I’ve seen some of these weird little messages (34 minutes), edge cases that appear when you talk to someone or witness an event at an unexpected time in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask’s three-day cycle, or do it while one of the game’s many masks.
A few of the cases covered:
Tatl the fairy’s information on a couple of the bosses changes as you progress through their fights.
The guards blocking the exits to Clock Town usually use the presence of your sword to determine whether they will let you leave, but if your sword was stolen or is being forged they’ll notice and let you leave anyway. They also give you different hints on which dungeon to do next.
The Astronomer has special dialogue if you speak to him as a Goron or a Zora.
The residents of Clock Town each have their own little story of how they’re handling their impending destruction. The Swordsman especially has interesting reactions that change as the clock ticks down.
The Swordsman also, like the Happy Mask Salesman, has a reaction to every mask you can wear to his shop. The lady in the Treasure Chest game and the both the proprietor of the Trading Post and his employee have unique reactions to some of the masks.
If Deku Link can shoot bubbles they can play the archery game, not even needing a bow!
What’s great about all of these cases is none of them are necessary to win the game! It’s there for the players who try to experience Majora’s Mask’s story from every angle. Disable used a text dump to chart out all of the game’s dialogue on a web page here.
‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.
The opening to NAQBU, a free web game, certainly makes all the right references. Its name first shows up as MORIA, and its similarities to Robert Alan Koeneke’s early roguelike are obvious. If you sit at its title screen, it also shouts out to the makers of Rogue, Hack, Larn, NetHack, Omega, Angband and ADOM. I feel like this game was made for me directly: I’ve played all of them.
The town level; unlike Moria, each building is labeled
Your job is to descend into The Dungeon and beat the boss monster down there, as @-signs have done since time immemorial, which for the purposes of roguelikes is 1980. I would tell you what it’s called, but a lot of the monsters and items have non-English names that don’t fit easily into my memory. I don’t think they’re procedurally generated, some objects and monsters have names taken, or else derived from, from Mesopotamian mythology, and don’t seem to change from game to game.
Naqbu right now is a very young game, so any of this could change, but right now it plays like a very simplified Moria, with only ten levels and without its vaguely Tolkienesque theming. Like Moria, above the dungeon is a small town with various amenities, and also like Moria each level of the dungeon is regenerated when you enter it. A couple of its enemies even make cameo appearances, like the white worms of the early levels.
Each level of the dungeon has a name. This is the first level, the Reed Marsh.
While Naqbu (mostly) uses ASCII characters for its graphics, it isn’t a terminal game. It uses a terminal-like appearance as an aesthetic choice, which is also an approach used by some versions of Dwarf Fortress and Caves of Qud. Naqbu then applies a layer of extra glitz on top of that, which reminded me a lot of the terminal emulator cool-retro-term. Magic items produce character-based animations around you when used, and some dungeon levels have display gimmicks. This is sometimes a little distracting; an effect I encountered later in the game offset the player symbol a few pixels to the right, and so made it a bit difficult to figure out just where they were standing. A few monsters have screen-warping effects around them that also make it hard to target them with attacks sometimes. (A few of the screenshots included here are a bit distorted because of them.)
Dungeon level three, the “Seven Gates.”
Moria-likes vs Hack-likes
Being a Moria-like, Naqbu is a tactical game about fighting monsters. In Moria-likes, such as UMoria and Angband, even though they have some item identification such as in Rogue, the creatures that live in the dungeon are the chief obstacle of the game. The alternative are Hack-likes, where it’s more like the dungeon itself is your true enemy, and the monsters that live in it, while a big part of the challenge, are just one aspect of it. Naqbu doesn’t even have traps in its current form, and only a few kinds of bad item.
When you find a better weapon or suit of armor, you automatically switch to it.
Naqbu has a lot of little comfort features. When you find a piece of equipment in the dungeon that’s better than what you’re currently using, the game will equip it to you automatically. That’s possible because none of the weapons or armor have any special functions at the moment, and there are no cursed items. There’s not much question whether one item is better than another, since it mostly comes down to numbers. Equipment power thus is largely the result of how much exploring you’ve done, and how deep. You can find scrolls of enchant weapon and enchant armor, and there is some minor strategy around whether you use them immediately or to wait until you’ve found a really good item, but with the game’s current difficulty I didn’t have any problems winning it on my first try even using them as soon as I found them.
