Pig becomes sand
Also: AI Minecraft, Cave Story unfiction, and a pumpkin surprise.
This week, we're talking cave stories, giant diaries, and Ice Spice Robloxians.
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What’s up with this weird Cave Story series?
A strange video titled “Orange” from the channel Doukutsu Iterations popped into our feed recently. It’s a recreation of the 2002 Metroidvania Cave Story in a pseudo-3D style, with a cryptic description and filename that places it in a series of “iterations” discovered by the uploader. Each of these is some kind of altered version of Cave Story, some of which end on an ominous note.
The account seems to be trying to build up some kind of lore about a fictional AI that is endlessly remaking and changing Cave Story. Commenters can’t agree on what to call this project — many call it an ARG (alternate reality game), but it lacks the puzzle-solving audience participation elements of that genre. Others call it “unfiction,” an umbrella term for online stories presented as real recordings, which encompasses stuff like Petscop but doesn’t require a horror narrative. Immersive storytelling experiments like these keep cropping up (here’s a more polished example), often as someone’s weird little project rather than a big commercial ARG. But the funny thing about “unfiction” is that it feels like a Gen Z rebranding of one of the oldest ideas in fiction — presenting invented materials as reality, as epistolary novels like Robinson Crusoe do.
The best shot in Dracula
If you’ve got any kind of Halloween tradition associated with the 1992 film Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, you might already know this, but the film contains one of the most movie-magical shots of all time. There’s a moment when Jonathan Harker’s diary lies open in the bottom ⅔ of the frame as his train to Transylvania travels over the top of its pages — and it was all done in-camera, without compositing two shots together. As explained on a DVD featurette, the effects team first tried it by holding a diary in the foreground with a model train behind it. But they realized that with this setup the smoke from the train wouldn’t cast a shadow on the page; to solve this, they placed a “20-foot-wide” prop diary below the train set.
Pumpkins added to alpha test
In an unexpected collision between two recent EX fixations — seasonal events and Valve’s in-development team shooter Deadlock — Deadlock added a bunch of Halloween decorations to the game as a surprise on Oct. 31. The changes were minor compared to the returning Halloween carnivals in big MMOs, but are notably weird as part of the Deadlock experiment. The game has no marketing and no purchasable items, which are the two normal reasons to run a limited-time seasonal event. It’s also a constantly changing alpha with unfinished sections of the map and placeholder character models. But adding a bunch of last-minute pumpkins just to amuse your playtesters is the kind of thing that makes Deadlock cool at the moment — developers who are free to do anything seem to be pouring all their ideas into a passion project they update at 10 p.m. on a Friday.
AI Minecraft opens portal to new dimension of horror
An "open-world AI model" that generates blurry Minecraft gameplay in real time (but quickly forgets about anything you aren’t looking at) has prompted another round of “Hollywood/the game industry is OVER” posts from the people who like to say that. However, it is hard to overstate how discomfiting it is to actually play this pseudo-Minecraft. A user on the Cave Story Discord called it “genuinely horrifying” and described seeing “a pig morph into a disgusting amalgamation and then become sand.” Others took advantage of the AI’s free-associating brain to invent amazing new exploits.
Chum Box
Games
The team behind Moon: Remix RPG Adventure — an experimental RPG that later inspired Undertale — is crowdsourcing voice recordings for use in their next game, Stray Children. If you want to participate, you’ve got until this coming Friday to submit a recording. [link]
Only a gacha game like Puzzles & Dragons could produce a tier list in which Hello Kitty is ranked higher than Jujutsu Kaisen’s Gojo. [link]
The trailer for Showa American Story — an allohistorical action-adventure game built upon a pastiche of both American and Japanese ‘80s pop culture — is a gift that keeps on giving. [link]
The latest game from Lucas Pope (Return of the Obra Dinn, Papers, Please) is a throwback to the era of primitive LCD handhelds, complete with a “scanned” manual. [link]
Roblox devs are gaming the marketplace using one weird trick: inserting Ice Spice into their thumbnails. [link]
Movies
Michael Mann’s horror film The Keep, which has one of the greatest Tangerine Dream soundtracks, has never come out on Blu-ray due to the director’s own antipathy toward the movie. A release seems to finally be in the works [link], and may finally replace the version fans have been using for years: a scratchy pirated scan of a 35mm print. [link]
The 1990 action-horror-Christmas movie Maniac Cop 2 ends with a “Maniac Cop rap.” [link]
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