Apple Quest Monsters DX Is Now Available In Digital Form!

Fan mock-up/fake of an NES version of Pac-Man Championship Edition. 

Point of Origin: A Retrospective on Schadenbergiana

I’ve mentioned a few times over the years that I’ve not just cooked up entirely fictional games to go along with the music I write under my Gonkaka alias, but indeed an entire fictional company with it’s own history to go along with them, Nincom. After having a lot of fun putting together a retrospective for one of my ongoing Gonkaka projects, Efiáltis, I decided to dig deep into the back catalogue of work I’d done and do something similar for a Nincom game I had already finished writing the music for a long time ago; Schadenbergiana. Along the way, a point about the preservation of old games made it’s way in there too. This piece of metafiction was written for the 2018 Halloween Countdown over on Random Lunacy, and can be viewed there with embedded music players.

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Ever since day one, Nincom has been defined by it’s dedication to uniqueness and the fervent ambition- traits which have found the company in hot water more then once, and most famously before they even got their first game out the door. Theirs is an attitude described by many as “weird”, fewer as “punk”, and by their dedicated fans as something that “sets them apart from everyone else in the game’s industry”. The company has recently celebrated their 32nd birthday with a release that has been rather aggressively marketed through various online channels; The Nincom N-Sides Collection, a compilation of some of the companies rarest and most obscure releases, each of them painstakingly emulated as accurately as possible using emulators programmed in-house. In honour of this momentous occasion, we’d like to cover what was perhaps the hardest Nincom game to find in any capacity and even harder to get emulated correctly; Schadenbergiana.

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Video Games That Maybe Only Exist in My Head, Part 2

Everything is Terrible (Acornsoft, 1982).

Super Banjo-Kazooie RPG

lost property control organization (samidare/hoshibackyard)

ICE WARS was a fantastically-popular vector scan game, featuring a thinly-veiled representation of the Soviet invasion of the Aleutian Islands early at the start of what became World War Short. It was also the game that turned struggling Vectorpoint into a major power in the field of arcade gaming, sponsoring three sequels, as well as the spin-off game SNOWMOBILE CARNAGE, one of the only vector-scan games ever to be rated AR for graphic violence. A tamer set of graphics was included on some supplemental ROMs, but they proved to be so unpopular that they were discontinued (and it’s one of the cases where the more-restricted version of the game ended up commanding higher prices on the collector market).

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Obviously ICE WARS is based on BATTLEZONE (1980), itself a fantastically-successful tank simulator (and one of the first realtime 3D games). It’s also an amazing technical achievement given the computing power of the time. The designers, Ed Otberg and Owen Rubin did so much to conceptualize digital space and set out basic rules for gaming within it. 

I learned a lot in the process of making up these screens and designs (themselves based on vehicles created for the Microgame ICE WAR (1979) by the eponymous Elohrir, though I wonder if that designer turned out to be someone else.) Probably the biggest lesson was that games like BATTLEZONE are really dominated by negative space. You don’t shoot at the vector lines, because your target lies in-between them.

Okiku (1992)

The 12 Tracks of Christmas 2019 Track 3: Nightmares Won’t Chill (Course BGM #04) [from “Nightmare Busters”], by Denji Koshiro Original Track: Chilling Air

Don’t worry, folks; this album ain’t gonna turn into “R.I.P.1.0.3. x XMAS 2019”. Pinkie swear, this is a one off.

Nightmare Busters is an older project of mine that holds a special place in my heart; it was the first fully-fledged Gonkaka project I ever worked on and completed, as well as the first (and so far, the only full-length) chiptune project I’ve put together. If memory serves me correctly it’s initial release on 103 Records was the first release I ever charged for- this was before the “pay what you want or get for free” clause was mandatory. It definitely shows it’s age compositionally, as well as my inexperience in terms of sound design- not helped by the inconsistency of sound design between tracks (each piece basically uses entirely different sets of waveforms/“instruments”, which is not at all period-accurate for what was supposed to be an arcade game from the late 80s/early 90s)- but it’s only with the benefit of experience and hindsight that I can say all of that. And of course, none of that takes away from the fact that I sat down and put the time in to create an entire album using software I was pretty much completely knew with on a mobile device, working on rough “game design” documentation alongside it with help from Dio (who provided the excellent cover art). I did grow discontent with it after a period, and strongly enough to actually take the initial release of the album down, though cooler heads would eventually prevail and the idea to re-release it swam around in my head for a while before it eventually dropped in 2017, with the story surrounding it reworked to frame the version of Nightmare Busters that music was written for, in Gonkaka/Nincom lore, being an overly ambitious prototype from a freshly established company that collapsed under it’s own weight. The story does state however that Nightmare Busters was eventually revisited by Nincom, re-imagined for the console that in-universe stands in for the Playstation.

That’s where this song comes in, but first I should probably explain what Nightmare Busters is about. Like, the in-story game, I mean. Strap in folks; this is gonna be a long one. So much so in fact that I’m going to throw up a readmore to preserve the sanity of mobile users, but I encourage you to read further!

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David Czar - Oliver! | famicase | meteor 

Oliver is a talented dog with a passion for skateboarding! Perform crazy tricks, challenge rivals and race around the vibrant city. Will you prove you are the top dog?