Hello.
My name is Robin, and this is my website about computer games. Here you can find essays about old games, industry commentary, free games I've made for fun, and funny songs.
My latest contribution to the Maraoke (formerly known as Marioke) video game karaoke songlist – first performed 15/11/2019.
“The Pathfinder Loots Tonite”
– after “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” by R.E.M.
(Heal me, heal me)
(Heal me, heal me)
This here is the place where we will be landing
I’ll be your jumpmaster
We can find a safe zone
Stay in the ring a long, long, long, long time
I’ll try to pick up your banner, fall back, spawn you in once more
Oh oh oh oh oh
If I don’t pick up, pick up
The Pathfinder needs, needs, needs a respawn
Call it when you find a hop-up
Call it when you find a Kraber
Call it when you find a hop-up
Call it when you find a Kraber
Call it when you find a hop-up
Call it when you find a Kraber
Oh
There’s scrubs landing around the SkullTown
And the Market baby, trying to rank up
But this machine is not a target dummy
You can’t win a match without shooting ziplines
Or popping smoke or using your lifelines
Teamwork
When you disconnect, you ass,
and laugh when we were on the verge of winning
That way to play is
Really really really really mean (mean)
Pwning when you find a hop up
Pwning when you find a Kraber
Pwning when you find a hop up
Pwning when you find a Kraber
Pwning when you find a hop up
Pwning when you find a Kraber
Oh
Babe this Mozambique doesn’t really grab me
Today I need a gun with more stop-stopping potential
A cannon or an Flatline please, or – oh yes – R-99
A Peacekeeper, a gold L-STAR, with no heater I’m not much use
Call it when you find a hop-up
Call it when you find a Kraber
Call it when you find a hop-up
Call it when you find a Kraber
Call it when you find a hop-up
Call it when you find a Kraber
The chap with the grap came back,
knocked ’em with a Havoc on the way
Always had a smile and a finisher to end
As he gunned a crap squad down
With little need to wait for his team
The Pathfinder leads the attack
Call it when you find a hop-up
(Call it when you find a Kraber)
Call it when you find a hop-up
Call it when you find a Kraber
I can always use a standard stock
(Or an Alternator) oh
Call it when you find a hop-up
(Call it when you find a Kraber)
Call it when you find a hop-up
(Call it when you find a Kraber)
I can always use a standard stock
(Or a frag grenade, uh) oh
Call it when you find a hop-up
(Call it when you find a Kraber)
I can always use a standard stock
(Call it when you find a Kraber)
I can always use a standard stock
(Call it when you find a Kraber)
We’ve got a newbie, newbie, noob on this squad
Tags: Apex Legends, ea, Electronic Arts, karaoke, maraoke, marioke, Pathfinder, R.E.M., Respawn Entertainment, The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite
Digital distribution of games (particularly on PC) is a mess. We currently have a situation where buying a PC game from a specific store often ties you into accessing that game through that store’s weird mini-platform, most of which were designed to pretend to be the ubiquitous standard (and stuffed with proprietary junk). To make things worse, ownership rights aren’t handled in the same way by different stores and can be withdrawn without warning. This landscape presents challenges for preservation efforts, and has significant (mostly terrible) implications for discoverability for new games as well.
For the end user this is suboptimal in the same way having the market split between a dozen different instant messaging protocols or sound card specifications was, and as with those situations it does not seem like something that is beyond human ingenuity to solve.
I think the best route out of this quagmire would be to create an open standard for digital game distribution.
For the market to adopt such a standard it would need to deal with all the existing stores’ bad design decisions behind the scenes, so the user simply sees one unified game library, friends list, etc. to manage.
This standard would be defined by a consortium (think CD and DVD) and anyone would be able to apply to use it. As far as developers and consumers are concerned, all stores would behave in the same way. Just as how barcodes and (for the most part) credit cards work seamlessly across all vendors.
The user would download a single client program that has close to zero local configurability or UI (it’s basically a driver – eventually shipping with the operating system like an API or a video codec). All account management and storefront functionality would be handled via the web. (There could be reference version of the account management website but stores and third parties could implement better, more fully-featured alternatives.) The client program would have a plugin architecture to emulate the legacy proprietary features of the different stores (where desirable), as well as offering open alternatives that can be run in parallel (which games would be encouraged to use going forward).
It would still be necessary (at least at first / depending on a given game’s revenue model) for billing transactions to be carried out by the source stores, but account creation could be streamlined.
As with CD/DVD, a suite of technologies need to be developed and brought together for the system to work, including:
1. A standardised production registry
Every unique piece of game software would be given a unique identifier, administered by a body independent from any store. Workable systems like this already exist: e.g., ISBN, Linux packaging schemes, and iOS and Android app standards. This identifier could be unambiguously linked to a specific rights holder.
The metadata would contain no information about the end-user license or revenue model used by the game: this can change over time for a specific game being offered through a specific channel, plus new models may be invented in future. Entries could be created by vendors and nested to allow them to offer bundles of multiple games and/or support materials (bonus materials, DLC, mods, manuals, etc.).
There is no reason that we should assume that an item in this database is a Windows (/Mac/Linux) executable, or even a computer program at all. Any game that can be packaged up as binary file(s) can be administered in this system. For instance, individual ROM images for old console, handheld or arcade games could be sold with the manifest describing the target platform, leaving it up to the store or customer to provide a way of running it (be that emulation, streaming, or the original or recreated hardware). (GOG.com are ahead of the curve here, having sold MS-DOS games bundled with DOSBox for years.) In this way we could finally get away from the holdover from physical retail of ‘retro’ games being sold in bundle packages.
If the system was immediately and obviously successful, there’s no reason that it would be limited to personal computers either – mobile and console platforms could also be supported. I suspect most of the big players are too paranoid about maintaining their walled gardens to fully embrace such a system but stranger things have happened.
If there was no cross-industry effort to develop such a system, I would hope that one company would develop it and (as with the IBM PC, Sound Blaster, the WWW, DirectX – kind of – and various Tesla inventions) open it up to encourage ubiquitous adoption. There is a danger that having one central authority as the de facto standard for recognising authorship could put too much power into one company’s hands. I’m not sure what the best solution would be to this problem – perhaps having several signing authorities that continuously monitor each others’ trust standing.
2. A transaction ledger
Everything I hear about blockchain technology is equally split between assurances that it will solve all human ills, and dire warnings that it’s all a huge con trick.
I don’t know enough about The Blockchain to know whether book-keeping across a diverse ecosystem of vendors would be a suitable (or wise, or practical) application of the technology. Having a fraud-proof way to look up whether a vendor is currently granting a license to a user seems like the sort of thing it’s made for though.
If blockchain tech actually is all an unworkable scam, assume that this will be implemented in an as-yet-uninvented technology, and transactions still live on the individual stores’ systems for now.
