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  • How To Play NUTMEG! (Sumo Digital, 2026)

    How To Play NUTMEG! (Sumo Digital, 2026)

    I’ve been playing Nutmeg! Sumo Digital’s “Nostalgic Deckbuilding Football Manager” during the World Cup and enjoying it a great deal, but I found it difficult to get into originally due to a tutorial I didn’t quite get and the game’s extreme (if charming) skeuomorphic UI. The game actually has quite a simple rhythm to it and the actual deckbuilder—once you understand what it’s doing—is fun rather than frustratingly random, so I thought rather than just post up a review of it I could immediately recommend it and explain how to play it rather than have you waste half a season not sure what you’re doing. Of course, working that out might be part of the fun for you—I might be making it too easy for you here—but this is a solid foundation to play the game from, I think.

    The Management Bit

    So, the thing about Nutmeg! is that even though it’s a deckbuilder, it’s not really what you’re going to spend most of your time doing. You will, ultimately, be doing a lot of managing a football team, trying to manage costs, buy and train players, and give yourself the best chance of winning as many games as possible as you only play one card game out of five matches.

    (If you like you can play every match by choosing “marathon mode” but one of the most important things you need to understand is that you just aren’t going to win every match, and especially in the early game while you’re slopping about in the fourth division that’s going to be quite deflating. You want to choose the games where you think playing will give you the edge.)

    The game is played on a month-to-month basis. Each month you’ll play five games–possibly a sixth if the Egg Cup is on–and you can see your “edge” in each match, so you can work out which games you can delegate because you’ll probably win, or delegate because it’s a “scheduled loss” or play to win.

    At the start of each and every month, you’ve got a lot of housekeeping to do. First, check your “To-Do” list (the highlighter on the board.)

    • This has a few things you need to do in order to get a free booster pack of cards. You want this booster pack, especially if you’re trying to drag a crap team up. The things it asks are pretty simple, and if you follow this guide you’ll know how to do them. Some, like winning games, are sadly a bit of luck unless you want to save-scum, but the main one you have to watch out for are the media interview requirements: you’re more likely to get them when you win games by a lot of goals, so you might want to broadcast some games you’re favoured in.

    Now you want to go straight to the magazine on the table.

    • You want to check if you have the best staff possible. The game has three kinds of staff: coaches, support and office.
      • All staff can provide “recipes” which are necessary for the deckbuilding portion of the game. In my opinion this is a major priority: you want as many of the right recipes as possible. You may wish to keep a slightly weaker staff member for the recipe(s) they offer.
      • Coaches train players and ensure you have the right kind of cards for the deckbuilding game: defence, control, attack, goalkeeping, and stamina.
      • Support includes assistant coaches, which you want a lot of as soon as you have any players who have skills, as they are the only way to train those skills. There are scouts, who find players and give you their information. Other support include psychologists and nutritionists and things like that, who help with morale, provide half-time boosts and may need to be unlocked by building facilities.
      • Office staff are things like accountants and recruiters who help with your budget or help find better coaches and other staff. A good recruiter seems very worth the money.
      • There’s no downside to firing staff and hiring new staff on a month-to-month basis, so just always have the best staff you can!
    • You want to check the transfer market. Use your scout to scope out any player that catches your eye that you can afford (you can’t go into debt buying players) and hope they have some skills. You want players with skills!
      • When buying a player you need to make an offer, with a percentage chance of it succeeding. You only get one chance, so work out how much you want them. You may wish to make promise like playing in the first eleven or training to snag them–and when you’re poor, that will be necessary. But it becomes a ball ache later when the player simply isn’t good enough any more because you’ve gone up a division–you’re at the mercy of the market if you have to shift a player and they can hang around and cause morale issues. 
      • Don’t forget to list players for sale that you don’t need, too. Obviously, just pick the ones with the lowest numbers, but be aware that some seemingly crap players have high potential, so you might want to hold on to certain younger players and hope they train up fast.
    • If you need to, check the front page of the magazine to see if you’ve still got a sponsor or not. If you don’t, hop on the phone, call the commercial director, and take a sponsor.
      • Sponsors largely have a negative effect on player, fan and board morale. I’m not entirely sure why this is, but it doesn’t particularly matter because you’re wanting to build that up by playing well, and you need money. Football is a money game even at the lowest tier.
    • Speaking of: go to the computer and check your merchandise. You want to try and match your merch to the season/how well things are going. To be honest, this doesn’t seem like it matters a ton, but if it’s winter, you want to be selling wooly hats. Summer, caps. As soon as you can, buy the merch facility because it allows you to sell four pieces of merch, meaning you can largely set this and forget it.

    Phew! Now you have to do something every week:

    • Check your skills training. At first, this is going to be fine, because you’re going to have like one or two skill training slots and maybe a couple of players with skills. But you’ll end up with six slots and entire team of skilled players. Skills degrade, so you will have to juggle players around these slots constantly. Is this boring and annoying? Yes. But it’s also something you’ll want to do, because skills give you “crits” and the percentages can be high (like 50%) giving you situations where players automatically succeed passes and even at scoring goals.

    Meanwhile, play or delegate the game each week.

    • When delegating, use your judgement on what positioning to use but be prepared for the percentages to go against you no matter what you choose. Injuries are really common in Nutmeg! so you’ll probably constantly have to shuffle players around–don’t think you can sell all your subs to save money. You’ll want a minimum of a couple of players spare for every position–this can be an issue definitely with forwards, because the game doesn’t have any formations like 5-4-1 so if you’re down to one forward you’re stuck playing a midfielder out of position.

    Before the last game of the month, go back to the computer and check attendance. If you’re filling your stadium, go to the blueprints and buy an upgrade (if you can afford it) or plan to do so as soon as you can. It’ll get built immediately at the start of the following month.

    You can buy facilities at any point as soon as you can afford them, because they get built instantly. You want the ones that make money or allow you to hire new staff. Past a certain point, it makes sense to leave a facility space open for sponsor facilities, which are free and make you the big bucks.

    Playing Games

    Before you choose to broadcast any match, go to training and make sure you’re chosen a coach to “focus”. One of Nutmeg!’s biggest issues it that you can’t see the hand of cards you hold already1 so you’ll have to remember if you are–for example–completely lacking any goalkeeping cards and so you want to focus on the coach that provides them. Once you’ve done that, choose to broadcast the match.

