posted on virtualmoose.org My Birthday Blog Challenge: Write About An Obscure Game
It is my birthday today so I am issuing a blog challenge. That is something you are allowed to do on your birthday. My challenge is to write a blog post about an obscure game, whether it’s a video game, board game, tabletop rpg, LARP, whatever, that you just do not see folks talking about online or easily findable documentation. No Substacks! Also you will not be graded on how obscure it is, don’t worry. If someone sees your post and says “That’s not obscure!” then they can get punched in the face. It’s just for fun. Doesn’t have to be a positive post about the game either, maybe it wasn’t very good. I just think it would be nice to see more documentation online of games rarely discussed and maybe someone will discover a cool new game they never discovered before.
I decided to rise to this challenge by loading up the list of all games I've ever played on Backloggd, sorting it from least to most popular, and finding the first one for which I felt I had something worth saying that I hadn't already articulated on my old media journal. What I ended up finding was a game I'd played long before I ever thought of tracking my impressions of media. It's sadly now unplayable due to the creeping march of time, but its place in my history and memory is worth writing about all the same:
This was one of a handful of games that my friends and I would play endlessly on the school library computers during lunch in middle school. It, more than anything in an actual cabinet, informed my taste for what "arcadey" games should be: fast-paced, easy to jump back into after a death, with just enough sense of progression and buildcraft to make each attempt feel a bit different than the one before.
It's a damn shame that this isn't playable anymore (I tried both applet-to-WASM plugins to running appletviewer from an old JDK), because I'd love to revisit some of the design decisions with older eyes. Instead, I'll have to make do with decades-old memories of power-ups changing shot shape and damage. In retrospect none of this is that different than any of its contemporary STGs, a genre which I wasn't even totally unfamiliar with at the time—I certainly had access to at least one cab on occasion, although I can't remember which game it held.
But Javaders had the crucial difference of being freely available on the web, even if it was much rougher around the edges, so I could throw myself against it again and again. This too is crucial to the arcade experience, as UFO 50 taught me (or perhaps re-taught me after I forgot the lesson I'd first learned from Javaders itself). The game is as much the progression through one's own skill as it is the progression through the game-space, or rather it's the dialectical relationship between the two. I don't remember for sure, but I think I did see the end of this game back in the day. I certainly put in the time on this game and came away with a fondness for it that's lasted all these years.