Starflight is an amazing game. First for the PC, but then with ports for the C64 and, of all things, the Genesis/Mega Drive. It was the first game to really nail the sense of being a kind of Star Trek simulator, with its combination of open-ended exploration and alien interaction.
PC Starflight (image from the article)
It’s possible to think of Starflight as being a trilogy, with itself, its sequel, and the quite similar Star Control II. Greg Johnson, one of my favorite people working in games, was a major mover on all three. Johnson went on to be one of the people behind ToeJam & Earl and a number of other projects, including some terrific music, and is currently working on the eagerly-awaited Dancing With Ghosts.
Time Extension translated an interview with four of the people who made the original Starflight, including Greg Johnson, from a German podcast. The story of the game’s creation is a bit rocky, with some of the principals having to put in their own money or take out loans to live on during its creation. It’s also a tale of the final moments of the good days of Electronic Arts, right before they discovered there was a lot more money running series into the ground and tying up the rights to multiple big-league sports than their original mandate of nurturing independent creators and making possible unique software visions.
But don’t weep for what could have been; instead, rejoice that it happened at all. Remember that Tarn Adams, half of the duo who make the literally incredible Dwarf Fortress, credits Starflight as a major inspiration. The path to the future, and the long-delayed realization of video games as a transcendent art form, runs through many different people, but the thread holds firm. The coming decades will see great things, and Starflight is but one brick in their foundation.
‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.
Violarium is another of that prolific genre of puzzle game, the grid- and turn-based series of progressively-harder problems where you learn the rules as you go, and new complications turn up periodically, until suddenly they’re all done and you’re looking at the credits.
At the beginning
Often this style of game takes the form of a block-pusher, but not this time. Each puzzle here is made of a number of dice blocks, their pips representing digits up to six. You must trigger each of the blocks in order: the 1, the 2, the 3 and then the 4 (and the 5 and 6 too, if they’re present). Each must be triggered once, and not more than once, or they all reset and you have to start it over.
You trigger a block partly by standing next to it, but that’s not the only requirement. Your facing matters too, but your character can only face left or right, and can’t turn in place unless you move into a wall. You can also trigger dice by moving next to them vertically, but the rules are subtly different. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how they’re different, but as you might expect, by the end you’ll have to have completely mastered the implications of this system, and some other devices too, before your purple pixel person can retire to his petite pixel pad.
Slightly later
Of note: I have noticed that the combination of Linux (and Wayland?), Vivaldi and this game is a bit unstable, I figure maybe due to the Unity browser runtime. That’s just a guess, but the game screen continually freezes up for me when running in that browser. I’ve not tried it in Chrome, but Firefox is okay, so try using that.
There is a universe of Japanese home computer games that are largely unknown in Western territories, especially the US which never got a local MSX machine. Some of these games can be played officially with emulation via Project EGG, and some of those are even available on Switch as part of EGGCONSOLE.
But the problem remains, most of them are in Japanese, a difficult language to pick up if you didn’t grow up with it. Well the Youtube channel Beyond the Scanlines has selected a few of them that are playable without any Japanese language knowledge (14 minutes).
Guardic is a strategic exploratory shooter from Compile that’s both an interesting game in its own right and the predecessor of the NES classic The Guardian Legend (Guardic Gaiden on Famicom).
Hydlide is a game that’s available on NES and is pretty infamous there, but it does play a bit better in its original version.
Slipheed is a classic shooter with 3D graphics that still hold up pretty well today.
The Scheme is a platform that I honestly don’t know much about, except from this video!
And of course Zanac is another classic Compile shooter. I think the Famicom/NES version is mostly better, but don’t sell this version short.
Please consider enjoying, if that is something you are able to enjoy. That is to say, to you, it’s enjoyable. If it isn’t, if it’s enjoy-not-able, maybe tomorrow’s post will meet your inscrutable fancy. (That is to day, sour fancy is able to be inscruted.)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
When I put it like that in the title it sounds like it’s going to be salacious but it really isn’t, it’s just anthropomorphized representations of the various enemies in Wii Play Tanks.
Okay… you don’t know what that is…. I’ll explain.
Wii Play was a mini-game collection on the Wii natch, a burgeoning genre on that system. It was an excuse to release a bunch of Wiimote experiments as an inexpensive package. As often happens with Nintendo, some of them were better than you’d expect. Three of them had some real longevity to them. Table Tennis was like a faster version of Wii Sports Tennis; Billiards was an excellent pool simulation; and then there was Tanks.
Tanks put you through a series of 20 single-screen levels where you piloted a tiny tank around destroying various other enemy tanks set around each board. As you passed level after level the game would introduce new tanks with various personalities and powers, like laying land mines, firing rocks, aiming bank shots off of walls and, eventually, invisibility.
If you were playing along you had limited lives, but it also had a two-player co-op mode, where each player only had one life, but destroyed players got revived so long as the other player survived to finish the level.
