Year: 2024

Set Side B 2024 in Review

We used to do monthly summary posts, but they ended up being a lot of work to keep up, and often there would be something interesting I’d want to post about that would preempt them. So in their place, and in recognition of Set Side B’s new Bluesky feed (which supplements, but doesn’t replace, our Mastodon feed), here’s a recap of what I consider to be just some of the more-interesting blog posts we published in 2024.

If you’re just coming in from social media and wondering what we’re about, Set Side B is a daily blog that covers what we call “the Flipside of Gaming” (notice the tasteful use of our tagline), specifically in the Retro, Niche and Indie fields. All of that basically gives us license to chase after whatever gaming information we enjoy, which is usually the antithesis of AAA gaming. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we do cover games sometimes that might be called Triple-A, the Legend of Zelda series comes up a lot and they’re often considered headliners, but Nintendo generally tends to have rather a different approach to gamedev than other companies. I’m not going to say they’re perfect, frog knows they have their faults, but they still manage to surprise us from time to time.

So, let’s get on to that recap. Posts marked Sundry Sunday are finds from gaming culture, usually funny Youtube videos. Posts that largely include original content by me are marked Original. I might have misapplied that signifier in places, because I often include extra commentary on posts, and even after spending two hours constructing this behemoth of a list, I have gone mostly by memory and not reviewed every post here. I’m certain that you’ll find something interesting, if you have a look. Set Side B’s archives are unusually rich with wonders, mostly found but sometimes made, and I’m sure if you take a spelunk through our mines, you will be rewarded.

JANUARY

JAN 1: Mario Kart’s catch-up system

JAN 2: FM-synth enhanced version of the Space Harrier theme on Japanese Master System hardware

JAN 5: The many fan revivals of Toontown Online

JAN 6: Dialup AOL-era Neverwinter Nights

JAN 9: Original — The 10th-Key scatter bug in NES Pac-Man

JAN 12 & MAY 20: Hempuli’s many riffs on Sokoban – Part 1, Part 2

JAN 15 & 16: Dark Arts of Pinball – Bang Backs and Deathsaves

JAN 21: AGDQ highlight: Playing Gyromite, but with a dog in place of R.O.B.

JAN 24: Original — On Stephen’s Sausage Roll

JAN 27 & 29: Displaced Gamers’ Behind the Code on Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Part 1 and Part 2

JAN 31: Gamefinds — Cosmic Collapse, a Suika Game-style remake in Pico 8, but with better play

FEBRUARY

FEB 1: The “no fire” bug in arcade Galaga

FEB 2: The inefficiency of Super Mario World’s score display

FEB 3: Mario Paint’s Data Over Flow error, when you draw an image that can’t be saved

FEB 11: Sundry Sunday — BitFinity’s song + animation Megalixir

FEB 15: Fans used computer tools to reconstruct lost BS F-Zero tracks from a VHS recording, then made a romhack around them

FEB 17: Chrontendo #64!

FEB 20: Project to finish every non-hacked Mario Maker 1 level enters home stretch

FEB 22: Original — Nintendo Direct quick takes

FEB 23: Popular Science magazine, of all places, explains how you can make old-style WordArt in current versions of MS Word

FEB 24: Gamefinds —A Pico 8 remake of DOOM

FEB 25: Sundry Sunday — various versions of the music from Gyruss

FEB 26: Original — How to play Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On (with a video tutorial!)

FEB 29: GifCities

MARCH

MAR 6: Fans fix the Garfield PC game

MAR 7: Speedrunners get custom N64 control sticks to make up for the infamous dust of death

MAR 14: Displaced Gamers on why NES Tetris crashes at extremely high levels

MAR 20: Winning at arcade Dragons Lair

MAR 24: Sundry Sunday — Baldur’s Gate 3 has gone too far

MAR 28: 4D Golf releases on Steam

APRIL

APR 3: Sharopolis on Youtube looks into NES games that perform particularly skillful technical feats

APR 4: Nintendo’s old corporate headquarters is a hotel now, and Before Mario stayed there

APR 7: Sundry Sunday — The crazy trailer to lost 3DO music game Duelin’ Firemen

APR 13: Original — On the New York Times’ Connections puzzles

APR 16: Annotated video playthrough of maddening arcade hit (in Japan) The Tower of Druaga

APR 17: Atari (not the same as the old Atari) makes arcade games with Food Fight Frenzy

APR 18: PannenKoek spends nearly four hours explaining Mario 64’s many glitchy invisible walls

APR 22: Nintendo Monopoly depicts Mario in the style of Rich Uncle Pennybags

APR 27 & JUN 25: Original — On Dungeon, a 30-year-old CRPG system for the Commodore 64, and my own attempts to rerelease it. The original and efforts to revise it.

