One of my favourite things about Paul Simpson’s work post The Care is how it teeters perpetually on the brink of cabaret. The Worst Year Of My Life especially sounds like the sort of thing you’d hear whilst passing a pub during karaoke hour and I adore it for that.
But it’s not a perfect song, that’s Bringing Home The Ashes. Ashes is still borderline cabaret but it somehow transcends that into the sublime. It’s very Liverpool indie, albeit tuxedo’d up. It’s great.
Beaver Bob In Dam Trouble is my PT, or my Silent Hills if you prefer. Except instead of a playable advert, there’s only a magazine advert and a loading screen designed by someone else.
To be fair, it is a really good loading screen.
I have no idea what Beaver Bob was ever supposed to be either. You know as much as I do. Younger me was sold from the moment they saw the magazine advert regardless.
A game about a beaver? I’m there for that. It might have some log chopping? Oh yes. Please. Beavers and logs sounds great.
I bet Beaver Bob would be amazing too. I can say that because it never launched, maybe never existed. It’s preserved forever in that moment when I first saw the advert, preserved forever in the thoughts of all the things it could be. All the guesses, all the hopes, all the beavers.
It’s the industry’s open secret that more games get some way to existing than the public ever see. Sometimes those games seep through into the gaming conciousness. Maybe it’s an announcement, a tweet, a rumour or a trailer released before things happen. Things happen a lot to games.
They’re always the best games too. You just know they play fantastic, they look fantastic. There’s no day 1 patches, no microtransactions, no bugs.
Just a beaver and their logs, happily being the best game that never was for the best part of 40 years.
I’m absolutely terrible at Matt Glanville’s Switch ‘n’ Shoot, a lovely but really quite difficult one switch shoot ’em up.
The addition of Tempest-style “baddies clog up your movement area” to a fairly usual tap to change direction fare makes for a really neat twist on an already solid formula. BUT! As much as I love the game (which is a lot), I love the bezels even more.
Wrap your eyeballs round this:
They’re the work of illustrator Paul Duffield and just woah, frankly. Woah.
They wouldn’t be even slightly out of place on a real proper arcade machine from the late 70’s/early 80’s. They’re tremendous.
And indeed, for only three grand I could be the owner of a Switch ‘n’ Shoot arcade machine. Sadly, I don’t have three pence most days, much less three thousand actual Earth pounds, but if I did…
The online home of Rob Fearon, disabled videogame maker, games journalist, crap film watcher, gobshite and doodler. Rob’s been around games a very, very long time now and Punching Robots Club is their personal blog featuring whatever nonsense takes their fancy.
Sometimes it’s a sketch, a review, an article about videogames, a pointer to something Rob finds cool. Whatever, really. Expect anything, Rob’s tired of being a brand online and so it’s just stuff and things these days. Nice stuff and things, mind you.
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