Isn’t it the way? I made a Halloween post on Castlevania games, including the various videos and pages friend-of-the-blog Jeremy Parish has done on that beloved series, but wouldn’t you know it? That very day, after my post here went live, he released a new video on one of the most beloved Castlevania games, Rondo of Blood.
It might be a bit late for Halloween posts, but isn’t Halloween something we hold in our hearts year long? If we don’t, we should. Here’s that video, which is pretty long by his standards at 25 minutes:
And just yesterday he published another new video about an appropriately spooky game, Ghouls ‘n Ghosts for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, which as it turns out was ported by Yuji Naka himself! (19 minutes)
But Dancing With Ghosts (Kickstarter, free demo) is a different thing from all of those. It’s the story of a troubled young girl who can see ghosts, and the departed girl who she befriends. I’ve played through a lot of the demo, and I think it’s wonderful. It’s also inspired by the look of Studio Ghibli’s movies.
There’s less than a full day left, so please have a look and give some thought to whether you can help chip in. It’s already made its goal, and then some, but every bit will help out the production. Thanks for listening!
SkiFree was part of one of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack releases for Windows 3.1, part of their limited gaming output before the went in on Xbox. Who knows, at the rate they’re going, maybe they won’t be doing Xbox much longer.
It’s a simple game where you guide a skier down through a scrolling course, avoiding obstacles, and trying to get a good time. After finishing the course and registering a time you could keep skiing, just for the fun of it, although eventually a yeti will chase your skier down and swallow them whole. Closing times on this slope are strictly enforced.
Its creator Chris Pirih maintains a homepage for SkiFree, along with history (it’s a port of a VAX terminal game he had written in Fortran), downloads (including one of an updated, 32-bit vesion), and other info. It’s the kind of page I’m surprised to see is still up, and hope remains up for decades to come.
Hello! John “rodneylives” Harris here. Let me quickly explain this before I get into it.
I have an overabundance of games links to present through Set Side B. My usual style of doing this is to pick one of them, then maybe write a bit of text introducing it, maybe a bit of a preview, a media embed of it’s a video somewhere (nearly always Youtube), and that’s a complete post. One a day, for approaching four years now. (SSB launched on April 5th, 2022.)
But working this way, I’ve developed quite a backlog! Not all of them are really worthy of a whole post, maybe, or I don’t have a full post’s worth of context to coax out of it.
So in an effort to clean up my link collections, I think I’m going to make regular posts, maybe one a week, that’s just several things that might be interesting. I post them, my link folder get slightly shorter, each individual person might be interested in one or two items in it each, then we move on to more of the usual kind of thing the rest of the week.
2. On Mastodon, there’s an account, @everybodyvotes@social,miyaku.media, that posts every poll published on the Wii’s “Everybody Votes” channel, back in the days when Nintendo would do fun, free things just for the sake of doing them. You can even vote on them again, using Mastodon’s polling feature.
3. On Balatro creator LocalThunk’s blog, they’ve published a timeline of its history, from original concept to launch, whereupon LocalThunk earned more money than he had ever had before in their entire life.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Waverly Films used to be one of the foremost sketch comedy groups on Youtube, when sketch comedy was pretty common there, along with other groups like Barats & Bereta.
Link Gets Bullied was from MTV’s “Gaming Week,” a long-forgotten (much like MTV itself) feature where they pandered to game players for seven excruciating days. It’s just a minute long, and demonstrates why you shouldn’t take mythical, evil-destroying weapons lightly.
To think that people once cared about MTV! Is there anything about it now that isn’t just like any other channel? Like how The Discovery Channel is now mostly about fakey reality series? Remember MTV News? Remember when they had a decently respectable website?
Years after Nintendo announced that Animal Crossing New Horizons wouldn’t get any updates following the 2.0 one that also introduced the Happy Home Paradise DLC, and underlined it by not even releasing any New Years arches after 2021, they’ve gone back on that statement, announcing that in January there’ll be a Nintendo Switch 2 paid upgrade (only $5 this time), as well as a free 3.0 feature update. As they tend to do now, they announced it in a video, not a Nintendo Direct video, but still (12½m).
