Set Side B

Set Side B 2024 in Review

We used to do monthly summary posts, but they ended up being a lot of work to keep up, and often there would be something interesting I’d want to post about that would preempt them. So in their place, and in recognition of Set Side B’s new Bluesky feed (which supplements, but doesn’t replace, our Mastodon feed), here’s a recap of what I consider to be just some of the more-interesting blog posts we published in 2024.

If you’re just coming in from social media and wondering what we’re about, Set Side B is a daily blog that covers what we call “the Flipside of Gaming” (notice the tasteful use of our tagline), specifically in the Retro, Niche and Indie fields. All of that basically gives us license to chase after whatever gaming information we enjoy, which is usually the antithesis of AAA gaming. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we do cover games sometimes that might be called Triple-A, the Legend of Zelda series comes up a lot and they’re often considered headliners, but Nintendo generally tends to have rather a different approach to gamedev than other companies. I’m not going to say they’re perfect, frog knows they have their faults, but they still manage to surprise us from time to time.

So, let’s get on to that recap. Posts marked Sundry Sunday are finds from gaming culture, usually funny Youtube videos. Posts that largely include original content by me are marked Original. I might have misapplied that signifier in places, because I often include extra commentary on posts, and even after spending two hours constructing this behemoth of a list, I have gone mostly by memory and not reviewed every post here. I’m certain that you’ll find something interesting, if you have a look. Set Side B’s archives are unusually rich with wonders, mostly found but sometimes made, and I’m sure if you take a spelunk through our mines, you will be rewarded.

JANUARY

JAN 1: Mario Kart’s catch-up system

JAN 2: FM-synth enhanced version of the Space Harrier theme on Japanese Master System hardware

JAN 5: The many fan revivals of Toontown Online

JAN 6: Dialup AOL-era Neverwinter Nights

JAN 9: Original — The 10th-Key scatter bug in NES Pac-Man

JAN 12 & MAY 20: Hempuli’s many riffs on Sokoban – Part 1, Part 2

JAN 15 & 16: Dark Arts of Pinball – Bang Backs and Deathsaves

JAN 21: AGDQ highlight: Playing Gyromite, but with a dog in place of R.O.B.

JAN 24: Original — On Stephen’s Sausage Roll

JAN 27 & 29: Displaced Gamers’ Behind the Code on Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Part 1 and Part 2

JAN 31: Gamefinds — Cosmic Collapse, a Suika Game-style remake in Pico 8, but with better play

APR 27 & JUN 25: Original — On Dungeon, a 30-year-old CRPG system for the Commodore 64, and my own attempts to rerelease it. The original and efforts to revise it.

APR 29: Commodore Free Magazine

MAY

May 2: Moviecart, adapting films to play on an Atari 2600

MAY 3: The history of KidPix

MAY 5: Sunday Sunday — Animated Lego breakfast with Super Mario

MAY 6: Retro Game Mechanics explains how to glitch out Super Mario World by stomping Wigglers

MAY 9: Which version of Wizardry to play?

MAY 15: Original — Comparing the character sets of microcomputers

MAY 16: Original — A directory of U Can Be Video Games’ videos

MAY 23: Nintendo uncensors Vivian’s transness in the remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

MAY 24: Original — @Play: Which is better, ring mail or splint mail?

MAY 25: Dani Bunten’s early classic computer game Wheeler Dealers has been preserved

MAY 30: Awesome Donkey Kong romhack compilation

MAY 31: Ocarina of Time timer bug, taking advantage of extremely low health

JUNE

JUN 4: The esports scene around Farming Simulator

JUN 7: Hardcore Gaming 101 thread on obscure arcade secrets

JUN 9: Sundry Sunday — Bing Bang, an awesome animation for a Splatoon 3 song

JUN 10: Why does Pac-Man’s split screen happen? Video explainer, with a lengthy text explainer-explainer by me

JUN 13: Complete but abandoned Tarzan Atari 2600 game recovered after 40 years

JUN 14: On Game Dads, small, inexpensive yet capable handheld emulation machines

JUN 16: Sundry Sunday — Mexican Flyer (that song from Space Channel 5) and its history

