exp. Is generally intended to be a video game website, but I like writing about film as well, so I think I can get away with celebrating my year in culture in general. Which I suppose makes it sound like I’m going to be sharing books and art shows I went to, but it’s just music and films and that, innit. I mean this is a video game website.
Single Of The Year: Hayley Williams – True Believer
Edge case here as this was, along with every other song on Hayley William’s Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, originally put online as a “single” but isn’t actually classed as a single on things like Wikipedia. But of course, such distinction is kind of meaningless these days. As I said on Bluesky, there are echoes of Chino Moreno’s ††† here, and I can’t help but loop it.
Album Of The Year: Deafheaven – Lonely People with Power
Probably wasn’t going to be anything else. I was shocked when I heard Deafhaven’s Infinite Granite, concerned they were making a full shift towards shoegaze the kind of which put me right off Alcest, but I’ll admit that album has grown on me. It almost makes me feel bad that I think of Lonely People With Power in that cliche fashion as “a return to form” but, well, it is.
“Evil Puddle argues … that community is very, very real, in both narrative and form.”
Interesting year for film. So many of the big award films this year were, frankly, absolute slogs, the worst kind of eating your greens. And here’s the bold Matt Farley embarrassing them with a shoestring budget and non-actors.
“War 2 is the realest fucking movie out there. And if you disagree? You’re a fucking idiot.”
Yes, Sinners is good–excellent, in fact–and probably what I’d go for if I was looking for the “mainstream pick.” But it’s still a pretender to the masala throne; better to go straight to the source. There was no bigger or better movie for me this year than War 2.
(Note: if this trailer autoplays with a terrible English dub, please click through and change it to Hindi. Please.)
TV Of The Year (Runner Up): The Rehearsal Season 2
I was a latecomer to Nathan Fielder, but I think he’s probably this century’s greatest artist (at least so far) and I already believed that before seeing the second season of The Rehearsal. I saw some complaints that the first season was him repeating himself (Nathan For You’s Smokers Allowed/Finding Francis) but I think that was uncharitable: Fielder has been able to drill down on his artistic process (thanks, unrealistically huge amounts of money from HBO) and create the kind of work that changes the way people see the world. Simultaneously, there are things in this that are so funny it’s actually painful. I am in awe.
TV Of The Year: Andor Season 2
It was a close run thing, but Tony Gilroy’s ability to take Star Wars, probably the world’s biggest “IP” and owned by the most overpowering and surely risk-adverse cultural force today (Disney) and turn it into a genuinely meaningful examination of what it means to live under fascism? A show that’s willing to say the word genocide? Much like Twin Peaks: The Return, this was a TV experience of the likes I don’t think I’ll ever experience again, one which will stay with me forever.
It’s March in 2026, the proper time for you to do your X of the year post, because people who do it in December are missing an entire month, the bell-ends. I mean the Oscars aren’t until the middle of March, so if anything I’m posting this early. Anyway, without further ado:
“I won’t lie–often when I’m playing these older games, I’m sort of just… working through them like a job. But Pro Wrestling? I just played it!”
I thought I’d start off with something simple to ease everyone in, but turns out this is a really hard one–the best game not from 2025 that I played that year–because it’s a year I played things including the original Metroid and The Legend Of Zelda. There are some games I really enjoyed writing about, like Zombi, but I think I have to go for Pro Wrestling here because I was so impressed at how it recreated the ebb and flow of a real wrestling match on the NES as early as 1986, and that it’s still so playable today.
“An extremely solid classic rooms and items, bread and butter text adventure. The best I’ve played since Meretsky’s own Planetfall, and arguably the best I’ve played full stop.”
Text adventures are an acquired taste and Infocom games are a pretty specific era, but I really have grown to love them. Unique amongst video games it really is like curling up with a lovely big book; I always imagine myself in a nice worn leather chair in a dark wood office, in front of an old IBM PC when I play them (I know I’m mixing my metaphors here.) Leather Goddesses Of Phobos is a superb Stephen Meretzky adventure, and while it’s no A Mind Forever Voyaging (a likely winner from a previous year) I just had such a great time with it and it has one of my favourite puzzles ever. An unchallenging pick, then, but what is my playing of all these retro games but looking for solace in an uncertain world, eh? Oh god… I might have unlocked something there.
