city.

He would not let Nyons memory fade away. Determined he knew he couldn't stay there. It wasn't safe and didn't have any resources for sparklings.

He traveled to the next city over. Which was a hard journey with the war destroying roads and him having to walk some ways.

By the time he got there he was exhausted and worried about his sparkling. Terrified that all of this stress would cause him to loose them.

He sat on the ground. Legs aching and unable to stand. He put a hand on his belly trying to figure out what he was going to do. He was in an unfamiliar city and had no idea where to go from there.

Luckily a kind medic offered to help him. He'd been weary at first, but not having another option he followed after them.

They led him to their small clinic where they were helping everyone they could and looked him over. He desperately needed energon. Which they were happy to provide.

They helped find him a shelter where he could stay and would check up on him, making sure the sparkling was developing nicely.

Laying on his back he watched in awe as his sparkling appeared on the screen. He felt tears fall because they were so beautiful and he loved them already.

Wanting to pay the medic back for their kindness. Even though they insisted it wasn't necessary. He helped out around the clinic doing small things like bringing them tools and cleaning up the place.

Things weren't perfect. The clinic was cramped and he slept on the floor. Energon while he was given some at the clinic was becoming harder to come by as the war raged on.

But it was home and he was trying his best to make a bad situation work. Hoping that maybe he'll find a way off world so his little one can be safe.

Of course then the war came and the city was ripped to shreds. He remembered waking up to screaming and panicking. He'd pressed himself against the wall and held on in fear of being trampled.

Looking around he could hear bombs going off as buildings and people burned. Panicking he ran to the clinic. Pushing past the panicking civilians who were trying to get away.

He somehow managed to make it. Gasping at the the horrible sight. The windows were shattered. Glass littering the ground. He could see the bullet holes on the wall and when he looked down. The medic along with the patients they'd been trying to help were all dead. Their bodies already turning gray.

He stared for a long time. The screaming a distant sound. All he could see was the medic laying their. Face twisted in fear and panic. Body riddled with holes. The smell of blood and death made him gag.

Snapping out of it. He knew there was nothing he could do. He needed to protect his little one. With a hand on his belly he joined the crowd who was trying to flee.

Only to be cut down by both sides fighting without a care in the world. So determined to destroy their enemies they didn't see the world around them.

He felt a sharp sting against his arm and he looked down to see himself bleeding. Looking around he needed to find somewhere he could hide.

Spotting an abandoned building nearby. He hid inside. Making himself as small as possible he waited in silence. Every time he heard a plane fly by he'd tense. Waiting for them to drop a bomb on him.

He didn't know how long he stayed there. Until he was found by a group of Autobots. He raised his hands spark pulsing in fear as they pointed their weapons at him.

One of them noticing his swollen belly smirked.

"This one might be of some use to us."

They grabbed him and dragged him to the Autobots base. Where they locked him in a room. Only coming in to give him energon, as they waited for his sparkling to arrive.

Afterwards they planned on using him to make more. Since their numbers were low and they needed more soldiers. They thought forcing carriers to have children would fix the problem.

It was disgusting and he was afraid for his little one. Knowing who the sire was. If they looked anything like him. He had no doubt the Autobots would kill his sparkling.

He couldn't let that happen and needed to find a way to escape.

Looking around he took note of everything. There were no guards outside his room and the base wasn't as secure as he's sure they'd like.

His room was completely empty. Which means it would be of no use to him. There were no windows so he couldn't use those.

When the base was attacked. He finally got his chance to escape. While everyone was busy fighting, he snuck out the back door. Only stopping to grab as much energon as he could before leaving.

Looking around. He needed to figure out what he was going to do next. He needed to find a way off world.

He decided to go to the nearby city hoping it wasn't completely destroyed. The journey wasn't as long, but he was a lot further along. Having to take frequent breaks to rest.

By the time he reached the city. He found it under Decepticon occupation. Exhausted,.he couldn't go somewhere else and had to find a way to make it work.

He kept his head low and took up all sorts of odd jobs to support himself and hopefully get enough money to leave. It seemed like others had the same idea. Because he heard whispers about the Decepticons having jobs that didn't involve joining their cause.

He was reluctant to take any of those jobs. Worried because of what happened with the Autobots. He'd always been under the impression that the Decepticons were crueler.

As the war continued raging. Jobs became harder to come by. Until he had no choice. He applied to work in their kitchens. Which seemed like a safer job than most.

Things were going well. He was safe and stayed in the kitchen. Rarely speaking to anyone outside of those who worked there.

He was as content as he could be. It was hard work but he was able to save money. Which he could hopefully use to get off world.

He'd been working late, cleaning up the kitchen before going to bed. When he heard people run inside.

Looking over he was surprised to find Soundwave along with his cassettes. The Decepticon didn't seem to recognize him as Rumble and Frenzy asked for milk.

He quickly made them both a glass of warm milk. Trying to hide how exhausted he was. Worried about loosing his job.

He could see Soundwave watching him but he didn't say anything.

He had no idea what the Decepticon was thinking and it made him nervous. He didn't know how he'd react if he learned the truth. Not wanting to put his sparkling in harm's way. He decided not to tell him knowing it was for the best.

Soundwave was busy helping lead the Decepticons. He didn't have time for a sparkling. If he even wanted their little one.

If anyone found out who the sire was. His little one could also be in danger. Autobots might try to use his sparkling as a hostage or kill them out of revenge.

It was best if Soundwave didn't know. Hopefully he wouldn't realize who he was.

The next day when he went into work. There was a chair waiting for him. He also noticed people seemed nicer and was surprised when Decepticons started giving him tips. Even though they usually didn't do that.

They'd also make sure he'd eaten and that he wasn't overexerting himself. They'd use the excuse that his food was really good whenever he asked and they didn't want to lose that.

Even though he could see them looking at his growing belly.

He was surprised that they seemed concerned about his well-being and didn't do anything to him. Now that they knew he was carrying. They continued treating him as a normal Cybertronian and didn't try to keep him for themselves.

They continued giving him money. Even though he tried to refuse they always insisted. Giving what little they had which he was thankful for.

It wasn't long before he had enough money and could buy a ticket to escape. Although he appreciated the Decepticons and all they had done for him. He couldn't let his sparkling be raised in a war zone. They deserved so much more than being forced to fight if they wanted to live.

He climbed onto the transport and looked at his home world one last time. Having no idea when he'd be back.

Maybe one day he'd see Soundwave again and he'd finally tell him the truth. Until then he was on his own.

[clatterbane]

New toy!

So, I am immediately reminded of just how long it's been since I last had my mitts on anything resembling a C64. (At least 30 years now.)

Do I have more than a few hazy recollections of BASIC, much less Commodore's specific implementation of it for this machine? No, I semi-embarrassingly do not. And of course BASIC is the user interface, so you'd better get some grip pretty damned fast if you want to do anything with it. Time for a little refresher!

Thank goodness for the internet, is all I can say. Including for ready access to WAY more software to fart around with in an emulator than I ever had access to back in the day.

(When yes, the C64 was the first computer that I got sort of passed down to me to keep in my room later in the '80s, after my dad upgraded to something more powerful. I don't even remember what, with as many at least semi-dodgy tech deals as he always had going. But anyway, we were chronically pretty broke, and I didn't even know other people with C64s to swap games and stuff with back then. Only ever had a handful myself.)

Also, this is probably a good excuse to throw a few bucks in the direction of The 8-Bit Guy for his PETSCII Robots game. He does also have a shareware version downloadable for multiple platforms, including DOS. Planning to try that out in a little while,.

[brandwhorestarscream]

Despite lacking any autonomy, is it possible for Thundercracker to be spoiled? Like, he's highly treasured and could get anything he wants except freedom. So if Megatron starts a book/poetry club with him, only joking a little bit, maybe he could calm his house? Again, this all depends on how he's treated inside the aerie. Please let me know how he's actually treated!

