Author: rodneylives

Link Roundup 5/3/2022

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Bryan of Nintendo Everything brings us the words of the Mother 3 producer who thinks they know why it’s not been released in English: it has to do with the difficulty in bringing the special qualities of Shigesato Itoi’s prose to a language other than Japanese.

Gabe Gurwin of Gamespot thinks he knows why the Castlevania game reboot failed: the first one fit into the prior story but “frustrated” fans a bit, but the second one sucked. Eh.

Tom Nardi of hackaday brings us the experiences and pictures of Vintage Computer Festival East 2022.

One entire internet has been posting about Ocarina of Time remade in Unreal Engine with a 60fps frame rate. I am told that I should at least acknowledge this. I do so with Marc Deschamps’s mention on comicbook.com. It mentions the fact that Sora from Kingdom Hearts is playable.

Slightly more heartening is a report from Joseph Luster, writing for Crunchyroll, that two tactics games set in the R-Type universe are being remade.

Isaiah Colbert on Kotaku brings us news of Twitch’s plans for improving profits from streaming. Hint: they involve reducing the cut that streamers receive and even more ads! All problems solved! The streamers themselves don’t appear to be thrilled.

Tyler Fischer for comicbook tells us Square Enix plans of reviving the Fear Effect series.

And Lowell Bell on NintendoLife uses speculation about bringing them to Switch as their excuse to mention ten Western RPGs: Ultima (why only the original?), Diablo (it’s already got Diablos 2 and 3), Fallout (Wasteland 2 is there), Might & Magic VI (bring us Xeen!), Deus Ex, Morrowind, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, Neverwinter Nights 2, Dragon Age: Origins and Witcher II.

Keep Nintendo Weird: Space Station Silicon Valley

The wonderful podcast Keep Nintendo Weird (Podchaser – YouTube), which spotlights a lot of awesome and unusual games made for Nintendo systems, recently covered a doozy: Space Station Silicon Valley! One of a pair of games made for the Nintendo 64 by DMA Design before they became known as Rockstar North, SSSV is a clever and charming action puzzle game where you’re a microchip that can take control of robot animals in a rogue space station.

It’s notable for its trademark humor, its inventive gameplay, and a weird bug that, as I discovered personally soon after its release, actually makes it impossible to finish! While the main story can be completed, one of the optional trophies hidden in the levels won’t collect when you come into contact with it, and it was a couple of generations before software patches could be distributed after a game went live, so there is just no way to 100% the game without hacking either it or your save file somehow. Oops!

Gaming Hell: For The Frog The Bell Tolls

It’s awesome when a tile-based game uses huge letters like this.

Gaming Hell is great! It’s an obscure game investigation site with some serious Oldweb power. They recently had a look at the Japanese-only Game Boy title For The Frog The Bell Tolls, known in its home territory as Kaeru No Tame Ni Kane Wa Naru, the game whose engine went on to serve as the basis for Link’s Awakening. (EDIT: As the article points out and I skipped over, and discovered after I wrote the preceding, while Kaeru no Tame Ni Kane Wa Naru has a number of aesthetic and gameplay similarities to Link’s Awakening, under the hood people note that the engine does not seem to be similar!)

There is a whole world of Nintendo games that never made it out of their home country on release, and the company only acknowledges exist in other territories with reluctance. Games like Captain Rainbow, Doshin the Giant, and Nazo No Murasame Jo. Once in while one might get a Virtual Console release, or a mention in a Smash Bros. or Nintendo Land, but other that it seems like strict radio silence.

Ant Cooke of Gaming Hell speculates on why this game didn’t make it to the US, that it has to do with some difficult to localize content. There may be something to this, but if I might offer? Kaeru No Tame Ni Kane Wa Naru also only got one rerelease in Japan. Maybe Nintendo saw its not featuring one of their large stable of marketable characters as a weak point? Likely it’s a combination of many factors that edged the game over into possibly-unprofitable territory on some obscure spreadsheet, somewhere.

(Source) We in the US never get cool box art like this.

One could spend hours speculating on why Nintendo does or doesn’t do a thing. Ultimately they are a huge company, not a monolith but composed of hundreds of people, and many people could doom a project if they chose. It is a shame in For The Frog The Bell Toll’s case. It’s not just their loss, but all of ours.

