Set Side B

Sundry Sunday: More Misted Pigmeat

2026-08-16T13:58:15Z

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

Three more entries from the long-lived Steamed Hams Simpsons meme that has charmed hearts and rotted brains for many years now.

#1: Chalmers is a Robot Running Classic Mac OS (3 minutes), by Dress Up Geek Out. The shortest of the three.

#2: The Graphic Adventure Game (7 minutes). It’s an actual game by neodement, in the classic Lucasarts SCUMM style, on GameJolt, which posting channel MS-DOS Friends credited but didn’t link to.

#3: As a Mobile Game Ad (30 seconds). By Tyrone Deise, it makes me twitch just watching it, so I’m glad it’s so short. I think you will be too.

#4: A last-minute addition, Recreated in Japan-Only N64DD Talent Maker (8 minutes). Prepare for an unforgettable bludgeon! And an unexpected few seconds of Totaka’s Song!

Extra: Another Steamed Hams Game, by MonsterJail on itch.io. No video that I could find for this one.

@Play: Musing on Classic Roguelikes, Directions to Explore

2026-08-15T06:53:46Z

‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.

I’ve been thinking about classic roguelikes, by which I mean old games from the 80s and 90s. What usually calls themselves roguelikes these days is a debased currency. Some of these games are very good (Spelunky! Balatro!), but they aren’t things that would have been recognized as roguelikes in the age of the coinage of that term, which was probably the naming of the Usenet group rec.games.roguelike. This has resulted in such things as Punished Backlogs’s “Objectively Correct” Ratings of the best roguelikes having, as a requirement, being “stage-based” and to have “great music.” Whether it’s nice to have or not, a true jedi craves not these things.

Every so often I start musing over what the “main” roguelikes, the ones that are most fitting to bear the banner of the genre, should be. When I was writing @Play for GameSetWatch, the games I settled on were Rogue (1980), Moria (1983), Hack (1982), Angband (1990) and NetHack (1987). Soon after I added Dungeon Crawl (1997), Larn (1986), Omega (1988), ADOM (1994) and Brogue (2009). Nowadays I’d add Alphaman (1995), the adventurer mode of Dwarf Fortress (2004) and Caves of Qud (2010). (If you want to see some more recent things I’ve written on roguelikes here, look into the @Play tag.)

There are some more games that deserve inclusion probably. There are some “lost roguelikes,” lost because they were written for ancient Unixes (Unices?) and were hard to preserve or their implementation relied on those old OSes. There have been attempts at preserving these games, like the Roguelike Restoration Project (GitHub), although its last update is from 2011. UltraRogue, infamously, saved games by doing a memory dump of the process space, and loading it back off of disk when time to resume the game. Some other games it lists are Advanced Rogue, XRogue and Super-Rogue.

While clunky, buggy and sometimes glitchy, there is still a strong appeal for these old games, from a time when roguelikes were a hyper-obscure niche mostly of interest to current and former computer science students. In the early days of the web, the worthy Boudewyn Waiyers maintained the first major Roguelike Home Page on the internet (Wayback Machine links: first archived version, last version there, final home).

A few other games that it mentions are:

Crossfire (which is multiplayer)
Morgul, a variant of Moria
IMoria, another variant, the only copy I could find is on the voluminous ArchiveRL on the Internet Archive
PMoria, also in ArchiveRL and possibly nowhere else
Ragnarok, a DOS game (download from Wayback Machine but it’s available from abandonware sites)
Rogue’s Quest (1996, seems to be preserved on the Internet Archive)
Saladir (see ArchiveRL)
and URW, or “UnReal World,” which has an interesting story behind it. Unlike the other games in this list, it’s still in active development, and while it’s much changed its focus it still seems to be a roguelike. I think this should be a forthcoming @Play subject

Not mentioned on the dusty archives of the Roguelike Home Page is Elona, a roguelike from Japan. I’ve bounced hard off of this in the past (its got some objectionable content), but hell, I’ve survived the likes of Omega Labyrinth Life. There’s also Castle of the Winds, an early Windows roguelike which is slated to be republished on Steam soon.

I must say, ArchiveRL on the Internet Archive is amazing, a 25-gigabyte collection of hundreds of roguelikes, many of them defunct and otherwise forgotten. If you’re looking for something ancient, esoteric and probably terminal-based, you’ll find lots of things in its murky depths.

I’ve played a fair bit of Caves of Qud recently and I have quite a few notes on it. I think my next subjects should be that, UnReal World and Elona. Are there any suggestions for directions to explore? I mean besides down, deeper into the earth, of course.

Commodore History on How C64 BASIC Works

2026-08-14T06:55:48Z

The title refers to an ongoing series with two videos so far. Part 1 (28 minutes) is about how the tokenizer works and how programs are stored in memory, and Part 2 (19 minutes) is on what the BASIC interpreter does to execute the program as it’s running. These are pretty detailed and a bit technical, but interesting of these kinds of shapes can fit into your brain. More below.

Part 1: Before a program is run

Part 2: How a program is run

Some extra links from the videos, a disassembly of the C64 BASIC ROM from pagetable.com, and the open-sourced by Microsoft code of their generalized BASIC interpreter. It should be noted that the original version of Microsoft BASIC were written for the Altair 8800 kit computer by Bill Gates and Paul Allen themselves.

I’ll distill the basics of the videos for you. Commodore BASIC is a dialect of Microsoft BASIC. It puts the loaded program at the bottom of memory, starting at 2049, or $0801 in hex. (The custom on the C64 is to denote hex numbers with a dollar sign.) When lines are written, the C64’s screen editor start from the beginning looking for a line number, and if it’s found tries to tokenize the rest of the line. Unrecognized keywords are still stored as PETSCII characters (which will cause a syntax error when run).

Commands are matched against a list of keywords stored in ROM. All the keywords are stored as “tokens,” single bytes, to conserve program space and to help with execution speed. At runtime, the tokens are detected by their high bit being set, then run through a lookup table. It pushes the high and low bytes of the command’s address in memory then does an RTS, which then jumps to the routine by acting like it’s returning from a JSR. Notably, the short routine that gets the next byte of BASIC text to act upon, CHRGET, is actually copied into zero page RAM to run, to take advantage of faster zero page versions of some instructions, but also because it’s self-modifying.

Bluesky User Lists Practically Every IP, To Track Which Are On Nintendo Music

2026-08-13T01:56:31Z

I could link the things that everyone already knows about, that people in that wretched hive they call Reddit have already linked five times, that have blown up on social media, that there’s already a Youtuber or two making snide comments about. I mean, I’ve linked stuff like that before, pretty often really. They aren’t hard to find.

