The Blair Hippo Project

And we’re back to the video games:

Page 2, Game 16: Micro Mages, by Morphcat Games

Man, do I need to get a game controller for my laptop. Between this and a game I was playing last night, if I’m going to keep doing arcade-style stuff on this machine, I need an arcade-style controller.

Micro Mages is literally made for the Nintendo Entertainment System, though the download thoughtfully comes with its own emulator, which is a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the code simulating the actual game. (But then again, that’s true of the PDF representing the game manual, too.)

It’s cute and fun, though I think having a proper controller and not just banging arrow keys would enhance the experience quite a bit. Like the games it draws inspiration from, quite unforgiving; you’re perpetually one oopsie away from death. (Though I don’t recall Mario ever ending in a blood splotch.)

It’s a side-scroller where you’re a tiny little mage dude, bouncing around and blasting skeletons and bats and stuff with your little pew-pew spell. I think you’re there to rescue a princess? There’s always a princess. I’m willing to bet she’s not in this tower.

Also, there are crates! Blast them! Some of them have treasures, which give you points! You like points, right? Or a fairy, who will allow you to take TWO hits before you die! Or a seagull you can mount on your back for in-air shenanigans!

Unlike most side-scrollers, this one progresses vertically; you need to jump your way up the tower. Through a bit of trial and error, I eventually figured out that the key mechanic is to fling yourself against a wall and press yourself against it, slowing your fall and allowing you to jump again.

Of course, before long, the game starts slowly scrolling upwards, regardless of whether or not your making progress. If you fall off the bottom, you die in an adorable spurt of 8-bit blood.

I feel like it’s a tad too unforgiving for its own good. Yeah, the games from the era didn’t fuck around with any kind of hand-holding, but even so, this one’s rough. Having the map start scrolling of its own accord is a step too far; the game is challenging enough without adding what feels like an artificial ticking clock element. At the very least, maybe don’t unleash that until the second castle?

But honestly? This is a cute, fun little game. If I could load it into the NES emulator on my Nintendo Switch, I probably would, just to see how it plays. If I do get a controller I like, I could see coming back to this.

The game is also set up to allow up to four players — SIMULTANEOUSLY. Which feels like it would be such a howling clusterfuck of boinging and pew-pewing that I actually want to try it sometime.

Not bad at all.

All right, random.org. Roll me a good one:

Page 55, Game 12: Costume Fairy Adventures by Penguin King Games

“A tabletop RPG about fairies. In costumes. Having adventures.”

I’mma guess this one is exactly what it says on the tin.

Time for an adventure!

Page 42, Game 24: Na Escuridão (In the Darkness), by Minakie

(Edit: This game can currently be found on Page 42, Game 23.)

“Look, it’s a Hundred Floors of Frights. They’re not all gonna be winners.”

Negative reviews are fun when you’re punching up; most of the people responsible for Cats being the nightmare clusterfuck it is are wealthy and powerful, and will likely never know I even existed; that shit is fair game.

But going HAM on something that was basically donated to charity by someone who worked on it largely just for the love? That’s … that’s just mean.

So I’ll go easy on In The Darkness.

It’s a system-agnostic one-shot adventure that fits onto a single sheet of paper by virtue of teeny tiny print. And….

Some tropes you embrace, some tropes you avoid. The Big Twist in this adventure would be one of the latter — for very good reason. It’s not offensive or in bad taste; I just worry that if I ran this, the rest of the table would come away thinking I’d just wasted their damn time.

Though to be fair, I HAVE seen this twist pulled-off successfully before; my friend did it in a D&D game, and it was kinda fuckin’ epic. The context was radically different, but still, he made it work. So maybe it’s worth a look if you’re GM and you’re in a challenge-yourself kinda mood.

I’ll pass, though.

Okay, who’s next…..

Page 2, Game 16: Micro Mages, by Morphcat Games

“A platformer developed for the NES. Now available on PC! ROM included.”

Ooh. This looks promising.

And the first properly randomized entry in the playthrough is:

Page 18, Game 15: Two Years of Mini-RPGs, 2017—2019, by Emojk

(Edit: This game can currently be found on Page 18, Game 14.)

Not one game, but a sub-bundle of 32 pen-and-paper mini-games!

Obviously, this is not one I actually played.

I was a little thrown and honestly a bit scornful when my first random toss of the bundle-dice landed me on something that wasn’t a video game — but as my friend pointed out, Itch.io is becoming a big venue for indie tabletop RPG aficionados, and including those games in this bundle put it on more people’s radar. Which can only be a good thing.

Okay, very fair points.

But what to do when my RNG traipse through the bundle lands me on these spaces? Just reroll and pretend they don’t exist? That doesn’t seem fair, but it’s not as though I can sit down and spend an hour or two playing them myself, unless I stumble across something I think my wife would really be into.

I can at least give ’em a look and report back.

This bundle-within-the-bundle comes from an indie game dev named Come Martin. He challenged himself to do a single-(ish)-sheet RPG per month, and wound up sticking with it for about two years, producing 32 games in total. They’re presented as either individual downloads, or rolled into a single mega-PDF.