3. A brokerage (or several) between creators and stores
During the Macromedia Flash gaming boom (~2005-2012), there was a fantastic website called FlashGameLicense (there is still a site at that domain but it’s owned by an unrelated company now) which made it practically possible for Flash game developers to find commercial sponsors for their work.
It basically worked like an auction site. Sponsors (Flash game portal sites, which at the time attracted vast ad revenue-driving audiences) could bid on games and developers could negotiate deals with one or more of them. It was still of course possible for parties to make deals through private channels, but for the thousands of Flash game developers starting out who didn’t have the knowledge or resources to undertake B2B marketing, it was a godsend.
If all the major stores are compliant to a basic version of an open standard, it becomes much easier for developers to negotiate distribution deals. A developer could negotiate terms (exclusive content? exclusivity? better revenue share? bundling?) with each of the major stores that serve their particular audience, and perhaps set up a standard secondary contract for the hundreds (thousands) of smaller stores targeting specific audiences and territories.
I am sure there are already lots of people at PC publishers, online stores and university start-up incubators toying with these ideas, but even if it really is the best way forward it’s not inevitable that it will just happen. Like Microsoft’s huge effort to align developers and GPU manufacturers behind DirectX, or Apple’s work to get all the major music publishers to get on board with iTunes, it may need a significant amount of focused willpower and resources to get such an initiative to critical mass.
Tags: amazon, battle.net, bethesda, braindump, commentary, discord, distribution, epic games store, flash game license, gog.com, green man gaming, humble, kartridge, origin, pc games, steam, twitch, uplay
My latest contribution to the Marioke video game karaoke songlist – first performed 18/01/2019.
This has now been performed twice (to my knowledge) and both times introduced as “the worst song on the system” – what can I say, we aim to please. I wrote this because the ridiculous backing track to the Pharaoh’s Code level of Tetris Effect reminded me of the original. If you do pick it, please note that “tetrominos” is assumed to rhyme with “dominoes” with the stress on the first “o”. Good luck.
“Tetrominos”
– after “Miracles” by Insane Clown Posse
We got a theory
Marioke, we got a theory
About stacking … Tetrominos
That’s right, that’s right
If Pajitnov‘s game was never known
Then would any of this have even caught on?
Now I see puzzle gaming every day
But there’s one puzzle game we all play
Pieces landing down from a height
Disappearing in lines if you shuffle ’em right
You don’t get to re-try if you stack ’em too high
And hope long tetrominos soon arrive
Look at the Esses, Zees, Ells Jays and Tees
The little square ones and the long thin ones, please!
Sometimes are … shaped … like gems … or cogs
Don’t need cutscenes or no dialogue
And I’ve played all of one thousand sequels
Including some that weren’t technically legal
Playing Tetris, since we were just kids
Played that shit till I got arthritis
The bus trip to school, or in your cars
We even play at fuckin’ Loading Bars
In your home
Or on your phone
On a Game Boy screen in monochrome
Those other games are derivative
Never won all the gongs Tetris did
Eurogamer, gave it best game
It was kind of a slow year but all the same
Licensed Tetris to a businessman from EA
To make it for a cell phone
That went away
Cuz Tetris is magic, pure and clean
You’ll still see it and hear it but without the screen
(Do you like rotating Tetrominos?)
Tetris is all magic, you can’t even pause it
(Are you placing and dropping Tetrominos?)
It’s just there in the air
(Do you like rotating Tetrominos?)
Pure motherfuckin’ magic
Right?
(Are you placing and dropping Tetrominos?)
This shit’ll blow your motherfuckin’ mind
Tetris that’s a bit like Rez, that’s more appealing
Blocks can fill the room from the floor to the ceiling
Find tetrominos all around me
Put on my VR hat, it’s all astounding
Oughta … try ‘n … be an expert
Fucking T-spins, how to they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a journalist
Y’all rolling eyes and sighing, when playing Tetris
Background effects, and changing weather
Stacking those Tetraminos together
Thank you Enhance, for bringing us this
Colliding planets, and moments of panic
Deep in the ocean or up on a mountainside
Out in space on a satellite
Tetsuya Mizuguchi made Sega Rally
For games we enjoy, he’s still the daddy
Music synchronised with each block you put
And firework displays if you take a look
See eagles soar, the ocean floor
Forests and windmills and several more
The Tetris Company is the corporation
Defend the brand with their litigation
So you can play Alexey’s creation
Sticking to their guidelines without deviation
Zone Mode
Your score is toast
Up on the leaderboard
I don’t mean to a boast
It’s Tetris Effect and there ain’t no way
To ignore synesthesia when you play
In Unreal
(Do you like rotating Tetrominos?)
Graphics everywhere in this bitch
(Are you placing and dropping Tetrominos?)
It’s all around you, you don’t even know it
(Do you like rotating Tetrominos?)
Shit’s crazy
(Are you placing and dropping Tetrominos?)
(All the tetrominos, stack ’em like dominoes)
(Do you like rotating Tetrominos?)
(Do you make lines from Tetrominos?)
(Are you placing and dropping Tetrominos?)
(All the tetrominos, they taste like Domino’s…)
Tags: alexey pajitnov, ICP, insane clown posse, karaoke, marioke, miracles, tetris, Tetris Effect, tetsuya mizuguchi, the tetris company
I didn’t play a very wide variety of games last year: it was a pretty moribund year for big releases; most of my gaming time was dominated by three of the games listed below; and I don’t play a lot of new games per year in any case, not being a journalist, IGF judge, student with endless free time or whatever. But here’s a look back at ten memorable ones.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
The Nintendo Switch’s killer app is the only Zelda game that I’ve completed. It’s not perfect by any means (it’s padded out with too many copy-pasted battles on the overworld and ‘filler’ shrines, some puzzles are absurdly cryptic, there’s little depth in NPC’s stories and quests, and the difficulty scaling is as broken as Oblivion’s), but it shows up every other open world game for not advancing simulation-based gameplay.
Being able to solve problems by exploiting the physical and material properties of the world hasn’t felt so satisfying since the original Deus Ex. The shrines feel in places like the third Portal game we never saw. I assume we’ll be getting another Zelda before the end of the current hardware generation, which will hopefully address the weaknesses.
Fun fact: my run through the game was drawn out by at least a dozen hours by my not finding how to switch the radar back to detecting shrines. I also never used the lock-on and dodge combat moves.
No Man’s Sky Next
I’ve played No Man’s Sky pretty much continuously since launch, and am in the camp that believes that it was a good game even early on. (It’s very obvious looking back that some key features got delayed thanks to external pressure to crowbar in the original ‘Atlas’ quest line to give the game some semblence of a traditional structure.)