And yessss Skywarp just going 🤩 upon realising it's actually the Megatron. I'm just getting this mental image of him nudging Starscream and going, "If I bond with you, does he become my concubine too?"

Ok ok hear me out 👀 the grand matriarchal trine of Thundercracker's family are his grandparents, and the trine leader is his grandmother. Let's just call her Permafrost (name not final), with her two mates Whiteout and Cirrus. Permafrost is typically an ice cold, incredibly shrewd, and strategic woman, but when it comes to her favorite grandsparks she's very protective. She loves Thundercracker very, very much, and only wants what's best for him: she won't have her favorite grandson being trined to someone who won't treat him with the love and respect he deserves, title as the crown prince be damned. And if the little upstart that's to be future Winglord can't be trusted not to stick it in a ground pounder, like hell does she want his tainted hands on her precious grandspark.

So yes! I like the idea of Thundercracker being very spoiled and doted on, but being unable to be free or truly control his life has him suffocating. The only way to salvage the engagement at this point would be to have him tell grandma Permafrost that he wants to trine to the prince. If he really, truly wanted it, she would concede, but as it stands now she's planning to call the whole thing off. If Megatron started a book club with Thundercracker 🥺 I think he'd be really happy. All high caste seekers are well read, naturally, but none really share TC's passion for it. He's an S-class bookworm and devours anything he can get his servos on, from adventure novels to sci-fi to horror to romance. A lot of it is considered improper or low-brow reading, so there's hardly anyone he can talk to about it.

Then Megatron comes along and recognizes one of the titles he's engrossed in--probably slipped away from the ball to get a break and finish the most recent chapter he was in--and they immediately hit it off. Thundercracker has stars in his optics pretty much the entire time, and when the two of them are found hours later, he's practically glowing. He's never had anyone to talk about his interests with, and certainly not someone who matches his enthusiasm. They lose track of time getting lost in their conversations, and when they're found, Thundercracker is practically walking on air. He's elated, the conversation was so invigorating and he leaves with a radiant smile on his face.

Permafrost has never seen him like this, no one has, not since he was very young. Thundercracker asks her to hold off on canceling the engagement, leaving them in a state of limbo. They're not out of the woods yet, he's not sure what he wants, but agrees to let Megatron (and Starscream) continue trying to win him over. It's a really weird reversal, of the royal line having to court and petition someone of lower status for their hand, but their relationship so far is anything but the norm 🤭 it's shaping up to be a proper courtship, and Thundercracker let's them set a date to meet with him again (for a coutship date, totally, definitely not the beginnings of a book club with Megatron, oh no, never 👀)

...

Now, for Skywarp. Starscream firmly tells him that no, Megatron wouldn't be their shared concubine. He's not some piece of shareware for them to pass around! That's the carrier of his children, thank you very much, and he won't have him disrespected and pawed at! Skywarp pouts about it, but takes it in stride. Says he'll continue the engagement if he gets access to Megatron too, as company if nothing else. They’re both aliens in the world of high society, so he feels smthn of an understanding kinship between them. He wants to hang out with his favorite gladiator, and even offers to keep him entertained while Starscream is schmoozing with Thundercracker. Little does he know TC wants to see the new concubine too 🤭

[rawmeknockout]

a little sneak peek at a thing i’m writing for ao3, it’s not done yet and i’m not sure how much longer it will be but i’m so excited to post it

cw: noncon

Bumblebee understands why Ironhide is worried Optimus ‘babies’ him. He knows that, eventually, being sheltered by the older mechs will only hurt him. Still, Bee thought he was ready for his responsibilities, to face whatever this war could throw at him. The only way he could prove his mettle was by going out and gaining experience, facing the realities of what haunts the mechs that look down on him. He wants to be just as reliable, just as respectable, as them. If only Bee could show them that he is ready to face the world. He’s starting to think that mentality is exactly what Sunstreaker meant by calling him pampered.

Thundercracker’s grip on his helm is too rough. Insistent. Servos too big to be gripping his helm horns and maneuvering him, but, by Primus, is he trying. The seeker’s glossa in his mouth is so thick, so large, compared to his intake that it feels like someone is stuffing mesh into his mouth. The Autobots he’s usually friendly with are nowhere near the size of warframes, especially flight-mode frames. Bumblebee has never realized how large they are, lucky to always be far below them when they are strafing over the battlefield. He never pondered before how fortunate it was to be the target of their evadable missiles as opposed to their servos. The seekers are known cowards, but Bee is built more like prey than a predator.

“You like this, little Autobot?” Skywarp is leering down at him, a cruel smile stretched across the sharp planes of his face. It makes him look like a sharkticon, like someone who wants to devour Bumblebee. His clawed servo grips Bee’s so tight the metal is surely dented, working it over his spike in erratic and rhythmless strokes. “You like having a Decepticon spike frag your little ports? I knew you Autobots were a bunch of shareware frames, but, Primus, you don’t have any dignity, huh?” Thundercracker’s laughter comes out in a loud bark, his own spike twitching and leaking transfluid across Bee’s abdominal plating. His processor isn’t sure whether to focus on the brutality of their words, on their looming frames, or on the sharp in-and-out of Starscream’s spike in his overly stretched valve. Bee feels both enraged and completely drained; sucked of life and fight.

“Don’t be so cruel Skywarp, you’ll hurt his feelings.” All three seekers fall into fits of laughter, as if Bumblebee’s emotions were, themselves, a joke. As if taking into account how he feels about his body being used by them was a joke. It makes indignant fury roil in his tank, but he knows there’s nothing he can do about it. That’s the most painful truth to swallow. Even at his most infuriated, he’s nothing but a bug to a group of Decepticons. Is this what Jazz foresaw when he told Bee he wasn’t ready for harder missions? Is this his deserved punishment for being ignorant? Did Primus see his hubris and attempts at glory, and decide Bee needed a hard lesson in reality? He would take it all back if he could. He wants to apologize for all the times he’s pestered and bothered and prodded at his superiors to take him seriously. He hadn’t realized just how merciless a mech could be.

“Tight little fragger,” Starscream’s high voice is just a hiss, sounding like an alarm. A warning. If only Bee had chosen to listen for it sooner. Every thrust from Starscream’s frame forces Bumblebee’s backplates into the hard, rocky Earth; the screeching of metal on mineral ringing in the air. As startling as a gunshot, as unnerving as Seeker claws on a blackboard. Bee wants to tear out his audials, but the clenching of his servo in frustration and pain draws a low groan from Skywarp. He can’t do anything, can’t do anything at all that won’t result in pleasure for his tormentors.

“I want in after you’re done, Screamer,” The purple seeker looks pitiful with how his frame curls around the servo on his spike, desperately thrusting into Bee’s grip. Even if they weren’t enemies, the pinched arousal on Skywarp’s face looks grimy and sick. Too open, too obvious, when Bee’s frame is aching and burning with every movement.

[cyberrose2001]

imagine humiliating sentinel with a second or even third party (most likely optimus and/or jazz…), maybe a bigger group for them to feed off of each other’s rambunctious enthusiasm about making sentinel squeal… of course, you’ll have rules for this stuff. stop if he passes out or says the safeword. other than that he’s gonna silently beg for anything else. it’ll probably start off a little uncomfortable, until someone speaks up about adding ice to the equation. so you drag the ice across his chest and he just can’t help himself when his panels pop open. the party of bots will (loudly) suggest other ways of humiliating him, all the way from making you tell him he’s an obedient piece of shareware for you to pulling his chassis open and tapping on his spark. he’ll twist and turn, his voice cracking as he screams and writhes on the berth. “shove your servo/hand in his intake!” “pinch his thighs!” “put that rod in his spike!” “make him hold his breath!” “tickle him!” and “see how many fake spikes he can take!” would only be a few of the nasty suggestions you get… and he’ll overload at almost every new thing you try. the hyena-ish sounding laughs, roars of approval and verbal applause are enough for you to keep going until he faints. when you’re done, he’s already asleep. you’ll clean him up and he’ll sleep for like, two days.

he’ll say it was worth it <3

oh my god YES!!

