2018

Bluey! (Nintendo DS, 2005)

raid v1 available now • video games + design • @raidmagazine

There are too many amazing Famicase designs ⊟ 

I wanted to feature my favorites from this year’s My Famicase Exhibition – the annual showcase of Famicom cartridge designs for made up games, hosted by Tokyo game shop Meteor – but there are too many splendid pieces to pick from. By the time I got through half of the designs posted on Twitter with the Famicase hashtag, the number of open tabs I had threatened to crash my web browser, so here are ten standout cartridges I’ve found so far, including a number from friends of the site we’ve talked about here before.

The artists we’ve featured above, starting from the top left: Duncan Corrigan,  @pyong_pyong, Adam Tierney, Austin DuBois, William Greenawalt,  Philip Summers, Jordan Rosenberg, Sebastien, @data_doge, and Cory Schmitz.

Meteor will have around 250 Famicase designs up for display at its gallery until May 13. It’s my dream to one day make it to one of these, so if you’re in the area, please do not miss this opportunity to pay Meteor a visit!

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Tales From Beacon Point by Lou-Ellen

Today is my day off so i decided to do some summer cleaning, and i found a box of my old SNES cartridges in my crawlspace, haven’t looked at them since high school. Has anyone heard of this one? It has to be a weird bootleg but i’ve never seen it before. It won’t play, just goes to a black screen with ambient music playing. Kinda spooky.

Splattle Sibsters

Happy splatfest! I played a bunch of Splatoon 2 today while also watching a stream of Battle Brothers. So here’s a mashup of those. Please enjoy tactical squid com-splat.

I’ve been enjoying Splatoon a whole lot. The core loop of ‘battle -> get cash -> buy clothes -> repeat’ is very enticing! I love a good dress-up game. I’ve only just started to dip my toes into Salmon Run, as my interest in the Turf War starts to wane (splatfests aside). I had very little interest in ranked until recently– I got really into ARMS’s ranked mode for a couple weeks, which has rekindled my interest in it for Splatoon.

Battle Brothers’ tactical-minis fighting seems pretty neat! Unfortunate that the  writing seems to be on that low-fantasy “it’s not realistic if women have agency” bullshit. All in all I’m happy to watch streams of it rather than play it myself.

As an aside– I think a splatoon tactics game could be really cool, although I don’t know that battle brothers’ approach is *quite* the right fit. Battle brothers is really focused on formations (as far as I’ve seen) while Splatoon has a big focus on using your colored turf to increase your mobility (swimmin’ as a squid, super jumps)

Video game titles created by a neural network trained on 146,000 games:

Conquestress (1981, Data East) (Arcade)

Deep Golf (1985, Siny Computer Entertainment) (MS-DOS)

Brain Robot Slam (1984, Gremlin Graphics) (Apple IIe)

King of Death 2: The Search of the Dog Space (2010, Capcom;Br�derbund Studios) (Windows)

Babble Imperium (1984, Paradox Interactive) (ZX Spectrum)

High Episode 2: Ghost Band (1984, Melbourne Team) (Apple IIe)

Spork Demo (?, ?) (VIC-20)

Alien Pro Baseball (1989, Square Enix) (Arcade)

Black Mario (1983, Softsice) (Linux/Unix)

Jort: The Shorching (1991, Destomat) (NES)

Battle for the Art of the Coast (1997, Jaleco) (GBC)

Soccer Dragon (1987, Ange Software) (Amstrad CPC)

Mutant Tycoon (2000, Konami) (GBC)

Bishoujo no Manager (2003, author) (Linux/Unix)

Macross Army (Defenders Ball House 2: League Alien) (1991, Bandai) (NES)

The Lost of the Sand Trades 2000 (1990, Sega) (SNES)

Pal Defense (1987, author) (Mac)

(part one, part two)

Devil Summoner: Lost Memories This album is an original set of compositions for the Megami Tensei fan project "Lost Memories", which is based on old JRPG music, specifically the PS1-era games.

You can also find the album on Bandcamp

Super Peanuts RPG