There are some locations in a few levels that have four invisible spots in the background that can detect your presence. If you touch the four in order, the extra life appears. They’re found throughout the game, and they’re supported in code to the extent that, if you find one in a level, the game sets a flag for that level so it won’t appear again in that play session. You have to exit your game and load it back up again before you can get another extra life by this means from that level.

Many of these locations are arranged so that to trigger them in order, you’ll have to move in a loop around some location. This is similar in concept to the stakes in Super Mario 64 that, if you run around them a few times, cause them to generate coins to collect. Another kind of weird secret in a Mario game. I feel like Shigeru Miyamoto must have been lying awake at night brainstorming ever more obscure things to put into them.

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We collect literally hundreds of links in compiling stuff to you, far more to give everything its own post. Here’s a scattershot collection of some of it, we hope that one or two of them might strike your discriminating fancy.

• As often happens, I find out about something cool right as it ending, and so it is with Good Internet Magazine. However its archives are still up at the moment! There’s cool things to find there like Build The Web You Want To See. I found out about it from this post on brennan.day, which is announcing an upcoming site called Long Horizon.
• Along those lines, for three years now Robert Birming has been organizing Junited on his blog, which is just an excuse for bloggers to link to each other. I think people should link things all the time, for any excuse, at the drop of the hat (that’s largely what I do over on Metafilter), but if some people need an excuse to do it for a month I can get behind it!
• On that site I found an Indie Web webring. Remember webrings?
• Returning to the subject of cool things ending, it didn’t get mentioned much in my online circles, but both Tripod and Angelfire, two of the biggest remaining free/low cost webhosts from the early days of the web, have called it quits. Parent company Lycos continues to soldier on, free of one more of those pesky legacy services they couldn’t be bothered to preserve. Bah.
• a2central is a site about Apple II computing.
• Juiced.GS is a quarterly Apple II magazine. My searches for issues of Softdisk has had me in an apple-y frame of mind lately.
• One useful page on that site is a rundown of Apple II emulators.
• On Mashable, Chris Taylor has a piece about the backlash against generative AI. I’m glad it’s being noticed how much people detest it! Let the anger flow through you! It’ll give you cool lightning powers!

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

They can’t all be winners here on Sundry Sunday, but sometimes I find something pretty darn cool, and that’s the case this week with this spot-on Wallace & Gromit parody/Legend of Zelda parody. (4½ minutes)

One of the most defining characteristics of W&G is its gentleness, and it’s a feel that smooshes into the fields of Hyrule fairly well. Wallace is Link of course, though a more verbose Link that we’ve ever seen in the games. It means the silent Gromit is Navi, so it’s like the roles were mixed up. Wallace is more concerned with finding his breakfast cheese than saving the princess, but at least his quest ends with him finding three golden triangles.

It’d probably have been too much to ask for it to have been made in stop-motion clay, but neither was it made using AI video generation either. The description tells us that creator “Tommy” spent seven months in Blender working on it. Wallace’s voice is pretty close to the shorts and movies, and I found the slight differences there are easy to overlook. Make sure to pause a few times to catch the many in-jokes scattered throughout, like the various objects in Wallace’s house and the titles of the books on his shelves.

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Loadstar and its side project Loadstar 128 were made for the Commodore 64 and 128 home microcomputers. They were disk magazines, a niche of publisher Softdisk, distributed by mail, and for a while even on newsstands. Even after it became untenable to keep distributing by retail Loadstar managed to retain enough subscribers to keep going for a while longer.

Loadstar lasted 22 years, from 1985 to 2007, an amazing run lasting well into the Internet Age. It hasn’t been 22 years since 2007 yet. In that time they published more than 6,700 items. Sure, it had its ups and downs, and towards its end its last editor, Rev. Dave Moorman, had to struggle to find things to fill its four disk sides with. Its last year only saw two issues, but Dave was determined to keep it going, aiming for 256, the number of possible values in a byte. Sadly a tornado hit his home and destroyed his issue-making setup. (We talk sometimes about reviving Loadstar and making the last six or seven issues ourselves to fulfill Dave’s ambition. We have most of the tools, and it’s much easier to find new Commodore software now than in 2007.)

Loadstar wasn’t Softdisk’s only product. I can legally distribute Loadstar because of a special carve-out for it. Loadstar is still owned by its longest-running editor, Fender Tucker, who used to sell physical CDs of the issues, with an old version of VICE on it to run them in emulation. I have one of those CDs myself, and it serves as the base of the version of Loadstar Compleat we sell with Fender’s permission.

The company that originally published Loadstar was called Softdisk Publishing. Founded in 1981 by Jim Mangham, it was a similar product to Loadstar but for computers in the Apple II line. It was also successful, lasting (I believe) for 166 issues (Loadstar went for 249), and given the popularity of Apple IIs could probably have lasted a bit longer, but for a lamentable fact: Apple IIs were refreshed several times during the series’ life, as Apple II+s, Apple IIes. Apple IIcs and then Apple IIGSes. Early issues don’t even run on Apple IIs after the + line; later machines, especially the GS, have much greater capabilities than the original, so a stock II owner would have to upgrade to get the most use out of the final issues. Unlike Commodore 64s which cost $200 for most of their life, Apple IIs were always pricey, and eventually an owner would have to decide whether to invest more money in a line of computers even its manufacturer didn’t seem too interested in anymore, or switch to one of the teeming IBM PCs types that were everywhere by then.