APR 29: Commodore Free Magazine

MAY

May 2: Moviecart, adapting films to play on an Atari 2600

MAY 3: The history of KidPix

MAY 5: Sunday Sunday — Animated Lego breakfast with Super Mario

MAY 6: Retro Game Mechanics explains how to glitch out Super Mario World by stomping Wigglers

MAY 9: Which version of Wizardry to play?

MAY 15: Original — Comparing the character sets of microcomputers

MAY 16: Original — A directory of U Can Be Video Games’ videos

MAY 23: Nintendo uncensors Vivian’s transness in the remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

MAY 24: Original — @Play: Which is better, ring mail or splint mail?

MAY 25: Dani Bunten’s early classic computer game Wheeler Dealers has been preserved

MAY 30: Awesome Donkey Kong romhack compilation

MAY 31: Ocarina of Time timer bug, taking advantage of extremely low health

JUNE

JUN 4: The esports scene around Farming Simulator

JUN 7: Hardcore Gaming 101 thread on obscure arcade secrets

JUN 9: Sundry Sunday — Bing Bang, an awesome animation for a Splatoon 3 song

JUN 10: Why does Pac-Man’s split screen happen? Video explainer, with a lengthy text explainer-explainer by me

JUN 13: Complete but abandoned Tarzan Atari 2600 game recovered after 40 years

JUN 14: On Game Dads, small, inexpensive yet capable handheld emulation machines

JUN 16: Sundry Sunday — Mexican Flyer (that song from Space Channel 5) and its history

JUN 22: Dan Olsen of Folding Ideas discusses James Rolfe, the Angry Video Game Nerd

JUN 28: Mattel’s handheld Dungeons & Dragons LCD game

JULY

JUL 2: Website for generating animated Earthbound battle backgrounds

JUL 5: Original — On the history of Wizardry

JUL 8: The marquee and instruction card for Vs. Super Mario Bros (including a rather different official illustration of Mario than you usually see from Nintendo)

JUL 12: Snafuru’s extensive Wizardry fanpage

JUL 13: The MAD Magazine type-in program

JUL 16: Blade & Bastard, the (current!) Wizardry novel/manga

JUL 19: Dune author Frank Herbert’s book on 80s microcomputers, “Without Me You’re Nothing”

JUL 20, 25: Original — Getting Started in Digital Eclipse’s remake of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, Part 1 & Part 2

JUL 23: The Mr. Saturn text generator

JUL 29 & AUG 5: Looygi Bros tests various glitches in the Nintendo World Championships game, Part 1 & Part 2

JUL 31: A presenter at RustCon explains why MISSINGNO happens in Pokemon

AUGUST

AUG 2: Original — Review of World of Goo 2

AUG 6: Shmuplations translates an interview with a programmer on arcade Donkey Kong

AUG 13: Original — Science facts from No Man’s Sky

AUG 14: Comparing versions of Space Harrier

AUG 15: How randomness is used in Ms. Pac-Man

AUG 17: Complete Youtube playthroughs of the original Zork trilogy

AUG 19: A blog about Sega’s Flicky

AUG 20: Hidden Dialogue in Earthbound

AUG 21: The game Mission: Impossible on CP/M

AUG 24: Sunsoft’s Hebereke cartoons on Youtube

AUG 28, 29 & SEP 2, 4 & NOV 19: Original — How to play Atari Games’ Rampart, and also someone other than me talking about Rampart, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, someone else

SEPTEMBER

SEP 3: Obit for Andrew Greenberg, co-author of Wizardry

SEP 7: Hidden flags in Earthbound, the Mole Playing Rough, and the Game Over Glitch

SEP 9: Balatro University’s beginner’s guide to extremely high scores

SEP 10: Spelunky on the Commodore 64

SEP 15: Balatro (intentional) deck-peeking involving Misprint

SEP 18: Gamefinds — Blob the Klex

SEP 19: Kaze Emanuar on misapplied optimizations in Super Mario 64

SEP 20: Why hasn’t Nintendo implemented achievements?

SEP 22: Sundry Sunday — The Untitled Goose Programme

SEP 25: Katamari Damacy turns 20

SEP 26: Nicole Express investigates incompatibility between Guardic Gaiden (The Guardian Legend) and the Twin Famicom

SEP 30: The Rogue Archive

OCTOBER

OCT 2: Ed Logg on creating Gauntlet

OCT 4: Original — Getting Started in Pilot Quest (UFO 50 game # 44)

OCT 5: A walkthrough of Barbuta (UFO 50 game #1)

OCT 6, DEC 22: Sundry Sunday — The Amazing Digital Circus, Parts 1-3, Part 4

OCT 8: On the maddening difficulty of “Snowman’s Lost His Head” in Super Mario 64

OCT 9: Aftermath’s Chris Person on web forums in 2024

OCT 11: Whatever happened to Toadsworth?

