TPWitchcraft

TPW proudly presents the Digital Museum!

The Works of Crash-Stop: Playing with Hydra

Featuring 5 "Rooms" showing works of Crash-Stop, a Glitch-Artist from Ireland. His works are great: Amalgams of various styles and ideas, postmodern, political, but always somewhat ambivalent. Saying more would be saying to much, check it out yourself!

Enter here: https://thunderperfectwitchcraft.org/DigitalMuseum/

The whole thing is fully in the spirit of OpenCulture. Crash-Stop is using free licenses, and the sites HTML is public domain.

The Digital Museum is an attempt to make good on one of the original promises of the Internet: To create digital spaces open to everyone, where culture and art can thrive unaffiliated by commercial interests and governmental control.

A small webring with 10 sites atm (we are the tenth); it is not dedicated a "underground game" webring (thought about doing so), but since all who are active there are amateurs (as far as I checked) I think its close enough :).

When reviewing, I refrain from reviewing older games - mainly because I feel that it is better to search and shed light onto more contemporary games; also, I see the risk of falling into a shallow nostalgia if one focuses to much on what has been - so some stuff that I considered writing about never made it onto the blog.

I fondly remember the video game Taso. It was a quite unique helicopter/RTS-Game; years later, the now adult developer set up a small page about the game

https://tasogame.wordpress.com/

the page does not only provide a DL-Link (playable with Wine/DOS-Box and some tinkering) and a video but also a short description of the Suomipelit scene. If you ask me, this was a result of the (by then) progressive education system of the Scandinavian countries. Education there seemingly often involved the use of "ClickTeam", a software able to create - among other things - small games. A collection of "Click Games" can be found here https://www.create-games.com/museum.asp?tag=museum

Many of the early 2000s "minigames" were made using the "Click"-Language, among them the work of the - back then popular, at least partly Sweden based - Fallen Angel Industries. One of the games released from this Group was Siege: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDIGwrwChNQ - A real jewel when it comes to sound, gameplay, and visual design. It is - among other games of the group - available at archive.org: https://archive.org/search?query=fallen+angel+industries , some of them can be played via Wine.

A vast archive of "Finngames" is available at https://archive.org/details/suomipelit_collection

The scene eventually shifted to the GameMaker; some of its members professionalized, developed more complex games and were a part of the founding base of todays Indie Game Scene.

The developer of Purple Martians, another one that I reviewed a while back had responded on Itch - since he didn't replied to my Post it took me quite long to notice.

After noticing I had some mail exchange with him. Development of the game is still highly active; a more up-to-date version than the one on Itch can be DLed at https://github.com/mweiss001/purple_martians

Greetings

A big recommendation I can dish out to everybody who seeks for some raw underground gaming experience are the works of Hodslate.

I had 2 of his games on my blog already; he is a australian roofworker iirc and is doing all of his games in his spare time, not using any premade assets or textures. His games are raw, dark, and oppressive. Quite like black metal gone video game.

He has quite some output. Didn't manage to play his more recent games till yet.

https://hodslate-productions.itch.io/

Is "Underground Game" in your opinion the right term for a political, non-commercial gaming scene? While some don't mind the term, some seem to be skeptical about it, stating that a self definition of underground is inherent inauthentic (we had, however, the uComix or various literature and press collectives using the term "Underground") or that the association with illegal activity could be a problem; these people, however, seemingly also most often disagreed to the far left political orientation of the Underground Gaming idea, and I'm not sure if those not just aren't bourgeois doubts.

One of the more bolt statements I made about underground gaming is that modding is somewhat under attack by the gaming industry.

I have received different reactions to this: Some agree, stating that modding is incompatible with the modern, usually centralized server structure of multimedia player games, agreed that my idea that the orientation towards professional competitive gaming lead to a stronger orientation towards standardization, or added that modding is incompatible to micro-transactions for skins or similar visual features.

Others told me that the modding scene is still active, but more restricted to specialized titles. Another reply that I received is that there is less a need for total conversion mods as there are more different games available, reducing the need to play "improvised" games.

Checking on ModDB, I noticed that there are few games among the popular or recent mods that are from after 2020; most of the popular targets for modding seem to be ancient for video game standards - I see this as evidence towards my point.

Would you agree that modding is declining within the modern gaming scene? I would be especially interested in hearing active modders about this, and what they would wish regarding their activity.

Hoping that this doesn't look like I created this thing only to advertise my blog, but you can find some examples for non commercial games on my blog, the Arcane Cache:

https://thunderperfectwitchcraft.org/arcane_cache/

If you have done a non-commercial/underground game, tell me - I'll check it out as soon as I can and a) give you feedback and b) review it if I think it is good.

0. Underground Gaming perceives games as a form of art.

1. Underground Games are non-commercial. They shun the logic of the markets and question the capitalist system. They attempt to create and use spaces for free creativity.

2. The Underground Gaming scene considers everybody as equal. Developers and players are both participants in the process of turning an abstract piece into a played game. Every form of group-focused enmity (including, but not limited, to ableism, classism, racism, sexism, homo- and transphobia) is ousted from its communities.

3. The Underground Gaming scene lives and dies by the exchange and interaction from its participants. It can only prevail through mutual support, acknowledgment, and feedback.

4. A Underground Game is a game that its creators consider to be complete. A work in progress or a demo is not considered an Underground Game until it is finished. The possibility to extend a completed Underground Game is explicitly supported.

5. Underground Gaming tries to empower people. It supports the sharing of knowledge and tries to reduce barriers. The scene helps people interested in Underground Game development to reduce dependencies from capitalist corporations, but does not reject creative work if dependencies exist.

6. Underground Gaming supports other non-commercial communities and movements. It seeks exchange and collaboration, as long as they share the fundamental values of the scene.

7. The Underground scene isn’t carried or lead by individuals. Whenever possible, a democratic self-organization for communities is established.

8. The Underground scene is open to editing and modification.

Today we put our first game, "Meditation 5" under a GPL. With this, all our games are "liberated"; the source codes are all available and put under GPL3; for "Acid Flight" and "Meditation 5" this also goes for the assets except of the fonts (that we don't own).

Our games: The Vaults of Minos is a roguelite precision platformer with very fluid controls and an refined level generation. Assets are non-free, but you might download the demo and place the binary you can build from the source there; the resulting game will have all features available.

http://thunderperfectwitchcraft.org/VaultsOfMinos/index.html

Acid Flight is a version of "Icy Towers" put on steroids. You might experience a texture glitch when starting it, in this case just restart the game (might require a few attempts).

http://thunderperfectwitchcraft.org/AcidFlight/

Meditation 5 is an minimal, abstract light gun game designed around taoist philosophy that should be played with a controller.

http://thunderperfectwitchcraft.org/Med5/index.html

Check them out!

The Arcane Cache reviews games that fly beyond the radar of the big gaming sites and blogs. I focus on amateur games and niche productions.

Since I play exclusive with Linux, all games I review run native or with wine.