The Flipside of Gaming
It is. It IS. It is not recommended, for hearing, for knowing about, for existing.
Two playlists, one for each season. Yes, they made a second season. So many characters are off model (literally, their models are off), but Cranky Kong’s is especially different.
Season 1:
Season 2:
Mario Kart World upends the series in several ways (not the least of which in price), but the biggest change is that the game now takes place in an open world, one that you can roam around freely, and even the main tracks in the Grand Prix are supplemented by races that travel between them.
One consequence of the game world is that the NPCs that inhabit it have a bit more of a life than in past games. In N64 Toad’s Turnpike, they’re just boxes that travel around the loop getting in the racers’ way. But now, when you’re exploring in Free Roam, you can pick out a specific driver and follow them around.
And what do you know, there actually seems to be a bit of an inner life going on there! They don’t seem to pathfind between locations, sadly, but they can get the mad yen to drive off the road and tear across the desert. And, surprisingly, a drive can get out of their car, which is more than the player racers in the game can do!
OnADock, on Youtube, made a 14 minute video where he followed a Toad around on their travels through the Mario Kart World, um, world. Maybe it’ll inspire you to do some investigation of your own?
Loadstar was a disk magazine for the Commodore 64 that lasted for 22 years! I’ve been put in charge of organizing its archives. From time to time I’ll present something interesting from its thousands of published items.
Even though I’ve been spending a lot of time working on the Loadstar project, I’m trying not to overwhelm this blog with items related to this Commodore 64 disk magazine. So for the time being I’m restricting myself to weekly Loadstar posts at most. Maybe on Wednesday? How would “Loadstar Lendsday” be as a name? Hm, not great. I’ll work on it.
This week I bring you one of the most polished games Loadstar published, Zorphon by Nick Peck, from issue 39. Here’s some demonstration video I recorded and posted to Youtube (13 minutes):
While he did have a few miscellaneous other items published on its disks, Nick Peck only ever made two games for Loadstar. Both are great, technically impressive, programmed entirely in machine code, and challenging. (The other is Paragon, from Issue 50.)
Zorphon is a space shooter in the vein of Gorf, where each stage offers different gameplay. Zorphon has three stages that loop, although there is an extra one, “Genesis,” that plays before the first loop, that’s only encountered at the beginning of the game.
You have your standard-issue spaceship that’s locked to the bottom of the screen, that can only move left and right, like the ships in Space Invaders, Galaxian and Galaga. This poses special problems in the stage that plays like Centipede: if one of the purple space bugs makes it down to your ship’s level it’s done for, because it’s not possible then to shoot or dodge it at that point, so it’s essential to ensure that doesn’t happen.
I played this game long ago, when it had just appeared in the magazine’s September 1987 issue, and even though it’s a fairly simple game, its quality has stayed with me all these years. There are different ways to represent moving objects on the Commodore 64. The most obvious, and smoothest, way is using its hardware sprites, but there are only eight of them. You could use sprite multiplexing to reuse them as the raster beam traces down the screen, but that poses certain limitations on the graphics and gameplay.
Zorphon instead chooses a different means of representing enemies, it draws them on the character map. That means that the attacking aliens can only be displayed on character grid boundaries, which is a drawback, but it takes the cap off of the number of foes the C64’s VIC-II chip can display. You also get free collision detection: just check the register at memory location $D01E (53278) to see if the sprite that represents the player’s ship comes in contact with any background graphics data. This method means the collision detection is pixel perfect, the flag isn’t set if the sprite overlaps empty portions of a character cell. This isn’t always desirable, but the ship in Zorphon is large and chunky, so mis-detected collisions are unlikely.
Zorphon is, of course, in the archive of Loadstar Compleat that I maintain, although admittedly it is $15 there. You could also play it on the Internet Archive’s emulation of it. That is a “cracked” version though, which I find funny because Loadstar is for the most part not copy-protected. It will offer you unlimited lives, which is also funny since it’s a score attack game, and running out of lives is the only way for it to end. I think Loadstar #39 is also available there somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it easily.
If you decide to try it, by however means, here’s some tips.
All the stages of Zorphon are made more challenging by your ship’s limited firepower, having only one shot onscreen at a time. If you miss your shot you’ll have to wait until the other one exits the screen to try again, and that can take two or three whole seconds. Getting into a rhythm of shooting at monsters helps a lot, especially in the first stage, which is all about finding that rhythm.
The first stage, Genesis, has two phases. The first end when you shoot enough of the red TIE-Fighter enemies, but to finish the second you must destroy all of the blue bouncing aliens within a limited number of passes. If you don’t get all of them in time, they’ll completely replenish, and if you fail at it again you’ll be sent back to the TIE-fighter phase!
