The Flipside of Gaming
More of my (Josh Bycer’s) favorite demos from Steam Next Fest, June 2025 edition.
00:00 Intro
00:16 Trash Heart
01:16 Sojourn Past
2:13 Theropods
3:17 Little Rocket Lab
5:31 Ace Overheat
6:20 Chordioid
7:58 AeroMachina
9:27 Truxton Extreme
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”
It’s a really strange game even without the context that your protagonist, a fan-waving Japanese guy running around from sunglasses-wearing agents, and occasionally celebrities like Michael Jackson (probably his first role in a Sega game) and a barrel chasing him around mazes, is based on a real person, Kakuei Tanaka, a prime minister in Japan in the early 70s who was taken down by a bribery scandal. When he gets caught by the suits, they put on S&M garb and Tanaka gets whipped by them! Here’s Kim Justice’s report on it (19 minutes). Here’s about five minutes of gameplay.
I can vouch that it’s playable in MAME, and it’s not even that bad a game, certainly better than Abscam, a pretty terrible Pac-Man bootleg that’s probably our closest version of it.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
As I type this it’s about an hour and a half until my presentation on the history of Loadstar at Vintage Computing Festival Midwest 2025. I think I’m ready for it, but yeah, am I really? That’s the kind of question that sends me into a panic attack.
Since I’m so busy panicking, and because I’ve been on my feet for most of the day, I’m going to post something more random than I usually like. Sundry Sunday is themed around randomness, yes, but this is even more. This week I’m posting NATRAPS X FINAL (5½ minutes).
It’s one of those oh-so-very memeish videos where video game characters do various violent things to each other. I think I grew out of these videos… hm, I’m not sure I’ve ever been to into them. But it’s 16 years old, and both the internet and myself were a lot younger then. Maybe I would have liked it when it was new.
“NATRAPS,” if you haven’t noticed yet, is SPARTAN spelled backward. SPARTAN X was the title of the game that was released in the US as Kung Fu. Despite the name, it was absolutely not the last of these videos posted to the account of Bash4208. If you can bear it, look for more of them here.
I’ll have a report up on VCFMW 2025 soon.
It’s a pretty good run-down of the various weird timing issues of the Commodore 64. Machines at that time had to do all kinds of weird things to keep up the overriding priority of microcomputers of the time: building a consistent video signal that could be displayed on a television. Nearly all machines needed special hardware to do the job of keeping up the display, to give the CPU time to run user programs, or anything at all.
The C64’s VIC-II video chip is a product of many compromises. The C64 could contain so much memory affordably because it used dynamic RAM, which requires periodic refreshes, and one of the tasks of the VIC-II was to handle that. It also needed access to main memory in order to build the display image.
But both of these actions conflict with whatever the processor needs to do, so the computer is designed to actually put the 6510 to sleep when the VIC-II needs to access memory. This is why, when the screen is blanked, the machine runs a little faster and more consistently, and that’s why the screen is blanked when a connected Datasette is loading programs from cassette tape.
VIC-II and FLI timing (part 1 of 3, c64os.com)
I think it’s pretty obvious that, while the game is excellent in many ways, Super Mario World has so many extra lives that they end up almost meaningless. There’s all the traditional ways to build up your horde of Marios waiting in the wings for their chance at platforming glory: getting 100 coins, hidden 1up blocks, knocking a bunch of enemies off with shells, stomping on many enemies without touching the ground, and defeating lots of enemies with a single Starman. Then there’s those specific to Super Mario World: getting 5 Dragon Coins, finding a 3up Moon, getting a lot of gray coins generated by a gray P-Switch, having a lot of enemies on-screen when hitting the Goal Tape, and earning several in one of the bonus games.
But there’s one source of extra lives that few know about, or at least, I didn’t know about it. There are invisible triggers in some levels that, if you cross over their activation points in order, will generate a single 1up Mushroom. Looygi Bros shows off all 15 of these spots in the game here (8 minutes):
Why Nintendo decided to include these spots in a game where players will usually be walking around with double-digit life counts, I couldn’t tell you. Super Mario World is one of those Mario games where it doesn’t save progress after every level, so running out of lives is a real setback. But they could have just designed it so that it saved more often? I guess they just saw that it’s fun to earn lots of extra lives.
