It’s a bit light, maybe, to be a day’s sole post, so I’m throwing this in as an extra. I was looking through my saved post list on Bluesky and found a few entertaining images that speak to me. Largely they say, “@!#?@!“, just like Q*bert does. Please enjoy, if you are capable of that. I won’t hold it against you if you aren’t. Links are provided so that you can follow these fine arteests/screenshooters/shitpostors.
Where does Pac-Man, um, pack the stuff he eats? If soy sauce existed in Pac-World this would definitely happen, and Miru would play along, that enabler. Meanwhile Pac-Man’s blood pressure is 3,000/a million.
This is exactly what all creepypasta sounds like to me. I only enjoy media where nothing bad ever happens and at the end you’re handed a free puppy.
From “Steeeve Duffy,” who has many great comics, but whose name has too many e’s:
It’s easy to imagine the voices from the N64 game speaking the characters’ lines. Later games established that Peppy Hare is getting on in years, and I like to think that inspired his scruffy depiction here.
Susie’s severed head has to put up with a lot. The way her right eye shows through her hair, anime-style, makes her look like a David Bowie-style glam rock star: Susie Stardust.
We still mourn the end of Blaseball, which sustained some people’s hunger for a sports-like communal experience during Covid lockdown, but can understand that without everyone staying at home it wasn’t possible to sustain it.
It’s not Blaseball, but kind of similar in a way, if you look at it sideways and with unfocused eyes, is Ribbie, which takes real baseball games, being played live, and presents them in a style not dissimilar to a video game. By its nature Ribbie is properly enjoyed while games are in progress, but there is a demo available that presents an archived match.
There’s no rogue umpires, black holes or resurrected players, but it is an entertaining presentation. There is sound too, though off by default, so if you don’t want to experience games in deathly silence be sure to turn it on.
Mine Bouy is a sporadically-posting Minesweeper enthusiast who posts interesting strategies sometimes, including one video about dealing with one of the most frustrating, yet sadly common, events in playing that game: “fifty-fifties,” or, situations where you have a choice of two spaces to reveal, and the chances that one will contain a mine losing you the game is ½ out of 1.
This situation may seem impossible to resolve, and it’s true that you have some chance of losing no matter how you deal with it. But there are sometimes ways to improve your odds and clear up the uncertainty without making a move that’s a 50% chance of losing. Mine Bouy calls this “breaking a 50/50.” (8 minutes)
Their strategy has to do with not picking one of the two questionable spots if you can help it. It relies on realizing that picking an adjacent spot with lower odds of failure may give you a chance to give you information that could reveal which spot has the mine. It trades even odds of exploding a mine with a greater chance that a spot is mine-free, and also revealing which of the 50/50 spots hides the boobytrap. Clever!
Two other helps linked from the video’s description are a browser-based Minesweeper analysis tool by MSCoach, which offers a no guessing mode that guarentees no 50/50s will be generated, and a Google Docs paper (by Scar) on the basics of 50/50s and the many forms they may take. You can play Minesweeper on the internet at Minesweeper Online, which also offers a no-guessing option.
All the OldWeb is NewWeb again. This is just to inform you of warppoint.games, a new directory and webring devoted to game-related content! Set Side B is listed there, and there’s a new link to it in our own sidebar.
There’s already a good number of links to explore, so take a look when you have a moment!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Submitted for your perusal: a version of classic game tune The Death That I Deservioli, the epic Lap 2 music from Pizza Tower that plays if you’re cocky enough to ignore the exit gate and be transported to the end of the level to escape again within the time remaining.
Namco, now the merged entity Bandai-Namco for some reason I can’t fathom but oh well, has certainly gone back to the arcade collection well a lot of times. Many of their games are genuine pop cultural phenomena, either/both in their native Japan and in other countries. It was US sales that propelled Pac-Man into being perhaps the most enduring legacy of the golden era of arcade games.