The presentation is … rough. Even for casually perusing them, the individual PDFs are the way to go. Some are laid out in portrait, others as landscape, but no effort has been made to normalize them for the master PDF, so a whole bunch of it will appear sideways on your screen. The author also has occasionally unfortunate tastes in font selection.

This particular bundle is for people who are already heavy into one-shot indie RPGs; little to no effort is made to ease you into the conventions of the genre. Which I guess makes sense, really. It’s not like someone’s gonna go “You know, binging The Office has gotten kinda stale. Whaddya say we head down to the dining room table and pretend we’re magic trees?”

It’s been a while since I played games like this (ie, Fiasco) with anything approaching regularity. I feel like there’s a kind of group storytelling mindset you and the other players have to get yourselves in for any of these to work — but if you can get yourself into that headspace for one, getting into it for the rest shouldn’t be that hard.

Each game starts with a setting/situation of varying degrees of wackiness — You’re incompetent time travelers setting out to solve the paradoxes you probably caused! You’re plushies protecting your children from nightmares! You’re basically Wall-E, except your batteries are dying and soon the world will truly become lifeless! You’re old folks trying to escape the nursing home! From there come rules of varying degrees of complexity; some of them involve rolling dice and looking up stuff on a chart, others have some element of resource management and risk/reward thing going on. The most prep-heavy one I saw, Murder in the Quantum Monastery, involves printing out three decks of reality-shattering cards (“The monastery is now a giant robot fighting the forces of evil”) players can use to spruce-up their medieval whodunnit.

The overall effect is a set of games I’d be CURIOUS to play, but not necessarily EXCITED to play, you know? Like, if I already had a group that was meeting regularly to play these kind of indie one-shots, I’d be glad to print a few out to toss into the mix just to see what happens. But I’m not making a list of who I’d wanna invite to assemble that group myself post-Covid.

I feel like doing this particular entry justice involves doing a sub-crawl on its own 32 individual components, and … nah, I think I’ll pass. But what the hell, it’s a thing that exists — on my hard drive, no less. I could see coming back to this if I was on an indie RPG kick. There’s a wacky low-fi charm to the whole thing that I kinda like.

All right, who’s next….

Page 42, Game 24 (ooh, nice palindrome, random.org): Na Escuridão (In the Darkness), by Minakie

Dang, another tabletop; I think those are more heavily represented in this bundle than I realized. But this looks like it’s one ruleset, not 32; I think I’ll take a peek.

And my big randomized playthrough begins with:

Page 1, Game 26: One Night Stand, by Kinmoku

Okay, maybe this first one wasn’t exactly chosen at random.

A point-and-click adventure game where you (assumed to be a male-bodied sort whose sexual preferences include women) wake up in bed hung-over as fuck and next to a stranger who’s as naked as you are. Feels like it’s part of a genre I’m simply not familiar with; sort of a slow-moving interactive novel kind of thing?

You wake up, and try to piece together just WTF happened last night. (You were, apparently, already visibly drunk AF by the time you met the lady you hooked up with, which is honestly not cool; but what the hell, my avatar clearly wasn’t processing the event as a sexual violation, so I wasn’t going to overlay that narrative on him.) You click on things. You make decisions. And you need to make those decisions count, because she’s not gonna be asleep forever, bro.

The game ended with me getting thrown the hell out of her house. Protip: if you’re going to violate someone’s privacy in the name of trying to reduce the overbearing awkwardness, make sure you don’t call her by the name that’s on her fake ID.

At least I had gotten my shirt and pants on and left with my phone — which had just died. No Uber here — old-school walk of shame for me. And she was nice enough to give me some aspirin before I left, which I clearly needed very desperately.

For such inherently salacious and potentially sleazy subject matter, the game presents itself gently, with soft, warm graphics. This girl had clearly had a really shitty night last night, and I was sincerely motivated to try and keep from making it worse — and obviously failed, super hard. I’m also intrigued by the mystery of just what the hell happened to “me” as well.

It was a pleasant little experience, even if the ending I got was … probably not the WORST possible, but still not good. I may well come back to it.

Next game: Page 18, Game 15: that’s gonna be….

Two Years of Mini-RPGs, 2017—2019, by Emojk

“32 RPGs in a single collection!”

Erm. Kinda flying in the face of this whole VIDEO game thing, aren’t we.

Eh, what the hell. I can at least give ’em a look.

It’s June, 2020. The world is sick as hell and kinda sorta on fire. Massive protests against rampant police violence are so commonplace they’re scarcely newsworthy anymore.

And Itch.io is offering a metric fuckton of games under the Bundle for Racial Justice And Equality.

“All proceeds will be donated to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Community Bail Fund split 50/50.”

As a middle-class white dude, throwing money at problems is kind of my core skillset. And I’m a gamer to boot! So, I got it.

… and now have over a thousand indie games to play.

That’s … a lot.

So I’m gonna play ’em. Not all of them; I still have a job. But what the hell, I’ll pull some games at random and post about ’em. Maybe this gigantic masterpiece of gamer slacktivism will be available for you to buy yourself! Or maybe you can just spot some cool shit you wanna check out a la carte.