Oof, haven’t done one of these for a month. Well, let’s get to it.
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!
Thirty Flights Of Loving continues my slow Blendo Games retrospective (see Gravity Bone, Flotilla) but I’m pleased to finally start doing something I’ve been meaning to do for ages, which is work through UFO 50 (similarly slowly). I’m always looking for reasons to make my subscription seem worth it, so these are going to be subscriber exclusive. Well, it is just $1, you know…
I supposed I also unlocked A Computer Christmas (Sierra, 1986), but I dunno if you want to be reading about Christmas at the end of January [only 326 shopping days left! etc.]
I’m speeding up my updating of the exp. Archive a bit because I’d like to catch up a bit faster–closer to a couple of archive posts a week, so I’ll probably not include them all here now, it’ll get unwieldy. Nice to see that my Attack of the Friday Monsters! post picked up a mild bit of traction over on Bluesky–there’s something quite ironic about the fact that in the article, from 2014, I complain about the inaccessibility of certain games, and now you can’t play Attack Of The Friday Monsters! officially either.
As much as you might not want to read about Christmas, do you want to be reading about Avatar: Fire And Ash at the end of January either? But we’re in the real January doldrums and to be honest I just couldn’t be arsed to go and see Marty Supreme just to keep up or whatever.
Couldn’t resist this based on the graphics, a short, simple platformer that initially appears to be about quick escape, but reveals itself to be a bit more of a puzzle if you’re willing to give it another go (I won’t spoil the trick–what have to do initially is simple enough, but the “a ha” moment is rewarding anyway. Although I suppose the trailer spoils it, so just… don’t watch that first then.) Does that thing I really don’t love where a lot of jumps are designed to be either just out of reach or just in reach (be more obvious/have more leeway, please) and the graphics don’t always make it clear what you can collide with, but this is a nice way to spend ten minutes or so.
“A fun new, 44-page, full-colour A5 music fanzine, featuring brand new interviews/features and lots of indie-pop silliness. #2 is dedicated to everybody’s favourite indie-pop band… Heavenly.”
“Before there was Battle Bots, there was the Critter Crunch. Read the story of the world’s first robot death match at the 1989 Denver MileHiCon. Trying out a different format—an online version of an 8-page zine.”
“Between the Scanlines is a fanzine launched in October 2023. Inspired by 90s anime and video game fanzines, we hope to capture their spirit and passion for video games and media history with our own. There are typically fourteen A5 pages in each issue.”
exp. was on Aftermath! Well, sort of. I talked to Luke Plunkett, as did a group of other writers and game developers, about not going to GDC this year because of [gestures at everything].
Next week on exp.: it’s hard to predict what’s in the cards…
Developed/Published by: Blendo Games Released: 20/08/2012 Completed: 18/09/2025 Completion: Finished it.
Thirty Flights Of Loving has loomed large in my mind for, uh, thirteen years, because I added it to my Steam wishlist and then promptly just never picked it up. An absolutely insane situation considering the game, at fifteen minutes long, is actually shorter than Gravity Bone which preceded it. I mean I waited nearly a year per minute. Well, I’ve played it now.
Thirty Flights Of Loving, compared to Gravity Bone, is a bit more of a challenge. If Gravity Bone took what you expected about a first person game and then twisted it, Thirty Flights of Loving doesn’t even give you the grace of letting you settle in before twisting. I mean, it’s pre-twisted is what I’m saying. You open the bag that says “bagel” on it and there’s a goddamned pretzel in there.
(I suppose in this metaphor, with Gravity Bone you’d start eating a bagel and then it would suddenly twist in front of your eyes into a pretzel? Creepy. I don’t like this metaphor any more!!!)
Thirty Flights Of Loving is ultimately an exploration of the idea: can you do cinematic cuts in a video game? Telling, vaguely and non-linearly, the story of doomed love and a heist gone bad, the game cuts intentionally and cleverly to remove the thing you just don’t remove from video games–the “dead space” between incident. It’s shocking, actually, to head down a corridor and suddenly find yourself, well, in a new room, because the trip down the corridor adds nothing narratively.
This is a decision that few games I know of have made outside of–of course–their cut-scenes, and I think it raises really interesting questions about the value of what we do in games. I’ve written at crushing length about the difficult path games try to walk–narrative, but play–and I suppose the disappointing thing about Thirty Flights Of Loving is that it has interaction but no “play”, where I feel like the theory–we could have cinematic cuts in games–can only be proven by giving me actual play and “cutting” when I’m not doing anything that’s actively in aid of that. After the firefight, cut to the exterior, don’t make the player navigate there–but never take the control away from the player. Just cut.
I think for many, the potential flaw here is obvious–it’s discombobulating. I mentioned above that the cuts are shocking, which in many ways is surprising, because cuts in cinema are, famously, not shocking (proven scientifically.) Is is simply that “flow”, that hugely important state to the interactive art is broken by a cut?
Or does Thirty Flights Of Loving’s use of only scene cuts–keeping action continuous elsewhere–create more discontinuity when paired with its mysterious narrative? Could a game with even heavier use of cuts–cuts within scenes and cuts between scenes–work better? What would that even look like?
I’m not sure, but it’ll probably take a game longer than fifteen minutes to work it out. Thirty Flights Of Loving does a lot with its time, managing some moments of beauty and ending with a recognisable longing. I might go so far as to say a saudade. Maybe Thirty Flights Of Loving doesn’t answer any questions, but the ones it leaves you with are worth thinking about.
Will I ever play it again? I’ll wait another thirteen years and see how I feel.
Final Thought: I’d be remiss not to point out something else cinematic about Thirty Flights Of Loving that really stands out–the superb score by Chris Remo. It’s a huge factor in the game’s feel.
Developed/Published by: Tose / Namco Released: 26/11/1986 Completed: 14/09/2025 Completion: Finished it. Save state at the start of every level.
