Set Side B’s Favorite Games as of October 2026

We think a lot about games here in the neon pixel halls of Set Side B.

You probably already know that three of my personal faves are Rampart, Party House, Balatro and Kirby Air Ride City Trial so I’ll set them aside for this. What else?

For me this isn’t a complete list by any means, but there are some games that come to mind, that stick out in my memory. All screenshots from MobyGames.

Nethack, of course, because it’s Nethack, and Rogue for similar self-referential reasons. A lot of classic roguelikes would get a place on my personal list: ADOM, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Brogue and the more recent Caves of Qud. But these would also go into the obvious list except that I haven’t talked about them here so much lately (except maybe Qud).

Cadash, a terrific early 90s multiplayer platformer RPG from Taito, is a whole class on game design in itself. It’s also a game that is almost unplayable in its original form, because none of its emulations, either open or commercial, support its linked-cabinet mode. (Also: the Capcom D&D beat-em-up games.)

Not to make all of these RPGs, but there’s also Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, especially Digital Eclipse’s remake of it. Lots of interesting ideas from the classic age of CRPGs have been wrong left behind. I blame internet culture’s relentless browbeating of anything that they don’t understand. The remake of PGotMO doesn’t wholly escape that, but there’s a lot of what once addicted hundreds of thousands of Apple II users remaining there. (Also: the Ultima series.)

A true list of my favorites at any moment will naturally ebb and wane, but a few other that I am fond of right now: Capcom’s arcade games Black Tiger and Magic Sword, Hempuli’s Baba Is You, Cruise Elroy’s Annalynn, Castlevania and Castlevania III of course, most of the Shiren the Wanderer series but I prefer the earlier ones, Gradiuses II and III, Pocket Card Jockey (the 3DS one edges out the Switch remake), Herzog Zwei, Athena (really!), the original Legend of Zelda and Zelda II, and Advance Wars II.

Josh Bycer of Game Wisdom, who’s reviews of indie games appear here every week or so, offers these:

Astlibra: Revision: The definition of a passion project, Astlibra is an homage to the action rpgs of the YS series, made over many years, it’s a game of high action, and lots of systems and exploration. You’ll never be able to tell where this game is going to go and just how many bosses one could fit into a single game. We may never get a sequel at this point, but it’s still one of my favorite games for all the ways that you can play it.

Xpiratez: I’ve always loved the X-Com formula, but hated how paper thin and limited the beginnings always were. With XCOM from Firaxis, I’ve often thought it would be close to one of my favorite games, but XPiratez, despite being a mega mod, nails the concept of a very fleshed out, all-consuming, take on the X-Com formula. Maybe by the year 3000 I’ll be able to finish a complete run of it.

Zeroranger: The only shmup I’ve managed to get a 1 CC on, it is an amazing game with a great story, fantastic music, and does a fantastic job of being a challenging shmup without going into the levels of Touhou mastery.

The World Ends With You: My all-time favorite RPG and it’s one that doesn’t play like anything else out there. Another amazing combination of gameplay and music, if you talk to anyone who has played TWEWY, they either love the game or completely hated it. It represents for me the peak of the DS era — a game that is entirely original and could have only existed on the platform.

Sundry Sunday: Do Not Ask Nova For Help

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

Kirby games are mostly light and friendly, but need antagonists. The first game had the mischievous and charismatic King Dedede, but after that it’s mostly been a long line of cosmic horrors: the Nightmare, Dark Matter, O² and others. Even the cute antagonists, like Magalor and Marx, have their scary sides.

Probably the Kirby antagonist though, of all of them, is a half cute/half terrifying machine god called Galactic Nova. Created by an ancient race, perhaps the same one whose ruins feature Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Nova’s main function is to grant wishes, but it almost always nearly destroys Pop Star as a result. It’s unknown if it’s malicious in a monkey’s paw kind of way, or if it’s just trying to help, but the result is the same: Kirby has to go and destroy it.

Galactic Nova’s attempts to help are summarized, humorously, by Team Dusk in this half-minute video, with bonus Strong Bad and Futurama references. Enjoy!

Displaced Gamers Explains Mario’s Physics

Displaced Gamers’s Behind the Code series is one of the best code explainers on Youtube, and here they describe, in 35 minutes worth of no-nonsense detail, how Mario in Super Mario Bros. moves, runs, skids and jumps.

Super Mario Bros. basically created an entire genre of video games, but it probably wouldn’t have happened without its exacting attention to how Mario moves, which is a large portion of the gameplay. A few of the details:

  • Mario’s position and velocity are stored in pages, pixels and subpixels, but acceleration is handled additionally using fractions of a subpixel.
  • When Mario is facing a direction other than he’s moving, his acceleration doubles! Speedrunners actually take advantage of this fact.
  • When Mario runs with the B button, he doesn’t slow immediately when it’s released, but waits for ten frames before he drops back to walking speed. This is why he doesn’t slow down when throwing fireballs when running, and also helps players who slide their finger to the A button to jump.

