Blippo+ is more of a unique means of telling a story than a game. I’m brought to mind of Portal, not Valve’s 2007 weird kinetic puzzle-action game, but Activison’s 1986 even weirder storytelling experience, about exploring a planet-wide information system to discover what happened to its missing inhabitants. In both Blippo+ and (older) Portal, all the “gameplay” is in a system of presenting information to the viewer/reader.

There is a story that progresses through a series of updates. On the Playdate it was timelocked, so it was like it was passing in real time. In the new Steam and Switch versions, the story unfolds more at your own pace; after you’ve seen most of one set you can “download” the next “packette” of shows, but also go to previous packettes whenever you feel like it.

I said shows, because Blippo+ presents itself as the television of a distant planet. I have avoided calling it an alien planet, because it’s really a lot like Earth, and while there’s definitely some unexpected elements (a scientist talks to long-dead inhabitants who are brains in jars) most of it you wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen on Earth TV in the early 90s. There’s a self-centered teen show, an exercise program, an entertainment news show that feels like it’s from the MTV of old, a show with a character much like Max Headroom, and many other callbacks to cable television of three decades past. There’s even a scrambled porn channel, although there’s really no porn behind it, other than “Tantric Computing,” which is but video clips of a lady’s hand lovingly fondling old-style computer mice and monitors.

There’s a show about two space-faring cowboys. A claymation kids show. The “Fighting Trillions” series of action movies, of which we only ever see trailers, narrated by a virtual soundlike of the late, great Gary Owens. (All of the shows have really great voice acting!) A D&D-themed trivia gameshow. The weird Julia Child-like cooking show Snacks Come Alive. And more. One of the shows is just different kinds of static. Another is info cards for local programming. The “Tips” channel is, wonderfully, just a sequence of error messages.

It’s all rounded off with a Preview Guide-style program listing channel, and a Ceefax-like information presentation service that’s somehow one of the most affecting parts of the whole package.

Each show, of about 20 in all, is only two minutes long. It’s easy to load it up and watch the entire contents of one or two of the channels, either intently or as background to other things.

It really needs to be experienced to get the idea across. This collection of first week clips on Youtube (11 minutes) that should demonstrate to you what it’s like.

Blippo+ (Playdate $10, Steam $15, Switch $15 currently on sale for $12)

First video (beginning to the end of the second dungeon + extras):

Second video (Jabu-Jabu’s Belly through to the end of the Forest Temple):

Third video (the Fire Temple, the Water Temple and the fetch quest to get Biggoron’s Sword):

Fourth video (The Shadow and Spirit Temples and the end):

Is that not enough? Rival channel U Can Beat Video Games has been churning through all of Final Fantasy VI (a.k.a. III, it’s complicated), having done five videos so far with one left to go, with videos ranging in length between 3⅓ to 4 hours: Part One – Part Two – Part Three – Part Four – Part Five.

I didn’t know that Nintendo’s first foray into consoles was making a custom controller for the Odyssey (not the Odyssey 2, the Odyssey), and distributed it in Japan. But I do know that Nintendo’s history extends far back before video games, to making Hanafuda and traditional playing cards, and still makes them to this day, along with Mah Jong, Shogi and Go equipment.

How well-known would you consider Conway’s Life to be? By one measure it’s incredibly obscure, in that if you ask a random person on the street if they know about it they’ll probably at best think you’re talking about Hasbro’s Game of Life, a simple board game where players pilot colored pegs riding in a tiny plastic car down a winding road from birth to retirement, a buffet of unexamined assumptions with a long history which itself may be worthy of exploration here itself some day.

But by another yardstick, few games are more well-known than Conway’s Life. It was created 55 years ago, in 1970, by British mathematician John Horton Conway, meaning it’s Older than Pong. It’s not technically just a computer game, but its explorations have grown so huge that practically everyone who cares simulates it on a computer.

When I say it’s a creation of pure mathematics, please don’t be scared off, because it’s really simple to understand. It was a popular subject of Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Recreations columns in Scientific American.

Imagine an infinite grid, a pocket universe that’s like an Excel spreadsheet that goes on forever. Each cell can contain a counter, which is considered “alive,” or nothing, which is considered “dead,” or just empty. From there, you use a simple process to simulate this universe.

You don’t have to worry about physics or gravity or free will. Instead, every counter on the grid with less than two neighbors dies (is removed) due to loneliness; every counter with more than three dies due to overcrowding; and on every empty space with exactly three neighbors is birthed a new counter. By “neighbors,” I mean on one of the eight spaces around it. By “birthed,” I note that reproduction in the world of Life is genderless and trinary.

So that’s how to do it. But why would you? It’s because despite its simplicity, Life patterns grow by unexpected and interesting processes. It’s a case of emergent complexity; like how DNA molecules ultimately produce living creatures in our world, simple origins create hugely complex results. That similarity of complexity to our universe is why it’s called a “game of life.”

A better introduction can be found at this page at Cornell University. It’s a type of cellular automation, a wider field with many game design implications. You could consider classical roguelikes to be a type of cellular automation, although not nearly as simple, or as elegant. Within the world of Conway’s Life there are Gliders, Oscillators, Wicks, Puffers, Guns, Methuselahs, Spaceships and more. While there aren’t physics as we consider them, there is a “speed of light.”

The website ConwayLife.com, created probably some time in 2009, is one of those many websites out there that invisibly hosts active communities that big media sites routinely ignore, the kind of thing that Set Side B carries both a banner and a deep affection for. There was a time where sites like this were a major focus of the World Wide Web, and it still is, even if the wider world fails to notice it. ConwayLife.com hosts a simulator on its homepage, a wiki of concepts, an active forum, a well-populated list of links, and even a Discord.

Please, those of you who read this, try to move your interest in the direction of exploring this strange but fascinating phenomena. Maybe it’ll bounce off of you, but maybe it won’t.

This is video review of the game Öoo played with a press key.