Anyone who says 8-bit chiptunes don't have soul has never heard this incredible performance of Bolero. This is one of the most impressive feats of musicianship I've ever witnessed.

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of hullabaloo about Steam’s so-called discoverability problem. So far in 2025, **19,606 games** have been released on Steam. Of those, **2,286 have zero reviews**. To some pundits, this is a crisis. No reviews must mean these games are invisible. Lost. Failed by the algorithm. Tragic. I wanted to test a simpler question. Would I actually buy any of these zero-review games? So I picked a single day. **September 1, 2025.** Recent enough to reflect current conditions. Far enough back that “it’ll get reviews later” is no longer a convincing excuse. I ignored Early Access. Those are not releases. Those are promises. On that day, I found **7 games** with zero reviews. Here they are, with genres, and whether I’d touch them. **Backrooms Maze 2D** Genre: Dungeon crawler rogue-lite Worth buy? No. Ugly, choppy, visually confused. I’ve seen Atari 2600 games with more charm and better pacing. **Fluffy Party** Genre: Sports Worth buy? No. Rocket League, but worse. Also PvP and co-op only. Which means if no one’s playing, congratulations, you bought a menu screen. **White Eternal** Genre: 3D RPG Worth buy? Maybe. Only if it’s under $1. It does have a free demo, which helps. The visuals are passable but rough. The UI looks hostile. This game radiates jank. **Day Of The Tank** Genre: Top-down shooter Worth buy? No. Ugly visuals, shrill audio, and a trailer with no music. That is not confidence-inspiring. **Dimensional Rift** Genre: 2D platformer Worth buy? Yes. Pixel art looks great. Music is catchy. This one immediately stands out. **ECHO Re:Kill** Genre: Visual novel Worth buy? No. I don’t like visual novels. Simple as that. **Line Defense** Genre: Top-down shooter Worth buy? Yes. There’s a demo. Visuals are basic but clean. I’ve enjoyed games like this before and would take the risk. So out of 7 games • 4 are hard no’s • 2 are definite buys • 1 is a maybe if the demo doesn’t embarrass itself Already, this doesn’t look like an algorithmic tragedy. Now let’s look at the ones I’d actually buy and why they might have zero reviews. First, the names. **Dimensional Rift** and **Line Defense** are aggressively generic. They tell you nothing. Worse, Dimensional Rift shares its name with a free VR game that already exists and is more popular. Good luck with that SEO. Second, presentation. These games target a specific audience that likes low-res visuals. That audience exists. I’m part of it. But it’s crowded. Everyone is doing pixel art now. Standing out requires exceptional art direction, music, or storytelling. “Competent” is no longer enough. As for **White Eternal**, the only reason it survives my cut is the demo. If that demo isn’t good, it’s dead on arrival. No mystery there. Regarding the four games in my “no” pile: even if they’re handmade, even if they’re artisanal, even if the pixels were lovingly placed one by one—they’re slop. Is this day representative of zero-review games in general? In my experience, yes. I watch Steam releases closely. There is far more slop than gold. Separating the two takes effort. And when a decent game fails, the reason is usually boring. Not discovery. **Marketing.** Bad trailers. Weak screenshots. Copy that explains instead of excites. No hook. No angle. No reason to care. Sometimes that’s fine. Many of these are solo dev projects. Getting onto Steam was the goal. Anything beyond that is a bonus. And actually, itch.io has far more of this. Steam just adds a layer of perceived prestige. So no, I don’t think Steam’s core problem is discoverability. It’s marketing. The algorithm can’t save you from a bad first impression.

Steam currently sits at 19,606 game releases in 2025. Will it break 20,000 this year? Yes. There are 11 days left. Steam needs 394 more releases by December 31. That works out to 36 games per day. On December 19, Steam shipped 62 games. As of this Saturday morning, 13 are already live. The pace is there. The math is simple. Steam is on track to pass 20,000 releases in a single calendar year for the first time.