The “Live Service? More Like Death Sentence” Award: Rematch (Sloclap)
2025 was an extension of 2024’s not just “maybe live service is not the answer” rumblings but also my own recognition that maybe live service just isn’t for me. This year I tried and put down Marvel Rivals in less than 20 minutes; I picked up and managed a few games of Helldivers 2 (even with friends) but then immediately forgot about it and the fact that it’s always updating doesn’t even remind me. But Rematch wins this award not just because it’s the one that was released this year because I thought it was genuinely great. It feels great to play–the amount of buttons is a little complex for someone like me who thinks Sensible Soccer is still the pinnacle, but it’s not ridiculous while compared to a modern FIFA (sorry, “EA Sports FC”). I thought it was going to lead to something like the period I had with Rocket League where I play it loads, almost to the exclusion of everything else, but I… didn’t. I stopped playing it after a couple of days simply because it was slow and annoying to get it booted up, through the menus and into a game, and the usual things–levelling up for cosmetics, and that–just wasn’t compelling to me at all. However, I’m beside myself imagining the universe where this is a single-player footy RPG. Oh well!
As this is picking up awards all over the shop, what harm another? I wrote at brutal length about Clair Obscur with the ultimate conclusion that it was fun, but flawed [“could have saved us a lot of time and just said only that”–Ed.] before I even knew it was just a rip off of La Horde du Contrevent. But I have to give my most major recommendation to watching French video essayist Ache’s lengthy deconstruction of the white European biases of the game. Is it too far to say there’s something sort of colonialist about a JRPG getting all these plaudits simply because it’s from the west?
“The difficulty of a work like Horses–if we accept my hypothesis that it exists in the spectrum of indigestible art–is that it is not a work about the horses, what happens to them, or Anselmo’s journey. It’s existence is, like Salò, a political act, to stand in opposition to the inauthentic, easily digestible product that floods our culture.”
I wrote thousands of words on the idea that Horses–by being banned by Steam and Epic–fit into the same spectrum of “indigestible art” as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom. I am unbelievably proud of this essay and I’m not entirely sure where all the awards are for it (I’m sure they’re in the post) but I’ll give myself one for it now. I can do that.
Game Of The Year (Runner Up): Evil Egg (Ivy Sly)
Yes, I admit: I haven’t written this one up. But only because I haven’t beaten the “proper” boss. I have beaten the alternative boss, and in most cases I’d just count that, but here’s the thing: I love Evil Egg so much that I don’t want to put it down and call it “finished.” I just want to keep playing it. Evil Egg is Robotron 2084 as a light Roguelike-like with a near-Jeff Minter level of visual noise and it absolutely rips. I really struggled with if this was my game of the year, but I’m becoming more conflicted over my feelings of games that feed my addictions, that take me to the “machine zone.” However, this game is fucking free. The only thing it costs you is your time, I’m still just trying to work out how comfortable I am with that. A few more goes, though, that should help me understand.
“It’s a rare video game that I say this could only exist as a video game’ but Many Nights A Whisper is one.”
I played this in August, and I knew it was simply not going to be matched. A game that respects your time (done in the length of a film) that is thoughtful, paced well, features an enjoyable central interaction, and builds towards an unforgettable moment that you could only do in a video game. You can read what I had to say about it, but just buy it.
Bonus: As I’ve actually never done a post like this before, here’s my previous “Games Of The Year” for the last two years, years in which I’ve been making a concerted effort to play more contemporary games than I have previously.
“What makes Hi Fi Rush genius, I think, is that it takes a type of game I am incapable of not button-mashing through and adds a rhythm action component that doesn’t expect but rather, uh… politely asks you to hit your combos on rhythm. And it works!”
In Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, Sam Rockwell stars as a man who claims to be from a future where AI has wiped out half the population and the other half live unable to escape their personal “perfect” AI realities. He takes a NORMS hostage with the belief that some combination of the restaurant’s diners will be able to reach the creator of the AI so they can install safeguards before it’s too late (the film, intelligently, accepts the inevitability of AI and has a sensibly scaled goal as a result.)
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die–immediately–takes aim at our modern affliction: that we’re all looking at our phones, all the time. The satire feels a bit broad, with entire classrooms of students all just trapped in an endless scroll, and I’ve seen more than one sneery “ok boomer” take on this.
But.
Last year I worked background for a while on a TV show, which is a job I rather like; there’s a lot of downtime where you can do things like finishing editing that zine you were working on. I haven’t done it in years, and the one huge thing I noticed was that while there was still a small contingent of people who brought books, or wanted to chat with whoever they were sitting next to (whether they wanted to or not…) the largest cohort of people—who were of all ages—just looked at their phone. Now, I look at my phone a lot too, but I was taken by how the majority of them used it: on Instagram or Tiktok, scrolling at high speed, endlessly. Like they weren’t actually seeing anything. Just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. For hours.
It looked exactly like it does in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.
“Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the ‘machine zone,’ in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible—even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion.”
Social media, as it currently exists, has been designed in exactly the same way slot machines have. It has been continuously and intentionally evolved, using every trick gambling designers have come up with (and more) to make sure people pick up their phone at the merest hint of boredom or discomfort. And now AI is here to make the skinner box even more personalised than the algorithm has already managed, with the ultimate goal that, eventually, you don’t put the phone down. Ever.
