exp.

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Author: Mathew Kumar

  • The exp. Dispatch #12

    The exp. Dispatch #12

    Everyone who ordered exp. 2602 (or the value bundle!) before mid-Oct should have (or soon be receiving if they’re far-flung) their physical copies! Digital copies were also sent out this week—check your spam if you don’t see them, and get in touch if you still don’t.

    I’ve been gladdened by the images people have shared with me of their copies (our header image here via Chris Baker) and if you’ve enjoyed the issues, please do share on social media. I don’t want to moan too much, but I’ve been turned down for every zine fair I’ve applied to since I launched exp. 26021 so I do, unusually, have a bit of stock to shift (I ordered more than usual due to strong pre-orders and because I was, it turns out, a bit hopeful the invites would flood in.) Let me know if you know any zine stockists who’d be interested, or outlets who might spread the word—I’m already eager to start the next!

    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!

    Cheeky ad-blocker? Sign up here!

    This Month On exp.

    Subscriber Post: Alex Kidd In Miracle World (Sega, 1986)

    Unlocked Posts: Zombi (Ubisoft, 1986) / The Texas Chainsaw Massacre / Halloween (Wizard Video, 1983) / Without A Dawn (Makkonen, 2025)

    Although my last block of articles was intentionally Halloween-themed, I’d have to argue this last month really represents what I’m trying to do with exp. We have an honest look at a recent indie, articles that dig into the history of less-known video games while also offering critique, and a reappraisal of a better known title with modern eyes but still historical context. All from my very specific, personal lens—openly subjective, but hopefully enjoyable and illuminating. These articles only ever seem to take more and more time, but I’m really happy with this and I hope you are too.

    From The exp. Archive: Pursuit Force (Bigbig Studios, 2005) / Soul Sacrifice (Marvelous/Japan Studio, 2013) / What Did I Do To Deserve This, My Lord? (Acquire/Japan Studio, 2007) / Papers Please (Pope, 2013)

    Meanwhile, you can really see how much patchier my articles were in the first year of taking exp. online—there are some ones which I think really hold up (most notably Papers Please)—and then a lot of things which are more just “here’s some quick thoughts on what I just played.” Which is fine! In some respects, I always imagined this as roleplay as a game reviewer for a 80s or 90s game magazine in its pomp—lots of games to review, you don’t know what you’re going to get and have no specialisation, and you can write whatever you like. Which I suppose it still is, but now I do a bit more than open Wikipedia to pull up dates. [“Not much more…”—Ed.]

    exp. Du Cinéma

    One Battle After Another (2025)

    This feels like it was forever ago, I should endeavour to get the newsletter out a bit more often, eh? Been a fallow month for my writing on cinema (though I did make a point of promoting Harvest Brood as a top-tier Halloween viewing.)

    exp. Capsule Review

    Puzzmo Mini Crossword (Orta, Zach and Friends, 2025)

    Puzzmo has been kicking around for a year now, offering an alternative to the New York Times’ stranglehold on digital newspaper games. I kicked Wordle a long time ago because I just don’t think you can ethically engage with the NYT now, and I think that Puzzmo offers an ethical alternative (though Hearst Newspapers is involved?)

    I haven’t really engaged with Puzzmo since launch because I’ve tried to avoid filling my time with this kind of thing post-Wordle/post-stupid Marvel Snap addiction, but in October they (I think specifically Puzzle Editor Brooke Husic) put together a nice run of thirty mini crosswords that attempted to help build a budding crossword player’s abilities. I’ve been more interested in crosswords since discussing them with Chris Remo/discovering Stephen Sondheim was a fan, and while I didn’t remember to do the mini crossword every day, the ones I did I enjoyed, felt I learned something from, and didn’t take an annoying amount of time out of my day.

    The good news is that Puzzmo is continuing the minis, and so am I! While they aren’t specifically teaching you how to do them now, I think they’re still worth a shot for the crossword curious (you can reveal characters if you’re completely stuck, for example.) The only issue I really have is that they have so many settings to make input suit you, but when you’re “fixing” an answer it doesn’t work the way I’d imagine—if you have a letter in a space but start typing in the space before that, it doesn’t overwrite that space but jump over it. It’s led to a lot of garbled answers, but I suspect the way they do it is intended for crossword masters playing for speed. Maybe I’ll get there.

    Zine News

    Zine Dump

    Alright this is one of the zine fairs I was turned down for but I’m not salty. Even if you’re reading this on Sunday there’s still time! Get down to Cecil Community Center before 5 p.m.! I’m so not salty that I dropped off five copies of exp. 2600 for the community zine table that you can pick up for a bargain price if you’re quick.

    From Masher To Master 2 (Patrick Miller)

    “This book is intended to serve as your companion through your own personal journey into fighting games … only this book will help you navigate the process of becoming a fighting game player.”

    Alright, not a zine, exactly, but Patrick Miller has just released a sequel to his original From Masher To Master book (“No, you do not need to have read the first book to get the most out of this one. I highly recommend starting with this one first.”) it’s PWYC and if you have any interest in fighting games there’s no one I would trust more to guide you. And it’s reminded me that I should probably stick at least the digital version of Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 on itch.io…

    BreakSpace Issue 3

    “Featuring 58 reviews! 2-new BASIC type-ins! Interview with Gabriele Amore! Elite BASIC coding tips!”

    …and actually, maybe the zines too? I don’t know how I’ve overlooked how thriving the zine/book space is on itch.io, and I also can’t get over the labour of love that is BreakSpace, a Speccy mag with tons of content that’s completely free!

    Funland Issue 4

    “Thrills! Chills! Evil computers! Eldritch horrors! Ghouls! Goblins! Even penguins! Folks if this one doesn’t make your hair stand on end you may already be a corpse.”

    Funland really out here putting the rest of us zinesters to shame with their consistency, and if you’ve been looking for a bargain, their Halloween issue has a demonic discount and is just $6.66.

    And Finally…

    I’ve been under a lot of stress the last month or so, and one thing I’ve been slightly embarrassed about is that I’ve given into nostalgia the disease, turning to playing Youtube videos of old Amstrad CPC games in the background as a soothing balm even if—to be honest—the videos aren’t often very good. Just as I thought I was kicking the habit, here’s ChinnyVision with the best video of the lot and he didn’t even script it. A lovely personal trip through a selection of Amstrad CPC games that matter to him that, surprisingly, picks a lot of the games that mattered to me. Particular shout-outs to Trap Door, the (in my memory) superb port of Paperboy as well as some of the more well-remembered games like Sorcery+ (which terrified me) Chase HQ and Head Over Heels.

    As I suspect you have no connection to the Amstrad CPC, it might be worth a watch if you’d like to know more. One day I’m sure I’m going to be digging into the CPC’s bounty here, so you might as well do a bit of homework first.

    Next week on exp.: A game makes me ugly cry.

    1. For what it’s worth: It’s still great there’s been so many to apply to, and that the competition is so fierce. I’ll get ’em next time. ↩︎

  • Alex Kidd In Miracle World (Sega, 1986)

    Alex Kidd In Miracle World (Sega, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: Sega
    Released: 01/11/1986
    Completed: 1/09/2025
    Completion: Finished it. Save states were used (for some obvious reasons.)