As we all know, ACAB includes Mappy, but I’m a bit unclear on his status with the police force in Mappy-Land. He’s got his rozzer clobber on on the cover, but when you actually play the game, he’s noticeably not got his policeman’s hat on, something he was still wearing in Mappy’s arcade sequel, Hopping Mappy (which came out in early 1986). So we could suppose, like we’re the Supper Mario Broth account but for Mappy, that at some point in 1986 Mappy did something to get himself thrown off the force. Or maybe being transferred to the pogo cop division was an attempt to get him to quit, because he’s actually a tiny mouse Serpico.
Or more likely, he just doesn’t wear his police hat while on holiday. Mappy-Land, I suspect, is Namco–or possibly Tose, who were tasked with developing this–trying to compete with (of course) Super Mario Bros., and looking at the success of Tokyo Disneyland, which had only been open for three years by this point, and going “oh, we have a wee mouse mascot, can we do anything with that?”
It’s not exactly a 1:1 copy or anything, but I find something very suspicious about Mappy’s redesigned sprite, with those big round ears. There’s also his new girlfriend with a strangely similar name (Mapico, in Japanese “マピ子”, “Mappygirl”). And he’s adventuring across a “land” which features levels that include, pretty transparently, analogues to Adventureland, Westernland… you go up a “main street” and end up in front of a fairytale castle!
I mean, case-closed. Though a bit like Mappy–where you play a mouse defending a house that’s full of trampolines–the narrative is a bit confused. It would make sense to say Mappy’s on holiday at Mappy-Land (convenient for him!) and then the Meowkies have shown up to create havoc that he has to solve–you know, sort of a Die Hard thing, Mappy our John McClane, he’s forgot his hat instead of his shoes, etc.–but actually the game tells the story of Mappy’s courtship with Mapico, where he first has to collect cheese across Mappy-Land as a gift (women, what are they like, always demanding cheese, etc. etc.) Then he has to collect rings in order to marry Mapico, who apparently feels forty-eight rings is the required amount for an engagement. Then it’s tiny Christmas trees for I assume their first Christmas together (again, forty-eight seems… extravagant, unless they’re planning on running a Christmas tree outlet). Finally, in a twist, you’re collecting baseballs… because many years have passed and you’re actually collecting them for your son!!! That’s right Mappy Jr. appears, and maybe it’s one of those situations where his little league is in danger of being cancelled because they don’t have enough baseballs, and Mappy just loves his son enough to, uh, steal them from an international theme park?
I mean what is Mappy really doing here? Look, it’s nice to see a policeman whose interaction with his wife and child isn’t solely beating them, but it’s almost like the tables have turned–he’s here ripping the trees out of a theme park and if anything the Meowkies are trying to stop him.
Anyway, none of this actually slightly matters, because it’s all just background to the game, that no one involved in the making of thought even slightly as hard about as I just have. And, to be honest, they probably didn’t think about the game as hard as I have either. As I said above, this is clearly an attempt to Mappyise Super Mario Bros. so Namco can get in on the action, but it’s strange how they went about it. Even as early as this companies were working you just slam your IP into a left-to-right platformer with some vague design signifiers and call it a day (even Jaleco understood this with JaJaMaru No Daibouken.) Tose and Namco go a different route where they’ve decided to keep as much of Mappy’s DNA as possible. It would have been easy, I think, to just do Super Mario Bros. with more of a focus on trampolines, but instead the core here is very much what Mappy was: collect things while being relentlessly hounded by the Meowkies.
What’s interesting, however, is what they’ve changed. Doors are completely gone, instead there are stage-specific counter attacks. Mappy gets a short hop, that allows him to (shockingly) jump over enemies if you’ve got extremely good timing. And you can collect items, up to fifteen, which you can drop to distract Meowkies–for example cat toys that they dance around and become harmless for a while, or coins that the head Meowkie, Goro, is specifically attracted to.
And then there are levels that break the system completely out of nowhere. The jungle stage instead features you jumping off moving trampolines to catch vines and avoid parrots (which is all a bit Donkey Kong Jr., weirdly) and then the spooky stage has you flying around with a balloon, shooting microwaves at ghosts and collecting keys.
Things get even more complicated because not every level finishes the same way either. Generally you’re just trying to collect everything and then run off to the right–a weak sop to being inspired by Super Mario Bros.–but many times you have to do things like find a secret entrance on the level to then play another level where you have to collect an item. So on the spooky stage you either have to collect a cross in the church to scare off vampire Goro at the exit, or enter the haunted mansion (full of warp doors!) to find an alternative exit to the level (vampire Goro just hangs out in the middle of the mansion, which feels… sort of unfinished, to be honest.)
Mappy-Land is… odd. It’s ambitious, adding probably too much to the core Mappy design, but it’s just wrong-headed in trying to do that, because the core can’t support the weight of everything that’s been added. Mappy was always a bit of a clumsy, seat-of-the-pants arcade game for me, but Mappy-Land quickly requires absolute precision and a dedication to a racing line and it doesn’t feel good at all. Maybe it’s just poor programming–sorry Tose–but the game has an infuriating number of collision edge-cases particularly with trampolines, and it makes the jungle levels especially complete bullshit as you hop on a trampoline and sort of vibrate off to your death, or fall onto one and miss it despite visually colliding with the edge. And idiosyncrasies from Mappy here make less sense. If you fall any distance onto a hard surface, you die. Unless you’ve been thrown in the air by a trampoline. So you have absurd situations where you drop down about three pixels and die, but you can fall from the top of the screen onto a hard surface if you’ve bounced off a trampoline? It’s hard to remember this in the heat of the moment, and by the third set of levels, the game intentionally uses it all against you, as you have to learn levels first before you can expect to complete them due to all the dead ends and death drops you can end up caught out by–the items help, but you really need to know how to use them and you use them in order of pickup, so you might have the exact opposite one you need to use at the wrong moment.