The blue bouncing enemies are really hard to hit. I find it’s best to hang out at the left side of the screen and shoot the ones there. Every time they pass by, they distribute themselves again, and there will always be an enemy on the left side unless there’s only one left (which will move to the center of the screen).
Since Genesis cycles until you pass it, one way to get a good score is to purposely repeat it, letting the blue enemies reset and then fighting the TIE-fighter phase again. Once you know the patterns Genesis isn’t very hard, and can be easily farmed for points. It’s not a very exciting way to play though.
The second stage, Challenge, will be the end for many players. It’s the Centipede-like stage, but your shots do nothing to the mushrooms! Many of the enemies wipe out mushrooms when they pass over them, which will help you out a lot.
To finish Challenge, you must wipe out two complete waves of centipede aliens, and a few pairs of segments that come in between them. After the second wave spawns, clear the stage of centipede segments and you’ll progress.
The third stage, Attack, is really tough, and made harder by the fact that it’s so hard to get to it that you can’t practice it easily! Maybe getting better at it is a use for that infinite lives cheat on the Internet Archive version? Maybe! To finish it, I think you have to shoot enough of the bouncing asterisk enemies to pass it. Look out for the exploding bombs dropped by the flying saucers that come in from the side!
I don’t know remember if I’ve ever finished Attack and gotten to the last stage, but I seem to remember seeing a full loop at some point so I think I have. See if you can do it.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
From TerminalMontage, who’s shown up here multiple times before. I thought maybe I might have already posted this, but a quick search seems to indicate that I haven’t, and it’s a useful intersection between Nintendo things, roguelike things, and silly things.
Specifically, this Something (5½ minutes) is About the original releases of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Rescue Team, Red and Blue. And you’ll probably best see what all the About is about if you’ve played the original.
I’ll throw in some notes about the references in this video:
I’m still deep in the 8-bit computing weeds right now, and I always look to connect what I’m personally researching with what I put up on Set Side B. So lucky you, what I’ve been looking at today is The 8-Bit Guy’s videos about the history of Commodore!
It’s a series of videos (yes, on Youtube) exploring the history of that company, both lauded and hated. They released one of the best-selling computers of all time in the Commodore 64, but founder Jack Tramiel wasn’t all that great a guy. Word is the C64 was priced so low because he held a grudge against Texas Instruments, a calculator company Commodore competed against, so he moved to undercut and destroy their sales of the TI-99/4A, turning it into just another computing history footnote. He also bought rising star MOS Technologies, which had a terrific things going with the ultra low-cost 6502 processor, but then basically only used the company as Commodore’s bespoke chip fab.
But say what you will about Tramiel and other strong personality company Presidents and CEOs, when they’re successful, their ups and downs make for interesting times, to read about and hear. So “hear” you go!
The series is collected into a 13 video playlist, 8 parts of the series itself averaging about 25 minutes each, plus some extras. It’s a tale that begins with one of the first (if not the first) pre-assembled mass market personal computers, and ends with the Amiga. If the dice had only rolled differently (and maybe if Tramiel hadn’t bee forced out of the company), then instead of Apple rising to become the leading computing device maker in the world, we might be using Commodore C-Phones today.
In the old old old old old old old OLD* days, people wrote computer programs by either filling boxes on paper cards or punching out squares, like they did (maybe still do?) for standardized tests. The cards would be fed into card reading devices, some of them called Hollerith machines, to be read into the computer’s memory. (Asides: Hollerith machines were invented in the 1800s. IBM’s start was in making them. IBM’s website though won’t be keen to publicize that they were used by the Nazis.)
(Another aside: What do the olds mean? Old #1: before social media. Old #2: before smartphones. Old #3: before Google. Old #4: before before the World Wide Web. Old #5: before the internet. Old #6: before online services. Old #7: before home computers. Old #8, the all-caps one: before timeshares. There is an awful lot history in the early years of personal computing that gets overlooked.)
The ultimate point after all this discursion is that paper, while little used today, is a time-honored way of entering computer programs. A while after that neolithic era, when home computers first hit it big, there grew a market for programs that weren’t as big and expensive as boxed copies on store shelves. That was the age of the type-in program magazine.
It’s the same age that that Loadstar thing I keep bringing up belongs to, but truthfully it lies only on its edges, as it was a disk magazine, created specifically to bypass the trial by fire that type-in magazines subjected its users to: sitting at a keyboard for hours, laboriously entering lines of code, or even plain numbers, in order to run some simple game, novelty, or other software. Loadstar itself served as the disk supplement, that is, media that carries all the programs from a print magazine’s issue, for both Commodore Magazine and Power/Play. (That age of Loadstar stretches from issue 9 to 61.)