    • Before you actually play the game, you will open a “booster pack” of cards that you can add to your hand. But what you really want to do is to have a bunch of recipes–thanks to your staff, or players who also can provide them–allowing you to combine cards into much more powerful ones. You don’t want a basic Sidewinder card (+30% to saving a goal.) You want to merge that with another Sidewinder to get the “Penalty King” card, giving you +60%.
    • You always want to come into matches with some goalkeeping cards. You can never draw them from the tactics deck.
    • Frankly, I don’t know if formation really makes any difference in this game–in every delegated match 4-4-2 seemed to be the best option, so I never changed it. The classics are classic for a reason, I guess.
    • However, your positioning–to either drop back, push up or hold shape–absolutely matters, and you can change this between every game event if you wish. This is important because during a game you will be aware of what cards you have in your hand: if you have no attacking cards, but lots of defensive cards, you can “push up” to try and draw more attacking cards from the tactical deck, which are “free” cards you draw if your hand isn’t full. If you just want to try and park the bus after a few goals, “drop back.”
    • IMPORTANT: before playing games, you can look at your opponents players, and if any of them take your fancy, “headhunt” them using a scout action and have them show up for transfer the next month. This is an important way of growing your squad with better players–don’t forget to do it!

    The way games are played is a match is boiled down to a series of runs. I’ll be honest–I don’t know quite what the system is that decides when in the game and how an event is chosen during runs–but if you watch the pitch map that gets drawn on the side of the screen, it might be fairly complex (or all smoke and mirrors.) In each run, you’re either defending or attacking, and a series of events are played until the run ends via an event that ends it (a goal, or a tackle, for example.)

    •  Every time you can play a card, you are trying to affect the percentages of the cards on screen in your favour. Generally, there are three cards available per event during a run: one that benefits your opponent, one that’s neutral(-ish) and one that benefits you. You want to increase the percentage of “goal” over “miss” or “save” (to give the most obvious example) by playing the best attack card (so a Goal Rush card, that gives you +30%, is what you want to play.)
    • You can only play the kind of cards that match the event. So if you’re all out of defensive cards, you are at the mercy of the quality of your defenders. This can go wrong fast.
    • The most important thing to understand is that Nutmeg! is sort of… card-based football X-COM. You are going to get screwed by the percentages, and it’s going to feel even more unfair if you’ve just spent a bunch of cards to get to goal and your opponent crits and automatically saves your shot. The entire game is about putting yourself in the position to win–not guaranteeing your win. It is amazingly accurate to football in that way.
    • If you score a goal, you get momentum, which means you get cards back in your hand–so there is a benefit to spending your expensive cards chasing the win. 

    The most important thing about a match, however, is that you keep the cards you don’t play for future games (apart from any free cards from the tactical deck you draw during the game.) This means that you have incentive to burn tactical deck cards and also to play conservatively when you can. Momentum is important here. If you’ve scored a goal and are winning, you might not want to burn new cards to score another–but you’ll lose the cards you’ve played even if they go back to your hand (where amusingly they look tarnished) so you can play them again. Similarly, if you’ve scored a bunch of goals, you might want to hold off on spending expensive defensive cards unless you’re facing an equaliser.

    After a game, sometimes you’ll get called by the press to comment. This can’t go wrong, so just praise whichever stakeholder needs the boost unless your to-do list requires you praise someone specific.

    Anyway, that’s basically Nutmeg! Have fun!

    1. If you can see this somewhere I couldn’t find it, which I think is on the game, not me. ↩︎

  • The Three Stooges (Cinemaware, 1987)

    The Three Stooges (Cinemaware, 1987)

    Developed/Published by: Incredible Technologies, Cinemaware / Cinemaware
    Released: 1987
    Completed: 30/01/2026
    Completion: Raised enough money to repair Ma’s orphanage… but not enough to get married to her three beautiful daughters. This is the “real” best ending; who’d inflict The Three Stooges on some women?

    As celebration of the release of The Journal Of Stoogealogical Studies Vol. 2, I’m proud to share this final excerpt from my article in said journal, “A History Of The Three Stooges In Video Games”. The Journal Of Stoogealogical Studies Vol. 2 is available only physically, and only from Amazon: .com, .ca, .co.uk (or your regional variation) so run out and get a copy today! Well, you don’t need to run anywhere, but you know what I mean.

    If there’s something that stands out about Cinemaware’s take on The Three Stooges–certainly before we have to get into the thorny issue of the game’s quality–it’s that it is the kind of work that absolutely deserves the cliched phrase “a love letter to…” because it is, from the moment you open the manual, clearly a love letter to the Stooges.

    Cinemaware’s manuals are famously more supplements providing historical context–the manual for Defender Of The Crown has pages on The Norman Conquest and the veracity of Robin Hood–but nothing matches The Three Stooges, which includes a massive thirteen page essay from “A Dedicated Stooge Fan” recounting the entire history of the Stooges from Moe running away from home in 1914 until his untimely death (and yes, that means it references Joe Besser and Curly Joe DeRita, though they obviously don’t feature in the game1). Someone at Cinemaware clearly loved the Stooges enough that they wanted to license what was–in 1987–hardly a gold-standard license, and treat it with more respect than it had likely ever been treated before.

    The opening page of the manual’s essay, which splendidly opens with both a dictionary definition and a quote from Leonard Maltin.

    It’s a slightly strange outlier in Cinemaware’s output. The company’s games were heavily influenced, of course, by the golden age of cinema–Defender Of The Crown Errol Flynn swashbucklers, It Came From The Desert ‘50s B-movies, and so on–but there was never any sense that they had to be licensed rather than just give off the affect. It’s possible that slapstick was chosen as a genre to tackle and they found it just doesn’t work without iconic characters to back it up; I find it much more likely that Cinemaware’s founder, Bob Jacobs, was just a stoogehead. After all, The Three Stooges doesn’t really fit the more “grown up” air the company was attempting to cultivate; The Three Stooges may have been from the era of classic cinema, but it was certainly the fodder of children (indeed, you only have to click on a few Youtube videos of playthroughs of this game to see how many people picked this up excitedly as children.)

    Interestingly, even if Jacobs was a stoogehead, designer John Cutter wasn’t (though he’d tell Youtuber Matt Barton that “by the end of the project I definitely was a fan.”) Designed by Cutter at Cinemaware and implemented by Incredible Technologies (who would go on to create the Golden Tee Golf games you probably remember from bars) The Three Stooges is similar to Defender Of The Crown in that it mashes together board game inspiration with minigames. Like in Defender Of The Crown, the issue with the design is that it isn’t very cinematic despite the company’s founding principles, and so it similarly relies on the idea that if you have big, flashy splash screens powered by the Amiga’s graphical capabilities things will seem cinematic. And The Three Stooges has, well, the Stooges to help: Cinemaware were able to use digitised images of the Stooges and frames from their shorts to push the illusion.