There was a time when I would have been thrilled to hear about this. I did, after all, write a guidebook to AC:NH, the “Black Book of Animal Crossing New Horizons,” which I still sell at itch.io. It contains an absurd amount of material. I suppose now I’ll have to update it again, but I’m feeling ambivalent about going back to the island paradise, despite the fully-upgraded house and tens of millions of bells I’ve left there.
Animal Crossing New Horizons holds a special place, not just in the series history, but in video gaming history. Incredibly, it’s the second best selling game on the Switch, at over 48 million copies, and it has the pandemic and the concomitant lockdown to blame for it. It outsold all of the other Animal Crossing games put together, going all the way back to Gamecube (and, in Japan, the N64) because a lot of people, for a time, used AC:NH as a replacement social scene, a kind of mini-MMORPG, focused not on fighting fake monsters in a bullshit fantasy world, but on decorating fake houses and islands, in a different kind of bullshit fantasy world.
And I think that’s okay, despite my use of profanity! Of course video game worlds are bullshit; that’s what they are made of. They’re all fake, they’re mere bits and bytes, but if you have a group of friends who pretend they’re real, then they gain reality from it, substance granted from their shared experience.
Well, the people are gone. I can’t expect that even a small fraction of the players it had back then are still invested in it. A few will return for this, surely, but without another lockdown it’s impossible to expect it’ll come anywhere close to it.
And even if they did… I think I’m done with Animal Crossing. Not just New Horizons, but Animal Crossing in general, even with the idea of Animal Crossing. The grandmothers who famously played the various versions, who the media happily reported on as a kind of uplifting story, they’re gone now. What happened to their memory cards, I wonder? Do their descendants load them up from time to time, pretending to be their grandmum, to falsely reassure the animals they still love them? Do they keep it as a kind of museum? Do they put it in the attic, maybe for future generations to discover, assuming their consoles still work, or sell them?
These are all troubling thoughts for me. Recent events have reminded me that life is finite. I still play video games, for my own reasons, but I don’t think I can appreciate, that I can afford, another huge timesink game like Animal Crossing, whether it be New Horizons or anything else . If I knew many other people who still played then maybe I could muster the will. I was on a Discord of Metafilter members who all played, but I left it over a year ago, before I knew they’d revive it, to clean up my server list. (Discord limits the number you can be a member of, you know. It’s higher if you play for their much-loathed “Nitro” feature, but I condemn that to extra hell.)
If this changes, I’ll let you know. The book could still use updating. But the joy in it has left me. Sorry critters; it was fun for a while.
From “Kin no Tori,” or “The Golden Bird,” an anime movie. This alchemist witch character and her cat-bat minions are so much fun!
It’s Halloween today! Boo! I don’t mean that in a bad way, I mean it enthusiastically! Boo, I say!
Growing up I was never a big fan of Halloween, other than the opportunity to get candy. I never wore a costume out. This has changed a bit in recent years, I still don’t dress up but I do try to observe the season. Today I’m running a video marathon of various things over on cytu.be. If you know me, you might know where to look to find it, if you’re interested in such things, but this isn’t really the place for it.
While waiting for trick or treaters, here’s a few vids to help you pass the time.
MrMatthews reviews all the Gameboy Castlevania titles (29m), a collection that rates from pretty good to abysmal. But that’s not what he says, he pretty much likes them all, even Adventure and Legends.
If your tastes run a bit more academic, Jeremy Parish has some dives into the Castlevania games: the original (16m) II: Simon’s Quest (15½m), Super IV (17m) and Circle of the Moon (23m). He hasn’t done III yet it seems. His old design discussions of the NES Castlevania games at anatomyofgames.com are still up, marred a bit by the fact that the site’s been hacked to host links to casino sites. Earlier this month Jeremy appeared on the Still Loading podcast to talk about the ‘Vainia, which you can listen to on the site, or on Youtube (1h33m). The embeds below are of the original and the podcast:
To finish off, an early Sundry item, TerminalMontage’s “Something About Castlevania” animation (4m). This is basically Simon Belmont’s whole personality: violence.
