【Game-Log: Post-September 2025】
The AFL season is over and I'm preparing for PAX in October. I played way more games than I expected in the last two weeks too.
Major Timesinks and Finished Games
Megabonk is a fantastic A.S.S. (Auto Shooter Survival) game. It distinguishes itself in the genre with its use of the so-called "third" dimension, and its robust and compelling movement. Rapidly dodging hordes of dozens of monsters while radiating assorted death rarely gets tired. It does have one significant flaw, in that the metaprogression quickly devolves to pure grind, with large parts of the game inaccessible without repeated unlocking awareness of the need to unlock the ability buy the ability to buy the chance to get a certain weapon in game.
Blippo+ is a fake TV network that was originally made for the playdate. You can flip the channels and watch various alien shows. There's also fake teletext. That's it. 10 out of 10.
Unfair Flips is a game where you click to flip an unfair coin (comes up 30% ). The game ends when you flip 10 heads in a row. There are some idle-game upgrades that make the coin fairer, or flip faster. But mostly it's just a log of flip results, occasionally interspersed with facts about probability. There are a few endings, but I've only got one. It's weirdly compelling.
Baby Steps is the latest game by Bennett Foddy and his collaborators. It involves a shut-in loser teleported to a fantasy world from his parents' basement, and tasked to walk up a mountain, manually, controlling one leg at a time. The game is a constant challenge of fighting the unintuitive controls across difficult and comically punishing terrain (everything from falling 100m down a mudslide to getting shoved off the mountain by a cactus). There's a hint of a story (a lot hidden behind exploration) that is quite interesting and moderately sad. The game would be close to perfect if it didn't also want to be the game that fucks with you, or has weird invisible barriers preventing the "wrong" path being taken sometimes, which both undermines the main point of the game and also the occasional physically comedic trap.
Dice Gambit is a strategy game where you also manage a dynasty of "inquisitors" and their relationship with nobility in a town overrun by monsters. You get to create an array of weirdos with numerous interacting special powers. It has quite a novel dice-based combat system that can severely buff or completely eliminate certain moves in any one turn. While all this is great, it has a bizarrely inconsistent presentation where the same word means multiple things, and there are several mission modes that are completely unappealing.
The 1-bit graphics of Pager are some of the best. It's a first-person horror game, where you play through a set of increasingly surreal office-themed vignettes. Creepy, funny, surreal. An easy recommendation.
Mind Diver is a unique first person adventure game. You control a "diver" virtually traversing the memories of another person, which take the form of lo-fi 3D scans of locations and actors. The gameplay is very similar to a point-and-click adventure where you use clues from existing details of a scene and carry them to "memory holes" elsewhere in that scene or others. It's a really novel mechanic, that makes point and click gameplay work in context in a way the traditional "revisit a 3 day old crime scene to steal something from a rubbish bin" gameplay doesn't. The story is also an enthralling mystery and touching personal tragedy...
...Which it's why it was so disappointing to have the game fail to save for 90 minutes and erase most of my progress right near the end.
Tried Out or Revisited Briefly
The demo of Q-Up is around an hour of an incremental game that presents itself as a fake coin-flipping esport. The writing is absolutely hilarious, and there are a surprising amount of mechanics and subplots around the fringe.
Hades II is more Hades. But seemingly less compelling judging by how little I've played.
Caves of Lore is an interesting CRPG where you control a group of amnesiacs and a dog in a set of caves. Has seperate battle and exploration screens, but seems fairly intuitive. Unsurprisingly there's also a lot of lore, both read in random books, but also told through narrative. Looking forward to getting deeper into this one.
I started on Consume Me, a narrative game about a teen girl's struggles managing her weight and her life in general. It takes the form of light management mechanics, and microgames. A lot of fun so far. But the content warnings kind of spoiled the game.
September Game of the Month
Easy Delivery Co.
Chill, Creepy, neither. Just a fantastic little game that aces what it sets out to do.
All Games Played
Automobilista 2: GREAT
Letters to Arralla: Good
Megabonk: GREAT (Notable)
Blippo+: GREAT (Notable)
Unfair Flips: GREAT (Notable)
Baby Steps: Good
Dice Gambit: Good
Pager: GREAT (Notable)
Mind Diver: Good
Q-UP (Demo): GREAT
Hades II: Good
Caves of Lore: Good
Consume Me: Good
#pager
What is so interesting about pagers (beepers) and in particular, this Motorola Bravo? :blobcatnerd:
Few decades ago kids like myself watched movies with businessmen and hospital doctors running around with pagers such as this and dreamt having similar tech in our pickets. But the best we could do was to have a basic alarm clock shaped exactly like Motorola Bravo - marketplaces were full of them :blobcatbaguettehero:
This thing still working (thankfully) #pager #oldtech #stillrelevant
カフカから着想を得た不条理サイコホラーゲーム『PAGER』配信開始。ポケベルで受け取った指令に従い、部屋と部屋を繋げて生まれた異空間を探索せよ
https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/news/250811d
#denfaminicogamer #ニュース #Pager #bilge #フランツ_カフカ #はくまいさん #PC #Steam
Pager, horror d'ufficio ispirato a The Stanley Parable, arriva su Steam! Segui il cercapersone, scala l'azienda e affronta compiti inquietanti su 60 piani. E accarezza un cane. 20% di sconto: 7,40€/8,10€. #GiochiIndie #GiochiPC #NotizieVideogiochi #gamingnews #Videogiochi #Pager
Fun story: I refused the demands of work for a cell phone 'till the stopped selling pagers.
