Hello! And welcome back on board for another gentle descent into the world of games and game-adjacent things. There’s a storm on the horizon, but Florence isn’t worried. Chris tried to get Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion running but couldn’t, and had to write about something else. Keith discovers the truth behind an apparently exclusive ZX Spectrum magazine cover-mount!

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The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

Messenger is a lovely free browser game that’s been doing the rounds for the last few weeks. It works on a phone, which is some kind of wizardry, surely, and it was sent my way by Bathysphere pal Emad Ahmed.

The game’s set on a very small open world that also happens to be a lovely lumpy sort of sphere. There’s a surprising range of different environments and it feels like the designers have learned from the quick transitions and sight-line manipulation of theme parks.

You play as a messenger, a simple objective that allows you to meet various people, travel back and forth between them, and ponder the connections between things. In truth, I think being a messenger is a lovely excuse to just explore a world, particularly one as interesting and varied as this one. CD

This week I’d like to recommend two games about visiting hotels. The first is Lovely Lodgings, a game about being a literal ghost writer reviewing, well, lodgings. It’s one of the latest DOMINO CLUB game jam entries and I’d recommend its combination of Bitsy and visual novel-like visuals. FSN

Secondly, Backrooms Booker is “the world's first booking agency offering hand-picked, uncanny holiday listings…it has become increasingly important to accommodate the growing need for individuals to noclip out of their daily lives.” Need I say any more? FSN

Interesting things

My Fitzgerald reading marathon continues with his Pat Hobby stories, which I’m sad to report I dropped in the bath last night. No matter. These are a selection of stories Fitzgerald wrote as he was working on his final novel, The Last Tycoon. Whereas the novel looked at Hollywood studios from the perspective of the people running them, the Hobby stories examine them through the eyes of a washed-up writer who hasn’t really been in control since the days of silent movies.

I remember going to EA many, many years back when they were still based in Chertsey, and thinking that this huge company with so many games on the go was a bit like the Fitzgerald-era Hollywood studio, with people moving between very different projects quite briskly and a general hum of terrifying industry going on. EA’s changed a lot since then, but I do suspect that if Fitzgerald was writing Hobby today he might be trying to get producer gigs on Madden or something like that. CD

Essay: How’s the weather?

As I write this, I’m hiding in the basement of a café as storm Amy runs her fingers through the trees outside. This weather reminds me of other times I’ve taken refuge from the elements, whether in real life, or indeed, a video game. From static to dynamic systems, weather can range from mere set dressing to a core game mechanic. Personally, I’m perhaps more drawn to games that allow you to bask in sensory meteorological pleasures, rather than battling with them as an existential threat.

In early design documentation for what would become Spyro the Dragon, there’s notes on potential enemies: “primitive man, saber tooth tigers (the weather?)” The weather often does function as an adversarial force in video games. A notable recent example is rain in Death Stranding that’s not only a minor inconvenience, but ages anything it touches. A more pedestrian example is rain in Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom making it more difficult to climb rock faces.

Some of my favourite memories of weather in video games, though, come from times I was able to indulge in it as an experience rather than an adversary. Think of the fun details in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, in which villagers carry umbrellas when it rains (except frog villagers, of course). Weather is so important in New Horizons that a data miner created a tool so that players can work out which weather seed their island has, in order to reliably predict when different phenomena will happen.

Rain in video games, in particular, can create a relaxing background ambiance that has been replicated in countless YouTube lofi videos. In Strange Antiquities, a point and click game in which you manage a shop of magical curiosities, there will periodically be rain pattering against the window. I’m disappointed every time that the sun comes out; classifying spooky artefacts just isn’t the same with blue skies and birds singing.

Rather than creating a sensory context in a video game world, real world context can bleed into digital space. This is the case with Breathe, a smartphone game about a woman communicating with her deceased mother. Breathe is an example of ambient literature, a term used to refer to the ways in which a person’s physical context affects their reading experience. It uses APIs in order to track data about your location, local time and weather, in order to incorporate these into a personalised player experience. This works particularly well for a ghost story like Breathe, that plays around with digital and non-digital presence.

Severe storms in south-west England in 2014 influenced the creation of this is a picture of wind. Described as “Part poetic almanac, part private weather diary” it responds to live weather data. Though it is a primarily text-based creation that is very different from the experience of a modern Zelda or indeed Animal Crossing game, it’s interesting to see the through line of weather being used to create atmosphere across all these digital games.

I’m finishing this piece on a sunny afternoon. Storm Amy has long departed, but her short stay has me thinking about how we like to personify the weather. It’s difficult and perhaps fruitless to cherry pick examples of weather across games, but I couldn’t end without mentioning the fog in Silent Hill. It was famously put in the original game to mask hardware limitations, but has since become such an iconic part of the game’s aesthetic that it may as well be a character itself.

Changeable, playful, strangely reassuring- it doesn’t have to be photorealistic, just make sure the weather in your game has some personality. FSN

Retrospective adventures

In the mid-to-late 1980s, video game magazines were competing, not just on the quality of their coverage, but also the value of their cover tapes. Publications such as Crash, C&VG, ACE and Your Sinclair all featured regular cover-mounted cassettes, usually filled with demos or full versions of older titles. This beautiful illustrated cover from the May 1987 issue of Your Sinclair claims to feature an exclusive “new” game, Road Race from legendary Manchester-based publisher, Ocean. However, this arcade racer actually started out as a Speccy conversion of the old Konami driving game Hyper Rally, but by the time it was finished, it was considered too dated for a full release, so Ocean cannily sold it to Your Sinclair. The game was updated for the new version by Mark R. Jones who would go on to become a prolific artist for Ocean, working on the Speccy versions of titles such as Gryzor and Mr Do. Anyway, it’s a lovely cover from a magazine that always brought the most out of games with its imaginative illustrations. KS