Link Roundup 5/1/22

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Late submissions for juried independent game festival Indiecade are open until May 15th.

C.J. Wheeler for Rock Paper Shotgun: Perfect World Entertainment absorbed by Gearbox Publishing.

Mitchell Clark for The Verge tells us that Apple claims right to remove software from App Store if they aren’t downloaded recently.

Brian of Nintendo Everything reports that Aspyr is open to ports of Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, including unreleased Wii versions. The source is this tweet.

“Dreadknux” of Sonic Stadium writes of fan art that adds the movies’ Agent Stone to images stills of other Sonic properties.

Brendan Hesse of Gamespot, speaking for site staff, offers a ranking of 14 Final Fantasy games. From worst to first, the ranking, all according to original Japanese numbering and not including the MMORPGs:
2 < 15 < 13 < 3 < 1 < 9 < 4 < 8 < 7 < 5 < 7 Remake < 10 < 12 Zodiac Age < 6

This is a little towards the technical end of things, but Sudden Desu on Twitter has created a framework for developing Mega CD (a.k.a. Sega CD) games, available from GitHub.

I’ve seen it elsewhere, but I’m linking to Eric Van Allen’s report for Destructoid, on Disney Dreamlight Valley, a lifesim with Disney IP. I’m imagining it as being like Animal Crossing, but with Disney characters. Do you know how annoying a neighbor Tigger would be?

Dennis Payne of Gaming On Linux tells us of a Dungeon Crawler Jam hosted by dungeoncrawlers.org, with some interesting output!

Ian Walker of Kotaku tells us of a mod for Final Fantasy VII Remake that brings Yoshitaka Amano-like designs to the generally un-Yoshitaka-Amano-like Barrett!

8 Eyes (image borrowed from MobyGames)

Alex Donaldson of VG247 snidely and suitably mocks the Denuvo DRM in the upcoming Sonic Origins for protecting the digital virtue of the original Sonic games, which have long been widely traded on the web.

Adam Conway at XDA lets us know of Skyway, a work-in-progress Nintendo Switch emulator made specifically for Android.

Christian Donlan, writing on Eurogamer, lets us know of Playdate games available on itch.io!

It fell to Sean Hollister at The Verge to inform us of a hack of a Fischer-Price toddler game controller to make it suitable for playing Elden Ring. Was it made by foone? It wasn’t, it was Rudeism? Cool.

And Steve Watts, writing for Gamespot, has, to mark the 35th anniversary of the release of the original Castlevania (the game not the anime), a listing of games not-too-subtly inspired by it, like 8 Eyes for the NES. Although this reviewer feels compelled to note they left out The Transylvania Adventure of Simon Quest!

Sleep Baseball

We here at Set Side B are about computers, and we’re about games, and we’re about the intersection between the two, which happens by accident to include Northwoods Radio Sleep Baseball, available as individual files, and also through Google and Apple‘s podcast systems.

People have remarked about the powerful soporific effects of having a baseball game playing on the radio when you’re trying to fall asleep at night. But there are several difficulties with using baseball for sleep-producing: there’s not always a game on, when the game’s over there could be any loud thing on afterward, and there’s always the chance something exciting might happen that would rouse you from your repose and briefly cause you to care.

Sleep Baseball solves all of these issues. The games played are not on a radio but on your phone or computer, as audio files. The Sleep Baseball league is entirely fictional, so there is no actual drama. And the announcer is pretty relaxed and low-key, as are all the ads (for fake products and businesses), so you don’t have to worry about sudden bursts of interest.

If you’ve followed Sleep Baseball before, you should know now that they have recorded their third game, and have recorded some new ads. If you had gotten tired of the same game and events between the Big Rapids Timbers and the Cadillac Cars, it might be of interest to you to give the new recordings a try. Sweet dreams!

Sundry Sunday: Strong Bad Plays Marzipan’s Beef Reverser

You made it through another week of life in 2022! Here is some video silliness to congratulate you, and encourage you to keep on keepin’ on!

I’m always down for an excuse to link new Homestar Runner content, but this here’s a gaming blog! It’s gotta be about games Mr. Strong Man.