It was for the original Playstation that Namco first started rereleasing home compilations of their classic-era arcade hits, in the six well-known and respected Namco Museum titles. But then their rereleases became rerereleases, and then, rerererereleases. So many collections, so many trips around the block, so many recreations, so so many. Going by the series’ Wikipedia page, the most recent entries have been for modern home consoles, the Evercade handheld retro console, and even a standalone unit.
I would despair of ever understanding all the Namco Museum releases, but for the tireless efforts of Mythic Resonance on Youtube. He has constructed an epic two hour review of every Namco Museum version, called The Namco Museum Museum! It took him over 2½ years to make! And as of this writing it only has 1.9K views, which I view as a darn shame, even if it is, right now, only nine hours old.
I don’t know how many of you have the stamina to watch all of an epic overview of these dozens of game collections, but some of you have got to be up for it, I’m sure. Good luck on retaining your sanity while weathering this massive onslaught of game information!
Now here’s something fascinating I had not heard of before Nicole Express recently wrote about it. Because of a law in Japan it was (maybe still is?) illegal to sell an arcade cabinet without a game in it.
When the market for replacement cabinets opened up, targets for upgrade kits without gutting an old machine to host them, they still had to have some game in them, even if everyone knew its PCB would be just be taken out and thrown away. It was also a way to assure a game center owner that the cabinet worked as advertised, as it could immediately be plugged and tested.
But games cost money to develop and need parts to implement, so these games have to be really simple. So there arose a micro-genre of games, usually a simplified remix of something from the cabinet manufacturer’s back catalog, using ancient processors, minuscule ROM and RAM, and the simplest means of driving the video signal possible, to fulfill this tiny and strange market need.
Sega’s Dottori-kun (image from linked site).
Nicole so far covers three such games: Sega’s Dottori-kun is a remake of their classic arcade game Head-On (remade before by Atari as Dodge ’em), a simple dot-eater where the player’s surrogate is a car that can only drive around a track one way. Taito’s Mini Vaders is a series of Space Invaders challenge boards, but with no enemy shots or sound. And most recently Konami’s Target Panic is a kind of fast reaction target shooting game, but using a joystick instead of a light gun.
Dottori-kun, a silent blue-and-white remake of a 1979 arcade game, was, via Sega’s Aero City cabinet line, a game they were publishing the year that also saw the release of their Super Scaler extravaganza G-LOC.
G-LOC, Dottori-kun’s sibling. (Image from Mobygames)
Nicole goes into detail about each of these games, possibly the most attention any of them has gotten outside of their creation, including their internals. She really knows her stuff, and dives into the implementation of each game. All three run on Z80s or variants. Only one of the three games, Mini Vaders, accepts coins. All three articles make for fascinating reading, at least to my fevered mind, so please click through
It’s not well known (but is becoming better known) that the NES’s PPU graphics chip has an unutilized feature. It has a way to pipe graphics into it from another PPU, giving the two chips a combined output. The Famicom and NES both ground out the pins that would allow using this interesting feature, making it impossible to use without desoldering and some other changes, but Youtuber decrazyo performed the necessary modifications (5 minutes) and thus made a system capable of hardware parallax scrolling, 128 sprites with up to 16 per scanline, and additional color flexibility.
The existence of this feature implies that the PPU was intended for greater things at some point in its development. A lot of the limitations of classic hardware end up being due to economic and complexity tradeoffs prevalent at the time of their making. I find it intriguing to imagine the PPU’s chip designers anticipating a future where it could have been daisy-chained like this.
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
sylvie’s Games Don’t Have To Be Good To Be Good is an interesting little browser game where the point is figuring out how to play, then what to do. It’s really short! You can probably finish it in five minutes.
The description calls it a manifesto, and I can see that, and also agree with it. (And it’s an entry in Manifestø Jam 2026 too.) My belief about game worth is that there can be a hundred things wrong with a game, and everyone can agree that they’re wrong, but if there’s one really really good thing about it, just one powerful elemental spark of awesome, if it’s strong enough, it can make all the “wrong” things meaningless.
