Basement Brothers is a great Youtube channel that finds and runs classic PC-98 games on original hardware. The PC-98 is a computer platform that was only sold in Japan, and was a home platform for Nihon Falcom, the long-lived JRPG publisher. Here they talk about Brandish, a unique style of dungeon crawl created for the PC-98. (38 minutes)
The first Brandish game did get an English port, released in the US on the SNES, but in Japan it got three sequels. It used sort of mixture between first-person and overhead view, with a bit of roguelike mixed in. You viewed the action from above, but your character was fixed to the bottom center of the screen, and the view was behind his back. He could move or jump forward, or strafe to either side, but if he turned 90 degrees the screen would be suddenly redrawn to the new facing. Enemies would attack you in the field in real time, that is to say, combat was not modal but took place on the same screen as exploration.
It was a bit disorienting; you might think that the SNES’s Mode 7 effects could be used there, but no it kept the same quirk. Smoothly rotating the view wouldn’t happen until the PS Vita remake years later.
Basement Brothers digs up lots of classic Japanese computer games that are still barely known in the US. Please check them out some time!
Nethack (I am more used to writing it without the capital H) is a venerable roguelike computer game, and by some measures the greatest roguelike of them all. Long before Caves of Qud or Dwarf Fortress it was, and still is, a game of surprising depth, and for many years no other games were anything close to it. Even today, few games do.
Level 1 of the Dungeons of Doom
The history of the game is recounted on the excellent Nethack Wiki. It got its start as a remake of Jay Fenalson’s Hack (1981), itself a recreation of Rogue (1980), and which was remade by Andries Brouwer (1984). The first version of Nethack, sometimes stylized ad”NetHack” was 1.3d, posted to Usenet by DevTeam leader Mike Stephenson in June 1987.
Nethack 3.0 (July 1989) saw major changes to the gameplay. Nethack 3.1 (January 1993) greatly changed the dungeon, and in large part all following versions are modifications and elaborations upon it. In the time since sometimes there have been great pauses in its history. Nethack 3.2 arrived April 1996; Nethack 3.3 in 1999; Nethack 3.4 in 2002; Nethack 3.5 in 2002; Nethack 3.6 in December 2015; and now, Nethack 5.0 on May 2, 2026.
Level 5 of the Dungeons of Doom
Here is a list of major changes, though it contains significant spoilers, and a note tells us that this is a renamed changelist from 3.7. With 3.4 the Devteam switched to a Linux-style numbering system: even minor numbers (like 3.6 and 5.0) are releases for wide play, and odd minor numbers (like 3.5 and 3.7) are development versions mostly intended for work and bug testing. Even so, as with all major versions of Nethack, bugs almost certainly exist in this version. Nethack jumped past version 4.0 probably because a notable fork called itself Nethack 4.
Three major architectural changes made in this version: the code now supports C99, bringing its source to the cusp of the 21 century. Much better support for cross-compiling exists now, building it on a system it’s not intended to run on. And the old yacc/lex special level construction system has been replaced with Lua. This make Lua a build requirement.
Exploring the Gnomish Mines
So, how do you play it?
For three systems binaries are provided: Windows, MS-DOS and Amiga. Yes, Nethack still supports MS-DOS, and yes, it still supports classic Amiga: it explicitly supports AmigaDOS 3.0, meaning it can still run on 68000 machines. While Atari ST support isn’t explicitly claimed, plenty of references to it are left in the code. (Does Lua exist for ST?)
That these are the only systems they provide binaries for shouldn’t be seen as an indication that these are the “most important” platforms for Nethack, it’s more that, since it’s entirely open source, building it yourself is entirely possible, and more expected than with most software. Nethack can be built for Linux, Windows 8-11, AmigaDOS, MacOS (I’m not sure if this includes classic Mac too but it might), Windows CE (wow), OS/2 (additional wow), BeOS, VMS and multiple Unixes.
The town in the Gnomish Mines
Linux poses a special challenge for releasing binaries since there are so many distributions, so until 5.0 becomes the main Nethack in their repositories you’ll probably have to built it yourself. I have done this on two systems and can vouch that it’s doable, make sure to read the directions carefully though. After reading the README in the top level of the gzip tarball, the file you want to follow is in sys/unix/NewInstall.unx, which will tell you the manner in which to invoke sys/unix/hints/linux.500, and then ultimately, again from the top level of the source, make fetch-lua, make all, then make install. I ended up with a directory in my home called nh/install/games/, which contains a script that starts the system-installed nethack. Note that nethack supports multiple play styles: ordinary tty, curses, Windows UI, X11, Qt, Gnome and more, and configuring any of those besides the standard game will mean you’ll have to find an option to enable in include/config.h.