I’d like to tell you more about Softdisk the magazine, but I’ve never used it! Just now, today, I’ve finally been able to obtain a mostly complete set of issues from the Internet Archive, in Softdisk Supreme. Doing so was an adventure involving an ISO using the Mac HFS filesystem (so standard ISO-manipulation tools proclaim the disk image to be corrupt), the website Infinite Mac, and having to dodge several annoying quirks of both Infinite Mac and Classic Mac OS itself.

Softdisk Supreme was the product of a company called Syndicomm. Distributed on CD much as Loadstar Compleat was, Syndicomm was owned by Eric Shepherd, who transferred it to Tony Diaz in 2011. Diaz passed away in 2021 (source), leaving ownership of Softdisk’s properties uncertain.

Or are they? There is a note in a PDF supplied with Softdisk Supreme that tells us that Syndicomm didn’t own Softdisk the Magazine, but just licensed it from the company:

So then, who owns it now? No less a figure than John Romero himself, the John Romero, game designer of Wolf 3D, Doom and Quake and former Softdisk employee, tells us that a company called Flat Rock Software owns the Softdisk IP now.

Softdisk made more magazines than just Softdisk and Loadstar. For the PC they made Big Blue Disk and Gamer’s Edge. I’ve found a mention online that parts of Softdisk’s legacy were sold in pieces to other companies. My Abandonware doesn’t distribute several notable games from BBD’s issues that were made by the id Software people, like Catacomb 3D, pointing people (but not directly) to GOG. Here is a direct link. It’s $6 for six games, and in the style of GOG retro releases they’re packaged with an emulator capable of playing them out of the box.

Catacomb 3D is listed as made by “id Software, Softdisk Publishing” and “Catacomb Games.” It’s the only product by Catacomb Games on GOG. They have a website. They’ve opened the source code to the whole series and uploaded it to Github. While their website doesn’t list a point of contact, their Github account page has an email address, which I sent a polite request to just a few minutes ago. I hope they can clear up the question of ownership, and if they can, that it’ll illuminate a path towards offering a package similar to Loadstar Compleat for Softdisk’s other products.

I believe that all software has value, but Softdisk’s output easily exceeds that low bar. The Catacomb games don’t need my pitiful efforts at preservation, but Softdisk published lots of other stuff that’s in serious danger of being lost forever. In addition to the work of their in-house programmers they accepted submissions, and bought software from a wide range of programmers. Many of those coders are aging, or are no longer with us. Attention must be paid! They cared about their work, and so must we. Wish me luck.

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The systems listed are the CD-i, the Sega Saturn, the Apple Bandai Pippin (wow really?), the Nintendo 64 (only in Japan with the 64DD add-on), the Game Boy Color (through the Mobile Trainer cartridge), Sega Dreamcast (I remember it well), the Wonderswan, Playstations 2-4, Portable and Vita, Nintendo DSes original, I, 3 and New 3, Xboxes 360, One, S and X, the Wii and Wii U (the Wii U had quite a cool browser, as the article explains), and technically speaking the Steam Deck (which can run lots of other software too). But please click through and read all about them!

Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles (vale.rocks)

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I have played Dragonstomper, in fact I wrote about it in an ebook on 2600 games here, and it’s quite an interesting game. Defining an RPG these days is rife with complication, but then it a bit more obvious: statistics, character building, equipment, exploration and turn-based combat. Dragonstomper has all of these things and more.

The Supercharger was a peripheral that allowed games to be loaded off of cassette tape. The unit itself housed an amount of RAM that held the games that the system would run. The Atari 2600 didn’t have write lines leading out to the cartridge, so the Supercharger had to load the code itself, which looked like normal inflexible ROM to the Atari. But the Supercharger could handle multiload games, making it much easier to make large games for the console. Dragonstomper was stored on the tape in three segments, corresponding to three stages of the quest.

The first section, and the most open-ended, involved exploring the kingdom, fighting monsters, finding items and trying to build your character’s power. A complication to this is that five magic items, a Charm, a Cross, a Potion, a Ring, a Staff, have randomized functions that change every time you begin a game. (There is no saving; the Atari has no way of writing to the tape.)

To get to stage two, you must get past the guard to town, either by showing him an ID, by bribing him, or by defeating him in combat. (They have more health than the dragon!) Town is kind of a break area where you shop for items to help you in the final part of the quest: the tunnel to and fight against a dragon waiting for you in its cave.

There’s all kinds of interesting things you can do, that helps give the game a lot of replayability. For example, you can hire fighters in town to accompany you against the dragon. There are traps around but also items that can reveal their locations to you. You can fight the dragon in melee, or by firing a longbow at it, or you can even avoid fighting it all together by figuring out how to get the gem its guarding without fighting it. There is a GameFAQs guide to it (contributed as late as 2023) that gives a good rundown of how to play and win.