Ultimately, I treated Mappy-Land as a puzzle the way, say, the original Pac-Man is–what’s the exact route you can use and recreate consistently to beat a level? Doing so I wouldn’t have had that bad a time if it wasn’t for the horrible collisions, and some later levels absolutely take the piss anyway–there’s an entire level where you can’t see where the platforms are!
After playing something like Castlevania, Mappy-Land just looks sort of crappy [“Crappy-Land, more like”–Ed.] I get what they’re going for–big, bright, childish graphics–but it does nothing to change my mind that in this era Namco is being left behind in a big way on Famicom after Xevious: GAMP No Nazo. This is… I mean, it’s ok. But if you want to play Mappy, you should probably play Mappy and enjoy it as a wee high score challenge, because this is less good as a high score challenge and actively not something you want to play through as an adventure.
Will I ever play it again? I shall not.
Final Thought: Worth noting that I played the Namco Museum Archives version of this, and, weirdly, despite the fact that the game was never included in the Namcot Collection, it’s the Famicom ROM, not the NES ROM that is included. The NES version includes a continue and stage select and even a “remaining items count” (absolutely necessary–something I forgot to mention is the game doesn’t make it clear when the stage exit is open or not–or even where the stage exit even is sometimes). That’s the version you can play on the Nintendo Switch Online service, but you probably shouldn’t bother either way.
Developed/Published by: Heather Flowers Released: 25/09/2025 Completed: 17/11/2025 Completion: Nine heads with an unlikely 40% chance and then the coin landed on its side. I’m taking it.
Q-UP (Everybody House Games, 2025)
Developed/Published by: Everybody House Games Released: 5/11/2025 Completed: 20/11/2025 Completion: Finished it with the Medic.
Oh, I didn’t think I’d do another one of these joint essays again so soon. However, with there being two games about flipping coins released within a couple of months of each it does feel like I’d just be repeating myself if I wrote two different articles, so here we are.
I did a jokey question on The Insert Credit Podcast about this: “Why is coin flipping so hot right now?” despite the fact that I feel like I know the answer: it’s our old friend simultaneous discovery. Yes, I may be an agnostic, but I also apparently believe that ideas float around in the sky and fall into multiple people’s heads at the same time. And it’s more people than actually act on it too, which explains how I invented nasal strips sometime in the late 80s as a child who suffered stuffiness far too often (should have made a bigger deal of it even though my prototype—sellotape and a broken toothpick—wasn’t that great.)
The more obvious answer, you’d think, would be Australian streamer/comedy man Tom Walker, who I best know for being on best TV show Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee, but I first heard of for playing GTA IV with all the cars set to 9999% speed. However before that, at the very start of 2024, he did a coin flipping stream, where he attempted to flip a coin heads ten times in a row, but every time he flipped ten tails in a row, he’d add an extra heads (meaning he’d have to flip eleven, or twelve…) This took over eight hours, and while there might have been other coin flipping streams before or since (he actually does joke during the stream that it’s “Mr. Beast shit”) it’s the one that seemed to stick in people’s imagination. But, and it’s an important but, Unfair Flips and Q-UP are not really about the coin flips.
In Unfair Flips, you’re trying to flip a coin heads ten times in a row, but the game fucks with the odds in an explicitly video gamey way. The focus of Unfair Flips is probability, and a player’s ability to understand it.
In Q-UP, however, you’re not going for an unlikely number of heads in a row–you’re playing “best of three” flips against opponents. The focus of Q-UP is the idea that in a perfectly matched ranking system–where you’d always play an opponent with equal skill level to yourself–you’d have a 50% chance of winning, so you might as well just flip a coin and skip all that playing the game.
When I describe it like that, you’d think “alright, well, those are both really different concepts to explore, and both games explore them in really different ways. Why if they didn’t both feature coin flipping, there’d be no reason to pair them. In fact, maybe there isn’t!”
But underlying thing that both games are exploring is twofold. One: the ways in which people do or do not trust computers, and two: that game design was broken to combat that, and in doing so a precedent was set that has allowed bad actors to create not “fun games for us to play”, but “products that dole out enough reward on a regular enough schedule to keep us chained to them.”
[“Fucking Christ. Is this another article about how capitalism is to blame for everything?–Ed.] I promise it isn’t. Well, maybe a little.
Something that’s really stood out to me about Unfair Flips–or rather, the discourse around it, which I’m well aware I’m massively behind–is how often people said it was a game about “how bad gamers were at understanding probability.”
This is generally put down to “fake RNG [random number generation]” aka “bad luck protection” where if you fail on a 10% chance the next time it might be an 11% chance (or more!) while still telling you it’s a 10% chance to try and make sure you eventually get the endorphins you so richly deserve. My position is that, well, people who play games are not actually bad at understanding probability! The industry is invested in making them not actually engage with it!
Criticise me for supposition and anecdotal evidence here if you like, but people who play video games, “gamers” if you absolutely must, often play tabletop RPGs and board and card games, and something about those is that you cannot massage the odds progressively1. Anyone who has played anything from Candy Land up is aware of the experience of hitting one after one or hitting the exact roll required for the worst outcome despite long odds, and card game players are especially in tune with the uneven way your odds can play out: I played Netrunner competitively for years, and there’s not a player of that who doesn’t understand that if you put three copies of a card in your 44 card deck, and then riffle shuffle enough to get “perfect” randomness (seven shuffles, isn’t it?) you’ll still play far more games than you like where you’re not going to draw one of those cards in the first 15 draws and instead find them all clumped at the bottom.
Indeed, there are entire games where the reality of RNG is what makes them legendary. In Blood Bowl, a couple of bad rolls can destroy months if not years of work, and the game is almost entirely about trying to make sure you never do anything where you haven’t stacked the odds in your favour as much as possible, and you still have to expect it to go wrong. And people love it for the incredible highs and incredible lows.