Another arcade classic strategy rundown, and again c0ncerning Donkey Kong. As the video rightly notes, the Springs board, a.k.a. Elevators, is most devoted players’ greatest barrier to playing to the kill screen, and even pros mess it up sometimes. I think it’s the worst part of the game, personally. Donkey Kong is great, says I, because it’s open to multiple strategies, while the later Elevators boards have to be finished a specific way, all because of those springs. That way is what this video (4m) is about.
Sadly the video has been made non-embedable, so it’s up to you to follow the link, if you care. The video encapsulates information on donkeykongforum.net (which it mislinks). That link is some hardcore geekery, of the kind beloved to Set Side B’s cadre of pixelated aliens, so please take a look.
Image from donkeykongforums.net.
Here’s the basics, in text form. Donkey Kong gets more difficult over the course of five “levels.” These are different from “boards,” a.k.a. “racks” or “screens.” In the corner of the screen there’s a notice, “L=X” where X is some number. That’s the Level. It goes up by one every time you finish a Rivets board.
The problem is, starting with Level 2, the spots at which the springs hit the ground is slightly randomized. The final climb up to Pauline’s platform is super dangerous, since Mario is vulnerable the whole way. Level 4 is the hardest difficulty for the springs on Elevators, and you have to handle it a very specific way: climb up to the first safe spot, wait for a spring that comes out bouncing at a specific location (near DK’s right foot) then running to another safe spot, then waiting for another specific spring speed to rush over and up the ladder.
So go forth and conquer the elevators, and as Coily the Sprite reminds us:
I’ll be honest, I got caught off-guard by the need to make today’s post, so it’s pretty simple today. But it’s still pretty cool.
There’s this Korean person who goes by Sanago on Youtube who used 3D pens to make models of various pop culture characters, and some of them are of video game characters. Here’s Sonic (11 minutes):
It’s been a couple of years, I believe since we reported on what we’re currently playing. This doesn’t fill in any blanks for the time since we last reported, but maybe it’ll be a useful snapshot for the current moment. Maybe we’ll return to doing these, maybe once a month?
rodneylives(John Harris): I’ve been playing a lot of Once Upon A Katamari, a new release as of this moment. Last night I played a bit of Shovel Knight for the first time, yes the very first. (I can’t play everything! And a bundle of the first game and all its DLC is currently on sale on the Switch shop.)
While mine’s not translucent purple, but white and with cool Apple II pixel art on it, the device pictures is similar to mine. I can vouch that it runs PSP games pretty well!
There’s also been some Final Fantasy VI and I, UFO 50 (Party House, Rakshasa, Mini & Max and Valbrace) and Power Wash Simulator (2nd playthrough). On Nintendo Switch Online, I’ve been playing Mr. Driller 2 for the GBA. Oh, and training amiibo players in Smash Bros. Ultimate. I also picked up a “Game Dad,” as Dan Fixes Coin-Ops calls them, at VCFMW 2025, specifically a R36S, and on it I’ve been playing a few favored things, particularly arcade games like Robotron 2084 and Cadash. What I’m really looking forward to, as you might guess from recent posts, is Kirby Air Riders on Switch 2, which isn’t here yet but is rapidly approaching.
Keith Burgun: He recently ordered a much more capable device than mine, an AYN Thor, powerful enough, so he tells me, to run Switch games. It’s still on its way, so he’s been playing the PSP version of Final Fantasy Tactics on his Retroid Pocket 5. He’s enjoyed it, but deep into the game thinks he may be getting a bit bored with it.
An AYN Thor. While prices seem to be around $250, it’s a very capable device, with two screens in a DS-like form factor. The clamshell design helps protect the screens while in one’s pocket.
