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.

I say that, but the dash attack in Sektori, which I think is called “strike”, actually puts me right back in the world of Eugene Jarvis. Not Robotron, though, so much as Defender. Strike shunts you forward and allows you to blast through any enemies in the vicinity, but it also leaves you startled and defenceless on the other side. It’s a bit like pressing the Hyperspace button in Defender, which zaps you to a random point on the screen. Escape from current problems, certainly, but Hyperspace was also pretty likely to land you in new problems.

For years, I didn’t know how to use Hyperspace in Defender, until I decided that the only way to be sure was to use it fairly constantly. I’d do the same thing with Strike, except it has a cool-down. Luckily, I’m still at the stage with Sektori where I’m overwhelmed by everything in the game, so Strike is one compulsion out of hundreds.

It’s complex stuff, albeit in a very simple and immediate coating of twin-stick clarity. What I mean is, the arena is constantly evolving, as are enemy patterns and types and bosses. You can pick up stuff left behind by foes to level yourself up and evolve your powers, so you’re changing as much as the level and the enemies are. Then there’s a layer of really consequential changes involving drones and whatnot that I’m not even ready to think about yet.

This should be too much. Combined with the audio and the visual fireworks, it should really be too much. But there’s a clarity I glimpse within Sektori that I think will see me through. You’re trying not to die all the time - that’s the bad things in the game taken care of quite neatly. But everything else in the game is almost always a good thing: new enemies mean points and spectacle. New level furniture means new opportunities, like jump-pads. Collectibles will almost always do something good for you. Everything around you is basically a receptacle for points. Sektori is hellish in some ways, but it’s also like wading through endless good fortune in another.

What I really feel fortunate about is having picked such a fascinating genre to obsess over for all these years. Since Robotron, through Mutant Storm, Geo Wars, all the others, this has been the perfect kind of game for me. Ugly and beautiful. Frantic and calming. Compact, even simplistic, and yet emergent and vast and wild and luminous. Short essay today, and my apologies, but sometimes there isn’t that much to say - or rather that much that can be said about the beauty of games using only words. CD

Retrospective adventures

If you think you’re a little stressed out as Christmas approaches, spare a thought for the Commodore computer owners of December 1983. According to Personal Computer News, a global shortage of 1530 Datasettes (the chunky beige cassette players compatible with the C64 and Vic-20) meant many customers faced a festive season without a single game of Manic Miner, Beach Head or – God forbid – Forbidden Forest. Most suppliers at the time sold the 1530 bundled with the machine, but if yours broke, or you had acquired a computer by itself, you were stuck. The article also shows the impressive sales of the C64 going into the end of 1983 – 80,000 units in November alone. One of those was bought by my Dad – although he was sensible enough to get a bundle: the C64, a Datasette, some very bad educational software, a Tandy demo tape (which included an excellent two-player version of Snake) and a copy of Interceptor Software’s Crazy Kong – a rather basic Donkey Kong clone that was, in fact, written in Basic. KS