Blood Bowl is a great example, though. In video game form the game uses “real” RNG, and yet there are many players who jump online to complain that the rolls are “rigged” in some way despite there being no evidence (their evidence, of course, generally relaying to them not hitting within some range of probability with what they think is some excessive amount of logged rolls.)
In a video game, we are not touching the dice; we are not shuffling the cards. We’re not touching anything real, so we don’t trust it. Every game we play with a computer is like visiting the casino, but the croupier is behind a curtain and he just yells out “no, sorry, you lost. Try again?” every time. We’re already seeing an illusion, so why should we trust anything about it? I’m struck by the comparison to the conclusion from that 4 hour Defunctland video a while back everyone was wild about (it is very good): visitors to theme parks get bored, and quickly, with fully computerised characters because they don’t feel real. That there’s this seeming paradoxical aspect that you prefer a Mickey where you know there’s a guy in a suit because it’s the knowledge that there’s a fourth wall that allows you to stand on the other side of it. You can trust the parameters of the experience and understand the limits the way you can’t with a robot.
So I really don’t believe people are naturally bad at understanding probabilities. And I do believe that “bad luck protection” was made with a genuine attempt to give the player an edge over the house not to fix the odds but repair trust. It’s a real “note under the note” fix, so elegant I’m sure even people implementing it don’t see what the real issue is.
The problem, of course, is that messing with odds in a way that players don’t understand presents an absolutely huge opportunity to fuck with a player’s brain chemistry to keep them playing. If you can take a player from “I don’t trust the machine’s odds” to “I am guaranteed to hit once every ten times because it says so” by repeatedly giving them slanted odds, it means you can give players the kind of shitey unfair odds that appear in gatcha games–1% chance or far worse –and they’ll keep playing or spending thinking they’re not really gambling at all.
This is where Unfair Flips steps in. Unfair Flips starts you with a 20% chance, makes explicit that this is the real odds, and things are so boiled down to one probability, and you flip the coin so many times that you actually cannot help but see the croupier behind the curtain is (for once) playing you straight. Tails. Tails. Tails. It’s doing it, alright. Tails. Tails. Tails. By jove, it’s doing it.
They then tie this to the exact kind of levelling system that is (if you allow the pun) the other side of the engagement coin: slowly doled out improvement that keeps you playing. Not just the hit of the “unlikely” wins, but the guaranteed hit, with enough time, of seeing a number go up.
There really isn’t anything more to Unfair Flips, but that’s what makes it brilliant. It’s a laser sight trained on the basest tricks that game designers play on us, and there’s nowhere to hide from it. You’re not competing to beat a system, you’re not even in a casino. You’re on a treadmill.
The only issue I have with Unfair Flips is in the end it overplays its hand [“Hang on, I thought you said we weren’t in a casino”–Ed.] by making the final flip actually only have a 10% chance of being heads with the others being gag endings. The game has already made its point about the ultimate meaninglessness of the treadmill, it does feel like a theft of something to not just play it out for real. I know it’s called Unfair Flips, but if you understand what some players might go through to get the final heads… I mean, you’ve made your point.
Q-UP is, at heart, an e-sports parody. In body, however, it is very much an escalation-focused incremental game2, designed, as it is, by a team that included Frank Lantz, designer of Universal Paperclips. I wasn’t super hot on Universal Paperclips–as is often the case, I think I was too harsh–but I agree that it does fall prey to the old “alright, I get the idea already!” issue that your, ahem, academic kind of games can have.
Q-UP masks this with an extravagance of mechanics. It’s kind of the joke. If a general player’s experience of an e-sport is that games boil down to a coin flip, then all of the other stuff you’re doing–your character, your loadout of items and abilities–all modify experience rather than outcomes. It’s (immediately) one of the most challenging things about Q-UP compared to the completely transparent nature of Unfair Flips–the game is all obfuscation, and poorly explains things in a way that I have to assume is also a joke (when I tried to play Marvel Rivals when it launched, it felt exactly as baffling) but doesn’t exactly lead to a smooth on-ramp.
We were coming to this metaphor, and I apologise, but these games are two sides of the same coin. Unfair Flips lays bare the trick; Q-UP makes the lie so huge, and so ridiculous, that you see right through it.
It does this by making the coin flips completely meaningless. It doesn’t matter if you trust the computer or not: the game isn’t about the matches, it’s about the metagame. I know this experience. I may have bounced off Marvel Rivals immediately, but I’ve played both Dead By Daylight and Marvel Snap for far longer than I imagined I would (and the latter, in an actively unhealthy way.) In Dead By Daylight the game became more about unlocking things than it was about actually playing it by the end (I think every player of any live service game knows the experience of realising you’re logging in to collect the free currency or daily unlocks for a game you don’t actually have any interest in playing.) In Marvel Snap, it was always about climbing that monthly ladder, and that game was almost as transparent as Q-UP: pretty much every competitive deck had a win/loss ratio that hovered around a coin flip, and climbing was just about putting in the time. Rather than making sure you unlock the right cards, in Q-UP you have to make the numbers bigger, but it’s the same thing: you spend time to climb the ladder. Time is the only real currency.
For what it’s worth: I think players understand this just as well as probability, and just like fake RNG, ranked ladder is the comforting lie that keeps us playing. God knows I played enough games of Marvel Snap aware that eventually the game would feed me a bot where I’d make up all my losses and then some.
The problem with Q-UP merging an incremental with ranked ladder, even if it’s in service of a critique, it does the exact thing that it’s critiquing! Q-UP actually is just the treadmill for, like, eight hours, and it doesn’t really matter if the game is going “ha ha, this is stupid, right?” if you’re locked into the loop. And you can, very easily, get locked into the loop. If you gel with the systems, Q-UP pops as those numbers get ever higher. Q-UP is the kind of game where I don’t think I had a great time playing it–you really are just watching a coin flip and numbers go up–but I couldn’t stop thanks to the next unlocks or the ranking system that forms the game’s core critique.
