Rob’s Terrible Tomb Of Tat

…and you will know me by the typing of the dead.

  • comics4Gamer

    Being perpetually skint gets exhausting so I’m branching out into gaming webcomics, hoping to have the merch and conventions going by the end of next Tuesday because I think that’s how it works. See you at TOTX in Home Bargains, I’ll be doing a meet and greet in the seasonal aisle. Autographs extra, soz. Merch is on sale by the washing up liquid. About half three, yeah?

    a comic strip called “comics4Gamer” it contains the same guy in three panels, his pose only shifting very very slightly. the first panel, they are saying “grand” the second, they are saying “theft” the third? “FARTO Hahahaha ahahaha haha hah *chokes* so funny

    I have no idea who that dude is even supposed to be. I’m portly, old and have a grey beard so it’s definitely not me. He just emerged from the hair and here we are. Maybe it’s my gamersona?

    a three panel comic strip of The Calmest Gamer In The World panel one: “corps are clearly oushing for a future where us gamers don’t actually own anything” panel two: no words, just a dude with a flat expression panel three: “I’m not particularly concerned about the shift away from physical media towards a rental based model”

    On second thoughts, perhaps a different career would suit me better.

  • Thoughts after Blood Dungeon (Steam)

    Blood Dungeon is pretty much what if you were trying to play Vampire Survivors but someone was shooting at your feet then a Satyr fell on your head minutes after you’d killed a giant skeletal worm with a laser and there was blood and bats everywhere and then you drowned.

    Not to worry though, you got your dog a bone or a few hundred.

    Generally, I am largely in Camp Brendy (subscriber link, but you can get the gist without) when it comes to autoshooters (though I have been thinking recently just how far ahead of its time Neon Wars was), I generally find them -at best- an okay way to pass the time and at worst, I would wish them into the infernal heat of the sun for being little more than a loose wrapper around gambling mechanics and a spreadsheet.

    I don’t really care for the “are they a game?” argument because ultimately, it doesn’t matter to me one way or another, I just find them pretty shitty in general, whatever they claim to be and they could claim to be a banana for all I care.

    Also, I am really tired of being asked to pick an upgrade from one of three things. Really tired.

    Blood Dungeon falls into the earlier category of “an okay way to pass the time” for me, which for anyone else is probably “woah, love this videogame so much”. It is, in essence, an attempt at mashing the autoshooter into Spelunky-ish platforming and at that it is largely successful. By necessity it leaves a lot of the comedy cruelty of Spelunky behind in favour of chaos but it is not without its moments.

    The introductory stage, the catacombs, is pretty forgiving even with its armed sentry doors and time gated walls, however once you start adding tighter spaces, different (and destructible) environments into the mix a bit later on, there are more ways to get yourself in a pickle and a panic. Having managed to lock myself between two time gated walls, whilst underwater and with my oxygen depleting, during a particularly vicious banshee attack, reader – I swore. I did, I did, I did.

    Having spoken to a few people about this sort of thing, I realise this is not an entirely universal experience with autoshooters but I find the spreadsheet and incremental upgrade dominant play kinda flattens a game out in ways I struggle to enjoy myself with too much and so, it’s the same here.

    When I play something like, I dunno, Tempest 2000 I am genuinely enjoying my time with it, I play it more not because it’s designed to keep me playing but because it thrills me – the movement, the lights, the sound, the game, all of it thrills me! Geometry Wars thrills me. Devastator, Bezier, Evil Egg thrill me. And obviously this is different strokes for different folks here but none of any of the current batch of autoshooters I’ve tried come close. Blood Dungeon is on the higher end of the scale compared to, well, pretty much most of the ones I’ve tried to date and yet still my mood goes no higher than “barely interested for a bit”

    A lot of it is I struggle to give a shit when it comes to having to choose incremental upgrades. Plenty is certainly that I resent games built around traps and time wasting but as I say, Blood Dungeon is mechanically at least trying to be more than that and it has a character with a swinging pixel nob out as well so bonus points there too.