Naqbu uses a Moria-like item identification system, which seems kind of like it plays lip service to Rogue’s challenging identification. There are a small number of bad items that give the ID system some teeth, there’s only three kinds of bad potions and just one bad scroll. All of the bad potions can’t be sold in the town shops, a pretty obvious tell that they’re useless. None of the bad items inflict any permanent harm on you either, so it’s a matter of saving potions until you have three with prices of 0, using one of each of them on the town level to identify them, then you’ll never be fooled by them again for the rest of the game. There aren’t a lot of different kinds of magic items anyway, making it a simple matter to learn what they all are, despite the complete lack of identify scrolls in the game.
Dungeon level 5.
The Dice Are In Charge
There’s a phenomenon in roguelikes where, after a certain point, it’s like the random number generator plays your character, where it determines your character’s strength more than your playing strategy does. All the best equipment is found in the dungeon, and how much you can boost them depends on how many enchant scrolls you find. For the most part it’s obvious how to make use of these items. There are no real decisions to be made there.
Rogue had some interesting risk/reward aspects with its items. There were monsters and traps that could decay your weapons and armor, but leather armor couldn’t be rusted, meaning every scroll of enchant armor that went into one was permanent, but otherwise it was the weakest armor.
You could wear a ring of maintain armor, but those were rare, and also increased your hunger rate slightly. You had a hard choice to make: did you hope to find strong banded mail or plate mail and put all of your enchant armor scrolls into them then try to preserve it, or did you pile them all into leather armor? What happens if you put on cursed armor then? Enchant armor scrolls will uncurse it, but you’ll then still have mostly-bad armor with a single plus added. Alternatively you could hope to find a scroll of remove curse, then switch to a suit that’s a better home for that plus.
Dungeon level 7.
Potions of raise strength drunk when at maximum strength raised that maximum, but rattlesnakes could drain strength and you might not ever find a potion of restore strength to get you back up to maximum. And all of these items had to be identified to know when to best use them. If it’s easy to identify items, then it becomes a lot more obvious what the optimum moves are. That’s what I mean by the random number generator playing the character: if you find an improvement item, you just use it right away, because there’s no reason not to. Hard item choices make the challenging combat more interesting by giving a player a way to blunt the monsters’ claws and teeth, but it’s not something that’s a real part of Naqbu.
It’s true that identification helps you know what to keep and what to drop, but there isn’t much drawback in using the bad items anyway. They certainly won’t harm your player’s long-term state, like Hack’s scroll of destroy armor or potion of sickness can. In practice, you use all the potion and scroll types once, and from then on you just never pick up the bad ones. In my run of Naqbu, I knew all the bad items by dungeon level two, so there was no strategy to it at all.
All of this is usually true of Moria-style games anyway. Because the dungeon levels can be regenerated endlessly, there is no real limit to the number of state-improving items that can be generated. This means that, at some point, the design expects the player to have spent time improving their state up to maximum or close to it. This is a reason why I tend to prefer Hack-likes, which generally don’t let players generate endless items, and tend to become broken when they do, as with Nethack’s exploit (now fixed I think) of farming black puddings. I’m not sure what can be done to reconcile this, but maybe Naqbu’s creator Jason Steuber can think of something? Or maybe he doesn’t see it as an issue that needs to be solved, I’d say that’s valid, but more on that further down.
Metagame Elements
Maybe Naqbu’s most interesting features come from its inheritance system. As you play and build up gold, you can improve your house to store more items, and expand your pack to carry more. Your house persists between lives: later characters will be able to take advantage both of stored items and its increased size. There’s also a bank where you can save money between lives, and even pays you interest for money saved, a notably Larn-like feature. A new character also inherits a percentage of earned experience points from
Now I should note that I won my first game of Naqbu, so I can’t say if any of these features work. I’m taking the game’s word for it, and making some assumptions about them too. As it stands now the game is too easy for these features to matter for that much. Now, it’s a good thing that you don’t have to use them to win, it’s possible to go too far in that direction, which is a problem I had with Rogue Legacy.