Sentinel being an experimental sex doll for them is hot… i can just imagine him begging for some kind of mercy towards the end, but as you said, he’ll also beg for even more next time <33

[thegreateyeofsauron]

Every game should switch to the shareware model. Like you should be able to download Tears of the Kingdom off of CNET.com but if you try to leave Central Hyrule suddenly CD-i Ganon appears along the border and says some shit like

“*ominous organ music and thunder crashes*

Foolish hylian twink, did you really think I would let you pass on by!?

Recite the Oath To Order And Registration now, or else, you will die!

*camera zooms in creepily close to his face*”

and then you have to enter the registration key mailed to you by Miyamoto himself or Ganon blasts you with lightning.

[symphonicdemise]

🚀 anon

You seem to enjoy surrounding yourselves with bigger mechs. Tesarus, Helex, Overlord, Deathsaurus. But how would you go against someone like me, where at best, you barely reach my codpiece?

I could do so much with four arms.

Hold your throat, your wrists, cover your mouth, palm those barrels, tease thighs, squeeze a spike, toy with that sweet little node, or curl my digits into your deepest node clusters of your valve. And with temperature mods across my frame, I could make every servo a different kind of hot and cold.

Take you up into orbit, where no one would hear even your loudest of moans, let alone test if that ability of yours works in the vacuum of space. Make you see stars, and supernovas, in all euphemisms of a frag. Where you are weightless, yet I can pull you down onto my spike like you’re nothing more than a sleeve, as you seem to yearn so much.

Let alone just using my spike in general. Could you even *take* someone like me? That blue imitation would be a good warm up, stretch you out nice and slick for me before the main event. I’d make your abdominal plating bulge. I would ensure by the time I am finished with you, round, after round, after round, that that sensation of a stretch is burned into that secret lust of a breeding kink you so deeply try to hide, that no other spike will do. No amount of spikes will fill you like I have with just one. No matter how much you paw at your frame, let these lustful mecha pass you around like shareware, stuff yourself with all pathetic mimicry of toys on your ship, nothing is going to grind up into the top of your valve like me. Nothing is going to stretch your needy valve like me.

And, I’ll be waiting for the desperate rendezvous to be pushed down on all fours and fragged like the needy little thing you are, clawing at the berth like it’s the only thing to ground you, dribbling out both ends, and letting all the locals know my name from how you wail it..

"heh" He does appreciate the "blue imitation" comment. A mech bigger than Overlord to frag his processor out? How tantilizingly lurid. He palms over his spike panel for a moment, leaning back and allowing this unknown suitor to fill his processor with the most lewd images.

"I'm sure I can handle such a big mech, and at any rate... Nickel could be on stand-by for any... internal damages there might be. If you are as large as you claim to be." His frame sparks with charge, "I've known mechs who like to... exagerate their size. Why don't you prove it to me? "Put your money where your mouth is", as they say."

[talenlee]

Game Pile: Commander Keen — The Kid; id; Tom Hall

Hey, kid

Hey psst

Ya ever heard of this game, DOOM?

Doom, the Firstest Person Shooter. Before the 2016 game that came out trading on its identity, this name referred to a game that came out in 1993, and was quickly followed by a sequel named Doom 2, then by Quake then by Quake 2, then by Half Life, then Half Life Episode two, then Half life Alyx – and there is a chain of history that defines the literal everyday environment of videogames that is, probably, directly spawned from DOOM. Steam, one of the dominant gaming platforms, is in part the result of people who made a mod for Quake called Team Fortress, which was one of the children of DOOM. A large body of the early architecture making remote gaming possible pre-internet that was made For DOOM started out with a service called DWANGO, which was so successful in Japan that it’s now a major corporation that itself owns Spike Chunsoft, and is owned by Kadokawa, the company that runs Bookwalker. Competing with and attempting to displace the genre of gameplay Doom and its children in Quake created resulted in a shareware distributor called Epic Megagames to create the videogame Unreal and that engine now runs everything including Star Wars TV Shows. Doom is so important to games that for a time that genre of ‘first person shooter’ was known, at one point, as doom clones.

Doom is important.

Doom is so important it’s difficult to express how important it is.

Talking about how important DOOM is to gaming history is like trying to describe the importance of Franz Ferdinand. Except that dude isn’t fun at parties, since he’s dead, while by comparison, you can boot up original Doom right now and still blast around having a great time with a game that largely holds up using a simple system of design tools iterated on endlessly over thirty years. We have never stopped playing DOOM.

When we talk about games being important, we tend to describe games in a way that hints at a sort of historical sequence of necessary steps – hi Ted, I know I’m skirting close to teleology here. You know, the narrative that this game existed so this game can exist so this game can exist. Trust me, I’m not: This is not about how things had to happen, it’s about reflecting backwards on how people say things happened, because they’ve told us. In the same way that 90s terrible RTS Krush Kill N Destroy directly led to the creation of Total Warhammer because it sucked so bad, we know that Doom and its enormous success is what led to the gaming landscape we live in looking like it does now. 

DOOM is one of the great landmarks, one of the first touchstones, of the PC gaming landscape that made it relevant to gaming beyond the boundaries of the PC.

With that in mind, let’s not talk about DOOM.

Let’s talk about the game franchise that made it possible for DOOM to exist. Let’s talk about the language of Minecraft, the formation and end of id software’s earliest identity, and an inexplicable cameo by Tom Cruise.

2

Let’s talk about Commander Keen.

Kicked off in 1990, Commander Keen is a series (kinda) of six games, made and distributed with the at the time new Shareware model of games. They’re adventure stories, focused on the adventures of one William Joseph Blazkowicz II, aka ‘Billy Blaze.’ Incredibly smart, with an IQ of 314, Billy is an inventor, who at the age of only eight, has been tinkering away in his backyard, even making a spaceship out of junk from around the home. For reasons at that point uncertain, he dons his older sister’s football helmet, and declares himself Commander Keen! Defender of something or other, depending on the text. All we know really, about Billy at this point, is that he’s a plucky kid, he’s a boy genius, and he’s going to solve problems himself.

It’s Calvin and Hobbes, but the spaceship is real and the sense of humour is grim.

Shareware was a really cool way to get games back in the way – you were given free licence to distribute some or even all of a game, as shareware, but the people who made it asked you to send them some money to register the copy, as a thanks for the program you had. Sometimes registering shareware would also get you more of the game or product. Doom was shareware, Wolfenstein was shareware, almost every game distributed by Apogee and Epic Megagames were some sort of shareware, and shareware was the way that good, easily distributed games became popular and made money enough to sustain their development. That meant that a lot of games of this time were divided up into chapters, so they could shareware the first part and then sell the rest. Such is it with Commander Keen’s first three games, the Vorticon Trilogy.

First up we have Marooned on Mars. In this story, while his parents are off having a nice dinner, Keen sneaks out and goes to Mars. As you do. He explores around a bit, and when the time comes to head home, finds his spaceship, the Bean-with-Bacon Megarocket, has had four of its parts nicked, and now you’ve gotta go explore the world to find them. Along the way, you encounter the aliens of Mars, which range from the friendly Yorps – one-eyed goofy friendly problems that run into you and push you into things but are just trying to be friendly – to the deadly Gargs – giant two-eyed monsters that can race at high speed towards you to kill you – and finally the pajama-clad Vorticons.  Not Vortigaunts, they came along later, but builds on my theory that this game is part of the lineage that leads to Half Life 3. 