The decades of video gaming history there has now been have had many companies, developers and studios that have went under, due to one thing or other. Many of those names are revered, and their vanishing have left lacks in the world of vidyagaems that are felt to this day. A few of those: Atari (the current one has improved greatly lately, but it’s still not the same), Midway, Bally, Williams, Lucasarts, Rare (in its non-Microsoft incarnation), Telltale, SSI, New World Computing, and many more if I cared to dredge them out of the muck of my mind. And that’s just Western companies, there were plenty more in Japan, I just wanted to narrow the field down a bit.
One of those companies probably isn’t Acclaim. They were one of the biggest third-party publishers in the NES era, and they lasted to around the N64 era, but although they did put out some Premium Quality Entertainment (thanks Murderbot), they also put out a lot of what in Yiddish is called drek. Towards the end it felt like the drek percentage was getting pretty high, and it didn’t help at all that they kept pulling some dodgy ad stunts. They ran a context where they offered to pay couples to name their kid Turok, another where they tried to put ads for Shadowman on tombstones in cemeteries, and the less said ab0ut BMX XXX, possibly the game that destroyed the company, the better.
Well nostalgia certainly sells, even for the less savory publishers, and so it is that some people have decided one of the brands we needed to once again be subjected to is Acclaim. They released a promo video yesterday that unveils their initial releases, here it is (relevant portion 13 minutes):
The games shown:
The question remains, why did they feel like they needed to resurrect the Acclaim brand and logo? Having a leg-up from obscurity is enough reason I guess, but none of the new games are based on and of Acclaim’s old IP. Maybe they could revive Extreme-G, Turok or Wizards & Warriors, but they haven’t yet.
It is true, but you do need some extra items. Not only the Gameboy Advance, but a Gamecube, a GBA controller cable, the Gamecube controller adaptor (the one made to support Smash Bros. games) and a Gameboy Player with boot disk. But if you have all of these items, none of them need to be modded. It’s all Nintendo code and hardware, baby!
The process is to boot the Gamecube and Gameboy Player with the GBA plugged into it with the cable. Then turn off the Gamecube leaving the Gameboy Advance on, disconnect the GBA cable from the GC, then plug it into the Gamecube adapter plugged into a USB port connected to the Switch. If the GBA is still powered on, it should be usable as a Switch controller at that point, until it’s turned off!
If you don’t have them all that kit, a modded GC or Wii will also suffice for the Gameboy Player. It’s all demonstrated in NotRealEric’s video. There is also some alternate hardware usable, including third-party adapters and connectors. The video is ten minutes long, but the setup is in the first 3½ minutes of it; the rest is demonstrating some use cases, including Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
The hardest to find of these devices now, if you don’t use modded hardware, is the Gameboy Player, which is quite expensive used. But if you do happen to have all the pieces, it’s quite the hack. It seems to work due to a controller-emulation program the Gameboy Player (or modded GB or Wii running mGBA) sends to the GBA, which, amazingly, is Switch compatible.
Maybe you have a magic combination of gizmos lying around to use this trick, and use a GBA as an extremely limited Switch peripheral? Yeah, let’s not kid ourselves, this is pretty silly and doesn’t have a strong use case, considering that Switches come with two Joycons, but it’s amazing that it works at all.
This is part 7 of my (Josh Bycer’s) favorite demos from Steam Next Fest, June 2025 edition.
00:00 Intro
00:19 Neon Inferno
1:44 Vampire’s Best Friend
4:05 Possessor(s)
6:10 Sping
7:25 Primland: The Magnus
9:15 Glaciered
11:13 Heroes Against Time
12:42 Rogue Eclipse
13:41 Jetrunner
14:50 Funi Raccoon Game
15:43 Hirogami
17:10 Gurei
18:51 Away From Home
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”
Primm made a number of high resolution images of the system cursors the Wii uses, for use as desktop cursors on Windows, macOS and Linux, and in four colors corresponding to the four player Wii remotes. You can get them here!
