This week in the exp. Dispatch we’ve got an exclusive PICO-8 capsule review, an exp. Du Cinéma that didn’t feel long enough to give its own post, as well as all the usual week’s round-up and zine links. Incredible value!!!
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This week on exp.
Subscriber Post: Despelote (Cordero/Valbuena, 2025)
Panic would probably not be best pleased that I turned another article on something they published into a rumination on the place of AI in creativity, but I’m proud of this one. I really think it’s worth subscribing for!
Unlocked Post: Super Xevious: GAMP No Nazo (Namco, 1986)
Last call on this meme. Last call!
From The exp. Archives: Thomas Was Alone (Mike Bithell, 2012)
On one hand, I think it’s good I have this record of games I’ve played. On the other hand, I have no recollection of playing this at all, so does it matter that I did?
exp. Capsule Reviews
Dino Sort (Adam Atomic, 2025)
I wrote about getting into PICO-8 games recently by way of Adam Atomic’s Prince of Prussia and owning a Chinese emulation handheld (a subscriber exclusive) and Adam recently dropped Dino Sort which I don’t think I can justify an entire post for, so isn’t it brilliant I have this newsletter now?
Anyway, Dino Sort is a brilliant wee game where you shuffle around dinosaurs to get them into the right positions based on their personal requirements (e.g. “don’t put me next to a predator”) very much in the style of Rush Hour. There are 26 designed puzzles which will probably take you, I don’t know, forty-five minutes to polish off or something, and though it will require some logic and lateral thinking, it’s good because at least I never ended up in one of those situations where untangling all my dinosaurs was going to be annoying or impossible the way it would be in a Sokoban game or something (god I hate Sokoban.)
Also as someone who actually hates when a puzzle game has a billion puzzles–the “infinite pizza” problem, you eventually get sick of even pizza–I loved that this was something I could pick up, play and put down, but if you really wanted to keep playing this, you can because it generates a daily puzzle every day. They’re of varying quality, but just think, you could play it every day instead of doing a Wordle, because The New York Times can fuck off.
exp. Du Cinéma
Pee-Wee As Himself (2025)
Pee-Wee—or should I say, Paul Reubens—has had an outsized influence on culture more than people give him credit for, deeply affecting the brains of a generation of millennials (my brain included) and helping define kitsch as a force in the 80s and 90s. He deserves his flowers, and as praised as this documentary has been, I can’t help but find it a bit… slight.
Archive footage is catnip for me, and there’s absolutely hunners of it here, but you get the sense here that either due to the loss of Reubens or his intransigence they couldn’t quite pull this together into something that feels complete. It limits itself to a chonological telling of Reubens’ life and struggles to make connections to knit anything close to a statement together.
(I wonder if they had plans to build to Reubens walking around a museum of all the things he’d collected as a physical representation of his life, but even that I question.)
For someone with as complicated a life (and who is actively passive aggressive here!) the attempt at haigography comes across as disingenuous. It just seems wrong to portray (for example) Phil Hartman in such a one-sided fashion, or to gloss over the idea that people might be fair in feeling that the original Pee-Wee show was created by a collective and Reubens maybe didn’t treat a lot of people well on the way up.
But in turn, his personal and legal troubles aren’t given the depth you’d expect either—especially considering his final statement makes it clear how one in particular so deeply coloured his later life. It almost feels as uncomfortable as Reubens in discussing it. He was stitched up! You may have to go into uncomfortable detail to exonerate him, but why hold back? Interrogate it!
Maybe it’s fine. Like all of us, Paul Reubens was messy and incomplete, so it makes as much sense as anything for this documentary to be the same. This is just what people are. They leave us, and maybe you try and dig through what they left and try and make sense of it. But better, I think, to enjoy what they gave you while they were alive.
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Other Zines
Did you know it’s International Zine Month? Well it is.
Between the Scanlines – Issue Thirty-Three
“Wi-fi connected C64s, epic 90s sci-fi 4X, Dreamcast 9.9.99 memories from James Webster, and John Bunday l shares his love for Streets of Rage 3!”
BreakSpace – Issue One
“Presenting issue 1 of the World’s Cheapest ZX Spectrum magazine … This inaugural Springtime edition covers games released in Q1 2025.”
And Finally…
Doujinshi are essentially zines, so I suppose I could just have put this in the “Other Zines” section, but I tremendously enjoyed reading this ROMchip translation of Hiromasa Iwasaki’s 2024 doujinshi Legend 7: Why Do 2D Games Usually Go to the Right?
It’s really one of those things that, if you know anything about video game development, actually seems really obvious, but you’ve probably never thought about in detail before. Officially sad now that I didn’t know about this zine before so I could have been hunting out copies of it (though I’d struggle to read much of it in the original language.) But better late than never.
Next week on exp.: I jump a little bit forward from GAMP No Nazo in 1986, and a winner is me!
