There’s something about over-the-air broadcasting. Tuning a radio has a way of making the world feel vast: picking up the clipped tones of a Beijing newscaster through waves of static, dialling into the current top 40 in Amman—these are experiences that make you appreciate how enormous and varied the planet is, like scooping a thimble of water out of a churning ocean.
The old days of TV were a similar story. There was nothing like idly channel surfing to remind you of what a diverse array of human experiences there are, from slick dramas to public access shows that seemed poised to collapse at any second. It’s gone now, with the advent of on-demand programming. Or it was gone, anyway. Now we have Blippo+, freed from the Playdate and now on PC.
Blippo+ is, from the time I’ve spent with it, not really a game. It’s more of an… interactive art piece? But wait! Don’t close the tab! It’s good! Really! It’s a channel-surfing sim, the conceit of which is that you’re a proud new subscriber to a space-based cable TV package.
You’ve got the whole shebang: an electronic TV guide to scroll through, a remote to mash when you get bored of whatever’s playing, and a veritable bounty of absolutely absurd FMV TV shows to feast your intergalactic eyes on.
It’s genuinely impressive how much Blippo nails the vibe of ’80s/’90s filler TV programming—the Vaseline smear on the lens, the garish neon, jaunty tunes, make-up-caked actors, it’s all there and it’s all great whether you’re watching the latest hot music videos or some kind of Dantooine take on Celebrity Squares.
I actually had the game running on my TV screen and… it happened. I found myself sat on my sofa, slack-bodied, thumbing through the programmes on offer like I was bored after school in 1998. The magic was back, the world was young and wide again, and when I hit the game’s ersatz Ceefax system… reader, I experienced a childlike glee of the sort I’ve not had since I started shaving.
It helps that the game is actually well-acted, too. It would have been easy, I think, to fall into a trap of making all the actors kind of suck. This is a cable TV pastiche after all, right? But Blippo+ is smart to avoid that. I didn’t run into anything that could break the illusion the game carefully sets out to create, and thank god for that. For a while there, I was truly back in the last time anything was good: the 1990s.
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