OCT 12: Masahiro Sakurai on Satoru Iwata

OCT 15: HTML for People, an online book about learning to make websites for themselves, as intended

OCT 18: Displaced Gamers on the awfulness of NES Ikari Warriors

OCT 22: Original — My talk on Mystery Dungeon games for Roguelike Celebration 2024

OCT 23: UFO 50 Showcase

NOVEMBER

NOV 7: Randomly-occuring debug mode in Super Mario All-Stars’ version of Mario 3

NOV 8: Blaster Master & Wing of Madoola’s unreleased and lost arcade versions

NOV 14: Tomato’s excellent game translation blog Legends of Localization shows fitful signs of activity

NOV 17: Remake of the DK Rap by Grant Kirkhope and Substantial

NOV 18: Score keeping on the NES

NOV 21: Super Mario Bros. Mini on the Pico 8

NOV 22: Retro365 on Little Computer People

NOV 23: How many Bokoblins are in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom?

NOV 26: Almost Something on game rental lawsuits and photocopying instruction manuals

NOV 28: Original — A deep strategy guide to Party House (UFO 50 game #25)

NOV 29: Moving Miis from the Wii to the Switch

NOV 30: Someone has written a script that will defeat ANY game of Pokemon Platinum

DECEMBER

DEC 2: The Zelda Timeline is updated to account for Echoes of Wisdom

DEC 6: Game making IDEs GB Studio and BB Studio

DEV 11: Kit & Krysta take a tour of a secret gamedev hangout in Tokyo

DEC 13: Intro videos for Caves of Qud

DEC 14: Info from a data scrape of the entire Steam storefront

DEC 15: Sundry Sunday — An old cartoon, “Microcomputers: An Introduction”

DEC 16: Nintendo’s weird corporate structure

DEC 17: Some Body lays out how the AI works in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red & Blue Rescue Team

DEC 19: Grouping ghosts in Ms. Pac-Man

DEC 24: The conclusion of the backstory of Team Fortress 2

DEC 25: A program that plays Animal Crossing music and weather noises in the backgroun on your computer

DEC 30: Hunter R. explains the letter grading system in Gamecube Animal Crossing

The Letter-Writing System in Gamecube Animal Crossing

I’m opening this post with a special message to any anthropomorphic animal video game characters who happen to be reading this. As we will see, they rate this special prologue quite highly, and so it will make us very popular to any Dottys or Apollos in our audience, being exactly the sort of thing they want to hear. In the secret, inner language of their minds, I’m sure it confirms all their biases and makes them feel good about themselves:

I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.

Nintendo’s Animal Crossing series has a lot of weird systems in them. Some games wear the grass down according to character walking patterns; all the games have the “Stalk Market,” a risky way to make a lot of money; most of the games have a lost-and-found; and so on.

A system that was in the first game, and I’m not sure was ever adapted for later games (but then it might have been) was letter-writing, not just to other players in the same village, but to the villagers. They’d save the letters you wrote them and show them off to other players if they moved to another town, and even write you back. Of course, parsing and intelligently responding to any text, no matter the language, was beyond computers of the time (and despite what AI enthusiasts will tell you, still isn’t), so the game has to fake it in some way. But, how?

Well, what is the purpose of writing letters to characters in the game? It gives villagers something interesting to show people when they move to their villages, and, it’s a roleplaying exercise for the writer, a way to pretend the animal denizens of your town are real people and not simulated game mechanics present to make the game seem less empty.

Both of these design goals work best if the person writing the letter actually writes real letters, and not random jumbles of characters, so Animal Crossing has a mechanism to reward players for writing what appear to be real letters, and not placeholder gibberish, and its system of ranking text to attempt to reward actual letter-like writing is quite complex. It looks for punctuation that looks generally appropriate, capital letters after sentence-ending punctuation, triples of characters that commonly appear in English, and sequences of characters followed by spaces that approximate the word lengths of English. Of special interest: these are elements that have to be tweaked by language, and so they pose a special challenge to localization.

Hunter R., popular Animal Crossing Youtuber, released a video that explains exactly how GC Animal Crossing scores letters written to villagers. As it turns out, the text that scores the very best looks a lot like that in the preamble to this post, up above. Go figure! Here is his description (10 minutes):

How Villagers “Read” Your Letters In Animal Crossing (Youtube, 10m)

EDIT: My mistake! Originally the villager-friendly message near the beginning of this post was missing a trailing period, which would cost it some points when brought under the exacting animal eye. It has been corrected.