Building a Better Dungeon
Right now Naqbu is unbalanced in the player’s favor. It’s really too easy. It’s possible to die, yes, but with proper care and timely item use the game is very winnable. Please don’t take me as some kind of final authority in roguelike design, but I have played a lot of them. I think what Naqbu could use is a general tuneup, a lot of different game systems tightened up a bit.
Naqbu has scrolls of recall, which teleport you back to town after a delay of around 20 turns, and for 3,000 gold you can build an obelisk at your house that will teleport you down to the deepest level you’ve been to. That eliminates a lot of traipsing through the same dungeon levels, which is important when the monsters on the early levels are no longer a significant challenge. But nothing prevents you from doing it anyway if you need to restore your stocks of items. The dungeon levels are rebuilt every time you reenter one, complete with a new stock of items to find, so it’s an endless source of supplies. There are shops on the town level, but it’s unlikely that you’ll need them much beyond the first couple of levels.
Stacks and stacks of items.
Items don’t have weight themselves, it seems: you can carry multiple suits of armor to sell in town without issue. Naqbu has Moria-style inventory limits. That means items of the same type automatically get pulled together into stacks, and carry limits are by slot, so you can have as many potions of a type in a stack as you can scrounge up. By around dungeon level 8 I had a stack of like 40 cure light wounds potions, and a not-insignificant number of stronger types. I also had a big stack of short-range teleport scrolls for getting out of scrums, and a few potions of speed, an underrated resource in many games, to tip combat odds in my favor. There are some nicely challenging monsters in the deeper dungeons, but by the time you reach them you have so many help items from exploring the earlier levels that you’re never in much danger.
If I were to try to improve Naqbu, I would tighten up each of its game systems a little bit. Maybe limit item stacking a bit. Implement a better state improvement system, where the choices aren’t all obvious. Add traps. Lessen the item generation so the player has an incentive to use the shops on the town level. Add some more kinds of items, so the player will have to choose between what to carry, and to make identification harder. Make equipment power more from intrinsic properties than just increasing their numeric power. Give more early-game monsters interesting properties besides just hitting you.
Maybe some of these problems I identify are from my own dissatisfaction with Moria-style design, but Moria makes up for it by having a lot of really mean monsters too. I think there’s room for Naqbu to make an identity for itself, not by making the monsters harder, but by making itself a bit more Hack-like and getting its challenge there, making it harder to build the player’s state.
It’s possible that’s my own biases speaking. There are lots of people who prefer Moria-style play, but if Naqbu wants to remain on that route, I think the monsters will have to get harder to make up for it. Naqbu currently limits player experience level to 25, which I reached by dungeon level 9. When you can’t grow the player character through experience any longer, there is a lot less incentive to explore the dungeon, and the focus on the game moves almost entirely to gaining more items, and if you have enough items to win by that point there’s really nothing else left to do. There is no more improvement in state left to gain.
I notice that there are no duplicates on this list. I don’t know if a single player can have more than one entry on the scoreboard.
Naqbu maintains a universal score list. At the moment there are only fifteen players on it, and five of them are winners. This proves pretty handily that the game isn’t very difficult. My own game is currently 4th place on the list as I write this.
I feel like there’s more I could say, but it’s almost 5 AM as I write this, and it’s already really lengthy. I threw it together quickly and obsessively. I wanted to get something out there, not just to contribute my opinions to the author while the design is still malleable, but also to get the news about the game out quickly. I think it’s a shame that there’s only been 15 players of Naqbu so far. I think all of its problems are due to the fact that the game’s only a couple of days or so old as of this writing, and that it has lots of potential. I have so many things to keep a watch for that I find it hard to make promises, but I’ll try to set aside a little sliver of my overtaxed brain to check on Naqbu’s progress in the coming weeks.
Mac OS/X, or “macOS” as Apple would like me to stylize it but that ain’t happening, is based on a number of prior OSes: NwXTSTEP, OpenBSD, and a kind of intermediate step after OpenBSD called Darwin. When OS/X was new Apple made much hay out of Darwin being open source. Was it ever really, completely? Once it may have been, but it’s said that gradually that’s become less and less true. It’s certainly not been super viable as its own thing for a while, needing some important parts, particularly a bootloader, to be able to run it.
There is a project to make it viable though, called PureDarwin. It has a small but devoted cadre of people working on it. One of them, up until November of last year, was project leader Cliff Sekel, a.k.a. InsaneDarwin. Sadly he didn’t lay down the keyboard because of growing tired of it, but instead he passed away after an illness. Here’s an memorial from the PureDarwin website.