    Speaking of Defender of the Crown, The Three Stooges references it in what I think is the best joke in the game: it opens with Defender Of The Crown’s title screen, before the Stooges walk on and realise they’re in the wrong game. It works particularly well because you could easily believe Cinemaware accidentally mastered the wrong game on the disks, and I assume it caught a lot of people out.

    There’s a simple framing device–the Stooges discover an orphanage is going to be foreclosed by an evil banker if they can’t raise $5000 in a month to pay the rent; the Stooges decide they’ll take on the task. Unlike Mylstar Electronics’ The Three Stooges, aka “Brides is Brides”, there’s no fiction that this represents a specific new Three Stooges short, but if it did, it would be one of the later ones where they use a lot of old footage, because Cinemaware’s Three Stooges pulls heavily from Punch Drunks (1934), Men In Black (1934) and Dutiful But Dumb (1941) with the other minigame generally inspired by the Stooges pie-throwing antics (the manual specifically references Hoi Polloi (1935).)

    The selection of these shorts is at least vaguely interesting to me. Frames are digitised directly from Punch Drunks and Dutiful but Dumb if not Men In Black; the shorts had been released on VHS by this point, but they hadn’t come on the same tape or anything. Punch Drunks and Men In Black are (basically) the first Stooges shorts (Woman Haters doesn’t count, with all that weird rhyming) but… why Dutiful but Dumb?

    (I’m getting ahead of myself here, but it particularly stands out because it’s a reinterpretation of the sequence where an oyster in Curly’s soup keeps eating his crackers as a cracker eating contest, which–look, I know I’m splitting hairs here–makes no sense because even in game Curly is dressed as a “Vulgarian” officer. I have to believe it’s because someone at Cinemaware just really loved that sequence.)

    As with all of Cinemaware’s output, the attention to visual detail (well, on things other than “what Curly’s wearing”) means The Three Stooges looks great. But similarly it comes at the cost of a game that is… bad. Based largely on the Game Of Life, the idea is that 30 days equals thirty turns, and on each turn you “roll” (in this case, hit the fire button to stop a hand) for your preferred event.  You want to hit on the movie-inspired mini-games or free money; you don’t want to hit on the banker (at best, you lose a turn) or the mousetraps, which just snap on the hand and cost you a day.

    It’s actually here that the game’s only interesting tactical consideration lies. As the days progress, the hand gets faster and faster until it’s sheer luck what you hit. To mitigate this, you can select the “eye poke” space, which wastes a day so that you can get involved in some classic stooge hijinks where as Moe you beat the everliving fuck out of Larry and Curly as punishment for… wasting a day I guess. Doing this, for some reason, slows the hand–unless you miss repeatedly on your eye pokes and shin kicks, in which case you can end up in a worse situation than you started with. So the game, at least, involves a bit of risk/reward, in that you want to ride the game as far as you can without having to waste a day on slowing the hand–but if you wait too long, you’ll struggle to hit the required space, and probably screw yourself completely.

    That said, it’s not like the game is that punishing if you just want to muddle through it. Money isn’t hard to come by–though if you’re truly aiming for a high score (and marrying the orphanage’s comely daughters) you have to play quite strategically (you make so much more from mini games than the free money spaces that a free money space is actually a hindrance.) Anyway, those mini-games.

    Not great! If there’s something I can’t shake about The Three Stooges, it’s the idea that–like Defender Of The Crown–it was made with great intentions but also an arbitrary release date that means that it comes across as a bit unfinished. Nothing really makes this clearer than the comparison between the Punch Drunks mini-game and the others. 

    In the Punch Drunks mini game, you can see that some of the developers have inserted themselves into this classic Stooge short.

    In the Punch Drunks-inspired mini game, not only do you get a proper digitisation of some of the beats of the short (Larry breaking his “Stradivarius”) the play screen features this entertaining split screen where you see the fight ongoing as you race to get a new violin. It also plays… fine, as you move up and down on the screen to avoid obstacles and can leap them too. It’s nothing special, but it feels like it’s what it’s intended to be.

    The Men In Black-inspired mini game is almost like what you get if you tried to do the same thing with absolutely no cinematic flair whatsoever. Inspired by the racecar sequence, you get a overhead view where you really can’t tell you’re playing The Three Stooges as they race up the screen avoiding patients, and a nurse in front of you drops stuff that you can pick up (but because you’re a massive, three car collision box, you don’t really have to move to do it.) Indeed, because the nurse moves out of the way of collisions, you can just follow her movements at top speed and that’s… it.

    Curly, clearly wearing the costume of a “Vulgarian” guard.

    You could argue that the Dutiful But Dumb-inspired mini game at least uses digitised art, but it’s actually a hindrance. You’re trying to collect crackers with Curly’s spoon–which controls horribly–but the game constantly cuts back to the splash screen of Curly so we can see him react to the oysters. Basically the only way to avoid this is to be superhuman at the game and stop the oysters ever stealing a cracker, but it’s beyond me or probably anyone’s patience.

    There’s a strange sort of dilemma with The Three Stooges: when you play a mini-game that doesn’t have sufficient Stooge content, it feels unrewarding. But when you do (like in the Punch Drunks mini game) you get sick of the repetitive intro and outro and all the horrifically slow loading that results. In fact, in a full playthrough on Amiga, it feels like you’re waiting for the floppies to load more time than you do anything else. 

    The repetition also doesn’t make sense in a game that expects you to do the same minigames over and over. Alright, Larry can break his violin and have to run and get another one day after day; but why does the hospital keep hiring the Three Stooges? Why do they keep getting hired as waiters if it always ends in a pie fight?2

    You can say I’m putting too much effort into trying to make this Three Stooges game make sense; the shorts, after all, barely do. But it speaks to that Cinemaware’s concept of game design was upside down. I’ve got a great sympathy for games that try and be maximally replayable, but it’s obvious that rather than this awkward attempt at the Game Of Life, The Three Stooges should have been a kind of supercut of Stooge shorts that you just played linearly.

    I suppose one bright spot for Stoogeaholics might be the trivia sequences, which feature absurdly trivia questions that veer from easy to bafflingly hard (do you know where Larry liked to drink?) and unarguably this is a more interesting, more authentic take on the Three Stooges than Mylstar Electronics’ attempt. But it outstays its welcome almost as quickly.

