Pieces of 79 and 15

Don't mind me, just catching up on housework that ought to have been taken care of ages ago. All the sites have been given a sweep to fix any formerly broken links, save the scans section and Bomberman shrine. I'll try to tackle those in the next updates...!

The blog's been ported from WordPress to static HTML, with new indexes for ONM Remembered and Dinosaur Hunter Diaries. They've even got little randomised links so you can jump to something that catches your eye, so do give them another read in lieu of me writing new content! I can't attest to how well a lot of the blog even holds up, but I'm beholden to keeping this shit on my site out of obligation, apparently. (though saying that, the Captain America, Spin Master, Heiankyo Alien, and World of Illusion shrines got junked because they didn't have anything worthwhile on them, so i'm not even consistent with my own beliefs)
This does mean the tags, categories, and comments have been lost, and going forward I'll have to manually update a whole bunch of pages instead of letting WordPress handle that for me automatically... but it means I'm in charge of my own destiny again, instead of WordPress randomly updating and breaking everything on a whim. I'm still convinced the Hanabi theme is what blew up my site, seeing how Progressive Ruin also had issues with it around the same time.

Anyway, site stuff. MS:MIA updated with access to Metal Slug Advance's debug menu, plus stuff that's been sitting in my inbox for years. Oh! My God!! Why'd They Change That?! (which has been shunted away off under Additional Impedimenta) has some gubbins I'd documented in the notes on my sprites page.
Speaking of, new sprites include Altered Beast, Bat Boy, Bomberman '94, Castlevania HD, Custom Battler Bomberman, Dino Quake, Double Dragon III, Final Fantasy IV, Mario's Tennis, One Piece: Gigant Battle 2, Panic Bomber VB, The Simpsons, Snow Bros., Xybots, and Yo Bro.

And lastly, there's a new Videos of Games section. It's just an index of the guff on my YouTube channel, a place to dump whatever links I'd found or research I'd made while documenting them, like my walkthroughs for Congo on SEGA Saturn, LaserCat, and the Rat! point-and-click adventures. It includes spoilers for videos that are scheduled to go up the remainder of the year, with links that won't work 'til they go public.

It's probably not the most exciting section to read, but it was nice to finally collate all the bits and bobs I'd scrounged on these games and give it a home, if a slightly scrappy one. Whenever I dig into works, I like to know a little something about the people who made them, what else they've done, that sort of thing.
Hopefully not in a snooping, doxxing, privacy-invading sort of way -- I just like to get a feel for a person's tastes and talents, y'know? To know the person behind the production! Sometimes you see an author who's left their mark on numerous fields and genres, and sometimes you see a work that's absolutely outstanding... but can't find anything else by its creator, either because it's hidden by a cryptic nomme de plume, or that's simply all they ever made, it seems.

That's an occasional motivator in the Videos of Games I record: playing a game that catches my eye, and wanting to see what else its dev has done and how they've refined their ideas. Catching up on the world of GameMaker was a real eye-opener, with Firestyle (aka TheMegaJord, cyanwolf12, @jfmiller_tt) and Nick Ploos van Amstel (NICKtendo DS) in particular really making an impression on me.
The two developers produced a lot of games in only a few short years, casting a light on their respective interests and influences, honing their craft with each one. They've both dropped off the radar in recent years, but I want it to be known someone out there loves what they've done, and wants more people to check out their creations.

Sometimes I can pinpoint what rabbit hole led me where, and for the two of them it was the YoYoGames Sandbox, the official hub for uploading GameMaker creations that was host to a lot of garbo, but also some diamonds in the rough. I'm still trawling those mines, hoping for more things to surprise me...!
I forget how I stumbled upon the Blinky games by Jeremy LaMar, but that was a rabbit hole in itself -- learning about not just the old DOS-based software for making top-down adventure games, but this author bucking the trend and using it to make more 'tactile' interactive cartoon worlds, surprising even veterans in what was feasible with this toolkit! It's not even clear where the games were originally uploaded, and yet they seemingly enjoyed an extended second life on the AOL Kids portal, at least according to retrospectives on RSD Game-Maker.

Apparently made when the author was a young teen, the Blinky games definitely stand out from the crowd: they're bright, they're quirky, and all about throwing donuts at weird roaming monsters. It's a far cry from your standard sword-and-sorcery or military adventures the top-down software was optimised for! It's got a chaotic, silly presentation that reeks of being made by a comic-doodling young teen, the sort of infectuous "spirit of creativity" I love to see in amateur creations.

But learning about the software and how it works, it's clearly playing with its capabilities in unorthodox ways. Blinky 2 makes use of tiles that push the player downwards to simulate slopes or drops, giving a sense of depth and verticality even on its flat top-down environments... and then the sequel manages to repurpose that engine to work as a 2D platformer!

It's not what you might call a good 2D platformer, with extremely juttery movements, awkward enemy encounters, and cryptic level design... but the fact something was feasible on software even older than Klik & Play is totes commendable. I, uh, have to extend apologies to Alex of the Retro Pals after suggesting this on a Request Gauntlet -- the duo have played literally hundreds of 2D platformers, some of them dodgy to the highest degree, and this is the one that drove Alex to explosive anger. If you don't know what stipulations it's working under, you'd have no logical answer for why it plays the way it does...!