But I’d much rather link something interesting that’s basically unknown. Help spread the word about it! The only problem there is, how do you find that stuff in the first place? It’s a bit of a chicken-or-David-Egger. I think that’s what you’d call it, sure.

So when I saw someone I follow on Bluesky wrote out nearly every Nintendo video game property, including those that appeared on niche platforms like Virtual Boy and Satellaview, primarily so they could boldface the ones that have arrived on Nintendo Music, I had to run directly here to link to it.

The beginning of a long list

I don’t vouch for its total accuracy, but it still could be a useful resource. In fact I know there are some things that are missing, like their early arcade games Sheriff or Radar Scope, just for starters. But if the idea is to present things that realistically could present soundtracks included in Nintendo Music, it’s a pretty good list.

More from Skawo: Demonstrating a NES’s Failing PPU

2026-08-12T06:26:43Z

We linked to a Skawo video yesterday, the one about flash card rumble motors activating when playing Link’s Awakening DX. Well I happened to have this one open, so here’s another: the last gasps of a failing PPU chip, shown off in several games. (5½ minutes)

It starts out seeming to work okay, but it isn’t long before it becomes obvious that something very wrong is happening. If you ever wondered what a failing graphics chip looks like, well, this will show you one example of it happening. Chips can fail in any number of ways, and there’s no guarantee that another PPU in the process of expiring will expire in the same way, but this is the kind of thing that can happen.

Skawo on Link’s Awakening DX’s Rumble Support

2026-08-11T06:19:16Z

The Game Boy doesn’t have a Rumble Pak. Of course it doesn’t; where would you slot it? But a few games were released for the Game Boy Color (and Game Boy Advance too) that have built-in rumble motors. Because of this, it’s impossible, with unmodified physical hardware, to separate the Rumble from the Pak. If the game supports rumble, it has the motor included; if it doesn’t support rumble, it won’t have the motor. Pretty simple.

Except. Some people discovered, if you put Link’s Awakening DX onto some flash carts with a rumble motor included, there is a point during the game where the rumble will activate. Skawo on Youtube looked at the game’s code and sought an answer as to why. (10 minutes)

The tl;dw: GBC rumble motors are controlled via a MBC5 chip, a chip not dissimilar to the now-famous MMC line of chips on the NES/Famicom. Writes to ROM space are caught by the chip and used to activate functions. The main purpose for these chips is to switch between memory banks, but one bit in the written byte activates or deactivates the motor. Link’s Awakening DX uses a MBC5 and a miscoded write that activates any included motor. The MBC5 usually ignores these writes because it checks the cartridge header to see if it includes rumble support, a check that fails for this game, but GBA flash carts run will use an emulator to run GBC games, and if the emulator is inaccurate it might trigger rumble motor regardless of any header.

So why is the value written anyway? I’ll leave that for the video to explain, but it has to do with the additional save information added for the Color Dungeon, and an issue in the game when it saves puzzle completion data for areas that aren’t in dungeons.

Increasing the Framerate of SNES Star Fox

2026-08-10T19:06:56Z

It’s been possible for quite a while to increase the framerate of SNES Star Fox. Even during the SNES’ hardware release period, an updated version of the SuperFX chip that made it’s then-amazing 3D visuals possible was used that doubled its performance, and was used in other games like Yoshi’s Island. And now overclocking and emulation can increase SuperFX performance by much more.

But there’s a problem with speeding up Star Fox this way. The game wasn’t designed that the frame rate can be separated from the gameplay or animations. If you speed up the chip, you’ll speed up everything else in the game too, rapidly making it unplayable.

Some progress has been made recently towards improving the framerate without making it a twitchy stuttery mess. Tyler Loch made a video of his efforts (3½ minutes), and to people used playing Star Fox’s at its original 15fps it’s a wonder to behold:

Because the code has to be adjusted in many different places, there are parts of the game that are obviously incorrect. Falling pillars, you’ll notice, tilt over much faster, bosses move and fire much more rapidly and are more dangerous as a result, and the engine of the player’s Arwing spaceship flashes at a rate that some people may not appreciate. And the video shows off only the first level, because the full game isn’t finishable yet. But much progress has been made! Let us hope Tyler’s momentum holds up through the rest of the project.

Sundry Sunday: Wapeach Wastuff

2026-08-09T07:50:06Z

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

Wario and Waluigi should need no introduction. (Wario shouldn’t anyway; Waluigi has not gotten most attention since the early 2000s.) After establishing them as the Nintendo-flavored version of “Bizarro,” we are informed by Michael McWhertor of Polygon that Camelot, the originator of Waluigi, had brainstormed up a wa-version of Peach too, which was rejected by Nintendo because they hate awesomeness.

Concept art of Wapeach, from Camelot originally, image from the Polygon article linked above.

It’s been two years since that article came out, and soon after fan material regarding this quasi-evil apparition began to appear. On DeviantArt (that place), user Niko–Neko has made to date 95 images of the princeless-waif, some just artwork, some comics, often involving her partners-in-wa, Wario and Waluigi. (Note: some images slightly NSFW, nothing explicit, but there’s at least one image where she’s wearing her cape and little else.)

One of Niko–Neko’s Wapeach panels, original here.

I’ll leave you to explore Niko–Neko’s renditions of her hapless adventures on your own, as they’re not the actual point of this post, not directly at least. Instead, I invite you to partake in gawking at GabaLeth’s playlist of eight of those comics with voice-acting. (Total length about 4½ minutes)

I now leave you to dream about lovably incompetent dark princesses and the things they might do to you if they got you in their clutches. “Yow, it hurts so good! How may I serve you, oh Mistress of Darkness….”

Um… forget you read that.

Kitfox Games’ Official Dwarf Fortress Beginners Guide

2026-08-08T07:51:09Z

Dwarf Fortress has always been a game about failure. It’s right there in its motto, “Losing is fun!” It’s a game where you just muddle through, doing what you can, learning as you go, and your games slowly, on the average, get longer and longer the more you play. It’s not that there aren’t guides and tutorials already out there, but the kind of game it is, it halfway feels like they rob something of the player. While I can understand not wanting to start from zero, the sooner the player learns that failure is the end mode of fortresses, the more they’ll understand that the intended way to play is to be audacious.

But which kinds of failure are the most fun? After spending several minutes setting up your expedition getting eaten by wild animals immediately off the wagon is a harsh start to play, especially if it happens repeatedly. Fortress destruction via dragon is scary, but it’s also hilarious; everyone dying on the surface before even digging your first warren is less auspicious.

Dwarf Fortess recently celebrated its 20th birthday, and in celebration Kitfox Games, its Steam publisher, has released a new official beginners video, made by BlindiRL. (34 minutes) It is a good way to move your fortress endings more towards the entertaining end of the scale.

