The C64 Appreciation Society has two videos on works by Access Software, which got its start making Commodore 64 games. Their first product was an interesting wargame called Beach-Head. It followed an interconnected mini-game structure, where your success at each game determined how many ships would survive to make it to the beach, which gave the player more chances to make it through an obstacle gauntlet and destroy the weak points on the enemy fortress. Beach-Head was particularly known for its graphics and its excellent sound design. In this video on Beach-Head (27 minutes), The C64 Appreciation Society plays through the game, showing off strategy and explaining its history along the way.
Access Software made other games, and would eventually begin the Tex Murphy series, but unquestionably their greatest legacy was their line golf sims, which began on the C66 with Leaderboard Golf (16 minutes). They’d move on eventually to making PC golf games, especially the Links series, which were so well-regarded that Microsoft bought the company specifically to make more golf games.
Eventually their work on computer golf would result in the formation of a subsidiary called TruGolf that made golf simulators, consisting of a huge screen and set of sensors that detects how you swing clubs and shows you your ball’s flight afterward, in a kind of deluxe version of Wii Sports Golf. Although Access would be eventually sold to Take-Two and is now no more, TruGolf survives to this day, and now they make simulators for other sports than golf, such as bowling and baseball.
You might not believe this from our unassuming appearance, but I consider Set Side B to be “The Real Deal.” I work hard to present something, anything, to you on the subject of computer entertainment each and every day. Often it’s a simple link to something someone has written, or a video they made. Sometimes, when time and energy allows, it’s a longer piece that one of us has made ourselves. We try to keep it on the site of things you’re less likely to find elsewhere, but you’ll find lots of crazy random stuff here, and that’s by design. And please know that, if something doesn’t go up at 10 AM on a day, it’s because something has gone wrong.
In April we’ll have been doing this for five years, and I am set to continue bringing new things to you into the future even after that. Some days it’s hard to find something new to post; some days I have multiple things that I want to bring to you, and it’s a hard decision which to present first.
But I understand that the sheer variety of things that SSB presents may be bewildering. I mention sometimes that our three watchwords are Retro, Indie and Niche. If you’re interested in just one of these three, to the exclusion of the others, then you probably want to read a specific category. Nearly everything posted here goes into one of the three categories Retro, Indie or Niche, or else on Sundays when we relax the format a bit, into SundaySundry. In this way, Set Side B is really like four blogs in one, five if you count the rarely-used news and blognews categories (this post falls under blognews). You can find all the categories on a post beneath its author box in the left sidebar <-.
Let me break these down:
By “Retro” I mean older games generally. I am of an age that I consider anything before the N64 era to be Retro, but I am considering updating that to before the Playstation 2 era. I judge that the PS2/Xbox/Nintendo Gamecube/Dreamcast era is around when game graphics reached the point, on casual observation, where you had to stop and look for a sec to notice that it wasn’t photorealistic, where increases in graphical quality hit the point of diminishing returns. I’m not saying that graphics didn’t improve after that point, far from it, but that we reached the point where capabilities increased, but didn’t enable completely new kinds of things. Evolutionary, not revolutionary. So I think the PS1/N64/Saturn age is where we’ll draw the line at what Retro means.
On to “Indies,” these are the province of my co-blogger Josh Bycer, who runs the Game Wisdom channel on Youtube. Note that, if you go by the raw text of the category name, a spurious decision made early in the blog’s history means that the category name is plural, so, “indies”. These are small-team, or even solo developers, which is where, due to the immense reluctance to rock the boat that most AAA developers have, much of the energy in pushing forward the frontiers of gaming reside now. It’s not solely Josh’s province though, and I also find things to add to this pile from time to time, often, suitably enough, under the gamefinds tag.
I’ll admit that the “Niche” category is a bit of a cheat, a way to include some things that don’t fall under the other two. Intended to spotlight games that are interesting takes on a genre, especially roguelikes, often it’s the feed that gets all the Nintendo-related stuff. Nintendo is often considered an AAA developer, but they still have the potential to surprise sometimes. If Microsoft or Sony decided to pack it in and leave game publishing then it’d be a blow, sure, but the loss of Nintendo, and their weirdly-persisting toymaker vibe, would be disastrous. In my opinion, of course.
“SundaySundry” is where our weekly collection of game culture finds, mostly videos, goes. Again, because of a decision made early on, usually this group is presented as Sundry Sunday, with the order of the words reversed from the category.