JUN 22: Dan Olsen of Folding Ideas discusses James Rolfe, the Angry Video Game Nerd

JUN 28: Mattel’s handheld Dungeons & Dragons LCD game

JULY

JUL 2: Website for generating animated Earthbound battle backgrounds

JUL 5: Original — On the history of Wizardry

JUL 8: The marquee and instruction card for Vs. Super Mario Bros (including a rather different official illustration of Mario than you usually see from Nintendo)

JUL 12: Snafuru’s extensive Wizardry fanpage

JUL 13: The MAD Magazine type-in program

JUL 16: Blade & Bastard, the (current!) Wizardry novel/manga

JUL 19: Dune author Frank Herbert’s book on 80s microcomputers, “Without Me You’re Nothing”

JUL 20, 25: Original — Getting Started in Digital Eclipse’s remake of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, Part 1 & Part 2

JUL 23: The Mr. Saturn text generator

JUL 29 & AUG 5: Looygi Bros tests various glitches in the Nintendo World Championships game, Part 1 & Part 2

JUL 31: A presenter at RustCon explains why MISSINGNO happens in Pokemon

AUGUST

AUG 2: Original — Review of World of Goo 2

AUG 6: Shmuplations translates an interview with a programmer on arcade Donkey Kong

AUG 13: Original — Science facts from No Man’s Sky

AUG 14: Comparing versions of Space Harrier

AUG 15: How randomness is used in Ms. Pac-Man

AUG 17: Complete Youtube playthroughs of the original Zork trilogy

AUG 19: A blog about Sega’s Flicky

AUG 20: Hidden Dialogue in Earthbound

AUG 21: The game Mission: Impossible on CP/M

AUG 24: Sunsoft’s Hebereke cartoons on Youtube

AUG 28, 29 & SEP 2, 4 & NOV 19: Original — How to play Atari Games’ Rampart, and also someone other than me talking about Rampart, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, someone else

SEPTEMBER

SEP 3: Obit for Andrew Greenberg, co-author of Wizardry

SEP 7: Hidden flags in Earthbound, the Mole Playing Rough, and the Game Over Glitch

SEP 9: Balatro University’s beginner’s guide to extremely high scores

SEP 10: Spelunky on the Commodore 64

SEP 15: Balatro (intentional) deck-peeking involving Misprint

SEP 18: Gamefinds — Blob the Klex

SEP 19: Kaze Emanuar on misapplied optimizations in Super Mario 64

SEP 20: Why hasn’t Nintendo implemented achievements?

SEP 22: Sundry Sunday — The Untitled Goose Programme

SEP 25: Katamari Damacy turns 20

SEP 26: Nicole Express investigates incompatibility between Guardic Gaiden (The Guardian Legend) and the Twin Famicom

SEP 30: The Rogue Archive

OCTOBER

OCT 2: Ed Logg on creating Gauntlet

OCT 4: Original — Getting Started in Pilot Quest (UFO 50 game # 44)

OCT 5: A walkthrough of Barbuta (UFO 50 game #1)

OCT 6, DEC 22: Sundry Sunday — The Amazing Digital Circus, Parts 1-3, Part 4

OCT 8: On the maddening difficulty of “Snowman’s Lost His Head” in Super Mario 64

OCT 9: Aftermath’s Chris Person on web forums in 2024

OCT 11: Whatever happened to Toadsworth?

OCT 12: Masahiro Sakurai on Satoru Iwata

OCT 15: HTML for People, an online book about learning to make websites for themselves, as intended

OCT 18: Displaced Gamers on the awfulness of NES Ikari Warriors

OCT 22: Original — My talk on Mystery Dungeon games for Roguelike Celebration 2024

OCT 23: UFO 50 Showcase

NOVEMBER

NOV 7: Randomly-occuring debug mode in Super Mario All-Stars’ version of Mario 3

NOV 8: Blaster Master & Wing of Madoola’s unreleased and lost arcade versions

NOV 14: Tomato’s excellent game translation blog Legends of Localization shows fitful signs of activity

NOV 17: Remake of the DK Rap by Grant Kirkhope and Substantial

NOV 18: Score keeping on the NES

NOV 21: Super Mario Bros. Mini on the Pico 8

NOV 22: Retro365 on Little Computer People

NOV 23: How many Bokoblins are in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom?