Another option is to play through public Nethack servers. The most popular of these are probably alt.org and Hardfought. alt.org doesn’t seem to make 5.0 itself available yet, and I’ve been able to get through to Hardfought today via ssh (possibly due to a misconfiguration on my end). If you can set them up for play then not only do you not have to build or install the game yourself, but you can even play with public bones, the remnants of other players’ games, adding an additional layer of high-stakes randomness to the dungeon.
A shop on level 2
For New Players
I wish I could point you to my old @Play column on learning Nethack, but its home blog GameSetWatch has been gone from the living internet for four or five years now. My book Exploring Roguelike Games from CRC Press has it, but it’s quite expensive unfortunately. It’s still buried somewhere in the Internet Archive. I must hunt it down some day.
If you haven’t played Nethack before you are in for a bit of a learning curve. Nethack 5.0 now has an optional tutorial in the early phases of the game that might help you. You can always press ? during the game to find its help system. If your keyboard has a numpad you’ll really want to enable it, or else you’ll have to learn vi keys, hjkl, for movement, as well as yubn for diagonals. This will also push several important commands into the “extended” input system, where you either hold Alt (aka Meta) and press a letter, of if you don’t even have that, you press “octothorpe” (#) and then type a command name. This is especially annoying for the #kick (Alt-K) and #loot (Alt-L I think) commands, needed for opening locked doors and chests, and getting items out of chests. You can set options during the game with #option (Alt-O), or in .nethackrc, defaults.nh, or NetHack.cnf, depending on your platform.
A statue garden on Level 2
I can’t impress enough how much fun Nethack still is, even after all this time. There is a ton to learn before you can play well (read the wiki if you don’t mind spoilers), but it’s mostly entertaining knowledge. What other computer game freely quotes from sources ranging from Edmund Spenser to Terry Pratchett? It plays much faster than roguelikes of more recent vintage. Every level is only one screen in size, characters advance through the early levels rapidly, and its monsters and item systems are still top class. It’s true that I do miss the days when they’d introduce huge new features (3.0 and 3.1 each made it into almost an entirely new game), but there’s still a lot of things to discover. Gehennom, the deeper areas of the dungeon, has been changed greatly, and I look forward to reaching those hellish climes once again.
This is the recording of our Debut Devs Showcase stream, focusing on first-time indie devs and student projects. If you want to sign up for a future stream, here are the rules and sign-up page
When you load the page it’ll inform you that the page wants to take over your cursor. Let it, but remember that you’ll have to press Esc(ape) to get it back. It needs it so it can let it to fun things, like slide down slides, float down rivers or ride carousels!
There’s quite a lot of fun things for your summering cursor to do! There’s movies and Popeye cartoons in the camp theater to watch, there’s a cat to pet, there’s chairs to sit it, seashells to collect, hats to wear, chandeliers to knock about, and much more! And you can do them all with a horde of other pointers from around the world who are exploring too, each with a little flag to indicate which country they’re in.
Low-powered machines like my Pi 500+ may struggle with all the 2D effects going on, but other than that the only thing wrong with it that it doesn’t remember anything about your session when you close it. So if you want to have a go at collecting all nine achievements (noted in a book in the cabin lobby), you’ll have to do it in one sitting. Fortunately they’re not difficult to earn, and even easier to re-earn.
There’s even what seems to be a backstory to the camp, which you can uncover by reading the book in the treehouse, playing with the radio there, and maybe also interpreting the drawings on the wall of the cave. Are they just quirky easter eggs, or is there some meaning to them? I don’t know; maybe you can figure it out.
I betcha don’t remember that he does that, but there is one point where, if you think back, I’m sure you’ll remember it. It’s when you light all the torches in the bottom floor of Goron City, which makes the giant clay pot spin around, for some reason. And then, also for some reason, Link spins too. Why?
Skawo, one of the best Youtubers I’ve found for getting to the bottom of mysteries like this, did a sixteen-minute video explaining it.
Here is a brief text explanation. Some cutscenes are programmed so that Link turns to face the subject of the scene, a given actor in it, presumably to make it look more realistic. This is a little clumsily done though. The “location” of the actor, its location in 3D space, is usually near its feet (it being the most relevant location for collision checks), so actors have a second location, for cutscene-Link to stare at.