    The discourse has long moved on, but a while ago there was a “revelation” that the extremely French CEOs of Sandfall (of Clair Obscur fame) and Lizard Cube (of Sega remake fame) didn’t play Nintendo growing up. This was one of those classic “Americans learn that their experience isn’t universal… and decide that’s stupid and wrong” online spats where everyone got annoyed at each other’s ignorance. Usually it’s like, learning people in another country prepare or enjoy a food in a slightly different way, and it’s always a bummer: that yes, the US believes its culture is the “normal one”, that the US view is dominant and pulls focus so much that even people in other countries might not know their own history, and that it’s never a learning experience for anyone because the urge to dunk on each other rather than celebrate a diverse history is completely overpowering.

    Which was interesting timing for me to play Alex Kidd in Miracle World. It’s really only the second time I’ve played a Master System game to write it up, having only previously played Fantasy Zone because I suddenly hungered to play a version of Fantasy Zone (because Fantasy Zone fuckin’ rules.) It’s interesting timing because the Master System, to me, represents so much about just how different video game culture is across the world, and how different people’s personal experiences of it can be.

    I mean, first of all, it wasn’t even originally the Master System, releasing in Japan in late 1985 as the Sega Mark III, where it failed to compete in really any way with the Famicom. It was then released in North America in 1986 around about the same time the NES went wide, only to get crushed by Nintendo’s stringent licensing agreements with third-party publishers, leaving it with a deeply limited game library.

    In Europe, however, it wasn’t released until 1987(!) and despite Sega managing to completely botch the UK launch, it managed to massively outsell the NES (as it would, quite famously, also do in Brazil under the Tectoy brand.) And then loads of games aimed at these specific markets would be released that wouldn’t see the light of day in Japan or the US!

    So the Master System was, and wasn’t, a success. It did, and didn’t, have loads of games and mindshare. And even on that you need to get a little more specific, because if you’re thinking about Europe things get even more fragmented. You might think “oh, it outsold the NES, so it was the biggest thing in games.” But of course, if you know anything about the era, you know the biggest thing in games there were home computers–at release it was competing with the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, even the Atari ST and the just released Amiga 500. And depending on what country you’re from, which of those was dominant could have been completely different–I’m sure for many of the developers at Sandfall and Lizardcube, the first 8-bit computer to mind is the Amstrad CPC due to its popularity in France1 [“It should be anyway”–CPC Ed.].

    Of course, they might not have an 8-bit computer to mind at all, depending on their age. Because not everyone is tiresomely playing through games before their time (ahem), and the era you came of age in has a huge effect on how you see certain things. To get personal, I don’t think I was conscious of a video game “industry” until around 1991(!)–I am pegging this, roughly, to the point when I started getting issues of Amstrad Action [“Hurrah!”–CPC Ed.]. But I’m also aware that by then my entire experience of, say, the NES was those kiosks in Currys or Dixons that let you play Fester’s Quest for literally ten seconds. I certainly never knew anyone who had one.

    Because I didn’t come of age–or at least, understanding–in the “true” 8-bit generation, the thing about the Master System that stands out to me–even as an Amstrad CPC owner in the twilight of the 8-bit systems–was that it felt like a “poverty” system.

    This might seem cruel, and indeed, incorrect. Even in the 90s the true poverty system was probably the Atari 2600–or the 7800, still being flogged in catalogues–but you have to remember one thing: Sega’s own advertising. The Mega Drive had been released in Europe in 1990, and kids were seeing adverts like this:

    It’s impossible to overstate how unbelievably cool this seemed to me as a child. A suave adult who lived in a truck with a spinning gaming chair??? You’re just going to have to trust me on this that it didn’t sound as bad then as it sounds now, because now that’s a real “hello, human resources???”

    But the point is–why would anyone want a Sega that wasn’t the Mega Drive? That wasn’t as good as the Mega Drive, a system that looked this cool? Poverty! Poverty!!!

    And it’s from this, perhaps, that you might argue Alex Kidd In Miracle World has caught a stray. Because as the in-built game on a poverty system, it just had to be rubbish. A wee game they included for people who couldn’t get any games with the system. I mean it had to be crap–it didn’t even come on its own cartridge!

    First impressions don’t help. Sure, the Master System had really bright graphics compared to the NES’s muddy browns, but the NES was a complete non-entity in the average British schoolchild’s mind. And Alex Kidd opens with probably one of the least exciting first screens ever, where you head down and immediately have to get to grips with Alex’s weird, slippery movement.

    As we know, platform game feel in 1986 wasn’t a solved problem–I’ve said it again and again that the original Super Mario Bros. just feels sort of weird–but Alex Kidd has a really slidey, sloppy feel, a little too fast in a way that looks wrong; you feel yourself sliding a collision box around rather than controlling a character, which isn’t helped by just how strict that collision box is–there are no close shaves here. Get even close to an enemy and die.

    Alex Kidd really only makes sense, at all, once you learn that the developers were literally just trying to do everything different from Super Mario Bros. to compete with it. Shmuplations comes to the rescue again with a translation of sega.jp’s meisaku interview with developer Kotaro Hayashida, where he notes that one of the most famous things about the original Alex Kidd release–that the jump and attack buttons are reversed–was done just to make it different (“when I look back on it, it’s just nonsense” he admits.)

    I mean it’s probably why you go down at first, right? Because Mario goes right, and they’re hardly going to make the game go left (for reasons. Although Alex Kidd does go left on some levels!)

    But look, it’s 2025. Let’s not get lost in our first impressions, let’s not blame a game for going out of its way to not be Super Mario Bros. and for not being cool enough to be on the Mega Drive. I mean it’s cool enough to be included in Sega Ages, getting a great Switch port with new FM soundtrack, right? So, is Alex Kidd in Miracle World any good?

    Ehhh… look, I really tried, but it’s a mess. It’s a game that absolutely feels like a group of people attempting to best Super Mario Bros. who not only didn’t understand that game, but didn’t know how to design one in the first place. Because Alex Kidd in Miracle World really feels like a completely random grab-bag of ideas outside of it featuring a wee guy who jumps around and can destroy blocks. The story is weirdly overcomplicated (The city of… Radaxian? Prince… Egle???”) and the levels don’t have any consistency.  There is some Wonder Boy DNA as you often use vehicles that work like Wonder Boy’s skateboard, and there’s even some Balloon Trip in there too, but suddenly you’ll find yourself in a somewhat non-linear castle that feels more like a Mega Man rather than a left-to-right scrolling level as usual and you’re just expected to get on with it.

    (Something that’s interesting to note, in retrospect, is how the slightly better graphics of something like Alex Kidd In Miracle World have a strange cost to them. In Super Mario Bros. you don’t mind that everything is just blocks, because there’s a consistency to the low-fidelity. In Alex Kidd, when you come to a screen with blocks designed very transparently to make you navigate them a certain way, it just looks sort of unfinished.)

