Year: 2026

AGDQ 2026’s Awful Block, with Bug Blasters

AGDQ 2026 still has a day and a half to go, but a highlight so far has been Awful Block from early Thursday morning. Among other games they did Rock ‘n’ Roll Adventures (16 minutes), Golf With Your Grandmother (1 hour 33 minutes), The Running Man (16 minutes) and Terry Cavanagh’s Egg (12 minutes), but the unquestionable highlight has to be the obscure SegaCD game Bug Blasters: The Exterminators, at 42 bizarre FMV minutes:

Made in 1995 but not released until 2001, it’s really something. That is, it’s a thing, and there is some of it. Not only are the effects and acting somewhere beyond the line of rationality, it looks like it’s barely playable, even on the easiest difficulty. Imagine plunking down $50 for this in 2001 for your obsolete Sega CD, out of production for five years.

Huh…. on further reflection, that actually sounds awesome! The Playstation 2 had been released by that point! It’s certainly memorable, although I wouldn’t have wanted to buy it for purposes of playing it unironically.

Resurrecting Sinistar

Resurrecting Sinistar: A Cyber-Archeology Documentary is a 166-minute, that’s approaching three hours long, documentary about the effort to recover the source code of the Williams arcade classic, made by SynaMax.

SynaMax also made a modified version of the game that makes the notoriously difficult arcade game easier in various ways, in interesting ways.

I’ve been watching Awful Block on AGDQ, so that’s all I have for you today. Hopefully that’ll hold you over, although I suggest that you might want to watch AGDQ too, while it lasts.

Adventure 751, from Compuserve, Recovered and Playable

Interactive Fiction blog Renga in Blue reports that a rare variant of classic Adventure, that was playable on Compuserve for many years and only went down when their game offerings went offline in the mid 90s, has been recovered and made playable online.

Promo image for this version of Adventure from Regna in Blue. You know it’s an adventure game in the70s & 80s when there’s a bunch of mostly naked people in the art.

It’s called Adventure 751 in reference to the number of available points there are to find. The post in turn links to Arthur O’Dwyer’s article on this version, and other versions, which seem to contain substantial added content from the original Crowther & Woods version.

It’s playable, but requires a lot of effort to get there, including compiling a PDP10 emulator and loading a disk image into it. I wish VCFMW wasn’t months behind me now, it’d have been a blast to see if someone there had access to a working PDP10, and if the game could have been transferred onto it!

As O’Dwyer mentions, there are plenty of games from this era that are just completely, utterly lost, with practically no chance of recovery. And even versions like this, that can technically be played, still hang on by just a thread. The people who created them often don’t have accessible archives, and the institutions who hosed them rare seem interest in preserving them. It’s a sorry state indeed, but at least there are a few survivals like this one.

Editing JPEGs in a Text Editor

Patrick Gillespie made this fun Youtube video showing what happens when you do an objectively silly thing: open JPEGs in a text editor. It’s only six minutes long:

I absolutely love doing crazy things like this. JPEGs are particularly interesting because, once you get past the magic sections that cause it to outright break, and the metadata areas that don’t change the image visibly at all, JPEGs are affected in all kinds of bizarre ways when you change random bytes!

One important take away is to not use Windows Notepad for your image editing adventures, because it’ll change many more bytes than just the ones you want to change, in the name of correcting and regularizing the file, and it’ll practically always result in a non-working image.

The Sound And Music of Games (Part 2)

This is the conclusion of my chat with composer Mark Benis about composing music for games. We talked more about working with designers, and how designers can best utilize composers for their games.