    Will I ever play it again? Cinemaware loved releasing their games on every system they could, but the differences between Three Stooges versions are lower than in Defender Of The Crown, for example. I’ll be honest… there’s a chance I’ll stick the GBA version on my Trimui Brick.

    Final Thought: If there’s one thing to be said for Cinemaware’s The Three Stooges, it’s that Moe’s daughter, Joan Howard Maurer expressed that seeing it would have been a “thrill” for her father to see it, very sweetly saying it allowed her to “join in during a pie fight and zap [her] father for the first time.”

    For that alone, I’m glad they made it.

    1. Neither does Shemp, again. Poor Shemp. ↩︎
    2. You’ll notice I haven’t discussed how this game plays–well, that’s because my joystick always stopped responding in it, so I just had to avoid it. I wasn’t heartbroken over this. ↩︎
  • UFO 50 #6: Mortol (Perry, 2024)

    UFO 50 #6: Mortol (Perry, 2024)

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  • Match Day (Ritman/Clarke, 1984)

    Match Day (Ritman/Clarke, 1984)

    Developed/Published by: Jon Ritman, Chris Clarke / Ocean
    Released: 1984 (first reviews showed up in Jan 1985.)
    Completed: 20/06/2026
    Completion: Scored a goal, at least, in every version I played.

    It’s the World Cup, and as usual when any major football tournament comes around, I suddenly get a hankering to spend all my time engaging with football content, which means that I end up playing a football game or two.

    Of course, this World Cup is a bit… extra, isn’t it? There are so many games a day that it’s hard to find space to do anything else, and I’m lamenting that I didn’t get myself a big wallchart or something just so I could remember the dazzling number of permutations of potential brackets. But on browsing Steam to see what was what in the ol’ football world, I was surprised to see that Match Day was available. Literally Jon Ritman and Chris Clarke’s original Match Day in its ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64 editions, along with International Match Day for the Speccy (which is just Match Day but with some extra pieces of art and they just changed the team names to international teams.) Not Match Day II, the one people have a particular fondness for. Match Day. The one from 1984. On Steam. For money.

    This seemed a bit… optimistic from publisher Pixel Games. The last time I mentioned Match Day was when I was discussing Nintendo’s shockingly rancid Soccer, where I made the (possibly controversial) statement that “Match Day was at least as good as this.” It’s a statement I more-or-less stand by–certainly if you were looking for value for money, you were getting more for less with Match Day. But in 2026, with Soccer (essentially) free on Switch with a Switch Online subscription… Pixel Games are absolutely asking for money for old rope, here. As with Soccer, only the most extremely nostalgic could squeeze some pleasure out of a game of this.

    Match Day isn’t the first home computer football game; it’s not even the first on the Spectrum. The original text–at least, the one that spawned all the imitators–was International Soccer, released on the C64 in 1983, and a pre-Batman Jon Ritman, looking for his next project, found that every publisher he asked was looking for a version of International Soccer on Spectrum. Publisher Artic would beat him to it with World Cup Football1, but it wouldn’t matter–Match Day would blow it away, becoming a top seller (and becoming well liked enough to be mentioned in Crash’s fan poll, published as late as April 1986!)

    I’ve mentioned it before, but the issue with early sports games is the effort required just to recreate the sport is such that there’s really no space to consider what would make it particularly fun as a video game, and Match Day is no different. You can recognise it as football. Sure, there aren’t the right number of players, but there are throw-ins, corners, keepers–it’s football. But on the humble Speccy, there are issues. Firstly, the colour palette is insane. The game defaults to everything being white or yellow on bright green, which (I imagine?) comes from the idea that the most important thing about football is that it’s played on green pitches with white lines and a white ball–though you can at least go into the settings and change that to black on green, which is more or less parseable.2 The main issue is that it’s slow (though not really any slower than Nintendo’s take on the sport…) and with only one button–and no ability to actually tackle, or control shot power(!)–Match Day is really sloppy and stop-start to play, as you and your opponent rely on trying to slowly block each other with your players’ weighty movements. Because players with the ball are slightly slower than opponents, this can lead to situations where it feels you get completely boxed out (or just end up passing it to your opponent and back again) especially because a cross or diagonal pass is more than likely going to end up in another throw in.

    Match Day makes you watch a long intro to each match to show off that they’d licensed the Match Of The Day theme (but not the name.)

    To be charitable, the game is a lot of scrappy midfield play chasing loose balls, very “jumpers for goalposts.” They may as well be, because the keepers are hilariously incapable. When you get control of them, you can either have them leap left or right, and that’s it. If the ball is literally next to them, slowly creeping over the line? You’re out of luck, it’s going in.

    The reason I suspect Match Day was successful is that–while it doesn’t exactly play a great, or let’s be honest, even an adequate game of football, it’s a game where you can name teams whatever you like and easily play against friends–even in tournaments of up to eight people! If you had a Speccy and at least one pal, this was definitely going to get played a lot.

    But today, Match Day is a museum piece. Essentially impossible to play (and with five minute halves, interminable to do so–a problem Super Soccer suffered too.) You’d hope then that in a modern re-release there’d be something to make the package feel worth it. Maybe I’m not asking for a Digital Eclipse-level documentary or something, but… some box art? Any context whatsoever?

    No, this is shockingly bare-bones. Like, bare-bones to the point you can tell they didn’t even bother to design a front end, it looks completely default. You get saves, rewind, and imagine resizing, but no scanlines or anything like that. There’s a real lack of care here. The first and most obvious thing they could offer is a “turbo” mode to speed the game up a bit, but they were hardly going to go that far when if you’re playing the Amstrad or C64 versions you actually have to watch the game get run from the operating system. And suspiciously the C64 version has the team names overwritten, so it’s not even a clean rom (look, I’m not saying they just downloaded it off the internet, but…) 

    Speaking of…

    The Amstrad version is not very fondly remembered–Retro Gamer seem to give it a kick every time they mention Match Day–and it wasn’t developed by Ritman and Clarke but by Sentient Software3. However, I do have to say… I like it better than the Spectrum version, sorry. Sure the ball’s yellow, it’s maybe a touch slower, and there’s some very weird colour corruption when players overlap, but exactly the same as far as I can tell–although Ritman says on his own site,

    “The versions for the BBC, C64 & Amstrad CPC were programmed by others who didn’t even talk to me about it.”

    I’m certain this version shares code (maybe Ocean passed it along) but happy to be corrected. Ritman does go on to say say he thought the conversions were dire, but the Amstrad version, at least, might be bearable at double speed. Still a shame about the terrible goalies though.