Q-UP’s problem, ultimately, might be the same as Universal Paperclips–the fact that once the player gets it… what then? In his essay, “Qing-UP in the Age of Tilt” Q-UP’s designer James Lantz discusses a lot of the things I’ve discussed in this essay, but he also makes a point of saying this:
“Q-UP wasn’t built as a commentary on the state of the world. First and foremost, the game is designed to be funny, engaging and addictive.” [My emphasis.]
This is quite apparent in that as much as the gag of Q-UP is laced through every aspect of it, the game is also extremely carefully designed. The live service-style game screens might be ironic, but they present deep and complicated systems that reward you for engaging with them. There are multiple characters with wildly different skill trees and the entire thing builds towards what is meant to be an actually competitive postgame where you’ve built your engine up incrementally with a squad to the point where you’re just making absurd numbers.
I’ll be honest–it was overcomplicated in a way that was beyond my willingness to engage beyond “I get the joke.” I reached a point where I had to look up character builds to understand what I was doing, and… I still didn’t. The character’s skills are placed in a huge matrix that has a trigger order based on placement, if they trigger from heads or tails (and so on) and it’s about two steps beyond rewarding for me, though I know it would be catnip for many. I got to the end with a build that made sense to me, but it was missing triggers left and right, and I really had no way of working out how I would fix it.
Alright, you make sense of this if you’re so clever.
Q-UP also has a story (of sorts) to keep you going. It’s jammed away in the game’s email system and it’s… I guess it’s there, but it added so little to the experience I was a bit surprised they bothered. I suppose it’s supposed to be funny, but when the entire experience is sort of a joke, it’s gilding the lily and as with Baby Steps, it just didn’t click with me.
If Unfair Flips is a dagger [“Hang on, I thought you said it was a laser sight”–Ed.] then Q-UP is some sort of a… blunderbuss. It’s still hitting the target, but it’s done it via overwhelming scattershot, and the collateral damage is, in my opinion, too much to bear.
So what’s my conclusion? Unfair Flips and Q-UP are both very, very good at what they’ve chosen to do–one minimalist, one maximalist. They ask the audience to take the reality of the dark patterns of game development on the chin, and I hope–and believe–that both leave players with a lasting insight of things that they probably understood, but had never deeply considered. But if Unfair Flips wants you to learn your lesson, Q-UP seems to want you to keep engaging anyway.
Will I ever play them again? I was done with Unfair Flips so hilariously quickly, I did fancy playing it again. But I learned the lesson! With Q-UP, I really just am not interested in learning any of the other characters. The design is good, but there’s the same emptiness at its heart.
Final Thought: That Q-UP wants you to keep engaging with the systems it critiques is understandable with further context from Lantz’s essay; he makes a point of saying that neither fake RNG or Ranked Ladder are “evil.” It’s getting into something really thorny to discuss the ethics of game design, but let’s here take some shorthand and say that it’s what you do with game design that matters. Frankly, the standpoint this essay comes from is that the design patterns of Unfair Flips and Q-UP are used elsewhere to eat up people’s money, time, and ultimately their happiness, because they exist within the context of late-stage capitalism, and [“Oh for Christ’s sake. I’m cutting this essay off now”–Ed.]
A tabletop DM with hidden rolls can, will, often does massage wins and losses, but that’s not really the point here. ↩︎
I notice people don’t make a point of this distinction, generally. Unfair Flips is an incremental game, but it’s not focused on getting comically huge numbers. I think there’s a meaningful difference there that should be given a genre marker for clarity. I’m partial to “exponential incremental” but I got cold feet about the specificity of exponential… ↩︎
Developed/Published by: Namco Released: 09/11/1986 Completed: 18/09/2025 Completion: Finished it. Save states at each checkpoint… though I also had to use a few more in lulls just for my sanity on levels 8 and 10 for very obvious reasons.
It’s strange, the games you remember, and the games that you don’t. I suppose it’s about the games that make an impression. Something interesting, I suppose, in my trip through these early(-ish) days of arcade games is not even how few I have any connection to, but how few I even remember seeing in arcades. They’re all from an era “before my time” but only a rarefied few managed to make a consistent enough profit to hang around until it reached my time, and even then, they were probably in some dusty old corner or a banged up cabinet in a chippy, something I probably never played but just stared at the attract mode while I waited for my mum to pick up… hmm, probably a fish supper and a sausage supper? Maybe a special fish if my nana’s over? A couple of pickled onions and a red cola?
Personally, I rather like this separation from nostalgia. That I can really experience these games with fresh eyes. And I can’t say that Rolling Thunder represents that we’re reaching an era that we’ll start to see more things that I remember, or might have played (looking at my to-play list, it absolutely does not.) But Rolling Thunder definitely had something to it that I remember it really well. This isn’t a vague, childish memory of maybe a Gradius or a Salamander machine in the Magnum–god knows, it could have been an R-Type–this is a “I played this. I played this more than once. I will have been annoyed because I’ll have lost my credit so quickly. But I definitely put good money after bad.”
Because Rolling Thunder looks. so. cool.
I don’t know if I can explain it. There’s just a very clean, clear style to the graphics. Although you’re actually playing a member of the “World Crime Police Organization” on a mission to save another agent, there’s a real 60s spy flick feeling from the very first screen–like you’re James Bond, attacking the base at the end of You Only Live Twice. And the action is fast and more importantly stylish. The hero, Albatross, ducks behind cover to shoot enemies, and leaps over rails to switch between low and high ground. It looks cool as hell. It looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun to play.