    So yeah, I won’t say I don’t enjoy my time with Blood Dungeon because that is certainly not true, it’s just the amount of joy I can extract from any of these things seems to have a hard cap pretty much across the genre. And you know, that’s fine, not every genre has to be super exciting to me! It’s fine to not be that tense or involved, I just sometimes wish I could enjoy them more than I do. Alas, it is not happening and so it is for Blood Dungeon too.

    It’s a perfectly fine thing, I just can’t get too excited about any of it. Maybe some day, someone will crack that one for me but as most people seem intent on just replicating the showiness of slot machines without any substance, maybe they won’t either and this is as good as it gets.

    Which is a long way round of saying you’ll probably really like this here videogame.

  • You don’t need to GenAI Manic Miner, put it down.

    I am tired of even having to think about genAI on a daily basis. Right now, just 24 hours not having to contemplate it in any capacity seems positively dreamy.

    I also don’t really want to get into that funk this sort of thing can get you into where I end up all “look at this, what is this absolute shite?” either because the sheer volume of shite seems more than any one human can possibly take right now, it could all too easily become an all consuming thing. And no thank you.

    Yet.

    I can’t pretend a piece of my heart didn’t break yesterday though when browsing Steam’s upcoming games and the same people who have made a disaster of my beloved Rockford have turned to the Spectrum classic, Manic Miner, and slathered it all over with GenAI graphics. Looking at the screenshots legitimately makes me queasy (there is something about GenAI colour choices that does weird things to my brain) so I will not be posting them here, or the video, or linking to the Steam page. It is out there though and it is horrible.

    For some reason Miner Willy is an animal now and also a ten year old boy, the AI obviously cannot wrestle with a bunch of references to things that made some sort of vague sense in the UK in 1983 so everything else is less quirky and amusing and just “there’s some stuff on the screen”. It is charmless and wholly depressing to look at. I hate it. It has no soul. It is akin to someone wiping their arse on the Mona Lisa and expecting people to go “yeah, that’s great, have a tenner”

    So. So far so “business as usual with GenAI” then.

    Look, I know wrestling with updating old games is work, I’ve done it. A bunch of the favourite people in my life do it and have done it for years and I know how daunting doing even some of the most basic sprite work can be, which is why I’ll still try and take the load off folks every now and then if life permits me time. But still.

    Manic Miner is a game that runs within, and is designed around, a 256×192 pixel screen. It is from 1983. There are twenty screens. A good percentage of the screen is taken up by the border and score/lives/room display. It contains around thirty sprites, 16 pixels by 16 pixels a piece. Four frames of animation for each. There are 15 colors and half of them are bright variations of another colour. So seven and a bit really. And it still looks bloody good in 2026! There are Spectrum games from the same year that have aged “interestingly”, Manic Miner is not one of them.

    Even if it didn’t look good though, the workload involved in recreating it, rejigging it, is still very little by most commercial game standards. It’s a simple game!

    You could pay a professional pixel artist to redo the entire thing and still have some change for lunch. You could do it yourself, part time, over a matter of weeks. You could do what so many others have done and ask Andy Noble nicely to use their sprite set, give the guy some love, he’s amazing! Or you could just 4x the original sprites because they look fucking fine over thirty years since they were first drawn.

    There is absolutely no good reason to help burn the Earth down further to make a new Manic Miner. The costs of getting a human to do the work necessary to make this look shit-hot are within my grasp (albeit with some saving up) and I’m on the dole.

    Certainly if *I* were releasing a commercial version, I would be looking at putting the effort in to getting the best fucking Manic Miner you have ever seen using the power of humans, not the water huffing, heat generating, ecosystem destroying machine your weird uncle gets their racist Facebook memes and bizarre looking takeaway menu photos from.

    Partly because I wouldn’t want it to look like complete shit, but even if it did end up looking like complete shit, I’d know some humans put some effort into trying to make it cool even if it fell apart somewhere down the line.

    Asking money for a game someone couldn’t even be arsed making with humans is just fucking grim, really. Down with that sort of thing. Have some fucking dignity, you know?