Year: 2025

Sundry Sunday: Recent Wigglewood

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

Presenting Wigglewood here is kind of a cheat, I suppose. It has the aesthetic of an old VGA MS-DOS game, with voice acting supplied on CD-ROM, but it’s really more of an animated fantasy cartoon. Its DOSness is more of a stylistic choice than something that really connects it with the world of interactive eclectic electronic entertainment (with the slightly fitting acronym IEEE).

But they’re fun anyway, and if I’m breaking the rules I was the one who set them to begin with. Here is The Quest, which finally advances whatever flimsy plot this series could be said to have. (2 minutes)

So the villain the barbarian and wizard are chasing is Wormdahl after all. Funny, although he hangs out with a succubus he doesn’t really seem that evil, even, as this video shows us, he has a vampire friend. He probably should find better friends. (also 2 minutes)

When these two groups finally meet up they’ll probably get into a slap fight, or maybe stub each others toes. I can’t wait.

TToOVG: Mario’s Death Animation

TToOVG is the initialism I’m trying out for Drew Mackey’s blog Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games, and they have an excellent post up about Mario’s death animation, in fact the death animation of lots of platformer characters, where the fall off the screen.

They turn to face the player, as if acknowledging for the first time that there’s a space alongside the strictly 2D in-profile world through which he traveled before the Nintendo 64 existed, and leaps out like an ant escaping an ant farm. Like this:

Image from linked blog (there, however, it’s animated)

Mario isn’t the only character to die this way. Other faller-deathers include Milon, the Doki Doki Panickers, Wonder Boy, Master Higgins, the Mice Mickey and Minnie, Little Nemo, Kid Dracula, Kirby, Sonic the Hedgehog, and even Scrooge McDuck, who really should be able to afford a more unique animation.

Think about how odd it is that so many games use this leaping out of the screen idea, and that we rarely question it. Then go read the post, where they interrogate the idea even further.

Nintendo eShop Deals (11/6/2025)

I am a sucker for a bargain. If something is 90% off I’ll often buy it if I have little interest in ever playing it (that’s how I ended up with the Borderlands games, don’t tell anyone). And if you keep your eyes open, you can build quite a game library that way.

I made a list of everything on my Nintendo Switch account: <b><u><i>two hundred and seventy-one items</i></u></b></ironicfakehtmltag>. Some day I’ll give you the list, but not today. But I figured it’d be useful to people if I reported on some notable deals happening on the eShop from time to time. Nintendo doesn’t pay me to do this, and any links you use earn me nothing, it isn’t advertising. And only items that catch my eye, and survive the crushing wave of ennui these tasks produce, make it into this list.

Note 1: I round off most prices. I count every keypress dearly, and typing “.99” over and over again pours caustic soda on my remaining nerve endings.

Note 2: I use em-dashes in this. That is not proof I am some idiotic LLM, you adjective[entire] derisive noun[breadbin].

Note 3: A foundational requirement for being included in this list is it must be at least half off.

Note 4: No screenshots or covers this time. I’ve just been up all night tracking down Japanese words in the Super Famicom version of Shiren the Wanderer, my neurons are floating in a thick soup right now.

Ahem:

General

The Wonderful 101 Remastered ($18, 55% off) — One of the most beloved games for the Wii-U, and contains a superhero character called Wonder Toilet, I say approvingly.

Dokapon: Sword of Fury ($12.50, 50%) — new entry in the cult JRPG-styled board-and-party game series.

SteamWorld Heist II & Build Bundle ($18, 60% off) and SteamWorld Build & Dig Bundle ($14, 60% off)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed ($16, 60% off)

Save Me Mr Tako: Definitive Edition ($3, 80% off): A rerelease of another Switch game that, I hear, was sabotaged by its original publisher. A challenging-yet-cartoony pixel art platformer with Game Boy graphics about an octopus hero, with a more involved story than you might expect. It’s three bucks, what have you got to lose?

Capcom

Resident Evil 4 ($10, 50% off) — The entry on the site spells “Resident Evil” all in lowercase for some stupid marketing reason. It’s widely acknowledge that this port of a Gamecube title is a high-point in the series, and contains zero percent zombies by weight. A lot of Resident Evil games seem to be on sale right now in fact, along with the Monster Hunter series, but I’ll leave those for you to seek out if you want them.

Street Fighter 6 (Switch 2 version, $20, 50% off) — After a dalliance with SoulCalibur back on the Dreamcast, and a ridiculous amount of time spent training amiibo fighters in Smash Ultimate, I’ve largely stayed away from fighting games. Still, it’s nice to see a classic series survive.

Devil May Cry, Devil May Cry 2, Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition (all individually $10, 50% off) — I never got into these, finding them a bit too preposterous, but I understand a lot of people like them, and hey, they’re here.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy ($10, 66% off) & Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy ($25, 50% off) — Why is Apollo Justice more expensive than Nick’s games? I don’t know, but it’s a good reason to get it now before its price shoots back up.

Atari

AKKA ARRH ($6, 70% off): To think AKKA ARRH finally saw commercial release decades after the old Atari passed on producing its prototype, and this version was developed by Jeff Minter himself. But how do you pronounce it? Like a pirate? ARRRRRH.

