Year: 2025

Sundry Sunday: Toad Sings Chandelier

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

oh god this hurts my ears (3 ½ minutes). it hurts so much that i’m typing this in lowercase because capital letters are too loud now.

its the most screamy of all game characters, that’s right toad. he’s singing. he’s singing real bad, and real loud. its funny if your ears can take it, i suggest though keeping the volume low. i’ll see you later, i’m going to listen to some whispery asmr.

the video dates back to 2018, and it has over ten million views. to each their own, i guess.

Atari 2600 Graphics Construction

We’ve talked about this topic before, but I recently found a video, from Mark Rotondella, on how the Atari VCS/2600 creates its graphics. (6 minutes)

It makes the useful observation that the first programmable game system (that is, with interchangable cartridges that contained program code), the Fairchile Channel F, contained 2K of RAM to use as a framebuffer, a region of memory the system’s graphics controller referred to in building its display. Using a framebuffer simplifies video creation, but at the time RAM was very expensive.

The Atari VCS/2600, however, only has 128 bytes of on-board RAM. It doesn’t create a framebuffer, it doesn’t have enough memory. Instead the processor, a MOS 6507 (a variation of the 6502), works with the TIA graphics chip to build the signal in real-time. Effectively, the VCS has a one-dimensional display: it focuses on building the video signal by focusing on it one raster line at a time.

There’s a danger when talking about these things, of telling people something they already know. It’s been observed that some game facts that were once obscure are fairly well known among enthusiasts, like that Super Mario Bros. 2 was adapted from an earlier Japanese game called Doki Doki Panic. I feel like the unusual way the VCS constructed its graphics might be one of these things. I’m still fascinated by how it works though. I’ll probably end up bringing it up again someday.

Review: Two Cozy Games to Enjoy

This is a double review of Spilled! and Pilo and the Holobook both played with press keys.

00:00 Intro
00:13 Spilled!
2:27 Pilo and the Holobook

A Bunch of Sites You Should Follow

I think you might find it interesting or useful or entertaining, or some combination of the three, to have a list of interesting gaming websites to look through and follow. They’re all pretty cool; I’ve tried to weed out some that don’t update often, but sometimes the content on the site overrides that.

The three big indie gaming sites at the moment are Second Wind, the newly-liberated Giant Bomb, and Aftermath, even if they do annoy me greatly whenever they call blog posts “blogs.” I feel like they do it on purpose, or something. Take note that currently Second Wind does not actually have a dedicated website of their own; their internet presence is on other sites and services, especially Youtube and Discord.

Two sites I suggest avoiding are Kotaku, which is run by soulless drones, and, whenever possible, the vast array of Fandom.com sites. This is often not possible, as lots of people use them for free site hosting, but it’s frequently the case that Fandom doesn’t have its users’ interests foremost on its mind, and if a wiki creator decides to leave Fandom for green pastures, you’ll often end up competing with your old site, and it’ll come in ahead of your new site in Google searches for a long time after, maybe forever, because of their strong search engine optimization. Notably the Nethack Wiki had to fight against the ghost of their old selves for a long time, and the Fandom version of the site still, after over a decade, comes up in the first page of Google results. (A useful browser extension for Chrome and Firefox is Indie Wiki Buddy, which marks search results that turn up Fandom sites, while not removing them entirely in case they’re the only real option.)

Some other useful sites:

The Cutting Room Floor, of course, is an amazing resource, bringing together development information on thousands of games.

Hardcore Gaming 101 may be the website with the most complete information on all kinds of video games that exists, other than Wikipedia of course, and WP prioritizes general audiences, not enthusiasts.

Thrilling Tales of Old Videogames has had quite the uptick in posts lately, but always has something new and unexpected to say.

Gaming Alexandria is preservation-focused, and hosts scans of old gaming and computer magazines, including scans of Japanese type-in computer magazines, a category that has not been well-preserved in the West despite some programmers having moved into mainstream commercial development after having gotten their start with magazine publishing.