NOV 26: Almost Something on game rental lawsuits and photocopying instruction manuals

NOV 28: Original — A deep strategy guide to Party House (UFO 50 game #25)

NOV 29: Moving Miis from the Wii to the Switch

NOV 30: Someone has written a script that will defeat ANY game of Pokemon Platinum

DECEMBER

DEC 2: The Zelda Timeline is updated to account for Echoes of Wisdom

DEC 6: Game making IDEs GB Studio and BB Studio

DEV 11: Kit & Krysta take a tour of a secret gamedev hangout in Tokyo

DEC 13: Intro videos for Caves of Qud

DEC 14: Info from a data scrape of the entire Steam storefront

DEC 15: Sundry Sunday — An old cartoon, “Microcomputers: An Introduction”

DEC 16: Nintendo’s weird corporate structure

DEC 17: Some Body lays out how the AI works in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red & Blue Rescue Team

DEC 19: Grouping ghosts in Ms. Pac-Man

DEC 24: The conclusion of the backstory of Team Fortress 2

DEC 25: A program that plays Animal Crossing music and weather noises in the backgroun on your computer

DEC 30: Hunter R. explains the letter grading system in Gamecube Animal Crossing

rodneylives

Gaming Feast StoryBundle

There’s a game ebook bundle going on at StoryBundle, with a collection of posts from Set Side B on it! But more than that, it has books on Mortal Kombat by David Craddock, books on beat-em-ups and horror games from Hardcore Gaming 101, on early arcade history from Andrea Contato, and books from Boss Fight Games on Parappa the Rapper, Goldeneye 007 and Minesweeper! It’s got just five days remaining.

That’s mine, in the upper right corner! It’s a reference to how many Youtube videos we’ve
featured lately.

You can get all 10 books for $25! It’s gone up lately but it’s still really worth it! All of the books have no DRM and can be read in most any reader, including Amazon devices! They can read EPUBs now! At last finally surprisingly at this late date!

StoryBundle is a wonder, they always present so much interesting stuff. I’m rather surprised they keep asking me back, so I try to make my own weird little contributions to it worth your while.

Gaming Feast StoryBundle (ends December 14th)

rodneylives

On One Of Our Tears of the Kingdom Videos

The world is a weird place.

Last week, our minor character Röq (pictured left), a barely disguised excuse to post Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom content on our blog, made a video about something that happened to them in the game. They posted it to Youtube. That video is embedded below:

They made a post containing it. The video itself is ten seconds long. It’s good for a few laughs. I’m going to drop character now, Röq is, after all, just me pretending.

Well, we keep getting comments on that video. It’s weird. So I went in and checked its view count.

The video has over 131,000 views on Youtube. Dear holy frog!

This fish *doesn’t* have 130,000 views. Poor Marot.

A couple of other posts have 4K and 11K views respectively. I guess there’s just a huge demand for Tears of the Kingdom meme posts right now? The odd one out is the Fish Songs video, about Marot, a Zora who “sings” the same “song” in her dialogue in both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, that video only has like 20-or-so views. There’s no accounting for musical taste.

Interesting information! If you have a video on Youtube that gets over 100,000 views, even though it has ads, and monetization isn’t available to you, what you receive is exactly bupkis.

There’s such a demand that I mused about going all-in on TotK memes, and… eh, I’m good? I’m not really a meme kind of person? I find all the jokes about Rauru trolling Link in the comments to be kind of tiresome? I’m not mad or upset at all, I’m just kind of numb to it. I’m glad people think its funny, but I feel like playing to this crowd is a dead-end for me. I’m not going to stop making videos, far from it, but there’s as good a chance it’ll be another post about something like Marot (who I adore).

