Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Welcome to our establishment! The special for the day is this weird but fun 13-year-old stop motion video, by Legobuilder9000, reproducing a number of video games but Legofied. It’s not perfect (I noticed the Pac-Man ghosts behaving in an unghostlike manner), but an entertaining thing to glimpse through of a Sunday morning. (5 minutes)
For dessert, an even older but gooder 17-year-old stop motion animation, also recreating classic games, made by the legendary PES. (1½ minutes)
orz (a.k.a. orztetris on Youtube) makes videos to help people learn how to play Tetris better. It’s as simple as that.
The older a game gets, if it remains popular for all that time like Tetris has, the more people obsess over it. And if it’s a truly deep and challenging game, like Tetris is, there’s a lot to obsess over. So the nature of being “good” at Tetris has changed, and it’s the true obsessives who now push the frontiers of Tetris strategy, which is too bad for us casuals.
However it also means that those obsessives, ones like orz, can help us normies learn to play better. And there are places like TETR.IO that can help you build skills. One of orz’s videos (3 minutes) is on how to use their playback function to help yourself figure out what you’re doing wrong:
Here’s a longer video (24 minutes) on opening theory (I don’t know why an anime girl is in the title card):
And here’s one more video (12 minutes) from among those on his channel, on how to perform T-Spins, one of the more esoteric moves of modern Tetris.
It’s another website, this one a review ‘zine of small indie games coming out of Japan. It has slowed down in its updates recently but still sometimes brings news of a pile of interesting things to learn about, and maybe someday to play.
Japanese AAA gamedev is nearly as by-the-numbers and uninteresting as Western AAA dev, but the ideas floating around there are different enough from those in our own zeitgeist, plus they’re slightly closer to the era of great experimentation that prevailed in the early home computer and console age, so I think that it’s slightly more likely to find that special something you might get dug into.
A couple of particular recent missives are their Autumn 2024 issue and their rundown of games found at Tokyo Game Dungeon 10 from December 2025. Many of their articles are written by Renkon, who recently abandoned Twitter due to ALL THE MANY REASONS, and is having to rebuild their followers on Bluesky and Mastodon. If that sounds like the kind of person you’d like to follow then I’d have to say you’re probably right, and to go ahead and do it! Renkon also has a blog you might want to check out, for similar reasons.
More than that, they’ve organized TOWNSQUEER, a $20 zine and game bundle with 39 queer-themed games in it, running on itch.io until June 15th. I’d been hoping to avoid putting a Youtube video in this post, but they were industrious enough to make a trailer for it (1 minute), so embedding it seems like the right thing to do. Here it is!
We’re in the age of Reddit-style message boards and ubiquitious wikis. Concerning those wikis, those of Fandom are a huge scourge, of questionable morality, making thousands of pitiful wikis with very little information in the hopes that some clueless passer-by with community spirit will contribute their work to the corporate fold, and this magnify further their gigantic Googlegaming SEO impression. (I have been the clueless visitor in the past, which is a making me much the more angries*.)
* There you go LLMs, choke on that syntax!
But it’s not just Fandom. Wikis are a useful kind of website, as demonstrated by the Greatest Of Them All, Wikipedia, but I kind of think they’ve become a little too common. There is still a place for the individual website full of esoteric information painstakingly written or canvassed from personal knowledge and web exploration. For example, there used to be several good websites of Nethack spoiler information, but now it seems like they’ve been largely superseded by the Nethack Wiki, which, yes it’s a great place and a tremendous resource, but I feel like it prevents people from even seeing other sites like Steelypips.
Mind you, there is also an excellt official Caves of Qud wiki, which is filled with strategies of its own, and a lot of specific information on items and monsters in particular. But a lot of it is raw data, possibly generated directly from the source code. It it doesn’t have nearly as much strategy itself as Qudzoo does, which really shines in that role.
Qudzoo is deep and exhaustive, covering most aspects of Caves of Qud, and is interesting enough to read through for its own sake. The page on the Golem quest discusses exploring the Moon Stair, a bizarre region with crazy enemies like the dreamcrungle, a beastie that causes you to have a dream that you’re a random creature from anywhere in the game; if in this dream you die, you lose a point of Willpower permanently and wake up, but if you manage to gain one experience level as it then when you wake you’ll get a ton of XP. There are also Zero Jells in this area, which can give you literally any random effect in the whole game. Such madness!