For the first month of NMS Next, I got to relive the aggravating “Playstation for Christmas but no memory card” experience, as I waited patiently for Hello Games to fix a bug which was preventing my ancient and bloated save file from loading. But eventually I was up and running again, and able to deep dive into building giant bases, visiting other players’ games and generally living the Gek life.
It feels like there have been some fairly big changes under the hood in Next, heavily optimising world rendering (at the expense of making it feel a little bit flimsier and glitchier) and making the game more modular so subsystems like base building, space stations, NPC structures, exotic worlds and underwater exploration can be fleshed out with loads of new components and creatures.
For a game that was initially criticised for not offering enough to do, it’s been turned around massively. Even now I more often than not encounter something new every session. (For example I recently discovered that crashed freighter missions have been reworked again, and there are loads and loads of exotic planet types now.)
One legacy feature that seems a bit odd now is that there’s such a clear delineation between player bases and NPC structures. I would hazard a guess that a future update will introduce lots more procedural buildings built with the base building kit.
Fun fact: I take lots of NMS screenshots but people were particularly taken with this one for some reason:
#PS4share pic.twitter.com/Q4E7oVHewq
— Robin Clarke (@rclarke) October 7, 2018
Tetris Effect
Eurogamer’s game of the year and quite right too. I can’t believe that people are grumbling about this game having a £34.99 SRP. You wouldn’t complain about a Napoleonic era chess set being “just chess”. The audiovisual experience wouldn’t work nearly as well built around a game that didn’t require full concentration in the way Tetris does. The ‘rap’ on the soundtrack is still completely ridiculous though.
Fun fact: Tetsuya Mizuguchi once blew up BAFTA’s PA system demoing Child of Eden.
Six Match
Aaron Steed has now made two of my favourite indie games: Red Rogue and this, which I dimly recall having seen (then called ‘Mandy Crush’) in the pub a few years back. It’s one of the most elegant puzzle game designs ever and it baffles me that it seems to have been overlooked while some other (pretty but quite pedestrian) mobile puzzlers have enjoyed flavour of the month status.
Six Match is a match-3 game (or ‘swapper’ as games publisher lingo now has it) where you control a character (not unlike Rogue’s @) who moves around the board by swapping with neighbouring pieces. Aside from coloured gems (well, tablets) there are a selection of other special pieces such as skulls, blocks, diamonds, bubbles, wild cards/pineapple rings and two types of bombs, each with their own rules.
The name refers to the fact that the player has exactly six turns (swaps) to make a new line (at which point the counter is reset) or it’s game over. The game’s genius is that it runs through every one of the 4,096 possible moves each turn and then indicates to the player whether they can successfully make a line. In practice, this means that a game that starts out as a fairly casual test of your attention eventually mutates into a fraught inch-by-inch advance through a string of almost Stephen’s Sausage Roll-difficulty puzzles.
There are three small things wrong with it: there’s a very rare bug where it doesn’t always resolve all the lines you’ve made in one pass; the animation of blocks falling eases in and out which isn’t how gravity works; and it’s life-ruiningly addictive. If you have a smartphone, it’s indispensible.
Fun fact: I am currently ranked #2 in the world on Game Center.
The Return of the Obra Dinn
I played through this in a couple of evenings with my flatmate. It works really well as a co-op game as it lets different people focus on different aspects of the mystery: physically investigating the scenes, unraveling character relationships, keeping tabs on the chronological thread of events, etc.
The 1-bit art is amazing, managing to make even complex scenes with many characters, explosions, rain and boiling seas readable, and never allowing the heavy stylisation to become a hindrance. It feels like a true successor to the Infocom games and early turn-based graphic adventures and treats the player like an adult. I’m not sure if I’d personally call it my game of the year but it’s a worthy choice many have made.
Fun fact: Lucas Pope also made the early-ish iOS game Helsing’s Fire. And something called Papers, Please, dunno about that one.
Basingstoke
I was a massive fan of PuppyGames’s Droid Assault way back in 2008, and quite liked Revenge of the Titans. Then they seemed to go quiet for a long time, and it seemed for a while that Basingstoke, their first 3D game, would be trapped in development hell forever. It finally came out last year to resounding indifference from the games media. Which is frustrating, as it’s pretty great.
Basingstoke is a twin stick shooter / adventure / survival roguelike in their signature chunky cartoony style, set in the titular English town after an extra-terrestrial zombie outbreak. With a tip of the hat to Shaun of the Dead it mixes horror with kitchen sink mundanity – as you make your way across town from safehouse to safehouse you’ll scavenge household items and realistic amounts of pocket change, and use an extensive crafting system to make a variety of makeshift weapons like dartguns and flamethrowers.
You can throw sausage rolls as distractions, and even spike them with poison to make zombies vomit. Use fire extinguishers to blind zombies and force them back. You have to constantly worry about being seen and heard, and even the tiddliest enemies can easily swarm and eat you if you let your guard down at the wrong moment.
It’s one of the most stressful games I’ve played for many years – it’s almost too relentless once you’re a few levels in. But if you have decent reflexes and like a challenge it’s worth a punt.
Puyo Puyo Tetris
This game is a few years old but only got a Western release on the Switch relatively recently. For some inexplicable reason the entire story mode is voiced (with the English language actors putting in much more effort than they needed to, really) although annoyingly there’s no Japanese option.
It’s a solid implementation of both Puyo Puyo and Tetris (the latter having rather more responsive controls than Tetris Effect, in fact) but the highlight of the package is the Fusion mode which involves both kinds of playing pieces sharing the same well. This mode is tucked away near the end of the story mode and forces you to throw away your tried and tested strategies.
I have a sinking feeling that it’ll disappear from digital stores once Ubisoft’s distribution rights expire.
Artifact
I have never played any MOBA, or Hearthstone, or Magic The Gathering, so I don’t really have any frame of reference for whether Artifact is a good version of this kind of thing or not, but I’ve enjoyed the few hours I have spent with it. I’m not sure that I have any compulsion to take it up as a hobby as its designers intend. It’s quick to learn and the production values are impressive.
I expect it’s going to go free-to-play soon and many long thinkpieces will be written about how this is a sign that it’s failing to find an audience, as opposed to being a completely routine and intentional stage in the product lifecycle of every online PC game released this decade.
Black Bird
In 2017 I spent most of the Christmas holidays engrossed in Super Mario Odyssey; this year it was Onion Games’s Black Bird. Black Bird is a wrap-around shooter (think Defender or Fantasy Zone) with a Victorian setting (sepia-toned graphics slathered in Irem-esque grit and grime) in which enemy waves spawn in time to the backing music, which is utterly preposterous and incredibly catchy opera with nonsense lyrics.
As the titular Black Bird, hatched from an egg formed from the body of a dead street urchin and sworn to hawk up firey doom on mankind, the player must lay waste to four distinct stages (a village/castle, a forest, a city and a futuristic factory) and fight four multistage bosses.