Game Developer Research Institute collects information on a vast array of companies and hosts a number of interviews with classic gamedevs too. They also keep an informative blog (being, a series of blog posts).

Computer Archeology updates but rarely, but has useful information on several classic arcade games. They’re the site that figured out the cause of the long-standing arcade Galaga bug that sometimes cause the enemy insects to stop firing.

Sonic Retro hosts a huge wiki on many topics related to the Sonic games.

We’re now moving into the category of personal sites, but don’t count them out because it’s mostly one or two people who make them!

Finally, more out of a sense of memory than anything else, there’s Press The Buttons, home of the blog and podcast of my late friend Matthew Green, currently still on the internet. I don’t know what will happen to it now that he’s gone. He wasn’t the only host of the Power Button podcast. I hope the surviving members keep it going. If they do, you should follow it, too.

Avoiding Walls in Mario Kart DS & Wall Assisted Super Bouncing

The gold standard of game breakdowns continues to be PannenKoek’s extremely detailed and approachable examinations of Super Mario 64, but there’s other people out there are also nerding out excessively over games.

Suuper W‘s makes videos about several different Mario games, but Mario Kart is their primary beat. They recently explained how Mario Kart DS detects when you’ve hit a wall. It’s worth a look if you want to either how the detection works, how it can be abused, or, just possibly, both. (14 minutes)

Also of interest is a video they’ve done about “Wall Assisted Super Bouncing,” a Mario Kart DS technique that can cause you to game big air and leap over barriers under the right conditions. It’s 11 minutes, and even if (as is likely) you’re not in the Mario Kart DS TAS speedrunning scene, it may be interesting for its look at the specifics of MKDS’s engine.

Jed’s Journey (on Loadstar 87)

Jed’s Journey is a fun little Zelda-like game for the Commodore 64. If you weren’t a Loadstar subscriber around 1993 or so, you’ve probably never heard of it. It’s one of the many programs from Loadstar’s 22-year run, which I’ve put up for sale (with permission of J&F Publishing’s co-owner Fender Tucker) on itch.io, but the disk can also be found on the Internet Archive. (We talked about making Loadstar available to people back last month, here.)

Jed lost drawing straws with his villager friends, and so it’s up to him to do something about all the monsters infesting his world. The monsters move quickly and randomly, so fighting them is a mix of reflexes, strategy and luck. Clear a screen and you get rewarded with coins, and possibly a potion that you can save for later. The potion colors are green for health, blue for invisibility, yellow to be teleported back to the starting point, and red to clear all the monsters from the screen.

Jed’s world is pretty big. If you explore for a bit, you’ll find treasure rooms with lots of money inside, a place to pay for healing, buyable weapon upgrades and keys for purchase. It’s not known at the moment if there is a way to win at Jed’s Journey, but the fact that the locked doors must be leading somewhere important suggests that there is. To even have a chance of reaching the end, if it exists, you should make a map of the world, and I mean by hand.

Jed’s Journey makes use of a hardware trick, seen in some sprite-based video chips, to get free collision detection. When the C64’s VIC-II is drawing sprites on screen, if two of them would be drawn on the same pixel, it’ll note a collision between them, and note this fact in a register. There are quirks to this system though. On the C64, this is pixel-based collision detection, not using hit boxes, which might mean occasional misses for players used to hitbox detection. Only two of the possible three colors in a multicolor sprite set off the collision detection. And the collisions only register which sprites are colliding, not what they were colliding with, which sometimes means, when you kill one beast, two others that were touching each other onscreen elsewhere will also be considered slain.

Will someone finally finish Jed’s Journey after all these years? Will it be you? If you try it, please let us know!

Indie Showcase For 5/25/25

The indie showcases highlight the many indie games we play on the channel (Game Wisdom) and feature a mix of demos, games bought, and press key submissions.

0:00 Intro
00:14 Crown of Pain
2:46 Sulfur
6:01 Our Adventurer Guild
7:45 Alien Boom Boom
8:46 Galaia
10:13 Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure