Jason Dyer

Save 90% on Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma on Steam Nine participants awaken, trapped in an underground facility. To escape, they must play a game with deadly consequences. Who will live, and who will die? The choice is yours. Let the Decision Game beg...

just to hit the unpopularity category, I thought the third Zero Escape was the good one

I have never run into anyone else with the same opinion

store.steampowered.com/app/311240/Z...

DROD: Gunthro and the Epic Blunder on Steam DROD is a unique puzzle-logic game with clever mechanics and an engaging story. It is a turn-based top-down 2-D dungeon puzzler. The game play has amazing depth through emergent behaviors as puzzle el...

it always baffles me how obscure DROD is given "best puzzle game ever made" is a very common comment

but a.) puzzle game b.) game that started long before Steam existed and c.) game with art aesthetic that's intentionally a bit wooly

store.steampowered.com/app/314330/D...

Misadventure 6 (1982) THIS TIME, THE SYNTONIC ROVING SPOTLIGHT HAS LANDED ON, -ICK- BOB KROTTS! THIS VERMIN CHARACTER IS THE -GASP- VICE PRESENT OF OUR CLUB! BOB IS A RESIDENT OF KETTERING, OHIO AND HE IS AN AVID MARVEL…

All the Adventures reaches Misadventure 6 for TRS-80, and you think the "TOTALLY NEW CONCEPT" might be sarcastic but it appears to be the first text adventure superhero game

bluerenga.blog/2026/03/09/m...

my favorite thread from today!

yes but how many minutes did that action take

TRS-80 screen You can see a vicious DINOSAUR attacking the city!

I've been sick the last few days; apologies, my next post will be delayed a bit. Hopefully it will be worth the wait!

PCGAMER Disc 7.7 OCTOBER 2001 : PCGamer : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive PCGamer Demo Disc 7.7 from October 2001 Features MechCommander 2

Took me a little while to find so in case anyone wants it

archive.org/details/pcga...

Fool's Errand progress report: intro is done, we're now porting the game itself. The game data loads and the story view is (mostly!) rendering properly; scrolling up and down will jump between sections of the story which have been unlocked. Next goal is to start porting over puzzle code.

I am in this, as are many other Cool People.

NarraScope 2026 | A Hybrid Conference on Interactive Narrative NarraScope is a conference that brings together the writers, developers, scholars, and players of interactive narrative.

Narrascope is a conference (June 12th-14th this year in Albany) which gathers "writers, developers, scholars, and players of interactive narrative."

I can now announce I am giving a talk:

*The First Year of Japanese Adventure Games*

a history of 12 months

narrascope.org

Misadventure 5 (1982) This is a continuation of the story of Bob Krotts, which I wrote about here, so you should read that post before you read this one. Krotts ran a “Softcore Software Company” which publis…

Bob Krotts wrote a series of "naughty" games for TRS-80; I had trouble getting number 5 to work, but I have now unveiled the mystery, which involves many deathtraps and a strange application of pants.

bluerenga.blog/2026/03/02/m...

person inside a computer, depicted in black and white with sparks flying around

From an ad for the educational game Microworld, in Compute! January 1982.

archive.org/details/1982...

Death Star: The View From Outer Space Is Breathless …I thought “well this could mean, shall we say, a mass market piece of hardware. Shops were springing up, not that many but they were springing up, retail computer shops, and they were sellin…

the messy conclusion to the Darryll D. Reynolds game Death Star, new ways for parsers to be terrible, and the consequences of a game reliant on six VIC-20 tape loads, including the destruction of planet Earth

bluerenga.blog/2026/02/28/d...

Definition of MINISCULE … See the full definition

also just learned miniscule may or may not be a typo depending on which dictionary you use

www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/m...

Death Star (1983) We’ve had semi-famous adventure game writer Brian J. Betts featured here already with The Secret of Flagstone Manor, but today we feature the other semi-famous bedroom coder from Australia, D…

All the Adventures returns to Australia, and Darryll Reynolds, well known for Secret of Bastow Manor. This is the first game of his I have access to, a conversion from TRS-80 to VIC-20, and it does a bizarre trick to deal with the miniscule memory size.

bluerenga.blog/2026/02/25/d...

ZENO: Program Your Way Out of Trouble Complexity in ZENO is reserved for the computer system it embodies. Your survival is totally dependent on your ability to program your way out of trouble. — from the instructions for the game…

The grand finale to 1983's Zeno, where programming errors are just part of the game and I needed to fling myself out of an airlock for Science

bluerenga.blog/2026/02/23/z...

Index of all deep dive articles - The Sentinel on the BBC Micro Index of all deep dive articles about The Sentinel

I'm releasing over 50 deep dives into The Sentinel, Geoff Crammond's epic #BBCMicro game.

Batch #1 is now ready: 6 new articles about memory maps, program flow and interrupts, all at thesentinel.bbcelite.com/deep_dives

Batch #2 (maths!) coming soon.

Enjoy!

