Arcade
I've wanted an arcade cabinet in the office for years and never had the wall space, so here is the version that fits in a browser tab instead. Three games from the Nokia era, rebuilt and moved to Nairobi. No case, no gimmick — just press start.
What's in it
Nyoka — Snake, except the snake is a matatu queue eating passengers off the CBD grid, and past a certain score a Kanjo starts hunting you across the board.
Bounce: Thika Road — the red ball is a tyre. Inflate it to ride the flood at the Globe Cinema underpass, deflate it to fit under the next gantry. Being the wrong size for the obstacle in front of you is the whole game, same as the original.
Matatu Impact — a side-scrolling shooter, four stages to a license: CBD gridlock, a highway weighbridge, a County licensing form that spawns sub-clauses when you shoot it, and an audit. Every boss changes tactics at half health, same as the original it's rebuilt from. That form is a joke and also, mechanically, an honest boss fight.
High scores
Bounce: Thika Road
Nobody yet. Be first.
Scores are counted in your browser, so treat the board as a claim rather than a measurement. Your own runs are also kept locally, in this browser, under the screen's own Scores menu.
Why this exists
Mostly because I've always wanted an arcade cabinet somewhere I work, and a website is the one place I could put one without asking facilities for wall space. This page is that, plainly — a place to keep the parts of the job that are fun, not an argument wearing a costume.
If there's a version of the thesis in it, it's a small one: the mechanics are exactly the mechanics everyone already knows from thirty years ago, and the only thing that changed is the city they're set in. That's most of what the rest of this site is actually about, at a much lower stakes table.
There's no asset file anywhere in here — every sprite, every sound, and the whole screen are generated in the browser, which is the kind of constraint that makes a weekend interesting.