And I’d like to point out, at the end of the video, we’re told that ending a fortress doesn’t quite mean it has to be a failure. If you decide to “finish” a fortress, but then start a new fortress in the same world and of the same faction, then it’s possible for your old dwarfs to decide to emigrate to it. This is something I’ve never tried myself, but it’s a good reason to keep playing in the same world, as you continue to write the saga of your game.

More From The Bard’s Tale Diaries

2026-08-07T14:28:10Z

The C64 Appreciation Society continues their playthrough of the first Bard’s Tale. (23 minutes) If you want to start from the beginning, they’re collected in this playlist. (7 items)

I’ve already introduced The Bard’s Tale in prior posts, so in brief: The original Bard’s Tale trilogy were all Wizardry-style dungeon exploration RPGs in the classic style, called by some “blobbers.” Indeed they did a lot to define that style. A few things that Wizardry did weren’t adopted by later blobbers, especially its particular form of permadeath, its simulation of “Out” parties and retrieving lost characters from the dungeon, and its willingness to obliterate your entire group instantly and permanently if you teleported into solid stone.

The Bard’s Tale, on the other hand, looks exactly what the standard picture of a classic blobber looks like today. So long as you have the cash to revive a character there is no real penalty for dying, there is no absolutely solid stone to teleport into, and there’s no concept of “Out” parties, for if your party wipes their corpses get mysteriously teleported back to the Adventurer’s Guild, where if there’s enough gold in their cold pockets you, I guess in the capacity of being a caring guardian spirit, can tell the priests to bring them back to life.

But while not as eager to annihilate members of your group, neither is The Bard’s Tale an easy game. Compensating for the lack of permadeath, dungeons tend to be much more diabolical in design, with magical darkness, teleporters, spinners and antimagic zones in evidence. Dungeon levels are bigger than Wizardry’s, there are more of them, and most significantly to a new player, “Town,” here named Skara Brae, isn’t a simple menu of options but an entire level of its own to explore! And at the start of the game, you don’t know where anything except the Adventurer’s Guild is! You have to do significant mapping before you can buy equipment, recharge your spell points, or even raise your experience level.

In this 7th installment of the video series, the player finds and begins to explore the third of the game’s dungeons, finds some interesting items, suffers from disk corruption and loses some progress, earns it back, and fights a jabberwock.

Tim Sexton Explains How To Improve at Multiball

2026-08-06T04:50:55Z

Pinball is tricky enough on its own, but then you “lock” multiple balls in some location, the game’s sound system starts to go nuts, and uh-oh, now all those balls are on the table at once!

Multiball is chaotic, and glorious for it, and it is not always possible to play one well. But you can learn to improve your chances at it, with practice and a decent strategy. For the latter, Tim Sexton explains how to go about it in an 18 minute video.

If multiball were easier, or less chaotic, it wouldn’t be as much fun! And even once you learn some decent tactics to lessen its complexity, like by learning to trap all but one ball on a single flipper and making shots with the remaining ball on the other one, it can still be fun sometimes to just try to make shots. Sometimes that works for me! But learning to play pinball consistently well means not taking on any unnecessary risk, and that’s certainly risky.

Tim’s video not only covers basic multiball tips, but it also examines some specific games, both new and old, and at the end presents examples of multiball play in progress. If you’re interested in improving at pinball, it’s worth a look!

Let’s Try to Make More Loadstar!

2026-08-05T05:34:50Z

First, to recap

The newsstand cover of Loadstar #1.

Way back in 1984, having had success with their first product Softdisk, the nascent Softdisk Publishing released the first issue of Loadstar, a “magazine-on-disk” for Commodore 64 microcomputers.

Softdisk is mostly known these days as being the former workplace of several people who would go on to found Id Software, creators of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. Softdisk published, as the Id guys’ last work for the company, Catacomb 3D using the Wolf3D engine, and a Commander Keen episode.

Softdisk released other products too, but Loadstar eventually proved to be something special. Early on they assumed that their PC and Mac products would be their legacy, but then Microsoft and then the internet came along and it suddenly became much harder to make a go of it with a monthly paid software collection. Softdisk became an ISP; they got bought out by a bigger ISP; nowadays they don’t exist really, except as a bag of rights owned in pieces by Piko Interactive and/or Catacomb Games, who bought their Id-related assets.

The cover of Loadstar #72, the last issue sold on newsstands.

But some time before then Loadstar and its relevant assets had left the company. Defying expectations and buoyed by the large userbase of the Commodore 64 (quick googling suggests they sold 70 million units), Loadstar was still doing fairly well for itself. It was no longer sustaining the whole company like it once had, but it was too large an audience to ignore. So Softdisk spun Loadstar off to J&F Publishing, under the captaincy of its longest-serving Managing Editor Fender Tucker, and they kept the lights on a while longer.

When Fender retired from Loadstar at the dawning of the year 2000, he passed managing editorship over to Dave Moorman, who kept it going for 49 more issues. It was starting to become hard to find new things to keep Loadstar going at this point. While Dave had some regulars sending in new things, a large back catalog to mine for material, and skill enough to write some software for Loadstar himself, its release rate slowly dropped from monthly to, in 2007, two issues in that year. Then a tornado his his house and destroyed the tools he used to make Loadstar. One more issue made it out in the following year, that had been in production and finished by Ricky Derocher in 2008. And that is where Loadstar’s story ended.

Next, what I’ve been doing

A year or so ago, with the permission of Fender who still owns Loadstar and J&F Publishing, I threw together something called Loadstar Compleat. A prior product also called that had been sold by Fender for some time, a CD-ROM with the 199 issues from before and during his run, along with the 42 issues of another magazine, Loadstar 128, and various other products and odds and ends.

I took the issues from there, replaced some bad copies with better ones provided by Ricky Derocher, added in the 51 later issues from Dave Moorman’s editorship, and added a kind of shell program to make browsing and searching through them all easier. I packaged this all together and threw it up on itch.io as Loadstar Compleat for $15. Since then I’ve now also given three talks on Loadstar and its history, in person at VCFMW 2025, virtually for TPUG, and three days ago also in person at VCFSE 2026. (There should be video of that soon, I’ll link to it here when it enters my notice.)

Now, possibly, the future

Loading screen for early Loadstar issues

Dave has always said he wanted Loadstar to last to its 256th issue, to make it an even binary number (2⁸, or 100000000). Even though Loadstar only had about 100 subscribers left by that point he was still committed to doing it, and only the fury of nature prevented him from making it.