Memorial from the PureDarwin site.
Lots of projects would age into irrelevance after a key figure leaves it, but it seems there is yet some life in PureDarwin, with code running on x86_64 and ARM64. I can’t speak for how viable it is to run yourself, for the most part it seems to be terminal-only, but work is progressing towards giving it a GUI for the first time in almost 20 years.
You might be interested in a video that Clean Retro Tech recently made getting an old version of Darwin running on a Pentium III (17 minutes). It might be interesting for the kind of people who obsessively watch Action Retro, which regularly dusts off old hardware units and tries to get old OSes working on them. Hey, it’s a kind of computer entertainment! I am entertained by it at least, and you can’t say that it isn’t niche.
That’s the title on the video. Here’s a link to it. (4 minutes) It’s played by “The 8-Bit Big Band,” and it’s pretty snazzy. Even if you haven’t heard the Mii Channel theme since your Wii left service, it’s a pretty popular piece of game music even now. The channel doesn’t post often, but they have a lot of bangers, relatively speaking.
Their video just before this one was a Klezmer version of Bonetrousle, Papyrus’s theme song from Undertale (5 minutes), with animation to boot, and that description is intriguing enough that I’m going to embed it here too.
Skawo over on Youtube explains a lot of early 3D Zelda weirdnesses well, and they have a new video (8 minutes) explaining a great strangeness in Ocarina 3D on the 3DS. Here it is, a basic summary follows:
The scene: Lon Lon Range. The time: Adult Link’s period. The event: rescuing Epona from farm usurper Ingo. To do it, you have to beat Ingo in two races, each two laps, around the pasture.
The basic gise is that, in the 3DS version only, for some reason walking away from the race while it’s still going on can allow you to still win. Skawo demonstrates the phenomenon in their video.
So, how? In the N64 version, race progress is tracked by checking for Link and Ingo passing through three spheres in order, then a finish line. Both games contain a provision to prevent Ingo from despawning when far away, so Ingo does go around the track twice. In both versions a horse’s position is tracked by the center ground point of its model. In the 3DS version, however, for just the final finish line check, the game instead checks the draw position of each horse’s front-most hoof instead, to avoid cases where a horse’s front leg and its center point might disagree on which crossed the line first.
The issue is, if Ingo isn’t on screen, his horse isn’t drawn, and its legs’ position isn’t updated, so Ingo can’t win the race if he isn’t on camera. He can still win by default, if Link takes more than three minutes to finish.
The full details are in the video. It is interesting how unintended consequences like this can sabotage a programmer’s best intentions. I’m left wondering, now that terrible “AI” coding agents are being allowed to program things on their own, how many such bugs will creep into programming of all times? My own coding experience make me sure it’s going to be many.
I also wonder how many silly errors like this are going to sneak into the Switch 2 remake of Ocarina of Time, whether it’s coded by a human or a big pile of linear algebra?
DidYouKnowGaming posted a video in 2021 with the provocative title “The Japan Only Metroid Game That Changed The Series,” (8½ minutes) and as is usually the case with clickbait titles like that, it’s leaving out important information: the game in question is a gamebook, not a video game at all.
I don’t often like rewarding clickbait, although doing it to some extent is largely unavoidable now. Here is the video embedded, if you want to see it for yourself.
The gamebook is called Metroid: Zebes Invasion Order, an example of gaming ephemera of the same stature as the Worlds of Power series of books. The video enthuses about how it foreshadowed elements that would appear in later games, although both the games and the book would have been inspired by the same pop cultural elements, the Alien movies, so it makes sense they would vibrate with a similar frequency.
Illustration of our hero, Samus Aran, from Twinetroid, ultimately from the gamebook
You can watch the video if you want to know more about it. Here are some salient facts.
The gamebook is roughly of a type with the Fighting Fantasy books from the UK, giving you various situations to overcome and a basic battle system for fighting enemies.
Also like Fighting Fantasy, it’s pretty difficult.
The battle system uses dice, and asks that you record your exploration with a hand-drawn map, and record your inventory on a sheet of paper.