It's clear that the dev had a passion for this type of adventure-building software, using similar DOS-era tools like ZZT (under the SnigWich moniker) and MegaZeus (now Otto Uhrwerk van Germain) to create more games that are apparently iconic in their respective niches!

Admittedly the original point of my rambling was to ask: where's Otto now? The man only went and innovated in the realm of three separate game creation tools, producing at least nine games in four years, leaving a lasting impression on their small but passionate userbases, then seemingly peaced out!
He was clearly still with us based on scattered comments and interviews, but just not as visible as one would like a creator of this legacy. After ditching his old monikers and pivoting to producing art in the early '00s, I assumed he'd just fallen into obscurity, not getting the same recognition or visibility in that field as he had in independent gaming.

Though long expired, the man's personal site Depot-13 and his domain at Webcomics Nation, Comics Wasteland, showed he was juggling at least four comics at one point, and earning some degree of praise for his craft!
Ottocomic is what you'd expect from author-insert fare, approaching everyday inconveniences with overblown reactions and violence. Look, we didn't have social media to get upset about worldwide injustices yet, so drawing ourselves threatening to strangle people over the price of cinema concessions was how we blew off steam at the time.
The Pretentious History of Everything was seemingly a detached recap of the Earth's history, with Soup a comedic offshoot about mouthy microbes, one that ran for 26 strips and was collected in a book sold at ComiXpress at one point. Uku appears to be the standout, a story of alien villagers discovering a fallen star with malevolent influence, a departure from the usual sardonic humour and grimy environs.

The thing is, there's barely a blip left of these on their respective sites. Those sites are long gone, and even though there's relics left on the Wayback Machine, all those images are gone, son! A blog post on webcomicgeek gives us a quick summary on most of them (including "Rex Target: Freelance Zombie Hunter", seemingly lost to time completely), and what grabbed my attention was the glowing review of Uku on Comix Talk.
Grant Thomas waxes poetic on its craft, how much the comic is able to express without words, even using the space between the panels as a way of laying texture into its world... on a page that no longer has functioning images, by an author who has no other internet presence, it seems. The pages here had to be scrounged from an older copy of the page on the Internet Archive.

Now, I understand webcomics, or comics in general, are perhaps not the loftiest or most precious of mediums. I feel like a recurring trend in even the most successful comics authors is being embarrassed of their old works, and wishing not to be reminded of it. Don't think I'm above such feelings either, a lot of what's on this very site is crap!
I don't blame Otto for choosing not to include the comics among his wares in the 2013 iteration of Depot-13. it's very likely it doesn't represent his artistic skills at their peak, or embody his current ethos. I could even be talking completely out of my arse. Sometimes you don't need a reason. It's old and I don't wanna share it any more!

I think the historical trawler in me just gets melancholy discovering something that only exists in second-hand observation. Were it not for two random blog posts choosing to proselytise the works of an unexpectedly competent artist in the webcomics field*, there would be nothing left of them at all, possibly. I got just as sappy when all that remains of X-Entertainment's Spider-Man Reviews Crayola Crayons article was people linking to it and saying "this is a hoot!". I'm sure this is exactly how biblical scholars feel when they read about the balm of Gilead.
* (lest i remind you that webcomics were pretty economic in the looks department yonder years ago! matching the graphical fidelity of Dilbert was considered a good start, and being able to draw a character in more than two angles was a bonus)

The example pages available on The Webcomic List are enough to scratch an itch, so I think I can live without reading them, or the need to preserve these works; I've enough bloody projects as is, and I am wholly unqualified to go salvaging old dead webcomics. Does the world truly need a complete annotated archive of Elftor? (I would like folks to remember White Ninja for more than the "c'mon, do something" meme. like, of all the wackadoo imagery in that strip, that's the one people run with? do better, internet)
I do like seeing the through-line of an artist's creative career, and this giant conspicuous gap was a thorn in my craw, but artists are free to do with their works as they please. I'm just glad the few surviving remarks on Otto's works paint it in an inspiring light!

In any case, I got hung up on those dead ends for a while, but keeping tracking of Otto's return to gaming isn't too cryptic. His work in RSD Game-Maker was spotlighted in a DIYGamer retrospective circa 2011, followed by an interview with the man himself. From there he mentions his interest in ZZT and MegaZeux (connecting the multiple monikers to the one man), and how he's been working on gaming side-projects for a while, but is keeping mum on it.

That looks to have been Depot Dungeons, and from there we can learn about his Kickstarter campaign for Puzzle Depot, which after a decade in production, now exists as a product you can buy on Steam and itch.io! An interview on LinkedIn shows the breadcrumbs of a man's dabbling in software in his teenage years, practising the independent arts as a young adult, and putting those skills together years down the line as a culmination of his experiences.
I confess a Sokoban-like might not be to my personal taste, but it's sweet hearing a success story like this, y'know? Someone whose talents have made an impression across multiple generations, and still capable of banging out the hits. I wish him and the team at Laughing Manatee all the best.

There's probably an anecdote in here about the ephemeral nature of art, how wrapping your creation in a sub-culture can almost assure its legacy. To be listed among the notable works made in a specific software toolkit, or even simply noted on a database of indie games, some freak out there will want to experience it, I'd hope.
Comics, though? Especially webcomics? They tend to require someone to champion their craft, to set them apart from the crowd and laud them worthy of your time, and even then it can be an uphill battle. To the people on both sides of that battle, the artists putting their ideas out there, and the enjoyers singing the praises of what they read, I salute you.

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