If you’re reading this blog from the URL in the video comments: hello! Welcome to Set Side B! I work very hard to make daily posts about gaming matters. We have extensive archives on many topics. If you read us long enough you will find many strange and interesting things. Thanks for visiting!

rodneylives

Set Side B is One Year Old!

Thanks for reading Set Side B! This year we’ve talked about roguelikes and classic arcade games and romhacks and silly game videos and even some more esoteric subjects, like Wordle clones and crossword puzzles, and all kinds of other things. We intend to bring you lots more, over the next year, from the Flipside of Gaming.

Might I suggest taking a moment to investigate some of our finely-sifted tags? There’s @Play, the continuation of my old GameSetWatch roguelike column, Arcade for Arcade Mermaid and other arcade gaming posts, Sundry Sunday for fun gaming memes and videos, and Romhack for Romhack Thursday and similar posts.

rodneylives

Set Side B Changes Formats!

I’m thrilled to announce that today marks the beginning of big news for Set Side B. We’re switching our theme! We’re no longer providing the most eclectic and interesting of retro, indie and niche gaming information. No, starting on this auspicious day we’re going to all old websites and ancient meme videos!

We’re talking zombo.com! We’ve got YTMND! The Onion! I Can Has Cheezburger! Know Your Meme!

You like wikis? Have you heard of Everything₂, or The Earth Edition of the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? I hear there is also another upstart wiki-based knowledge site out there somewhere, we look forward to the day when it’s nearly as content-packed as E2 or H2G2.

Remember Slashdot? Remember Digg? I mean the Digg after the Digg that succeeded Digg! Have you been to Fark lately? How about MetaFilter? For some reason I’m still there! The twin fonts of news, Salon and Slate! Liberal infozones Dailykos and Talking Points Memo, they still exist, thumbing their noses at ennui and entropy!

Project Gutenberg is still gamely trying to give away a trillion ebooks! Snopes debunks all the worst misinformation out there, and Cecil Adams’ The Straight Dope column stopped running, but seems to be now running again, and new columns debut on their message boards! And the Internet Archive, in particular their Wayback Machine, is an essential tool for any thinking netizen, and I hear they could really use your support!

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency still brings a droll sort of funny. The IMDB may be owned by Amazon now, but you can still get a ton of information on nearly every form of visual media there. Rotten Tomatoes still aggregates movie reviews from critics and viewers alike.

Game stuff? GameFAQs, although owned by Gamespot, is still around, and StrategyWiki is the good version of what Fandom ruthlessly exploits. The Cutting Room Floor provides info and esoterica on hundreds of games!

There are webcomics too! Let’s see. XKCD, Argon Zark, Dork Tower, Order of the Stick, Penny Arcade, PvP, Bob the Angry Flower, Girl Genius, Megatokyo and The Perry Bible Fellowship! Also Maakies and Red Meat (although they’re a tad edgier, and Makkies is sometimes NSFW).

We hope you’ve enjoyed this April Fool’s Day post! Happy thoughts! It’s intended as a real and useful post and certainly isn’t just an excuse to write whatever I wanted today!

But pleaase remember: the internet isn’t forever. The sites you love now won’t always be around. Ask me about Suck.com, Plastic, or the Brunching Shuttlecocks someday. But not today, I’ve got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side.

Have a few ancient Youtube videos from our voluminous files! (Yes, we keep files of cool Youtube videos. We’re awesome that way.)

That should be enough for now. Gotta keep some of it in reserve. For later….

rodneylives

What We’re Playing 11/18/2022

John Harris: I’ve been playing a ton of Glitch revival Odd Giants, which I mentioned last month. It’s incomplete but still under development, and the original game was never complete anyway. I might write something more on it in the near future.

Josh Bycer: I just started playing Warriors of the Nile 2. it’s a tactical strategy game with roguelike elements too, a lot of ways to break the game with the right skills and every character has their own abilities and strategies to use.

