Tag: pico-8

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video games

Cab Ride is a Delightfully Minimal Train Sim with Fantastic Music

A screenshot from Cab Ride depicts a highly pixelated 4 by 3 image from the front of a train at night with tracks rolling out in front and power lines overhead to presumably connect to a panograph.

Cab Ride by Powersaurus is a free game that runs on the PICO-8 fantasy computer in your web browser or with a download. In Cab Ride you’re just driving a train from with a minimal interface through pretty pixelated cities and countrysides while enjoying some nice music and optionally picking up and dropping off passengers at different stations kinda like your JR East Train Simulator (Steam link for Windows, Early Access stream by Yours Truly).

Cab Ride’s controls are minimal, like other PICO-8 games, but thoughtful. For example, for maximum chill there is an “express mode” that drives the train on its own. To activate this you press the right arrow or the right direction on an analog stick. When I saw these instructions, at first I thought this would lead to a lot of accidental user-input causing you to flip into this mode too often, but there’s a smart countdown that prevents accidental “express modes.”

Cab Ride is free on itch.io for your web browser, Windows, macOS, and Linux, or through the PICO-8 BBS.

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video games

Lexaloffe Announces a New Fantasy Console for 2022

Lexaloffe’s Zep announced a new fantasy console today, Picotron is the third in their line after the original Pico-8 and the voxel-y goodness of Voxatron. According to the announcement we can expect an early alpha of Picotron in late 2022, and that the system is more focused on being a “practical and flexible development environment.”

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video games

PICO-8

Speaking of unknowingly acquiring games, PICO-8 showed up in my Lexaloffe account recently. Lexaloffe are a small game developer who also produce what they call Fantasy Consoles, like PICO-8. Fantasy Consoles are game consoles that only exist in software but have similar limitations for developers to a real console.

For example, PICO-8 limits developrs to 128×128 pixels with 16 colors and like older 8-bit computers that had their own versions of BASIC and a minimal operating system you can launch games and switch to the editor in order to immediately start developing your own in Lua.

Or you could just play a ton of games that others have developed using PICO-8 right in your browser. There are scrolling shooters, train (riding) simulators, drawing programs intended for Japanese calligraphy that are abusable into creating artful sketches of Splatoon characters, hardcore platformers, and many others posted to the Lexaloffe BBS.

If you had Voxatron before from a Humble Bundle or directly from Lexaloffe, then you already have PICO-8 available to you via your Lexaloffe account.

Unfortunately sound for the browser-based PICO-8 games doesn’t work in Safari, they’re fine in Firefox and Chrome. The downloadable PICO-8 Fantasy Computer is available for $20 in a bundle with Voxtraon on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.