There are some other categories too, which overlap with these. Probably the most important of these is @Play, the continuation of my old GameSetWatch columns on roguelikes. This is mostly the same as the roguelike category, and both are subsets of Retro for the most part. You can also find lots of cool stuff in the romhacks category.
In addition to categories, I’m a strong believer in tagging, and all of the categories listed are also tags. Tags are a much more fine-grained system though. Game series, titles, developers, and individual content makers each get their own tags. The way Set Side B’s Mastodon autoposter works, it tries to include as many tags as it can in the body of the post, even to the exclusion of much of its description, but whatchu gonna do? Because of all the tags I add to posts, you can get around pretty well just by using tags! There’s a list of our most common tags in our tag cloud in the right sidebar, but so you won’t have to search for the link it here it is again.
The right sidebar is also where you’ll find the sign-up for our email-based, very non-Signal newsletter. That’s working now right? I should ask the always-wonderful Phil Nelson, who maintains the site and pays the bills, is that’s operational now. We’ve considered adding the odd extra thing exclusively for the newsletter. When it’s working, that is.
So there you have it. If you’re only, only interested in roguelikes, you now have the means to only see material relating to that. If your lifeblood is indie gaming, then you can get that too, and may I congratulate you on your worth as a human being. If you just want to see silly video stuff about games, then away with you to the back alley of Sunday Sundry, where the disreputable sorts who dispense with that kind of stuff lurk, as with that sunglasses-wearing frog who hands out romhacks.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
anothermartz made a couple of Parappa the Rapper videos that look and sound very close to the original, albeit in its remastered Playstation 4 incarnation. Listen these!
Note: anothermartz admits to the use of “AI” to match the texture of his voice to the originals. Even though they say it was an open source model and locally-hosted, this is usually a strike against an item for inclusion here, but I learned about it late. I considered scrapping the whole thing and starting over, but at 2:30 AM one wants to just conclude matters and get to bed.
The first one is more timeless and generally better, it stars the vaguely disreputable flea market denizen Prince Fleaswallow, teaching the young Parappa a bunch of questionable facts, as well as one that is, sadly, true. (2 minutes).
The other, also by anothermartz, is a lot more timely, replacing the put-upon Inspector Mooselini with Nigel Farage (2 minutes), the UK MP being investigated on corruption charges who’s so disliked and disrespected now that he called an election with mere months left to go in his term to stall that investigation, but as a result had to defend his office from a surprisingly credible threat from Count Binface, a joke candidate space overlord who would have been a much better MP than he has been. We only rarely touch upon political topics here, not for lack of interest but because they’re usually a distraction for us, with the whole retro/niche/indie thing, but this nicely aligns with gaming, so here you are.
Again, a Kickstarter for a sequel to General Chaos. I frankly can’t believe this is happening. It’s a sequel to a little-known, yet brilliant, Genesis/Mega Drive combat game with serious developer star power behind it. How did this get started? Are there other people in the world who love General Chaos as much as I do? Perhaps even more than I do? The prospect makes me wonder.
Promo image for Major Snafu, from the Kickstarter page.
General Chaos was the product of a couple of ex-Midway developers, and creators of some of their most iconoclastic hits, Brian Colin and Jeff Nauman. They were the creators of Rampage, one of the standouts of the Silver Age of arcades, and the basis of a certain popular movie. They tend to dwell in the shadow of the likes of Ed Boon and John Tobias, creators of Mortal Kombat, and Mark Turmell of NBA Jam and NFL Blitz. Yet there’s a strong argument that could be made that NBA Jam wouldn’t have existed without the similar-in-play Arch Rivals from the same company, which was from Colin and Nauman.
In addition to Arch Rivals and Rampage, Colin and Nauman worked on Spy Hunder, Xenophobe and Pigskin 621 AD, before leaving Midway and striking out on their own under the banner of Game Refuge. And that’s where they made General Chaos for the Genesis, published by Electronic Arts. And hey, Game Refuge still exists, while Midway is currently a locked cabinet full of IP somewhere in a basement of either Warner Bros. Entertainment, or the company currently called “Light & Wonder,” (I don’t know Pete I don’t think I buy it) but contains such multitudes as “Scientific Games,” “Autotote Corporation,” “Shuffle Master,” “WMS Industries,” “Bally,” or even other totemic brands that once saw better days. These days they mostly sell to casinos, may they speedily pass on their way to hell.