A perfect smooth-brained populace, circuses so good they don’t realise there’s no bread.
You might think I’m being histrionic, but addiction is a disease, and we now live in a climate of a designed disease. We’re all addicted—to varying levels—and we need to start treating it the same way we should be treating any addiction: by being hard on those who peddle the addictive substance, and treating the addicted with care and respect rather than punitive measures. And we need to wake up to this now, before it’s too late.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die get it.
It feels absurd for a Gore Verbinski movie to be the first thing I’ve seen outside of Adam Curtis documentaries to get it, but welcome to the resistance, I guess?
Don’t get me wrong. This is a big, fun, silly film. It’s trying to make its point by being entertaining, not preachy, and here’s none of the nihilism of a Black Mirror. It embarrasses Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, a movie that seems like it’s trying to say something angry and real about the world we live in and manages to say nothing at all. And not only is it not a sequel, remake, or part of a franchise, it’s also not “new IP.” It’s just a movie, which is almost the most subversive thing about it.
It’s a little scattershot, could be a little shorter, Asim Chaudry’s accent is… not good. But it refuses to fall into some traps that might blunt it (there’s no “AI can be good if we just use it correctly” here) and frankly, I’d follow Sam Rockwell anywhere.
There’s not a lot of movies where I think “I hope a lot of people see this” but this is one of them, not least because it’s just a straight up enjoyable film. I admit I wrote this to post online, on a social network, but Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die chimed so much with my own experience that I now notice, just a little more, when I pick up my phone for what feels like no reason, and to then try and interrogate it.
Sure, the movie might only be mildly illuminating on the dangers of our encroaching, all encompassing “machine zone”, but sometimes a little extra light on the problem is all you need to actually see it.
I think we’re settling into a monthly dispatch after all; it seems like the correct frequency, for my own sanity at least…
Hey, do you hate in-line advertising? We do too! We’re only ever going to do it here at the start of our newsletter posts because we want you to get these missives in your inbox a day early. Sorry!
Dang, big month for subs! Öoo will unlock in a week, as is the tradition for the monthly posts, but the other two will remain locked up ~forever~. The Plug & Play and KIDS article is a minor bonus to follow up on my Time Flies write up, but Bug Hunter is proof that I’ve committed to the UFO 50 project enough to write a second one at least.
Particularly proud of the Defender Of The Crown article. I’ve been concentrating more on “modern” games recently, and look forward to digging into more “retro” soon, but even saying that Fortune-499 was from eight years ago, I’m hardly sticking to the cutting edge as it is.
With a lot of subscriber exclusives this month, I’ve not exactly kept up the pace with archive posts only managing six. Here’s four of them, but if you ever want to make sure you see when I share them, you can follow me on backloggd (or bluesky, but you’re more likely to miss it there.)
exp. Du Cinéma
It has not been a great month for movies up here in exp. Towers. I put the blame at the feet of The Fantastic 4: First Steps, which really did basically put me off movies. And then I went through the doldrums of Marty Supreme and Weapons. Thank goodness I went and saw… a movie I haven’t posted about yet. Something to look forward to, then.
“Pixels and Polygons Quarterly is a self-published magazine about retro games…The games covered inside this new issue are: Ehrgeiz, Secret of Mana, and Parasite Eve”
“In this supersized 20-page zine, you’ll see a collection of essays, reviews and art all centered around horror movies. Handmade in the Twin Cities metro, this special edition covers the occupation of Minnesota and a celebration of horror cinema by black and latine creators, Minnesota-based scary movies, and thoughts on joy and art as a resistance.”
“I created a free Palestine zine I could hand out at events, here’s a downloadable version so you can print your own!”
And Finally…
This 1964 theatrical 35mm advert was posted in a new restored version from Kineko Video last year (and has been kicking about online unrestored for a long time) but it’s so beautiful in 4K that I just have to share it. That cinema texture!!!
Öoo is… perfection. I’m not sure I can phrase it any other way, actually. It’s not simply a textbook case of a game that’s doing exactly what it set out to do as well as it absolutely could, it’s doing something so clever–on a level that I didn’t think was possible–that I actually could not believe it was doing it. I actually think Öoo might be the gold standard for mechanic-first game design now. It’s that clever.
I mean the cleverness starts with the name, doesn’t it? It’s called Öoo, and you play a wee “bomb caterpillar” that looks exactly like the title. They must have felt like a god when they worked that one out. As the caterpillar–is it named Öoo? I’m not actually sure–you find yourself snaffled up by a big bird when you were innocently planning on snacking on an apple and have to escape by, well, getting as deep into the bird’s guts as possible so you can blow up their heart and then jump out of their mouth (I mean, I’d just have waited until they yawned or something, but you do you, Öoo. Yoo doo Öoo.)