Historical Aside
There was a meme going around on Bluesky a while ago that looked like this:
I’m absolutely not going to disagree with it, not having sucked it up and tried to play the Portopia Serial Murder Case (yet). But history is a many faceted thing, and I think if I was going to make the meme from what I’ve learned over my time spent digging into the history via what I’ve played, it would look like this:
Now, I haven’t written about Spartan X (better known as Kung-Fu Master) because, well, I’m trying to not keep loading more games onto my to-play list (uh, more than I already do) but it’s an unbelievably important keystone. It takes the rhythm of the designer Takashi Nishiyama’s previous game, Moon Patrol, and translate it into a side-scrolling action game (one that, weirdly, starts with you scrolling right-to-left). The main thing you need to know about it is that pretty much any game you’ve ever played where dudes relentlessly stream in from a side of the screen? That’s from Spartan X. Something like My Hero is an obvious, but the DNA is over Ghosts n’ Goblins, even Super Mario Bros., and, absolutely, Rolling Thunder.
Rolling Thunder is, actually, very fun! But it absolutely suffers for the nature of arcade games of the era (or any era, I suppose): the requirement that it remove the quarters from your pocket like you’re being held upside down and shaken by a bully. From the very beginning of the game, you have to play it in an exacting fashion, and be prepared to learn the game’s layout, because you can’t survive via reaction–you have to know what’s coming and act before it happens (literally, in many cases.)
It’s a shame, because the core design is unbelievably solid. You can move and shoot. You can leap between the two levels (as long as there’s a railing–Albatross will only jump if it looks cool) and there are doors enemies come out of and which you can enter, which is a bit like Elevator Action but actually the only doors you want to go in are the ones that have more bullets or the machine gun upgrade, because coming in and out of a door is dangerous and confers no advantage (you can’t duck into a door to avoid taking a hit, it’s too slow, and enemies often just hang out in front of them. In fact, you quickly learn to not even stand above or below doors, because enemies might pop out and leap on you before you can do much of anything.)
The design is a game of forward momentum, enemy and area control. You want to keep yourself positioned so you don’t get overwhelmed or surprised, take on enemies and move forward. When it works, it’s amazing. You shoot an enemy when they pop out from cover from behind cover yourself. You leap over the cover, spin around, shoot another enemy. You leap up to the higher level, pop a few more enemies, move forward so an enemy on the lower level leaps up too, you shoot them–and so on.
The problem is that it only rarely feels like play. The game plays a genuinely ridiculous trick on the player from the off–it claims you have eight bars of health, but actually, you generally die in two hits, and often what is one or feels like one (I think headshots kill you in one, and some enemies hit you twice in quick succession.) There are no ways to regain health, and you get a maximum of one checkpoint on the often long levels (and the 5th and 10th levels have no checkpoint!) so you just can’t style it out ever. The game doesn’t have strictly deterministic enemies or enemy layout, but you can plan around the doors and spawns.
If you do this, the game is… mostly fair for the first five levels, which the game calls “Story 1” (this is a confusing bit of framing. Story 2 feels like a second loop, but it’s actually different. There is a narrative, of sorts, to the game and levels, so is Albatross failing the first time? I’m overthinking it). A player with a patience could probably single credit the first story with some effort as long as some particular gotchas are memorised (the section where you have to jump an obstacle to get to an enemy throwing bombs at you stood out to me, but there’s also the timing of invisible, flying and fire enemies to worry about). Story 2, however, is absolutely fucking bananas.
Something I’ve failed to mention about the design–once you’re three levels in, the game, almost quietly, introduces the ability to switch between the foreground and background planes on the lower level via doors, and that seems to allow the designer(s) to increase the chaos on screen tremendously. So no longer are you just dealing with enemies in front of you, behind you and above or below, but also in all those locations on a second plane. If you’re on the upper level and there are enemies on the background, well, they can jump up and kill you the same way the enemies in the foreground are.
This gets pretty bad, but the true depths of Rolling Thunder are in any of the sections where it tries out being an actual platformer. Albatross is stiff in the way Arthur in Ghosts n’ Goblins is, but he’s also about twice the size and only has a short hop laterally compared to his leaps over railings. The 4th level is bad enough, but the 8th introduces a final section where you’re hopping across tiny columns after an enemy gauntlet where you literally have to position yourself correctly to avoid being killed immediately by enemies below you–I have no idea how anyone did this when they had to start from a checkpoint minutes earlier.
As I played this via Namco Museum I had no rewind to abuse like I did in Ghost n’ Goblins, so finishing this–particularly the ridiculous final level–was an absolute test of my nerve. Rolling Thunder is so determined to strip you of your money that even the level timer is stupidly tight–I finished many levels with less than ten seconds to spare, and that was booking it as much as I could–which made me save state only when absolutely necessary. That I still finished this makes me think that the game is easier than Ghost n’ Goblins, though not by much.
I think also that I liked it a bit more (even if it was, at times, deeply annoying and frustrating.) As the enemies are more predictable and the layouts simpler, the game is easier to learn, though for many the more reactive play in Ghosts n’ Goblins might be preferable (but at this level of difficulty, I don’t think I agree.)
Because Rolling Thunder gates its “true” ending behind the last five, brutal levels of Story 2 I’m not certain I can give it an unequivocal thumbs up. I wish that they’d been able to ease off the gas a little bit, maybe let the levels live a little more (like a lot of these arcade games, it introduces ideas briefly, forgets them, moves on.) But I don’t know… it’s still as cool as it ever was.
Will I ever play it again? I don’t say this for every arcade game, but if I saw this in an arcade, I’d see how much I could show off by how far I could get into this. I suspect only the second or third level, but still, most people don’t make it to the first checkpoint, so I’ll take it.
Final Thought: Rolling Thunder received a couple of sequels, but the true legacy of the game is almost certainly that it inspired Shinobi quite directly, a series that would go on to far outlive it. Also the game’s Blogas absolutely 100% had to at least slightly inspire Blanka. I mean look at their colours! That’s basically Blanka’s alternative palette!!!
I do not think the original Avatar is good, but I’ll be the first to admit that Way of Water had me both hootin’ and hollerin’ as I watched genocidal whiteys get murked, and I remember thinking “oh man, I enjoyed that enough I’d watch it again.”
