Hello! And welcome back for another dive into the icy waters of things game-like and game adjacent. This week, Chris is pondering where games often can’t go. Elsewhere, Florence takes a gamble on The Invisible Casino and Keith discovers an unexpected Pal version of a cult SNES fighting game.

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

Last week I went to the UAL London College of Communication MA Game Design show. There I had the good fortune to try out Chris Diffin’s The Invisible Casino. Diffin plays the dealer, an enigmatic persona with tinted glasses. He produces cards out of a briefcase, encouraging you to take part in a series of inscrutable mini games in which it’s not always clear how you win, or even what the rules are. You can find documentation of this creative immersive experience on itch, but you really need to experience it with Chris in-person. FSN

Another highlight from the Game Design show was Cloud Posting, in which you take requests to write messages as a skywriter. It’s delightfully tricky to manipulate a plane using your mouse, experimenting with how you can concoct anything from an invitation to get drinks or a heartfelt birthday message. FSN

Interesting things

The Video Game History Foundation has two fascinating events coming to its official YouTube channel very soon. On 15 December there’s a look at the organisation’s attempt to save the Sega Channel, the groundbreaking Genesis digital games service. On the 17 December there’s a live archaeological dig through unlabelled ROMs donated by Sony Imagesoft and Atari Games – the collection apparently includes unreleased projects! KS

Essay: Where games struggle to go

I remember, and it must have been almost twenty years back, seeing a game that ran in the URL window of a browser. I’m sure it was in EDGE. I thought at the time that games had gotten everywhere. I remember having this same thought a lot more during the golden age of smartphone gaming: games were suddenly on the bus, in coffee shops, in bed just before lights out.

But over the last few years I’ve started to think about the places that games haven’t gone yet, and what a deep, miserable shame this sometimes is. Not to overshare, but I volunteer at the local hospice through its Compassionate Neighbours program. This is a program that matches hospice members who are living in the community but need a bit of company with people who can check in on them once or twice a week and have a conversation about this or that, generally about nothing at all, and just offer a bit of contact.

I don’t think I’m revealing any personal details when I say that while I love doing this and it’s been life-changing for me in all the best ways, I’ve also been shocked by how isolated many people are in the last stages of their lives. My Neighbours have all been wonderful people, but they’ve often been pretty much alone: just them, a next-door neighbour or two who checks in, and the spectre of daytime television. (Daytime television is a menace. I remember when I went off to university a chef at the restaurant where I worked gave me one bit of advice for what I was getting myself into: never turn on the TV before 9pm.)

Once I’d seen this arrangement several times, I started to wonder. I’m not the sort of person who thinks that games are the answer to everything, but this really did seem like a situation that games might be a partial answer to at least. My Neighbours are often filled with the urge to be doing things, learning things, exploring things, but they can’t get out much or they don’t know where to start. Zelda, say, would work beautifully in this situation, I reckon. So would a really good Cryptic. So would something like Mothmen 1966. So would a book of mazes. So would a single-player card game. Onwards.

Some of my neighbours are into Cryptics or Sudoku or word searches, and that’s wonderful: I’m into these things too so we can exchange notes. But when I’ve mentioned other games, there’s often a sense that these things are too complex: where do you begin, what do you need, what if it goes wrong? There’s often a sense, I think, that it’s just not for them.

I’ll be honest - I don’t know how to bridge this. I don’t know what games can do to make themselves more approachable to people. I think smartphones were big leap forward because a bunch of people, fifteen years ago or whatever, suddenly discovered that the devices they already owned ran games, so what was the danger? But a lot of my Neighbours don’t have smartphones, and the idea of any more gadgets can be overwhelming.

A while back, I commissioned the wonderful Andy Robertson to write a piece about games that people who didn’t know games at all might use as a starting point. He did a lovely job, but by the very nature of running it on Eurogamer it didn’t really connect with the audience we wanted for it. I’m also aware, on the other side of things, that there are a bunch of people who don’t fit the ragged cliche of people who like games merrily chugging through Elder Scrolls and all that. Stereotypes are always wrong. I just wish there was a way to introduce this strange, beautiful magic to more people at a time when a little magic might make a big difference.

(And yes, I’ve been thinking all of this because I’ve been trying to buy Christmas presents for a Neighbour. In the end, I went with a Lego flower.) CD

Retrospective adventures

There were at least five SNES fighting games based on the legendary Ranma ½ manga, but I didn’t realise any had received a Western translation – until I was flicking through a Nintendo magazine from 1984 and found this gorgeous advert. It seems veteran UK publisher Ocean secured the Pal distribution rights for the decent second Ranma game, subtitled Hard Battle in Japan, while in the US it was handled by the long defunct, DTMC (Digital Touch Media Corporation). Anyway, it’s a really pretty 2D fighter with a few characters and scenes from the manga, although the text translations aren’t great. Copies of the game are selling for around £200 on eBay so sadly, this advert and a few YouTube long play videos are as close as I’m going to get. KS