You do this by navigating platforming challenges, but you can’t jump. Initially you can’t do much of anything, but you quickly unlock your first tail segment and then the trick is that you can drop it as a bomb and choose when it explodes–and when it does, it propels anything near it in the opposite direction the explosion hits it from. So you can, for example, drop it, stand on it, and then blow it up to propel yourself into the air to get you to a higher platform, or stand next to it to get you to blow you over a spike pit.
One amazing thing is that the game is able to do so much with that before it even introduces the second tail segment, thanks to the thoughtful implementation of other mechanics. The game immediately introduces a generous warp system where you can easily warp between any two warp points, and then begins to gate your progress with yellow frogs who require you deliver them flies to let you pass, along with a variety of other obstacles–the usual spikes, but also blocks that need to be blown up (which may reappear on a timer) buttons to press to open or close doors and… huh, you know what? That’s about it.
But here’s the most incredible thing about Öoo. They never give you more than the two exploding tail segments and they stop introducing new obstacles about half an hour into it, but the game is full of a sense of discovery I don’t think I’ve ever felt in the game before because (and I’m going to spoil the “trick” of the game here, so if you don’t want that spoiled, please stop reading and just play it):
You are never truly “gated” at all by the frogs. In each situation you’re stymied by one, you just need to know how to use your caterpillar’s already existing abilities to pass it right there and then. The section of the level you’ll go and play leads to a dead end that you just warp back from and it is entirely there to teach you the mechanic you need to perform.
I’m not sure if I can express how revelatory this is. It’s like in a movie when the hero learns they always had the power inside them and they just had to ~believe in themselves~ happening to you, repeatedly. I can’t say for sure if you’re going to have the reaction I did, but not only did I enjoy the game so much even when I understood the trick that I was happy to progress through the game in full–not stopping to try and figure out the “shortcuts”–and I definitely never knew how to do what was required to progress via frog gate until I’d done the whole thing anyway, because it was never as simple as knowing the mechanic; you needed to understand the mechanic fully.
It is wonderful. It’s made me look at Metroidvanias, roguelikes, even “git gud” games in almost a whole new light, imaging a world where rather than making the player jump through hoops for required unlocks or permanent warps or extreme mastery players were simply shown ways to use the mechanics in new ways through play.
I imagine this world, but I also find it hard to believe it’s possible, because I can think of every way it can go wrong immediately. And that’s why Öoo is such an incredible piece of game design. There’s a version of this game where the average player hits a gate, goes “oh, maybe if I do this” and then skips 10, 20% of the game, possibly backtracks to do it and discovers that there’s just a dead-end there and wonders “well what was the point of that.” You have to have incredible confidence to decide you can hide a solution that’s already accessible to a player from them until you want them to have it, and bloody hell does Nama Takahashi have it.
The only caveat I have here is that was my experience, and maybe you’re king shit problem solver, and you’ll grasp what do to immediately in every situation. You cut your teeth on kaizo and never thought “well, I’ll take that other easier path instead.” But I’d be surprised if that wasn’t a statistical irrelevance in terms of players of this game (maybe only slightly heightened by people who read things like this who learn the trick in advance.) The funny thing is how much trying to break Öoo would be to not just miss the point but to actually ruin the fun completely. That rather than learn a mechanic that allows you to unlock the doors as you go you hit your head against them until they bust open.
It would be pointless, too, because for the real heads there are loads of hidden extra hard sections to do found via hidden trophies that test your abilities as far as you can go if you really want to (in my case, not very far.)
Öoo is short–my completed playthough clocks in at 2.4 hours–but if it were to be any longer I think either cracks would start to show or new mechanics would have to be introduced, and the perfection would be sullied. But if you want to play a puzzle platformer, there is no better option. Probably at all.
Will I ever play it again? No. I am interested to see what Nama Takahashi does next, but good lord what an act to follow. I don’t think I could, but then I also couldn’t have come up with Öoo. It’s humbling.
Final Thought: If you’re going to play this or Elechead, Öoo wins; but if you think you’ll play both, I recommend playing Elechead first, as it has a rougher design but you can see the evolution towards Öoo in it (whereas playing it second will just feel like a step backwards.)
Developed/Published by: Playables / Panic Released: 31/07/2025 Completed: 03/02/2026 Completion: Crossed off every fly’s bucket list.
There’s a cliché about criticism, that the worst thing that you can have to review is something mediocre; the idea being that there’s nothing that much to say one way or another when something’s just fine. But actually, I sort of think that’s not entirely true–at least when it comes to games. Because think of the platonic ideal of the “7/10” game; a “mediocre” score under the prevailing wisdom of not using the entire scale, but often games with grand ambition they couldn’t quite match, or interesting ideas that didn’t entirely work.
Really, the worst thing you have to review is something that’s overall good… but unremarkable. Something you enjoyed… but couldn’t find anything special about. Something successful at what it set out to do… but what it’s set out to do is forgettable.
