Welcome back! This week Chris is delirious with love for the twin-stick shooter Sektori, and also misses Tom Stoppard an awful lot. Elsewhere, Florence visits Boshi’s Place and Keith uncovers some worrying news for any Commodore 64 fans still living in 1983 and hoping to buy a new Datasette in time for Christmas. You’re out of luck, mate.

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

Boshi’s Place, a DIY games and third space in East Williamsburg NYC, recently held a Game Manual Jam both in-person and online, and you can check out the entries on their itch page. I did take part, but don’t hold that against it - instead I’d recommend perusing the archive of manuals for games that don’t exist, like Teeth Fairy, a low poly fantasy game about collecting teeth from NPCs. FSN

It was so sad to hear about Tom Stoppard this week. Probably my favourite line in all of literature comes from his play Arcadia: “You cannot stir things apart.” That’s writing, isn’t it? Cor etc.

But along with walking around and muttering that to myself, I’ve been thinking about Questions, the game that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play before they are dead. Conduct a conversation in questions, without relying on non-sequiturs or statements and without hesitating. Reader, if you haven’t played Questions, it’s completely brilliant. And so was Stoppard. CD

Interesting things

On the theme of manuals for fictional games, publisher Hollow Press specialises in what they call “lore game books,” often in the form of intricately crafted manuals. Vermis, for example, has been discussed by YouTuber Super Eyepatch Wolf in his video on fake video games. FSN

Essay: Sektori

Sektori is a really great twin-stick shooter that manages to survive the fact that an awful lot of twin-stick shooters are really great. This is a genre I love very much indeed, and I will play any and all variants. I know that Sektori is something special not just because loads of people who don’t really care about twin-sticks seem to love it, but because as I play all sorts of strange things come to mind. One moment I’ll be thinking about Petri dishes. The next I’ll be pondering whether this is part of a new wave of twin-sticks, twin-sticks that have emerged from the likes of Geometry Wars rather than the originals like Robotron.