Vorticons are a kinda-dog-alien that isn’t from Mars with the mysterious ability to jump. The Vorticons are connected in some nebulous way to the plot to keep Keen stranded on Mars,which they didn’t just try and do by waiting by the Megarocket and kill Keen, but you know, we take those. You thwart their plot, usually by shooting these Vorticons, you drop an enormous weight on their leader, and then make your way home.

This was the shareware episode of the trilogy, so it’s the one most people of the time are likely to know. It dropped in December 1990, and gave you 16 levels to peek around in.  It was brightly coloured and had big, detailed (for the time) sprites. In purely technical terms, it’s incredible, but not in ways that most people would ever even notice.  It’s a real classic videogame of its type, and you might be forgiven for asking ‘well what’s the big deal’ to look at it. This is definitely a type of game that looks unremarkable to the Nintendo market at the time – it’s basically a slightly higher resolution version of something like Super Mario Bros, and maybe a bit more of an exploration game than a to-the-right hold-on-tight plotless execution game. 

We got a lot of videogames early on in the history of shareware that were ultimately exploration games. Drop you into a space to look around, and then gives you stuff to find that lets you win the game. A lot of them were about going to some strange distant place, and walk off with the treasure. This particular narrative, from a designer perspective, is really desireable because it encourages you to get involved with a place and look around for things you might want, but also it’s a trend you’ll see come up in a lot of conversations around colonialism in games. Yes, I’m saying Paginitzu is probably racist. And yes, that game series goes places, but we’re not talking about Paganitzu here. We’re talking about Commander Keen1, Marooned on Mars.

What Commander Keen does is that instead of putting you in the shoes of a coloniser, it puts you in the shoes of an explorer who has been trapped. Keen shows up on Mars to look around (because dang that’s cool), but his goal isn’t the enrichment of the self, it isn’t his own treasure and loot, it’s rather reclaiming earth artifacts that the Martians seem to have stolen (why do they have Pepsi?) and the tools taken from him to stop him from escaping.

Mars’ history, as we understand it, is that there are the Yorps and the Gargs. Gargs, violent and aggressive, ruled over the Yorps for year and built a civilisation on Mars, and then in 1976, humans accidentally killed the King of the Gargs by dropping a exploratory probe on him at speed (based). Then the civilisation was fractured, and all these city states are left to fend for themselves… and then the Vorticons show up and take over a few places. It’s weird because in a way, as much as this silly aesthetic holds together. In the context of trying to make a game that looked and felt like the Mario Bros, short for Brossentias, It’s kind of just videogame stuff… and it tells you about a colonised people at war and their attempts to ensnare a stranger into their mess.

I believe this to be entirely, one hundred percent accidental.

3

Alright, so, moving on to the next game! Keen fixes the Bean With Bacon Megarocket and flies back home to earth before his parents come home from their nice dinner out (this was a thing that could happen in the 90s, it’s wild). Anyway, they arrive home and check in on Billy. Finding their beloved son faking being asleep, they’re about to go to bed themselves before they notice the Yorp he brought home. Rather than contend with it so late at night, his parents promise to talk about it in the morning and go to bed. 

Once his parents have gone to bed, though, Billy sneaks out again, because now he has to deal with the huge floating battleship next to Earth that he saw on the way home.

This begins the second game , where you now have to quest your way through a battleship, which has guns trained on a bunch of important(?) earth cities. If you want, you can even fire the guns, ending the game and blowing up a city you think sucks. But it’s the same basic energy as the first game: Find your way through levels, avoid baddies, shoot things, explore secrets, and break the right machines so you can get out and go home.

In any given trilogy you run the risk of creating the ‘middle’ problem. The middle of a story doesn’t usually get to do anything because the stakes are set up in the first part and resolved in the third, so the middle can feel like padding. The Earth Explodes avoids that because it is still an interesting game with its own exploration mechanic to it, and a real consequence for failure, its own stakes, but the why isn’t explained. It is a detour but not an unrelated detour.

3.1

Also, this game has a gun. It’s not Keen’s first gun. His first gun is the one you pick up from the surface of Mars, not one of the things Keen makes himself. That’s also where he gets the pogo stick which was maybe some sort of alien artefact they stole from Earth a long while ago, sometime after 1919. Don’t get bogged down in those details. The point is, the gun in Commander Keen is external to the self. He gets his first gun in the first level, and it’s marked with a sign that he can’t read.

This gun is essential to completing the game – there is a final puzzle that cannot be solved without access to the gun. Also along the way, numerous lethal threats can be contained with the gun – enemies that are willing to kill Keen are shot, and stop. Some things won’t stop when shot, and some things are only annoying when they’re un-shot, but basically the gun is framed as a tool for protecting Keen himself.

In the mothership, you pick up your next gun, which seems largely the same as the last gun, but stronger – it can now best Vorticons in only one hit – and you’re off. Keen disables the many guns of the mothership and is presented with very few opportunities for a truly pacifist run. While the nature of the game doesn’t make shooting enemies absolutely 100% required, it is definitely necessary for a blind playthrough, and level design makes any alternative pretty much impossible for playskill levels that doesn’t rely on speedrunning pixel-perfect tricks. This is a game where the gun is essential (for breaking the ship’s plot-critical guns, as gun feeds on gun) and presented as part of solving problems.

But there is an optional level you can do, where you find, after a long passage that has involved shooting some more Vorticons, a frozen Vorticon. The frozen Vorticon tells you that first of all, the Vorticons are mind controlled at the behest of the Grand Intellect. All of them. 

Then it asks you not to kill them.

This carries with it two horrifying realisations. First, to proceed through the rest of the game with this knowledge requires knowing that you are killing Vorticons, helpless slaves in their own bodies. That’s bad. That’s a rough challenge for a game that is, at the least, a bit unfair about how it distributes difficulty and spawns sprites in its enormous, chunky, vertical-over horizontal engine. This game isn’t easy, and I haven’t finished it without shooting, despite my time trying.

The other thought is that you’ve already killed people! The Vorticons aren’t an alien nothing, the guns you shoot on Mars aren’t knocking people out, they’re killing people, and the killing was done without you necessarily knowing. Though I guess there wasn’t a way to nonviolently crush the Vorticon captain.

The justification – that they are threatening you and may kill you – is perhaps compelling (and we’re not going to get into the Juul-side idea of how multiple lives interact with the game fiction), but even then that’s not necessary because why is this game about being an 8 year old super scientist so dark all of a sudden, and also, all along. 

It’s one of those things that I think is part of how Tom Hall got along in id software early on. There’s a bleakness, a schlockness to it, and it is pretty funny to realise the game at one point goes ‘hey, blood is on all our hands. Anyway, doot de doo, go get some teddy bears.’ 

4

This is an interesting example of what structuralist game examination, the kind Gerard Geanette never does, calls hypertext. Text is the work, a participation in the media, then there’s paratext, the zone of media created to experience that media, which includes things like interviews about the work, the box it came in, the way your room changes your perception of the light. There’s also subtext (things in the text implied but not stated), and supertext (things the text says that it has in common with other unrelated works), as well as metatext (the way the text replicates trends in other, related works), and finally, finally we get to hypertext.

Hypertext is the way a text changes when you participate in the same text multiple times. First coined when describing interactive fiction (like Twine games!) Hypertext is the conceptual space where videogames can thrive. Hypertext is how you can develop a view of a text by iterating over it again. Sometimes this means rewatching a movie with a twist ending, or watching a movie for the thirtieth time and seeing all the technical details in it now you can appreciate them, or maybe it can mean reading a book twice, with a ten year gap in between. The point is, hypertextuality is using the text to examine the text.