Completing the game unlocks ‘True Mode’, a harder remix with more enemies and bonuses and weirdness, where you can supposedly unlock lots of different story cutscenes and endings although I’ve not worked out how this system works yet and GameFAQs is disappointingly short of answers as of this writing.
Black Bird is a perfect example of a game that defines a limited scope and then massively over-delivers in polish, room for experimentation and sheer density of ideas within those constraints. It’s the best game opera since Oikospiel.
Fun fact: look out for a quite interesting old interview with the game’s director in the forthcoming Japansoft book from Bitmap Books.
Gris
Right at the end of the year I played Gris (“Greez”), an arty platformer from Spanish microstudio Nomada. Gris has no enemies and a very lightly branching/looping layout. It’s gently interactive, requiring a little bit of platforming competence and rewarding observation. It’s perfectly paced (“huge expanses of just dull running” – John Walker, wrong) and looks and sounds incredible. It reminded me a bit of Gorogoa in its exacting draughtsmanship, and a bit of slightly tacky 1970s European comics in its preoccupation with classical architecture and female statues.
It’s weakness is that it doesn’t have a lot to say or a character to care about, it’s ultimately decorative rather than a fully-rounded experience. It’s still worth playing just to see something so skillfully crafted – in terms of effortless style and cohesiveness it leaves ustwo, Playdead and even the mighty Amanita in the dust. (8/10)
Tags: Artifact, Basingstoke, Black Bird, game title, Gris, Hello Games, iOS, lucas pope, mobile games, nintendo, nintendo switch, No Man's Sky, nomada, onion games, PC, PS4, puppygames, Puyo Puyo Tetris, richard garfield, sega, Six Match, tetris, Tetris Effect, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, The Return of the Obra Dinn, valve
My latest contribution to the Marioke video game karaoke songlist – first performed 14/12/2018.
This is actually the second version of this song on the database. There’s nothing (as far as I know) wrong with the previous version, I just forgot that it had been done before. Both versions can be requested during Marioke Christmas events. (The Christmas songs on the system are not available to request during the rest of the year.)
I’d never really paid attention to the original lyrics before – they’re actually kind of clever, what with the hidden title mention in the chorus and the triple pun in the last verse. Or perhaps listening to it over and over in the process of writing this has done something to my brain. Merry Xmas!
“Merry X͠m̵a̴s Ev̩̯̳̖er̭̝̰̘̮̭ͅỵ̙̼͖̻́b̻̻͇̺͓͜o͖̻͠ḓ̺̙͖ͅy̫̙̞̠”
– after “Merry Xmas Everybody” by Slade
Has your character got stuck inside a wall?
Do your goalie’s hands just pass right through the ball?
Do you find you’ve not the same gear
That you had when you last saved?
Do the NPCs keep standing in your way?
Our README lists many glitches
Of which those are only some
Patch them in future, now
It’s only version one
Your companion’s just a floating pair of eyes
You fell through the world and now you’re trapped outside
Did you find the key this lock fits?
Did you lock it in this chest?
Did you shoot the man who sent you on this quest?
We released with many glitches
Of which those are only some
Patch them in future, now
It’s only version one
What are you gonna do? You just keep on buying these buggy Elder Scrolls
A – A – A
Are you firing your shotgun through the wall?
Are you using a cheat code to catch ’em all?
Are you filling your invent’ry
With the duplicates you’ve made
Do you wonder how this made it through QA?
Our README lists many glitches
Of which those are only some
Patch them in future, now
It’s only version one
So here we’ll list many glitches
Of which those are only some
Patch them in future, now
It’s only version one
This game consists of mainly glitches
Shipped out long ‘fore it was done
Who thought releasing now
Was a good decision?
Here’s who it is: Randy Pitchford
And the game is Aliens:
(IT’S PITCHFORD)
Co-lo-ni-al Marines
It isn’t any fun
Tags: aliens: colonial marines, Assassin's Creed, bugs, christmas, gearbox, glitches, karaoke, marioke, merry xmas everybody, new song, slade, the elder scrolls
My latest contribution to the Marioke video game karaoke songlist – first performed 21/09/2018.
The joke here relies on the knowledge that Capcom originally released Final Fight for the SNES with only two of the three playable characters from the coin-op.
“Eliminate Guy”
– after “Live And Let Die” by Wings
When you’re Capcom, and SNES carts
Sold for 80 bucks
You’d port your games to 16-bit
(You know you did)
(You know you did)
(You know you did)
But when there’s only so much ROM
For them to fit in
They’d still give it a try
Eliminate Guy
(Eliminate Guy)
Eliminate Guy
(Eliminate Guy)
[INSTRUMENTAL]
“Cody and Haggar’ll do, yeah?”
When you hit that launch window, you know it’s gonna sell
They couldn’t fit the other guy as well
[INSTRUMENTAL]
You used to play on 16-bit
(You know you did)
(You know you did)
(You know you did)
But till you sold it us again
With Cody missing
Named it Final Fight Guy
Eliminate Guy
(Eliminate Guy)
Eliminate Guy
(Eliminate Guy)
Tags: capcom, final fight, final fight guy, karaoke, live and let die, marioke, paul mccartney, snes, wings
We now know that Metroid Prime 4 is coming at some point in the lifetime of the Nintendo Switch. The as-yet-unannounced developers have big shoes to fill: the interval between Metroid Prime 3 and 4 will be longer even than the one between Super Metroid and Metroid Prime.
While the Switch is a substantially more powerful platform than the Gamecube or Wii, it’s hard to imagine the new game having the same epoch-shattering impact Metroid Prime did in 2002. Now players are spoiled for choice for sprawling, rich fantasy worlds to explore, what can still be done to surprise them?
Even before the announcement, I’d thought a lot over the years about how the Prime series could be revisited in the light of subsequent developments in technology and design trends. While I wait for the call from Shigeru Miyamoto, I’ve jotted some ideas down here.
What works
First off, I don’t think the Prime series needs to dramatically pivot in the way games like Breath of the Wild or Resident Evil 4 called a reset on their respective franchises. The view should still be first person, the world should still be relatively small and dense, and the player character should still be Samus Aran, alone in a remote alien environment with the minimum of friendly NPC encounters.
There are some established expectations of what a Metroid game should be, both thematically and mechanically. Quite a lot of the appeal of the series is that it’s such an out-of-character thing for Nintendo to make. The series’s aesthetic takes cues from Alien as well as pulpy horror comics, and it was successfully marketed to seem timeless and exotic.
From my first glancing encounter with the series (when a school friend bought Super Metroid), I got the impression of being privy to something momentous – the oversized box, and the ponderous (subtitled!) intro sequence, and the promise of a sprawling world all diverging from the console game norms we’d understood up to that point.