Youtuber Beating Caves of Qud as a Pacifist

I’ve been meaning to write on Caves of Qud for a long time, but it’s such a huge topic! In the meantime you may enjoy this Youtuber getting a “lesser victory” as a pacifist, never killing a creature, while playing a “Classic mode” permadeath game. (58 minutes) The video, of course, contains spoilers for Caves of Qud.

Making it much easier is that there’s a lot of ways to gain experience in CoQ without killing anything, so you aren’t stuck at level 1 the whole game. If you play a mutant character you can pick which mutations you begin with, with Force Bubble, Phasing and Precognition being a few that help you escape many forms of danger. And CoQ has a variety of items that you can use to overcome tricky situations, like mechanical wings, and a spiral borer for digging staircases.

Going for a bigger victory would be harder. The ultimate victory requires dealing with all seven of the Girsh Nephilim, which can be done without killing them but requires a special (somewhat spoilery) trick. I should save more explanation for that eventual article series on Qud….

5½ Hours of High Level Discussion of Kirby Air Riders Machines

A few days ago I linked to a nearly 10 hour documentary of the Gold Box computer D&D game Pool of Radiance. Maybe it’s something in the air, maybe it’s people desperately trying not to think about elections, but now there’s someone on Youtube talking for five-and-a-half hours of strategy for Kirby Air Riders.

It’s been some time since I obsessed in detail about KARs (my acronym for the sequel, it’s KAR with a plural y’see) here. I haven’t had the chance to play much of it, but I still like watching other people play, and the player who made the video, Moip, doesn’t just rank highly in the competitive scene, but she has logged 2,485 hours in it.

2,485 hours! I think that’s more than I played Animal Crossing New Horizons! It’s more than I logged in Smash Ultimate when I was running experiments on amiibo, running the game overnight with CPU players beating each other up! Both of those figures are over 1,000 hours, I think, but they aren’t as much as that, and I had far longer to log them; KARs has only been out a little less than a year so far.

Will any of you care that much about it? I don’t know, but I care about it, and I write on this blog, so you’re along for the ride. Even so, 5½ hours is a whole lot of obsession. The advantage to posting daily, as I say every so often, is if you don’t care about one day’s subject you can just come back tomorrow.

Even if you are interested in Air Riders though, 5½ hours is a formidable amount of time, even if you turn the speed up to double. Here are the basics of what they say about each machine:

Warp Star:
Doesn’t like, pretty weak generally.

Wing Star:
Really fragile, while not as fragile as Paper Star but being slower on the ground makes it easier to attack

Shadow Star:
Great for City Trial for the combo of flight ability and offense. It’s got low defense, and lift is poor though, you probably won’t make it to sky islands on its own.

Wagon Star:
The “master of being decent at most things.” One of the most solid generalists in City Trial, so long as you don’t care, at all, about flying.

Slick Star:
If you can control it it’s pretty fast, not as fragile as Shadow, but has trouble breaking boxes.

Formula Star:
Great for going straight. Recommended in City Trail to go for Boost and Turn. Being on Formula can make you a target.

Bulk Star:
They love Bulk Star, but say they’d never take it in City Trial. Moip says it is good for keeping legendary pieces.

Rocket Star:
Hard to control, but great boosts. Becomes hard for others to kill you because your movement is unpredictable. Low turn in the air.

Swerve Star:
Feels good to break things with it and collect stats, but bad for PvP. You instantly stop when breaking, and being absolutely still is dangerous in City Trial.

Turbo Star:
A favorite generalist pick. You can do something they call a “wall bounce” with it, which they explain in the video.

Jet Star:
Very bad for heavyweights, but a good generalist pick for lightweights.

Wheelie Bike:
Moip’s favorite generalist for City Trial. She explains you have to know how to build it: avoid Weight and look for Turn early. This gives you a lot of control and makes it safer to go for other stats. Takes some practice to get used to.

Rex Wheelie:
Similar to Wheelie Bike. A risky pick with low stats. Very hard to control, go for Boost and Charge to make up for it. Has really good Top Speed scaling. Benefits from Turn too. A top pick for offense.

Wheelie Scooter:
Great in City Trial early game due to high manueverability. Fragile though, and top speed is a little low.

Hop Star:
Low acceleration, needs Boost.

Vampire Star:
Normal state, it’s sluggish but has strong boost. Blood state: stats scale to extremes, and becomes the best machine in the game but for only a few seconds. Also it can steal items.

Paper Star:
Extremely good flyer. The master of air farming and going for islands, but it’s very fragile. Great if you can stay in the air, but often dies in one hit.

Chariot:
Great generalist for ground characters.

Battle Chariot:
Great for battle, but Moip would only pick it as a generalist with a lightweight.

Tank Star:
Aim for Boost and Turn. Makes it difficult for other players to tell where you’re turning. Pretty fast.

Bull Tank:
Loves taking it with lightweights.

