This is where you can send in your archived computer game!

The number isn't part of an address or discord id—I got it by keysmashing—and I haven't drawn a cover (wrote this up in a notes app), but here's a game:

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name: Warp Worms

number: 1794 

days to beat: 1 + 7 + 9 + 4 = 21

genre: Adventure

theme: Comedy

platform: Portals94

feature: Procedural Generation

notes: Warp Worms, released in 1994, sees players take control of The Worm That Walks as it travels through portals trying to reach its grave. In order to pass each procedurally-generated world, you need to gather a selection of ritual components to open the next portal to the next world; this involves exploration, occasional combat, and interacting with semi-coherent generated NPCs*. Known for its extreme difficulty and bizarre sense of humour.

The game ends after travelling through a random number** of portals. It took me the full play-time above to get lucky and only have to travel through 37 portals before the end. I don't advise playing this game yourself and hoping for such a short time***.

*except for the itinerant merchant NPC, Mr. Barter, who not only follows you through the worlds, but is programmed with an impressive memory that records all of your actions and insults you for making bad choices

**between 1 and 65536, randomly picked when you start a new game (in the original Japanese version it was fixed for each game disc, leading to a vicious secondary market among speedrunners looking for discs with the lowest possible numbers)

***I don't advise playing this game yourself, period

name: Kachuando Ririsu

number: 99577

days to beat: 9 + 9 + 5 + 7 + 7 = 37 days

genre: Arcade

theme: Romance & Fishing

platform: SFX

feature: Multi Theme!

feelies: Postcard

notes:
A reasonably successful Japanese indie game, "Catch & Release" gained a small but dedicated fanbase in the anglosphere among fans that were fortunately willing to circulate translations but were less-fortunately so enamored with the idea of Japanese culture that they refused to call it by its obviously English name.

The art of the game is pretty amateur, presumably done by the the two devs themselves, and includes a few examples that are mildly-edited versions of art from commercial games. Presumably this didn't result in legal problems because the game wasn't at any point really "sold". The Win screen did request you send some money to the so-called "company" responsible if you enjoyed the experience, after which they would send you a postcard from wherever they'd been recently, with some hand-drawn game art.

After some static exposition screens where a mermaid questions your strength and suitability as a mate and charges you to prove your worth, the gameplay looks a bit like a side-scrolling beat-em-up, but once you get a fishing rod and make it to the lake, the screen switches to underwater and the game changes focus to the hook, which is still attached to a line but controls like the ship from Asteroids. The goal is to get the highest point fish from as deep as possible while not getting your line intersected by shallower fish, which will break it if your trying to reel something in. There are some fish you don't want to catch but can reel up and release to eat any fish that are being too much of a nuisance, some fish are poisonous, and sometimes the mermaid requests only specific fish, and gives you a time limit. Each time your line breaks, your time limit on a request expires, or you reel in a poisonous fish or just the wrong fish irritates the mermaid, and if you do this three times it's Game Over. If your game ends with over 3,000 points, the mermaid declares her love for you, but if you don't first catch the Magic Goldfish then you can't breathe underwater and you drown while she kisses you.

The listed time to completion is how long it took me to get over 3,000 points before losing; I have not gotten the good ending.

Important addendum: the fish are color-coded and not well differentiated in shape, so this game may sadly be impossible if you're colorblind, though some modern fangames exist that address this problem.

Name: Star Courier. Code: 92200

Genre: Arcade Theme: Space Platform: IM-98 Feature: FMV Feelies: Journal

An action game where you dodge asteriods, fire from enemy ships, and more to traverse the space between the stars and deliver your vital packages.

Release Year: 1991

Time to Beat: 13 days. This is definitely from the era where they used difficulty to stretch out playtime - fortunately, we had some friends willing to hang out with us while we streamed playing it and give pep talks.

Notes:

The IM-98 CD-ROM attachment was a late addition in the history of the machine, and opened up space for a few early FMV games to release on the console, like Star Courier. It’s clear that playing video used up almost all the power of the processor, but they got around it by having video windows pop up during breaks in the action. The game is essentially a rail shooter without the shooting - obstacles and enemies are sprites that pop up in front of you, grow, and then fly (hopefully) past you, and you move your ship around the plane of your screen to dodge them. Some objects do move diagonally, and it uses the limited color capacity of the IM-98 to highlight them as they near you. The story is pulpy and the acting is campy, but it’s still a neat experience if you’re willing to die a lot to get through it.

The booklet included with Star Courier is something of a highlight - it’s a fictional research log by a scientist investigating a strange new element. The urgency of the rest of it - and how dramatically your ship explodes when struck - makes a lot more sense if you read this first.