Secret rooms were handled in a novel way. As a gamebook in the same ballpark as Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure, you would sometimes be given a choice and a page number to turn to. Secret rooms would tell you only part of the page number, leaving you to search through the book for the right page. Important items were hidden this way.
The book has ballooned in price, with copies selling, in 2021 when the video was made, for around $2,000.
Yet scans of the book can be found online, and Devin Monnens used them to assemble, using Twine, a kind of play-like of the book, called Twinetroid and hosted at Metroid Database. It changes a few things for the format, automating combat and changing the mechanics of the secret room search. The instruction page mentions hidden hyperlinks, which is an interesting solution.
Combat example from Twinetroid
One interesting aspect of the game is that it largely recreates the play structure of the original game: the game world is divided into three major sections, you find items that increase you exploration ability, and you backtrack into earlier rooms to use those items to access new paths. There is an automap, but it doesn’t record anything about what’s in each room. You’ll probably need to take notes.
If Samus “dies,” you can still restart from a checkpoint with all the items you’ve found. Once you defeat the Mother Brain the game isn’t over yet though, becoming more of a traditional text adventure from that point, with a variety of endings. Give it a try, and experience an obscure piece of Metroid history.
Twinetroid (Twine-based text adventure, from Metroid Database)
There’s three events that I always hype (or try to, if I remember them), the charity speedrunning events AGDQ and SGDQ in January and July, and the two-day online conference Roguelike Celebration in October.
We already announced Roguelike Celebration’s preview event a couple of weeks ago, but the main event is Saturday the 171h and Sunday the 18th. They’ve posted their lineup for this year. Just to remind you, you’ll need a ticket to attend, which cost $30, but you can usually get a free ticket if you ask nicely. I encourage you to pay if you can however, since it allows them to pay for their human-provided text transcription, to pay their speakers, and to keep the server running.
A interesting thing about Roguelike Celebration is that while it’s mostly about roguelikes, naturally, they also have other interesting talks, and they always seem to find good subject. A few highlights this year, Andrew Plotkin is giving a talk about mazes in games, there’s a talk about randomness in a Fire Emblem game, and “stealing roguelike mechanics from Microsoft Word.” There’s one about recovering and modernizing one of the original Hack games (I suggested that one!) and one about cellular automation in roguelikes. Oh, and the Caves of Qud people are talking about localizing their procedurally generated texts.
There’s always a bunch of interesting talks each year, and although they go online after the conference, if you show up you can offer questions to the speakers, talk with them yourself in a MUD-based conversation space, and talk with the other attendees, who tend to be crazy intelligent types themselves. It’s all a lot of fun, and if you’re reading Set Side B, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy being there, so please consider giving it a try!
You wanna know something? I think everyone should learn to program. I don’t mean using some, the word I usually use is cockamamie, “AI,” that will produce brittle, inefficient, unmaintainable code if it doesn’t mess it up, but actually code. I think most of the difficulty with coding is actually in the languages. Woe betide the person trying to learn to program in C++ from scratch these days. C is much better, but still obtuse. Python is better, but also not great for systems or performance work.
The solution? Why, learn to code in assembly of course!
Aaaaand 90% of readers just clicked away. Hah.
But the funny thing is, for many languages, assembly is actually a little easier than them I’d say. When you’re working directly with the hardware, all the weird abstractions you have to learn fall away. It does mean you have to do everything, and I mean everything, yourself. But on the other hand, programming is largely the process of connecting building blocks together, tiny routines comprising larger ones. It takes longer to do it in assembly, and working with a lot of current-day hardware is trickier because you have to jump through more hoops to use it. But its difficulty, I think anyway, is a little overblown.
There’s a wealth of material to peruse, including videos walking you through coding a bunch of different architectures, including 6502, 8086, Z80, 6809, 68000, and even ARM, among others. Even if you have no interest in actually coding for these multifarious* chips, just knowing out they work may be very interesting to you, if not be actually useful someday.
Here, to get some idea of how understandable this will be to you, take a look at his series on assembly coding for the C64 (Youtube playlist, 13 videos, about 170 minutes in all), beginning here:
* That’s 17 points with no bonuses, but 67 if a bingo
It was brought to my attention by <b>scruss</b> over on Metafilter (Mastodon) that Peter Jennings, not the newscaster but an oldschool hardwre guy, has a long and great page on the creation of a standalone chess-playing computer for Commodore in its early days, we’re talking between the creation of the KIM-1 and the VIC-20.