Transform Star:
In wheel form, a mixture of Wheelie Bike and Wheelie Scooter. Too much Weight makes it hard to turn without stopping. Generally for wheeled machines, Weight increases grip and slows you down, so it’s important not to go for it too early.

Dragoon:
A Legendary. Moip notes it can actually be a bit squishy for a Legendary. If completed early, says it’s best to farm air rings and sky islands.

Hydra:
A Legendary. Extremely high offense, tends to one-shot most other machines.

Leo:
A Legendary. Very maneuverable, generally high stats. Not invincible though, high offense machines can still kill you.

Dog Online

Due to project recovery I haven’t had a lot of extra time to spend on blogging, so I hope today you’ll be content with Dog Online, as linked from Aftermath, a web game in the vein of the Neopets of old and the Kingdom of Loathing of slightly-more-recent. Remember Neopets? It was popular enough to get actual console game spinoffs. A quick aGooglin’ reveals one was released just this year. Huh!

It’s the good and pure kind of web game that used to be much more common. Maybe it’s inevitable that things like this will eventually sell out, like Neopets did, and become a cesspool, so please enjoy it while it lasts.

Dog Online is in open beta, and it’s a little difficult to see how to get started. The Explore link just took me to the homepage until I created an account and adopted a dog. To do that, first you must go to the Dogtown Pound.

There you can pick one of three randomly-chosen pals, like this oddly-colored fellow:

When naming your dog you can’t name it after another dog that already exists in the game, and it took me several tries before I managed to adopt Plurpel.

Once there, you can buy plant seeds with coins (not real money!) from the Farmer’s Market, then plant them at the Farm. You can find tokens to play the Gatchpon Machine. You can buy bait from the Fishing Mart and fish at the Fishing Spot. You can play a couple of puzzle games at the Temple of Dog.

Part of the fun of this kind of website is exploring and finding everything there is to do. There’s a simple action game under the Games menu, Mimi’s Countless Children.

It’s the most fun if you’re a kid, but unlike Neopets Dog Online seems to be here mostly as a simple fun thing to do, without any visible profit motive. Again, it’s always possible that it’ll get ruined some time in the future, and these kinds of things do tend to either disappear or get ruined eventually, so please find as much joy as you can in its transitory nature.

Dog Online (free, browser)

Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival 2026

Coming late to adamgryu’s Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival this year, that community experience where you can carve pumpkin models with simple tools then upload them to a display for people to enjoy. The festival is open for a while around Halloween every year then goes offline until the following year, with all the old pumpkins discarded at that time, so enjoy it while it lasts.

Just a plain ol’ Jack O’Lantern here, but you’ll find much fancier ones at the festival.
I’m sure this is fine.

Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival 2026 (adamgryu, itch.io, $0, for Windows, Mac and Linux)

Sundry Sunday: Electric Light Orchestra’s Mr. Blue Sky, with a Twilight Princess Animatic Set To It

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

If you’ve never played The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess then you probably won’t understand much of anything going on in this five-minute animatic, and even though I have played through it I still found it difficult to follow, but it’s well-made and entertaining. By the way, how about the song? I misidentified it as from The Beatles until I looked it up….

GameHut Reveals Graphics Tricks Used in Genesis Adventures of Batman & Robin

It’s been quite a while since GameHut, a Youtube channel run by Jon Burton, 29-year director of Traveler’s Tales and an old maven of Genesis/Mega Drive effects, posted a video. I’m not sure Burton himself worked on this game in this one, but he does a fine job of explaining (14 minutes) how the developers used the Genesis’ catalog of technical tricks to make one of the most visually striking games on that platform, The Adventures of Batman & Robin, pulling off realtime effects that might seem impossible on a system with no hardware scaling.

The primary trick used is the old raster interrupt on HBLANK, manipulating graphics registers while the beam is part of the way down the screen, abetted by the Genesis/Mega Drive’s speedy, for its time, Motorola 68000 processor and 7.87 mHz clock speed. Change horizontal scroll registers midway down and shear the background. Swap palettes on vertical stripes and create a checkerboard pattern. It’s not the only trick used, but its versatility sure made it impressive when it showed up.

A Ten Hour Documentary on Pool of Radiance

MrEdders123 on Youtube went way way beyond the call of duty and made a video on nearly every aspect of SSI’s classic RPG Pool of Radiance, the first official D&D product to attempt to adapt the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons tools to computer play with any degree of completeness and the first in the legendary “Gold Box” series. It’s nearly ten hours long.

It’s true that the length is kind of ludicrous, but in its description there is a helpful directory of chapters to get you to jump around it to the places most appealing to you. And what a monumental task they’ve accomplished! Included you’ll find a history of unofficial attempts to adapt D&D (many games cribbed from its rules in the early days), the licensed Intellivision D&D games, TSR’s own computer products, SSI’s becoming the official D&D company for computer games, the history of the Gold Box line, the play of the game itself, the ports of Pool of Radiance (including the Famicom release) and three fan remakes in different engines.