This snuck up on me, and in fact I had thought I’d missed it, but it turns out it’s tonight! Roguelike Celebration‘s main event isn’t until October, but they’re having a preview event tonight with two long and one short talk. The schedule is here. It kicks off at around 3:00 PM Pacific time, which to convert is 6 PM Eastern, around 10 PM Greenwich, and Midnight CEST.
(EDIT: I had the Eastern times too late by an hour. The event will begin at 6 PM Eastern time.)
Tonight’s show is being done for free, but you still need a (costless) ticket for it, which you can get here. As has been usual the past few events, there will be a live MUD-like chatroom to participate in during the show, for interacting with other audience members, for submitting questions to the queue, and just for bumping around and exploring. The doors open a little before the talks begin, to let people get used to the space, and as a buffer against lateness.
I hope you can make it! Tonight’s talks are:
3:15 PM Pacific / 6:15 PM Eastern / 10:15 PM GMT / 12:15 AM CEST – 45 minutes
Fireside chat with Jon Perry: Host Alexei Pepers and Jon Perry will chat about game design and his contributions to UFO 50 such as Planet Zoldath, Party House, and Mini & Max! (Personal note: this is not one to miss. I have been obsessed with Party House, enough to write a gigantic strategy guide for it.)
4 PM Pacific / 7 PM Eastern / 11 PM GMT / 1 AM CEST – 30 minutes
Building Synergy Networks for better Roguelike Deckbuilders, with Ezra Szanton: Roguelike Deckbuilders live or die on the quality of the drafting decisions they present. When a player chooses between 3 cards, what is going through their head? This talk is about how to achieve deep but accessible drafting decisions which result in memorable games that excite players. Synergy Networks are a helpful lens for creating sets of cards that achieve these aims. Modeling the synergies between cards as a network allows us to use ideas from network theory like path length, density and hubs. Digressions will include characteristics of synergies, broad types of synergies useful for brainstorming, and why anti-synergy is just as important as synergy itself. This talk is informed by my work designing Hellscaper and Mr Magpie’s Harmless Card Game, two roguelike deckbuilders.
4:30 PM Pacific / 7:30 PM Eastern / 11:30 PM GMT / 1:30 AM CEST – 45 minutes
Designing for System Suspense, with Alexei Pepers: The host will give a talk which she gave at GCD and had previously been trapped inside the GDC Vault.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
So, Deltarune Chapter 4. After the mostly-comical adventures of Kris, Susie and Ralsei through three alternate-world dreamscapes, the fourth got a lot darker with the revelation that there’s an entity trying to revive Titans, huge evil monsters that could rip up the world.
During the battle with a Titan near the end of the chapter, a point is reached in the fight where none of your attacks can get through its defenses. That is where Susie, the bruiser of the group, has her idea.
You aren’t told what the idea is, it just shows up in the menu as Susie’s Idea and a little graphic of her face. Selecting it is necessary to win the battle; it causes Susie to grab Kris and jump directly into the Titan, reckless behavior sure, but that’s just who Susie is. And it works!
Susie’s Idea has become a meme, with at least enough standing to get its own Know Your Meme page. chorālunar made a Youtube video of many of these meme images with (mostly) quirky music, akin to the old collections of cursed images set to Earthbound music. It’s five minutes:
Kim Justice has done a few of these videos and they usually have interesting games to look into. They try to present machines that aren’t as well-known to current eyes, so you’ll probably find at least one new favorite in each of their videos. Here it is (32 minutes):
The games presented are: Mr. Do!, Frenzy, Anteater, Nibbler, Kangaroo, Bagman, The Pit, Blue Print, Jack the Giant Killer and Abscam. I personally vouch for Mr. Do, Anteater, Nibbler and Bagman. A surprising fact revealed is that Midway’s Blue Print was actually an early production of Tim and Chris Stamper, long before Rare, and even before Ultimate: Play the Game!