I don’t know when the first magazine that published software in print form was, that’s a solid fact kind of question, there definitely was a first at some point, but there’s been tens of thousands of magazines, some of them really short-lived and obscure, and there’s a great many edge cases to look out for. Mad Magazine, to offer just one example, published a type-in in one issue.
To state that solid fact definitively requires more time and resource access than I have. But a strong claim could be made for The PET Gazette.
The PET Gazette’s first issue was near the end of 1979. It was more of a fanzine, with a few aspects of a science journal, than a general magazine. It served a highly motivated and focused audience, the kind who would drop $800 in 1970s money on a machine that had 4 or 8K of RAM. The kind who thought making a machine perform automated calculation or data manipulation, all by itself, seemed really really neat. (I kind of feel that way, even now.) The kind like that, or that else bought one of the even earlier kit computers, like the KIM-1, which users had to assemble from parts, soldiering iron in hand, and for which a video monitor was a hopeless extravagance.
I would say at this point that you might know PET Gazette by its rebranding in the early 80s, to COMPUTE!, title in all caps, with exclamation point. But then I would be expecting you to say “Wow, I had no idea!” But who these days even remembers Compute? (I’m not going to persist in replicating 45-year-old marketing stylization, I have difficulty making myself type Xbox.)
As its title indicates, PET Gazette focused primarily on the PETs, along with the KIM-1 which is like a sibling. Compute served a community of users of many different platforms, of like half a dozen: Commodore microcomputers of course, but also Atari 8-bits, the Apple line, the TRS-80s, the early days of the IBM PC, and at times even some more esoteric models.
Compute soon spun off two or three subscriptions for specific platforms, for users who wanted more than what was limited, by space reasons, to one or two programs an issue. By far the most significant of these was Compute’s Gazette, its title a tribute, to those who knows, to the Compute empire’s origins.
I’ve mentioned here before, certainly, that Loadstar lasted for a surprising and amazing length of time, 22 years. Compute’s Gazette (Internet Archive) wasn’t nearly so long-lived, but it still made it pretty far. Wikipedia claims that it survived to 1995, but really its last issue as its own magazine was in 1990; then it persisted for a bit as an insert in Compute, then as a disk-only periodical.
Fender Tucker tells me that when Compute’s Gazette closed up, they paid Loadstar to fulfill their remaining subscription obligations, so at least they did right by their remaining customers. It was a dark day when CG perished, though, the former heavyweight of the type-in scene.
Some other type-in magazines of the time were Ahoy! (again, with an exclamation point):
…and Run:
The word has arrived via the Floppy Days podcast that the Compute’s Gazette may soon return. What really happened is that James Nagle saw that the trademark had lapsed and registered it himself. There’s no continuity of editor, writer or IP with the original. Yet I still hope that Nagle’s effort, which rebrands the Gazette as supporting all retro computing platforms, succeeds. His heart is in the right place at least. Here’s their website. I hope that they at least have the sense to offer a way to enter programs other than typing them in by hand; that was always the worst thing about these magazines.
Smash Melee has had a huge amount of attention payed to it over the years, and one source of player obsession has been the Home Run Contest.
In brief: Smash Bros. games are about racking up damage to a target, measured in percent. The higher the percent, the further an attack target flies when struck. The idea of the Home Run Contest is to do as much damage to a special Sandbag character, which doesn’t move on its own, in 10 seconds, then to hit it as hard as you can, usually with a baseball bat item, to make it fly as far as possible.
The Home Run Contest has been in every Smash Bros. game since Melee, and its first implementation has lots of weird things about it. Like, if you set the game language to Japanese, you get a slightly smaller platform, which makes your distances count slightly longer.
Lots of oddities are pointed out by Youtuber “Practical TAS”, in their 26-minutes video, here. Warning: serious geekery ahead!
Another find that should be credited to a Metafilter member, in this case AndrewStephens. It’s an interview on the site “spillhistorie.no” with Peter Liepa, creator of the 80s home computer hit Boulder Dash, an early game application for cellular automation. A digging game, like Dig Dug and Mr. Do!, but instead of just dropping single rocks or apples on enemies, falling boulders are an essential aspect of gameplay, as well as gemstones, butterflies and growing amoebas. And oddly, its publisher, First Star Software, still has a living website, yes even in 2025, and may even still be in business, presumably as a company licensing its microcomputer-era products?
Please take a moment that Peter Liepa is still alive, and willing to talk about his work, for which the same can’t be said for Doug Smith, creator of Lode Runner. There, that’s enough maudlin talk. Time to dig out from beneath a pile of boulders; no one else is gonna do it for me.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Given how similar their art styles are, it’s surprising that there aren’t more stylistic crossovers between Charles Schulz’s and Shigesato Itoi’s respective classics of popular media, but this is the first direct connection between them that I can name.