In fact, a lot of Atari games are on discount right now, including multiple titles in its Recharged series of updated arcade remakes. A few others: Head Over Heels ($2, 80% off), Asteroids Recharged ($3, 80% off), Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration ($18, 55% off), Atari Flashback Classics ($12, 70% off), Atari Mania ($6.24, 75% off) and Centipede Recharged ($3, 70% off), among many others.

SquareEnix

A lot of SquareEnix games are on sale at the moment. Collection of Mana ($16, 60% off) — Three games, Final Fantasy Legend (Game Boy), the beloved Secret of Mana (SNES) and the heretofore unreleased-in-English Seiken Densetsu III, now christened Trials of Mana. Sadly Trials, unlike Secret, doesn’t support three human players, not even in its original version, but it does offer a lot of replay value with multiple scenarios to complete.

A while bunch of Final Fantasy games are currently on sale, too many to link them all. VII is $6.39 (60% off); IX is $8.39 (also 60% off). On the Enix side of the building, Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age ($20, 50% off) is interesting. There’s also four Kingdom Hearts games with typically silly names, like HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMIX ($16, 60% off), but be careful, many of them are cloud versions that won’t work without an internet connection. There’s also Octopath Traveler and its sequel (both $24, 60% off) and Romancing SaGa 2 ($7.50, 70% off), among others.


Jeremy Parish on Castlevania Rondo of Blood & Ghouls ‘n Ghosts

Isn’t it the way? I made a Halloween post on Castlevania games, including the various videos and pages friend-of-the-blog Jeremy Parish has done on that beloved series, but wouldn’t you know it? That very day, after my post here went live, he released a new video on one of the most beloved Castlevania games, Rondo of Blood.

It might be a bit late for Halloween posts, but isn’t Halloween something we hold in our hearts year long? If we don’t, we should. Here’s that video, which is pretty long by his standards at 25 minutes:

And just yesterday he published another new video about an appropriately spooky game, Ghouls ‘n Ghosts for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, which as it turns out was ported by Yuji Naka himself! (19 minutes)

Last Moments for Kickstarter for Dancing With Ghosts

Set Side B usually updates at 10 AM Eastern time every day, but this post needs to go out right now, since it only has 18 hours to go….

Dancing With Ghosts is the next production by Greg Johnson and Humanature Studios, producers of site favorite ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove, and Doki Doki Universe. Johnson is also the designer of the classic DOS and Genesis game Starflight, and also co-designed Star Control II, a.k.a. The Ur-Quan Masters!

But Dancing With Ghosts (Kickstarter, free demo) is a different thing from all of those. It’s the story of a troubled young girl who can see ghosts, and the departed girl who she befriends. I’ve played through a lot of the demo, and I think it’s wonderful. It’s also inspired by the look of Studio Ghibli’s movies.

There’s less than a full day left, so please have a look and give some thought to whether you can help chip in. It’s already made its goal, and then some, but every bit will help out the production. Thanks for listening!

The “Officialist” SkiFree Homepage

SkiFree was part of one of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack releases for Windows 3.1, part of their limited gaming output before the went in on Xbox. Who knows, at the rate they’re going, maybe they won’t be doing Xbox much longer.

It’s a simple game where you guide a skier down through a scrolling course, avoiding obstacles, and trying to get a good time. After finishing the course and registering a time you could keep skiing, just for the fun of it, although eventually a yeti will chase your skier down and swallow them whole. Closing times on this slope are strictly enforced.

Its creator Chris Pirih maintains a homepage for SkiFree, along with history (it’s a port of a VAX terminal game he had written in Fortran), downloads (including one of an updated, 32-bit vesion), and other info. It’s the kind of page I’m surprised to see is still up, and hope remains up for decades to come.

Link Roundup 3/25/2025

Hello! John “rodneylives” Harris here. Let me quickly explain this before I get into it.

I have an overabundance of games links to present through Set Side B. My usual style of doing this is to pick one of them, then maybe write a bit of text introducing it, maybe a bit of a preview, a media embed of it’s a video somewhere (nearly always Youtube), and that’s a complete post. One a day, for approaching four years now. (SSB launched on April 5th, 2022.)

But working this way, I’ve developed quite a backlog! Not all of them are really worthy of a whole post, maybe, or I don’t have a full post’s worth of context to coax out of it.

So in an effort to clean up my link collections, I think I’m going to make regular posts, maybe one a week, that’s just several things that might be interesting. I post them, my link folder get slightly shorter, each individual person might be interested in one or two items in it each, then we move on to more of the usual kind of thing the rest of the week.

Got all that? Here we go:

1. Dave’s Garage interviewed Commodore 64 chip designer Albert Charpentier three years ago (it’s about an 1 hour):

2. On Mastodon, there’s an account, @everybodyvotes@social,miyaku.media, that posts every poll published on the Wii’s “Everybody Votes” channel, back in the days when Nintendo would do fun, free things just for the sake of doing them. You can even vote on them again, using Mastodon’s polling feature.

3. On Balatro creator LocalThunk’s blog, they’ve published a timeline of its history, from original concept to launch, whereupon LocalThunk earned more money than he had ever had before in their entire life.

4. Back on Youtube, speedrunner Kosmic expresses disbelief on the current state of Super Mario Bros. speedrunning (24 minutes), which is more active than you’d think it’d be for a game that’s so old, and has had so much attention poured onto it.