I mentioned this at VCFSE, musing that perhaps I could finish the task he had started, making a final six issues of the venerable disk magazine, and a couple of people there thought that it might be a good idea. And I think I have enough knowledge now of Loadstar’s underpinnings that I might be able to accomplish this. With all the tools available for producing software for retro platforms now (I have an upcoming article on those in the works), it is arguably easier to make C64 software than it’s ever been, and now that there’s the Ultimate64 and Maxi65, the size of the C64 platform is growing once again.

So, let’s start making plans for how this could happen. In addition to doing whatever needs to be done to understand Loadstar’s file formats to get its Presenter system to fulfill our purposes, I figure we need:

Contributors, and contributions. Commodore 64 software, hi-res artwork (at least one image for each issue for the loading image), SID music (at least one piece per issue for the Presenter background music), articles and anything else we’d need to keep up Loadstar’s standards according to the systems they used in their late period, which used a polished Presenter menu program written in machine code, a text reader to display documentation and articles, and miscellaneous other niceties.
Means to compensate them. We aren’t sure if this can support itself financially yet. For right now, we need to keep our options open. If we get a lot of interest it’s not out of the question that this could mean a bit of actual money, but for now free issues are what we’re considering.
A means to produce physical disks. These issues would be sold digitally (as .d64 and .d81 disk images for emulators), but it feels like to be a real disk magazine, there must be actual Commodore-formatted 5 1/4″ and/or 3 1/2″ disks to sell too. You can still get 5 1/4″ disks. Amazon sells them ten for $25.

Middle-period loading screen. (Later issues used custom loading screens for each issue.)

We’re currently discussing ways to accomplish these things. I’ve started a thread at loadstarce.com to discuss this project. We are fortunate that many of the Loadstar editors are still around, including Fender Tucker, his associate editor Jeff Jones, and Dave Moorman, as well as people who care about Loadstar’s memory like Ricky Derocher.

There are two things we need right now. The first is indication of interest. Would you be interested in buying something like this? How about spreading the word about our little venture?

The other thing we need is “content”: software, writing, art and music, in formats appropriate for the Commodore 64. C64 art must be hi-res VIC-II format. Music can’t just be any old SID tune but in the format its Presenter used (more information on that as I determine it). Software doesn’t have to be machine code, for Loadstar published many BASIC programs, and multiple BASIC extensions too, including one, Dot.BASIC Plus, that still has a website and working downloads!

Are you any of you interested in, and capable of, providing these things? I don’t know how much we can pay you yet. For my part I will make the rounds online and approach people who might be interested in helping revive Loadstar, if just for a little while.

And who knows, if this proves popular enough, maybe we could go past issue 256? Shooting for 512 seems like a ludicrous dream, certainly not something I could do in my remaining lifetime, but who knows for sure? Let’s dare to dream.

If you want to be involved in the continuation of the frankly improbable legacy of Loadstar, you can reach me:

on Mastodon, at either @setsideb@mstdn.games or @rodneylives@mefi.social.
on Bluesky, at @rodneylives.bsky.social.
via email, at johnwh (at) gmail.com.
on Metafilter, via MeMail to JHarris.

Some Notes on Set Side B’s Linking Policy

2026-08-04T13:42:31Z

Today it’s a big talky thinky post, that doesn’t have much to do, directly, with video games. Sorry for that, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while and wanted to get off my chest. If you leave things like this spinning around your head for too long they begin to fester, and I’d also like to give my reasons for having grudges against the likes of Fandom (the wiki company, with a capital-F).

Until recently I didn’t have a specific list of things I absolutely won’t give the privilege of a link from these halls. It was more an ad hoc judgement: “Oh, this thing is on Reddit. Do I really want to point people there?” It’s not that I have such a high opinion of ourselves, but that there are some internet entities that I don’t want to further in any way, whether it’s through added traffic or search engine rank. We may not have much influence on the web ourselves, but what we do have we should use wisely.

So now, in order to be consistent, I’ve started making a list, of places or things I don’t want to aid nor abet. Perhaps I won’t be able to avoid linking to them ever, depending on how available the content is from other sources, but we do try to veer away from these things. Maybe it’ll make you think about your own linking practices.

Remember, the thing that makes the internet great, always has and always will be, isn’t companies, it isn’t “AIs,” it’s the people on it, as commenters and linkers, as readers and as creators.

Generative AI

That leads us to probably the biggest of these things on the list: generative AI. I hate it.

I hate it, and I hate that so many people have uncritically adopted the moneyfolk’s naming it as if it were actual AI, the expert system type, decision-making neural networks and so forth. It has confused people on the difference between slop machines like ChatGPT and Claude, which work by constructing the semblance of actual work which may or may not be useful or even correct, and actual AI that does things like discovering new proteins. That kind of AI is doing real and important work; the text constructors that you ask to do homework for you, finish your presentation or write an app are not.

It’s true, a couple of years ago I made a couple of posts using “AI.” (Always use the scare quotes if it isn’t clear you’re talking about the bad kind!) One was a link to someone’s generated image of Kirby, which was funny for how uncanny it was; the other was a mocking sequence where I asked it as many ridiculous questions I could think of, including asking it repeatedly if Biden was a vampire. (The most interesting thing it said was the word moose repeated many times.) There may have been a third time way back then, for I kicked its tires as many others did in the early days of Teh Hype. I won’t be doing that ever again, even for the purpose of mocking it. It’d be better for all of us if it just died.

Twitter

Another thing, or rather place, that I won’t link to is Twitter, a.k.a. “X.”

What a stupid name. What a stupid thing. Its overlord, an incredibly insecure man whose loathsomeness is only exceeded by the one in the White House at this moment, has at least given us an acid test of human quality. Are you still on Twitter even now, in 2026? Is reaching whatever audience remains there worth legitimizing, enriching, this awful human being and everything he stands for? Why are you there? Are you waiting for some other shoe to drop? Haven’t enough fallen already? Your presence conspires to give all those other people who haven’t left yet their own reasons to remain. Stop doing that!

You might be concerned about abandoning others, an established following, friends, conversation partners. Some of those are at least slightly understandable. But come on, there’s no lack of other ways to communicate now! Here is a partial list: email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Signal, Discord, Whatsapp, Instagram, Medium, Blogger, TikTok, Youtube, text messages, forums, IRC (it still exists), and others.

What is more though, I would say you need to think about what digital life means. Without exception, every long-lived, corporate-based popular internet service has betrayed its users in some fundamental way. Every single one! There are good companies out there, you may argue, and it may even be true, but it isn’t true of any big one, and the big ones are the ones everyone knows, and do the most damage, because chasing money and size to the exclusion of all else paints a certain route for your organization that naturally leads to enshittification.

So what other choices are there?

