e558— Exploding Bananas

Photo by Gabriel Meinert on Unsplash

Published 22 June 2026

e558 with Michael M and Andy - slowing things down with games where you walk, fly, sail, throw bananas and play ball, along with 3D printing innovation, a new flip phone from Commodore and a whole lot more!

Michael M and Andy get things started while Michael R is away with cornucopia of games. First up is StonkRider, which bills itself as “motocross meets wall street” where you ride a motorcycle up and down a stock ticker.  Then, from the makers of Untitled Goose Game, is a new title called Big Walk, where, as the title suggests, you go out for an unstructured walk.  This harkens back nicely to the discussion between Ian and Andy in last week’s episode.  And it reminds Michael of a story he saw recently about Google’s take on Flight Simulator using Google Maps.  Next, the pair discuss TinyWind, a pixel pirate sailing game, where you might charter an accountant and sail the wild accountancy.  Then, an even more retro game appears - Gorilla.JS.  This DOS game has gorillas throwing exploding bananas at one another from across a cityscape where you can choose the angle and force to throw.  Both cohosts promptly thew their bananas with such little force that it went up in the air and exploded on their own gorilla.

Batter up!  Andy and Michael’s next set of topics take them to America’s pastime, and the adjacent sport of cricket.  After checking out the game visualization of Ribbie, the pair get into a discussion on what 8-Bit really means.  Michael remembers the SmallBall game, and was disappointed to learn that this game is no longer maintained.  On the other hand, he is happy about his university playing in the College World Series.  Baseball and cricket really lend themselves well to games because of all of the stats that are kept about each player and the games themselves.  Andy shared the story of the Wisden Cricketers Almanack which chronicles enormous details in it’s 1,500 pages!

After turning to innovations in 3D printing and visionOS collaboration, the cohosts consider the slow tech movement using the example of the new Commodore Callback flip phone.  This phone features the promoted ability to run 99% of Android apps while completely blocking social media and browsers.

Andy and Michael wrap things up with a new LEGO Ideas set - a playable LEGO space themed pinball machine.

Links to all of the fun are below - check them out!

What do you think the Commodore Callback model number