    I suppose, from another perspective, you could instead see Alex Kidd as a game that’s full of surprises and variety, and I don’t think you’d be wrong. It is bright, and cheerful, and there is a charm enough to it that keeps you playing. But it never feels good to play–keeping Alex Kidd from sliding to his doom becomes unbelievably taxing in the latter stages of the game–and there are a bunch of unbelievably annoying gotchas to kill you off all over the place (I haven’t mentioned the rock-paper-sissors bosses, but they do the same thing every time, meaning you either die and redo an entire level at best, or just use save states like a person who doesn’t have time to waste.)

    So, in a weird sort of way, finally playing Alex Kidd, I have to admit that I was wrong in considering it poverty. It’s a full game that people put real effort into, not just a tossed-off pack-in, and if you’d got a Master System you’d have played the shit out of it. There was value there.

    But I’m not wrong now in thinking it isn’t very good.

    Will I ever play it again? Of course, that’s a very personal opinion! Circling back to what I was waffling on about at the start of the article, Alex Kidd is beloved enough in some cultures that it even received a full remake, Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX, by a Spanish team created explicitly to make it. And in the spirit of celebrating the wonderful diversity of video game cultures, I’ll probably play it. Why not? Alex Kidd isn’t that long, it’d be nice to see it from the idealising eyes of some Spanish lunatics.

    Final Thought: I should probably make it clearer–and god knows that I mean to go through all the essays and clear up some of the categorising details–that because I don’t consider North America to be the most important market, when I “date” a game I just use the earliest date unless there’s a really good reason not to. So for example here with Alex Kidd in Miracle World, the release date is November 1986, the Japanese release date. This feels absolutely necessary when covering games like, say, Star Soldier, which would get released literally three years later in North America rather than Japan, completely removing it from the context required to understand it.

    1. See my article on Zombi, from just last week! ↩︎
  • Zombi (Ubisoft, 1986)

    Zombi (Ubisoft, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: Ubi Soft (it used to have a space in it…)
    Released: 1986
    Completed: 28/10/2025
    Completion: Everyone escaped!

    Man. We’ve absolutely got to get access to old games sorted. I’ve talked about this previously–most notably when discussing MULE–but I think it’s good to reflect on the fact that Zombi is the first game ever released by one of the most recognisable game publishers in the world, Ubisoft, and in order to play it I had to scrabble around online to find it–and then scrabble around even longer to find it English. And then have to fiddle around with emulators because emulating old home computers is just not as plug-and-play as emulating old consoles is.

    Now, you could argue that Ubisoft might prefer that Zombi not be accessible, because one of the first things that you’ll learn about it is that it’s a completely blatant rip-off of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, to the point where–and I’ll go into more detail on this later–you actively need to know the plot of the film to understand how to progress in the game. Which makes sense, considering the game is called “Zombi”, the literal title of Dario Argento’s cut (released, fact fans, nine months before George Romero’s definitive version in non-English speaking countries.) The game was, at best, on some shaky legal ground (you’d think they’d just have ripped off Night of The Living Dead instead–no copyright issues there). For their part, Ubisoft haven’t tried to paint it out of their history–they do mention it right on their website–but its 2012 Wii U title ZombiU has absolutely no connection to it, and then re-releasing that as Zombi on Steam and elsewhere does go some to making finding their first game absolutely more of a ballache, whether that’s intentional or not.

    (It could be worse, I suppose–most of Ubisoft’s other earliest titles, such as Fer &  Flamme (“Iron & Flame”) weren’t even released in English, leaving the likes of the poor old CRPG Addict absolutely flailing.)

    As Ubisoft’s first game, it would probably serve us to dig into the founding of Ubisoft a bit, because it explains quite a lot. Ubisoft began as the Guillemot’s family business (though the family, in effect, does still control it) selling, uh, the things farmers need to farmers. The five sons of the family, however, had bigger ideas: first selling audio CDs (then a brand new technology), then computers and software, before realising that they could buy hardware and software from the UK–where it was half the price of a French distributor–and resell it on to French consumers undercutting competitors and still making a tidy profit. Before long they were engaging in a roaring trade of computer games, and so obviously decided they had to take the next step in (ahem) vertical integration: making the games themselves.

    Well, not exactly themselves, obviously. It’s not like the brothers got their hands dirty with that. As was usual for the time, they got school children to do it for them. Yannick Cadin–still a high school student, though eighteen so I am being a bit hyperbolic by calling him a child–would code the game despite having (in his own words) “never written a program of more than 100 lines in assembler”, along with graphic designer Patrick Daher and screenwriter Alexandre Bonan under Sylvie Hugonnier1, all of whom appear in Zombi as the main characters (though if Cadin looks like his video game equivalent, he’s a terrifying fellow.)

    What makes this even more interesting is that as a French company, the games that Ubisoft will have been importing will almost certainly have been for the Amstrad CPC, because the system was uniquely popular there, meaning that Ubisoft’s first game would be a CPC exclusive for several years until it’s ported to the usual suspects (Spectrum, C64, Amiga, ST, and PC.)

    As a result, I really wanted to play this through on CPC, as it was, after all, my first computer, and I so rarely have a decent excuse to play anything on it. Zombi on Amstrad CPC looks like this:

    At least, this is the version that everyone seems to have online. Intriguingly, in Retro Gamer Issue 204 there’s a claim that there were “separate versions for 64k and 128k machines (the latter benefited from more detailed graphics)” though it’s completely unsourced and I can’t find any other reference to it or difference in versions online. What’s important either way is that Zombi is an absolutely fascinating example of one of my favourite things about this era of game development, something I’ve talked about many times–the fact that genre has not ossified. There are no expectations.

    Zombi is, sort of, a dungeon crawler, with the dungeon here a shopping mall. It’s also sort of a graphic adventure, because most of the game is about collecting objects and then using them in particular ways. But, there are zombies roaming, and you have to fight them in real time, so it’s sort of an action game–maybe the first survival horror! On top of that, characters have to eat, and sleep, so it’s also sort of a pure survival game. And at the same time, it isn’t even that simple, because you have four characters, and you can use them all separately, switching between them whenever you like!

    It is a lot, an astoundingly broad game design for a teenager at a completely inexperienced company to pull off, and apparently it only took about six months (Cadin, modestly, claims it could have been done a lot faster.) What gets so interesting about it is that there seems to have been absolutely no thought taken to make anything about the way Zombi tries to pull its disparate genre ideas together match anything gamers of 1986 might have already seen.

    Now, to be fair, it is France, it is 1986, and it is the Amstrad CPC. Games such as The Bard’s Tale wouldn’t hit that system for a couple of years, so I really can’t say if the Zombi team had ever seen a first-person dungeon crawler. But if they had, they apparently rejected samey corridors to instead prioritise making each location visually unique over every other consideration, because the interface is completely bonkers.

    Most apparent will be the menu at the bottom of the screen. The Amstrad CPC didn’t have mouse as a default input, so they had to get creative, meaning that you have to scroll back and forth through a list of everything you might want to do (bafflingly, the scroll direction was backward from my input, which I imagine must be how they intended it.) That already makes doing really anything awkward. But navigating is even more insane. Rather than a “dungeon” it’s better to imagine the world of Zombi the same way as a text adventure–each screen you see is a series of rooms with distinct entrances and exits. However, the game doesn’t tell you what exits there are. While you can work some of them out by what you can see, in many cases (for example, things behind you) you have to blindly attempt moving there–and the game on CPC has absolutely no feedback when you do anything wrong. You almost can’t be sure you’ve even done anything in many cases.