#retrocomputing #retrogaming #c64 #8bit

ZENO: Powerful and Potentially Dangerous Devices (Continued from my previous post.) I’m still trying to get my bearings on how this works. Back when I wrote about my favorite games of Tlön — essentially, imagining games from an imagin…

ZENO continues, as I hack the lift to explore two more floors, and die from a nail on a fake space shuttle

also, manuals with pages missing, and how an editor application can be a game

bluerenga.blog/2026/02/17/z...

These games are listed in the order I played them: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations Snatcher Hotel Dusk: Room 215 Famicom Detective Club Part II Clock Tower Ghost Trick 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors Corpse Party Attack of the Friday Monsters Danganronpa 2 Another Code R 428: Shibuya Scramble 13 Sentinels Gnosia Paranormasight

With the new Paranormasight releasing soon, I decided to make a small list of my favorite Japanese adventure games. I'm using the term "adventure game" loosely here, as some of these are more VNs than ADVs, but these are the titles that affirmed my love for this type of game and all its sub-genres.

My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza Over the last few weeks, I created a computer game set in the Arctic. Or maybe I've been working on it since 1981. It all depends on how you count. All I know for sure is that I programmed the orig...

@jdyer.bsky.social Breaking Arctic Adventure news: technologizer.com/home/2026/02...

ZENO (1983) Welcome to ZENO – a test of your initiative The objective is to survive as long as possible against an increasingly hostile environment IBM as a company has only come up here so far in passin…

in which All the Adventures reaches a mysterious "programming adventure" for IBM mainframe that was lost for many years

(download included!)

the concept is related to Infocom's Suspended, except you have to program the robots yourself

bluerenga.blog/2026/02/16/z...

The Picture You Probably Saw of the “First Videogame” Is Wrong This is about as niche as a post of mine can get. What happened is I’ve been deep at work on my next game, which requires some history going back to the 1950s, and more specifically, Christop…

Have you ever read or seen a discussion about the "first videogame"? It turns out the picture you likely saw as part of it is wrong.

#history

bluerenga.blog/2026/02/13/t...

Epic Hero #1, Ocean Hunt: Welcome to Winsville (Continued from my previous posts.) I’ve finished the game, and as predicted, there was not much left to go. I was left before with a crystal rod and a related curious hint. I have no idea wh…

grand victory in the "epic" hero game Ocean Hunt

involving dubious infosec methods and bad grammar

bluerenga.blog/2026/02/12/e...

Epic Hero #1, Ocean Hunt: Welcome to Killedsville (Continued from my previous post.) First off, some corrections to statements in my last post: two of the Colour Genie games (from the “Colour Quest” series published by Gumboot) are by …

Epic Hero #1 continues, with another bad pun, an island British demon woman (??), cryptic messages that don't get used, and an author self-insert scene.

bluerenga.blog/2026/02/11/e...

Epic Hero #1, Ocean Hunt (1982/1983) In the April 1984 edition of Imagine magazine, intended mostly for tabletop gaming, Mike Costello (editor of Wargame News and Warmachine) started a column devoted to home computer gaming. Many read…

in which All the Adventures returns to England with Epic Hero #1: Ocean Hunt

containing a bloodthirsty merchant

an extremely bad pun leading to an existential crisis

a brief history of the Colour Genie

and a mostly unknown yet prolific author, Marc Leduc

bluerenga.blog/2026/02/09/e...

Cosmo Cross: The Thing’s Hollow—It Goes on Forever— (Continued from my previous posts.) I was missing one reasonably simple (but still hard to find) action in order to escape with the Bluestone; I did try the next part of the game but it didn’…

My conclusion to the grand cinematic experiment for PC-88 from XTAL SOFT in Japan, Cosmo Cross. I get past the adventure section and reach a mysterious planet full of monoliths, and a cutscene which aspires for an era far past its time.

bluerenga.blog/2026/02/08/c...

“To fight a troll”: notes on the combat mechanics of Zork 1.

blog.zarfhome.com/2026/02/to-f...

Cosmo Cross: Don’t Look Behind You (Continued from my previous post.) I’ve made progress on but haven’t yet finished the ADV part of Cosmo Cross; while I suspect the section is short, I made it through enough content to …

Cosmo Cross, the bizarre sim/adventure hybrid, continues

involving major issues with guess-the-noun

and one looming warning

bluerenga.blog/2026/02/07/c...

feel free to drop thoughts in the comments! I've still been poking at PRISM every few days because it feels like there's still more there I'm missing, even if jumping to the final solution is impossible because of broken puzzle reasons

Cosmo Cross (1982) The company for today’s game, confusingly, goes by X’TAL SOFT, XTAL SOFT, or CRYSTAL SOFT depending on what document you are looking at. At least the title of the game is straightforwar…

All the Adventures dips back to 1982 for a space sim-adventure game hybrid from Japan. I give the history of how a music company switched to games and the workings behind the space-combat section:

bluerenga.blog/2026/02/06/c...