[Monkey’s paw curls]
Did that mean I wanted to watch the exact same film again, but as a sequel? Because I did not.
Now, before you start quibbling here–there’s the fire Na’vi, multiple(!) whale councils, a fuckton more Spider, the climax which is whales vs. whalers again features more, bigger whales and even some squid too–I think I assumed that this film was going to, you know, not just feature the Sullys mostly hanging around and swimming in the same location of the previous movie. That there’d be some contrived reason for them to end up at a volcano, or among the fire Na’vi, and the film would be a feast of fire and particle effects the way Way of Water was for water physics.
No. In fact, the film does a hilarious thing where the Sullys have their contrived reason to leave the water Na’vi (“Unlike the audience, we don’t want Spider to die!”) and so they leave, get into complications on the way to their original settlement (literally due to the Fire Na’vi!) but within about twenty minutes they’re back with the water Na’vi.
What the hell?
The film does, briefly, go to a volcano so the OG antagonist Quaritch can enjoy a Far Cry 3 cutscene with the leader of the Fire Na’vi Varang, but we never learn anything meaningful about the Fire Na’vi or their motivations, they don’t do anything exciting (one guy Witness Me’s himself, so I thought that might be a thing, but he’s the only one that ever does it, so maybe he was just depressed or something) and Varang has them all move to the evil human settlement so she can be close to her boyfriend? I mean she basically tradwifes herself into irrelevance?
Fire And Ash is just so deeply unrewarding. Look, I’m not exactly hung up on the lore here or anything but the fact that the movie does absolutely nothing to move the overarching story forward feels like… a mistake. If you’re really reaching I guess there are some underwhelming revelations about Kiri and a glimpse of a big white rotating head (???) but I don’t get a sense of where that takes anything. And don’t get me wrong, I could watch whitey get killed in a variety of ways for hours, but it’s mostly the same stuff you’ve seen before, and the one death you’re waiting for–the evil whaling captain–is… nothing. You can’t have him get torn in half or something? At least if you do that he could come back with spider legs (come on, all together now [chanting] Spider legs! Spider legs! Spider legs!)
Speaking of Spiders… what was the deal here? James Cameron made a bet with George Lucas that he could make a human Jar Jar? I’m being unnecessary cruel to Jack Champion (it isn’t his fault) but it’s so weird to make your film about indigenous revolt that’s already about a white saviour end with every Na’vi in I guess all of history crowding round the one white guy that’s cool with them to say “congratulations!” like it’s Evangelion.
I’ve seen a few people say that they like this more than Way of Water, which… I mean, fine, I’d like to agree, but there’s even less narrative drive here. And even if Varang is hot or whatever (where are the thicc Na’vi tho? Am I right, fellas?) the fire dancing and ululation is wildly cringe no matter how desperately we’re all trying to pretend the allegory here has any distance at all.
If you’re “only” going to make five of these, and you’re 71, I don’t think you can piss an entire film and several years away on doing the same thing twice even if it’s still making bank in China and kept a lot of people in New Zealand employed.
*Sigh*
It’s weird that not only do I want these films to be good, I think they should be. “We should brutally kill the people who are making our planet uninhabitable. Like really fucking fuck them up. Real Drive elevator hours” is just the kind of message I can believe in, I guess, even with all this baggage.
Ah well, maybe next time. At least it still looked completely fucking stupid in high frame rate!
A dispatch a little earlier than has become usual, but it’s the last newsletter of the year and feels like I should get it in before Christmas happens and we end up in that weird no-man’s land between it and the New Year.
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!
Going with A Computer Christmas as my last pre-Christmas new article is going for a kind of sophisticated, adult Christmas shindig vibe; Christmas Crackers is more that last day at primary school when you’re allowed to bring in any toys you like and the teacher lets you play games on the computer. Of course, if they’d booted up Christmas Crackers you might prefer to wait your turn to see if you could get a game of Crossbows and Catapults with the older kid that brought it in, because it looks amazing (you won’t, and you never will, so you’ll just have to imagine how amazing it is… hang on, they made a new version in 2024??? Finally I can stop imagini… oh it’s $90.)
If you follow me on Bluesky you’re probably sick of me posting about my Horses essay, but I’m just so dang proud of it/it just took a long time ok? Better for me to make a bigger point of drawing the first map for Jingle Bells that exists online, an experience more enjoyable and festive than close reading Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, let me tell you.
A subscriber exclusive in the archive as well! It’s nice to be able to offer a few of these at certain times in the year to say thanks to those who support my writing.
Definitely didn’t originally plan on writing this up as extensively as I did, but sometimes inspiration just takes you. Wish it had for Wright and company.
Yes, I’ve been playing Christmas games chronologically (more or less) but when I saw this pop up in my feed I felt I had to play it, as I love unique customs!!! And Mari Lywd is… a pretty unique custom.
Mari Lwyd’s Pantri Panic was made by Rhys Wynne for the Pico-8 Advent Calendar Jam 2025 (of which there are a huge selection of Christmassy games to play, but this is the one I played.) As admitted by Wynne, it’s a version of the Blokus/Tetris mash-up game design where you place shapes on a grid until they can’t fit, but rather than be a series of grid-filling puzzles, each time you make a line it disappears, opening up space so you can hopefully keep going.
I’ll be honest—I don’t entirely gel with this game design; I find it slightly uneasy to be playing Tetris on four sides with a wider range of block shapes. And it’s a shame Mari Lywd is just window dressing (there’s probably an interesting idea in a game where you have to keep thinking up new songs to stop a horse skull getting into your house, but I think that’s somewhat out of scope here.)
That said, this is a pleasant diversion, and another great example of the pick-up-and-play Pico-8 puzzler. It particularly gains serious points for including a different Christmas song (Nadolig Llawen i chi gyd) rather than Jingle Bells again.