General Chaos isn’t one of their best known titles, but it has a certain something. It’s a cartoony, comedic take on deadly warfare. The Kickstarter calls it a predecessor of the real-time strategy genre, and there is some of that there certainly, but truthfully General Chaos is something entirely unique. It’s an intrinsically two-sided battlefield action combat game where the warzone is made of single screens, and where each player controls a team of five soliders with different abilities (with one exception I’ll mention in a bit). In action it feels a bit like Mattel’s classic tank combat games Armor Battle for the Intellivision and Armor Ambush for the Atari 2600, in that a single player must command multiple units, but with much more depth.
Gameplay from General Chaos. This and all following screenshots are from Mobygames.
There is also quite a bit of General Chaos essence in Team Fortress 2, even though it’s not an FPS, for both its comical, satirical atmosphere and its array of characters which each have substantial differences from each other. There are gunners, rocket launchers, grenadiers, flame throwers and dynamite chuckers. Most of the time characters are controlled indirectly: control a cursor to point at a location and press the B button to send your current character to it. C changes characters, and A tells all your units to fire their weapons. They automatically pick their targets.
Hand-to-hand combat
When opposing soldiers get near each other the battle pauses and they engage in hand-to-hand battle, in the form of a simple fighting game. Combatants who are knocked down can be revived by pointing at them with the cursor and pressing A to call in one of a limited number of Medics. Characters who fall too often will eventually turn into a pile of bones and vanish. Additional Medic uses can be found on the battlefield, and are also awarded for reaching certain point totals.
General Chaos Commando team battle
As an alternative playstyle, a side can choose to field a pair of Commandos. If one player is using Commandos they must divide their attention between them, but two players can also play co-op with a Commando apiece. Commandos don’t use the indirect method of control, and instead control directly. This can make them much more effective warriors, but comes at the cost of only being two people to a squad, instead of a full team of five. Commandos can call in Medics too, but must reach their teammate in person to do so.
There are lots of worthy games from the 16-bit era that didn’t receive their due, and while I don’t know how well it sold, General Chaos always struck me as a bit of a sleeper hit. Video game genres were already becoming locked-down, and Electronic Arts was already showing signs of abandoning their reputation for nurturing talent and becoming the grotesque behemoth they are today. I’m surprised they don’t outright own the rights to General Chaos, but it appears they do not, or maybe Game Refuge bought it back from them.
The Kickstarter page makes it clear that Colin and Neuman have spent a lot of time thinking about how their classic wargame could be improved. There are more characters planned, more control options, between battle upgrades and most interesting of all, the ability to “go commando” and take direct control of any unit on your side. Home turf battles come with extra units on a given side, “expendables” that have limited abilities but help to give defenders a slight edge. There’s an array of stretch goals, with an especially interesting one at $200k: an arcade version. I think General Chaos was always destined for the arcade, and now it may finally happen.
So if all of this seems interesting to you, please consider supporting their project. Because war is a deadly serious business, so the best thing any of us can do is to laugh at it.
I’ll keep the prologue brief today. The Japanese version of Police Quest II was redrawn to give characters neon hair and big eyes. I wouldn’t call the look anime, but it’s obvious that the changes were made to sort of try to make it look anime-ish, though the effect is more like they were trying to parody the anime style.
Space Quest Historian showed off some of the changes in a video recording of a stream they did (8 minutes), and it’s worth your while to see, if just to glimpse sights like this:
In case you saw AsumSaus’ name atop yesterday’s post and assuming it was going to be some great bit of Smash Bros. nonsense, but then was disappointed when it turned out to be World of Warcraft and Dark Souls (phooey!), here’s the beginning of PKBeat’s series where they’re in the middle of giving you the lowdown on every one of Smash Bros. Ultimate’s many Assist Trophies.
Just some of interesting facts revealed about Assist Trophies:
Some Assist Trophy characters have their own HP, and if players deplete it with attacks they can even be KOed with a strong enough attack. This earns the defeating player a point, although it doesn’t cost the player who picked up the trophy a point.
Usually the owning player can’t attack their own trophys, but if the trophy has started glowing, a state they get into when very low on health, the trophy will actually become vulnerable to attacks even by the player who collected it. This is so they can earn the point before another player earns it.
The trophy with the highest health is Mother Brain, with a base health of 120 HP.
“Base health,” what’s that? Assist Trophys that have health get more health the more players are in the game! This goes up to twice their usual health if there’s eight players.
A good number of trophies have health, and can be attacked, than you’d might think. For example, in the trophy of Color TV Game 15, an early Pong-clone Nintendo made in 1977, the paddles are vulnerable to attack. Each has only 15 HP, but the trophy is defeated if either paddle is defeated.