In this case, the first time I finished Commander Keen 2, I never thought about the moral implication of the shooting, because I figured the enemies would get back up. Some of them did. Some were immune. And they were shown falling over, or bouncing and glaring or being surprised at their state. Also, it was a boy’s adventure! There was no need to think about the morality of the violence because the story was more focused on exploration and making that violence relatively low impact. You don’t see blood or violence or injury. Just, well, enemies are zapped.

Once you know about this other point – that the gun works, the gun kills, and nobody you kill in game 2 deserves it – the entire game changes. You can’t not know about it. It was true whether you knew it or not, and the game has no intention of making you feel good about whether or not you engaged with that.

That is some heavy stuff to drop on an 8 year old!

5

Commander Keen 3, Keen Must Die, is the capstone of the first trilogy, and is meant to be a kind of finale for the character (for now). While one is an escape and two is a rescue, three is a weird kind of journey to confrontation, and the first real representation of something you could consider a boss monster in this otherwise runny-jumpy looky-shooty game. In 3, Keen travels to the homeworld of the Vorticons to do battle with the Grand Intellect, who is both in charge of the invasion force and directly out to get Keen, personally. To defeat the Grand Intellect, he fights his way through the normal homes and lives of the Vorticons, which have been militarised and made into defences for the Intellect.

The intellect, who you then discover, right at the very end is your rival! 

No!

Way!

Who you’ve never heard of before this point! 

It’s Mortimer Mcmire. Not Morty Maxwell. That was a different 90s videogame villain, second Super Solvers reference ding. 

Why does he want to blow up the earth? Well, because everyone there sucks and he’s smarter than him. That is to say, Mortimer McMire believes that everyone in the world who doesn’t test well on an IQ test compared to him deserves to die, and in that way this game was remarkably prophetic about the state of nerd culture in 2023, yikes. Mortimer’s IQ is 315. Billy’s is 314. You know, pi reference. Mortimer, knowing that he’s smarter than even the smartest other kid in the world, has resolved that he can blow up the world and lose nothing. Which, if nothing else, you have to respect the scope of the pettiness.

6 

Structurally, 3 is Billy kind of presented as an aggressor and it’s for a strange purpose. He’s on the Vorticon’s home planet to try and find the person imprisoning them and liberate them, but in the process of liberating most of them he’s going to certainly kill a lot of them. Including several children. The story even makes a point of it: The final narration says that you’re crowned and hailed as a hero by the Vorticons you haven’t slaughtered.

Cough, pause, anyway.

Something you might have noticed so far is that despite being games full of levels for you to play, the narratives of each Keen game quietly ask you to finish the game with as little time spent in the game as possible. In the first game, you’re under a time crunch – you have to get your ship repaired before your parents come home. In the second game, your priority is the destruction of the guns on the ship, and you don’t really care about the other things on the mothership. In the third game, you’re exploring the everyday homes of the mind controlled Vorticons, who you know definitely don’t deserve to be killed.

It’s interesting because this kind of game is one where the fun of the game is usually in exploring and playing them. There’s reward in the form of points from doing a level and looking around in it and finding stuff. They make you stronger or better though, Pogo stick aside, you never get better, you just get lives and points and ammunition. The first time through the game you’re trying to find the end of the game, but after that point, on the second play through you’re left playing a game where your optimal path through the narrative is playing as few levels as possible.

These are games that narratively invite speed runs.

7

Oh there’s more to it of course, like there’s a whole narrative about Mortimer McMire, and the idea of Billy having a villainous opponent. Across seven games, then, there’s a chance we’ll see more development from this character, right?

Right?

(Not really).

This game also gives you the first full translatable cipher of the Standard Galactic Alphabet, which is used to decorate all the signs around the levels. When you find this secret area it lets you finally go back and translate all the other notes you’ll find written in this.

Like you see in Minecraft.

Yeah! Minecraft’s little weirdo script of enchantments? That’s from Commander Keen.

Does this mean anything? Not really. I guess Hatsune Miku is a fan of  90s shareware videogames.

8

Thus ends the first three games of the Commander Keen saga. But those are the games as game texts, things for immediate critique. The games are boxes you reach into and you move the parts around inside them. What about the box outside the box? What about the machine that made the game, the id software that started a genre that defined an industry? And where does Tom Cruise figure in? And I know, I know, if you’re a super nerd who knows the origin of Doom you may think you know how Tom Cruise is involved, but no, it’s not that.

Commander Keen was a game made to solve a problem. Before Commander Keen, the PC videogame market had an unsolved problem, and it was a problem that the consoles of the time, the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, could handle easily. The question was about smooth scrolling to create a space. If you looked at videogames from before Commander Keen, it’s very rare to see a game where a game entity, like a player, walked forwards and the screen moved with you. 

Instead, you were likely to see screens that split things up bit by bit, or limited the movement of the player to big, chunky steps, because what it was secretly doing was drawing simple tiles and keeping a protagonist moving slowly was a good way to keep the buffer from being overwhelmed.That’s how other games, such as the Super Solvers, handled their Ageless-Faceless-Gender-Neutral-Culturally-Ambiguous-Adventure-Person, waddling along  at a fixed rate in a slow scrolling background in fixed distances. These fixed steps meant that 

 Even then, you’ll notice, the screen loading is weird and feels choppy. This creates a phenomenon called ‘tearing,’ where layers of the screen load differently to one another. 

Okay, so, scrolling backgrounds and fluid movement. It was a thing EGA based PC games could do, but couldn’t do it fast, they couldn’t do it fluidly, and they also couldn’t do it in a way that handled input from players and allowed for fast reactions.

The problem was the EGA chip, or ‘Enhanced Graphics Adaptor.’ It was a lot better than its predecessor, the CGA Colour Graphics adaptor, but both were pretty ugly. CGA could manage four colours, but EGA? It stepped up to sixteen whole colours. The VGA was years away and the EGA was the industry standard for PC Games, and what it could absolutely not do is Nintendo-style smooth scrolling.   Now I’m not going to try and give you a lesson in how the EGA chip handled things, because I can’t, and even if I tried, it would just be me copy-pasting into my script from Masters of Doom. The solution, as best I can describe it is that they simply lied to the graphics display about what they were loading.

Rather than try to load the whole level on demand, at any given point, you were loading A Little Bit More of the level than you could see, and moving that grid of extra space around. You had one full tile on each edge, – you showed a 15×15 square of screen tiles, but you were loading a 17×17 square – and when you moved over one, you didn’t load a neverending thread in that direction, you were just moving the invisible tile off the edge into the visible area, unloading the ones that just left, and loading into the freshly emptied space. Rather than ‘on demand’ it was a sort of ‘just in time’ delivery system for visual information.

When it comes to this kind of ingenuity, you hear that and I bet, if you’re one of my very smart graphic friends with lots of technical knowledge and bappy wolf paws, you go ‘duh.’ But also this was being done on a chip that could manage eight kilobytes of graphics at a time. For comparison, the plain text Wikipedia page on ‘kilobyte’ is 227 kilobytes. The plain text of this script is – at this point of six thousand words – thirty kilobytes. Eight clapping emojis is about eight kilobytes. Eight kilobytes is very small, and using a space that small to process smooth visuals, atl east the first time was very, very impressive.

Commander Keen isn’t the first thing they made with this. The first thing they made was Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement, which was a proof-of concept where they made a Super Mario Bros level that ran fluidly and correctly on an EGA computer. This was a disk famously left on Romero’s desk after Carmack spent all night making it work, and was a proof of concept that the PC could do the kinds of games they wanted to do, that they could make the things they wanted to make the way they wanted to make. In a lot of ways this technology is what let id software form, going from a business in potential to people with a product.

A year before Commander Keen 1 came out, the MCGA and VGA chipsets dropped and EGA was a dead chipset walking. When Commander Keen was out, it was already running on old tech. But PC gaming moved slowly, people weren’t going to update their video card to run one game – and making a game that ran on the computer most people had was necessary.