Festive Vibes Ranking: HIGH (if you’re Welsh) MEDIUM (if you’re not)
Darren Hupke has always been very kind about exp. and he’s been a shockingly prolific zinester, putting out quality zines on a monthly basis, but he’s sensibly decided to slow a little to provide more coverage in a less logistically challenging fashion with a new quarterly zine. You can back the new Kickstarter now.
(And if you missed the 2025 zines, you can pre-order the annual now too!)
JP Coovert takes you through how to print up an A5/half-letter zine at home in a quick little video, so you’ve got no excuse. He’s talking about TTRPG zines—I’ve often wondered how zine oldheads feel about how much “zine” has become synonymous with self-published TTRPGs in some circles—but it works for any kind of zine you’d like to make.
(If you don’t want to watch a video, or use a computer to make your zine, check out this neat guide from Julia Gfrörer.)
“There but for the grace of god, go I” goes the saying, and as someone also struggling with unemployment in the games industry (and who expects to see games industry people in need like this a lot more) I want to share Andrew Elmore’s fundraiser to help support him as he tries to keep him and his family going after being laid off by Bungie in 2023. It hurts to read and recognise in myself the words “there is so much—SO MUCH—work that I can do!! But nobody wants any of it anymore, I guess!?” It’s tough out there, but maybe we can get through it if we help each other when we’re able.
And Finally…
I shared No Games For Genocidelast Dispatch in the And Finally… spot (which is actually supposed to be something funny/nice, but never mind) but I’d like to highlight People Make Games’ superb video on the movement. For what it’s worth: I’ve signed the pledge and exp. won’t be covering Xbox-published games. Please consider signing too.
Next week on exp.: I spend the week eating chocolate and watching the old films that they always put on the telly (maybe this is the year I finally watch The Railway Children.) When I return: Quentin Tarantino’s favourite arcade game.
Developed/Published by: Sierra On-Line Released: 1986 Completed: 02/12/2025 Completion: Well, it’s not really a video game. Watched it until I was pretty sure I’d seen everything.
Christmas is drawing ever closer, so let’s relax, let’s have those Christmas party vibes, and let’s just watch Sierra’s 1986 “Christmas Card” A Computer Christmas together:
(For maximum vibes, I suggest running it for real–well, at least with emulation. You can do so, easily, at archive.org!)
Sierra are a company that I’ve not really dug into here on exp.–I’ve really only played King’s Quest I and II–and I have to admit I’m a bit disappointed that in 2025 I didn’t get to King’s Quest III or Space Quest (especially considering their release dates land right around the time of other games I’ve been writing up, like Pro Wrestling and Alex Kidd in Miracle World.) But I got a bit stuck in an earlier PC game I was playing by another historically important developer and did that thing where you put it down for slightly too long, and I loathe to start something else.
But I think it’s alright that we’re getting to enjoy A Computer Christmas together, now. For such a beloved company, with quite a lot of history written about it, and even though Sierra’s Christmas “cards” would become a regular occurrence–there are four between 1986 and 1992–I’m surprised by how little information is online about any of them, and especially not this first one. There’s a bit of irony to that, because it seems that essentially all the information that there ever was about Sierra’s Christmas cards was uploaded to the Sierra On-Line BBS–BBSes, of course, filling the market before internet access went mainstream.
BBSes are not well archived and I can’t exactly ring up (209) 683-4463 to get the details, so really all I’ve got to go on for context is a random Facebook post from an Aaron Micah Wester (dug up for me by ftb1979 on the Gaming Alexandria Discord–thanks!). It’s unsourced, so I’m a bit unsure about calling it the gospel, but he notes these were something “the Williams family were very fond of” while being a “a low-pressure way for developers to experiment with various features they wanted to potentially add into their games.”
I think it’s fair to assume that this first card was intended specifically for stores (it does, after all, say in the intro it’s intended to promote “the Christmas spirit within your store”) though Wester notes that these cards would go on to serve double duty as a way to draw more users to Sierra’s BBS (a 1988 Sierra Newsletter claims the BBS was getting 6000 calls a week, and had 25,000 active users). But this is a marketing tool first and foremost. Distributed to computer stores on disk (“Egghead Software, The WHEREHOUSE, LECHMERE, FEDCO, B Dalton Software Etc, Electronics Boutique, Babbage’s, Walden Software, or RadioShack” Wester seemingly exhaustively states) the staff were more than likely to leave the demo running running across the festive period, and as at the end of each loop of festive scenes there’s an advert for a Sierra game–here Space Quest and King’s Quest III (the ones I haven’t been able to play yet, boo!)–this was a cheeky, very Sierra way to try and push more product.
(The card also mentions The Black Cauldron as part of the default text scroll, but doesn’t seem to include a demo for it. I forgot all about Sierra making a game for The Black Cauldron.)
That A Computer Christmas includes ads does sour the experience of playing it, just a little–the games aren’t festive at all! I mean at least just put a Santa hat on the character sprites or something–but it doesn’t exactly ruin it. And that this card is limited to the PC beeper… well… let me just say I’ve heard a lot of horrible beepy version of Christmas music thanks to the BBC Micro by now, and this is the worst.
Still, A Computer Christmas is a charming object, one you won’t regret leaving playing while you open your advent calendar or something. Unless you forget to mute it, I guess.
Festive vibes ranking: HIGH (unless it’s an ad break.)
Will I ever play it again?Onward and upwards: perhaps next Christmas I’ll try the 1988 version, which, thankfully, includes a Roland MT-32 option.
Final Thought: Sierra’s computerised Christmas cards as stealth marketing, are, of course, not the only example of such a phenomenon. There are examples such as “Seasons Greetings from Thoughtware” from as early as 1984. Strangely, that’s as hard to find much online about as A Computer Christmas, though it is covered briefly on LGR as part of their longer video on the commercial “Jingle Disk” it turned into. Is this where Sierra got the idea? Probably not, but I suppose you never know.
Unlock with Patreon