Phil Nelson: I finally have been playing the recent Marvel’s Spider-Man games and Miles Morales really does kick ass as a game most of the time, but I still run into some bullshit. In a more just world we’d have a proper Spider-Man roguelike.

I like how Josh and Phil are talking about roguelikes, and I’m really into an old non-violent MMORPG with like maybe 100 players. I’ve always got to be contrary I guess.

rodneylives

Set Side B September 2022 Recap

Some of the posts we published last month:

Sept 1: We only had one @Play post in September as other things competed with my time, but it was a good one, on the history of Angband!

I probably was at this locale unveiling! Up in the cloud with an eye on it, in the top-right corner! We could usually only have six avatars physically in a locale back in those days but the robed ones (called *oracles*) could override that limit.

Sept 6: We linked to the Reno Project, which seeks to preserve information on early and foundational virtual worlds Lucasfilm Habitat, Club Caribe, WorldsAway and its variants and descendants, a matter of which I have some personal experience.

Sept 7: We pointed to Nicole Express’ post explaining NES Mappers!

Sept 8: A true classic of one-person gamedev tools, the Zelda Classic engine and its editor software ZQuest! It originated way back on DOS but is still being worked on today! Amazing!

Can you do it? Can you succeed at the internet’s ultimate challenge? Can you FIND THE SPAM?

Sept 9: I’ve been doing a lot of looking back on old web games personally as of late, and we look at a quick and very dry joke on the formula, probably going back to at least 1994, Find The Spam.

Sept 13: Final Fantasy IV has an unusual bug concerning how it handles doors leading into buildings that we examined, in a post on its Door Stack Glitch.

Sept 17: Sonic Retro’s guide to that series’ physics!

Sept 19: Also to do with Sonic the Hedgehog, did you know that game’s Chemical Plant Zone boss is much easier than it first seems?

Sept 28: Remember the GROW games, from EYEZMAZE and On?

Sundry Sunday:

Adam West in the PS1 Golden Nugget game! Crash Bandicoot commercials and live-action videos from Japan! Cutscenes from Pepsiman! Strong Bad plays DOS text adventure Vampire Castle, with illustrations made by The Cheat!

This song is an amazing earworm, even if you don’t speak Japanese at all

Josh Bycer’s indie dev posts:

Top games of Gamescom! Demo Spotlight – Video 1 – Video 2 – Video 3 – Video 4

Indie Showcases! 9/12 – 9/21 – 9/23 – 9/28

Zachtronic’s final game, Last Call – Fashion Police Squad – A review of Moonlander’s Steam store page – Rogue Command developer interview – Genfanad developer interview

Romhack Thursday, a new feature we began last month:

Advanced NES Rom Utility and Metroid romhack Junkoid

To find more invigorating posts, please look through our well-stocked sidebar. Many of our posts aren’t the sort to spoil, so as we put up more content, you’ll find more there to discover!

Thanks for reading Set Side B through the month of September! We will continue bringing you the most interesting finds from the Flipside of Gaming.

rodneylives

Set Side B August 2022 Recap

A spotlight on some interesting posts from August….

2nd: What are blobbers? Wizardry-style maze games, usually party-based dungeon crawls. How many has there been? At least 48, and definitely a lot more!

8th: A short post, but interesting. I found, from the official Nintendo SNES devguide on the Internet Archive, a list of things that could get a game rejected.

10th: It was all over the internet, but still, we reported on that hidden cheat code in Super Punch-Out!! that let you play it against a friend.

11th: The developer menu buried in arcade versions of Mortal Kombat and its sequels and how to access it from attract mode. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to show this off to multiple people in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and it never fails to impress.

12th: Mamesaver, the screensaver that uses the roms in your MAME folder.

13th: Revivals of old online services QuantumLink, AOL, and Prodigy. No word about Compuserve though.

15th: Arcade Mermaid visits Vs. Castlevania, in which a hard game gets much, much harder.

16th: Hyrule Interviews, a ton of information that the developers of Zelda games have revealed to the media.