9

After the closure of the Vorticon trilogy, what next? Well, next up was the ‘lost’ chapter of Commander Keen: Keen Dreams, released only months ahead of the next ‘real’ Commander Keen game, in mid 1991. Keen Dreams marked a turning point in Commander Keen design. Where the first games were about overcoming a technological impossibility (as they perceived it), Keen Dreams was a game to address a new problem: Legal obligations.

Commander Keen was a success! Id software had the money to make themselves into a proper company! They could stop working it as a hobby while doing a day job, pulling together the early dream team of Johns Romero and Carmack, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack. Together this squad left their job at Softdisk Software to make a new company.

Except there was suddenly a little spike in the tail – because it turns out they’d developed Commander Keens 1-3 on Softdisk’s computers, in their off time at work. Id, considering the situation, and really, really wanting to make their own games rather than being on the hook to keep being part of Softdisk, made a deal to settle this misuse of company machinery. The deal was that they’d make several games for the Softdisk Gamer’s Edge subscription service. This deal was, essentially, a shareware game a month. Id delivered on this and sure, the games had a fairly healthy ‘guess that’ll do’ vibe. Educational games, puzzle games, a mah-jong game, things that can be made pretty easily and the question of how well you do is a matter of polish. They weren’t all walk-it-in style friday-night-of-the-assignment games though. There wer the two pre-doom first person shooters Hovertank 3d and Catacomb 3d, and the Very id vibes game Dangerous Dave In The Haunted Mansion.

And there was Keen Dreams.

Keen Dreams is a… decent game. It’s fine. It’s alright. It’s definitely weaker than Keen 4 and a little bit better than Keen 3. There’s less game here than you’d think, less spectacle, less fun exploration. Enemies are all based on vegetables, and usually, some variety of pun or playing with words that sounded similar. You’re going to run through places that are, well, also puns or wordplays, find keys, collect Flower Power for flinging at baddies, in an attempt to defeat the villain of the story, the leader of all the vegetable kingdoms, Boobus Tuber.

9

Keen Dreams is definitely a Commander Keen game; it’s about Commander Keen. It was the first of the VGA Keens released but not the first made. It was essentially . Now, the remaining three Keens (4, 5 and 6) use this base engine, but they have a very different style. They continue Keen’s adventures into space while Keen Dreams is focused instead on the story of Keen being a child. The first adventures were about getting up to something exciting when left to your own devices and your parents were out at dinner, or dealing with a school bully, while Keen Dreams is about not wanting to eat your vegetables and having a nightmare about being tormented by food you don’t like.

The whole game has a lot of what I think of as Tom Hallness to it. There’s a really deliberate lightness to the whole thing – Tom’s reported that his parents weren’t happy with how the Vorticons in Commander Keens 1-3 left behind corpses, because, y’know, you were killing them. In Dreams, instead, your Flower Power seeds that you throw at enemy vegetables, they just turn them into flowers for a bit. When you ‘die’ you don’t even do the classic wiggle-bounce that other Keen games do. You fall asleep. It’s just a gentle game, really.

It’s weird then, that Keen Dreams has a failure state.

The Commander Keen games are relatively robust. They’re not glitch-free, by any means, with the first three games having holes in the ceiling you can thwack into, the ways Dreams lets you sneak keys out of levels, 4’s death warps and 5’s door manipulation, or the most ridiculous thing you can do in Keen 6. Still, the games are, for the most part, an engine dedicated to to handling scrolling correctly.

Levels are largely about just moving – running, jumping, climbing, predicting your jumps and your awareness of vertical or horizontal arcs. They’re pretty much simple iterations on simple objects, and there aren’t a lot of things that can do things that create weird glitchy situations. Plus, the way that you die to almost everything dangerous means that if you’re ever stuck, the game will usually default to just killing you off, and that kicks you out of the game. You may not win, but the game doesn’t lock up, with nothing to do, while it deprives you of ways to advance. 

Also, to make the exploration more safe, Keen games tend to be designed as a sequence of levels you can do in almost any order. That means outside of skipping the Pogo in Keen 1, it’s very hard to make whole levels unwinnable by dint of a choice in the earlier game, and it’s not like the Pogo is hard to get. 

In Keen Dreams, to kill Boobus Tuber, you need things called Boobus Bombs. Those bombs are scattered throughout the world in sets of three, and in a number of levels in hidden spots – you can finish those levels without getting the bombs. That presents the possibility that you can finish all the game’s levels without getting enough Boobus bombs and find yourself running around in a game world that cannot be finished. There are seven levels with Boobus bombs in them, which means it’s possible to finish four of the sixteen levels, and by not getting the Boobus bombs there, meaning the game doesn’t have enough Boobus bombs in it to finish the game.

It’s a byproduct of freedom and it’s an example of something id games normally design around. It’s a lesson that most of the subsequent Keen games avoided. It’s a phenomenon that you might be familiar with in the Sierra game space as dead man walking syndrome, where the game is bricked, but you won’t know it’s bricked until you’ve spent a lot more energy exhausting your alternatives. 

Oh and you don’t have a pogo and you can’t grab ledges, which means that Keen Dreams doesn’t control a lot like either previous or subsequent games.

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But okay enough faffing around with the ‘lost chapter,’ this Contractually Obligated All Just A Dream Keen. What about the next place for the story to go?

Commander Keen 4: Goodybe Galaxy! Billy Blaze is off cruising the galaxy again looking for fun on the weekend, and he hears a distress call.  Investigating it he finds that there’s a new threat to reality, but to understand them he’s going to need some heavy duty information gathering, which he does by approaching the Gnostiscene Ancients on the planet known as the Shadowlands. Thus begins another journey of Keen to the fire level, the water level, the ice level, the … hole… level? To find the eight beardie dudes and their janitor (if you’re good).

At its heart, the game is a treasure hunt, like Commander Keen 1 and 2. You arrive in a top-down world where you move around between a bunch of little places of interest, and these are levels. These locations of interest can bar your way to progressing to other locations, and there are other locations that are further barred by less obvious means. For example, there are some islands you can’t get to at first, and there’s no obvious adjacent level to beat to work out a way to progress. There are only about eight levels you ‘need’ to finish (some levels gate other levels), where you can find the eight Gnostic mystics that will be able to divine your needed information and win the game.

Keen 4 was the chapter almost everyone got to play, because it was free to share, because, like I said, shareware. It also was brightly coloured, had vibrant music if you had an adlib or soundblaster, and it didn’t feature lots of blood or guts, the way that videogames were parodied as being at the time. You weren’t shooting things with a laser gun that killed them (any more). Basically, Commander Keen 4 was easy to distribute and worth distributing. You’d use it to show off what your computer could do, and you could just straight up give someone a game for the cost of a disk as a present. That normally is enough to make a game a nostalgic classic, because videogames of the 90s were in many cases there to be something you reused until you absolutely had wrung everything out of it. In the case of Commander Keen 4, though, it’s a merciful coincidence that the game is also really quite good.

An interesting question is what are these places? If you look around the environments of Gnosticus IV, you’ll find that a lot of these places are designed to reflect a space people don’t necessarily live but where they do go. Locations like Slug Village, Border Village, Hillville and even the Perilous Pit are all clearly places people live, as you can tell  by the number of doors and lodgings, even if they’re not exactly fleshed out with beds and the like. They’re all village-shaped, with a sort of villagey-ness to them. There are large forts, like Sand Yego and probably Crystalus, places that have some purpose that implies a construction, and there are pyramids, which imply mysteries and hidden knowledge with things like runic iconography.

This is of course, a byproduct of tilesets and the limited colour palette of VGA graphics. Oh, you could put 256 colours on the screen, but loading them and moving them around made scrolling less excellent, so if you made everything out of standardised tiles that you can bolt together, you get things to load faster. This is why very few levels have any unique visual elements – oh, they’re sometimes elements from another level, but aside from Miragia, most levels look like a unique combination of elements rather than a unique element. Which is also pretty cool, small numbers of parts used well.

