How About A Tomie Game? 

Apple Quest Monsters!

Over 50 lovingly crafted sprites and descriptions of monsters from a non existant RPG, inspired by my childhood love of reading strategy guides for games I never played.

4 of the monsters here previously appeared in my Guide to Ghosts.

I spent a lot of time on each monster, so I hope you enjoy reading them!

Buy on itch.io here!

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Point of Origin: A Retrospective on Schadenbergiana

I’ve mentioned a few times over the years that I’ve not just cooked up entirely fictional games to go along with the music I write under my Gonkaka alias, but indeed an entire fictional company with it’s own history to go along with them, Nincom. After having a lot of fun putting together a retrospective for one of my ongoing Gonkaka projects, Efiáltis, I decided to dig deep into the back catalogue of work I’d done and do something similar for a Nincom game I had already finished writing the music for a long time ago; Schadenbergiana. Along the way, a point about the preservation of old games made it’s way in there too. This piece of metafiction was written for the 2018 Halloween Countdown over on Random Lunacy, and can be viewed there with embedded music players.

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Ever since day one, Nincom has been defined by it’s dedication to uniqueness and the fervent ambition- traits which have found the company in hot water more then once, and most famously before they even got their first game out the door. Theirs is an attitude described by many as “weird”, fewer as “punk”, and by their dedicated fans as something that “sets them apart from everyone else in the game’s industry”. The company has recently celebrated their 32nd birthday with a release that has been rather aggressively marketed through various online channels; The Nincom N-Sides Collection, a compilation of some of the companies rarest and most obscure releases, each of them painstakingly emulated as accurately as possible using emulators programmed in-house. In honour of this momentous occasion, we’d like to cover what was perhaps the hardest Nincom game to find in any capacity and even harder to get emulated correctly; Schadenbergiana.

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lost property control organization (samidare/hoshibackyard)

A few of these I can elaborate on: 

Astro Robin Hood is an obscure JRPG with a "Robin Hood IN SPACE" theme. Like many RPGs of the era, it's mostly a Dragon Quest clone, but you can a build a party of out several available Merry Men. 

Star Trek - The Atlantis Bone is a Japan-exclusive Star Trek game, framed as if it were an episode of the Original Series. Some claim the story comes from an unfilmed TV script for the show, but this has never been confirmed. Japanese fans say it represents the show better than many of the other Star Trek games of the era. 

Insection - The Arcade Game is based on a bug-themed space shooter made by an obscure European dev. Oddly, the actual arcade game was never finished or released, as the games were developed concurrently and the arcade version was canceled due to financial issues. 

Metal Fighter Blaseball - An oddly misspelled baseball game with a sci-fi theme, similar to Base Wars. Some cute sprites based on tokusatsu characters and aliens, but otherwise a pretty standard baseball game for the era. 

Nigel Mansell’s Font Fighting - Japan-exclusive "action education game" meant to teach kids English and to improve handwriting. Borderline unplayable. No is sure who Nigel Mansell is. EDIT: While some assume the title refers to the race car driver Nigel Mansell, the game doesn’t feature driving a tall, nor does it have Mansell’s likeness, so your guess is as a good as anyone’s.

Fourteen obscure NES/Famicom ROMs that were never released in North America, according to a neural network:

Power Punker (Europe)

Business Gaiden (Japan)

Astro Robin Hood (Japan)

Entity Rad (Europe)

World Championship Shting (Japan)

Star Trek - The Atlantis Bone (Japan)

Insection - The Arcade Game (Europe)

Captain Player Earth (Japan)

Magic Dark Star Hen (Japan)

Murde - The Fingler’s Quest (Europe)

Metal Fighter Blaseball (Japan) (Rev A)

Smurf the Edify (Japan)

Skate or Space Dive Bashboles (Europe)

Chack'van, Ultimate Game of Power Blam (Japan)

Nigel Mansell’s Font Fighting (Japan)

What Is Black Skies?

Well, I may be cheating a bit for the drabble, but I might as well write what exactly that vector graphics-y game idea I was talking about is.

Black Skies, for the long and short of it, is a science-fantasy Zelda-like game idea that’s been bouncing around in my head for a while now, with a pseudo-vector-graphics style and a world inspired by pre-gaming-crash-styled games and the 70s-type sci-fi and fantasy it drew from, set in a world that has moved on, where you’re a lone mercenary set on rescuing a princess from a malevolent force of space demons .

Of course, the idea, as it stands so far, is a fair ways more complex than that, but read on for more info there…

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‘If Winter Ends’

Cartridge for My Famicase Exhibition at METEOR in Tokyo. @meteor_club #famicase

Kazuo Umezu’s horror manga The Drifting Classroom may have reigned in the 70s, but it wasn’t until a decade later that game developers in Japan would begin to cash in on its popularity. The Famicom title, as seen above on a bootleg NES cart, sold millions, and was lauded for its 2D platforming depiction of the manga’s harrowing events in a slightly truncated form. In fact, the game was so popular that an official soundtrack was released, containing every piece of music from the title. Whether you’re familiar with the manga or not, you can surely find excitement in the tale of an elementary school zapped to an uncertain, desolate future, where adults resort to barbarism while the children devise a new world order.

ICE WARS was a fantastically-popular vector scan game, featuring a thinly-veiled representation of the Soviet invasion of the Aleutian Islands early at the start of what became World War Short. It was also the game that turned struggling Vectorpoint into a major power in the field of arcade gaming, sponsoring three sequels, as well as the spin-off game SNOWMOBILE CARNAGE, one of the only vector-scan games ever to be rated AR for graphic violence. A tamer set of graphics was included on some supplemental ROMs, but they proved to be so unpopular that they were discontinued (and it’s one of the cases where the more-restricted version of the game ended up commanding higher prices on the collector market).

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Obviously ICE WARS is based on BATTLEZONE (1980), itself a fantastically-successful tank simulator (and one of the first realtime 3D games). It’s also an amazing technical achievement given the computing power of the time. The designers, Ed Otberg and Owen Rubin did so much to conceptualize digital space and set out basic rules for gaming within it. 

I learned a lot in the process of making up these screens and designs (themselves based on vehicles created for the Microgame ICE WAR (1979) by the eponymous Elohrir, though I wonder if that designer turned out to be someone else.) Probably the biggest lesson was that games like BATTLEZONE are really dominated by negative space. You don’t shoot at the vector lines, because your target lies in-between them.

design document part 2