SGDQ 2026: Stressful Balatro naneinf Run On Stage

As you read this SGDQ 2026 is on its last day, and as always there have been a number of interesting runs, including last night a full deathless run of arcade Ghosts ‘n Goblins: it’s always good to see a player make flying monkeys out of those damn Red Arremers.

Certainly a memorable run was Friday’s play by adef earning a “naneinf” in the solitaire poker roguelite Balatro (1 hour 16 minutes), a score high enough to overflow the game’s floating point math and become, for practical purposes, infinity. The word for this scoring bug is produced by another bug in Balatro’s string output function: it’s NaN (Not a Number) e (as in exponent) Inf (for Infinity), all together in lowercase with no spaces.

A standard game of Balatro goes for 24 Rounds (though some can be skipped) over eight Antes, of exponentially increasing score targets. After the player clears the last Ante, requiring usually 100,000 points, they may choose to keep going in “Endless Mode,” where the goals increase yet faster. In Ante 33 the goal reaches naneinf, a number that’s impossible to reach even if you earn a naneinf score yourself. By Balatro’s math code, Not a Number can never be greater than or equal to anything, even another Not a Number, so despite the literal words Endless Mode, all games of Balatro end there. Even the joker Mr. Bones won’t help, for it only saves the player’s run if they earn at least a quarter of the score requirement, and one-fourth of naneinf is still naneinf. It is the inescapable black hole of Balatro scoring, from which no value can escape.

The requirement for this game is a bit less than that. It’s to reach naneinf with the score somewhere along the way, not to reach Ante 33. There’s only a few ways to do this, and most of them require Perkeo, a Legendary joker that allows for building up unlimited free copies of consumable cards. Even

Perkeo isn’t enough to do it by itself, it needs help from a bunch of other cards, and because Balatro’s joker selection is entirely random, they may show up immediately, or never. Since Perkeo is a nearly essential element, to make the game marathon safe the run begins with a mod that searches for a random seed with an Ante 1 Perkeo and a guaranteed Overstock in the first shops. Everything else, as will eventually become painfully evident, is chance.

Despite adef having tons of play experience, and also having Youtube Balatro expert Roffle on his couch to advise, the tone of the run slowly decays from a jolly “let’s beat this as fast as possible” to a panicked “holy crap this is some bad luck how can we salvage this?” That’s much more drama than is typical for the SGDQ stage!

DEF CON Talk on Getting Started in IoT Hacking

We’re mostly games here at Set Side B, the whole “retro, niche and indie” thing ya kno, but what is a game really? This is to say, we’re not against linking to other kinds of computer, and even electronic, entertainment. That’s the excuse reason I give for doing posts on old websites sometimes, and new sites done in the OldWeb style.

And that’s also the excuse I’m using for this one, which is about as far afield as you can get concerning computer “entertainment”: learning how to hack devices like smart cameras and routers.

This video, a presentation given by Andrew Bellini on this subject given at DEF CON 32 (54 minutes), is an inspiring pep talk that makes me want to go out and find some old device, rip its PCB out of its case, fin some likely unpopulated UART points, attach them into a USB plug and plug that into a computer, and snoop on the output messages that come in over the line. At least it makes me want to try such a thing; could you be the same? Whether I’d get any further than that seems unlikely, but it’d be nice to give it a shot.

It seems entertaining to me. That’s an advantage of posting daily: tomorrow there’ll be something else, and practically speaking, you’ll probably find it much more entertaining to you.

Strong Bad Plays Mini Golf in VR

Once upon a time the types of people on the Internet skewed much smaller in number, and you could be reasonably assured that if you made, say, a Monty Python or a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy joke in forum company, nearly everyone reading it would get it, and probably also find it funny. Those days are long past, and in some ways it’s for the better, but the near certainly that people would just know what you mean did make it easier to find accord with folk you met online.

One of those universal early net touchstones was the Flash cartoon site Homestar Runner, and its true star Strong Bad. His name and look inspired by the early NES game Tag Team Wrestling, yes everyone knew about Strong Bad, and waited with bated breath for the weekly cartoon where he answered viewer email.