GWBycer (Josh “Game Wisdom” Bycer) plays lots of indie games for his Game Wisdom Youtube channel, and as contributor many of his videos end up linked from here, so you’ll see those roughly as they happen. He does mention that, for his own enjoyment, he’s been playing Silent Hill f. Apparently, the ‘f’ is officially lowercase.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
A few years ago, former long-time voice of Mario, Luigi and Wario, and current Nintendo “brand ambassador,” Charles Martinet posted some amusing videos on Instagram, of him playing around with some figures of the plumbers and improvising their voices during his vacation in Chile. At the time I found them charming! I don’t know about others? The posts have been preserved here (10 minutes), but they aren’t the point of this post.
SuperStaticPro made some Source Filmmaker animations that repurposed the audio into little vignettes. I also like them, and they are the point of this post.
NOTE: In another world, Roguelike Celebration is going on today! A lot of people worked hard to organize it, and more worked hard to present at it, including some of the coolest people in indie gamedev, IMO, just to apply a little timely peer pressure. As I write this it hasn’t happened yet, so not a lot to say that I haven’t already, but I’ll say more about this once the talks have actually occurred. In the meantime….
I overall really like the direction the news of Kirby Air Riders is going, even if I have a few mixed feelings about it. There’s a lot of cool and funny new elements, but it also feels like Sakurai might be leaning a bit too hard into the Smash Bros. style. So many of the new features are note-for-note similar to Super Smash Bros, which I can’t just abbreviate to “SSB,” because that’s the same initials as this blog.
Like the fully-voiced opening theme song. The feature of Smash Ultimate that I hated more than perhaps any other part was that stupid theme song. It’s not that it’s a bad song itself, but every time I started the game up I was greeted by a song about the most overused tropes, not just in gaming, but in current-day media altogether: light and darkness. Oh, if my griping might start a movement to take pop culture back from terrible good-slash-evil narratives I would be a pleased whatever-it-is-that-I-am. I got the Adventure Mode out of the way very early in my time with Ultimate, I didn’t need to be reminded it existed at every startup. Air Riders has one of these songs too. I’m sure it’s nicely sung and produced, but it’s the opposite of what makes Kirby music great: bright, cheery, impressively scored tunes with an incredibly quick tempo.
Other features in both games:
For starters, the interface, especially the menus, are extremely Smash-like.
Amiibo support, in the sense that both games store machine learning parameters onto the figure’s 2K of flash memory to support trainable characters. Yes, figure players are back, the feature only interesting to me and a handful of others. I wonder how the game will utilize the approximately ½K of flash storage available to game applications this time?
Uses a currency for unlocks, and a weird kind of fake economy. Smash Ultimate has gold and “SP.” Air Riders has “Miles,” which are essentially gold coins again. Is anyone annoyed that gold, a metal without a lot of industrial use, is still absurdly valuable mostly because of jewelry use and tradition?
A very similar visual style. When unlocks happen, words splash across the screen in your face in exactly the same way familiar to anyone who followed the Smash Ultimate updates eight years ago.
Sakurai says it’s different, but “Global Win Power” still looks a whole lot like “Global Smash Power.”
On top of it all it uses the Smash Announcer, who unless my ear is mistaken (it frequently is) has been with the series since Melee, at least in English.
Not that the requisite griping is over, there’s lots of really fun things unveiled too. Like the inclusion of loads more Kirby characters, some of them pretty deep cuts. My favorites have to be Lololo and Lalala, who are direct references to HAL Laboratory’s early MSX hit Eggerland, known in the US as The Adventures of Lolo. Other than an obscure Windows release many years ago now, Lolo and Lala basically live on Planet Popstar these days, with no forwarding address left to the King of Eggerland.
Do you have any blocks that need pushing? No? Well we’re just going to hang out in case you get some.
Í’m struck by the fact that, by having so many varied villains who all have become Kirby’s friends over the years, Kirby’s adorable little universe has become one of the largest and deepest in all of gaming. Among Kirby’s friends are a mischievous penguin, a mysterious knight with a battleship, a lady robot entrepreneur, a mouse thief, a spacefairing alien, a spider person, a tricky clown, and more. Most of these characters were created after Sakurai left HAL and Nintendo, but yet are fully embraced by Air Riders, and I love that.