Goodbye Galaxy is a mid-point game; it’s in a way, the kind of story you’d see as 2 of a trilogy, rather than the start of one (though, it and its sequel were conceived as a pair, not a trilogy). It’s because what you’re doing, the thing you’re after, primarily, is information. Billy is trying to rescue eight grumpy old men who can commune with a really powerful artifact (in a funny way) and get information Billy needs about how to stop the Shikadi.

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If you look at videogames of this period, the typical end of any given game is killing something. The plots of these games may sometimes have made that end goal – a boss monster – something that may have impeded information, or may, like in games like Bio Menace, reveal to you that hey, actually there’s something else you didn’t know about, now. Now, I’m not getting all functional determinist here, I’m not trying to argue that because videogames express violence that’s all their good for, because it’s kinda dumb? But the premise of Goodbye Galaxy isn’t that you’re finding an artifact broken into pieces, or build a weapon, or awaken some evil you can kill, but instead you’re trying to find people, who can explain something to you. There’s something to be said about the instrument the game is shaping, and what matters to Billy.

There’s something weirdly sweet in all that, too: Billy is trying to learn something, and as much as it can be metaphorised, all of this game is about that quest for discovery. Oh, sure, he still gets through it with a stun gun, but there’s questions you have to answer on the way to building that collection of eight elders.

There’s something weird about this because we often see the question of ‘middle’ stories in trilogies as being hard to do. In Goodbye Galaxy, they don’t bother introducing or explaining the story (which they could do as their own thing), but if they had done a story introducing the conflict, then Goodbye Galaxy would be a nearly perfect example of a middle story. You know there’s a problem, you don’t know how to solve it, and you look for a solution that makes a game mechanical demand out of finding not the solution, but finding out how to find it out.

Anyway, what I’m saying is Commander Keen 5 is the real Half Life 2: Episode 3

One final note about this, though is this: The music in Commander Keen 4 is nothing but bangers.

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Commander Keen 5 is kind of the last full conclusion that Commander Keen got. Not a shareware game, and arriving on the scene as BBSes were getting to the point of being able to pirate games a bit more readily, it was apparently a real good seller, at least according to id when asked about it. In 5, you’ve found and boarded the Shikadi’s Armageddon Machine, and have to travel to all the different parts of a great big ship – again – to disable all the bits of the machine that are going to do something bad – again – until you encounter a final stage that involves doing something a tiny bit different, and that’s new.

It’s back to exploring a location with more of Keen running jumping climbing fighting. This time instead of encountering wildlife and living creatures, he’s mostly fighting fighting against ship security, and guard robots and the occasional hapless system operator that can completely mess with the game code if it touches you accidentally.

By the time we reach The Armageddon Machine, the game definitely has a feel of mastery to it. There are more secrets designed to play with your expectations and assumptions. Monsters are a little more time-crunched, and there’s also the biggest monster in all the games, the wonderfully enormous big red robot. The levels are a bit more interwoven, a bit more easy to get lost. Reading the tea leaves I feel like the game is just a bit larger and made by people more familiar with the tools they were using, but also… I might just be getting that vibe because I’m less familiar with it.

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Where Goodbye Galaxy was populated by monsters that  were meant to be the native wildlife and weirdo beasts in the existing Shadowlands, the Armageddon Machine is a spaceship, set up and set aside from its environment. Everything in it is something that’s meant to be there, things with a purpose and a reason to be where they are.

Because someone chose to make them that way.

Because someone – someone human – is guiding these monsters. That’s right, once more the revelation is that the story of Commander Keen episodes 4 and 5 is about Mortimer McMire, and you can tell because uh

Uh

They’ll answer that later.

But yeah, monsters in Aramagddeon Machine are a lot more directly and deliberately malicious and a lot less whimsical. There’s no slugs that poop or charming friendly bouncer balls, or even just things that you can point at and see as creatures just living their lives. There’s a lot more mechanical, a lot more purpose to the game and its setting. But while  Shocksunds may be cute, there’s something so much more charming about Goodbye Galaxy’s monsters, what with things like the pooping slugs and the Sneaky Rocks.

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And then, finally, we reach the last game in the Keen Heptalogy, Aliens Ate My Babysitter.

Gosh, it’s just a nice one to look at. Or maybe that’s just me.

Keen 6 is set on the world of Fribbulous Xax, where Billy’s babysitter has been kidnapped to. It means you get a mix of the beautiful outdoor environments of the style of Goodbye Galaxy, but along with that, you also get the wonky, weird factories and buildings of the Bloogs as they emulate human society. There’s a really fun, charming aesthetic here that feels, again, to me, very Tom Hall, where there’s an inherent comedy in a world full of extremely stupid versions of things we’re already familiar with.

There’s a lot more funny, silly style to the monsters of Fribbulous Xax. A lot more silly words, things like you’re not breaking fuses and destroying elaborate machines, you’re getting the second biggest sandwich you’ve ever seen. There’s a grappling hook that you can’t really use but can kinda pretend you’re using! The bloogs have factories but run around in them smacking the ground with big clubs to guard things!

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Iii love Keen 6. It has also one of the most ambitious end-games of all of them, with the final level being essentially a maze that’s explicitly trying to play with your memory and perceptions. It’s all in a very 1990s aesthetic, in the odd colour scheme and the wonky architecture, intestine walls and high tech flaming orbs.  

Uh, Commander Keen 6: Aliens Ate My Babysitter is the most broken of the keen games, with a big bug that you would never discover if you weren’t actively trying to push glitches in speedrun tests. You see, somehow, the bullets your stun gun fires are considered objects – so if you execute the particular technique right, Keen stands on the bullet as he shoots it, which launches you in a straight line across most of the level. It makes Keen 6 one of the more shocking games to watch in speedruns.

Shout out to CapnClever for teaching me this trick.

Keen 6 ended with a promise of a final confrontation with Sir Not Appearing In All But One Of These Games, Mortimer McMire. This final confrontation never happened, for perhaps obvious reasons: There were no other Keen games. The license for Keen doesn’t really belong to id any more, and the people who made the first games all moved on to another stage of their lives, and other projects.

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I like talking about Keen in light of Doom in part because Doom is so significant and important , but also because it’s this mix of adolescent and selfserious. It’s a game with murder and blood and demons and rocket launchers and chainsaws and it doesn’t feel like the followup game to a bunch of games about collecting teddy bears on Mars. It’s very easy to look at the gap in aesthetics between Commander Keen and Doom and Quake and ask ‘what happened? Did they lose something that made this kind of game not work any more?’

And kinda, yeah. The answer is Tom Hall. Tom Hall was the lore and fiction guy, the storyteller (and other stuff, I don’t mean to imply he just wrote documents all day) of the early id days. Famously, he didn’t have a lot to do on Doom and all the work he did on Quake was scrapped – and if you wanna know what that work was like, you can find it in the Ordering Info for Commander Keen, where that game describes the ambitious story of the future, of the game they want to make, far off in the future where you play a hammer-swinging demigod called Quake.

I don’t mean to just retell Tom Hall’s story. Hall moved on after id to work on games like Rise of The Triad and Terminal Velocity, both great games on their own terms, Anachronax which was at the very least an interesting game. It even fails to deliver on its plot and assumes it’ll get a sequel, in the true Commander Keen tradition. Nowadays, if you look him up on social media, he’s mostly spending his time playing with games, offering advice to other developers, and doing weird experiments like a game whose whole code base can fit inside two standard sized toots.

Tom Hall is responsible for the Dopefish’s design.  He’s responsible for Commander Keen, along with others, of course.

It might suck to have his story have this wrinkle where id software pushed him out because they didn’t need him, but also: I suspect he’s pretty fine, now.