    The C64 version, however, is unsalvagable drivel. It’s way smoother than the Speccy or CPC versions (oh to have hardware sprites…) but it gets pretty much everything else wrong. The AI is non-existent. Opposing players seem to just stand about in a stupor, occasionally waking up to run at you and the camera doesn’t move until you’re at the very edge of the screen, so you’ve got no idea what’s coming, but it doesn’t matter because you can basically walk it into the goal every time. Absolutely shocking.

    The Pixel games release doesn’t include the BBC Micro version, but I feel like I should mention it anyway because it was, absurdly, ported by Chris Roberts, he of Wing Commander and Star Citizen fame. So there’s a game he actually finished, then.

    Match Day was important in its time and place, and I feel like I should be glad it’s “in print”–so many games aren’t–but you just can’t release it like this.

    Will I ever play it again? Aye, I’ll get the lads round for an eight-player cup one day. (I will not do this.)

    Final Thought: Literally the day Ritman handed in Match Day he saw Rare’s Knight Lore and became “determined” to make an isometric game. He went on to make Batman, and we all know how that went.

    1. Which would, of course, infamously become World Cup Carnival. You can read all about that on Super Chart Island. ↩︎
    2. The way you know which player you’re in control of is that that player’s boots are a different colour. Not an ideal system, but it works. ↩︎
    3. There are a few Sentient Softwares on Mobygames, but the most likely one is the one that made How To Be A Complete Bastard. So that’s cool. ↩︎
  • The Three Stooges (Mylstar Electronics, 1984)

    The Three Stooges (Mylstar Electronics, 1984)

    Developed/Published by: Mylstar Electronics
    Released: 05/1984
    Completed: 29/01/2026
    Completion: Rescued Curly’s bride, Cora. It’s just the same thing again for the other two brides!

    As celebration of the release of The Journal Of Stoogealogical Studies Vol. 2, I’m proud to share this first excerpt from my article in said journal, “A History Of The Three Stooges In Video Games”. The Journal Of Stoogealogical Studies Vol. 2 is available only physically, and only from Amazon: .com, .ca, .co.uk (or your regional variation) so run out and get a copy today! Well, you don’t need to run anywhere, but you know what I mean.

    I’ve never been a huge fan of The Three Stooges. I remember once watching what’s generally considered a peak Stooges short, A Plumbing We Will Go, absolutely stone-faced as Will Sloan, editor of the Journal of Stoogealogical Studies, and fellow Stooge fan Justin Decloux sat next to me, crying with laughter. But I never grew up with The Three Stooges–in fact, I can’t remember ever seeing them at all on TV in the UK, while I do have strong memories of Laurel and Hardy shorts playing on BBC2. When I finally encountered The Three Stooges I viewed them as, at best, poor imitators of the best of the slapstick form. Some cursory research shows that this reflects an Atlantic divide: bolstered, perhaps, by Stan Laurel being English, and that Laurel and Hardy toured British music halls post WWII, Laurel and Hardy remained popular in the UK, with their shorts staying in rotation, whereas in the US, The Three Stooges continued to grind away into the 70s, a hegemon led by cheap syndication and desperation.

    But I have warmed to the Stooges. I’ve actually got Will and Justin to thank for that. I was invited to Justin’s bachelor party where we watched a 16mm of one of their later, recycled-footage filled shorts Husbands Beware, and the sight of these old men hurting each other… if you’ll forgive me for recycling my Letterboxd review: if the old adage goes “comedy is tragedy plus time” the sight of the Stooges,ravaged by time, stumbling through a cheap lazy remake was genuinely tragic. So very, very funny!

    But it’s not purely an ironic appreciation; there’s a charm to their underdog tenacity; a tenacity that ensured their brand would endure into the video game age. It may seem surprising, but The Three Stooges license has been used several times for video games, starting with Mylstar Electronics’s arcade game The Three Stooges, and I don’t think only because it was cheap and accessible–I think because the people making them genuinely were fond of the Stooges.

    Released in May 1984, The Three Stooges is a product–and victim of–the legendary video game crash of 1983. Mylstar Electronics’ route to developing a Three Stooges video game began in 1976, when Columbia Pictures–owner of the majority of The Three Stooges output–purchased Gottlieb, then purely a maker of pinball machines. (It’s interesting to note there is no record of an attempt to make a Three Stooges pinball machine after this purchase, though Gottlieb would make several pinball machines based on Columbia properties in the era, such as Charlie’s Angels and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.)

    Gottlieb would have some success with arcade machines in the early 1980s with, most famously, Q*Bert, and in 1983–a year after the Coca-Cola company acquired Columbia–Gottlieb was renamed MylStar Electronics (somewhat controversially.) Mylstar Electronics would last mere months, releasing a handful of games before being shuttered in the continued aftermath of the crash. In fact, it’s believed that there were only a few hundred Three Stooges machines produced as a result, and due to poor reception, most of these machines were repurposed by arcade operators into other games, leaving–reputedly–as few as fifteen machines surviving today.

    Mylstar’s The Three Stooges is poorly remembered as a result, with no retrospectives and even few contemporary sources. Electronic Games Hotline (July 29th, 1984) has the closest thing to an announcement, claiming that the game was released in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of The Three Stooges (signed, as they were, by Columbia in 1934.) The game’s most notable developers are Jeff Lee–who did the graphics for Q*Bert–and David Zabriskie, a long-time creator of audio for pinball machines, with programmer Sam Russo and designer Tom Malinowski with little else to their names.

    The Three Stooges sets the tone for the Stooges in video games in some ways, most notably that it sticks to the original Columbia trio, Larry, Curly and Moe (sorry, Shemp fans.) But the most interesting thing it does is that it portrays itself as a new Stooges short: “The Three Stooges In Brides Is Brides.”

    Although the game isn’t referred to as such anywhere except the title screen, it does imply that this machine did not just have the license slapped onto it–the developers had to have some interest in making the game offer a “true” Three Stooges experience, with a story (The Three Stooges must rescue their fiances from the evil Dr. “I.M.Acad M.D.”1) a genuine attempt to recreate the Stooges in pixel art from and lots of digitised speech.

    Unfortunately, they made a very optimistic decision: the game is made for three simultaneous players, one playing each Stooge, and the game is absolutely terrible if you don’t play it that way.

    Now, it’s entirely possible that it’s still terrible if you do play it that way–not that I expect to have much chance to find out–but the game is clearly fully designed around a group of three players working together. A single screen game, on each screen the players must attempt to destroy all the furniture to find three keys to open the door to the next screen, and they do this by picking up one of two hammers that spawn on screen. While this is going on, the police are attempting to capture The Three Stooges, while civilians get in the way–both of which can be halted by chucking pies at them, which sit around the screen on indestructible tables. But the civilians can also pick up and throw pies, complicating things further!

