Randomly found this on my hard drive from when I downloaded it - still such an absolute banger. The framing device is so good.
Packbat
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We semi-accidentally started a solo TTRPG book club on the fediverse, and “Princess with a Cursed Sword” was the first game all of us played. It was super super fun to talk about the game and read others’ playthroughs! We had some good conversations with folks about how its mechanics shape the tone of the stories we told. Our own playthrough ended up on the dark end of those we saw, but we had a good time with it.
I think if I understand you, yes - the way a Bitsy game works, you have the initial title text in a box with a blank background, then you play through the part of the game with screens that you move your character through, then you have the epilogue text in a box with a blank background, and then it goes completely blank. When the title comes up again, that’s you back at the beginning again.
Name: Star Courier. Code: 92200
Genre: Arcade Theme: Space Platform: IM-98 Feature: FMV Feelies: Journal
An action game where you dodge asteriods, fire from enemy ships, and more to traverse the space between the stars and deliver your vital packages.
Release Year: 1991
Time to Beat: 13 days. This is definitely from the era where they used difficulty to stretch out playtime - fortunately, we had some friends willing to hang out with us while we streamed playing it and give pep talks.
Notes:
The IM-98 CD-ROM attachment was a late addition in the history of the machine, and opened up space for a few early FMV games to release on the console, like Star Courier. It’s clear that playing video used up almost all the power of the processor, but they got around it by having video windows pop up during breaks in the action. The game is essentially a rail shooter without the shooting - obstacles and enemies are sprites that pop up in front of you, grow, and then fly (hopefully) past you, and you move your ship around the plane of your screen to dodge them. Some objects do move diagonally, and it uses the limited color capacity of the IM-98 to highlight them as they near you. The story is pulpy and the acting is campy, but it’s still a neat experience if you’re willing to die a lot to get through it.
The booklet included with Star Courier is something of a highlight - it’s a fictional research log by a scientist investigating a strange new element. The urgency of the rest of it - and how dramatically your ship explodes when struck - makes a lot more sense if you read this first.
Not sure what to use as a cover image? Feel free to ask for help and/or hash out ideas here!
Pro tip: Wikimedia Commons and Flickr both have good tools for filtering search results by language. Taking a photograph, cropping it to a square, and running it through a tool like bikibird’s Depict is a really effective way to get something evocative without a lot of effort.
A friend linked to this and we’re all talking about giving it a try - thanks for putting this out there!
Small bit of feedback: hollow point bullets are are actually less able to punch through armor than other kinds of bullets, not more. Just poking around on the Internet, there’s a kind of US military armor-piercing ammo that’s referred to as “Black tip”, which might be a cool name? I don’t know, just wanted to point out that hollow point bullets are not armor piercing.
Unrelated to bullets: the Turmoil mechanic is really interesting! That sounds like a really fun dynamic to try to lean into.