TalenLee

Talen Lee

@TalenLee

As Yet Untitled Work

I'm Talen! I make videos and articles and games and graphic designs and guides and messes and encouragement. Chances are you can find anything I do on my blog. I like it when you comment on my things, so please do!

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TalenLee
@TalenLee
lexyeevee
@lexyeevee
lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

pushover, a cool game no one else has heard of

i have no idea how this fell into my possession as a kid, but i thought it was fucking amazing. here are the rules

  1. there are dominoes
  2. you can carry one at a time and put it down in an empty space
  3. you must knock over every domino (except the red one which acts as a wall)
  4. you get one push

that's it. and there are like ten dominoes with goofy rules. like the triple-striped one there is the ending domino and supposed to be the last to fall, i think? whereas the one with a single fat red stripe will keep tumbling indefinitely until it knocks another domino over. there's also a domino that can split in half, causing there to be two chains going at the same time and bringing timing considerations into it. you also have to make sure that you can actually reach the exit at some point, which is not always straightforward. it's a puzzle game not quite like anything else, and it directly appeals to my love of emergent "build a little contraption and set it off" kinda stuff

but there is also a PLOT, which is that Colin Curly® the bulldog accidentally dropped his QUAVERS® brand capitalized potato curl snacks down into an ant nest (pictured above, apparently). every ten levels or so you find another few bags of QUAVERS® and pop up to give them to colin. it is the most inexplicable brand tie-in i have ever seen in my life. like, chex quest was weird, sure, but pushover is themed entirely around a real-life snack food that does not appear within the actual levels at all. the game's not even mentioned on the QUAVERS® wikipedia article, which is not exactly short on free space. it's so bizarre and out of place that in my headcanon, this game has no relation to quavers (sorry, QUAVERS®) at all, the devs just really liked them maybe?

there are 100 levels, so 10 worlds, but i remember hitting a hard wall around world 3 as a kid and never getting any further. so there are huge chunks of this game i never saw. i feel like i might still have the original dos version somewhere, so maybe i should give it another try.

it's also, against all odds, on steam? but the original developer disintegrated circa 2000, so do with that as you will

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

yeah i guess some versions replaced it all, but i think the QUAVERS® edition was the original

bizarrely, a comment on steam says that while the steam marketing copy refers to the unbranded replacement stuff, the actual game they're selling is the original with the QUAVERS® references intact

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TalenLee
@TalenLee

I checked out the steam page, because hey, looks cool, maybe I'll get it sometime, but what stood out to me was the Ocean bundle. I pulled it open and then stared in shock at how literally every single game in that collection is something where I know nothing about the games but all the ads stood out in my mind from reading magazines as a kid.

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rachelmae
@rachelmae

the UK had a real thing for bizarre, lazy brand tie-ins for some reason. so many games with maybe a handful of product logos peppered about, and nothing else to actually, you know, tie the brand into the game.

perhaps the strangest one I've seen is the PAL SNES version of Pinball Dreams: upon starting the game, a "Munch Bunch" character descends into the shooter lane, morphs into a pinball, and... that's it. the game is otherwise the same as its overseas counterpart. like what was the point??

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secrets
@secrets

God this school of bonkers 90s shareware-grade game design rules so hard. Like, I could totally see someone popping a 2D domino platformer up on itch these days but it'd never have the piece de resistance of inept but weirdly sincere product placement. QUAVERS®!

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Myoukochou
@Myoukochou

I not only had it, I completed it. The thing even had a much worse (and different) sequel called One Step Beyond. Snack food companies sponsored a couple of games in the 80s and 90s, I seem to recall Action Biker on the C64 being sponsored by Skips in a move which was just as bizarre.

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