    It’s obvious that The Three Stooges is meant to be a raucous, silly arcade game for three; the design intentionally only places two hammers on the stage so that one player is left out to either play defence (by throwing pies at enemies) or spoiler (by throwing pies at the other players so they can get the hammer.) Sadly, played solo, the game’s deficiencies are blaring. Enemies seem to move about completely randomly, and when the other two Stooges are computer controlled they become just as dangerous, making the game (I suspect) significantly harder as they cost you lives by walking into you with a hammer. The game also suffers rough, unforgiving collision detection where you’ll find yourself stuck on furniture or killed by things you thought you avoided. 

    The game also massively outstays its welcome. I only played up to the point where I was able to rescue the first fiancee, but it took forever, and every stage is exactly the same bar the one unique stage that has you throwing pies at singers, avoiding the notes they create (this is by far the most frustrating level, as the notes are almost impossible to avoid.) On each level you beeline to the hammer, destroy the furniture, grab the keys then leave. Without other players, there’s very little play (I do wonder, if the company had not been rapidly closed, a revision might have seen the hammer and furniture placement change more across levels.)

    Fuck this level.

    And the thing that should be the most charming about it–real Stooge voices–becomes insanely annoying about 30 seconds in. Every time a Stooge collides with anything, they’ll say the same stock phrase; prepare to hear “Oh a wise guy, huh?” more times in a single playthrough than the Stooges ever said during their entire Columbia Pictures run (no, really.)

    The Three Stooges is an interesting curio, and one that I do believe was made with the best of intentions by people who were on some level fans. It’s certainly possible that it’s worth playing if you ever have two other Stooge fanatics to hand–I guess I should have given Sloan and Decloux a call–but I suspect that even the most hardcore group of Stoogeaholics would never have the patience to get that far.

    Will I ever play it again? Sure, if I see a real machine and Will Sloan and Justin Decloux happen to be standing next to me.

    Final Thought: The game features a few comedic interstitials (almost certainly inspired by Pac-Man) but the funniest thing in the entire game is that once all fiances are rescued, before the game loops, it announces “now it’s on to reruns.” Probably the most accurate representation of The Three Stooges in the entire game.

    1. I don’t grasp the joke here at all… Oh wait, “I am a cad.” Damn, everyone reading this in print is going to think I’m an idiot. ↩︎
  • Wild Gunman (Nintendo, 1974)

    Wild Gunman (Nintendo, 1974)

    Developed/Published by: Nintendo
    Released: 1974
    Completed: 31/05/2026
    Completion: Played Reel A and C.

    Well now howdy, y’all, gather round as I tell the tale of how I played the only Wild Gunman in the West….

    *cough*

    Ach, I cannae be arsed keeping that up for an entire essay.

    Yes, in what can be considered an insane stroke of luck, I just happened to be within driving distance of Ontario Pinfest, Ontario’s only pinball show (though I admit I hadn’t actually ever heard of before) and 74XX Arcade Repair, aka Callan Brown, just happened to be taking his recreation of the North American Wild Gunman cabinet there. So obviously I had to go.

    Wild Gunman has been covered in some detail before, so I’m somewhat wary of just reiterating a lot of prior work. I recommend Kate Willaert’s lengthy article on A Critical Hit that goes into the history, and I similarly have to push you towards Callan Brown’s video, where he goes into great detail about his own research after discovering an auction for some of the original 16mm reels.

    But to summarise Wild Gunman’s story: the game was released in a fascinating period of Nintendo’s history, as it continued its transition from playing card manufacturer into entertainment powerhouse. Already successful in electronic toys, the company was continuing to expand, and Hiroshi Yamauchi hit upon the idea of using the company’s existing toy gun systems to create a laser clay pigeon shooting system, and to then install it in abandoned bowling alleys, as bowling as a fad had come and gone in Japan. It looked sort of bonkers:

    This was, by all accounts, extremely successful until the 1973 oil crisis hit, leading to a ton of orders for the system being cancelled. This pushed Nintendo into debt to the point of bankruptcy–they had created a smaller version of the Laser Clay Shooting System, Mini Laser Clay for arcades, but it wasn’t enough of a success. Satoru Okada, Gunpei Yokoi’s “right hand man” and an engineer at Nintendo R&1 told Retro Gamer in 2016:

    “Nintendo was in such poor financial state. I remember that president Yamauchi came to see us and said: ‘We need money. But in order for banks to lend us some, we need to show them that we have new fun projects to launch. In short, find me some new fun projects quickly, even if we cannot really sell them!’ Since we still had a lot of material left from the Laser Clay, we came up with the Wild Gunman project in a hurry. In the end, the president liked it and he insisted we sell it.”

    Wild Gunman’s big benefit is that it’s immediately a lot more thrilling than simple clay pigeon shooting–because clay pigeons don’t shoot back. As designed, players step up, put on a holster(!) and pistol, with the idea that they’ll be shown five different opponents. The opponent’s eyes will flash, which is the player’s cue to draw, cock the pistol, and fire–all before the opponent shoots them. The goal is to shoot all five to get a perfect score, shown by lighting up all the sheriff badges on the machine.

    The original Wild Gunman is a clever bit of tech, in that it uses two 16mm projectors, and it would switch to the second if you shot your opponent to show them falling over (otherwise it would just keep the first projector running). There were four film reels that operators could purchase, allowing them (I guess) to switch them out or, if they were feeling flush, have more than one machine running. What’s really fun is that I think you could assume that the footage was re-used from something else, because by virtue of the rich 16mm film stock it just really feels like something from a legitimate spaghetti western, albeit an especially cheap one. But according to Okada, it’s not! He states that the footage was shot by Yokoi, and it featured actors/random whiteys local to Nintendo who they found and shot at Dreamland, the now sadly demolished Disneyland-inspired theme park in Nara.

    However, I’m going to have to quibble with Okada on his recollection, because there are four film reels, and if you look at the flyer, you’ll notice something: 

    Film reels A and B have a background that’s very building heavy. If you look at an image or map of Nara Dreamland, that seems correct. Inspired by Disneyland, it has its own version of Main Street, U.S.A., and I’m sure if you collected enough images from the park you could pinpoint where these shots were taken.