What’s that you say? It is a game? Well fine then, I will gladly accept that flimsy excuse! It’s Marzipan’s Beef Reverser, and it’s on itch.io. You play Only Girl in the Homestarniverse Marzipan as she whips mobile steaks with her Shantae-like hair in a Game Boy setting, sending them careening into a cow skeleton, helping to reconstitute it back into a cow. I’m sure it works that way in real life too. And notice, it’s not a Flash game, it’s an actual Game Boy rom file, playable in your favorite homebrew-capable Game Boyish setting.

And as a special extra, they recorded Strong Bad, in VTuber style, playing through it and unlocking all the bonus extras. It’s a bit slight, but in the grim darkness of the far future, we accept all the H*R stuff we can staff.

Devlog of Cross Breeder X

A short devlog from RujiK the Comatose about a monster breeding sim they’ve been working on. Dismayed as a kid by the fact that breeding in video games tends to be done according to tables rather than truly from combining the attributes of the parents, they set out to create a procedural version that matched what they expected when they were young. The results seem to be satisfactorily freaky, although, possibly to the dismay of some, we get no renditions of monster mating.

A quick digression. They’re basically redoing what was done in Spore some 14 years ago now. Why is this interesting, while Spore is old hat? My guess it’s that the tech is being put in service of a Pokemon-like game instead of Will Wright’s extremely generic simulationist gameplay.

Memory Machine 57: Preserving 70s Arcade Machines

The Memory Machine podcast has a new episode talking about the preservation of 70s arcade machines. Guests include Ethan Johnson, Kate Willaert, Dale Geddis, and Kevin Bunch of Atari Archive.

Games from the classic (Space Invaders onwards) and later eras of arcade machines tend to be preserved fairly well, or at least have MAME watching their backs, but there was a whole era of arcades before that time, that pose special challenges for preservation. Atari/Kee’s early release The Quiz Game Show, for instance, their first game using a processor, read questions off of special data tapes that may not even exist nowadays. Many games from that era had no processor, and were constructed out of discrete logic components.

When I wrote part one of We Love Atari Games, I was surprised by how many games from this era are so little known now. Atari’s Football, for example, sold extremely well, even keeping up with Space Invaders for a little while (until Super Bowl season that year ended), but I barely even heard of it before I started working on the book.

These games are important to preserve too, but the difficulty in emulating them, their great rarity, and the inescapable arrows of time and entropy present huge challenges. Please listen to the podcast for more information, from people who know much more about them than me.

Link Roundup 4/29/22

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Cian Maher for IGN, on players who obsessively chase rare “shiny” variants of Pokemon.

Ted Litchfield for PC Gamer, on the disappointment of FFXIV‘s producer on player taunting.

Morgan Park of PC Gamer tells us Call of Duty has lost 50 million players in a year, a third of their base

Andrew Kiya of Siliconera noticed a tweet in which Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai revealed facts about the origins of the Kirby Dance (what dance? this dance).

Keith Stuart of The Guardian (wow, drebnar!) on why Sonic the Hedgehog is great.

Michael McWhertor for Polygon tells us that Yuji Naka was kicked off the Balan Wonderworld project six months before it finished, partly for bringing up quality issues. He mentioned possibly retiring from the games industry.

Steven Blackburn of Screen Rant informs us that some fans are working on a third season of the old Saturday Morning Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon show. That’s the “darker” one, with Princess Sally and Bunny Rabbot. The other one from the time, made for syndication, was sillier, and the podcast What A Cartoon did an episode on it with Ian Jones Quartey.

Jody Macgregor for PC Gamer on the D&D Gold Box games coming to Steam, and why they’re great.

And Jason Fitzsimmons of Ghostbusters News points us to a tweet about a fan project to hack the character of Winston Zeddemore into the Sega Genesis Ghostbusters game, where he had been originally excluded.

The New Yorker: Mario at 40

In addition to the ZX Spectrum, Nintendo mascot Mario, née Jumpman, also turns 40 this year.

I’ve actually seen people claim that Mario is the perfect mascot, like he were destined towards super-stardom. He was nothing of the sort! Only a vaguely ethnic stereotype at first, although purposely a bit ugly in his original incarnation, he’s a working-class kind of guy. It seems prescient now, but it was the 80s at the time of his creation. Who picks a carpenter (his original occupation) to be their hero? Shigeru Miyamoto does. That’s really the secret of Mario’s success: he was created by one of the most successful game designers of all time, as part of his first project.