I think you can see where I’m going with this.
Time Flies comes from Playables, a production company with a focus on what they describe as “playful interactive projects” (and I do think this intentional distinction from games is important) and is published by Panic. Panic, of course, behind the Playdate, but also a surprisingly large slate of games in 2025 including Despelote, a game I consider interestingly boring (and one of their 2024 releases, Thank Goodness You’re Here!, was absolutely my game of that year.) In Time Flies, you play a fly who, in its short time on earth, has a “bucket list” to cross off, and so you fly about a side-scrolling black-and-white 2D world attempt to do all the things on the list (things like “get drunk” or “read a book”) before you die.
The trick is that the fly’s lifespan is the length of time you have per attempt, and that lifespan is based on the average lifespan in the country you are playing the game from, with years as seconds. So, for example, in Canada I got a whopping 81.6 seconds per attempt; in other countries it could be significantly less. I’ll talk about this aspect of the game in a moment–feel free to count it in seconds–but mechanically, at least, it simply means that you have a handful of seconds to do everything, and if you don’t do all the things in one life, you simply start again with another fly.
There are a few points of comparison here, play-wise, none of which quite fit. There’s Minit, of course, where you’ve got a minute to complete a quest (and which is also in a striking black and white) but as you keep your inventory, it’s more incremental. There’s actually Thank Goodness You’re Here, where you similarly interact with a world in a limited way to make funny things happen–though that’s more narratively driven. And then there’s the original Glider for Mac, which is probably the first thing old bastards like me will think of, and I think the most likely to be an actual source of inspiration; but that’s far more of an action game (although you do “collect clocks” in both games. Sort of.)
Really, even with the tension of having to do everything in a single life giving Time Flies the air of a “speedrun” game, it is much more a continuation of Playables “playful interactive projects.” Yes, the fly can die if you do something like stick it on some flypaper (come on man, have some sense) but the fly is in many ways just a cursor that you’re using to make funny things happen. So, for example, you push two statues together and they kiss. That’s amusing. Or you fly back and forth over some guitar strings and it makes some noise, counting as “learning an instrument”, and you can do it for as long as you like (longer than you need to, usually.)
“Hold on, there’s some buzzing on the recording. I’ll check the cables.”
This is… enjoyable! And it very much does not outstay its welcome. You get four levels with a selection of things to do, and just enough play in it that you have fun flying around, doing the things, then working out the racing line to do them in one life. It’s not boring, or too difficult, and moving the fly around feels good.
But it’s also the kind of thing that doesn’t stick with you at all. At the end of the game, all those memories flash by in the fly’s mind, all these things lost, like tears in rain, and… yeah. I did some silly stuff for a while and now it’s done.
Now, to be fair, not everything as to be dripping in meaning, but Frei did describe the game to Stephen Totilo as a game about “the finiteness of our existence and what to do with it, with the time we have.”
I think the use of real World Health Organization data for your lifespan is interesting–I like that it forces the majority of the assumed audience to, quickly, face up to the idea that by simply living in a Western country they get to experience more time to do more silly things. And it may simply be that, possibly, I’m just somewhat nihilist; I’ve lived long enough now to know how much I’ve already forgotten that felt so important to me at one point, so I’m not sure anything matters than the moment. It’s possible this could hit you in some way that is deeply profound.
But I had an enjoyable 70 minutes and that’s, you know… it. And it really puts the game in a weird position for me where I basically recommend it–it’s fun, funny and I liked it–but I still feel kind of indifferent.
Will I ever play it again? There’s only so much time on earth… I feel like something I played recently taught me that…
Final Thought: One thing to be said is that I really appreciate Totilo talking to the developers about it and focusing on the life expectancy angle; the team’s decision to include Palestine is meaningful, even if they are using out of date statistics and most players will never notice it.
Developed/Published by: Cinemaware Released: 11/1986 Completed: 22/01/2026 Completion: Finished it by conquering the invaders, but remained unmarried…
Defender Of The Crown is a game I’ve been eager to play, and I had a reason to boot it up a bit earlier than I intended, so I jumped at the chance. But of course, a problem immediately reared its head.
Which version to play?
The game is famous, really, as an Amiga game. If you’re not familiar with the story, video game agent Bob Jacobs saw a prototype Amiga in action, realised that the system provided a huge leap in the potential for video games, and went into business as Cinemaware1, with the explicit intention to create not merely Hollywood-inspired but Hollywood quality video games by (generally) making the graphics really fucking good. The first game to come from this was the Errol Flynn swashbuckler-inspired Defender Of the Crown.