There’s even a special process for this, to make Link’s turning seem more natural: his head turns first, then the rest of his body. But, who knows why, during the clay pot cutscene, Link’s focus point is himself. The focus point is connected to his body, and the angle is a little off-center, he turns his head to look at it, his body rotates beneath it, causing the focus point to move, and so continue the rotation.
This, by itself, is pretty minor. But more than that, the focus point is also a bit above Link’s head, so he looks up at the same time. Eventually, the focus point rotates so far around that it’s technically behind Link, and that makes the horizontal rotation angle nearly 180 degrees, increasing the rate of spin considerably.
This isn’t the whole story, just a tl;dw. In fact, it’s just half of it, which then moves over to a different cutscene, one from the 3DS version of the game. For more, please refer to Skwaro’s video above.
There’s a good chance, even if you’ve been nursing as heavy a Balatro addiction as I have, that you not even know that there’s a cutthroat competitive Balatro tournament that’s been running for three seasons, or even competitive Balatro at all.
Balatro Multiplayer (homepage, GitHub), a.k.a. “Balaatro,” is a mod for base Balatro that adds a robust versus-play component to the base game. While the stake and deck may (or may not, it’s heavily configurable) be selectable between the participants, each player plays with the same random seed, and will find the same shops, the same tags, the same deals (presuming their decks have yet to be modded) and so on.
The mod has a few extra Jokers that add additional nuances to the game when played against a human opponent, but in Major League Balatro they try to keep the settings as close to standard Balatro as possible. The basic idea is that all but the first of the boss blinds are replaced by Balatro deathmatches against an opponent. Each plays their own round simultaneously, receiving updates on the score progress of the other player’s round. At its end, the player with the least chips in the Blind loses one of four lives. You also lose lives if you fail to make the normal escalating score challenges of the Small and Large Blinds each Ante.
Even if you lose, you still get the money and other rewards from playing the Blind as if you won. One potential strategy is to not make a strong effort on early Boss Blinds, saving consumable resources (especially Glass Cards) for later bosses, but Balatro being Balatro and focused as it is on super powerful exponentially-growing strategies, it’s easy once you start losing to keep losing.
The third season of Major League Balatro has just wrapped up in a battle between Dr. Spectred of Balatro University, possibly the strongest Balatro player in the world who’s pulled off tricks like earning the rarest achievement, Completionist++, from scratch without losing a game, and Bean, a very strong player themself.
If you’d like to follow Major League Balatro, either in the future or to watch prior seasons, you can do it on their Youtube channel. Or you could just watch the finals with commentary, although beware: it’s 5 hours and 50 minutes long! Maybe you might turn up the playback speed, or skip around, or to the end.
Everyone in the Balatro community is waiting for news of a major update to the game, teased by its creator Localthunk, that is promised to add lots of new Jokers, but in the meantime there’s certainly lots of other things going on there, from competitive play to lots of insane mods.
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.
NANDgame is one of those puzzle games that’s really an educational game in disguise. By hooking up wires and relays, then logic gates, then larger pieces of basic computing hardware, you construct a basic processor from first principles, step by excruciating step.
This is actually a puzzle solution, which I don’t usually include as screenshots, but it’s small enough that it probably won’t be useful to you unless you stare and memorize it. So if you want to do it entirely on you own, don’t look hard at it!
Of course, the difference between a puzzle game and an educational game is only if the skill the puzzle requests you to learn has some objective use in our physical world. Tetris masters are robbed by the rest of the human race that their unique skill can’t be used to write software or design cars or something, for the kind of effort involved in getting good at all these things is exactly the same. This puzzle, at least, can get you on the road to designing low-level computing hardware, or at least started on that road.
Now that’s out of the way, I’m not completely happy with this introduction to computing architecture. It is true that you can start with NAND gates and, from them, derive all the other logic gates, and from there the rest of computing in its entirety, and this game has you do essentially that.
But NANDs are not the simplest gate to understand. Even their name comes from combining two other gates that you’re not introduced to first. And forcing the player to invent one out of relays, which you are actually required to do here, is a difficult first step. If you aren’t already well-versed in the kind of thinking this involves I’d suggest making use of the hints for each level, because the game gives you no other aid. It is a real trial by fire, and without prior exposure you’ll be staring at the relays for a while wondering not just what you’re supposed to do with them, but why.
