When I was a child, if you had opened the door to the locker I was stuffed in and said to me, “Paste, what is Mahjong?”, I would’ve simply replied “People don’t call me paste yet. But to answer your question, Mahjong is the game where you have to match the tiles to clear the board.” Boy, was I partially correct.
Not long ago I played a game called Maptroid on the can-you-believe-it’s-still-around “educational” video game website coolmathgames.com. The premise is simple: it is a metroidvania, but without the pesky direct control over a character. Instead, you control where you are on the map and can only see the map and map accoutrements. “You” are the cursor on the map and the goal is to fill out the map by traversing it. It is very basic, but it is also very chill. I had a good time playing it.
One of my favorite chiptune artists is Bill Kiley. I have no idea how I came across his work, but I must’ve been listening to his stuff for at least ten years at this point. My current method of exploring new music is to just keep a list of anything that strikes me as interesting in a notepad-ish app and listen to something from that list at almost-random when I take a shower. It’s probably not the best method, since the shower is loud and makes it hard for me to hear the music. It’s also not good for reminding me to listen to new music by musical acts I already like. Thanks go to past paste for using a Chrome extension that saved a bunch of tabs I had open when I switched to Firefox many years ago because it reminded me to listen to a Bill Kiley soundtrack album for two games: A Kitty Dream and The Valley Rule, both by a Flash game developer called Raiyumi.
At its heart, Tametsi is Minesweeper, both in mechanics and presentation. I don’t know who I’m explaining Minesweeper to, but the premise is that you have a grid of tiles and there are numbers on some of them. The numbers indicate how many of the adjacent tiles are mines. Mark the mines with right-click and click on the spaces that you believe don’t have mines. If you click on a mine, you lose.
Do you ever get the overwhelming sense of dread that things aren’t entirely covered with moss? If so, drop everything and head over to Noel Cody’s itch page and play Moss Moss, a game created by Noel a mere month and a half ago for the PICO-8 platform.
I’m ashamed to say that PICO-8 is mostly unexplored territory for me, considering everything I have played on it or seen for it has been fun or, at the very least, adorable. Moss Moss is no exception, on both counts.
If you’ve ever wondered how the first few minutes of Jonathan Blow’s/Thekla, Inc’s 2016 puzzle game phenomenon The Witness might’ve looked if it was developed for the NES, then you have quite a specific imagination. Nevertheless, homebrew NES developer dustmop had that in common with you and brought your thoughts to lo-fi life.
I came across The Wit.nes while putzing around on RetroAchievements, looking for interesting games. I was a big fan of The Witness, so this seemed right up my alley. Short, retro, puzzley; The Wit.nes ticked all three boxes for me. I immediately downloaded it from dustmop’s itch page and let it sit in my rom collection for two or three years. Okay, it was more like a couple of months, but such a short time frame really is an exception for me.