The modestly-sized companies, who by definition are not trying to squeeze out every cent from users. They’re in a bit of a dilemma: people like them because they haven’t enshittified themselves yet, but the more popular they become the more tempting the drive to ruin their experience will be. Sooner or later they’ll fall: either they’ll just go out of business, the founders will betray their principles, they’ll get bought out or the people running it will just die.
Free or community-run services. These are pretty good for the most part, but you may not be able to rely on them forever either. They have less incentive to ruin themselves for cash money dollars, but nothing says the good folk will stay in charge forever. Even decentralized services have their drawbacks. Mastodon servers tend to emerge, enlarge then pop like bubbles in a boiling pot. My personal Mastodon account has moved three times. On that note….
Being a digital nomad. Never staying in one place for too long. Being ready to pull up stakes and transplant yourself to a new site at the first scent of shit. The plus: you can feel good about yourself, so long as you have the time and energy to do this. The minus: how will you ever build up a substantial audience if you keep having to move around so often.

It’s funny. None of those seem like perfect options! I don’t mean funny ha-ha; I mean it more like funny oh-no.

Fandom wikis

I’ve been making a list of alternatives to as many Fandom-based wikis as I can find, and I may share it with you some day.

Fandom got started as Wikicities (it’s old enough that, back then, having a Geocities-like name was considered an advantage), then it changed its name to Wikia, and now to Fandom. One of its founders was Jimmy Wales, yes, the guy on Wikipedia who’s always begging you to give them money.

You might not realize how far Fandom’s tentacles extend. They own Gamespot, GameFAQs, TV Guide, Metacritic, ComicVine and Fanatical!

The problems with Fandom are manyfold: they’re loaded with ads for one. For two their different wikis crosslink between themselves and give them all an artificially high Google rank, meaning one of their sites is much more likely to come up in search results than other people’s.

But probably their worst aspect is they suck much of the creative oxygen out of the web. Do you start your own website to tell the world what you know, or do you find one of their many tens of thousands* of innocent-looking Fandom sites, and contribute to that, thinking that you’re helping people out? But unlike Wikipedia, Fandom isn’t a non-profit, they’re owned by venture capital and are looking to put as many ads on your edits as they can. You’re giving of yourself, but they’re turning it into cash for their investors.

Back when they didn’t seem quite so rapacious they managed to shelter a couple of very high-profile sites under their umbrella, the Star Wars wiki Wookieepedia, and the Star Trek wiki Memory Alpha. Those two sites were probably the most prominent non-Pedia wikis on the internet, but now they’ve both been creatures of the Fandom empire for well over a decade. Imagine how much Google rank that gave them to spend.

* How many wiki sites does Fandom really have? Try this experiment. Take any even slightly famous entertainment media property you can think of, and search for it on Google. See if “fandom” is in the URL of one of the first page of results. I’d wager you’re very likely to find at least one, and that it’ll probably rank pretty highly. Fandom wikis seem to appear very readily, almost as if there’s an automatic process creating them.

A few other things that negatively affect my willingness to link to them

As I mentioned above, Reddit is another place that I won’t link to, but I’ll save my diatribe against them for another time. Many of the Fandom arguments apply to them too.
Paywalled pages are not completely off limits, but I don’t like sending visitors head-first into a paywall.
Substack also has its problems, oh yes,but it isn’t a completely hard no yet, due to the sheer number of them. Of course, there’s lots of Fandom wikis too.

Notably, Youtube is not on this list. There’s just too much content that’s only on Youtube. I’d love to wean us off of it some day, however. Something to remember, in case the opportunity comes.

Namco Museum Museum Reviewed, Updated

2026-08-03T04:52:08Z

Recently we posted a link to an excellent video that took a look at every software product (Bandai-)Namco has made that had the temerity, the utter gall to call itself “Namco Museum.”

Since then however, its creator Mythic Resonance became dissatisfied with how it turned out, so he took it down for a bit for some editing. Well, it’s back now, and at 2 hours 23 minutes it’s even more complete and in-depth as it was originally.

We’re promised new entries, updated information and corrected errors. He admits that it may still not be absolutely perfect, but of course projects as lengthy and effort-intensive as this one will probably always have something about them that could still be improved. He says it took him 35 months in all to make it, so I’m willing to grant any deficiencies it still has, if just to help Mythic Resonance preserve his mental health.

Sundry Sunday: Dr. Robotnik Is All-In on AI

2026-08-02T05:06:07Z

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

This video’s from Dorkly (3 minutes), which isn’t a source I often link from, but what I can say I’m a sucker for mockery of all this “AI” awfulness being foisted upon all us by every large tech company. Also its pretty well-written, and hey, Dr. Eggman has a terrific Bluesky account too (not related to Dorkly as far as I know, also I think I linked to it before but I’m looking for an excuse to mention it again).

VCFSE Day 1

2026-08-01T04:52:24Z

Aaah such has been the rush that apparently I didn’t make a post yesterday! And today has been so tiring that, while a lot of fun things happened today, I feel like it’ll take more time to write them up than I do right now, half an hour after midnight on Saturday.

VCFSE in Atlanta, while it has many interesting exhibits and lots to see, doesn’t have quite as much as VCFMW did last year. It makes up for this for being connected to Southern Fried Gaming Expo (SFGE), a convention devoted to all kinds of games-playing, includinng tabletop RPGs, board games, console games, computer games, arcade video games, and especially pinball. There are so many pinball machines! There’s even very new machines, like Pokemon and Sonic the Hedgehog, and a lab where you can work on building your own, or so the displays seemed to imply, but I’m not sure such a thing can even be done over a mere weekend.

Extracting the photos from my phone is more mental effort than I bring to bear at the moment, but they will be coming. In the meantime, you may be interested to know that I have the #1 score on the Addams Family Gold machine at SFGE, and Grand Champion on it is in my sights: my fourth game on it ended up with me Touring the Mansion twice. It helps a lot that it’s set up to award extra balls from score, meaning high-scoring games tend to become even more high scoring. By contrast, the Twilight Zone machine they have is set on tournament settings, so it doesn’t award any extra balls at all.

See you soon!

VCFSE 2026!

2026-07-30T04:41:04Z

Tomorrow begins is VCFSE, which stands for Vintage Computing Festival SouthEast, a three day celebration of retro computing. Not only will I be there, but I’ll have a table for Loadstar Compleat and also selling copies of Exploring Roguelike Games (I just brought two though; they’re heavy!) and ancient issues of Loadstar in their original packaging. And I’ll be presenting an encore of my VCF Midwest talk from September! Maybe the recording system won’t mess up with this one! If you’re around, please drop by.

I’ll probably be a bit overwhelmed over the weekend with VCF stuff, but I’ll try to bring you news from the show floor!

Double the Incremental Fun

2026-07-29T04:06:08Z

This is a double review of Astro Prospector and Legends of Dragaea played with a review key and press key respectively.