After you finished the 20-level version you unlocked a 100-level version, which threw in a couple of new tank types. There’s some nice grace notes in the design, like how the background music adds different tracks depending on which kinds of enemies are in play. It was a lot of fun, and deserves to be remembered as more than just the best game in Wii Play. Here’s a marathon playthrough of the whole thing. It’s a surprising hour and 22 minutes long, but just a couple of minutes of it will suffice to give you the idea.
I don’t know if any game series has a higher ratio of difficulty to simplicity as the Monkey Ball titles. Just use the analog joystick to tilt a 3D landscape to use physics and gravity to steer a plastic ball containing a money into a goal tape. But within that simple premise is some of the most devilishly hard gaming of all.
Especially in the original game, Super Monkey Ball. (Okay, the original original was Monkey Ball, but that was only released in Japanese arcades, and is pretty similar to the arcade mode of Super anyway.) To truly beat S.M.B. you have to complete 50 stages of Expert, then the secret 10 stages of Expert Extra which only appear if you finish Expert without using a continue. This means doing it in three lives, plus whatever additionals you can scratch together by collecting 100 bananas, while completing levels like this:
It isn’t the focus of this post, but here’s a run through all of SMB1’s Expert, Expert Extra and Master stages. The thing about Super Monkey Ball is it’s very hard, but it looks even harder. Check out this utter insanity (34 minutes):
Being separated into discrete levels like this and being so exacting in execution, one might think that the incentive to cheat at this, by splicing together footage of different runs, would be high, but due to some interesting factors it’s not as easy to do this like one might
think. Goober13MD made a video (13 minutes) explaining why you can’t just edit together your best plays in Shotcut and present that as a world record run:
But that video is from eight years ago, and since then some people have, indeed, tried to cheat, and for quite some time succeeded at getting away with cheating at speedrunning this most ludicrous of games. Here’s GooberMD13’s exposé from four years ago at uncovering a cheater (48 minutes):
And two years ago they put together this epic 1 hour-6 minute video about ancient records revealed to be the probable work of cheaters:
The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
Microsoft pioneered a form of hypertext that came onto the scene around the same time that HTML, the format that web browsers read and display, did. As sometimes happens with Microsoft, they didn’t really understand what they had there, and relegated it to a format for help files, called WinHelp, which debuted on Windows 3.0.
HTML unquestionably won out over it, but the WinHelp format, extension .htp, and its successor Compiled HTML Help or CHM, has some advantages. Both are self-contained, bundling all of the individual pages of the help system into a single file, and didn’t need network access to read them. That ease of transport meant in the early days of the World Wide Web you could sometimes find downloadable Windows Help files, and that’s the format that the “Roadmap to the Information Superhighway” was released in.
The Roadmap, from Spring 1995. Just take a moment to bask in that green-on-bright-cyan text.
In the early years of the Web it quickly became obvious that there was a great need to enhance findability, that the greatest website in the world was useless if no one knows it exists. The Roadmap, and the previous year’s upstart Yahoo (later called Yahoo Directory) were two attempts to combat the obscurity problem. I insist that this problem has always been with us, that the creation and rapid adoption of Google just made it less obvious for a while, and now that the Goog’s enshittified its bed, entering its dotage and embracing “AI,” it’s become more visible how difficult it is to find interesting things online. (It’s why I’m still a devoted Metafilter member and poster even now, 27 years after its creation.)
The Roadmap to the Information Superhighway (it calls itself the Official Roadmap) is mostly a list of tutorials and links. It is so old that it refers to “the Mosaic,” Mosaic being the first popular web browser. Yet even back then enshittification was still present in online spaces, and this edition of the Roadmap was deep into it, so some of the links you click on will open up, in its own window, an ad for its “Internet Yellow Pages.” They were double-dipping: the Roadmap itself cost money, $39 for a subscription, which is probably why it was supplanted by Yahoo, and even print listings of websites.
A portion of the Roadmap’s section on Gopher
In 1995 the Web had only been around for five years or so, and substantial portions of it were still accessible only through protocols like News, Gopher, Telnet and even web BBSes, so a portion of its text went to explaining how to use these services. There’s even a page on how to use Finger, which being a very Unixy thing, was something a lot of people just didn’t use even then.
I’d like to someday go through all its links and find out what percentage of them, but even then there were a lot of websites, and yet I fear the proportion of them that are still active is depressingly low. I’ve complained here before how some people still seem to think the internet is forever, when it is really really not, we’ve lost countless pages and sites, and the Internet Archive’s collection of them is spotty. It’s a miracle that it exists at all, and they are well-deserving of your donation dollars, if you can spare a few. It’s a miracle that they host the copy of the Roadmap that I link above.
A hint to browsing the roadmap from WINE, at least one of its links, the one reading What Is the Internet Superhighway?, crashes its Help reader when I open it.
To return to the phenomenon of WinHelp, the original Windows Help stopped being bundled with Windows Vista, and Windows 10 completely dropped support for it. You can still load Help files, like the Roadmap, on Linux systems using WINE, and that’s where my screenshots come from. Isn’t it just like Microsoft to invent a technology that other people now support far better than they do?