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In the past I’ve done brief takes on every game in a Direct, but I feel like this time I’d be reduced to either saying the same thing about many of them that I’ve said before, or else be forced to resort to the same kinds of loathsome cliches most game enthusiast sites use. No thanks.

Oh look! Yet another grandiose and pretentious anime-themed combo-based melee combat RPG, how original. Is there an omininously Latinish-named evil force? Are we destroying God again? Are there Disney characters in this one?

Most game players, it’s true, are either kids or recently-kids, and I remind you that I haven’t been either of those for a long time. Think of me what you want for saying this, but these base and juvenile depictions of coolness are things I outgrew long ago. But I suspect at least some of you think that way too, so here then are the few games that I’m genuinely interested in from the recent Direct.

Rhythm Heaven Groove

This is the big one, the game from the show I’m most likely to actually get when it’s released. All the Rhythm Heaven games are big gooey piles of joy and this’ll be the first new entry in an age. (Example from a prior game: Packing Pests.) The footage we saw yesterday only confirms my anticipation. A day one purchase for me.

Big Walk (cross platform) *

The first game from House House since Untitled Goose Game looks very interesting, basically just an excuse to wander around a big island wilderness with friends. Big Walk purposely eschews most of the concessions most games make when exploring large spaces, like fast travel, and the ones made when communicating with other players in large spaces, like being able to talk to people wherever they are. It doesn’t just this for realism’s sake though, many of its puzzles rely on overcoming communication difficulty. It’s wildly experimental, and my only real qualm with it is most of my friends aren’t the kind to explore such a game with me. For those who have them though, this is something to watch for.

Deltarune Chapter 5

I loved Undertale and Deltarune Chapter 1, but then fell away from playing the series myself. But I love watching other people play through them, so soon there’ll be another quirky and fun, yet entirely vicarious experience for me to watch.

Nintendo Switch Sports Resort

This is essentially the Switch version of Wii Sports Resort, the followup to the Wii pack-in Wii Sports released way back in 2006. I still have many fond memories of playing Wii Sports with friends back then, a perfect pack-in game if there ever was one, but each successive game was more complex, and that much harder to get friends interested in. The simplicity, perhaps even more than cheapness, of Wii Sports was what made it accessible to so many people. I’m sure when we reach the inevitable age of nursing home Wii Sports parties that the appeal of its simplicity will become even more important.

Final Fantasy Resonance

Not only is it the first Final Fantasy game to get the HD2D treatment, but the first (somewhat) new one to get it too. The brief glimpses we got of it show us a game that seems to take after the old-school 16-bit era battle systems that recent entries, and I find that more appealing than anything else about it. It’s not that I’m nostalgic for the way it was done, but there the quality of the experimentation seemed greater, there was less change for its own sake, and there were still attempts, even if just nominal ones, at simulating adventure above just throwing systems at the wall. But I’m old and grumpy about these things. Just give me five minutes and I’ll probably fall asleep in my rocking chair. Oof, here I go now… Zzzzzz…

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We’ve linked to these several times before, and I claim directly to you that they’re about as good as you get when it comes to investigating game internals. PannenKoek goes more into specifics and implications maybe, but ZoomZike has much more ground to cover. He’s now done twelve Mario Party titles, all in this playlist, and as they’ve continued they’ve gotten even more complete and detailed. The shortest of all of them is for MP1 at 1½ hours long; the longest, for MP7, is nearly 5½ hours!

Each video covers all of its game’s boards and events, all of its items and how they work, and all of its minigames. While “Identifying Luck” is the title and ostensible purpose, what we get is more like a complete guide to the internals of each game, includingly the many ways the games put their thumbs on the scales, often in favor of the last-place player.

They take a long time to chew through, oh yes, but if you want to know how the masters of video board gaming put their long-running series together, I don’t think you can find a better source.

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

This one from Donk-tk is very short (39 seconds), but extremely memeable. Hang in there Donkey Kong, we know just how you feel.

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birthbydrip over on Neocities (psst: yay!) has a terrific guide to getting to $20K and a Crazy License on the arcade course. It’s not for absolute beginners. If you don’t yet know how to perform a Crazy Dash/Limiter Cut your score is doomed to the $2K range until you learn that essential trick. But if you learn it, and nail the timing to spam it, then an S-license don’t look nearly so impossible any more, and then this guide is your golden path to getting to $20K, and racking up hour-long games on any aging Crazy Taxi machine you should encounter on your travels—assuming it’s well maintained that is. I encountered a machine at DragonCon a couple of years ago with a flaky gas pedal that made Dashes terribly inconsistent, grumble grimble gromble.

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Rachel Simone Weil’s FEMICOM is museum and repository of information on overtly girly gaming paraphernalia. They also publish research and a sporadically-updated blog on related issues.

One of the more recent additions to their collection is Parappa side-game and Set Side B fav UmJammer Lammy. Another is on Idol Hakkenden, for which you may remember we’ve written about a translation patch before.

They found a manga introduction for girls to assembly language programming, a topic so baroque that I don’t think I’ve seen any such guides directed to boys, unless you count standard non-gendered guides and reference works. And they’ve interviewed femgaming star Anna Anthropy too.