    (Well, unless you’re outside, in which case you stumble into a horde of zombies and immediately die. Or if you move backwards off the mall’s balcony without a rope, and fall to your death.)

    You don’t navigate the world by doing anything sensible like moving with the arrow keys, however. Instead on screen a tiny wireframe representation of the space appears, and then you have to select what direction you go (for example, selecting the outer frame to move backwards.) It is completely inelegant in a way that somehow also feels like a stroke of genius, in that it’s arguably far clearer than movement in an early first-person dungeon crawler (think how many times you could move in those wireframes and not actually be sure you moved) but is also unbelievably clunky and frustrating.

    You can see the wireframe representation in the middle here. I’m trying to move right.

    The game has some other quirks–similarly stylistic, similarly related to developer immaturity. The game honestly looks good for the system, with a stark grey and black palette (that again makes me wonder why they didn’t go for Night of the Living Dead) and the clever decision to make anything on screen you can interact with pop with a bright blue colour. The game feels genuinely atmospheric and lonely as you creep around the dead mall, scavenging for what you need, but it does seem that they didn’t quite know how to get the zombies into the game in an exciting way. When you’re in a room with a zombie, they’re just given a portrait on the same line as your heroes portraits, and after a number of seconds you’re officially attacked. What this means is that you have to bash keys rhythmically (boo!) to beat them to death with your hands, taking damage the whole time. You can avoid this if you have a ranged weapon–you can use the gun before you’re attacked, and take part in a simple, almost golf swing-meter like system where you just have to hit the button at the right time to kill them.

    Unfortunately, navigating the menu to get to the gun in time was, for me, like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube behind my back, and so, unfortunately (and I’m not proud of it) I had to give up on the Amstrad CPC version for my own sanity. Thankfully, when the game was ported to Atari ST and Amiga four years later, Alexander Yarmitsky took over porting duties and changed the interface to something more contemporary, so I pulled up the Amiga version to try it there.

    In the ported version2 all the weird controls are replaced with, thankfully, a cursor-based system and direction arrows around the screen so movement makes more sense (well, there’s some double duty taken where “forward” and “back” also mean “up” and “down” but I’ll take it.) You can also see zombies now, who sort of… toddle across the screen so you can headshot them with the cursor before they attack you. It’s maybe too easy, but it’s certainly more engaging.

    I’d love to say that makes the Atari ST or Amiga version definitive, but… it’s in full colour! Not only does this remove all of the atmosphere, it means that you literally can’t tell where any of the interactibles are on the screen, turning what was a perfectly understandable adventure game into a baffling pixel hunt. It is… ruinous, and it really means that if you want to make sense of the game you have to use a walkthrough (and probably a map).

    This is something you’ll want to do after a while, because you’re eventually going to need something to do. If there’s one truly disappointing thing about Zombi–outside of there not being the perfect mama bear option for me, our retro game Goldilocks–it’s that as just a survival game it’s not that interesting. It’s neat to wander the level, kill the zombies, and have to eat and sleep, but there’s no incident. I think as a kid it could have been something I loved to noodle around in–there’s a lot of space for your imagination–but the CPC’s controls just kill any thought that I would have.

    When you actually intend to beat the game, it’s weirdly trivial (when it’s not tedious) as long as you can actually spot where the things you need are and know the plot of the movie. First you have to block all the entrances to the mall; then you have to kill all the zombies and put them in cold storage so they don’t reanimate (I’m not sure if you have to turn the electricity on in the basement to do this, but I did.) Once you’ve done that, the mall is immediately attacked by Hells Angels, and you just need to steal petrol from their truck for your helicopter, get in and escape. 

    If it wasn’t for having to trawl the whole map for every zombie–don’t forget you can move backwards, because I missed one and had to cover the map about three times–and then lug them down to the cold storage, only being able to carry about three at a time, this would be over in about ten minutes. But I don’t even think they made you kill and store all the zombies to pad the game out–I think it’s just because, well, that’s what happens in Dawn of the Dead, isn’t it?

    I’m not quite entirely sure how to explain it, but a raw enthusiasm for the source material shines through via touches like that, and even if functionally they’re not good game design, something about Zombi is charming. I don’t know if I recommend it as such, but I think if there was a monochrome “can see objects” version with the updated controls I actually think I would.

    At the very least, more people should know about it. I guess I’ve done my bit!

    Will I ever play it again? Come on Ubisoft, release a 40th anniversary ultimate version with the proper colours. I dare you. 

    Final Thought: If you want to play through this, the best help is (surprisingly) Amiga Action’s walkthrough, even though as an Amiga Power boy I’d never admit it. They do screw up the map a bit–they don’t distinguish between inside and outside on the first level so it’s confusing, so you might want to use it in conjunction with this other map which is, sadly, unsourced (but I assume from one of the many French CPC mags.) Or just draw around the mall interior with a pen or something. But as usual, I recommend not just jumping straight to the walkthrough–it’s more fun to noodle around first, even just the big beats I gave you above should be enough to get you through the game really if you’re willing to map it yourself.

    (Actually, that’s a lie. Even with the map and solution I usually couldn’t find where to click on most of the screens to use buttons and things without basically clicking everywhere. Sigh.)

    1. This is a bit of an assumption. Most sites explicitly state Hugonnier was director of marketing/PR, but Cadin refers to a “certain Sylvie” who “explain[d] that she was approached to set up a video game publishing house and, as she ha[d] some experience in this field, she [was to be] the director of this new company.” Surely the same person. ↩︎
    2. Well, in the ported version for Atari ST, Amiga and the ZX Spectrum. Cadin ported the PC version and doggedly stuck to his original control scheme and the Commodore 64 porting team followed his lead. Unfortunate. ↩︎

  • The Texas Chainsaw Massacre / Halloween (Wizard Video, 1983)

    The Texas Chainsaw Massacre / Halloween (Wizard Video, 1983)

    Developed/Published by: Ed Salvo (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Tim Martin and Robert Barber (Halloween) / Wizard Video Games
    Released: 1983
    Completed: 22/10/2025
    Completion: I played ‘em!

    The schedule for new articles has gone a bit squiff due to life difficulties (let’s just say: if you weren’t already a subscriber, I’d be asking you to subscribe here with big wet wobbly eyes) and I had planned to do a really interesting game–the first from a very well known company, yet it doesn’t get talked about much–this week, but it’s simply taking too long to get through. So I’m going to lean on the crutch of some crappy Atari games (not least because I only mentioned The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in my Poltergeist essay) and then of course write far, far too much about them anyway.

    I’m combining them because it’s sort of hard to talk about them separately without repeating yourself relating their provenance, which relates very much to the absurdities of the pre-’83 gold rush and the resulting fallout.