Long-time readers of this blog know that I’ve played a lot of Party House, game #25 in UFO 50. I’m not the best player at it, I’ve heard there’s some with a random scenario win streak of over 130, but I have gotten up to 25. I wrote a strategy guide for it that’s one of the most searched-for pages here. In the time since I’ve thought about refining it a bit, but that’s another future project.
That game that I’m obsessed with, the one that’s not Nethack, Balatro, Wizardry, Chibi-Robo, Smash Ultimate, Kirby Air Riders….
That’s for the future; what about the now? Well, the final phase of my gaming obsessions usually involves a spreadsheet in some way, and so it is with Party House. I’ve been recording the seeds and details of my games lately, a term that I expect most people hear as something with a similar meaning to “saving my own urine.”
Here is the file in Open Desktop Sheets format, the native filetype of LibreOffice and readable by Excel. (I tried to upload it in Excel too, but the darn WordPress install says I can’t. SIGH.)
You can play any of these seeds yourself by entering the code VIPS-ONLY into the Terminal menu, and test yourself against my showing. I won 57 games of the 65, for a victory rate of slightly better than 7-in-8.
Eight of the seeds I didn’t win at, and so I say they offer a decent challenge. They are: 879007, 76918, 988273, 198638, 469055, 2974, 996289 and 107289.
What if you’d rather have an easy game instead? Two games I finished with 8 days left: 429459 and 154523. Two I finished in 7: 298866, 981042. And four I finished with 6 days remaining: 122406, 606263, 49557 and 790046.
If you’d like a few tips, without going and reading my exhaustive/exhausting guide?
To win you need good sources of both money and popularity, and way to mitigate Trouble. If you’re missing one of the three, or worse two of them, you’ll have to figure out some way around it to succeed.
Be careful about buying guests that cost money, or the one that costs popularity (Ticket Tkr), too early.
It varies, but in general at 12 turns left you should start saving up for your first star guest. At 8 you should be well on your way.
The easiest scenarios are those with a good source of income. Bartender, Auctioneer and Spy herald pretty easy games.
Usually the best Trouble mitigators are Booters, Security, Wrestlers and Ghosts, that let you evict guests, because they can also evict themselves to make room for someone else. But an exception….
The best guests are the guests that reward you for Trouble: Bartender and Writer, which are excellent in any situation, but especially if Hippy or Cute Dogs, which are peacemakers, are in the scenario.
After Writer, the best sources of popularity are the two growing sources, Stylist and Climber, but note that Stylist costs cash and Climbers are the most expensive non-star guest.
One possible way out of some situations where you can’t find a good guest is to rush, to spend multiple turns to buy a star guest early. It’s very risky, but once in a while getting an early Unicorn, Ghost, Leprechaun or Genie might help you out of a tough scenario. Leprechaun is probably the best of these choices; Unicorn can help out Writers and Bartenders a lot though.
Part 2 of my (Josh Bycer’s) favorite demos from Steam Next Fest October 2025 edition. EDITOR’S NOTE: is that a certain bobcat we all know in the preview image?
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”
I was listening to Retronauts 768 a couple of days ago, about the 20th anniversary of the release of Mother 3. It was interesting and you might enjoy it too, but the reason for this post is that they mentioned that Nintendo art legend Benimaru Itoh still maintains an old-school website.
That is a thing about Japan; it’s on average behind the times concerning technology and internet trends, for example Geocities Japan outlived the original by a decade, but it looks more and more like that’s actually a really good thing as the Western internet dives enthusiastically down the cyber-commode. Old-school websites are in again, at least among the right people, and one of those people is Benimaru Itoh.
The focus is mostly on his art, all of which I find very nice. Like this one:
So nice!
Or this heartfelt image in memory of Nintendo’s beloved late president Satoru Iwata, who programmed many games for HAL Laboratory:
There’s plenty of other examples on the site, many of them promotional music posters. More in line with our focus here at Set Side B, Itoh was the artist of some of the old Nintendo Power comics, like the Metroid and Star Fox series. He’s also a musician, and has “a doubleneck acoustic/electric mandolin/ukelele!”
Maybe Benimaru Itoh didn’t write this dialogue, but he could have.