Girl-focused games are a little-discussed community among your obsessive webists, and anyone collecting and discussing them deserves more exposure.

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On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

We’ve not done a Romhack Thursday* for a while. Found by way of a Bluesky post by bro3256, of the website Famibro, this is a brilliant romhack by jroweboy (SMBArena page) that not only puts Mario into Zelda II, but also subtly remixes the game to allow for his different moveset.

While this is a hack to Zelda II, not Super Mario Bros., Mario’s physics and jump have been faithfully recreated in the engine. Mario doesn’t have Link’s sword, and without certain spells his only means of attack is his trademark jump! But all of the enemies that Link could employ his downthrust move against Mario can stomp. This makes some enemies much easier to beat, like the Dairas in Death Mountain, but it makes Stalfos and Ironknuckles almost impossible to defeat without some aid. It takes a lot of familiarity with the original game to notice it, but a couple of enemies have been removed in order to provide a better play experience.

I’ve found it to be unusually well-balanced and implemented for a romhack, especially one with such a unique premise. The game plays a lot like if Nintendo had made it themselves. When Mario is reduced to two bars of health he loses his Super status and becomes small, just like in the SMB games. There are certain advantages to being small; a few keys require a difficult running ducking jump/slide to get when Mario’s big, but if he’s small it’s simple to collect them.

The spells have been redone to fit Mario’s abilities, and the implications of the new rules make the game seem fresh even to Zelda II obsessives like me. The Shield spell doesn’t reduce damage taken, but instead gives Mario a floating shield that acts like Link’s shield. Mario already has a great jump, so the Jump spell is replaced with a spell called Tanooki. Tanooki gives Mario his tail from SMB3; he can’t fly with it, but he can float down from jumps and, crucially, he can use it like Link’s sword if it were limited to low attacks. Unlike all of Link’s spells, Mario’s Tanooki and Fire powerups don expire when the scene changes, but instead lasts until Mario becomes small. I think there are other changes too but I haven’t gotten far enough to find them.

On top of all of that, the music has been slightly Mariofied too, and the soundtrack is really good! Here’s some footage of me playing through some early portions of the hack. (1 hour 23 minutes)

I do need to warn you of one issue though. On my first attempt at playing the game, one of the keys in the first dungeon didn’t register when I collected it, softlocking me and making it impossible to finish the Parapa Palace (the first dungeon). I suggest you save often in case something like this happens to you. It was lucky for me that it happened so early in the game, and starting over didn’t lose me much progress. There’s another place where you appear to be softlocked, in the third palace, but I managed to overcome it by getting the item out of it then setting it aside and exploring ahead, and sure enough, soon after I got an ability that let me go back and finish it.

Despite those issues I’m having a great time trying to puzzle through Zelda II’s huge challenges with this different moveset. If you’re a Zelda II fan too (I hear there are a few of your out there at least) you should check it out!

* Why, you may ask, a Romhack Thursday? It’s because I wanted to do a weekly romhack feature but there aren’t any days of the week beginning with the letter R! You may also ask, why a picture of a frog wearing sunglasses for its header image? They’re the cool frog of the swamp, they know how to edit rom files and give them to all their friends. If you look closely at the cartridge in its hand, the label may look slightly familiar if you’ve played a lot of classic arcade games….

Zelda II: The Adventure of Mario (hack of Zelda II by jroweboy)

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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.

It’s got every level of the original Lemmings, including variants from different versions, and the first Holiday demo collection, along with a smattering of extras with more on the way. Picotron of course is the successor to the popular Pico-8 fantasy console, more of a fantasy workstation, but you can still play Picotron Lemmings without buying the $20 tools.

It doesn’t have music or many of the sound effects (including any digitized voices), but it does play very well. It’s smoother than the original and even has visual indicators for Climbers and Floaters, which the originals didn’t have.

Lemmings is a true classic from the 16-bit era and even without music this version is a fine remake. And it’s free to play!

One of those ports we mentioned was a web-based port from 2004, DHTML Lemmings, still online after all these years. Back then it was amazing to see a game like that without even needing Shockwave or Flash. We’ve come a long way, for better or worse, but Sophie’s version is destined to be a highlight among the legends of the Lemmings.

What is that? Some of you may not know what Lemmings is? It’s a classic computer game from DMA Design in the early 90s, originally for the Commodore Amiga but ported to many other systems including the SNES. A bunch of green-haired numbskulls march forward through a huge variety of dangerous landscapes. As kind of their benevolent god, you give them skills to help them get through the terrain and also prepare the way for their friends. In the original you had to have a certain percentage survive to progress to the next level, but in this version you can play them in any order you choose. Give it a try, it’s just as brilliant now as when it was first released in 1991.

Sophie’s Picotron remake of Lemmings (Picotron, Web, $0)

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

Larn, created by Noah Morgan, may his name be sung by the bards forever, is a venerable classic roguelike game, from the same era as Moria and the first Hacks. It’s always been more obscure than the other games but was still popular, and it’s still played today. atsb, aka Gibbon, made a GitHub post commemorating its 40th anniversary, and noting the code has been ported to run on many systems, like Windows, Mac, Linux, DOS, OS/2, 68000, Alpha and many others. There they have both its source code and many precompiled binaries. We covered Larn once back on GameSetWatch, but GSW’s now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, and my Larn article from there is in the book Exploring Roguelike Games, so it seems a good opportunity to write of it again here.