00:00 Intro
00:20 Astro Prospector
2:57 Legends of Dragaea

A Reimplementation of DOS King’s Bounty

2026-07-28T09:11:48Z

While it’s seen more than one revival since its original release by New World Computing (the Heroes of Might & Magic series, and the 2008 series titled King’s Bounty by Katauri Interactive), that first version is still a fine game to play even today. Players explore four continents raising armies, fighting hordes of monsters, building income and leadership, collecting artifacts and bringing a variety of colorful villains to justice.

The game simulates the passing of time, which affects a number of things. Every week (five game days) you get income from the king of the realm, but also must pay your troops and other miscellaneous expenses. There is a time limit (determined by the game’s difficulty level), preventing you from passing weeks for income. While you’ll probably fight hundreds of battles in a typical game, technically speaking you can win without fighting any: bringing villains to justice earns you pieces of a map, a depiction of one screen of the game’s vast scrolling area, and the win condition is to find that screen and search for a lost scepter on its center location. While the maps are the same every game, nearly all the locations of the wandering monsters, treasures, villains and other important elements are randomly placed each game, giving King’s Bounty tremendous replayability.

A true classic strategy wargame, King’s Bounty was widely ported, to DOS, the Mac, the Atari ST, even to the Commodore 64 (that must have been a difficult job), and there’s also a surprisingly good rendition for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive that might be the best version, and was implemented in-house by New World Computing themselves (they did a similarly great version of Might & Magic II for that system).

Dan Heskett has recreated the engine of King’s Bounty and put the code on Github. You’ll need the files of the original DOS disks to use his code, but if you don’t care to go that route you can instead play it in your web browser. The keys are the same as the DOS version; use this PDF of the manual to learn how to play. The Github Readme has a wealth of information, not just on how to build the recreation but of the internals of King’s Bounty. It even includes two autoplayers, one that simulates a game as a human would play it, the other a game played with perfect knowledge of the game world.

Note: I have noticed a couple of bugs in this project. I am giving this project the benefit of the doubt that it was not generated by an AI system. If I discover otherwise, I will mention that fact here.

Here’s a few more screenshots:

The Bad Game Hall of Fame Covers Sonic Jam: Game.com Version

2026-07-27T06:09:03Z

The world is full of traps for the unwary. There’s a whole genre of movie, mockbusters, that exists purely to try to catch people who are only vaguely familiar with some media property, and they make enough money that by cutting their costs extremely thin they can be profitable. Mobile app stores are full of games that try to trick people in a similar way, making themselves look as closely to some popular game as they can get without becoming legally actionable.

Let us all spare a thought for the poor kids who opened up a bright package on Christmas Day to find this. (Image from Wikipedia)

A similar kind of trap was the Game.com, Tiger Electronics’ bid to compete with the Game Boy. It made a kind of sense, sure. Nintendo got into portable gaming with the Game & Watch series, from there spreading into a more flexible system with replaceable cartridges. Tiger made Game & Watch-style LCD games too, so why couldn’t they do the same thing?

Thing is, Tiger was doing this through most of the 1990s! They kept their costs and prices down and managed to make them profitable by just putting out the most barest games possible, Game & Watch-like LCD games in the era of the Sony Playstation. (Ernie Smith at the excellent blog Tedium wondered at their success too.)

Tiger released their Game Boy competitor, Game.com, in September 1997. It was absurdly cheap at $30, but at that time a Game Boy Pocket was only a little more expensive at $55. I think it’s safe to say the only people who were buying up Game.com devices were extremely low information buyers. But they found 300,000 such buyers. I expect a majority of them were grandparents.

Surprise! Your birthday has been ruined!

So, what were those lucky enough to get a Game.com in for? The system got a total of 21 games. One of its games was Sonic Jam. The website Bad Game Hall of Fame had a look at it, and it was quite the thing. I call it a thing because it barely qualifies as a game.

It was named after a Saturn release of the Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog games, and claimed to have Sonics 2, 3 and “and Knuckles,” but not only were all the games strained through the Game.com’s small monochrome screen, they all were drastically cut down. Each has only one level! And it’s barely playable at that!

I’m loving the optimism of that six digit score counter. Screenshot from Mobygames.

Bad Game Hall of Fame did a general retrospective on the Game.com. I personally love terrible janky systems like this, but it’s not because I think they’re secretly good, it’s because, like the mockbuster output of The Asylum, I think they’re hilarious. But I’m not laughing at the kids who were expecting a Game Boy but ended up with this instead.

These days Tiger Electronics exists, as many other game companies from past decades like Milton-Bradley, Parker Brothers, Avalon Hill and Wizards of the Coast, as merely one organ out of the many that comprise the grotesque Frankenstein’s Monster of Hasbro, Inc. Hasbro paid $335 million dollars for them, possibly because they saw something in their then-new Furby product. Nowadays I don’t think Tiger’s name is being applied to any current products, and that’s probably for the best.

Sundry Sunday: Seinfeld Stufffeld

2026-07-25T02:26:56Z

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

This week it’s simple. It’s easy. I won’t say it’s pure, I won’t insult your intelligence by going that far, but I will insult your intelligence with a video game music done in the Seinfeld theme song style round up. Let’s go.

Note that these are game music compositions done in the style of the Seinfeld theme. A different category would be the Seinfeld theme done in the style of different games. That I will leave for some other time.

Super Mario Bros. Underworld Theme (36 seconds):

Super Metroid Norfair (2 minutes):

Gameboy Tetris (1 minute):

Sonic the Hedgehog Chemical Plant Zone (2 minutes):

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Gerudo Valley (3 minutes):

Gamefinds: The Pac-Man Brothers

2026-07-24T05:58:58Z

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

Three finds on consecutive days. This is another in a particularly beloved genre for me, the elaboration upon Pac-Man, which I like so much I wrote one myself back in 2013.

This one’s interesting in that it takes the most after Jr. Pac-Man, the last of the Pac-Man versions in the old style in arcades. Like Ms. Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man was made by GCC and released by Bally-Midway, and like his mother isn’t recognized by Bandai-Namco, though his circumstance is different because Namco never really supported him, while Ms. Pac-Man sold so well that Namco themselves sold Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga arcade units for a long time.

Jr. Pac-Man differs from prior Pac-games by having large scrolling mazes. Most Jr. Pac-Man mazes have six energizers instead of the usual four, but if their wandering fruit reach an energizer it could potentially destroy it. Jr. Pac-Man is also much more difficult that most other arcade Pac-Man titles, actually it may be the hardest of them all.

