An interesting Ludo – in pewter!

After finishing the last entry, I did some idle googling and came across this interesting Ludo. It was designed by Alberto Tabellini and is made of pewter. I especially liked the pieces, they seem to be made of brass, and since they all have the same color, each player has a shape of his own. You find the same solution in older monochrome computer games, for example H.A.B. Smals’ Mens erger je niet on Hercules and CGA.

And of course, the pun potential of pewter and computer did not completely escape my notice either.

Germany, Russia, Italy, Sweden

I’ve always been interested in where games come from, and I’ve listed the games I write about or offer for download by country for years. Now I looked at the Download Central stats to see from which country listings people actually click through. The results were not what I was expecting. There’s a steep curve, each entry in the following list has about half as many clicks as the one above it:

1. Germany
2. Russia
3. Italy
4. Sweden

All the other country listings create so few click-throughs that the numbers are hardly relevant and might well be a product of chance.

Of course I cannot say how relevant these numbers are at all. I do not know if people come to these pages because they are interested in games from that country, or if the page just turned up in the search for a game they were looking for. But it’s interesting.

One thing that baffles me is that there is absolutely no relation between the number of games I have from a certain country and the number of clicks. UK, France and Canada for example are very long lists, longer than anything except Germany. I’m especially astonished that there was not a single click from the Finland listing, since this is quite a long list as well and one of the few countries with a distinct game culture of its own.

Scopa Scopone

Scopa is, along with Tressette and Briscola, one of the national card games of Italy. It is played with the Italian playing cards that you see above. Both the design of the cards and the rules of Scopa is subject to local variations. Scopone is just one of them.

Scopa has been translated as Clean Sweep. Scopare is Italian for to sweep, and some computer implementations feature a broom in the icon. Incidentally, scopare can also be used for another activity that involves rhythmic movement, and as a standalone swearword. A google image search for scopare turned up precious few brooms, but lots of other things.

Computer implementations: I found four, Windows games all of them, and uploaded them all today. Unsurprisingly, three of them are from Italy, the fourth, while from the USA, has an author with a definitely Italian name. That all four are Windows games did not astonish me either (compare Windows 3.x card games).

Nebula Fighter

About two years ago I came across the shareware version of Nebula Fighter, a 1997 shoot ‘em up by Fabrizio Farenga and Alfredo Siragusa. The closing credits announced the full version for November of the same year, to be distributed exclusively by a Texas publisher, One Reality. Later I uploaded the shareware to Download Central, and it became quite popular (currently DOS game #9, new download #5). Here’s a screenshot from the Nebula Fighter shareware:

I have often wondered if that full version ever manifested. I still don’t know, but probably not. The game was however published two years later on CD-ROM, but as a Windows/DirectX game. Holodream Software, the label under which Nebula Fighter was developed, still maintains a website, and still offers a Windows demo for download, which I have now put up as well, untested and untried. Here’s a screenshot, from the Holodream website:

Nebula Fighter is interesting because like Katharsis or T-zer0 it represents an attempt to salvage a dying genre into a new era. None of these attempts was particularly successful, and the games remained mostly obscure (currently Nebula Fighter does not even have a MobyGames entry). For a while, scrolling shooters just like the once so dominant platform games were simply considered quaint. As the interest in classic gaming rises, these latecomers may be discovered again.