When Metroid Prime came along it used the change in viewpoint to really thoroughly explore the feeling of being a foreign entity intruding into a lethally hostile ecosystem with only a thin shell of metal and glass protecting you. (This theme is referenced right away in the electron microscope images on the title screen, and Retro only get more confident from there.)
It went to great pains to not break immersion (only leaving the first person view for brief establishing cutscenes) and constantly used small animations and effects to remind the player that Samus is physically present in the world (from reflections and condensation on the visor, to displaced leaves and pollen, to idle animations such as Samus holding out her palm to feel raindrops).
But we can’t just remake Metroid Prime (although if Nintendo did, I’d definitely buy it). If we’re keeping what works, we need to give Samus a new interesting challenge to face, and new themes to explore.
Themes
Retro Studios already covered a lot of the stock adventure game clichés in their trilogy – ice and lava worlds, light and dark worlds, giving the hero an evil twin and a life-sapping (but ability-granting) curse. But we don’t have to resort to Nintendo’s favoured tactic of coming up with hyper-specific themes (e.g. coffee, emotions, wool, hats) for late entries in a series just yet.
There was a minor enemy in Metroid Prime 2 (the rezbit – used perhaps only once or twice in the whole game) that could attack Samus by crashing her cybernetic suit’s computer, requiring the player to ‘reboot’ it to be able to see again.
A cute throwaway Robocop-esque gimmick, but it made me think that this could be the key to doing something new with Metroid Prime’s situation: have Samus face off against an alien species that can ‘ghost hack’ her suit’s systems. Samus’s suit has always been a dependable constant in the series – having to be wary of it being breached (perhaps having to actively maintain its integrity?) would add a new level of tension.
The player could then use the tools at their disposal (visors, beams and environment traversal) to reveal misleading sensory data, both to find secrets and to advance the game. As the game progresses there would be an escalating arms race in Samus’s puzzle solving ability and the level of cunning used by the enemy to cover their tracks. (This would also provide an excuse if needed to take the adventure to more abstract locations, if the enemy eventually resorts to creating wholly illusory environments – plundering Samus’s memories perhaps?)
It would require some care to stop the unreliable inputs from being frustrating and confusing for the player – perhaps these sequences would be used sparingly and signposted for players paying attention. When designing the puzzles it should also be kept in mind that this isn’t intended to be a ‘sanity’ mechanic as seen in some survival horror games.
(Another somewhat meta idea – which I don’t think Nintendo would allow, sadly – would be for the game to detect when the player is taking screenshots of puzzle solutions etc. and doctoring the screenshot output.)
Beams
It would also be nice to see the game take a more simulation-based approach in the light of Breath of the Wild’s success at giving the player multiple routes to beat many of its puzzles and battles by exploiting the physical properties of objects in the world. A voxel- and material-based environment would open up a huge possibility space for new puzzles and situations. (And because individual rooms tend to be relatively small, a manageable CPU – and QA testing – overhead.)
Using the Switch’s gyro aiming we could finally deliver on the promise of motion controls (which seemed to start to be going somewhere with Half Life 2’s Gravity Gun, and then various Wii and Playstation Move experiments, but of late seems to be confined to VR games like Media Molecule’s Dreams).
The first person view would give us more fine-grained control than the rather clumsy end effectors of the Slate powers in BOTW. Prime 3’s motion control implementation never really got the attention it deserved at the time – early on in the game it tended to be gimmicky but later it allowed for some brilliantly immersive sequences, and would be a good foundation to build upon.
The beams collected over the course of the adventure could open up new systemic ways to manipulate the world, rather than being a red key for red doors.
We could for example have a filament beam that cuts through soft materials but wraps around dense materials, which could be used to build temporary ‘spiderweb’ walkways and barriers, or charge up mechanisms like a whip and top. Coupled with Samus’s locking on and strafing around enemies this could lead to lots of variations on ‘snow speeder vs. AT-AT’ tactics.
Or perhaps a microwave beam that passes through certain materials but heats up or excites (or disintegrates) others? Or a concrete extrusion beam that lets the player fill negative space with expanding foam (a bit like the terrain manipulator in No Man’s Sky), allowing the construction of dams, bridges, keys, traps or other oversized tools by using parts of the environment as moulds. You could even use the other beams to carve up the sculpting material.
The only limitation Metroid Prime’s conventions place on these ideas is that each beam needs to be effective as a weapon as well as a special purpose tool, but this is hardly an insurmountable problem.
Dreams
It would also be important (particularly after such a long hiatus) for the opening stretch of the game to be memorable. Like, Naughty Dog, ‘throwing bushels of money at the screen’ memorable.
Retro Studios stunned naysayers with the extended prologue sequence in Prime 1, and I hardly need to explain the impact of the Super Metroid’s opening, echoed consciously or not in the intros of dozens of indie passion projects two decades later.
It’s probably wildly overindulgent, but the opening I’d pitch for the new game would be to drop straight (cold open) into a hyper-bombastic, over the top ‘Saturday morning cartoon’ action sequence, with a Smash Bros. styled Samus (over the course of a few minutes) crash landing on a weird jungle planet, fighting through a Space Pirate facility/ancient temple, stealing a ludicrously overpowered MacGuffin and escaping as everything collapses and explodes.
Then just as we’ve seemingly confirmed that Nintendo don’t know what to do with Metroid and are making it into a sugary Uncharted-esque action game, we pull back and reveal that everything up to this point has been kid Samus playing at being a bounty hunter.
(I’ve thought of an elegant way to frame this reveal, that would melt a hundred Twitch streamers’ faces off, but this post is getting long enough already.)
In this way the player would be wrong-footed and introduced to the overarching theme of whether they can trust their perceptions. Such a ‘twist’ would of course be spoiled all over the internet within minutes, but collective efforts not to spoil films until they’ve been out for a while, plus the fact that the massive divergence of the modern games audience means even ‘tentpole’ Nintendo releases don’t dominate the conversation for weeks in the way e.g. Halo, Half Life and Quake did, give me some hope that at least some players would want to try to go into the game blind.
The second half of the prologue could then show (through time shifted jump cuts, still under the player’s control) Samus’s origin story more or less as told in the official manga – Space Pirates (led by Ridley) destroy the mining colony where Samus grew up, and she alone is saved by the Chozo and trained and augmented to be a bounty hunter. This could be told with minimal dialogue, and emphasis on the young Samus’s lack of agency being the motivation for hunting the Space Pirates in adulthood. (Yeah, Samus is basically Space Batman.)
The above is perhaps a lot to wade through before we get to the story (and actual peril) ‘proper’, but seeing as the Metroid Prime games have gotten away with the motivation of ‘respond to this distress call’ or similar it could perhaps work. The prologue would be a success if players play through it again after knowing the ‘twist’ to spot details they missed the first time.