As an “Amiga first” project, you think it would be easy to choose that version to play (after all, when I played through Pirates, I decided to play the C64 version, as it is Sid Meier’s preferred version.) But the Amiga version is not generally considered the best version to actually play because of its somewhat tortured development: originally intended to be developed by Sculptured Software, Cinemaware attempting a more “Hollywood” process than keeping everything in house, Sculptured ended up so behind on schedule–indeed, seemingly with nothing useful–that the game was handed off to a previous acquaintance, R.J. Mical, to crunch until the game was in a state it could be released.
Something I’ve always wondered about Cinemaware’s early releases is just how arbitrary their release dates were. It particularly stands out with Defender Of The Crown, the Amiga version of which–and I can speak from experience, now–is slight to the point of being unfinished, with apparently weeks of work from the artist, Jim Sachs, going unused. Considering the game would be improved for basically every other release, Jacobs couldn’t have let them spend a little more time on it?
That all said, no one can exactly agree which version of Defender Of The Crown to play. The Amiga version is the best looking, but the Atari ST version is somewhat close visually; versions on the Mac, PC, NES, even the humble CPC and C64 get design improvements. I was originally of a mind to play the Atari ST version, but I discovered that there’s a Defender Of The Crown II on CD32 that is, apparently, not a sequel but kind of an “ultimate” version of this era’s Defender Of The Crown, so I thought… well, I probably want to play that. And if I’m going to play that, I might as well just play the very original version so one day I can compare and contrast. After all, the whole selling point of the game originally was those graphics, so no point being short-changed there!
(As my mother would say, what a roundabout road for a shortcut.)
Now, I have played Defender Of The Crown before, briefly. My main memory of it was not quite getting the game’s mix of Risk-style strategy and simple mini-games, but thinking that when I had time I’d be able to dig into it properly, imagining it was, you know, a proper wargame.
Playing it this time round? I learned within, hmm, an hour? that while the game initially seems challenging, there’s absolutely nothing going on. No strategic depth. No “play” in the mini-games, each solvable if you can just practice them enough. If you restart the game a few times after learning the mini-games, you will essentially become unstoppable, meaning you can rinse what was once an expensive, system-selling game in an afternoon. The emperor–or I suppose, the crown defender–has no clothes on.
But dang does his body look good, am I right? As I said, it was the selling point, and playing it, you get it immediately. What you very quickly realise however is that those graphics quickly become a hindrance, because every time one of those big, gorgeous splash screens appear, you have to sit through the Amiga loading them off a floppy disk. Which is, and I always forget this for some reason, not fast. There’s a lot of waiting around so you can see a picture you’ve seen many times before (thank goodness, to be honest, that you can be done with the game so quickly.)
That zzz bubble isn’t a sleepy herald; it’s the game making it clear you’ve got some waiting to do.
But that all said, what actually is the game?
Set at the time of Norman conquest (but in an extremely “made it up as we went along” anachronistic fashion) Defender Of The Crown starts with Robin Hood letting you know that the king has been assassinated, the crown lost, and the kingdom in chaos, so it’s up to you (yes, you) to sort it out.
You start by picking a Saxon hero–each of whom have different stats in leadership, jousting and swordplay, although this matters less than you’d think and the stats for one of these characters are even wrong on the selection screen–before you’re dropped onto a map of medieval England where you, two other Saxons and three invading Normans hold one castle and territory each. On each turn you have some options: to grow your army by buying soldiers, knights and catapults; to conquer territory or raid enemy castles; or to hold tournaments where you can joust for land or honour. On each turn, your opponents make the same moves (one thing I’ll say for Defender Of The Crown: it does seem to play completely fair.)
This is pretty basic, so as well as being dressed up with the graphics, it’s also dressed up with a range of mini-games. Something fascinating about Defender Of The Crown is that it’s, at least in its Amiga incarnation, completely mouse-based. This has a bit of cost in that in none of the games is the feedback that great, which is probably the reason that, for example, the jousting section is so infamous.
Something I find slightly annoying about Defender Of The Crown: the game is letter-boxed, but it’s not centred on the screen. It annoys me so much that I edited all the images other than the first one. You’re welcome!
As befits it, it’s definitely got the most pomp and circumstance, and also seems to have the most confusion about it online. There’s a lot of discussion about when you need to hit the button to strike your opponent in a joust, or whatever, but if you just play it a bunch of times in a row you’ll eventually get it: at least on the Amiga, you don’t have to press anything at all, and the trick is knowing that you collide on the “upswing” so you just have to make sure that your lance is aimed at the center of your opponent’s shield at the peak of its bobbing movement. Once you know that you literally can’t lose, and it’s actually one of the quickest ways to win the game, because you can as of the second turn just joust the Normans to immediately take any of their land gains off of them and (probably) make a clear path to their castles all for the cost of some loading time and counting the amount of times you’ve bounced up and down on a horse (it’s seven, you hit them after seven. Spoilers, I guess.)