    However, film reels C and D are suspiciously… deserty, and several feature guys riding horses. It doesn’t match any area of Dreamland I’ve managed to see online, digging through different sites.1 I found this pretty suspicious. I got briefly excited when I saw that some of the footage in reels C and D match footage in adverts for Nintendo’s light gun toys while looking something else up in Florent Gorge’s The History Of Nintendo (1889-1980), but that’s almost certainly re-use as the toys in question (Custom Gunman and Custom Lion) didn’t come out until 1976. 

    However, I would still gamble that these second reel sets were not in the original Japanese release of Wild Gunman, and possibly created for the North American release, which also heavily changed the cabinet design. If I’m correct in my hunch, this creates a new mystery: who shot this footage? The different canisters and film stocks that Brown has aren’t really helpful there. It seems unlikely it was, say, Sega (who hilariously released the North American version of Wild Gunman) but I’m sure a proper historian will dig into this and solve it at some point in the future.

    That all said: How does Wild Gunman feel to play?

    Now, I can’t say definitively, in some respects, as it’s worth noting the original Japanese version–initially called Gunfight–has a slightly different design, and Brown’s recreation of the western version has some changes (indeed the gameplay is a re-creation in Unity.) To have the exact experience of the Western version, you could hope that the guy in California who apparently has a real cabinet has put it back together, or possibly you could make your way to Vierzon in France and hope that the original machine that was seen there at a music festival(?) in 2011 is still there. But that said… I can’t imagine it’s that much different, and I’m confident in saying: Wild Gunman was great fun.

    One of my absolute favourite arcade machines is Quick & Crash, Namco’s novelty quick draw game, and while Wild Gunman doesn’t quite hit the highs of breaking a “real” ceramic cup and being timed down to the millisecond, what really stands out is how close it is anyway–and I’m sure in 1974 the live footage was more than enough novelty.

    It’s all about the experience of drawing the gun. There’s so much tension in preparing to shoot, and as much as you prepare yourself–”don’t shoot before you see the whites of their eyes,” you recite to yourself–the urge to panic and draw early is high. It’s exciting, too, that the game expects you to cock the gun before firing, adding just a touch more complexity to the experience.

    Wild Gunman even features two levels of difficulty. Players can optionally turn on the “Foul Check” mode which requires that they draw and cock the gun after the opponent’s eye-flash, making the timing even harder. I have to admit I didn’t check with Brown if this mode had been implemented when playing the re-creation, as I was generally overwhelmed by the experience (on my first play he just told me to cock the gun early, and on my second I forgot to put the holster on, which is probably why in the video I took I look so cool and skilful.)

    If I’m going to be a little critical, it feels like such a missed opportunity that the game doesn’t tell a bit of a story, though. It doesn’t need to have an intro or outro or whatever, but you can’t help but feel that the fact the game is just five random standoffs and then it’s over feels… wrong, considering the potential of using video. To have more sense that you were in a shootout against a band of outlaws or something.

    But I also sort of get it. You can “lose” every battle, so it’s not like it makes any sense anyway, and at least originally they were filming random white guys they found in Japan and they probably just had to make do with what they got.

    I played Wild Gunman twice at Ontario Pinfest because I was a bit shy and I didn’t want to bogart the machine. But I could happily have played it until I “mastered” it, the same way I have to play Quick & Crash until I’m as good as I remember being at it (good. The best, even. Don’t ask me to show you though.) That’s really remarkable for a game from 1974.

    Will I ever play it again? I’m sure I’ll be back at Ontario Pinfest, or maybe Brown will be showing the machine elsewhere–I’ll be happy to play through the other two reels.

    Final Thought: As exciting as the discovery of the Wild Gunman reels were, there’s a Nintendo shooting game reel that I suspect will never be found but which should be an A Day The Clown Cried level grail: according to Gorges, Yokoi and Nintendo created a prototype called Fascination using the Wild Gunman hardware, where the aim was to watch a (specifically noted as) Swedish woman dance around, and each time she paused to shoot off a piece of clothing until she was dancing around in the buff. This was never released (unsurprisingly) but was apparently very popular with the staff of Nintendo. I bet it was, the dirty buggers.

    1. And trying to work out which are AI slop websites that stole other people’s images. It’s getting harder and harder to work out what’s legitimate and worth linking. ↩︎
  • UFO 50 #5: Magic Garden (Yu, 2024)

    UFO 50 #5: Magic Garden (Yu, 2024)

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  • Slay The Princess (Black Tabby Games, 2023)

    Slay The Princess (Black Tabby Games, 2023)

    Developed/Published by: Black Tabby Games
    Released: 23/10/2023
    Completed: 28/03/2026
    Completion: Completed it twice. I couldn’t leave them there.

    After Milk Inside…/Milk Outside… I wasn’t feeling particularly positive about this one, feeling a bit concerned that another delve into inner-voice horror might not be the right move and I should just play something nice again. But I was surprised to discover how much I loved this; it absolutely deserves its plaudits.

    It opens with a simple ask–get up to that cabin and kill a princess. I think initially this is going to go a few ways depending on what kind of player you are–you might just do it, you might fight it, or you might simply get stuck arguing with the voice that’s telling you to do it, as the game offers an either impressive or annoyingly self-aware amount of options for the kind of player who like to see where the edges are. Whatever happens, pretty soon you’re going to see some fucked up shit.

    And before very long at all (well, depending on how long you spend arguing) you’ll learn you’re stuck in a loop. I think it’s that aspect where the wheels of the game come closest to coming off, because what starts as a simple story (“just kill the bloody princess”) becomes really huge and weird and existentially complicated. There’s a lot of detail that I admit I don’t really feel is necessary (I almost longed for the abstraction of Milk Inside…); the game could benefit from leaving at least a little more to mystery.

    But it doesn’t take away from the enjoyable puzzle of trying to play the game your way. You’re not choosing who to date, here, but you’re trying to live up to your own code, reacting to what the game throws at you, and I appreciate the game often forces you into unwinnable situations. 

    Of course, like any choice-based game, they haven’t been able to cover every eventuality. On my second playthrough, where I really tried to stick to my guns, that I was occasionally forced to do things due to lack of other options really stung. At the end of the game I genuinely cared what happened, which I think really proves how well the game works (admittedly helped by the rich art and excellent voice acting.) I’m really surprised it never garnered more than an honourable mention at the 2024 IGF for Excellence in Narrative.

    It’d be a bit rich to say the game was overlooked–lord, they’ve got enough money now that they’re publishing other games–but if there’s any possibility you have overlooked it, as I had until this sudden burst of research… don’t?

    Will I ever play it again? There are a lot of more paths in that I could explore, but I’m completely satisfied.