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… Okay, so that’s Minecraft, Tom Hall, and is there anything I’m forgetting?

Oh! Oh yeah, there is!

Tom Cruise! Of course!

What are you thinking I mean relates to Tom Cruise in this project?

If you’re a particular kind of nerd, you might be thinking about how Tom Cruise is the guy who’s responsible for the name of Doom, based on this clip from Risky Business.

But no.

That’s about Doom.

That’s not about Commander Keen.

The traditional way to talk about id software is about its genesis. There’s usually the vision of the company as being at its heart, the intersection of the work between  John Carmack and John Romero, usually as seen as being two guys in their early 20s, after major life changes, given the freedom and space to work with one another. But did you ever wonder how they met?

They met because they were both recruited, to make videogames, by a guy called Jay Wilbur. Jay was the guy recruited by Softdisk to make videogames for them, and he recruited Carmack and Romero, seeing a programmer and a game creator who both had the minds to work on the kinds of project he wanted them to make at Softdisk. And Jay Wilbur, who is now, the vice president of business at Epic Games, before he worked for Softdisk?

He was the guy who taught Tom Cruise how to mix drinks in a showy, theatrical way for the movie Cocktail.

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There, I think I got most of the things you’d find if you just read the book Masters of Doom by David Kushner.

This video was the product of months of work, if you can call writing like this work, per se. It was originally meant to be a thing a lot like the text-and-video work like the Super Solvers. As it is, that didn’t work out for the schedule so instead I’ve just slowly chiselled away at the script for this one.

So hey, if you’re the kind of person who thinks that my short videos are bad, tell me about it, and tell me if you liked this. Or if you’re the kind of person who thinks my long videos are bad, tell me why this is bad. What I’m saying is please, give me feedback, I crave attention.

And of course: This was made with the support of my patrons over on patreon, and I thank you so much for that.

[cozzzynook]

Drift and Ratchet walking in on Soundwave "dealing with" one of Hot Rod's heats, or maybe just a very horny cycle.

They're going with you know, feel better soon things, maybe a box full of his favorite treats or some kind of certificate to a massage or something since the last time the two of them were there, Roddy wasn't doing too great, but nope.

They are treated to the full view of Soundwave using his tentacles and all to keep his partner pinned as he goes down on him.

Already a mess of lubricant and transfluid between both of them, and Hot Rod keeps wiggling to try to get Soundwave's face closer again because, even blinded by carrier-coding and heat, the speedster still likes to kiss his pretty conjunx's face every chance he gets, and Soundwave still likes to bite to tease during sex.

Then the tapedeck realizes they're being watched.

No idea how else to continue this but it's been rattling for A While so I figured I'd just share it.

I actually really like this idea because i can see Soundwave looking ready to kill them because he does not share and Hot rod already knows his days of being fun shareware are over so he can’t let drift and ratchet join them.

[anim-ttrpgs]

If you have downloaded and read the shareware demo copy of the rulebook, please send us a message or leave a comment on our posts telling us what you think. Even better if you actually played with it, tell us how your session went and what happened. Though if you played the free adventure module that comes with the shareware rulebook, please try to avoid specific spoilers, for the sake of other fans.

[kylekozmikdeluxo]

Special Interest Timeline: Retro Games

I'm on a retro games special interest kick, and in my previous post on said things, I talked about how - in the mid-aughts - I really got into games made in the 1970s and 1980s... In the early 2000s.

And I got my history a little messed up when writing about it, so I shall do... a timeline!

Mostly for my sake!

I'm one of those autistics who tries to keep a whole-ass timeline about my special interests... When I got into it, what got me into it, how long it took me to take the next step and discover more things about it, etc....

My love of retro games stemmed from a childhood of playing simplistic MS-DOS shareware games in the late '90s. Games off of floppy disks, like HUGO'S HOUSE OF HORRORS, COMMANDER KEEN 2, CRYSTAL CAVES, WORD RESCUE, CD-MAN (a PAC-MAN clone), SKI FREE, and more... I also forgot to mention that I had a hand-me-down NES in the '90s as well...

Again, going off of my previous post, I mentioned that it kinda starts in the early 2000s. I want to say approximately 2002/2003?

Christmas 2002: I get a GameBoy Advance and SUPER MARIO ADVANCE 2. SMA2 contains a really good port of SUPER MARIO WORLD, originally released in 1990, and an updated version of the 1983 arcade title MARIO BROS. I don't know if this necessarily kicks off the special interest, but it definitely plays a big part in it.

Late 2002/Early 2003: This is approximate. A guess. Around this time, I went to my local swimming pool every mid-week, or something like that, with my father. Afterwards, we'd stop for a bite at a nearby diner. They have a MS. PAC-MAN machine in the vestibule. One day, I watched someone doing really really good at the game. I'm reminded of the old DOS games I loved so much. Around this time, I was obsessed with what year a piece of media came out, so upon seeing the "copyright 1980, 1981" on the attract mode of the game, I had learned something new: Arcade games like that dated back to the 1980s.

Throughout 2003: Going to arcades wherever I went (i.e. bowling alleys, restaurants, etc.) and seeing at least one retro arcade game there. A lot of the time, it was one of those MS. PAC-MAN/GALAGA "Class of 1981" cabinets that were pretty new at the time.

Christmas 2003: I'm given two plug-n-play retro games collections... This is where it all *really* takes off...

The one on the left is the Jakks Pacific Namco set, which contains PAC-MAN, BOSCONIAN, RALLY-X, DIG DUG, and GALAXIAN. Pretty solid ports, all things considered. This I got on Christmas Eve, and I remember that night trying out all the games... And I played the living daylights out of this thing after that...

The one on the right was a bootleg, a Frankenstein's monster-like controller system concoction that were sold in malls and on QVC and the like. My grandmother got that one for me, and it contained a cartridge containing 84 various Famicom and NES games. These "Famiclones" were common back then and it was a side-market that only mutated over time. Luckily, this was one of the less egregious ones, and it had an assortment of NES games I couldn't get elsewhere. The hand-me-down NES we had no longer worked, so this was a worth substitute... Take out the cartridge, there's 10 built-in games that are basically Famiclones. Weird thrown-together 8-bit games of origin I'm unaware of at the moment.

Early 2004: Near my dad's place is a warehouse selling arcade machines and cocktail tables. While they didn't allow customers to play the games, they did - somehow - make an exception for me. I visited a few times and loved it, it was like paradise to my 11-year-old self. I'm sure the guy running the place wanted us OUT, haha.

Next... This is going to sound super-nerdy, but upon doing very well in a spelling bee around February/March and winning... A $200 gift card to... Circuit City! Yes, upon a winning that gift card, what do I buy? Retro game collections!

I believe I got NAMCO MUSEUM and MIDWAY ARCADE TREASURES on one of the shopping trips, in addition to the GameBoy version of NAMCO MUSEUM, PAC-MAN COLLECTION, and KONAMI COLLECTOR'S SERIES: ARCADE ADVANCE.

I visit the website System 16 and KLOV (Killer List Of Video Games) quite frequently, too.

Also around this time, I get my hands on an Atari collection for the PC called ATARI ANNIVERSARY EDITION. I also receive a book called THE ULTIMATE HISTORY OF VIDEO GAMES by Steven L. Kent.

SUPER MARIO ADVANCE 2 is in regular rotation around this time.

Fall-Christmas 2004: For my birthday and Christmas, I get...

ATARI ANTHOLOGY for the XBOX, and another Jakks Pacific Namco collection, this time including MS. PAC-MAN, MAPPY, GALAGA, XEVIOUS, and POLE POSITION. I also get this fantastic coffee table book by Rusel DeMaria and Johnny L. Wilson:

I'll cap it off here, but this is where it peaks, and I'm all about these kinds of things from here on out.