A weird dog is bothering the kids of Polestar Preschool (2 minutes), so Paula calls Ness over to do something about it. But this dog is a bit smarter than it lets on at first. Video uploaded by russmarrs2.
Let’s break down the title. “AsumSaus” is one of the best Youtubers on the subject of Super Smash Bros. Melee. He makes well-edited, entertaining videos that don’t go overboard. Overboard is hear defined as employing obnoxious editing and a speaking style that would make a morning zoo radio host say, “hey, maybe you should dial it back a little.”
AsumSaus is great, and his most popular video, which we posted here back in 2023, tells an engaging story well, about the success of aMSa, the Melee player who won championships using Yoshi, a character nearly everyone else in that scene looks down upon. Hey, if you missed that video you should go watch it now (54m). It’s enough to almost make people who (gasp!) don’t care about goofy tournament platform fighters take interest.
This video isn’t about that. In fact, I’ve been trying to not post so many Youtube videos here lately. This is the first one I’ve posted since Sundry Sunday! See, I’m trying! Josh Bycer’s doesn’t count!
AsumSaus’ video this time, his first in 10 months, is about the most emblematic Melee stage: Final Destination. The boring stage, and its symbiotic relationship with most of the roster of Melee. Specifically, the group of players who don’t want to get killed by Fox, Falco, or sometimes Captain Falcon. (20 minutes) Enjoy, if you’re of a mind to enjoy that kind of thing. If anyone could cause you to care, it’s probably AsumSaus.
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.
ABA has returned! The brilliant creator of dozens and dozens of short but incredibly catchy gamethings, like PAKU PAKU (the one-dimensional Pac-Man variant, we’ve linked it previously) has made a new one, and you really should try it. It’s free and playable in your browser! (EDIT: Oh dear, I forgot to link the game! Here it is! Follow the link, you won’t be disappointed!)
It’s a variant of the classic game Snake, where you control a long serpent as it gobbles up food, growing a segment longer each time. You don’t need me to explain Snake to you!
But, Blasnake has enemies too. They don’t attack you, but instead move around you and try to get you to collide with them. But the brilliant part is how you fight back, by surrounding them. It’s hard to see at the default game size (you might want to zoom in on the page), but there’s a line of dots projected in front of your snake. If your body and those dots enclose an area of the board, it vaporizes all the enemies inside the region, and you get points based on how many things you destroyed at once.
Every 30 food you eat (dollar-signs represent the food) you get an extra life, and your snake shrinks back down. That makes it harder to run into yourself, it’s true, but it also makes it harder to destroy enemies. You also get longer every time you score 1,000 points.
It’s really fun to play and try to beat your high score, and beyond all this there’s really good music to accompany the gameplay. Honestly you should try it just to hear it.
ABA always bats it out of the park, but this one is really nice even by their standards. The enemies are just the right balance of annoying and defeatable, and it always feels like you could do better if you played just one more time. Give it a shot, and see if you agree.
Things Pvt. Skippy is not allowed to do at the Switch 2 release event, #14: Loudly read their erotic, explicit Sonic/Shadow fanfic.
#18: Spread rumors that the Switch 2 requires a new, more costly form of electricity to use.
#23: Dress in a robe, ask others in line if they’ve accepted Mario as their lord and savior. Also, they cannot set up a shrine to their Wario Amiibo.
#26: Show off the SD Micro Express card they bought online, telling people “If you don’t have one of these, you’re already dead.”
#28: Swear people to secrecy, tell them they’re a spy working for Sony, then take pictures of people in line to send to “headquarters.”
#32: Bring a blue bowl with spikes glued to the underside, then throw it at the person at the front of the line and try to take their place.
To explain: Lists of things Private Skippy is not allowed to do (usually in the U.S. Army, but also other armed forces or even other places) are an ancient form of internet humor, possibly older than the World Wide Web itself. It’s the kind of thing that would have been traded around Usenet, or even Fidonet. (Its absence from Know Your Meme proves its affected by recency bias.) TV Tropes has a page on Skippy, a claim it originated in 2001—I think it’s older but could easily be wrong—and a link to the webpage skippyslist.com, which is a broken WordPress install. Sorry Skippy.
Here is one surviving list on the Web, although part of the process of Skippy is that people add new items as they pass it around, so there is no canonical list. I should warn you that, as a very old form of internet humor, you can expect these lists to have questionable items on them, depending on who’s posting it. The list I linked also prefaces the list with a backstory. It’s entirely unnecessary: many of us know a Pvt. Skippy of some variety, even if they never served.