That made me skip the entire era of Nokia style feature phones.
These days the smartphone is a pager 😁
Beeper-Fueled Exhaustion - Dr Talley Bowden on JRE
Danke an alle, die uns beim Norddeutschen Funktag an unserem Tisch und im Vortrag zum POCSAG-Pager-Projekt besucht haben!
Es war eine wirklich schöne Veranstaltung mit guten Gesprächen und interessantem Austausch.
10/10 would assembly here again.
Wir freuen uns aufs nächste Event :)
#NorddeutscherFunktag #Funktag #NF25 #POCSAG #Pager #DIYPager #ChaosPager #Meshtastic #Assembly #TUHH #DL0TUH
Morgen, 31.5., sind wir an der TUHH (Gebäude A) in Hamburg-Harburg und machen eine kleine Assembly beim Norddeutschen Funktag — im Raum oben schräg gegenüber vom Flohmarkt.
Bei uns gibt es Pager/POCSAG und voraussichtlich auch ein wenig Meshtastic, also besucht uns gern oder grüßt mal auf Long Fast :)
#POCSAG #Pager #DIYPager #ChaosPager #Meshtastic #LoRa #TUHH #Hamburg #Harburg #Funktag #NorddeutscherFunktag #NF25 #Assembly
LILYGO T-LoRa Pager is an ESP32-powered communications device with LoRa, NFC, and GPS
Pagers may have largely gone out of fashion in the age of the smartphone, but the T-LoRa Pager from LILYGO puts a modern spin on the class communications device. It’s a portable device with a 2.33 inch widescreen display, a thumb keyboard for tapping out messages, and support for LoRa, NFC, and GPS (GNSS), theoretically allowing you to communicate without relying on cellular networks.
It’s […]
@kallemp I did in fact already thought about a similar project and device.
- As for the anonymous reading / recieval: Using license-free #ISM bands like 27MHz #CB radio to send messages & then recieving them like a #pager would work, only making the transmitter detectable during trabsmission via triangulation, which may have a too narrow window of a few seconds given #OTP doesn't have #PGP-Style overhead. Making it feasible for using #POCSAG even...
I merely focussed on airgapped data transfers as being able to do OTP encryption wasn't feasible until the advent of legitimate 1TB microSD cards and thus negligible impact on key logistics, to even then one could update those OTA in a broadcast encrypted with per-user-/device-keys if that's feasible.
While I agree with all of this in theory, I think it's probably reasonable for people writing shellscripts today to assume the presence of `less`. It was even in SunOS 5...
`more` may have been improved over time, but to the best of my knowledge it still doesn't do everything `less` can, like switching to tail mode with `F` while viewing a log file. FreeBSD doesn't even ship `more` anymore (anyless?), I don't think - `man more` shows the manpage for less. So I think this is a case where literally, "less is more".
I confess I haven't used `pg`. Debian doesn't even provide it.
Including bash-isms in a supposedly portable script is definitely beyond the pale, though 😉
QasarBeach CMI IIz ist kein Synth, es ist eine Zeitmaschine in die 80er.
Ein kompletter Software-Klon des legendären Fairlight CMI IIx, vollgepackt mit Sampling, Page R-Sequencer, additiver Synthese & Retro-Vibes. Läuft auf Win, Mac, Linux.
Wahnsinnig. Wunderschön. 🤩 🎹
Von AdamStrange.
Ein Muss für Fans von Künstlern wie Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel oder Art of Noise.
#Qasarbeach #Fairlight #Synthesizer #RetroSound #PageR #80sVibes #AdditiveSynthesis #adamstrange
EasterHegg was fun and we had many great conversations about our pager project (and adjacent nerdy topics)!
If you didn't meet us there — or visited our table and would like to learn more —, the next opportunity to meet us is going to be at Norddeutscher Funktag, a ham radio event at Hamburg University of Technology.
#EasterHegg #EH22 #NorddeutscherFunktag #Amateurfunk #HamRadio #radio #DL0TUH #Funkttag #NF25 #Hamburg #TUHH #HamburgUniversityOfTechnology #pager #POCSAG
There are always more features to implement and bugs to fix ... no egg-ception even on a Sunday at #EH22
#EasterHegg #EasterHegg22 #EH22 #EasterHegg2025 #POCSAG #pager #radio #ChaosPager #firmware #coding #SoftwareDebugging #DevelopmentBoard
Our second transmitter is connected and on air!
You can find it in the Hardware Hacking Area next to the table of draussenfuchs.de
Please do not touch the antenna and respect the tape ;)
#EasterHegg #EasterHegg22 #EH22 #EasterHegg2025 #POCSAG #pager #radio #hamradio #broadcasting #transmitter #ChaosPager
We put the fun in Funk (radio) 🥳
#EH22 #EasterHegg #EasterHegg22 #EasterHegg2025 #pager #ChaosPager #POCSAG #radio #signage #Denglish
