While going through old boxes, looking for the Iksar Shaman EverQuest action figure in the previous post, I found one of my old virtual pets — the Rakuraku Dinokun, also known as Dinkie Dino. When Tamagotchi made it big, suddenly virtual pets of all sorts were everywhere. Digimon were the best, but my favorite was the Dinokun. Not really sure why. I made a fan page for it on Geocities showing all the animations and growth charts. And pretty soon I found all the same content, content I’d worked so hard on, on someone else’s page.
And that was the day I lost all faith in humanity and vowed to destroy it all, if I could. I guess that’s something that can happen sometimes, and I should just get over it, right?
I replaced the batteries, no luck. I cleaned the battery terminals with alcohol, and it started up, but the buttons weren’t working at all. So, I went further and removed the circuit board, cleaned the buttons and the button contacts, put it all back together, and it mostly worked — with some dead pixels. I then opened it up once more, put in the last screw I’d found rolling around the table, and now it worked fine, no dead pixels. Now I’m wearing it, dangling from a belt loop on my jeans. Every so often it beeps and I play with it. It doesn’t like Rock/Paper/Scissors much because I keep winning.
In a day or two it will mature a little and I’ll find out what kind of dino I’m going to get. It changes to one of three types based on how you treated it when it was young.
The rest of the games are a little more recent 🙂
8-Colors Star Guardians
The developer pitched this game as part of #TurnBasedThursday on BlueSky:
Thanks for hosting this #TurnBasedThursday! For the last day of Steam Spring Sale (5 hours left!!!)… five queer idiot gal sentai! Alien monsters from outta space! Turn based battles! Space catgirls! And WRESTLER LOBSTERS …all and more in 8-Colors Star Guardians+
Um. Hello? Has there even been a Power Rangers parody game yet? I’m thinking this might be the first… one that I have seen, anyway.
8CSG was a challenge the developer Andrea Demetrio made to herself to make a game using just eight colors. The game itself has echoes of classic MegaMan — there are nine bosses you can take on in any order, and defeating bosses will give some of your crew powers that may help defeat another boss, until finally you have beaten them all and the real villain shows their evil face.
The five Star Guardians spout hilarious dialog between fights, filling in the backstories and the real stakes behind their battles! Once the first story is done, an arcade mode brings the fights to all new arenas, and the second story ups the ante in a surprising way.
It’s good, clean, affordable fun.
Terminal
You’re going to see this screenshot and immediately want to play the game or turn away in confusion. There’s no real middle ground.
You play as Tera, a hacker whose computer has been invaded by some entity. You’ve isolated it and disconnected it and now you’re trying to figure out what it is by talking through a terminal. It seems to know rather a lot about you, too. You will play through Tera’s life and memories learning about the entity that is attacking you and coming to grips with your past, and how you came to be as isolated and disconnected as the entity attacking you.
Each chapter starts with a prompt, like “You can’t change today, only hope tomorrow”. You determine the verbs (“change”, “hope” and I think “can’t”.) and combine those with two or three other words in the prompt. Each one will play a memory, and the game will give hints on which word combination will complete the chapter, but not hints exact enough to let you proceed without getting a good chunk of story.
There are graphics, but they are ASCII graphics, keeping with the theme. And there’s not many of them.
Pool of Madness Playtest
This game is currently in early playtest on Steam.
What if pool, but on a 19th century sailing ship, maybe a pirate ship, maybe a pirate ship that is about to be swallowed by some Lovecraftian entity, and sometimes you’re going to need a shotgun to clean the table, and sometimes some of the balls will explode.
But, basically it’s you, a cue stick and cue ball, and some bombs, maybe skulls, maybe some dead fish, and a good heaping double handful of rituals that you must complete before you are released or lose yourself to insanity.
It’s a refreshingly weird game, but I kept on waiting for the real game to arrive — like in Inscryption, when you begin to realize what is really happening, or in Balatro when you figure out the idea is not to play poker hands. I’ll have to play more of it to figure it out, but the atmosphere alone puts it in the same weird mix of horror and parlour games as the also-currently-in-development Forbidden Solitaire.
