I have returned from the DUTCH ZONE
Hello folks! In case you missed it, I released a new Playdate game with SquidGod called Core Fault. He made a whole video about the game's development, it's a good watch!
...and you can listen to the soundtrack on Bandcamp.
In other news, I forgot I wrote a whole newsletter ages ago and forgot to hit send. It's still fresh to you, right? Well, here it is.
Huis Ten Bosch
Have you ever thought about that long period of history when Japan closed itself off from the entire world except for a handful of guys from the Netherlands who promised not to talk about Identified Imperialist Threat "Jesus" and only wanted to deal in Benign, Friendly Western Capitalism?
And did you wonder to yourself, after all this time have those events rippled forward and culminated in the construction of a sprawling, deliriously weird Dutch theme park full of surprisingly accurate recreations of architectural icons from Amsterdam?
Well, the answer is yes! It's called Huis Ten Bosch in Nagasaki, and I just got back from there.
I am a sucker for strange, large, "why does this even exist" style tourist traps, so of course I was instantly obsessed with this place. There are some uninspired attractions within the park (mostly silly looking VR things and bad collections of mildly interesting objects), but the main thing for me was the fact that they built a surprisingly convincing city for you to walk around in. It feels like the GTA take on Amsterdam.
Exploring this place, I mentally drafted a script for Paul Blart: Mall Cop 3 in which he winds up chasing criminals on a golf cart through the streets of Huis Ten Bosch, jumping off one of the bridges spanning the canals that divide it and continuing pursuit in a little boat.
If you'd like to read more about our experience, I posted about it a bit on Twitter.
That's all for now, take care! Dave