The main game world would presumably once again take the ‘Crystal Maze’ approach of a handful of discrete themed zones (with lots of backtracking), and the bump in technology gives us endless possibilities of new things to try here:
1. A zero-G orbital space station that can be reconfigured (perhaps by making improvised hacks using the beam tools) – with lots of morph ball/spider ball exploration.
2. A boss that you have to capture alive, setting up traps and constructions in the surrounding area to lead it to a containment pit.
3. More and richer organic environments in general. Even with the rudimentary technology of the time these were by far the most visually interesting parts of the original trilogy. Let’s see jungles, coral reefs and cave networks.
So that would be my approach, or at least the equipment I’d pack and the bearings I’d set off to follow: a more simulation-based (and probably less relentlessly combat focused – easing off on the Chozo ghosts and boss bottlenecks at least), reality-bending 2019 retooling of the Prime trilogy.
It would also be vitally important (and here I hope the real Metroid Prime 4 devs agree) to have distinctive art direction, from someone of the calibre of Andrew Jones or Kenneth Scott. The Switch hardware may preclude the game from being as technically mindblowing as the likes of Horizon Zero Dawn, but the art style should at least be immediately recognisable even from screenshots.
And finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, I hope we’re not going to be seeing a return of the voiced NPCs / cowering scientists / comic relief rival bounty hunters from Prime 3. I skimmed some Let’s Plays to refresh my memory when writing this and I’d forgotten just how horrendously they shatter the mysterious tone of the series up to that point.
Tags: fan fiction, fantasy pitch, gamecube, metroid prime, metroid prime 4, nintendo, nintendo switch, retro studios, Samus Aran, thought experiment, wii
My latest contribution to the Maraoke video game karaoke songlist – first performed by Beck Michalak on 10/08/2018.
The version live on the system has a couple of line edits to better fit the tricky timing of the verses. Altered Beast is a bad game.
“Altered Beast”
– after “Kiss From A Rose” by Seal
They may have said in Sega Power it’s not very deep
You’d complain, but why when you got it for free
Ugly game, we’d shrug but they’re buying it still
And yeah we know, uh that it blows
Those sprites were so large of a size that we had rarely seen
Sega! You transformed me to a beast when I rose from the grave
Ooh, the more I play of you the stranger it feels, yeah
Now that you rose from your tomb
“Welcome to your doom” I will say
There are so many things you can turn into, the longer you play
You became a tiger, a dragon, a bear
Hades has cursed me with a strange affliction so I’ll never die
Won’t you drop a glowing health for me?
With one of those, yeah then I’ll grow
My thighs become large and I’ll piledrive you right off the screen
Sega! You transformed me to a beast when I rose from the grave
Ooh, the more I play of you the stranger it feels, yeah (yeah)
Now that you rose from your tomb
“Welcome to your doom” I will say
[BREAK]
Altered Beast when you rose from your grave
Altered Beast when you rose from your grave
And if I should fall please insert coin to play
Altered Beast when you rose from your grave
The Mega Drive should be remembered for much better games
You can play my Harrier, my Hedgehog, my Rage
To me the sequel to Shinobi, even, was a better buy
At least then you can be stealthy baby
But to dethrone Mario
This guy’s their best chance until Sonic arrives on the scene
Sega! You transformed me to a beast when I rose from the grave
Ooh, the more I play of you the stranger it feels, yeah
Now that you rose from your tomb
“Welcome to your doom” I will say
Sega! You transformed me to a beast when I rose from the grave
Ooh, the more I play of you the stranger it feels, yeah
Now that you rose from your tomb
“Welcome to your doom” I will say
Now that you rose from your tomb
“Welcome to your doom” I will say
Tags: altered beast, karaoke, kiss from a rose, marioke, one life left, seal, sega, sega power, sonic the hedgehog
My latest contribution to the Marioke video game karaoke songlist – first performed by Viv Schwarz on 13/07/2018.
“If I Could Turn Back Time”
– after “If I Could Turn Back Time” (Diane Warren) as recorded by Cher
If I could turn back time
If I could climb that way
Then your platforming nerves would desert you
And you’d play
I don’t know where they’ve got the princess hid
I don’t know why the Vizier wants me dead
I’ve got this knife that can make time rewind
Guards have got weapons, they wound sometimes
I just pressed X instead of circle
Rewind and have another go
I know with one more try, oh baby
If I could turn back time
If I could climb that way
Then your platforming nerves would desert you
And you’d play
If I could swing from bars
Ledge grab and wall jump too
Then you’d load me, load me, on your PS2
(If I could turn back time)
My bones were shattered I was torn apart
But I’ve a magic knife and now I’m
Back at the start
Ubi made three more, got bored and then didn’t care
Now they just put Assassin’s Creed everywhere
Nobody else used this mechanic
At least until Braid came along
Reboot me one more time, and darling
If I could turn back time
If I could climb that way
Then your platforming nerves would desert you
And you’d play
My movie needs a star
Jake Gyllenhall will do
Earned back money, money, don’t read the reviews
If I could turn back time (If I could turn back time)
If I could turn back time (If I could turn back time)
IF I COULD TURN BACK TIME! OH! BABY!
We know that you made Karateka
The Last Express was good, I know
We want the Persian guy (but oh)
If I could turn back time
If I could climb that way
Then your platforming nerves would desert you
If I could reach those bars
And not fall to my doom
Then you’d love me, love me, like on Apple ][
If I could turn back time (turn back time)
If I could climb that way (climb that way)
Then maybe maybe maybe you’d play
Tags: Cher, If I Could Turn Back Time, Jordan Mechner, karaoke, marioke, one life left, Prince of Persia, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Ubisoft
Valve have made an announcement about their review policy for the Steam store.
This has resulted in several extremely angry editorials from the games press, who have (perhaps reasonably) interpreted this to mean that Valve intend to take an almost completely hands-off approach to moderating their platform, in the style of leading internet hellholes Reddit or YouTube.
Some developers have tabled the contrasting view that censorship inherently chills creative expression – it shouldn’t have ever been Walmart’s job to be the morality police when it comes to stocking games and the same principle applies here. (For the benefit of the terrifying number of journos who’ve seemingly never questioned this: The present situation where a narrow band of subject matter is seen as safe for mainstream titles isn’t simply down to developers being unimaginative, or the whims of the free market, so much as to the 1990s US industry collectively deciding to shut any remotely challenging ‘adult’ content out of retail stores to avoid statutory regulation. The Comics Code, basically.)
This is a complicated topic. I think that Steam should exist as a pipeline – a thin layer of technology facilitating billing and distribution that can be freely used by anyone within the bounds of the law and societal norms. I don’t think the Steam store (versus local library management tools etc.) should exist in a weird proprietary client, and the front page of the store should be massively deprioritised as an entry point / bottleneck into their catalogue. As such, removing any part of the system that’s geared towards Steam acting as a gatekeeper or destination in its own right is a positive step.