    Final Thought: I really wish I had a more consistent theme across this “theme week”, but I’m not ashamed to admit it came down to length. Sorry Raptor Boyfriend, Doki Doki Literature Club and more, once you’re creeping past an hour or two I go back to looking at my pile of unread books. It should really stand out, to be honest, that I played Slay The Princess twice. That’s how much I liked it.

  • Milk Inside a Bag Of Milk Inside A Bag Of Milk / Milk Outside A Bag Of Milk Outside A Bag of Milk (Kryukov, 2020/2021)

    Milk Inside a Bag Of Milk Inside A Bag Of Milk / Milk Outside A Bag Of Milk Outside A Bag of Milk (Kryukov, 2020/2021)

    Developed/Published by: Nikita Kryukov / Forever Entertainment
    Released: 26/08/2020 / 16/12/2021
    Completed: 22/03/2026
    Completion: Bought milk / Went to sleep.

    These psychological horror video games form a pair in a way that I can’t really separate them—and indeed, as they’re sold as a bundle now, I don’t think you’re really meant to anyway. This is somewhat annoying, considering their lengthy titles, which for the sake of completeness I will list in full here once and only once: Milk Inside A Bag Of Milk Inside A Bag of Milk and Milk Outside A Bag Of Milk Outside A Bag of Milk (phew.)

    Dealing with themes of trauma, depression, grief—though Milk Inside… in a more abstract manner–these games have a thriving analysis industry with all sorts of lengthy Youtube videos picking them apart, which I’m absolutely not going to compete with.

    In Milk Inside… you’re an inner voice1 trying to help2 the protagonist get to the store and buy some milk. Like many of the Canadian-inclined, although this game comes from Russian game developer Nikita Kryukov, I assumed they put milk in bags in Russia for similar reasons they do in (some parts of) Canada but it’s entirely a translation mistake3. In Milk Outside… you’re trying to help4 the protagonist go to sleep after buying some milk.

    These games are… fine! There’s an interesting sort of “Evil Dead to Evil Dead II” transition as the first game is grimy and unpolished whereas the sequel has a far glossier sheen, opening with a whole anime intro that reveals the protagonist is a girl cute enough to be dubbed “Milk-chan” by many fans (to be honest, it’s probably more of an “Evil Dead to Army of Darkness” level of glow up). There are more endings and routes to play with in the sequel too.

    It’s a matter of personal taste, I guess, but these games didn’t really connect with me. The first game is sufficiently creepy, but something about that it identifies you with a voice rather than the girl herself detached me from the experience, and the second game is a touch to cutesy for me, and feels strangely drawn out even at merely an hour (compared to the first game’s sprightly twenty minutes, anyway.) A point-and-click segment feels like it should have been a nice little twist, but I kind of resented it for drawing things out.

    It’s obvious I’m the outlier here; many people have connected with these games on a deep level, and while I found them interesting enough, they just didn’t stick with me. If they sound or look particularly interesting to you I think it’s likely you’ll respond better to them. 

    Will I ever play them again? There are a lot of paths I didn’t explore in Milk Outside… but I’m not especially interested, and the triggers are vague in a way that I think makes the game more conducive to a one-and-done. I don’t mind that, I do appreciate a game that wants you to play it once and get “your” story, but at the same time, I’m not sure if that was the intention here.

    Final Thought: While I’ve got you… I have to complain about the fact that milk bags in Ontario are 1.33 litres. You can’t buy a glass bottle in that size!!! You’re stuck using a grody plastic jug that you put the bag into or giving up and buying the even less eco-friendly cartons or expensive fancy milk in returnable glass bottles (for more money) unless you want to start doing annoying fixes like always immediately drinking .33 litres of milk, or decanting into either a bottle that’s way too big or into two bottles. There’s got to be a better way!!!

    1. Or not. ↩︎
    2. Also or not. ↩︎
    3. See the highlighted comment here! ↩︎
    4. Or not (again). ↩︎
  • Doomed Love (Cooper, 2021)

    Doomed Love (Cooper, 2021)

    Developed/Published by: David B. Cooper
    Released: 11/06/2021
    Completed: 22/03/2026
    Completion: Finished it with every ending!

    I feel like every article I start recently has me open it by going “I had a research-related reason to play this…” and even though that’s usually true, how much it matters is debatable. I’m a man of rabbit holes, and it just happens to be the rabbit hole I found myself heading down was one of visual novels, and I wanted to play some quick ones to feel them out again. Although it’s a genre I like, I tend to rarely engage with it1, and I don’t think I’ve played one since… Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney in like 2022?

    (I suppose it depends on how genre essentialist you are. Ace Attorney is an adventure game, in many respects, and Paradise Killer and 1000x Resist skirt close to visual novel. I’m not really that bothered about genre, but in this case I was looking for what people think of as “pure” examples.)

    Anyway, Doomed Love is in the dating sim parody genre? Sort of? It gives the reviewers of Edge what they always wanted (you can talk to the monsters) as you play a simple zombieman preparing for the “Icon of Sin Festival” with your friends Cacodemon, Revenant, Mancubus and Demon–one of whom you may wish to take to the festival…

    I believe visual novel-style dating sim die hards rankle a bit at the way in which the genre can be treated as a joke (especially as a marketing stunt, as seen with I Love You, Colonel Sanders) but Doomed Love (I think) joins the like of Hatoful Boyfriend in taking the style seriously–even if it doesn’t go to the absurd lengths that Hatoful Boyfriend does. 

    It’s a simple game–there’s only a couple of choices, and you can run through the game with every possible “date” within about twenty minutes–but it’s charming, and somehow there’s no friction with the game’s treatment of the cast of Doom as (essentially) high schoolers. I suppose you could complain that means that the Doom setting is really just a bit of set dressing, but I prefer that it takes the visual novel more seriously than it takes Doom.

    I mean, I was really surprised by how in the short runtime each little narrative pays off. My absolute favourite being the Demon storyline, where the Demon becomes comfortable expressing their own unique identity and choosing their own name.

    “It’s got a good heart” seems like a weird thing to say about a game about demons, but, well, Doomed Love has a good heart. 

    Will I ever play it again? I’ve rinsed it, so I’m good. 

    Final Thought: I googled David B Cooper and realised his name is… D. B. Cooper. Incredible to think he’d turn to writing visual novels after such a sensational crime.

    1. Weirdly, this is because usually when I think of playing one I look at my shelves of unread books and think “you know, if I’m going to do all that reading…” and then I just read a bunch of random Wikipedia pages or something instead. ↩︎