But if you can power through them all, again using hints, it is really rewarding to know that, if you had the parts, you could construct a simple processor from first principles. It is difficult, but this is a good introduction. I’d treat it as kind of a test, and that the actual game is learning what you’re supposed to do to win by looking it up from other sources, including the help system. That’s to say, it’s all bosses, with the skills learned to defeat them coming from what amounts to GameFAQs.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
A comment says, Fludd was their favorite They Might Be Giants album, but that doesn’t quite work; Fludd’s from Super Mario Sunshine, the 3D Mario game after Super Mario 64.
Even so, Seanathan S has made quite the recreation. (3 minutes) No vocals, but if you know the song you can recognize the track that’s duplicating the syllables of the singing and sing along with the. Everything is intact, even down to Flansberg’s counterpoint chorus at the end.
I’ve said it more than once: what’s the use in having a blog if you don’t use it to tell people the things you like?
Here’s what I’ve been enjoying lately on my Switch 2. These are store links, but we get no affiliate or advertising dollars from them, they’re provided just out of convenience.
Cruise Elroy’s great retro-styled action platformer Annalynn (Switch, Steam, itch.io)
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream (Switch), a social sim abounding in quirkiness
UFO 50, for many things but especially for the addictive Party House (homepage, Switch, Steam)
Caves of Qud, the terrific true roguelike, filled with equal parts, with atmosphere almost as great as its challenge, but also two accessible easy modes (homepage, Steam, GoG, itch.io)
Chibi-Robo, the sleeper hit for Gamecube where you help a tiny housekeeping robot save a fractured family and also discover the secret of the house’s living toys (Nintendo Gamecube Classics)
Kirby Air Riders, Masahiro Sakurai’s remake of the Gamecube cult classic, with even deeper gameplay, robust online multiplayer and so much fun that it oozes out of the system’s USB-C ports (Switch 2)
Dragon Quest I+II HD-2D Remake, not just a conversion but a redesign, not always for the better but still great (Square-Enix page, Switch)
Blippo+, Yacht and Panic’s sci-fi tale of interplanetary communication told through the medium of an exacting recreation of 90s satellite television (homepage, Switch, Steam, Playdate; currently on sale for Switch and on Steam)
Nintendo got its start making playing cards, and, incredibly, still makes playing cards to this day. I guess there’s always money in the banana stand.
A service Nintendo offered, and even more incredibly still offers, is to make customized playing cards for people, anyone, although the stated purpose is to promote products. The blog beforemario tells all about the service, and even links to Nintendo’s page where you too can order custom playing cards, and all you have to do is order them in a batch of at least 3,000 decks, oh and also navigate through the entirely-Japanese order site. Or you could just buy non-customized cards, some with Nintendo character art.
Lest the domain name not convince you that this is the same Nintendo, one of the example decks pictured uses Pikachu in its art (along with the appropriate copyright notices, as Nintendo doesn’t actually own the Pokémon characters).
beforemario has mentioned before that Nintendo still runs a large sideline in making traditional Japanese gaming equipment like Go and Shogi sets, or Chinese Mah Jong sets.
We’ve linked to TheZZAZZGlitch’s videos before, their obsession with the Pokémon and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games is both admirable and somewhat worrying.
I’ve played quite a few Mystery Dungeon games, including nearly all of the many versions of Shiren the Wanderer (Rainbow Labyrinth is the only one I’m missing), and these dungeon level types keep coming up again and again. I’d be very surprised if essentially the same code, or close to it, wasn’t used in all of them. The beginning of the dungeon generation explainer is at 5:03.
One interesting thing is that the dungeons generated by the various routines often create maps that can be seen as variations upon the dungeons from the original roguelike, Rogue itself. Rogue used a distinctive 3×3 grid of rooms. Sometimes a “room” might be a winding corridor, a dead-end or a dark maze, but it doesn’t take much playing to see the patterns used, and the Mystery Dungeon games obviously use a similar system for most of its floors, using differently-sized grids. Sometimes extra dead-ends are generated, and there are a few extra styles, but in its overall plan it’s Rogue-standard. It’s what the video calls the “standard generator.”
This isn’t all that the video explains, for just one example it goes over the details of how the game’s random number generators work, and also how they can be abused (the dungeon RNG is seeded to 1 at boot, which can be used to ensure dungeons generate the same way). I think it’s essential viewing for any Mystery Dungeon enthusiast.