You can download it from that page, but note that after unpacking it you should copy the files in the larnfiles directory into that of the executable, then edit larnopts to suit your playstyle (I’d change the player name, turn on color and pick a suitable gender.) If you don’t copy the files you won’t have in-game help; if you don’t edit larnopts your player will default to a male character named Gibbon.

I’ve only played a little of this version, but what I’ve seen is in keeping with the style of olde. Larn is a great game and worth trying. It makes a lot of different choices from its colleague games, which gives it a different feel. By default it’s easier than Rogue or Hack, but you can pick a higher difficulty if you want. High-difficulty games are ranked higher on the scoreboard.

Larn has a town level like Moria, but it includes features like a college that can teach you skills (but cost money and time) and a bank to save money at. It has two dungeons: a main dungeon that’s ten levels long, and a volcano that’s three levels and much stronger monsters. It has many random features, akin to Nethack’s fountains and thrones, that can do various things to your character, and it uses a code-based spell system. Press Shift-I from the spellcasting prompt (the c key) to be told what spells you know and what their codes are.

In the land of Larn many items cost lots of money, but you also find lots of money in the dungeon, there are lots of valuable gems there, and enemies frequently drop more. There are some things that are different from the Rogue and the Hack line of roguelikes that will need some adjustment:

• One key that works the same is Question Mark for Help, which should give you enough information to start you on your way.
• I haven’t tried using a numpad to play yet, but the help text doesn’t mention it. You might have to use the vi keys plus diagonals to move: h–j–k–l for left–down–up–right, and y–u–b–n for up&left–up&right–down&left–down&right.
• While the standard keys < and > go up and down levels, to enter places from down you have to press Shift-E.
• Monsters don’t follow you between dungeon levels, but the stairs, going both up and down, deposit you at a random place on the next level, so you can’t just retreat up if you find a dangerous monster on the next level.
• Some dungeon features use letters of the alphabet in addition to monsters: a deep blue P is a pit you might fall down.
• There is no key to put on or remove a ring, for they take effect automatically as you carry them. They’re identified immediately too.
• Potions and books don’t get individual descriptions when unknown, like “scroll titled KIRJE” or “plaid potions,” but they do still have underlying identities, and get identified when you use them.
• Lots of items, not just weapons and armor, have plusses, and you can even see them when the item type is unknown. What they mean, you’ll have to figure that out for yourself.
• When you find gems, don’t sell them in the trading post. Take them to the bank and have them appraised there.
• The flow of your quest is unusual to players expecting to collect an Amulet of Yendor some ways down and escape with it. The Eye of Larn is at the bottom of the main dungeon, but it won’t cure your daughter. But there is a way it can greatly further your quest, if you can figure out what that is.

A really distinctive thing about Larn is its time limit. Larn doesn’t use a food clock like many other classic roguelikes, but instead your daughter is dying of a mysterious disease whose cure is rumored to be somewhere in the land. As long as you progress slowly enough you can usually handle the monsters, and you can learn new skills in the College of Larn, but if you take more than 350 “mobils” you’ll fail your quest, although there is an item that can give you more time. If you manage to win the game, the Larn Revenue Service assesses you taxes based on your score before you can use the stores in subsequent games, and you can set a difficulty level before playing that affects the game in many ways: use the command-line option -# where # is the level, with 0 being the easiest.

Larn has its own wiki with many play tips (a lot of them spoilers) at wiki.larn.org.

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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)

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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.

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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!

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* 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.

Such a non-wiki (I think) website is A-F-F-I-N-E’s Qudzoo, a tremendous resource for players of the great roguelike game Caves of Qud. There is so much great information here! Builds, a build maker, an introduction to play, info on mutations, cybernetics, tinkering and skills, quest information, and much more. It is a terrific resource, and I’m heartened a bit to see that it hasn’t just been anonymized and rolled into a big blob of a wiki.

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!

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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.

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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:

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!”

Benny’s Arcade: The Website of Benimaru Itoh

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

Bandai Namco has yet another new Pac-Man cartoon series, I think this is the fourth? This one is a monthly series of short (not Short) Youtube videos called Snack Breaks.

Namco’s commissioned a bunch of sidelines based on their characters. Anyone else remember Shiftylook? None of them seem to last for long, and they seem to have no interest in preserving them. This one’s a series of Youtube videos, and while videos there are by no means guaranteed to last indefinitely, so long as they get even a trickle of views they seem to last.

I’m full of little observations of these cartoons, the result of an obsession with Pac-Man that began for me in third grade. Like, there’s no Ms. Pac-Man in these, due to B-N retconning her out of Pac-continuity due to GCC’s co-ownership of that game. However, in the trailer, we do see Professor Pac-Man, which is much further from Namco’s ownership since they didn’t make any of that game.

