Electron Dance Highlights
The Abandoned Church
This is the second part of a five-part series on INFRA. The first part was Optical Delusions.
Mark climbs the tower in the steelworks so he can repair a mobile transceiver. Luckily, as a videogame avatar, he has a head for heights, because up there you can see everything for miles.
Stalburg looks pristine. It’s easy to forget the rot that brought you here.
The city can be an impersonal, alienating environment, living and working amongst permanent strangers. It can also be a potent stew of diversity and change. Small towns don't change, they just grow old and die. A city constantly reinvents. How can you resist the siren call of a sprawling metropolis?
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and be blown away.
Discussion: Always Waiting
Welcome to late June newsletter (sign up if you want to read it):
I’m getting tired of never playing what I want.
Dear subscribers, if you feel like chatting about anything at all from the newsletter, please speak your mind in the comments here.
The Update Patch Fairy
Hey, remember SNKRX (a327ex, 2021)? SNKRX has been modestly successful but it is not the same game I cackled about a month ago. SNKRX has changed.
Hold on. Let me download a patch for that sentence: is changing.
Discussion: Irredeemable Design
Welcome to May newsletter (sign up if you want to read it):
You are the Alpha and Omega of marketing and your mission is to encourage parasocial relationships. If they think enough of you, maybe they’ll buy your work. I’m your number one fan.
Dear subscribers, if you feel like chatting about anything at all from the newsletter, please speak your mind in the comments here.
Optical Delusion
This is the first part of a five-part series on INFRA.
I still think about INFRA (Loiste Interactive, 2016).
Over the course of eight months in 2019, I worked my way through this behemoth of a game. After an enormous Twitter thread of my progress, I wrote about it briefly and labelled it “one of my top love/hate games of all-time”, definitely right up there with NaissanceE (LimasseFive, 2014).
Why? Because INFRA was a game I misunderstood.
SNKRX Is Way More Fun Than I Expected
SNKRX (a327ex, 2021) is an unusual snake-shooter hybrid released today. It popped up on Twitter in the last couple of weeks and I was smitten with the visual madness in which I couldn’t help but see a little Holedown.
Now it has some UI crimes to answer for but SNKRX is really compelling. It's lo-fi, lo-price and lo-pronounceable. The developer has described it as an “arcade shooter roguelite” but - and perhaps I’m too oldskool at this point - I’m not sure you need the word “roguelite”. But, hey, the marketing bods out there would probably disagree. Actually, they’d probably tell the developer to call it a “roguelike” because no one gives a shit about calling anything a “roguelite” and then I’d probably start chanelling my inner Raigan Burns about the sanctity of game taxonomies.
But let me tell you what SNKRX actually is.
Discussion: Zealot
Welcome to the something quaintly called the "April" newsletter (sign up if you want to read it):
I was often too loyal when it came to the designer’s purpose of a thing. I would treat instructions as a true believer might approach a holy tome, a sacred container of inked words that are beyond mortal question.
Dear subscribers, if you feel like chatting about anything at all from the newsletter, please speak your mind in the comments here.
Transmission: Death Crown
It's happening - I'm going to deliver a full run of Death Crown's 30-level Domination mode with some strategy explainers before each level. It'll take around two hours.
Wednesday 28 April. 9:00PM UK, 10:00PM Central Europe, 4:00PM EST. My Twitch channel can be found at twitch.tv/electrondance.
Previous Transmissions are available on the dedicated E/TX YouTube channel.
Update 29 Apr 2020. The stream has now been archived on YouTube:
Transmission: The Golem, Wildfire
90 minutes-ish. Five games. EPILEPSY WARNING.
Stream this week - Wednesday 14 April - and will begin at 9:30PM UK, 10:30PM Central Europe, 4:30PM EST. My Twitch channel can be found at twitch.tv/electrondance.
I will discuss the following titles:
- The Golem
- The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED]
- Post Void
- Wildfire (key received for free)
- Sensorium
Previous Transmissions are available on the dedicated E/TX YouTube channel.
Update 15 Apr: The stream has now been uploaded to YouTube.
Goodbye Cruel World
Developer droqen is most famous for the endless vertical scrolling platformer Probability 0 released in 2012. Okay, fine, if you insist, it’s actually Starseed Pilgrim from 2013 he’s most famous for. I wrote about that game without spoilers, with spoilers and then I made a short movie about it (without spoilers).
On April 1, 2021, he released the game Cruel World which was commentary on cryptocurrencies, abusive to players and only on sale for 24 hours.
Today, it’s back on sale again, some players interpret the abusive design as meditational and I’m not even sure if it is about cryptocurrencies any more.
Welcome to this week’s edition of “the author is dead”.
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