Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

Since getting my little yellow handheld, I’ve gotten into exploring Pico-8 games.

Pico-8 is a retro-like game emulation system, with a deliberately constrained scope: 128x128 screen and limits on program size, by way of spurring inventiveness in developers. Which worked: I’ve come across much wonderful stuff. Celest the platformer is the system’s big-breakout—it started as a Pico-8 game, and is still available in its original form. (I’m not rec’ing it because I don’t play platformers and so suck at them. Or maybe it’s the other way around.)

Here’s a few I’ve been especially taken with. All are available on the official community, and many are also on itch.io. If you want to download “carts” for local play, it’s $15 for the emulator (which is often included in fundraising bundles through itch.io), or you can play in your browser; many developers also make games available through itch.io.

Alpine Alpaca - A deck-building game where you draw cards to guide your skiing camelid through a slalom course, avoiding the ever increasing trees. I’ve played a few rounds a day for over a month. Love it.

Porklike & Dungeon 1.0 - Two roguelikes with limited but effective scope. I especially like the first, which has only 9 levels (you’re a pig trying to ascend the tower of the Wurstlord to steal his legendary Kielbasa) but is still pretty hard to clear—good balance of danger and limited HP. Also, the BGM earworms me like mad. The second is slightly more traditionally like Rogue.

Mai-Chan’s Sweet Buns - From the same developer as Porklike, a cute pastry-themed puzzle game of the match-a-set type (not limited to match-three). If you like Bejeweled-type games, this may work for you.

Marble Merger & Combo Pool - Two merging-things games (does that genre have a name?). The former is a Suika type, but with fun jiggly physics. The latter uses billiard mechanics to interesting effect.

Onitama - Port of a chess-like board game, on a small (5x5) board with moves constrained to those on a small set of cards which get traded back and forth. I’m still figuring out strategies, but it appears to be more expansive and flexible (in a chesslike way) than that description makes it sound. (There’s other board games I still want to explore.)

Up and Away - Hot-air balloon simulator with a small story-line: catch the winds that take you to Grandma’s house for cookies. Nicely challenging, though the landing mechanics are cheatingly easy—the random cloud-fishing mini-game (to trade for more fuel) makes up for that. Love it.

Also-rans: Villager, a charming build-and-management game with farming villagers, but once you’ve played it through there’s not enough there to replay often; Islander, a build-and-craft game with Minecraft vibes that’s large enough to require save states, which unfortunately require using a computer rather than a handheld emulator.

---L.

Subject quote from Dreams, Fleetwood Mac.

In honor of the bat found lying on the gravel of our driveway and taken to our local wildlife rehab center (quote Eaglet: “We did a thing!”), a couple unrelated links. Well, one’s about a rescue:

Two words: Duck Amuck (via)

Two more: Bugs version. (via YT sidebar from previous)

Continuing followup: Voyager 1 probe is fully online again yays! (via)

500,000 books removed from the Internet Archive’s lending library after publisher lawsuit. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from What I’ve Done, Linkin Park.

A few deep links:

Some history memes go deep—really deep. (A follow-up to part one of this.)

After 2500 years, Bybon son of Phola is still flexing at us. (via, in the comments)

tiktok.com/@aishuadd dancing in an Indian classical style to the Avatar: The Last Airbender intro music. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Life During Wartime, Talking Heads.

It’s been a good week for links to share:

Attention sovay and others interested in Sumerian customer complaints: an excellent t-shirt. (via, which is itself an excellent sub)

Kasey Chambers’ spare and shattering country(?) cover of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself”. (via YT recs)

Answering the important question “Can I lick it?” for the periodic table of elements. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from The Quiet Singer, Charles Hanson Towne.

A few … interesting … links:

Rating 20 time-travel movies by a) scientific logic and b) entertainment value. (via)

A comparison video showing the evolution of Mozart’s music from 5 to 35 years old. I’m struck by the constant playfulness and growing sophistication of his use of pauses. (via)

From There I Ruined It: “Hallelujah” but it's “Baby Got Back”. Seriously cursed. (via YT recs, and I’ve no idea what I did to provoke that)

... for certain senses of “interesting” ...

---L.

Subject quote from Missing You, Ingrid Michaelson.

A few random but most excellent links:

Billions of miles away at the edge of the Solar System, Voyager 1 has gone mad and has begun to die. (via)

The Godzilla Meditation Series, lightly animated stills from kaiju movies with ambient music to smash Tokyo chill to. I prefer my chill background more on the lofi hiphop side a la Krill Wave Radio or LoFi Girl, but this does just fine. I mean, dude, kaiju chillin’. (via)

The delightful Sympawnies of Noam Oxman, including this Purrlude in G (Tiger), Cello Purrlude in C, and Sympawny no.4 (Chubby Cat). (via)

---L.

Subject quote from If—, Rudyard Kipling.

A few more links. They happen around here:

Knitting pattern for a sweater with the Penguin Classics cover of 1984. “The pattern includes extra alphabet charts so that you can customise the title and author to your favourite book.” (via)

Pong Wars. Surprisingly fascinating to watch. (via)

These Happy Dogs Love Sliding Down Snowy Hills. Exactly what it says. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Evangeline, Prologue, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Playing around with links, or maybe links about playing around. Something like that:

An amateur Belgian luthier builds a bass guitar for and with his 6-year-old daughter, who is very sass. Other builds (with occasional daughter commentary) on his channel. (via)

Paku Paku, a one-dimensional, one-button implementation of Pac-Man that is surprisingly addictive. (via)

Flipping a coin is not a 50/50 thing: coins have a 50.8% chance of landing on the same side they started. (via)

Needless to say, this last result is huge.

---L.

Subject quote from Caset at the Bat, Ernest Thayer.

A few links for rainy day just after the solstice:

It’s not an xkcd channel, but it is What If? channel and the videos are narrated by Randal Munroe, and that I think counts as close enough. (via YT sidebar rec)

66 Good News Stories You Didn’t Hear About in 2023. (via)

Ten interesting dissertations on games, play, and meaning.

May your year be filled with light.

---L.

Subject quote from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, stanza 29, adapted by Edward FitzGerald.

Let’s talk about links, ba-bee / Let’s talk about you and mee / All the good things / And the bad things that may-bee:

People who are blind from birth gesture as they speak with the same frequency and ways as sighted people.

Training parrots to video chat with each other. (via janni)

Animation vs. Physics, a sequel to Animation vs. Math. (via)

(With apologies to Salt-n-Pepa.)

---L.

Subject quote from Get Me Bodied, Beyoncé
(I couldn’t find an appropriate line from Shoop).