Off-site Goings-ons

Posted on July 27, 2019 by Cassidy

Howdy readers! I figured it might be a good idea to put a post up on the site to plug some of the content we’ve been releasing outside of the website — since not all of it is necessarily worth writing up individual posts for on this end. As always, the best way to stay up to date on what we’re up to is by following our Twitter, where I do try to keep all y’all filled in on my goings-ons on a day-to-day basis.

For one – following a nearly year-long hiatus – we’ve returned to a regular streaming schedule on Twitch! As long as we’re able to maintain it, we’ll be streaming at 6:00 PM (PST) every Thursday and Saturday. The subjects of Thursday’s streams will be decided by Twitter polling, while Saturday streams will be subject either to polls on our Patreon and / or continuing previously-started games. For the time being, stream archives will also be exclusive to patrons; as I’m not currently looking to greatly expand the audience, and as I’m still not entirely comfortable with my voice in its current state.

On the aforementioned Patreon front: We’re currently looking into more along the lines of exclusive content. While new articles will continue to never be locked [even temporarily] behind the paywall; I’m currently considering something like a short-form podcast, where I can discuss stuff like games I’m currently playing or writing about in a more direct format. In addition to whatever comes out of that brainstorming, we’ll also be doing more regular polling to determine Twitch streams and upcoming article subjects. Access to all that and more is available from the $1 a month tier, in an effort to make them available to any and all interested.

It still feels weird to me to be locking anything behind our Patreon — even at the lowest possible tier. But moreso than whatever money we might make from it, the primary motivation for it is to curate and catalogue content I’m not yet entirely comfortable putting out publicly. Namely, anything incorporating my voice, due to reasons. Hell, maybe I’ll put up a Patreon post in the coming days to better explain these particular anxieties of mine. All that being said, I do apologize to anyone who takes umbrage with the idea of exclusive content, and completely understand anyone who can’t commit to a subscription to it. I only hope that you can continue to look forward to articles continuing to go up here on the website.

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Bad Game Music #14

Posted on July 25, 2019 by Cassidy

Never mind the fact that it’s been nearly a year between inductees to the Bad Game Music Hall of Fame: This month’s tracks deals in soundtracks to video game conversions, and the horrors that may occur therein. Listen in as an NES hack manages to butcher its source material, as an arcade-to-Speccy approximation fails to approximate music, and as the N64 somehow manages to best PC CD audio in 1999!

  1. Billiard 2008 (NES) – “[Main Menu]”
  2. Super Hang-On (ZX Spectrum) – “[Course Select]”
  3. Turok 2: Seeds of Evil (PC) – “The Death Marshes”
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Yaroze a Day #03

Posted on July 19, 2019 by Cassidy

ASOBU RAKUGAKI | ASSAULTER | BAKUDAN | BALL BLAZE |
BANJO INVADERS | BEET | BENDY

Welcome back to the third installment in our still-semi-new feature, “Yaroze a Day!” In this series, we’re attempting to cover the complete catalogue of games compiled in the unofficial “Net Yaroze Collection 2014,” and giving each of them brief explorations and reviews. While the plan was originally to updates covering seven games on a weekly basis – as if we were somehow covering a game a day – that schedule has unfortunately sort of fallen by the wayside. From here on out, I’ll be shooting for a bi-weekly update schedule, in the hopes of not burning myself out so quickly on the idea of it.

This week’s update finally sees the last games in the collection beginning with the letter “A,” as we move swiftly into some “B” titles. While you certainly don’t have to read through all the preceding articles and reviews in order to understand the games we’ll be covering today; we would at least recommend reading our primer on the subject of the Net Yaroze hardware and introduction to this series, which you can find here. With all that cleared up, please to enjoy this week’s assortment of oddities and obscurities!

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Dark Castle (Genesis)

Posted on July 13, 2019 by Cassidy

“Beware This Brimming Tome!”

“Explore 14 rooms filled with zombies, rats and dive-bombing vultures!”
Dark arts by @snakeandrews.