Then there’s the ghost’s personalities. The arcade game, of course, gave them different personalities from their programming (as delineated by the terrific Pac-Man Dossier), but different animated depictions of the ghosts (or “monsters,” in original parlance) tend to be inconsistent. The Saturday morning Pac-Man cartoon show made the Red monster Blinky, the most tenacious pursuer in the games, a coward, but the Orange ghost Clyde, the least threatening one, the leader of the group. While Snack Breaks matches the colors with the personalities a lot better, it makes the Pink monster (Pinky, of course) a girl. I have nothing against the chosen gender expression of a 16×16 pixel sprite, but I thought Sue was the girl ghost? Ah, but I guess Sue is also owned by GCC.

The animation’s pretty good, I’ll say that much. Pac-Man’s character design looks closer to Namco’s official art of the character. The telling details are the classic Mickey Mouse eyes and the orange gloves. (No Pac-Man animation has ever attempted to use Bally-Midway’s strange cabinet art as inspiration, see below.) There are a few nice jokes too (Pac’s cranky neighbor is great), but the pacing feels rushed in that way a lot of cartoons feel, like they’re trying to squeeze too much writing into too little time.

And so another attempt to cartoonify those evocative bits of 8-bit art has begun. Will they eventually be as neglected as Shiftylook became? Will future Pac-Man collections mine them for artwork, as Pac-Man Museum regrettably did for Ghostly Adventures? I can’t read the future, I’m not a Magic 8-Ball, but: signs point to yes.

Trailer (40 seconds):

Episode 1 (3 minutes):

If you wish to compare it to Hanna-Barbera’s take, here’s an episode of the old SatAM show (11 minutes). And here’s some of Bally-Midway’s weird U.S. cabinet art for arcade Pac-Man, as referenced above. Try to imagine what an animation of this would be like:

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More than that, arcade games in the days of their ascendance had a breadth and variety that no other style of video game has ever had. Even home microcomputers, to my eyes, didn’t see games as ludicrously peculiar as arcade games could be, especially in their early days.

Somebody on Youtube with the user name GaryRetroGamer has made a three videos showing off obscure but interesting arcade games from the 80s, ranging in length from 20 to 25 minutes, 127 games from 1983-1984 (25 minutes):

133 from 1985-1986 (22 minutes):

and 100 from the late 80s:

To help you track down individual games, the ones in each video are presented here, in order. Please excuse errors, these lists were compiled with the aid of text processing tools. (For any bashheads out there, of particular use: cut, tr, wl-paste, wl-copy)

1983-4

Dr. Micro, Exerion, Guzzler, Harem, High Way Race, Hoccer, Hopper Robo, I Robot, Intrepid, Joinem, Joyful Road, Jump Coaster, Kick Boy, Lover Boy, Markham, Marvin’s Maze, Money Money, Mouser, Mr. TNT, New Sinbad, Nova 2001, Phozon, Popper, Raiders, Regulus, Roc’n’Rope, Saturn, Scrambled Egg, Senjyo, SF, Sinbad Mystery, Sky Lancer, Star Jacker, Stinger, Super Doubles Tennis, Super Glob, Tin Star, The, Traverse USA, Tropical Angel, Uncle Poo, Van, Vastar, Yamato, Acrobatic Dog Fight, Appoooh, BanBam, Bank Panic, Battle, Ben Bero Beh, Bull Fighter, Bullfight, B-Wings, Champion Boxing, Cheyenne, Chicken Shift, Chinese Hero, Circus Charlie, Complex X, Country Girl, Crater Raider, Crowns Golf, Cycle Mabou, D-Day, Demolition Derby, Do Run Run, Dragon Buster, Drakton, Driving Force, Eeekk!, Eight Ball Action, Equites, Field Day, Fighting Basketball, Fire Battle, Freeze, Future Spy, Gladiator 1984, Goalie Ghost, Great Swordsman, Grobda, Gyrodine, Hero, Hole Land, Hunchback Olympics, Imago, Itazura Tenshi, Jack Rabbit, Jumping Cross, Jumping Jack, Kamikaze Cabbie, Kick Rider, Kick Start, Liberation, Lode Runner, Mad Crasher, Mister Viking, Mr. Kougar, Mysterious Stones, Ninjakun Majou No Bouken, Off The Wall, Pandora’s Palace, Peter Pack Rat, Pinbo, Pirate Ship Higemaru, Progress, Revenger ’84, Roller Jammer, Rumba Lumber, Sea Fighter Poseidon, Seicross, Snacks’n’Jaxson, Snake Pit, Son Son, Spatter, Star Force, Super Bag Man, Super Basketball, SWAT, Three Stooges in Brides Is Brides, Timber, Tube Panic, Two Tigers, Wai Wai Jockey Gate, Wanted, Wily Tower, Zaviga, Zwackery