And there are so many weird little unnecessary touches. There’s a full lobby-like “paddock” where characters can congregate between matches, and they gave everyone full walking and jumping animations just for interacting within it. Sakurai says it took a lot of effort to make them, and I believe him. Also, it seems to be fully catered. Chef Kawasaki’s been busy, I see.
The best reveal was the new game mode, Road Trip. I’ve always liked Smash Bros’ weird side game modes, like Smash Run and Smash Board. There’s no one working in big gamedev who is as free with his thinking and design atoms as Masahiro Sakurai. He takes all these design elements and combines them in a way to create these little narrative engines. Road Trip fills the biggest gap of the original Kirby Air Ride, a game that, despite the greatness of City Trial, had absolutely no Story or Grand Prix mode, and so seemed a bit light. And indeed, there’s still no Grand Prix, or other structured racing-only mode.
Back to Road Trip, I especially like that it uses the patches from City Trial, so as you play you also create customized vehicles.
Kirby games don’t usually give you much of an indication of what day-to-day life in Dream Land is like, this is more than we’ve ever gotten.
All of the tracks from Air Ride are returning in Air Riders, although it seems the original City Trial City isn’t. Also returning is Top Ride, Sakurai’s weird homage to, of all things, Atari’s incredibly ancient Sprint series. He’s never mentioned Sprint in a Direct, but it’s so obviously a riff on Sprint. Even if he’s never heard of Sprint (given the breadth of his knowledge of the history of video games that seems really unlikely), it had to have been inspired by other games that were inspired by Sprint.
Another of Air Ride’s signature features, the Checklist, is back. To explain: each game mode has a grid of boxes, each with some feat or objective to perform. While you can unlock them in any order, you aren’t told what any of them are at first. But after you stumble upon your first unlock, the conditions of the squares surrounding that one are revealed to you, so it results in a kind of progression. Some of the squares unlock features when opened, and as you clear the board you’re eventually granted a handful of free checkmarks, to help clear out the hardest challenges.
In Air Ride, the Checklist was the only thing providing continuity between play sessions. That’s less the case with all the things there are to unlock in Air Riders, but what with Nintendo’s stubborn resistance to implementing Achievement features, as about the nearest thing to that Nintendo’s ever published, they’re welcome.
There’s a whole menu dedicated to making visual effects less jarring!
Here’s a flurry of little things I noticed:
A bespoke boss, a mecha version of our favorite emperor penguin*, called Robo Dedede. Say it quickly, it’s fun!
A special kind of collectable called gummis. They seem to have no purpose except to pile up onscreen in a physics engine and letting the player sift through them like a greedy candy miser.
A transforming vehicle, that transforms like a Transformer, metal bits shifting around into an alternate shape.
For the first time in any Kirby game, you can be nice to Whispy Woods, instead of making the old tree cry.
Some fun cameo characters revealed: Tortilding (from Forgotten Land), King Golem (from Amazing Mirror) and Computer Virus (Super Star), the funniest Kirby boss of all, where you fought it in a mocked-up JRPG-style battle.
A track only named “?” in the Direct, which uses music from the Nightmare fight from Kirby’s Adventure (the first “serious” opponent the pink blob creature ever fought), and features the Heart of Nova in the background.
For the first time really in a Nintendo game, it looks like they paid serious attention to accessibility! You can turn off screen-shake and move the camera so that motion isn’t so extreme. As time has passed I find myself more and more bothered by screen-shaking effects, though I’m not sure if that’s me, or just that they’re much more common nowadays than they were in the days of the NES.
Once of the license designs shown off uses iconography from the Japan-only Kirby Cafés.
I’d love to go to a Kirby Café some day!
* I think the official line is that King Dedede is some kind of eagle, but he’s never shown any hint of flying like a real bird, and the idea of Kirby’s first major antagonist being a penguin with royal pretensions is too much fun to reject.