I usually wait to Sunday to post something like this, but Bill Wurtz is a frog-slam internet treasure, and I want to crow about his return to making thoughtful and incredibly songs and glitch-art videos attached to them, after a three year break, that I want to crow about it from the highest, well not mountaintop. Skyscrapers also seem too high. From the highest molehill maybe? It’s still a really high molehill.
Wurtz has made lots of songs-and-videos like this, but perhaps his masterpieces only contain songs as components. There’s his history of japan (9 minutes) and history of the entire world I guess (19 minutes), and both are incredible, in the sense that I don’t believe anyone actually made them. No, it’s impossible, I shant accept it, I shant! They were found in a field some day and Bill Wurtz adopted them, raised and nurtured them as his own. But they existed before then, I’m sure of it, and he may have aided and abetted them but they arose from some weird natural process that’s entirely inhuman, and entirely non-AI either. See for yourself:
If you’re old enough to remember Usenet, then I don’t have to tell you buddy, you are old. Google’s given up on archiving it (Google’s given up on lots of things), but Tedium remembers it, and reminds us all about the promise and wonder it once held.
Even though it’s older than the World Wide Web that many people mistakenly see as the whole internet, Usenet has many lessons for us today. Like email and the Fediverse, no one owned or owns Usenet, it’s an ad hoc assemblage of many newsservers. And also like email, Usenet at one point was drowning in spam. In fact, one could argue that it drowned in spam, that rampant unsolicited commercial messages are why few use it today, even if it technically still exists. Sure, as some wrinkled ancient netheads will insist, Usenet had ways to stop spam, but if they didn’t get used, consistently and comprehensively, then their existence didn’t matter.
The big advantage that Fediverse services like Mastodon have over what Usenet used to be is a solution to spam. As was demonstrated a few years ago, Mastodon servers that start spewing potted meat product rapidly get defederated, or will be ideally, giving server maintainers an incentive to stamp down on them quickly. With megaservers like mastodon.social out there serving as the Fediverse home of a large portion of its users, who knows if maintainers will prove willing to defederate that whole bloc should it become a spam generator. But then the internet is primarily a mechanism for generating difficulties. Let’s hope for the best.
Metroid’s famous JUSTIN BAILEY password was not a secret hardcoded password included by the developers, the fact that it worked was completely accidental.
Secret of Evermore didn’t use Secret of Mana’s engine (despite apparent simularities), and was never intended to be a sequel to Secret of Mana, nor did it replace Seiken Densetsu III in Square’s US release schedule.
The Mega Drive II (released in the US as the Genesis, as opposed to the Sega Genesis) did not remove the original’s Z80 co-processor, it just used a smaller version of it in a different package.
The Atari Jaguar didn’t claim its system was “64-bit” by adding up the bits of two 32-bit processors, it was a lot more complicated than that and the system contained 16, 32 and 64-bit components. (Measuring by bitness is often misleading anyway.)
There was a claim that Satoru Iwata himself implemented compression in Pokemon Gen 2 (Gold/Silver/Crystal) that allowed the Kanto region from Gen 1 to be included as well. Iwata did implement compression for Gen 2, but it was to increase decompression speed, not to save more space.
Eternal Darkness: Challenge From the Dark Side on Sega CD didn’t use an Amiga-like Hold-And-Modify mode to display 256 colors at once. This game doesn’t display that many colors anyway, it uses dithering to increase the apparent number of colors onscreen.
And finally, a pretty well-known fact now: the mirror room in Super Mario 64 doesn’t reflect the room that Mario is in, but just renders another copy of Mario that echoes his movements, reversed.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Tay Zonday was the Chocolate Rain guy (5 minutes, over 143 million views!), and his voice is still as deep as ever. He’s made a new song, (5½ minutes) with Dave Days and Gary Brolsmo, reminding us all about the long and strange journey the internet has carried us through. It’s only had 19 thousand views so far, but maybe we can do something about that?
EDIT: I got the time wrong for Eastern Daylight! It’s 5-7 PM (today, Sunday), not 4-6. Oops!
It’s yet another of those times of year again! The specific moment to look forward to? It’s the preview event for Roguelike Celebration 2026, taking place online tomorrow (Sunday)! You can get a free ticket for it here. Although tickets are free, you will still need to get one to attend.
The preview event this year happens on September 13th from 2 to 4 PM Pacific Daylight Time, meaning 5 to 7 PM on the US East Coast. The talks this year are:
Ancient Roguelikes: The Pre-History of Roguelike Games by Martin Pichlmair
Bitwise Black Magic: How to Computer, Better Faster Stronger by Greg L
Don’t Save The @: What Roguelikes Teach Us About Story Structure by Jamie Brittain
The full conference is happening online from October 17-18. You’ll need to get a ticket for it too; they nominally aren’t free, but you can usually receive one gratis if you can’t afford it and ask nicely. For more information please check out the homepage for Roguelike Celebration here.
