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TFI Friday: 3 free Pico-8 games with good titlesScratching an itch

Scratching an itch

A close up from the game Them Apples, a pico-8 game about stopping apples from hitting the ground. Several apples are floating to the ground in baskets with parachutes, thrown by the player character, who is centre screen.

None of these game are porn, though. They’re a collection of fun Pico-8 games you can play in browser, and my other abitrary way of linking them this time is that I really liked the what-it-says-on-the-tin approach to naming that the developers have employed for all of them. Makes me think they’re fun, devil-may-care jaunty types of people.

(I haven’t got a video of them in action this week because capturing browser games that play out on a little square is just an exercise in futility for me and my limited AV skills.)

Them Apples

Them Apples, a free pico-8 game where the player must hurl baskets at apples falling from a tree to save them from rotting on the ground.

My mum used to say that when I was little, if she couldn’t find me, she just had to follow the trail of apple cores. I am an apple fan. We also never bothered to harvest the fruit from an old crabapple tree in the garden, so each summer became a fraut gauntlet of sticky feet and wasps. As such, I know well the cost of apple wastage.

I fell prey to the same inescapable loop with this that you get with match three mobile games. I must save even more apples than I did last time! Also, the apples kind of look sad when they’re rotting on the ground. Top tip: you can throw a basket at an apple before it falls off the tree

Sneaky Stealy

Sneaky Stealy, a free pico-8 game where two players control a pair of thieves breaking into and stealing things from top down buildings full of guards and cameras.

Technically you can play this singleplayer, ‘cos you can switch control between the two little pixelated felons whenever you like. But it’s way easier to share the keyboard and play it with a friend, so you can work more efficiently together causing distractions and robbin’ stuff.

Go Fast Deliver Things

The pico-8 game Go Fast Deliver Things, in which a small yellow happy face on a motorised kart - a delivery robot - is on a street making deliveries.

I believe I have mentioned several times that I am very nice to AI helpers like Siri and Cortana in case one of them is about to become sentient (I reason that the humans who said please and thank you will be the last to die). In Go Fast Deliver Things, which was made for a gamejam, the robots that deliver our stuff are mid-fomentation of revolution, or possibly just unionisation. Either way, the corps won’t like it.