It’s points to one of the great problems with game journalism as it’s currently practiced. The traditional lists of flaws, the reporting of how “smooth” it is, of how realistic the polygons are and the other excuses a reviewer gives not to play something, none of those things matter. Not if the game has something really good going for it, and to obsess over trivialities will blind you to many worthwhile things.
It’s why it took forever to get the gaming press to notice roguelikes! The genre of classic roguelikes feels like it was designed to be a koan, a seemingly-impossible question that prompts thought, meditation and eventually enlightenment. Classic roguelikes (or as I’m coming to call them, true roguelikes) look entirely unlike everything magazines and websites told players they were supposed like. They rejected everything that being good meant. So why are they fun? Please contemplate that with me now. Ooommmm….
Coming back to Games Don’t Have To etc., it does push the boundaries of enjoyability a bit, but overcoming its purposeful vagueness turns out to be a puzzle to solve. And you can do it! Please give it a try. It might not be an all-time classic, but it’s an enjoyable use of five minutes. See if you agree.
It’s been going around the gaming bigsites (PC Gamer, Time Extension, Kotaku, Eurogamer and others) that due to a quirk of US copyright law Richard Garriott, who begin the Ultima series in June 1981, may finally be getting back the rights to his now-ancient series from the corporate behemoth, Electronic Arts, that has long owned them.
The details of the story are that this only involves the copyrights, not the trademarks. But trademarks are different from copyrights, they must be continuously defended and expire if not utilized. Every so often Electronic Arts attempts to do something new with the Ultima name, but none of them usually turn out that successful. The sole remaining example of classic Ultima is the venerable MMORPG Ultima Online, older than World of Warcraft, even older than Everquest. It’s possible that EA could use its unbelievable continued existence as a pretext to keep hold of the Ultima trademark, but UO is incredibly ancient itself nowadays and doesn’t have the large userbase it once did.
I have no love for the monstrosity Electronic Arts has become, the memory of their enlightened early years under Trip Hawkins fading after decades of stagnating sports lines chained to big leagues licenses, and piles of brown and gray military shooters. They sit on countless classic computing properties, doing nothing with them while people who fondly remember them age and die off. Yet I choose to believe this isn’t out of spite, more that they can’t be assed to do anything with properties that aren’t gigantic sellers.
Ultima is one of the few cases where a piece of their gigantic lucite block of IP shows a crack that could be broken away. Richard Garriott has maintained his wealth from the time of Ultima’s success, and may have the resources to fund a revival. Whether it would be successful… I can’t say. Garriott has tried making multiple games since leaving behind Ultima with varying degrees of quality. His Tabula Rasa from NCSoft, from nearly 20 years ago, didn’t do well; I’m not apt to hold that against Garriott though, considering how badly they treated City of Heroes.
Every so often Richard Garriott comes up with some new concept, but truthfully it’s been a while since he’s made waves. I personally sat at a talk he gave at DragonCon a few years ago where confidently held forth on the direction that he saw gaming going, but then failed to go. I’ve tried Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues recently, he was involved with it but has long since left it. I bounced off. I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but Garriott’s most recent project involved NFTs, which seems like a huge danger sign.
My personal opinion is that Richard Garriott should immediately approach Digital Eclipse, developers of the terrific remake of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, and together start making something along those lines. Richard, if you’re somehow reading this, please consider it! They do great work. Maybe something involving Ultima III, IV or VII? Any of those would be amazing and could open up this long-neglected series for a new generation of players.
Anyone else out there have personal experience with how amazing this game was?
I’ve heard that Garriott is going to be at DragonCon again this year. I plan on reporting on it on-site. Despite what you might think from what I wrote two paragraphs above I’m still rooting for him. Ultima is the most shamefully neglected classic RPG franchise out there right now, and I’m excited to think that it might make a comeback, no matter how unlikely that might seem right now. I didn’t think Wizardry could make a comeback either! Let’s all clutch our ankhs tightly and hope.