17th: An old video but still fascinating, the last new Data East Jurassic Park pinball machine is opened on camera.

19th: Chasing the world record in Hatetris, a player-hostile Tetris variant.

22nd: NCommander on Youtube on why 3D Pinball was removed from Windows Vista.

27: The absurdly weird and detailed romhack of the prototype of Monster Party, starring Elvira!

29th: The long (in both number of entries and runtime) Youtube series Identifying Luck in Mario Party, which is an amazing detailed look into the internals of those games.

30th: The Museum Monster presents a weird moment in video games: the Cleopatra bonus in arcade Star Force.

@Play: Reintroduction to Angband – Playing the game

Sundry Sunday:
Lore Sjoberg’s Alt Text: The Five Most Guilt-Inducing Video Games
Old Commercial for Pitfall!, with a young Jack Black
Strong Bad Email #94, Video Games
Cabel Sasser’s Buggy Saints Row: The Musical

Josh Bycer’s indie dev posts:
Store Page Review of Metroplex Zero
Interview with Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games
Interview with independent dev Brian Cronin
Interview with Gideon Griebenow of World Turtles
Store Page Review of Transcendence

Indie Stream Archive from 8/15

Indie Game Showcase:
8/6: Mahokenshi, Gastova The Witches of Arkana, Castle Cardians, Transiruby, Vesper Ether Saga, BackBeat
8/12: Ancient Gods, Critadel, Deiland: Pocket Planet, Monster Tribe, Zoeti, Printersim
8/15: Spellbook Demonslayers, Mech Shuffle, Endling Extinction is Forever. Ginger the Toothfairy, Lightsmith, Myth of Mirka, Supernova Tactics, Fabled Lands, Kokoro Clover Season 1
8/22: Trinity Archetype, Green With Energy, Super Grave Snatchers, The Lightbringer, Happenlance, Timemelters
8/24: Affogato, Rogue Genesia, City Limits, The God Unit, Redshot, Combo Card Clashers
8/27: Evertried, Sands of Aura, The Shore, Infraspace, Rogue Spirit, Ruin Raiders
8/29: Hex of the Lich, So to Speak, It’s a Wrap, We Took That Trip, Eternal Remnant The First Chapter, The Mortuary Assistant

To find more interesting posts, please look through our over-full sidebar. We now have archives that you can browse from! Many posts you find here aren’t the sort to go obsolete, so as we put up more and more content, you’ll find more and more wonderful stuff to discover there.

Thanks for reading Set Side B through the month of August! We will continue bringing you the most interesting finds from the Flipside of Gaming.

rodneylives

Set Side B July 2022 Recap

Favorite posts from July….

2nd: The weird “Triforce%” run from SGDQ’s 2022’s TASbot presentation is explained.

5th: Review of games presented in SGDQ’s Silly Block.

7th: @Play: An early level FAQ for Omega. After doing a ton of posts the month before, we took it easy on @Play in July.

9th: Reviving the Ouya.

10th: A rare substantial Sundry Sunday post, a collection of YouTube videos that purport to explain Kingdom Hearts’ legendarily convoluted story.

11th: Arcade Mermaid: Pepper 2, ultrafast maze game from Exidy.

18th: A popular longpost we did about rebus crossword puzzles. Of special note, this is currently the Set Side B post with the most hits, with over a thousand pageviews.

21st: Obituary for Robert Koeneke, creator of Moria, the first non-Rogue roguelike.

23rd: Video review of Zachtronics’ final game, Last Call BBS.

27th: A weird find, GameSurge, a gaming website that hasn’t updated since 2005 but is still on the web.

28th: Scott Adams’ video Q&A about his career and his early parser-based games and company Adventure International.

Indie Dev Showcase archives

2nd: Monster Harvest, Recompile, The Night Is Grey, Space Tow Truck, Fire Tonight, Arboria.

23rd: Hack or Die, Batboy, Citizens Farlands, Alina of the Arena, Remnants of the Rift, Itorah.