The Pac-Man Brothers starts from Jr. Pac-Man and gives him a sibling, makes them both greasers, and arrays the four (or five) ghosts against them, making them greasers too. It’s kind of if the Fonz, or maybe Kunio-kun, ran around a haunted maze eating dots.

Pac-Man Brothers can be played either in one or two player modes. It’s not as difficult as Jr. Pac-Man, not only is it more forgiving in its ghost chase routines (they go into scatter mode more often and reverse direction when it happens as in Pac-Man), but they have a dodge move. Pressing the button causes your Pac-kid to rush ahead. When dodging no dots or energizers are eaten, but you can also pass through ghosts. If the ghosts are vulnerable dodging still still eat them, and it still eats fruits, so it’s a good way to catch up with a fleeting morsel. If a dodge runs your Pac into a wall, he’ll bounce backwards, which can easily cause you to rebound into a pursuing ghost. That can be frustrating, but it’s an acceptable balance for such a powerful ability.

The ghost behavior, as I said, is a lot more forgiving than Jr. Pac-Man. They seem to scatter more often, and for longer times. The scatter phase at the beginning of a board seems quite long.

One of the coolest aspects of Pac-Man Brothers is that the mazes are randomly generated. Random mazes have their drawbacks; they tend not to contain the one-way routes that made Pac-Man a much fairer game, and even if they did, if the mazes are different every time the player won’t know where they are, and can’t make effective use of them. But they do make it resistant to patterns (although Pac-Man Brothers seems to use Ms. Pac-Man’s random scatter periods anyway), and help to enliven the early game by giving a player who might be playing through level 1-1 for the hundredth time some different terrain to wind through.

One more interesting difference here from Pac-Normal is that Pac-Man Brothers uses a Universal-style extend system, where sometimes a vulnerable ghost will bear a letter in PACMAN, and if you collect them all you get an extra life. The update log gives the history of this feature, mentioning that it went through some revisions. Now the ghosts only generate PACMAN letters sometimes, at random, making them an unreliable way to earn bonuses.

While The Pac-Man Brothers is made for Windows, I played it on a Linux machine through WINE and it seemed to work okay. It requires Mono, but WINE prompted me to install it automatically. However, keyboard input didn’t work at all. I had to use a USB Xbox controller to play. I also found using the joypad to move caused Johnny Pac-Man to control a bit stiffly. Using an analog stick allowed J.P.M. to move with more smoothness. My high score so far is a little north of 100K, and my game ended on the eighth board. You may consider that a challenge score to aim for.

The Pac-Man Brothers, by ThatLeftHandMan (for Windows on itch.io, $0)

Gamefinds: Samuel’s Sickoban

2026-07-23T05:12:37Z

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

Another little fun indie puzzle game! And it’s based on Sokoban too, and it was also pointed out on Metafilter, this time by user Cogito in a comment. So let’s get our warehouse gloves on and get back to pushin’. It’s Samuel’s Sickoban!

Depicting the famous Onion cartoon was pretty much mandatory.

It’s implemented in Pico-8, and should run wherever it runs. As typical in this burgeoning puzzle genre, you have a pusher character (of boxes not drugs), whose job is to set objects in the right places. Here the objects you move are round spheres, a fact that becomes important later on….

In the screenshot above, the striped spot is a button, of the video game type with a broken spring, that must be held down in order to keep being pressed. The black square is a pit. You shouldn’t step on that part. Holding down the button with the ball causes the wall to the north to vanish, allowing you to move into the next room.

Already Sickoban seeks to earn its name. This might seem like a simple room to pass, there isn’t even anything to push. But something is amiss… there are walls that don’t line up with the checkerboard. The exit is half off your movement grid vertically. You’ll have to find a way to get yourself off of it too, by pushing against a half-aligned wall.

Actually, you’ll have to do that more than once to compete this puzzle, and the large pit won’t help in that. Fortunately, you only fall into a pit if you’re completely over it. You’re allowed to hang on by just a sliver of your square, if your movement allows for it.

Figure that one out and you’ll probably feel pretty pleased with yourself. But Samuel’s Sickoban wants to make sure you’re learned your lesson, so this horror is next. And that’s only room three! What will follow after this? I won’t tell, but it’ll probably make you break out in tears. “Happy” solving!

Samuel’s Sickoban, by spratt (itch.io, $0)

Gamefinds: Soko Striker

2026-07-23T04:28:41Z

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

Pointed out in a post on Metafilter by long-time user pwnguin, Soko Striker is fun, and not excessively challenging, free Soccer-themed Sokoban game by Axylaric on itch.io.

The idea is to get all the balls (up to three in a level) into the goal net. The ball slides when you kick it, continuing to move until something interacts with it. We could call these “ice block” style Sokoban pieces. One wrinkle in this is that the balls can’t cross the white lines at the edges of the board, or it’s a foul and you have to start over. There is no undo command, only a retry, so think carefully before making a move. You yourself can walk outside the line freely, and will often have to.

Those yellow barriers in the screenshot above are simple blockers, mere walls that the ball will collide with and come to a halt.

Later on you find these other players on the checkerboard pitch. If the ball rolls into an arrow, the player will automatically kick it in that arrow’s facing direction. You can adjust the direction a player faces by kicking them, a trick you’ll have to use a lot.

Near the end of the game’s 30 puzzles you’ll find these traffic cones. You can push them a single space at a time by kicking them, much like how one would move a Sokoban crate. Other players can kick crates too. A cone can block a ball and stop it a single time.

There’s a few other tricks you’ll have to learn too, but Soko Striker introduces them to you itself fairly gradually. Many of its puzzles are simple tutorials, and the difficulty doesn’t get very high until near the end. The last puzzle will take you at least a few minutes to figure out, but I think you can probably handle it. One note that might be helpful: the scoreboard that shows you the level number looks as if it might be solid and block soccer balls, but it doesn’t. You can even walk through it! That’ll be helpful to you eventually.

Soko Striker by Axylaric (itch.io, $0)

Behind The Code Examines NES Double Dribble’s Shot Code

2026-07-22T07:27:25Z

Displaced Gamers‘ Behind the Code series, and its companion Talkin’ Code, are probably the best technical examinations of NES games on Youtube. They take games that were the bread and butter of the Famicom/NES in its heyday, products of skilled programmers some of whom had gotten started working on arcade games, and disassemble them, revealing both their the tricks of their trade and the quirks, and sometimes glitches, that made their work unique.

Their most recent examination is the best NES basketball game, Double Dribble. If you’re not familiar with it, it plays and feels an awful lot like it were an early version of NBA Jam, without the teams or players or personality sure, but it does play a mean arcade-style game, which makes sense since it was a port of an arcade game (one that plays, I should say, a hideous vocalized version of the Star Spangled Banner at game start).