    It begins with Games by Apollo, a company formed purely as cash grab by someone with no knowledge of video games–unusual at the time, but surely not the first, and absolutely not the last. That company would have its own “gang of four”-esque exodus led by Ed Salvo (who would go on to develop The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) because the company was apparently so mismanaged: The founder, Pat Roper, grew the company beyond its means to compete with Activision, and frustrated with traffic in Dallas got distracted with a plan to create two-person helicopters(???) Within a few weeks of the exodus the company collapsed.

    Somewhat desperate to get their fledgling company, Video Software Specialists (VSS) off the ground, a very strange saviour would swoop in, obviously attempting to cash-in in what was–by then–a rapidly collapsing market: Charles Band’s Wizard Video.

    If you’re familiar with Charles Band by this point, it’s probably due to his relentless, desperate exploitation of whatever IP he happens to have to hand and can make something as cheaply as possible with. Perhaps you’ve seen one of his eight (eight!) Evil Bong movies [“Don’t forget the Gingerweed Man spin-off.”–Ed.] or one of the fifteen (fifteen!) Puppet Master films? [“At least some of those are… ok?”–Ed.]

    At the time however, most of those films were but a twinkle in Band’s eye, and Wizard Video was his home video distribution company through which he was able to distribute titles such as (yes) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. On Band’s own website he describes the decision to get into video games thus:

    “A forward thinking company, Wizard foresaw the potential for massive growth in home video gaming and produced adaptations of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and HALLOWEEN for the Atari 2600, which were in effect the very first horror console video games ever released.”

    I genuinely love the use of “in effect” there, because they absolutely weren’t, and they literally chose to do this while the market was crashing, which makes the portrayal even funnier.

    Either way, it seemed that Band’s idea was to exploit the IP of the most popular videos they’d been distributing, and try and make hay with the fact that these were adult video games (Mystique’s “Swedish Erotica” games had come out the year earlier.) There were three planned games, and ironically the most adult, Flesh Gordon–based on the 1974 sex comedy–would never see the light of day with not even a prototype found1. The other two games would however, with both The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween seeing release at some point in 1983–seemingly close to the Halloween season if we can base that off the timing of contemporary review (we probably can’t).

    The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

    According to Ed Salvo, this was developed in “about six weeks” and he told Digital Press that he was “not real proud of this one, but we had to eat.” Which is actually a change of tune, because in 1983 he wasn’t even willing to admit he’d worked on it, with an aside in the announcement of the title and Flesh Gordon in the Feb 1983 Videogaming Illustrated stating:

    “We were asked–make that begged–by the designer of these Atari-compatible cartridges not to reveal his/her name. We won’t.”

    (They actually hint that you can work out who it was by reading the previous issue, but I couldn’t. I found this funny quote from Bette Davis though?)

    Frankly, it’s completely fair that he wouldn’t want anyone to know he worked on this, because it’s absolutely terrible, even by the low bar set by any Atari 2600 game (buy exp. 2602, etc.) As Leatherface, you run right (or left, doesn’t matter) to chase “tourists”, trying to avoid fences, thickets (makes sense) cow skulls (ok) and wheelchairs (lol) to catch up so you can chainsaw them to death. 

    There’s supposed to be some tactics to this; your chainsaw is constantly idling, creating a timer via remaining fuel and when you actually run the chainsaw the fuel runs out faster–and you only get extra fuel for a certain number of successful kills. But it doesn’t work at all, because there’s no meaning in which direction you run as tourists always appear, and then when you try and chainsaw them they… teleport behind you? Repeatedly?

    There may be some kind of timing aspect to starting your chainsaw otherwise they “dodge” you–but I couldn’t work out the timing at all. Worse, probably, is getting stuck on one of the obstacles, where you get awkwardly frozen for what feels like an age. The wheelchairs that fly onto the screen are very very funny–clearly one of the few things they pulled from the film, which apparently they hadn’t even seen before getting the contract–but it’s otherwise just annoying.

    The game also has a bizarre coda when you lose all your lives: one of the tourists runs onto the screen and appears to kick Leatherface in the balls. It made me laugh the first time I saw it, but it does, well, make a mockery of the whole thing.

    I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this game was originally planned to be a touch more in-depth–because you can move left and right, I assume they were planning a kind of Defender-like system where you had to run around the level getting all the tourists to then move onto the next, but in six weeks they just ran out of time or (more likely) just couldn’t be arsed because they knew they were shoving out a dog to a company that didn’t know what it was doing during a historic market crash.

    Halloween

    Ed Salvo, again via Digital Press, notes that although this was produced by VSS, it was actually contracted out to a couple of different ex-Games By Apollo developers, Tim Martin and Robert Barber. It’s possible that these names ring a bell if you’re a real old-head, as they’re two of the founders of MicroGraphic Image, and there they would develop the beloved (sort of!) and influential (also sort of!) Spelunker!

    As with VSS and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the money from Halloween allowed Martin and Barber to found MicroGraphic Image along with a fellow called Cash Foley [“when you riffle a stack of paper against a microphone”–Sound Dept. Ed.] and all three would develop Spelunker.

    I think there’s something very serendipitous about the shlockmeister Charles Band indirectly helping the creation of one of the most infamous “kusoge” (and to be honest, that’s the kind of thing that he should trumpet on his website rather than statements that aren’t vague enough to not be obviously incorrect.) Unfortunately, the company wouldn’t last too long even with his largesse; the reason Spelunker is so well known is that it was ultimately sold off to Brøderbund at which point (sadly) Barber and Foley’s names would fall off the marquee. Foley explained on his blog:

    “Spelunker was Tim’s original idea and programmed the game logic. When the game was released, we made a strategic decision to put Tim name out front.  Besides, we were all convinced this was the first of many games and we would all have our turn.”

    Sadly, they didn’t, and Martin and Barber don’t seem to have discussed their time developing Halloween online at all, so I am stuck, as usual, with a lot of supposition and my own interpretation. Foley, for what it’s worth, says:

    “The game was really very good considering the restrictions of the the Atari 2600 and was ahead of its time in content and usage of the Halloween theme music.”

    I’m gonna say he’s being too kind here–although I do think he’s more or less correct about the music.

    With The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I’m really stretching to say that they had plans for the game beyond what you see, but with Halloween there is, genuinely, an actual attempt at game design, and it almost works.

    The screen shows two levels of a house, in which you (in this case an unnamed babysitter) must navigate to find children that you are attempting to rescue from the (also weirdly unnamed) “killer” (you know, Michael Myers2.)

    To do this, you can move through the house left or right, and go into doors which teleport you to another room. When you see a kid, you can press the fire button, at which point they “lock” to you as if you’re holding hands, allowing you to run to the “safe rooms” at the end of each house where Michael won’t show up (there’s no reason given for this, and I wonder if akin to The Empire Stikes Back, they simply didn’t have space to add graphics to make this make sense–like bundling the kids out of the house via a window, or something.) In the safe rooms the doors more obviously move you between the top/bottom levels, which isn’t that important in the game as released, but I imagine felt more important in the game as designed.

    While this is going on, Michael is pursuing you in an amusingly relentless way. I don’t know for sure, but I assume he just spawns from a random screen entrance within a random range of time, meaning that you can run off a screen where he was and have him appear from the other side of the screen within a couple of seconds. Each time he appears a honestly decent (for Atari 2600) recreation of the Halloween theme plays, and you know what? It’s effective! You want to get the fuck off that screen! Immediately!