Once upon a time, Apple launched its line of Macintosh computers. And they were pretty darn practical back in the day, as it turns out! For all your data and word processing needs – and without the hassle of command prompt mastery – it served a fine alternative to the reigning IBM-compatibles of its era. And for what it’s worth, they were A-OK at playing games, too… albeit, featuring a distinctly different library than what was available on the likes of DOS. Being stuck with purely 1-bit black-and-white displays [until around 1989] was almost certainly a dissuading factor for some games software publishers — not to mention the complications of codebase compatibilities when it came to creating conversions. But for a brave few developers who recognized the potential market, the early Mac served as a platform of choice for some classic games.

Judging from retrospectives and nostalgic postings in the modern era, 1986’s Dark Castle is among the most widely and fondly remembered titles from this golden age of Mac gaming. At the very least, it certainly benefited from one of the larger campaigns bringing Apple’s interactive offerings to other computer and console hardware. With versions made available across Amiga, Apple IIGS, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS-compatibles, and even the Philips CD-i; you can likely gather that the mainstream aspirations for Dark Castle aimed fairly high. But perhaps the greatest opportunity came with its debut on one of the most popular home consoles of the early 90s: The venerable Sega Genesis. If any one conversion had the potential to launch the burgeoning series into the stratosphere, it was likely to be the release on Sega’s 16-bit, millions-selling piece of kit. All that was left to do was to stick the landing.

Needless to say (considering that we’re talking about it on this website), the Genesis version of Dark Castle isn’t quite as fondly remembered as its source material on Macintosh. As a matter of fact, it’s well-considered to be among the weakest offerings in the console’s entire cartridge library — between mediocre critical reception surrounding its original release, and more recent reviews slamming it as one of the Mega Drive’s all-time biggest stinkers. Perhaps most infamously, it’s received a treatment by the Angriest of Video Gaming Nerds, and thus cemented its legacy as one of the worst games of all time. But here on the Bad Game Hall of Fame, we like to question these sorts of assertions, and see for ourselves whether or not the hateful hullabaloo rings true. We’ll be giving the Genesis release the fairest due we can, as well as tracking the muddy path that lead us to the darkest version of Dark Castle.

Quaiff thine elixirs, and gather ye stones:
The Black Knight awaits us, atop digital throne.

I reckon I have a sentimental favorite in the original MacVenture release of Déjà Vu, but maybe that’s just me?

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OUYA (2013-2015)

Posted on June 25, 2019 by Cassidy

“The Little Box Inside This Box Has Big Dreams.”

“There would be no OUYA without you.”
OUYAwesome art by @puttinginpocket.

On May 22nd, 2019, the announcement was made that the OUYA’s online services would be shut down in just a month’s time thereafter.[1] For a platform relying entirely on digital downloads to populate [and authenticate] its library of games, this spelled the death knell for a piece of hardware which had already spent the past four years in a state of dormancy and disrepair. In the minds of many, the only “surprise” element to this short-notice shutdown was the fact that it hadn’t already happened sooner. The cessation of service for OUYA serves as the predictable punchline to what had become an inside gag within the games industry — the expected ending of a stage play tragedy. In a word: “Inevitable.”

But the OUYA didn’t debut on the scene as an immediately doomed endeavor. Far from it; its beginnings are that of one of the most successful Kickstarter projects of all time, and its expected impact on the games business was to be immense. An attached tagline dared consumers to dream: “What if you could press a button, and reset the entire video game industry?” But of course, that dream would quickly be dashed, along with any other hopes for it as a sustainable fourth competitor in the ongoing console wars. Instead, the questions we’re left to ask ourselves are where it all went wrong, and if anything could’ve been done to avoid this unfortunate fate?

In this article, we’ll be seeking to answer these questions and more, as we provide a history of the life and times of the ill-fated console known as the OUYA. In tracking its development from a bragworthy beginning to a whimpering end, we aim to pinpoint the fatal flaws made along the way. But we’re not just here to fixate on the negatives: Where it’s due, credit will be given to the ideas that made the OUYA such a promising prospect in the first place, and to the handful of success stories it helped hatch. For as easy as it may be to mock the ultimately failed business venture, you can’t say it wasn’t without its merits, or that its original intentions were entirely ignoble. With all that well in mind: It’s time to bring the OUYA to ya’.

Special thanks to a fellow Cassidy (@madlobotanist), who kindly provided the OUYA used to gain the necessary first-hand experience for this article! She also confided in me that she’s “weirdly attached” to the accompanying controller for it, which… hey, y’know what? Don’t put up with anyone telling you any differently. You keep fighting for what you believe in, you hear?

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