Email is much less of a thing now than it had been then, and the site updates much more sporadically these days, but Homestar and Strong Bad are still kicking for now, lovingly maintained by their creators the Brothers Chaps, Mike and Mark Chapman. The Chaps chaps have done other work since then: they once made a website (with a couple of cartoons) for the pizza chain Mellow Mushroom, collaborated with Telltale Games to make an excellent series of adventures, they created the Youtube series Two More Eggs (and we’re almost done following all of their Eggpo subseries here on SSB), they contributed to the Aquabats show back on pastel horse network The Hub, they wrote for incredibly awesome Disney Channel cartoon Gravity Falls, and more recently made a board game based on their breakout pretend man dragon Trogdor and a few computer games like Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate.

Now we come to their most recent electrowork, an add-on pack for VR putt-putt sim Walkabout Mini Golf called the Homestar Runner Distraction Pack, that features 18 H*R-themed holes and a whole lot of in-jokes.

But if you are like me, and not only have you never heard of Walkabout Mini Golf before, but don’t even have a VR headset, this might seem like a great pile of interesting content that you have no hope of ever seeing.

Well I can’t say that it’ll cease your longing for all that forbidden golf, but they did release a 53-minute promo play of the game, with WMG creator Lucas Martell playing with Matt Chapman and Strong Bad himself, as represented by a floating head.

No, not that floating head. You get that reference, right? ‘Course you do, this is the internet.

The Nine Endings of Star For Command

This post contains spoilers for the various endings of Star Fox Command.

Old… man? (Images in this post come from vgmuseum)

The always-excellent Hardcore Gaming 101 is currently working through the Star Fox series, due to the well-received remake of (the remake of) Star Fox 64, still generally regarded as the high-point of the series.

Star Fox has gone through a lot of variation through its life. Rail shooters, strategy dogfighting, whatever Assault was, and even Zelda-style adventure. The strategy dogfighting is interesting as it plays out completely differently from the original game, becoming a kind of RTS. It’s a really interesting style, and one that I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else. I’m a little upset that it’s not as popular as the rail shooter Star Foxes, because it’s really interesting from a design standpoint.

The original of this type, Star Fox 2 back on the SNES, was long known as an infamous unreleased game, shelved due to the immanent release of the impending release of the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation, and the flat polygons and low framerate of SuperFX Star Fox would have looked insufficient in comparison to soon-to-come 3D titles like Panzer Dragoon and Tomb Raider.

While it didn’t get released until the SNES Mini in 2017, it did get a sequel, before the original had been seen by anyone who didn’t either work at Nintendo or played one of two leaked prototypes. Star Fox Command for the Nintendo DS featured the return of series co-creator Dylan Cuthbert, and elaborated upon the gameplay in its nearly forgotten predecessor.

Star Fox Command served as a conclusion to the story thread began in Star Fox 64, and perhaps realizing that whatever became of Star Fox after that would involve rebooting the series, it takes some pretty major liberties with the story. In Star Fox Command, it’s revealed that Andross actually had valid reasons for leaving Corneria, and that General Pepper forced him into exile for political reasons. By the end (spoilers!) former team member Peppy takes over command of the Cornerian military. Kurt Kalata of HG102 expresses some displeasure about this revisionist take on the story, and I have to agree, but oh well, they’re just games, and it’s not like Pepper served much of a role before, other than to deliver mission briefings, or reacting in hilarious dismay if you sent him a huge bill by getting a high score in SF64.

But even weirder than that….

Star Fox Command has nine endings, depending on which two characters you play the game with, and each of them serving as its own conclusion to the Star Fox 64 saga. It’s kind of a choose-your-own-future setup. Depending on your selection, Pepper’s heel turn isn’t the only reversal in the offing.

The nine different conclusions are all shown off on vgmuseum.com, and as Kurt notes, some of them are insane. Some of the story outcomes are a bit odd, but at least they’re interesting! In one, you take Falco on a side mission, resulting in Fox and company saving the day in your absense, causing him to leave Star Fox in disgrace, team up with Kitt, and start his own team. In another, Star Wolf saves Corneria, gets their fugitive status lifted, and become the toast of Corneria.

Krystal, the rescuee from Star Fox Adventures, is the focus of many of the endings. At the start of the story she’s left the team due to strife with Fox. In a couple of endings she and Fox get back together; in a couple more she joins up with Wolf! In one she leaves the team, and the galaxy all together, goes all emo and changes her name to “Kursed,” and becomes a bounty hunter.

She also started wearing black and listening to My Chemical Romance.