On the other hand, we have to weigh up the reality that Steam is a monopoly, and as such shoulders a social responsibility beyond that which might apply for a smaller service provider in a truly competitive market. Its every action (or inaction) can have unforeseen and serious repercussions. Shrugging and pointing out that technically they’re not to blame when kids are exposed to bigotry through their store is a weak excuse. (YouTube could do well to learn this lesson also.)
The maddeningly ill-defined rejection criteria of anything “illegal or straight up trolling” should cover a lot of the indefensible stuff that certain journalists have assumed Valve must now endorse (and early indications are positive).
Valve’s best course of action would be to acknowledge the negative reaction to their announcement and publish a revised and clearer policy. I don’t think (mostly) recusing themselves from the content review process is going to cause their store to descend into chaos overnight, and changes to how content is organised and filtered should be in place well before that. It would be foolish to believe a company automatically endorses the message of every product they sell in their store.
Bonus miscellaneous observations:
Valve are really bad at communicating.
It would be hard to imagine Microsoft, Google, Apple or any other billion dollar tech company making such an important announcement in such vague, informal language.
Making an equivalence between the harm caused by hate speech being targeted at a vulnerable group and the ‘harm’ (mild petulant annoyance) experienced by a bored kid on seeing “shovelware” sullying the shelves of ‘their’ store is astoundingly tone deaf. The latter concern doesn’t warrant serious attention and should have been left out of this blog post.
Valve as an organisation seem to have never developed the skills at dealing with the disparate needs of their player community. They will always advocate an engineering solution first (here hinting at a keyword tagging system to automate content filtering) rather than taking the scarier, messier approach of reaching out to their users and trying to intelligently determine what would make the most positive difference. Harm being caused in society at large by hateful material being normalised won’t show up on a sales chart.
Some people have a really weird idea of what getting a game onto Steam should mean.
Steam has been around a long time, but Valve ran it as a distribution platform – to put this, uh, diplomatically – very very very suboptimally for most of its life to date, leading to the widespread misconception that having a game grace their store shelves should be some kind of exceptional value judgement, rather than something that happened infrequently because their process was terrible.
Steam is a shop, like Amazon. It has unlimited shelf space. A creator having their work accepted onto it should be the norm, not the exception. The situation where any game that was added to its catalogue was given a period of exposure (free marketing) by dint of how slowly new content was ingested by Valve was a temporary quirk, not a right every game released was entitled to forevermore.
As with the iOS App Store (or Amazon, or the PC ecosystem in general), a rising tide of low quality / uninteresting content will never overwhelm the attention available for good quality content. Distrust anyone who tries to make you angry about this imaginary boogeyman. Making and selling games is being democratised and not everything has to appeal to every player or gauge its success by the same criteria any more.
Valve’s monopoly is the problem, not how they choose to govern it.
The games press and community have a feudal mindset, quickly and eagerly pledging fealty to any corporate overlord who offers them even a scrap of comfort and convenience. Many gamers still view Nintendo’s grossly anticompetitive 1980s business practices as a noble effort to fend off the spectre of a Second Video Game Crash. Xbox Live is regarded as a bold innovation, rather than as a vendor lock in strategy that has resulted in console online services still not interoperating nearly two decades later. So of course because Steam is convenient and ubiquitous, it must be benevolent and there’s no reason to question its market dominance.
We should be asking why one company is getting to decide what gets to be commercially viable on the PC rather than petitioning them to build taller walls around their garden. Applying the ultra-strict App Store / Google Play / XBL / PSN etc. review policies to the PC would be unworkable in any case – the PC is a much too broad and adaptable a platform for a one-size-fits-all policy.
While Steam has no serious competition, Valve will be slow to fix the (many) things wrong with it. I don’t think anything is going to directly usurp Steam any time soon, but it would be nice to see other stores become established with a more narrow focus, much as Netflix, BBC, HBO etc. offer different kinds of experiences. Buy more games on itch.io, Kartridge, etc. and politely ask your favourite PC developers that only sell through Steam to offer their games elsewhere too.
My latest contribution to the Marioke video game karaoke songlist – first performed 08/06/2018.
We didn’t have enough (or possibly any?) songs specifically about Shinji Mikami’s masterpiece, so this was an attempt to correct that oversight.
“Villagers with Parasites”
– after “Another Day In Paradise” by Phil Collins
They call out to Leon Kennedy
Señor, can you help me?
We’re told the intruder we seek
Has blonde hair and looks healthy
A bell gongs, stops their attack
He can sense that he’s near her
There’s a castle at the end of the street
They perhaps took Ashley there?
Oh, shoot twice, cause it’s the only way to neutralise the parasites
Oh, shoot twice, headshots alone will not subdue
Villagers with parasites
He’s not a zombie
He calls out to Leon Kennedy
On whom he has been spying
He’s got ballistics in the folds of his sleeves
He asks what are ya buying?
Oh, click buy, you’ve saved up all your loot to get that Broken Butterfly
Go through twice, Chicago Typewriter cuts through
Villagers with parasites
Now that’s a weapon
Oh lord
Where on Earth is everyone going? Bingo?
O-o-oh lord
They’ve got me fighting El Gigante
You can tell from the spines in his face
He’s a regenerator
Running out of room in your attache case
Cause you’ll need these guns later
Oh, shoot twice, cause it’s the only way to neutralise the parasites
Oh, shoot twice, headshots alone will not subdue
Villagers with parasites
Mm – hmm
Un forastero
Cause it’s the only way, to neutralise, the parasites
Cause it’s the only way, to neutralise, the parasites
(Para, parasites)
Parasites!
[REPEAT AND FADE]
Tags: Another Day In Paradise, capcom, karaoke, marioke, one life left, Phil Collins, resident evil 4, Shinji Mikami
My latest contribution to the Marioke video game karaoke songlist – first performed by Aubrey Hesselgren and myself 09/03/2018.
One that’s been hanging around in my partially completed songs folder for years now.
“Samus Aran”
– after “Stand By Your Man” by Tammy Wynette & Billy Sherrill
Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman
With an arm cannon and just one hand
You’ll hunt reptiles
That hurl projectiles
Tryin’ to upset this hunter’s plans
But while the Mother Brain’s still living
You still have your orders from command
Metroids may leech you, but we beseech you
They’ve got weak points, if you’d just scan
Samus Aran
Your spider ball will cling to
The cavern walls you bomb through
To get to Meta Ridley
Samus Aran
Have you been sequence breaking?
You’re not supposed to but you can
Samus Aran
Samus Aran
Till you removed your helmet
Gamers assumed you were a man
Samus Aran
Tags: karaoke, marioke, Metroid, metroid prime, nintendo, one life left, Samus Aran, Stand By Your Man, Tammy Wynette
For the second year running, Marioke have made a Christmas charity video, this year in support of GamesAid. You might spot me in a few places in the video, among lots of games industry folks who contributed.