1985-6
4-D Warriors, Alien Sector, Arm Wrestling, Bogey Manor, Boulder Dash, Canvas Croquis, Cerberus, Chanbara, City Connection, Combat, Cop 01, Crazy Rally, Crowns Golf in Hawaii, Doki Doki Penguin Land, Field Combat, Finalizer, Flashgal, Galactic Warriors, Go Go Mr. Yamaguchi, HAL21, Heavy Metal, High Voltage, I’m Sorry, Ikki, Knuckle Joe, Lady Master of Kung Fu, Lizard Wizard, Lode Runner III, Lot Lot, Mat Mania, Mayhem 2002, Metal Clash, Mirax, Motos, N.Y. Captor, Penguin, Performan, Pinball Action, Pitfall 2, Porky, Powerplay, Raiders 5, Repulse, Samurai Nihon, Sarge, Scooter Shooter, Sega Ninja, Shanghai Kid, Shoot Out, Shot Rider, Sky Destroyer, Sky Kid, Special Forces, Spelunker, Splendor Blast, Street Heat, Submarine, Super Speed Race Junior, Tank Busters, Team Hat Trick, Teddy Boy Blues, The FairyLand Story, Typhoon Gal, Wink, Wiz, Wyvern F, Argus, Baluba, Battle Lane! Vol 5, Big Event Golf, Body Slam, Brain, Calorie Kun vs Moguranian, Chiller, Clash Road, Clay Pigeon, Competition Golf Final Round, Danger Zone, Darwin 4078, Empire City 1931, Fire Trap, Flower, Gardia, Genpei ToumaDen, Gigas, Gladiator, Guardian, Halley’s Comet, Hopping Mappy, Joust 2, Kiki KaiKai, Land Sea Air Squad, Legend, Lock, Lost Castle In Darkmist, The, Mania Challenge, Max RPM, Merlin’s Money Maze, Mighty Guy, Mission 660, Mr. Goemon, Night Stocker, Ninja Emaki, Noboranka, Omega, Power Drive, Prebillian, Rack + Roll, Rafflesia, Red Robin, Return of Ishar, The, Riddle of Pythagoras, Robo Wres 2001, Rock ‘n Rage, S.R.D Mission, Shackled, Sky Kids Deluxe, Slap Shooter, Soldier Girl Amazon, Space Position, Spiker, Stompin, Super Stingary, Thunder Ceptor, Tokio, Top Gunner, Top Secret, Toypop, Transformer, Ufo Robo Dangar, Up Scope, XX Mission, Youjyuden

Late 80s
Aaargh, Act Fancer, Bakutotsu Kijuutei, Battle Shark, Black Panther, Block Hole, Bonze Adventure, Buccaneers, Burning Force, Champion Wrestler, China Gate, Chopper, Chuka Taisen, Crazy Climber 2, Crime City, Crime Fighters, Cue Brick, Dead Angle, The Deep, Demon’s World Horror Story, Devastators, Devil World, Diamond Run, Don Doko Don, Dr. Topper’s Adventures, Dragon Punch, Dragon Unit Castle of Dragon, Dynamite Duke, Enforce, Extermination, Exterminator, Exzisus, Fast Lane, Final Round, The, Finest Hour, Gang Wars, Garyo Retsudent, Ginga NinkyouDen, Gold Medalist, Gondomania, Gorodki, Hachoo, Hard Head, Hippodrome, Hot Chase, Hyper Crash, InsectorX, Kabuk, Kageki, Kitten Kaboodle, Konek, Kozure Ookami, Kuri Kunton, Kyros, Legend of Hero Tonma, Legend of Makai, Legion, Mad Gear, The Main Event, Marchen Maze, Maze of Flott, Metal Freezer, Metal Hawk, Mirai Ninja, Mustache Boy, Mutant Night, Night Striker, Ninja Kazan, Ninja Kid II, Ninja Mission, Pig and Bombers, Plump Pop, Poker Ladies, Psychic 5, Psycho, Python, Rabbit Punch, Racing Hero, Raimais, Reikai Doushi, Rompers, Shingen Samurai, Skull & Crossbones, Sky Robo, Snezhnaja Koroleva, SOS, Spark Man, Special Project Y, Star Guards, Street Smart, Super Ranger, Shadowland, Tough Turf, Trick Trap, Tricky Doc, Trio The Punch, Ufo Senshi Yohko Chan, Viper, Wild Fang, Wit’s, Wonder Momo

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Wizardry was the first popular (actually, mega-popular) CRPG, though as with many CRPGs from the time it’s much forgotten about now, even if its legacy is truly gigantic. It is indeed fortunate that Digital Eclipse has released that modern remake of Wizardry I, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, which is a lot more than you can say about Ultima, Phantasy, Might & Magic or a bunch of other games.

Nerdly Pleasures has posted a detailed history of the original games and their microcomputer ports, breaking down versions, features and bugs. It reminds of a number of interesting things, like that the original Apple II Wizardry would write to the Scenario Disk if you defeated a certain encounter, and thus make it permanently impossible to encounter it again on later playthroughs. Or that character growth was badly broken in the original PC version, with stats going down when they should have gone up. Or that the Commodore 64 version came out so late that it not only includes support for the C128’s extra memory, but even Commodore’s bankswitching RAM expansion modules.

I have come to realize that I much prefer the gameplay in these early CRPGs to those of more recent takes like Skyrim. The simulationist depth of those founding games has largely been replaced with gamish fluff, and in place of the imagination that the first CRPGs asked players to bring to the experience, everything has been made literal, explicitly rendered on your screen just as you’re supposed to perceive it. I know this comes across as nostalgia talking, but I don’t think it necessarily is. There’s a whole approach to making RPGs that has been lost, and I think we’re all poorer for it.