The New Yorker, which, it’s a fact, publishes humor other than cartoons, has a pretty funny bit of short fiction in tribute to Nintendo’s plumber and his advancing age by Simon Rich, even if it posits a version of Mario who’s a bit seemy, and worries that he’s-a gonna be cancelled. But it ends on a happy note, with Mario finally getting that back surgery he’s been needing for so long. Wait, what? Also he gets scammed by Wario.

The New Yorker is one of those publications that throws up a paywall at times, probably related to how many articles you’ve seen this month, so be warned.

And I know what you’re-a thinking: “How does Super Mario go broke? You collected entire rooms of coins! What happened?” And the answer is-a simple: I trusted a close personal friend to manage-a my money. And I can’t say too much about what happened, because the lawsuit is-a ongoing, but essentially, all those years I thought that I was riding Yoshi, it was the other way around.

Link Roundup 4/27/22

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Gavin Lane of Nintendo Life: Playnote gets a Flipnote Studio-style art app.

Jay Peters of The Verge, also on Playnote. Its makers wonder if its seasonal distribution model will be appreciated by purchasers of its becranked yellow joybox.

Ollie Reynolds of Nintendo Life: UbiSoft to shut down server support for a number of older titles.

Florence Ion (cool name!) of Gizmodo: Google Play is getting data safety settings.

Ollie Reynolds of Nintendo Life, again: Lego to release a huge new Super Mario set.

Thomas Whitehead of Nintendo Life (lot of items from them today): Game Freak to offer employees option of four-day workweek. Awesome!

Wes Finlon of PC Gamer: Moneyfarm Square-Enix unveils a new $11,600 statue of Terra from Final Fantasy VI riding Magitech armor that caused series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi to basically go WTF. Remember, back when he designed the first game in the series, Square was facing issues whether their little game development operation could survive.

“Master Blaster,” if that is their name, at Sora News 24, on Sega trying to bring eSports into Japanese high schools with a Puyo Puyo Boot Camp. “Listen up maggots, you’re going to spend the next hour setting up combos and fighting Draco Centauros until you get it right and I don’t want no backtalk or I’ll bust you down to facing Nohoho again!”

Rhys Wood of TechRadar: An Elden Ring demake for Game Boy is in the works.

Luke Plunkett of Kotaku: Super Mario movie delayed, Miyamoto promises it’ll be worth the wait. Aww, it’s just like that apocryphal quote often attributed to him. This reporter is overjoyed, the last one ended on that cliffhanger, Daisy was back from Dinohattan and needed Mario and Luigi’s help again, no doubt because of some scheme hatched by Koopa. I wonder how they’ll manage to bring Dennis Hopper back from the dead to reprise his role?

Alana Hauges, also from Nintendo Life: Sega plans to delist classic games from some platforms (but not Switch) in anticipation of the release of Sonic Origins.

And Ryan Dinsdale of IGN tells us Sony is creating a game preservation team, of which this reporter can only say, IT’S ABOUT FREAKING TIME.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe

It’s hard to believe that the original The Stanley Parable, one of the weirdest games in memory, is nine years old. It’s just gotten an expanded version with even more disturbingly hilarious narrative metatextuality. Or, if you wish, hilariously disturbing metatextuality narrative. Metatextually narrative disturbing hilarity?

Now there’s an Ultra Deluxe version, which is described as a “re-imagining.” It’s a third-off on Steam for the moment, putting its price close to that of the original, which is still listed on Steam, waiting to trick people into buying it who don’t know there’s an expanded version on the same store. This version also has ports to Switch, the two most recent PlayStations, and the current/past three Xboxes. I’d hate to be in charge of that build chain.

So once again prepare to pilot Stanley through an FPS without any combat or weapons, experiencing* a story, and a narrator, who reacts to your actions in entertaining ways. The original game had so many riffs on its subject that it might be worth picking up the new version just to see what further milk they can extract from its thematic teat.

(* “And the prize for the Most Generic Verb goes to….”)