The weekly indie game showcases cover the many games we (Josh Bycer and friends) play each week on the channel. Games shown are either press keys, demos, or from my own collection.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
We love oldschool websites around here, and unlike Final Fantasy Kingdom, whose images are all broken and likely isn’t long for this world, Caves of Narshe has been kept up-to-date, its images and links all work, it’s got a good design, and is full of interesting info on Final Fantasies 1, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 9, plus Final Fantasy Tactics and Chrono Trigger. It’s loaded with good information, and best of all, it isn’t Fandom.com! I can’t even rightly give it the oldweb tag, because it’s modernized! May it last a thousand years.
What kind of focus image does a normal standard regular website get? Well how about a screenshot?
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
(grumble grumble… stupid WordPress…)
PES is an acclaimed and Oscar-nominated stop motion animator. They’ve done terrific work. One of their videos is game-related, and additionally references classic-era arcade games. Have a look (1½ minutes):
Between U Can Beat Video Games, Video Games 101 and other channels like that of the late SaikyoMog, there are _<i>lots</i>_ of video guides to classic games. If I linked to all of them here they’d overrun the channel. I’m considering making those links a weekly thing, like Sundry Sunday and (sporadically, these days) romhacks, to keep their numbers under control. We’ll see.
Of course Super Mario World is a game that’s been destroyed by speedrunning. If you set aside scripted, tool-assisted speedruns (TASes), which I usually do nowadays, there are people who have still taken advantage of glitches to warp directly to the credits from gameplay, and perform much weirder tricks besides. This video doesn’t rely on those: it’s just the most direct route from start to finish through its levels, as God and Tezuka intended.
After yesterday’s exploration of a huge collection of antique electro-mechanical amusement machines, it seemed meet to drag out a little video I’ve been aware of for a while, a demonstration of a Piccadilly Circus-style redemption machine made by Konami, amusingly named Piccadilly Gradius (2 minutes).
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of this strange entry in the Gradius series on the internet, just a stub on a couple of wikis. Piccadilly Circus itself seems to be a Konami series, only a little older than Gradius really. Most of them seem to be simple roulette-style machines where you stop a light on a number to win a prize. The Gradius one makes it into a journey to get a spaceship to the end of a course.
It’s hard to believe, but an “arcade” didn’t used to mean video games. Across “the pond,” to trade in ludicrous understatement, in “old blighty,” there is an amazing collection of old-style mechanical machines. Northern Introvert has an ‘alf-hour video exploration of them that makes for fascinating viewing!
This Youtube video is a follow-up to Choa’s 40 Sonic Adventure 2 Facts, which we posted about recently. Unlike the standard lists of this nature that litter the internet, most of the ones in these two videos are genuinely interesting, and paint a picture of a team trying a lot of things to make their take on the Sonic series work, while pressed for time.
For those not acquainted, Sonic Adventure had a weird structure, with free-exploration Adventure Fields, with permanent powerups to find, NPCs to talk to, and even a few subquests; and more demanding Action Stages. Each action stage had an entrance somewhere in an Adventure Field. Sonic Adventure had six playable characters, each with an entirely different style of gameplay! Sonic running, Tails racing with Sonic, Knuckles treasure hunting, Amy being chased by robots, Omega (itself one of Eggman’s robots!) blowing things up, and Big the Cat… fishing.
What a weird game. And you can tell just from playing it, the weirdness extended to its development. Characters can enter parts of courses intended for other characters. There are secret areas that seem like a holdover from early development, that sometimes can still be entered. Voice lines and animations that are very obscure, or even impossible to trigger without mods, remain in the game. Choa’s video is not a complete listing of these oddments, but it’s certainly a good introduction to them.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Here is the page, just to get the link out of the way. It was written by sdomi back in 2023. They were also one of the people who presented the talk from a couple of days ago about turning Chromebooks into more-useable laptops.
Part of the page describing the wholly-questionable project.
People who know what both Minecraft and bash are are right now exclaiming WTF. People who just know what Minecraft, of which there are very many, might be wondering why writing a server in bash is such a big deal. People who only know what bash is… well, you should remember to take your medication, and remember your gerontologist appointment on Thursday.
bash is the primary scripting language over in the Linux Dimension. Think of it as the old DOS command prompt, but much more powerful. How powerful is it? Well evidently you can write a Minecraft server in it, of course. It can do lots of other, less ludicrous things too. I use it to help get the data into shape for my Loadstar Compleat project. It is not made, to put it lightly, for things like this.
These days “bash” is sometimes used as a synonym for a range of command shells, like zsh, ksh and the like. This is a mistake of course, but to an untutored eye they all look broadly similar, and work in a similar way.
This shouldn’t be mistaken as producing a useable Minecraft server, suitable for hanging out with your friends, building blocky castles and fleeing from creepers in. As much as I can gather, it produces the bare minimum needed to connect to the game. And it cheats slightly by using awk to handle loops and some numbers. But much of the point of bash is to connect other tools together into a data flow, so I’ma allow it.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Is this trying to make a point about racism? Is it arguing against it, or for it, that claims of racism are too prevalent, or not enough? For expanding the definition? For contracting it?
I’m honestly not sure if one could make a solid case for any answers to these questions, but it’s fun, so here (1½ minutes):
That’s it. That’s all for today. It’s 39 minutes though, so it should keep you going for a while. If you’d like to avoid Youtube and its various vagarities, you can also get it directly from the event website.
This is weird. This was around the time of the PC Engine and Mega Drive/Genesis, years after the short-lived laserdisc arcade game boom, but still within the period where some people (executives mostly) thought you could just just have a barely-interactive movie and it would rule the world. One of the attachments allowed it to play Sega CD (a.k.a. Mega CD) games, but it could also use its Mega Drive hardware to play special-made laserdisc games.
The hardware’s uniqueness, and the nature of the format, has contributed to the system’s resisting emulation. As the article tells us, laserdiscs are an analog format! So while it’s possible to copy a disc with a fidelity that would satisfy any human viewer, you couldn’t make an absolutely perfect digital copy even in theory.
The LaserActive bit is the lead-off for a substantial issue of the newsletter, which also contains news about a fan effort to translate a Cowboy Bebop game!