The Starman trophy, if it’s defeated, displays the SMAAAAASH!! message from Earthbound!
Each Assist Trophy has a list of stages is can’t appear on. Very few trophies can appear on absolutely any stage. One of them is Lyn from Fire Emblem.
There are even trophies that get blocked by Omega or Battlefield versions of certain stages. Usually these are trophies that reside in the background in some way, like Midna or the Moon from Majora’s Mask.
Each Assist Trophy also has a list of items, and other Assist Trophies, that it disables, that can’t generate while it’s active, and alternatively, if that item or trophy currently exists in the world, that prevent it from appearing.
Referring to that last point, “existing” can mean many things. Like, an item held in Isabelle’s pocket still exists in the world, and so will block all the items that can’t generate while it’s instantiated almost indefinitely.
AsumSaus is probably best known for their Smash Bros. Melee videos, and it was they who made the terrific video (54 minutes) about aMSa, the Yoshi player who won major tournaments. And hey, we linked to that back in 2023.
They’ve been diversifying a bit since, and their most recent video is on alternative communication in games. (21 minutes) How so alternative? As in, ways to talk to players without talking to them, either via speech or direct text.
They give a few examples. The first is when Blizzard changed the /spit emote so that it couldn’t be used to specify someone to spit on, when players used that means to express disgust over people who bought a $70 paid mount. The second is the piecemeal phrase building system used to leave environment messages for people in Souls games, also known as template messages. And third, canned messages from Smash-style and modded Smash games.
‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.
I’ve been thinking about classic roguelikes, by which I mean old games from the 80s and 90s. What usually calls themselves roguelikes these days is a debased currency. Some of these games are very good (Spelunky! Balatro!), but they aren’t things that would have been recognized as roguelikes in the age of the coinage of that term, which was probably the naming of the Usenet group rec.games.roguelike. This has resulted in such things as Punished Backlogs’s “Objectively Correct” Ratings of the best roguelikes having, as a requirement, being “stage-based” and to have “great music.” Whether it’s nice to have or not, a true jedi craves not these things.
Every so often I start musing over what the “main” roguelikes, the ones that are most fitting to bear the banner of the genre, should be. When I was writing @Play for GameSetWatch, the games I settled on were Rogue (1980), Moria (1983), Hack (1982), Angband (1990) and NetHack (1987). Soon after I added Dungeon Crawl (1997), Larn (1986), Omega (1988), ADOM (1994) and Brogue (2009). Nowadays I’d add Alphaman (1995), the adventurer mode of Dwarf Fortress (2004) and Caves of Qud (2010). (If you want to see some more recent things I’ve written on roguelikes here, look into the @Play tag.)
There are some more games that deserve inclusion probably. There are some “lost roguelikes,” lost because they were written for ancient Unixes (Unices?) and were hard to preserve or their implementation relied on those old OSes. There have been attempts at preserving these games, like the Roguelike Restoration Project (GitHub), although its last update is from 2011. UltraRogue, infamously, saved games by doing a memory dump of the process space, and loading it back off of disk when time to resume the game. Some other games it lists are Advanced Rogue, XRogue and Super-Rogue.
While clunky, buggy and sometimes glitchy, there is still a strong appeal for these old games, from a time when roguelikes were a hyper-obscure niche mostly of interest to current and former computer science students. In the early days of the web, the worthy Boudewyn Waiyers maintained the first major Roguelike Home Page on the internet (Wayback Machine links: first archived version, last version there, final home).
and URW, or “UnReal World,” which has an interesting story behind it. Unlike the other games in this list, it’s still in active development, and while it’s much changed its focus it still seems to be a roguelike. I think this should be a forthcoming @Play subject
Not mentioned on the dusty archives of the Roguelike Home Page is Elona, a roguelike from Japan. I’ve bounced hard off of this in the past (its got some objectionable content), but hell, I’ve survived the likes of Omega Labyrinth Life. There’s also Castle of the Winds, an early Windows roguelike which is slated to be republished on Steam soon.
I must say, ArchiveRL on the Internet Archive is amazing, a 25-gigabyte collection of hundreds of roguelikes, many of them defunct and otherwise forgotten. If you’re looking for something ancient, esoteric and probably terminal-based, you’ll find lots of things in its murky depths.
I’ve played a fair bit of Caves of Qud recently and I have quite a few notes on it. I think my next subjects should be that, UnReal World and Elona. Are there any suggestions for directions to explore? I mean besides down, deeper into the earth, of course.