Here is the video. (32 minutes) Discussion of the discussion is below it.

Okay, the first surprise is that it that whether the ball goes in or not depends entirely on physics. The game takes the angle of the player to the basket (gotten from the X and Y position of the shot on screen) and sends the ball towards the basket using a lookup table to tell how the ball should move. When the ball arrives, whether it goes in depends on whether the ball is close enough to the center of the basket.

Double Dribble actually just sends the ball towards the basket, and if it’s close enough to the hoop (less than four pixels away), it goes in. Basically, the spot on screen the ball leaves from is what determines whether it scores. Affecting that is that there’s a limited number of discrete angles the ball can be thrown at. Displaced Gamers runs through the math, which is fairly involved, but in short, if you throw at the wrong combination of angle and distance, the ball just won’t go in.

More than that. The big discovery made by Displaced Gamers is that the two hoops aren’t the same! Due to flaw in the math, both hoops’ centers are essentially shifted to the right slightly, and both are also easier to hit when shots are made from the top of the screen, above the basket.

This is only a couple of points from the video. It’s full of the kinds of shortcuts that time-pressed programmers from the age of 8-bit consoles often had to use to make their code work. If you’re allergic to discussions of math (especially trigonometry) you might want to skip this one, but I think it’s worth a look.

Webdepths: Pac-Man Fever Forever

2026-07-21T05:00:29Z

The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….

A recent Retronauts episode looked back upon the history of Buckner and Garcia’s 45-year-old video game novelty song Pac-Man Fever. Host Drew Mackie also runs Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games, and it just as recently linked in passing a pair of ancient websites devoted to its album, Lee Seitz’s Pac-Man Fever Forever and 52 Weeks of Pac-Man Fever.

We here at Set Side B do everything we can to encourage the kind of unhealthy obsession with video game ephemera that is epitomized by these sites. And carrying a torch for a novelty song dating back to the height of the arcade era, that sounds even crazier (“It’s drivin’ me cray-zee!”) than my own obsession with Rampart.

Started in 1994, when readers would have had to browse the page in Mosaic, the length of the site Pac-Man Fever Forever’s legacy now begins to rival that of the song itself. Like all good websites it refers to other pages on this Widest of World Webs, but alas most, if not all, of the sites it refers and links to are defunct now, saddest being that of the song’s creators, Buckner and Garcia themselves.

As countless kids on social media remind me nearly every minute, I am old, and yet I still dimly remember 1981, the year of Pac-Man’s release, which now might as well be the Stone Age. Social Media, the Web, the public Internet and, I seem to remember, electricity didn’t exist back then. But people still listen to Pac-Man Fever, and they still play Pac-Man today, and Bandai-Namco continues to squeeze the hungry lemon-wedge for every final drop of its juice. I maintain that Bally-Midway, R.I.P., was at least as responsible for its worldwide success as Namco was, and it would have been them who’d have sub-licensed the game’s sounds for a novelty song, as they would have for the Pac-Man Saturday morning cartoon show, a whole landfill of tatty merch, and most of the other instances of Pac-mania from the classic age of arcades. (But not Pac-Mania: Atari published that in the US)

We know Gary Garcia has since passed away. Jerry Buckner (IMDB) continues to roam the neon-blue tunnels of the Earth, and he wrote a song for Wreck-In Ralph. We here hope he continues giving breath as long as he wants. Thanks for the tunes, and to Lee Seitz, thanks for remembering them.

Incremental Fun With Progress Racer RPG and Maktala

2026-07-20T02:49:26Z

This is a review and preview of two incremental games, Progress Racer RPG and Maktala. Played with a retail key and demo build, respectively.

Sundry Sunday: Gruntilda’s Revenge

2026-07-19T06:25:33Z

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

Porky Draws gives us (by which I mean, gives the world, not us particularly, we’re just pointing to it as usual) an epilogue to the Banjo-Kazooie games (2 minutes) where persistent enemy Gruntilda (who is active and alive and everything) casts spells on Banjo and Kazooie’s internet connections. It’s pretty short, but I feel the effort should be recognized for the excellent Gruntilda voice and keeping her words in rhyme. (The worst thing about Banjo-Tooie, other than it being way too big and convoluted as well was that they dropped Gruntilda’s rhyming dialogue.)

A Speedrun of a Joke Donkey Kong Romhack

2026-07-18T04:29:46Z

I hope you’re ready for something pleasingly pointless. Let’s review.

In 2024 Kayinworks wrote an essay about games as models vs. toys. I’d describe the same dichotomy as simulationism vs gamism. Neither are necessarily bad, but their aims are different. Models, like model trains, take some real-world thing and try to give you its essence. Toys use a real-world thing to lend flavor to a friendlier, more accessible, but in some cases more pandering experience. That’s an oversimplification, it’s a great article, well-thought and full of nuance, but it gets across what you need for item 2. (It also mentions and links to the preposterous and awesome Ginormo Sword.)
Taking inspiration from that essay’s description of changing old games, modernizing their looks and in some cases changing game rules to be more acceptable to players, although sometimes in ways that miss the point of why those old games do things they way they do, plourples created a romhack for NES Donkey Kong that does away with such quaint notions like Mario having a jump that’s only his own height tall. “What’s that? This ruins the entire game? But it’s for Quality of Life!”
Darkman425 and Spikestuff speedran that game. (Youtube link, 48 seconds)

I’m only sad they didn’t do the version with the Conveyor Belt level.

White_Pointer Gaming Explains SNES Enhancement Chips

2026-07-17T06:56:58Z

White Pointer Gaming is the Youtube channel that examines games and figures out how they pull off the graphical tricks they do, and we’ve linked them to those several times before because they almost always find some interesting tricks to explain, like when the Genesis/Mega Drive pulls off something which looks like scaling, which happens more often than you’d think.

This video is a bit more general than that, describing the various kinds of extra chips included in SNES carts. (11 minutes)

It didn’t have as many different kinds of mappers as the NES did, since its processor had a much larger address space, but it still had a few helper chips included in cartridges through the system’s life. Most of these were essentially co-processors. The most famous one was, of course, the Super FX, which supplemented the unit’s relatively pokey 5A22, providing it enough extra muscle to rapidly draw polygons. But there were other chips, like the DSP line, and the SA-1, which was essentially another processor of the same kind as in the SNES, with its own memory and clocked at a much higher speed, and additional aids.

The use of these chips allowed the SNES to perform feats it was incapable of out of the box. Unlike the NES, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t intended to be used with mapper chips in its initial design, at least one SNES launch title, Pilotwings, used a DSP-1 chip. I have to wonder if Nintendo’s affection for including extra hardware in cartridges played a role in their ill-fated decision to go with cartridge media for the N64?