42! A special number indeed. Welcome back aboard the creaking, slightly leaking, chill spaces of our underwater craft. This week, Chris falls in love with a twin-stick and muddles through a sound toy. Elsewhere, Florence is also thinking about eggs.

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

Oddada

I’m at that enviable point with Oddada where I don’t really know what I’m doing but I appreciate everything that happens. This is a musical toy - I think! - and it’s one in which you place objects in 3D space to trigger sound effects. Every level feels like it’s about to fly apart and surprise you. CD

I grew up playing Super Monkey Ball 2 on the GameCube, and now I can sneak in a level any time I like because its been ported (along with Super Monkey Ball 1) to a website. It’s like they say, all in all, you’re just another monkey in a ball. FSN

Interesting things

Chris’ piece on Evil Egg reminded me of the Awesome Games Done Quick run of Terry Cavanagh’s Egg, which is about, well, being an egg. It’s less than 12 minutes long, frankly you could fry your own egg in that time, what do you have to lose? FSN

Need some inspiration? Feeling nostalgic for an era you don’t even remember yourself? Try out Michael Klamerus’ British Game Generator. I’ve included my own favourite British Game in the screenshot, feel free to send us any other gems it comes up with. FSN

Essay: East Egg, West Egg, Evil Egg

When it comes to twin-stick shooters, I often feel like that elderly American couple that Bill Bryson spots in a supermarket in The Lost Continent. They’re scanning the shelves for some kind of weirdo cereal flavour combination that will bring them a little fresh joy after many decades of trying every weirdo cereal flavour combination capitalism will allow for. In other words, I love a twin-stick, but since I play them all, I need to be really shaken about in order to have a memorable time.

Enter Evil Egg, by Ivy Sly. Evil Egg is free on Steam and it’s absolutely glorious stuff. It’s frantic and filled with surprises. It has a codex to steadily fill up as you play. It’s cruel. It’s overwhelming and beautiful in its garishness. Stop reading this and go and play it!

Here’s what I reckon about Evil Egg, though: the spirit of Robotron is so vividly present in here it feels like a sequel, zipping to us from the mid-1980s. It’s not just the fact that there’s something to collect as well as all those things to blast. It’s not just the zorbing, tinkling, brain-shudderingly inhuman sound effects. It’s not the black backdrop and the simple bright lines. 

I think it’s that the whole thing feels like it’s pushing the hardware. Evil Egg feels like it’s constantly on the brink of collapsing. There are so many enemies, so many projectiles, and so many things to draw and re-draw on the screen it feels like a work of magic that the game runs at all.

And of course this is mirrored by the fact that the player has so many things to think about too. Where to go, where to go next, what to prioritise, where to aim, what to collect. I spend a lot of the game frantically trying to find myself on the screen, and that’s always a good sign with these twin-sticks.

One last thing - and apologies for a short essay today; life is lifing as Becky Hill once put it - in my last game, I got stuck in a kind of weird feedback loop where enemies kept spawning and spawning showers of projectiles that seemed to spawn more enemies and more projectiles, and I felt like I couldn’t blast stuff as quickly as the screen was refilling with fresh stuff. I felt genuinely overwhelmed. And that’s the best sign with these twin-sticks. Jarvis would be proud. CD