It’s a terrific article that covers far more than just Jennings’ experience making the device, covering among other things a pitch to Mattel, meeting with 6502 designer Chuck Peddle, a story of Bobby Fisher, and the unfortunate news that Jack Tramiel, then the boss of Commodore, rarely paid vendors what they were due. Seems about normal for the man.
There’s even a long list of interesting links about the Chessmate at the end. I can’t recommend it enough!
For this critical thought, there are plenty of games that feature inverted difficulty — starting very hard to becoming easy, and I (Josh Bycer) wanted to talk about why this often leads to frustration and imbalanced design.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
There are few websites that have blown themselves up as often as The Escapist. They were once a respected market for insightful games writing, but between going all-in on Gamergate and alienating their video content creation arm, I’m surprised their domain name doesn’t 404 by this point. I don’t mean this as speaking ill of anyone currently working there, as someone who’s almost never had what I’d call a steady job in games media I know you get the work where you can find it.
One of the casualties of The Escapists’ multiple destructions was a terrific series from Graham and Paul, two of the scrappy minds behind Loading Ready Run, who I’m shocked I haven’t mentioned more often in these electronic pages. The Escapist was a long-lived sequence that riffed, Mystery Science Theater 3000 style, the richly deserving category of video game cutscenes, especially those at the starts of games. As cutscenes are video intended to be consumed by an extremely broad audience of young, internet-saturated males, it contains some of the most bizarrely ridiculous animation ever stuffed into MP4 files, and during its time Unskippable mocked over 300 examples of it.
For a while Unskippable was only available in The Escapist’s archives. Then those disappeared, and they vanished from the internet, a victim of bitrot. But lately many (all?) of them have been uploaded to Youtube via the channel LRR Videogames, and a welcome revival it is!
Here are three selections from the list, just a taste of what you can find there.
The Darkness (Unskippable #7, 5 minutes) is an early classic from their work, a game I’ve never heard of (it doesn’t seem to be my kind of thing), but apparently got a sequel, which has also been riffed on Unskippable. It’s the source of a long-running in-joke in the series, “and that was the nth time I died,” of which all of the instances have been categorized here by some obsessive worthy.
X-Blades (Unskippable #14, 6 minutes) is the story of an extremely underdressed and annoying young lady, a treasure hunter who runs afoul of a magical artifact. But instead of being turned into a frog or killed outright she gets to have an adventure fighting monsters and stuff. On the cover of the game box she basically moons the observer, which should indicate the game’s intended audience. The game is named after her weapons, which are knives that are also guns. I guess that was enough to title a game after in that distant misty year of 2007.
Sonic the Hedgehog (Unskippable #133, 5½ minuites) is not the Genesis/Mega Drive classic 2D platformer, but one of Sega’s many attempts to present its trademark super fast gameplay in 3D. It was presented as a reboot of the series, with a backstory involving some kingdom and its princess, but it didn’t work out too well. Our hosts remark more than once that it seems to want to be a Final Fantasy game. This observer wonders why they haven’t tried making a 3D game with the kind of abstractified geometric terrain that makes the 2D games so much fun to watch. Maybe they have and I haven’t noticed. I also wonder why the movies have done so well. The world is full of mystery.
Once in a while we have something that one of us has done to promote, and so is the care today. It’s been a while in coming, but at last my second print book, a greatly expanded version of We Love Mystery Dungeon, is now out through Limited Run Press!
It’s just $25, but it’s packed with information, from the original Torneko through to Shiren 6: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island, with absolutely no generative “AI” (always use the scare quotes) used in its creation. This edition has stuff on Shiren 6 and a huge new section on the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games! Thanks to Jeremy Parish for helping edit this monster into existence!
And since it’s unofficial we don’t toe any company lines in making this. This does mean some idiosyncratic terminology, sure (I call monsters advancements “promotions,” which I think I got from the Nethack source code?), but it also means I’m not coy about which games I think are good and which aren’t. And I try to at least mention every game, including weird ones like Nightmare of Druaga and the Japan-only Etrian Odyssey II. There’s also Rainbow Labyrinth, a free-to-play mobile game which I only know about from a page from a Mystery Dungeon wiki, and which never left beta!