Please share the video and donate if you like. Merry Christmas!
Tags: charity, gamesaid, marioke, merry christmas everyone, shakin' stevens
The second of two new Marioke video game karaoke songs of mine to debut this month – first performed 10/11/2017.
Context:
“The David Perry Incident”
– after “Lose Yourself” by Eminem
Look
If you had
One shot
Or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted
In one moment
Would you capture it?
Or just let it slip?
Yo
His palms are sweaty,
knees weak, arms are heavy
Has Dominik upset him already?
David Perry
is nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready
to grab coins, but he keeps on forgetting
the controls now, to bowl down, Cool Cool Mount’n
He tries to turn ’round, but his plumber’s freaking out
He’s chokin’, wow, everybody’s jokin’ now
The clocks run out, times up, over, blaow!
That’s Project Reality, yo
There’s no parity no
he’s not played Mario
now he’s mad that he won’t
take back that trophy so
he won’t have it he knows
that backstage he’s a joke
he’s not rattled he’s stoked
and that pad wasn’t broke
the Games Animal? nope
just some sap as he moans and goes actually
“N64 won’t be out till past January”
Keep going back to this moment
Why won’t we move past it?
You better fool yourself with excuses, the truth is,
you’re useless, the web’ll never let it go
You only had one shot, you flopped, missed your chance at gold
Mid afternoon TV comes once in a lifetime, yo
You better fool yourself with excuses, the truth is,
you’re useless, the web’ll never let it go
You only had one shot, you flopped, missed your chance at gold
Mid afternoon TV comes once in a lifetime, yo
You’d better …
His reputation, lord of all British gaming
Games World was yours for the taking
Kirk Ewing
falls off toward the second corner
Performance is appalling,
but Perry’s tantrum throws the host’s boredom
Knows he’ll cause drama, knows that he’s gotta
Before the show’s over, uphold his old patter
Expose the show’s flaws, they know he’s no importer
Most KOs, battles he flows and knows that he’ll wipe floors with E Honda
He’s known to blow those high scores with one quarter
But let’s-a-go ’cause here goes the cold water
He moans he’s no journo no mo’ he sells product
The true Dave Perry who rotoscopes nematodes and that’s not ‘im
Now that GamesMaster, is old and not shown, but he still provokes laughter,
Not the Shiny one, the one with the bandana
You better fool yourself with excuses, the truth is,
you’re useless, the web’ll never let it go
You only had one shot, you flopped, missed your chance at gold
Mid afternoon TV comes once in a lifetime, yo
You better fool yourself with excuses, the truth is,
you’re useless, the web’ll never let it go
You only had one shot, you flopped, missed your chance at gold
Mid afternoon TV comes once in a lifetime, yo
You’d better …
No more games on my TV since the old days
Scotsman spouting innuendo while two kids played
It was never about the winning, just being on stage
On a real channel it went out, not viewed on Dave
Thursday tea time we’d set aside to get hyped for
Dean Gaffney being pulverized at Street Fighter
Andy Crane on the other side beside Violet
Hoping perhaps that we would catch sight of
Fly games that weren’t yet out on this side of
Akibahara oh man cause God damn I am still on dialup
Most of our news came from Digitiser
This was our life and these games are so hard
and they’re getting even harder, trying to one-credit Silpheed plus
beat Dishonored, Catch-’em-all, avenge your father, rescue Sarah Connor
Cooking Mama, Amidar – you know it’s too much
For me to even play or keep up, give a damn or not,
If I’ve gotta be Goro or unlock Noob Saibot
So Patrick tell you what, I’ve been playing a lot
Progress the only entertaining option, failure’s not
Son we’re sorry every game cannot be Souls, ’cause at 8 years old that was all we got
So here we go it’s your shot
Dean fail me not
This may be the only Cuphead video that I watch
You better fool yourself with excuses, the truth is,
you’re useless, the web’ll never let it go
You only had one shot, you flopped, missed your chance at gold
Mid afternoon TV comes once in a lifetime, yo
You better fool yourself with excuses, the truth is,
you’re useless, the web’ll never let it go
You only had one shot, you flopped, missed your chance at gold
Mid afternoon TV comes once in a lifetime, yo
Tags: David Perry, Dominik Diamond, Eminem, GamesMaster, karaoke, Lose Yourself, marioke, one life left, Super Mario 64, The Games Animal
The first of two new Marioke video game karaoke songs of mine to debut this month – first performed by @MazHem_ 10/11/2017.
Thimbleweed Park is a neo-retro graphic adventure game by the creators of Maniac Mansion. If you liked Maniac Mansion and the first two Monkey Island games you’ll definitely get a kick out of it. As with the SCUMM games, Thimbleweed was made by a tiny team with the minimum of external interference, and is a very personal, precisely crafted work as a result. The mid-1980s setting begged the choice of song.
“Thimbleweed Park”
– after “The Riddle” by Nik Kershaw
Back at LucasArts
Maniac Mansion and
Monkey Island one and two
Were his, so we’ll kickstart
Ron Gilbert’s new adventure game
Now let’s play
A body by a river
Near the old Thimble town
Where two FBI agents
and a nerd and a clown
Hope to find out the reason
By the end of the night
But adventure game puzzles
Can take long to get right
And we’ll never use a guide for a clue
We’ll break into the
Old pillow factory
Send Reyes ahead of me
I keep on finding specks of dust
Those signals are strong tonight
Where to find a vacuum tube?
Though reluctantly
Ransome the Insult Clown
Will help Dolores out
So they can solve the mystery
Meanwhile old Franklin is a ghost
Why? Who knows
A body by a river
Near the old Thimble town
Where two FBI agents
and a nerd and a clown
Hope to find out the reason
By the end of the night
But adventure game puzzles
Can take long to get right
And we’ll never use a guide for a clue
It’s got tentacles
Sprites from the Commodore
Creator cameos
The hot dogs there will make you ill
Find me a thimbleberry pie
How we’ve tried
[BREAK]
A body by a river
Near the old Thimble town
Where two FBI agents
and a nerd and a clown
Hope to find out the reason
By the end of the night
But adventure game puzzles
Can take long to get right
And we’ll never use a guide –
WALK TO Tree
LOOK AT River
PICK UP corpse from the ground
We’re not sure all these puzzles
Are quite logically sound
As we hunt for a pixel
Use everything in sight
Tweet out to @GrumpyGamer
Hope that he’ll set us right
Cause we’ll never use a guide for a clue
No we’ll never use a guide for a clue
Tags: karaoke, lucasarts, Maniac Mansion, marioke, Nik Kershaw, one life left, pc games, ron gilbert, scumm, Terrible Toybox, The Riddle, The Secret of Monkey Island, Thimbleweed Park