    Against Michael you have only a few tactics. Obviously, there’s running away. Alternatively, you can try and juke him; if you’re leading a kid, you can let go so you can dodge and then try and grab the kid again, which is high risk. Rarely, you might find a knife in the level, which allows you a very short range stab that can hit Michael if you can get the timing right. It doesn’t give you any extra downtime or anything, but it’s worth points.

    As I’ve said, as a game this almost, sort of, works. Collect kids, avoid the enemy, occasionally get the chance to turn the tables. Unlike The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, even the deaths are rewarding–the babysitter and even the kids(!) get decapitated with a wee Atari blood spray, and there are other touches that show that they seemed to be invested in making something, you know, actually good: some rooms have “electrical blackouts” so the light flicks on and off–you might find yourself in the room, see nothing, have the lights go out, and Michael suddenly appear. That’s fun!

    The problem is that there isn’t really a good solution to the game design’s one obvious flaw: you can get stuck running back and forth between rooms trying to avoid Michael when you’re trying to rescue a child, as he will repeatedly spawn in front of you. Obviously, you’re supposed to juke him; but in practice, it’s much easier to run away and hope that the random number generator will work in your favour, giving you enough time that he spawns behind you instead. 

    It’s possible that players who spent a lot of time with this game did get the dodging down pat and get something out of it–E.C. Meade in a contemporary review in Videogaming & Computergaming Illustrated surprisingly called it a “wonderful game”–but there’s just not quite enough here. Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it needed to be a Defender-like succession of levels with a set amount of children to rescue and with punishment for letting Michael kill them for this to really pop.

    But at least there’s an actual idea here. In fact, if you wanted to be really generous you could say this still prefigures things like Clock Tower or the immortal enemies in things like the Resident Evil franchise, or even the hand-holding of Ico. I mean, I wouldn’t go that far, but you could.

    Will I ever play them again? Oh my no.

    Final Thought: But whither controversy? Interesting to note that although E.C. Meade was a fan of Halloween–though cooler on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre–his co-reviewer Jim Clark was much more prudish. On Halloween he stated “It takes a sick human to enjoy this sick game” although weirdly he found The Texas Chainsaw Massacre “marginally less offensive.”

    A few months later Phillip Edwards of Fresno CA would send in a letter to Videogaming & Computergaming Illustrated to say “Make no mistake about it, the games Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween are harmful and dangerous. A disgrace. Jim Clark’s reviews and perceptive insights were right on.”

    But that seems to be about it!

    1. Amusingly, at AtariProtos.com the (anonymous, but possibly Ed Salvo?) programmer claims that Wizard Video stole the near-final version and intended to publish it without paying. ↩︎
    2. What’s annoying here is that they could have referred to him as “The Shape” as in the film’s credits. But I suppose that might have been confusing for Atari 2600 gamers expecting an actual cube or triangle or something, considering that’s what most of the fucking games look like. ↩︎
  • Without A Dawn (Makkonen, 2025)

    Without A Dawn (Makkonen, 2025)

    Developed/Published by: Jesse Makkonen
    Released: 19/05/2025
    Completed: 14/10/2025
    Completion: +++ +++ +++ +++ +++

    [This article includes a major spoiler for Without A Dawn and reference to self-harm. It’s short, so you may wish to play it first, though I will admittedly go on to explain that I don’t recommend you do.]

    Vibes.

    Horror is so much about vibes.

    I know that’s is pretty much baby’s first media literacy, but I was lucky enough to see a work in progress of Joe Meredith’s latest film, Harvest Brood, as part of my buddy Justin Decloux’s 24-Hour Horror Movie Mind Melter, and I’ve been thinking about it because I was so blown away by Meredith’s careful curation of vibe. Despite an obviously low budget, the film uses the SOV (“shot on video”) aesthetic to mix imagery of post-industrial suburban America, “true-crime” documentary talking heads/rostrum camera, and goopy lo-fi gore to create something genuine and unsettling. Something that lingers; a perfect movie to watch in the wee small hours, eyelids drooping, losing connection between what’s real and isn’t. Drifting off, perhaps, into your own reverie of deserted strip malls at dusk, or the feel of damp leaves underfoot as you trudge past suburban homes decked out in Halloween decorations, only to awaken confused or distressed.

    This feeling–the space between the real of the awake and the disordered unreality of sleep, is explored in Finnish developer Jesse Makkonen’s visual novel Without A Dawn, and a preoccupation he’s had across his releases in titles such as Silence Of The Sleep and Afterdream. The visuals, however, of Without A Dawn are immediately arresting, with stark, limited palette pixel art filtered to appear as writhing ASCII art, not so much “All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead” as symbolic of the fog of slumber, that our visual processing can be so easily scrambled by our own systems.

    But vibes are not visual alone.

    A short game–I was surprised to find it the shortest I’ve played this year, even when compared to games such as Cyrano–Without A Dawn concentrates on an unnamed character who has cut themselves off and retired to a remote cabin as a form of escape, but finds themselves troubled, unable to sleep, questioning: did I see something? Is something strange happening, or is it all in my head?

    There are a variety of styles of visual novels, and Without A Dawn takes the most restrictive path, as a nearly completely linear experience with no major branching. There are only a couple of situations in where you even get a choice that doesn’t lead straight back to the same options if you don’t select the “right” answer, and while I do think it’s intentional–the game is about a creeping inevitability, about the illusion of choice–even in such a short game it’s quickly transparent that your choices are meaningless and it’s immediately unrewarding to even have to do them (real “why bother asking if you know what the answer is?” hours.) 

    I think it more than edges the game towards problematic, too, because what it treats as inevitable is… suicide. Now, whether or not it is I think you could debate–perhaps it’s no more real than anything else–but I think it’s just as easy to say I’m soft-pedalling here, it reads clearly as such and even goes so far to reward the player with a climax with an abstract beauty, ultimately telling them this was the “right choice”.

    It feels dangerous. Even if you retry, the game makes it clear that you will, ultimately, never be able to resist or escape it. The only thing the protagonist is allowed to do is end it.

    Like VILE: Exhumed, Without A Dawn struggles with the problem horror often does: what are you actually trying to say? Vibes are not just aesthetic; it is to find a frequency that harmonises with our understanding of the world, and in horror it must find that frequency to create the discord that unsettles us. In Without A Dawn, the inevitability feels false, it feels authored, because it gives the player no real way to fight it. It simply doesn’t ring true, and as a result the game collapses. Particularly disingenuously, as soon as the game ends, the developer appears–still clothed in the game’s creepy aesthetic–to directly ask you if you’ve enjoyed the game and if you’ll give it a review. It’s utterly immersion-smashing, and makes you feel like he hasn’t taken anything he’s shown you seriously. Horror vibes and suicide chic as product, first and foremost, rather than being about anything at all.

    When writing about a smaller game, I want to err towards forgiving. But Without A Dawn isn’t merely hollow, or frustratingly uninteractive; it’s ill-considered to the point of negligence. 

    Will I ever play it again? Absolutely not.