My understanding is that Jim Sachs put in a ton of effort to represent realistic castles in a game that’s otherwise basically nonsensical.
Once you’ve bought some catapults–each piece of land you have pays upkeep that allows you to buy units–you can attack castles, which is similarly simple to work out. You have to knock down the castle wall with a limited amount of ammo; each shot’s height is selected by “pulling” (placing your mouse) to a certain position, and it requires adjustment after each shot to make sure you’re still hitting the wall. It’s a little harder to practice this one–you have to have a castle to attack–but once you work out the first shot, you basically just have to move your mouse a few pixels up when needed and you’ve got more than enough ammo to make a few mistakes.
This fuckin’ suuucks.
I wish I could be as smug about the last mini-game, but sadly, I can’t. A castle raid mini-game is triggered either by choosing to raid a castle to steal gold (don’t bother, it’s not worth it) or, occasionally, when you are notified that a comely Saxon lady has been kidnapped by the dastardly Normans and needs rescued (which, amusingly, you can turn down doing.)
This game is… awful. It’s an attempt at a side-scrolling sword-fighting game, but we’re in late 1986 so it’s not like it’s never been done before, and even being hamstrung by only being able to use the mouse is no excuse. You hold the cursor in front of your hero to move them forward, behind to move them back, and you click the mouse to attack with your rapier, with the idea being you and your companions will fight the guards until you make your way to the lady’s chamber.
I can really imagine what Jacobs pitched here: one of those amazing old swashbuckling scenes where the hero, like, swings in on a banner and then fights the enemy on a banquet table, all feints and parries. Instead what you get is this weird shuffling back and forth, hitting the mouse button constantly with absolutely no sense you’re doing… anything. As the only reward for doing this is a wife, it’s really not worth learning (am I right fellas? Take my wife, please? I wouldn’t even go and get her in the first place, etc.)
Of course, I do say that as a grown man who has seen a boob or two, but I do think if I’d been playing this contemporaneously as a kid I’d have probably gone to the effort, as the real reward is a chaste love scene between your hero and the rescued lady that I’m sure set teenage loins afire (the shadows do have some unintentional, uh, implications.)
They’re holding hands! Get your mind out of the gutter.
Thankfully on my winning run I got everything sorted in England so quickly the Saxons didn’t have time to kidnap anyone (hmm, I didn’t get married in Pirates! either. I’ll need to get married in something soon otherwise people will start to talk.)
The “real” game of Defender Of The Crown is actually the Risk-style strategy game. Now I’m an absolute Risk hater–random, unfair, takes fucking forever–and Defender Of The Crown is only really preferable that you’re not going to fall out with any mates over it because you can only play it single player. The game boils down to just making your campaign army as big as possible and steamrollering opponents. Every turn, send your army home, buy more soldiers (you don’t seem to really need knights) and then smash whoever gets in your way. The game even gives you a wee bit of help in that three times you can ask Robin Hood for help (he bolsters your army a wee bit) and there’s three Norman castles, so it’s pretty obvious when to use them.
This is the screen you’ll spend most of your time looking at–especially because the battle screen got cut from the Amiga.
Because of the game’s design–more land means more money, more money means a bigger army–there’s really no “play” in it. If you start the game knowing what to do–grab land, win tournaments, build your army every turn, attack castles while the Norman campaign armies are in other regions–you win. It really makes this game’s smashing success seem absolutely bizarre.
But I’ll be kind to Defender Of The Crown and say that, well, most players at the time weren’t going out of their way to min-max the experience. I’m sure most players who got this played obviously losing campaigns to the bitter end; I’m sure many people never worked out jousting and found it exciting and risky. At a certain point I’m sure they found a winning, repeatable path (you really do just get the biggest army) but the game, simple as it is, will have worked until then–a generator of minor player stories as they remembered great victories and losses.
The funny thing is, it’s so uncinematic. For a company that was literally called Cinemaware, it’s strange that their games are so gamey. You would assume that a Errol Flynn-inspired swashbuckler would have started with a story, a script; a blend of cut-scenes and action scenes in order. In many ways I’d imagine the design would be more like the movie licenses released by Ocean later in the 80s and 90s–half-assed mini games with a cinematic connective tissue, and it would have probably been easier to make, less wasteful, and just as successful.
Because the hero of Defender Of The Crown is undoubtedly artist Jim Sachs. Games–even in arcades, really–in this era simply didn’t look this good, so I do understand why this was mind-blowing to anyone who brought it home for their unbelievably expensive Amiga 1000 (the 500 wouldn’t show up until 1987.)
Truly, even though I don’t think Defender Of The Crown is good (at all) Sach’s art is so beautiful and full of life that even now I think “might be nice to play Defender Of The Crown.”
That’s insane!!!
Will I ever play it again? Obviously, the thing to do is to play Defender Of The Crown II which, in a stunning plot twist, was developed entirely by Sachs!