30th: Moons of Ardan, Terror of Hemasaurus, Hex of the Lich, Firekeep, Aztech Forgotten Gods, and Tactical Galactical.

Developer Interviews

The Dark Heart of Balor

Chris Knowles

Videogame Fables

Sundry Sunday

Pixel Orson Welles Disses Game Characters, Summarizing Kingdom Hearts, Mario Frustration, Take Me Home Mario, Classics of Game

To find more interesting posts, please look through our well-stocked sidebar. We still need better archive browsing, I recognize, as we work to fill Set Side B full to overflowing with interesting and entertaining video game news and information on a daily basis, and most of our posts do not have an expiration date.

Thanks for reading Set Side B through the month of July! We will continue bringing you the most interesting finds from the Flipside of Gaming.

rodneylives

June 2022 Recap

Chrontendo #60 covered Final Fantasy III, by the Japanese numbering! Dr. Sparkle thinks it may be the best Famicom RPG of all!

Some favorite posts from the month of June….

4th: Arcade Donkey Kong Romhacks

11th: Baba Is You XTREME

18th: Fixing E.T.

21st: The Looker

24th: Chrontendo #60

30th: How Retro Games Have Taken On A New Life

and

Sundry Sunday: Eleanor Rigby/Pokemon Battle Theme, Nintendo Says “You Cannot Beat Us,” Mornal’s Phoenix Wright animations, and There’s Something About Zelda: Breath of the Wild Speedrun Animation.

@Play, on Omega: first – second – third – fourth

Indie Dev Showcase: on the 5th, 11th, 12th, 16th, and 18th, and

Best of Next Fest: on the 19th, 22nd, 24th, 25th, and 28th.

To find more interesting posts, may I direct you to the Useful Tags link in the sidebar?

Thanks for reading Set Side B through the month of June! We will continue bringing you the most interesting finds from the Flipside of Gaming.

rodneylives

This is our 100th Post

Not a bad start to our little endeavor! Here’s to many more!

rodneylives

Welcome to Set Side B!

Please watch your step, the floors have just been waxed….

We’re a new daily (we hope!) blog devoted to what I call the “flipside” of gaming: indies, retro and niche.

“Indies” are typically games made by small teams, but it matters less who makes or publishes them than how interesting their ideas are. A good example of a game that I consider indie that was put out by big names is Pocket Card Jockey for the 3DS; it was made by Game Freak and published by Nintendo, but its style and gameplay have that independent spirit we’re looking for and adore.

“Retro” games are older titles. The meaning of retro keeps expanding: nowadays, Dreamcast, Gamecube and even PS2 games could be considered retro, but it still seems to best fit that era when hardware sprites were the norm.

“Niche” refers to those side genres that have relatively small numbers of fans whose dedication makes up for their lack of size. Shmups, dating sims, visual novels, builders, roguelikes, pet sims, interactive fiction, all kinds of weird and fun amusements that remind us of the wide range of things that a video or computer game can be.

Of course, we’re far from the only blog these beats. For others, please consult our rather luxurious sidebar and links page. We will happily link to lots of things that other people have written. Spread the love, spread the word. Still, we hope to provide a wide enough range, and an engaging enough voice, that you’ll come back to us many times. Not that you have to visit us to read us: please avail yourself of our RSS feed, that can be found at setsideb.com/feed.

We were inspired to start this blog by the passing of the old blog GameSetWatch, which covered much of this same territory from around 2005 through 2011 or so. It still hung around in archive form until its current owner, Informa, custodian of the Game Developer nee Gamasutra family of properties, deleted it during a recent site reorganization. It can still be found on the Internet Archive’s ever-helpful Wayback Machine, for however long that survives.

Speaking personally (rodneylives, aka John Harris), GameSetWatch is where I wrote a series of articles for awhile, the roguelike column @Play. I will be resuming that series here and on our sister site RetroStrange.

A few other contributors should be showing their faces in the coming days, so please keep your eyes open for them!

We’re still getting some things settled so the look of the site may change a lot in the upcoming weeks. But for now, welcome to Set Side B!

rodneylives

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