    Final Thought: I hope that Meredith will be able to complete and release Harvest Brood soon, a work where vibes are in service of an exploration of a uniquely American decay. I also hope the trailer convinces you to keep it on your radar:

    Update (28/10/2025): Harvest Blood is available online now, and you can watch it, in full, on Youtube for free!

  • One Battle After Another (2025)

    One Battle After Another (2025)

    Been thinking about this one a lot since I saw it, rolling it around and considering if it’s worth giving my take on it, but I keep coming back to my frustrations with it in the face of what feels like a weirdly universal uncritical praise, so I guess I can’t keep my mouth shut.

    The thing I keep thinking about, really, is how incredible the middle of this film is. The entire segment where we see real community action at work, as Benecio Del Toro’s Sergio St. Carlos leads us through their worst case scenario–an aggressive immigration raid–with efficiency, thought and care right down to his interactions with individuals. It is beautiful, moving, a masterful piece of film-making, and I think almost certainly going to be one of the very best things I saw this year.

    It’s what makes it so frustrating to me that the rest of the film’s treatment of activism and fascism is so… hacky, and that it’s been given such a pass. Paul Thomas Anderson is a filmmaker who doesn’t mistake setting for story, but here I do think he does our current moment a disservice, whether or not the reflection is mere happenstance.

    I feel like Anderson views (for example) the opening sequences of revolutionaries as “inspired by” or within the spectrum of the blaxploitation era, but I find something so… unpleasant about a well-off, successful white man writing black revolutionaries as largely ineffectual thrill-seekers who get off on their notoriety, considering the actual era contained movies of revolutionary power such as The Spook Who Sat By The Door (a movie Anderson must be familiar with.) I’m not offended by the image of him giggling behind his MacBook as he writes out a character called “Junglepussy” but isn’t it just sort of… embarrassing to sit there watching the result, however well made?

    Potentially not as embarrassing for all involved as his later treatment of the “revolution”. Look, I know we all hate two-factor authentication but the password stuff has to be some of the direst “student revolutionaries should get a job” hack comedy possible. Absolute fucking baby food for the smug middle-class cunts that are the general audience for a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. And the “Christmas Adventurers Club” stuff isn’t much better. We were all happy to see Kevin Tighe, but abdicating the responsibility for fascism to small groups of white men in hidden backrooms when we know it happens via large groups of white men in front of our fucking eyes sucks. As many people have pointed out, the most chilling character in the movie is the military guy who dispassionately, chillingly dismantles a group of teenagers, and he’s a non-professional actor who was actually in Homeland Security.

    [takes breath]

    Anyway, while I’m at it, and while you’re potentially  rolling your eyes at how humourless I am, facial disfigurement as a punchline can also fuck off. And the ending being our main characters enjoying consumerism and a weak sort of “it’s up to the next generation” beat? What was I saying about baby food for middle-class cunts?

    It all, ultimately, makes the claim that this film is some sort of actual political statement feel like wish-casting from both the leftist cinéaste and the right wing chud. It’s the setting for a story about family, and that’s about it. I wish it wasn’t so ironic and detached, but at least it’s not about how much he wanted to fuck his art teacher again.

    But as I said, I think about the middle of this movie all the time, and I loved the payoff in the climax (even if I did get a little tired of the undulations, sorry.) I respect the craft, but I guess with PTA for me it always comes down to if I’m buying what he’s selling rather than just appreciating what he’s doing. Here? Not so much.

    Follow Mathew on Letterboxd.

  • The Insert Credit Show #410: Games Somerton

    The Insert Credit Show #410: Games Somerton

    Writer and developer Mathew Kumar guest hosts the panel, covering the Balatro of coin flips, Bitmap Books bad decisions, and especially crude actions performed by Rabbids.

    With my podcasting setup warmed up, I make my triumphant return to the Insert Credit Show… as host!? Highlights include actual coin-flipping and bending the show’s format to my evil whims by making the panel design games based on the names of Matt Farley and Charles Roxburgh films.

    It’s not being shared directly via my patreon, so listen over at insertcredit.com, watch on YouTube, or you can subscribe to the show (and you should) via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and so on. You can get involved on the Insert Credit forums to discuss the episode too.

    Full show notes

  • The exp. Dispatch #11

    The exp. Dispatch #11

    They’re here, and they’re gorgeous. Apologies to everyone who has been waiting for a dispatch notification for exp. 2602 or the reprints, but due to a Canada Post strike I’ve been unable to send them out. It’s been unfortunate timing, but I support the strikes—the workers are standing up to a predatory capitalist political class undermining an essential public good. Issues will begin being dispatched next week, though delivery may be slow due to the continuing rotating strike. The PDF/ePub editions will be sent out at the same time (though those will be instant, obviously.) Thank you so much to everyone for their patience on this.

    If you haven’t ordered yet, now is the perfect time! Pick up exp. 2602 or the full set over at the shop in the next couple of days and they’ll be included in the first batch of orders sent out.

    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!

    Cheeky ad-blocker? Sign up here!

    Recently On exp.

    Subscriber Post: Poltergeist (Tandy, 1982)

    Decided I wanted to celebrate the Halloween season the same way I celebrate the Christmas season: by adding yet more fucking obscure games to my backlog and then writing way too much about them.

    Unlocked Posts: Pipistrello And The Cursed Yoyo (Pocket Trap, 2025) / Castlevania (Konami, 1986) / Elechead (Namatakahashi, 2021)

    My Halloween theming began with Castlevania, though Pipistrello is a bit of a edge case (there’s a curse, and you play a bat?) Worth mentioning that as I write this Elechead is 50% off on Steam and well worth it.

    From The exp. Archive: Wipeout 2048 (Studio Liverpool, 2012) / Rymdkapsel (Grapefrukt, 2013) / Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse (Sega, 1990) / Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse (Sega, 2013)

    Quite a grab-bag here again, with the Wipeout 2048 article that was at one point the most popular article I’d written for exp., a look at a game I wished was a Roguelike-like before we all got tired of everything being a Roguelike-like, and then that weekend where I played both Castle of Illusion games and thought they were… fine.

    exp. Du Cinéma

    Subscriber Post: Still Family #11: Fast X

    I was invited on to the Still Loading Podcast to talk about the Fast & Furious franchise (specifically the currently final film), and the host Josh let me share it with my own Patreon patrons as well. So if you’ve got a hankering to listen to me waffle for nearly three hours, go wild!

    Also reviewed: Kneecap (2024) / Billy Connolly: Big Banana Feet (1977)

    Zine News

    poster by zine maker / artist Cort Hartle. Printing and distribution encouraged by the artist!

    Antler River RPG Trade: 8 Points to Buck Up Your Games!

    “100% of the proceeds of Antler River will be donated to the Homelessness Program of the Elgin-Middlesex United Way.”

    Saw this one covered at the CBC of all places.

    A Decadent Day

    “A zine of three recipes, developed over the last eight months, for a breakfast, dinner, and dessert cooked exclusively in an 8-inch cast iron skillet.”

    As a vegetarian I can’t recommend all of these recipes, but I can recommend skipping the meat or subbing in your favourite alternative. Plus there’s a pretty neat tofu dessert here.