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Most of it is new information, including a fair bit of arguing against perceived elements of Mario lore, like his getting his name from a Nintendo warehouse landlord. I’m personally glad that one of the many sources cited is Matthew Green, deceased game journalist and the maintainer of the (also deceased) blog Press The Buttons. Wherever you are Matt, I hope there’s lots of great games to play.

There’s a bunch of stuff there. It’ll take you quite a bit of time to work through it all, but honestly? It’ll still be much faster than if it were all presented in a two-hour Youtube video, so count your blessings! Wait, they’re already counted: 101, a hundred-and-one blessings. How holy!

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COBOL stands for Common Business-Oriented Language, and is an extremely verbose language designed purposely to be understandable to managers. Everything in COBOL reads like it does, which makes it hard to work with. A fair portion of the financial world still runs on COBOL, in some cases using programs nearing their 60th year of existence. And someone wrote a way to use it write code for Vulkan.

Here’s the Github repository. The About blurb says it’s the shader language you didn’t know you needed. With due respect, that’s because no one ever needed it, but it’s still a fun thing that exists.

There appear to be no examples of output online. I had a look at building it myself, but my distro doesn’t seem to have the necessary programs to do that. Would any of you care to give it a try?

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Shadowman39 has been working hard to implement an 8-bit computer entirely out of parts of the building set K’NEX. He’s just released his fourth progress video (18 minutes):

Here are the previous videos in the series: Part 1: the ALU (15 minutes), Part 2: Registers, RAM and Data Transfer (18 minutes) and Part 3: ROM, Program Counter and Jumps (20 minutes).

This isn’t the only K’NEX-based computing device out there, but it seems to be the most complex and capable of doing actual work. I do hope that none of the little plastic parts on the inside of that multicolor computational Borg cube doesn’t break a tooth, because replacing it seems like it would be nearly as hard as fixing a cylinder in an engine block.

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

Glitch Productions has made a number of well-loved bits of Youtube culture, most notably so far: the concluded Murder Drones, the nearly-done Amazing Digital Circus, and the forthcoming Knights of Guenevere.

Their newest pilot is heavily game-themed, so you can probably expect to see it return to Sunday Sunday eventually. Called “The Gameoververse,” it follows a team of hero-types that go out into the video game cosmos to prevent the good guys from winning, I think on the grounds that, if they win, their worlds cease to exist due to the player turning the game off or some such. Yeah, pretty much a similar premise to Reboot, if we’re honest, though there’s nothing wrong with that. (Wouldn’t the game world also cease to exist if it’s too hard and the player gives up? What about roguelike game worlds, that are generated anew whether the player wins or loses? Let’s see them make a Nethack episode, that would be something….)

Here is that pilot (32 minutes):

Gameoververse (Wikipedia) was created by RubberRoss, and existed before as a web series from 2009, though with substantial differences. Notably the new version has music by former Rare musician Grant Kirkhope. We look forward to seeing, should the pilot be picked up, the continuation of its story.

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Not only do they explain, I won’t say effortlessly, but effectively how tiny implementation consequences in the foundational 3D platformer, but along the way they explain a bunch of useful computer science concepts. They are a wonder, and if Nintendo ever paid attention to their fan communities for purposes other than suing them or making them pay licenses to use Their Content, they would hire them like a shot. But they don’t, and they won’t*.

Whenever Pannenkoek publishes a notable new video I usually try to draw a little extra attention to it here, but it’s been a little while since the last one. So here’s three shorter ones, all permutations of the topic of 1-up Mushrooms.

From 12 years ago: 1-up Checkpoint Locations, all the places you can go to increase your already swollen extra life count from 72 to 73 (7 minutes):

There are a few 1-ups in the Bowser levels that aren’t always there. It turns out the game can be set to make them appear only if you’ve already gotten the key from a particular Bowser fight, and that’s what’s going on there. It’s explained here: (1 minute)

And the longest one at 12 minutes, why do some 1-ups flicker before disappearing? Along the way it painlessly explains object activation, visibility and spawning, and the six types of 1-ups:

* A few more contractions, all nonsense: bron’t, fron’t, plon’t, hron’t, vnon’t.

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One of those things I mentioned is, I’m getting a table at Vintage Computing Festival Southeast 2026 in Atlanta! And they said they wouldn’t mind if I did another presentation on the history of Loadstar, so it looks like I’ll be doing that again too! If anyone reading this is in Atlanta July 31, or on August 1-2, please drop by and say hello!

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It does this because of a couple of other changes: the player is identified by their initials before each fight, and it saves a high score table for each fight that’s displayed when the game comes up in attract mode.

While we’re on the subject of Playchoice differences, on dual-screen Playchoice-10 machines, the top screen is used as a simple UI for selecting games and tracking how much playtime you have left, but it also displays instructions for the game. The instruction screen for Metroid contains a simple map of the first area. (Cutting Room Floor article with image)

Just a minor thing today, as I’ve been splitting my time between other projects. I may have mentioned the Punch-Out fact here before, but if I have it’s been awhile.

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