Final Thought: Of course, now I’m thinking about how that compares to the later, more fully featured but “official” Cinemaware versions of Defender Of The Crown, which doesn’t even include the second incarnation of Cinemaware in the 2000s which put out a remaster, a PS2 version, a GBA version… like maybe I should play the Atari ST version after all, just to get the full picture??? Gnngh.
Well, actually as “Master Designer Software” but a bit like Tales Of The Unknown, that would be almost immediately dropped.↩︎
I was looking to stretch my legs during a deep dive on some other games for research recently, and when the IGF Award shortlist was announced there was an avalanche of people in my feed expressing excitement that they could finally say how good AP Thompson’s upcoming Titanium Court was. So I took a quick look, saw that Thompson had previously made the game Fortune-499 which at least looked visually similar, and thought “why not!”
Fortune-499 is styled as a JRPG, but it has a really beautiful mechanic, one that I think–because it sounds complex, but has to play out simple–would be very easy to fuck up completely. It’s a rock paper scissors prediction deckbuilder. In each JRPG-style battle, you hit your opponent if you win rock paper scissors; you get hit if you lose, and you both take damage if you throw the same. Now, as we know from Alex Kidd, rock paper scissors is an absolutely rubbish, frustrating mechanic in a video game, but Fortune-499 fixes it completely by giving you a fortune telling deck. Before each hand you can draw up to four cards which “reveal” (well, affect the probability of) which hand your opponent is most likely to throw. So if you draw paper +4, you can be pretty confident they’ll throw paper, so throw scissors. As you play the game, you can shred cards in your deck and power up cards, so you could, for example, have a deck that’s got nothing but strong rock cards in it, meaning that you can always throw paper, because it’s extremely unlikely your opponents will ever throw anything else.
I love this design. It’s so elegant. But it’s also, I think, a little limited, which Thompson has had to work around. The game is played across a series of in-game days (which basically work as a series of dungeon levels) and after each day your deck resets, because otherwise you’d quickly build an unstoppable deck. There are also a few more mechanics layered on, which muddy things up a bit: you have magic points, and can cast spells, and stick cards aside to replay them, allowing you to break the game a bit by spamming a mana card repeatedly.
I think these design decisions are included because Thompson–probably correctly–felt that the base design didn’t really have enough challenge or variety to sustain something like a roguelike deckbuilder1 and Fortune-499 does put me in mind of Dicey Dungeons, because it similarly is less interested in letting you play out a power growth fantasy than making you solve puzzles built around the game mechanics.
The issue I have with this in Fortune-499, unfortunately, is that the puzzles are usually… annoyingly fiddly. Fortune-499 doesn’t have manual saving and on certain levels punishes you for dying by charging you to retry (boo!) but it asks you often to move around the level to trigger certain things or change your deck and spells in pretty specific ways to defeat certain enemies, and you can… just get it wrong and not really understand why. I’ll admit, I spent far too long on an early-ish puzzle that required me defeat a group of enemies at once that should have been quite obvious and easy because I hadn’t noticed something important2 and a later puzzle, that required you shaping your deck to defeat an enemy in one turn… phew (at least that one let you restart the level for free.)
It’s just a little, you know… clunky, and never quite as rewarding as you’d hope (there’s some player-hostile moves too, like a section that lets you shape your deck in preparation for a battle that doesn’t come. I get the joke, but it’s annoying!)
Narratively, too, Fortune-499 is… fine? You play a depressed, cursed witch stuck in a dead-end office job who finds their workplace infested with demons, and it largely goes the way you kind of expect it to go. Like many people these days, I’d probably fucking kill myself for a dead-end office job with any sort of salary, so that aspect is a fucking lead banana in 2026, but there are parts that work: I loved an entire section where a wizard co-worker is summoned to “help” on clearing out the demons but ignores your pre-existing knowledge, eventually cutting you out completely (when he fights an enemy that he doesn’t have to fight, and it takes forever… now that’s a player-hostile joke that works.) That thread wraps up a little too neatly, I guess, but nothing else pops quite as much–though I like that the game works its way to a conclusion both narratively and mechanically. It’s not quite as breathtaking as the conclusion of, say, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, but what is?
As is sometimes the case, Fortune-499 is the unfortunate recipient of… faint praise. I love the mechanic, I found it generally pleasant enough for the three and a half hours it took, but the moments of frustration just held it back enough to get a “well, if this sounds good to you, play it, but if it doesn’t, don’t.” Dang!
Will I ever play it again? Nope!
Final Thought: Having said all this, the good aspects of Fortune-499 make me genuinely excited to play Titanium Court. Hopefully soon!
Though don’t get me wrong–they just might not have been interested in creating a game like that anyway. ↩︎
When a summoner dies, their portals explode, not the enemies that were summoned. ↩︎
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