    Mutual Aid

    Legendary game developer Rebecca Heineman, whose work includes The Bard’s Tale (which I only wrote about recently) but honestly just so many things, has been diagnosed with adenocarcinoma and is facing huge bills for her treatment, because… America. Support if you can.

    And Finally…

    A couple of things this week. First up I’ve been obsessed with with the big strong boys of Haha, You Clowns since I discovered it, and with a HBO Max show hitting next week, the best time to get caught up on creator Joe Cappa’s original shorts is now. It would be easy to say “the joke is that there is no joke” but what makes the shorts so captivating is how they explore just how strange it is to try and act normally while living with grief, and it ends up very, very funny as a result. I love it.

    Secondly, I adored Majuular’s ridiculously long retrospective on Ultima VII: The Black Gate, and he just put out a video on the sequel, Serpent Isle. I have a tremendous warmth to these two Ultima games in particular, and I think Majuular explains very well why they’re so unique and special, so I loved getting to spend another 6-odd hours(!) in the world with a fella who seemed to love them as much as I did.

    Next week on exp.: The scariest thing of all… more of my voice.

  • Still Family #11: Fast X

    Still Family #11: Fast X

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  • Poltergeist (Tandy, 1982)

    Poltergeist (Tandy, 1982)

    Developed/Published by: Unknown / Tandy
    Released: 1982
    Completed: 02/10/2025
    Completion: Well… I saw all three levels.

    Before we get into the article: you can pre-order a copy of exp. 2602, my brand new zine, right now. If you haven’t picked up any issues yet, there’s a discounted bundle of all three zines! Patreon members get an even bigger discount: subscriptions start at just $1!

    It’s October, which means it’s a time of spooks, Draculas, werewolves, and finally getting to wear that light coat you love. Since writing about Castlevania, I thought it might be fun to spend the rest of October with a bit more of a focus on the Halloween season the way I do for Christmas, but I was quickly struck by a key difference between the seasons: in the Christmas season, everything “Christmassy” actively relates to, or features, Christmas. A “Christmas movie” has Christmas in it–even if it’s completely tangential to the plot, it’s at the very least set during the season. But during the Halloween season, we really don’t need everything to relate directly to Halloween. Sure there’s your, well, Halloweens, your Ernest Scared Stupids, but no one is making a case that you include films that just happen to feature Halloween as “the best Halloween movie” that everyone should watch every year–well, unless there’s someone out there with Die Hard-like passion for Marriage Story, or something.

    What we instead require is that our Halloween content be, well, scary. Or at least a little unsettling. So it felt like it wouldn’t really make sense for me to limit anything I played this month to things that were directly Halloweeny, and instead just nose around the horror genre and pull up anything I found interesting or surprising. Which is how I ended up playing Poltergeist for the TRS-80 Color Computer.

    I’ll be honest–I know absolutely nothing about the TRS-80 Color Computer. In fact, I assumed it was a version of the TRS-80, which would make sense, but it’s actually a completely different system. So it’s not the system that made me think to boot up Poltergeist. I decided to look at it because I think like many people, I particularly associate this season with horror movies, and it just seemed utterly surprising to see that one of the biggest films of 1982–directed by Tobe Hooper, produced by Steven Spielberg–somehow had a game exclusive for a computer that, at this point, is pretty poorly remembered. 

    It gets even more surprising when you consider that 1982 is pretty much ground zero for the movie tie-in. Sure, there have been licensed games before–read all about Superman in exp. 2602!–but in 1982 suddenly movie tie-ins, and Spielberg tie-ins specifically, become big business, with Raiders Of The Lost Ark and (unfortunately) E.T. showing up.

    It wasn’t just Spielberg getting in on the action: we’ve got The Empire Strikes Back for Atari 2600, Star Trek: The Motion Picture for Vectrex, multiple Tron games, even an adaptation of Fantastic Voyage, a movie from 1966! Poltergeist really is an outlier, however, by being released on a home computer where the market lent far more hobbyist. The TRS-80 Color Computer–known fondly as the CoCo–would eventually be popular enough to have several magazines that covered it, but at the time of Poltergeist’s release only The Rainbow would exist, and it really wasn’t much more than a fanzine (no shade!)

    I can’t find anything about Poltergeist in it, or anywhere else, so the game, outside of my direct experience of it, is a bit of a mystery. What I do know is the game is an early example (maybe the earliest) of the bread-and-butter of the movie tie-in: the “each level is a minigame that reflects something you know from the film” thing that most famously Ocean Software would run into the ground.

    On the first level, you’re running around what looks like a Mondrian but its actually a suburb, with the goal of collecting the things that will allow you to rescue Carol Anne (sorry, I didn’t go over the plot of Poltergeist: a wee lassie gets sucked into a telly and she needs to be rescued. There.) It would be over-selling this segment to call it a maze game–it’s no Pac-Man, not even Head On, as you run around the grid avoiding cars by ducking into driveways to grab items like towels that maybe have some importance in the film (can’t remember.) I suppose it’s the early 80s so there aren’t speedbumps and signs saying “Twenty’s Plenty” everywhere, because every car is going maximum speed and will kill you, which, I mean, I think I’d probably want to move out even if there weren’t ghosts. Especially with a madman running around stealing very ordinary items from people’s houses.

    Thankfully, if you just hold down the fire button when the level loads and keep holding it the cars never spawn–up to you if you want to abuse it, but it can be quite annoying to get killed by a car because you have to go near the edge of the screen.

    The second level is sort of a Frogger-a-like, where you (some disembodied footprints) have go up the stairs, avoiding, uh, holes, pretzels(?) and the poltergeist itself, which makes a direct line for you. You basically just have to roast it up the stairs, and be lucky–you can’t hang around waiting for the right opening.

    The third level is… confusing. Is it supposed to maybe represent, like, flying through the television? (It’s just described as an “energy field” in the manual.) Faces fly towards you that you have to shoot before they pass you using an annoying gunsight that fights you, and that you can’t shoot too early because one of them will be Carol Anne (represented by a wee stick figure) who you obviously can’t shoot. And that’s it.

    This is, obviously, rubbish. And barely representative of the thing it’s based on. I suppose we could be impressed by the last level, but it’s barely the level of Starship on the Atari 2600, and close to impossible (for the amount of effort I wanted to put in, anyway.) I find it really hard to believe this could have entertained anyone for very long at all–and if you do get good enough to finish the third level (something it looks like only one person on Youtube has ever managed) all you get is a bit of text saying the house is clean–which is at least a direct reference to the film, I suppose.

    Poltergeist feels like a film that if you were going to adapt it you’d rather do something like a text adventure in the era, but it does seem (from my little research) that games on the CoCo tended towards arcade experiences, which probably explains why this is what it is. I suspect, also, that each level is just whatever the programmer had lying around that they’d been noodling on with the explanation bolted on after. I can’t imagine Spielberg was too impressed–if he ever saw this–and to be fair, neither am I.

    Will I ever play it again? My promise to you: I’ll boot this up if I’m ever hanging out with Steven Spielberg.

    Final Thought: Weirdly the era was not just Spielberg adaptation heavy but Hooper-heavy, with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre showing up on Atari 2600 within months!