Spelunky is one of my favourite games of all time. So when I finally played Aura of Worlds, I paid attention. It sits in the same lineage as Spelunky, but it is not content to be a tribute act. Yes, it is a roguelite platformer. You still descend into hostile spaces, fight enemies, steal everything that is not nailed down, and die constantly. The difference is how much freedom the game gives you while doing it. Movement is faster and more expressive. Abilities like dashing, grappling, blasting, and grabbing objects turn every room into a small physics problem rather than a binary test of reflexes. The weapons and tools matter more than raw execution. You can improvise. You can make bad situations survivable. The difficulty is still real, but it is less punitive and more conversational. When you die, it usually feels earned. The boss fights are the standout. They are epic, readable, and aggressively fair. You die quickly, but almost every death comes with a clear post-mortem. You know exactly how you could have won. Visually, it looks great. Pixel art, but not trapped in 8-bit or 16-bit nostalgia. Detailed sprites, dense environments, and effects that sell motion and danger without visual noise. It feels modern without chasing trends. If you love Spelunky but want something looser, more expressive, and more forgiving without going soft, Aura of Worlds is the answer.

Successful Jitsi test. Passed with flying colours. I feel this will be extremely useful for steering committee meetings and AGMs for the upcoming Federated Video Co-op Initiative.

We’re live now. The Jitsi test for the Federated Video Initiative is running. This is a technical test for Steering Committee and AGM meetings, and an open space to discuss incorporation, funding, governance, or ask questions.

Nextcloud

Jitsi test starting in 10 minutes. If you are interested in the Federated Video Co-op Initiative, you are welcome to join. For the next 30 minutes, we will be discussing the co-op and answering questions while testing the feasibility of using Jitsi for Steering Committee and AGM meetings.

Nextcloud

Everyone knows Donkey Kong. Fewer people remember that it kicked off a lawsuit where Nintendo was sued by Universal Studios for allegedly infringing King Kong. That case is deranged enough to justify its own write-up. What interests me more is the officially licensed King Kong game released in 1982 for the Atari 2600—one year after Donkey Kong was released. It is, functionally, a Donkey Kong clone. Nintendo didn’t try to stop it. Probably because the lawsuit was still unresolved and losing would have created injunction risk and licensing chaos. Awkward. But Nintendo unequivocally won after Universal’s claimed rights collapsed under its own prior legal positions. The court didn’t just dismiss the case. It called out Universal for bad-faith bullying of Nintendo’s licensees. The King Kong cartridge itself was part of that paper trail. Thereafter, the licensed King Kong game immediately stopped mattering. I’ve played it. Compared to Donkey Kong on the same hardware, it looks awful. The controls are worse. Movement feels like you’re steering a damp sponge. Still, it’s not unplayable. The climbing works. The jumping mostly works. I had fun with it. Part of that is because Tigervision tried harder than people remember. This was their first cartridge release. The game shipped with eight variations, including speed changes, two-player modes, and “magic bombs” that could fling you up a level if you timed things right. It’s still a clone, but it’s not a completely lazy one. King Kong didn’t vanish from games after that. In 2005, there were multiple tie-ins for Peter Jackson's King Kong movie, and some of them were genuinely solid. Then in 2023, we got Skull Island: Rise of Kong, which answered the question: what if a modern King Kong game shipped with no shame at all? Meanwhile, Donkey Kong just kept climbing. After years taking the backseat to Mario, Donkey Kong Country dragged him back into relevance. This year, Donkey Kong Bananza is getting Game of the Year nominations. That trajectory is earned. King Kong still pulls box office numbers. However, Donkey Kong is now getting movies too. King Kong shows up because he always has. Donkey Kong shows up because he's part of the shared Mario cinematic universe. And now King Kong’s 100th anniversary is coming up. He’s already in the public domain in his earliest form, which makes him suddenly very attractive to game developers. Expect a lot of Donkey Kong–style platformers starring a very familiar ape, all carefully staying on the safe side of the line. History doesn’t repeat. It reskins.