To my surprise,
Pico-8 has become my second favorite* gaming system—not that it’s a real console, but a virtual machine/fantasy console, where games created for it are run via a parser on whatever system you’re playing on. In my case, I have a handheld with a square screen, which is perfect for the 128x128 Pico-8 window—and with my brainage right now, bite-sized games for 5 minutes at a time is perfect, and there’s a lot of small yet excellent Pico-8 releases. I’ve been exploring the
main site library and
itch.io (and that’s just the free ones) for a while and still finding gems. Here’s a few getting play-time since my last
rec post. They can all be played in your browser, btw (controls are the arrow keys, Z, X, and Enter).
Pico Sound DJ is a sequencer and tracker that does for Pico-8 music what
Little Sound DJ did for Game Boy music: gives you full control of all four channels, including a good selection of samples and a wave-form editor. I’ve spent hours building beats and grooves and loops. Unlike LSDJ there’s no chaining, though, just phrases and channels. Still damn cool.
Among the various Breakout clones,
Brick Tickler amuses with also bouncing the falling bricks and
The Endless Sewers of d’Oh! with continuous action even when losing a life and advancing a level. I still prefer the action of
Breakout Hero, but these compete.
Of the several farming sims in the vein of Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley that I’ve tried, my faves are
Overcast with Light Rain and
tiny farm. Note there’s no NPC interactions (no room in Pico-8’s limited resources) so it's just the other farming activities.
Two circuit racers of note:
Brutal Pico Race has F-Zero style hover cars, with banked instead of flat tracks but is fun even with the bumpers.
Grand Prix+ increments the model number by having F1 cars, with a first person view and surprisingly good drifting, all of which make it a challenge—plus it comes with a
track editor. (The latter was made by the same developer as
Whiplash Taxi Co., and that one’s passenger missions and 3D modeling makes it my fave Pico-8 racer so far. )
BTW, one thing I hadn’t realized when I rec’d
High Stakes is that the more you win, the harder it gets (the penalty for passing a round goes up) which adds to the replayability. That or it adds crushing pressure, depending on how protective you are of winning streaks.
* After Game Boy Advance, which had an amazing library. ---L.
Subject quote from Downtown, Petula Clark. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