Probably the greatest ending is the one where Fox and Falco give up being space fighters and get into high-speed hovercraft racing called “G-Zero.” I remind you that one of the drivers in F-Zero X and GX is James McCloud, the name of Fox’s father, as a human but piloting a vehicle that looks an awful lot like an Arwing. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie isn’t the only one of their properties to cross into Nintendo’s Furry Universal Century.

How many planets are in the Lylat system anyway?

Steam NextFest 2025 Coverage, Part 9

The ninth part of our (Josh Bycer’s) coverage of Steam NextFest 2025 October edition.

00:00 Intro
00:26 Curtains the Clown
2:16 Archon Soul
4:09 Homura Hime
5:59 Malleus Maleficarum
6:52 Bottom Up Beatdown: Hostile Takeover
8:37 Smash it Wild
9:58 Broomstick Exorcist
12:03 Earth Must Die
13:38 Funky Heart

Monster Maze on Unused Zelda Maps

I started this post out intending to do a Multilink Monday, but within a few seconds of starting this video I came to realize, nah, this one deserves the spotlight all to itself. It’s well made, seems to be constructed with a stable eye and doesn’t seem hugely pandery… other than the big BACKROOMs intro card, I’m not a fan of that. But other than that, I appreciate the style. Creator Monster Maze seems to make good videos.

This video is on unused spaces in Legend of Zelda games. (24 minutes) If you want to see some weird developmental crap, it’ll fill the bill. Look and see:

There are loads of unused rooms in Zelda games! This video, despite being 24 minutes long, is more a highlight real than an exhaustive listing, but they do find some really interesting places, like an abandoned haunted house in Link to the Past, and the unused inside of the head at the top of Tingle’s Tower in The Wind Waker.

Sundry Sunday: Needlemouse the Musical

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

From Random Encounters fifteen years ago, it’s a four-minute musical starring people dressed up as Sonic the Hedgehog characters, though a full minute of it is credits. There is no guarantee that this will entertain you, but then there’s no guarantee that it won’t awaken something within you either.

Extra: Dr. Eggman has a hilarious Bluesky account (not for kids).

SGDQ 2026 Begins Sunday

It’s one of those two times of year again. Games Done Quick, the bi-annual week-long charity speedrunning marathon, begins at 12:30 PM (“Noon Thirty”) Eastern Time on Sunday, July 5th, that’s tomorrow. The day after today, the 250th occurrence of that particular US holiday some people make a fuss about.

This one is SGDQ, where the S stands for Summer. If my recollection is accurate, AGDQ, the one that happens in January, is the home of Awful Block, speedruns while SGDQ hosts Silly Block. You can keep track of them by the first letter: AGDQ for Awful, SGDQ for Silly. Even so though there’s a lot of leakage between the two, and many of the games in Silly Block this time would fit in well in its Awful relative, including the infamous Snoopy game on Commodore 64, Mega Man for DOS and The Legend of Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon.

The schedule is here. A few games of interest, I think, are Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Kirby Air Riders (only Air Ride mode though), No More Heroes, a couple of games from UFO 50, the SNES version of Ogre Battle, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Vs. Super Mario Bros, Earthbound Beginnings, What The Golf?, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Randomizer, Gauntlet and Castlevania both for NES, and a naneinf run of Balatro, among many others.

1960s Navy Training Film on Computers

Surprise! Today’s post is about a video from Periscope Films from sixty years ago on the fundamental building blocks of computers from way back then. Right off we’re told that computers no longer rely on primative things like electromechanical relays (gags) or vacuum tubes (wretches). NOW computers are made of TRANSITORS, and we truly are living in the future! (18 minutes)

The cool thing is, while they’re much faster now denser now, and faster, and we have much simpler ways of interacting with them, and storage, both chip and magnetic, hold much more data, and each of these things has improved by a factor of billions or even trillions, computers still basically operate on these same principles.

This video mostly concerns itself with explaining how basic computer circuts are made. It makes for fairly dry viewing if you don’t know anything about electronics or circuit diagrams, but maybe it’ll be interesting anyway, from a historical perspective.

Extra: Four Bluesky Image Posts, Sure

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.

From Nick C:

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.

From Ammnontet (this is just image 1 of 2):

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.

And from Deltarune, “New Video Game Advisor“:

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.

Ribbie: Real Baseball in 8-Bit Form

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.