If it’s not the holidays, it certainly is a holiday, at least for those of us in the US. We’re preparing to load up on turkey, or maybe a vegetarian equivalent. We’re occupied with various other things, so please enjoy this report on some games we’ve been playing.
Of course, Kirby Air Riders has been the main thing for me. I just finished the “true ending” of its story mode, Road Trip, a few minutes ago. It’s bombastic and loud, true, but it was nice to see O², Nightmare and Marx as bosses again, and Galactic Nova, from way back in Kirby Super Star, make a return as part of Kirby’s weird lore. For a series originally about beating up a penguin with royal pretensions because he took everyone’s food, Kirby’s certainly killed a lot of Cthulhus.
Rakshasa from UFO 50, screenshot borrowed (because of laziness) from syltefar.com.
Now that my excuse to talk about that again is out of the way, I’ve been playing more of Party House and Rakshasa in UFO 50. I’ve already said enough about Party House, and I’m working on a revision of my strategy guide; Rakshasa is also something that should have some things said about it, a very short, very hard take on Ghosts & Goblins with a spicy Indian flavor. It’s a game that revels in randomness, and it’s easy to get overwhemed if you don’t stay on your toes at all times. I actually think its big gimmick, that you don’t have lives, but instead must complete a minigame when you perish, of escalating difficulty each time, to be one of the less interesting things about it.
Besides that, I’ve been working my way through Dragon Quest III 2D-HD, which has some quite major design differences from the Famicom/NES game from 1988. Lots to say about that too—just, later. (BTW, if you think using em dashes means something is written by an “AI,” well, I won’t have much kind to say to you about that belief. Please read better writers.)
And then there’s Blippo+. (trailer above, 1¾ minutes) Published by Panic, who also published Untitled Goose Game and Thank Goodness You’re Here!, and first released for Panic’s little portable system that could, the Playdate, Blippo is simply a pitch-perfect rememberance of 90s TV, although as experienced on another planet. It has weird indulgent kids TV (“The Boredome”), classic MTV-style news programming (“The Rubber Report”), D&D-themed fantasy gameshows like from the UK (“Quizzard”) and even a scrambled porn channel, not real porn, but with a sexy lady’s hand caressing mice and monitors (“Tantric Computing”). It’s wrapped up in presentation that kind of looks like adjusting a satellite receiver, and all the shows are like one minute long. It’s weird, unexpected and fun, like everything else Panic makes.
Statue’s most recent focus has been Mechabellum, because as they told me, “I like games that trick me into doing math.” I think one could say that all turn-based strategy games are doing math in one form or another. Math is weird that way.
In addition to all the games they play to review on their Youtube channel Game Wisdom, GWBycer has been playing strategy game Phoenix Point, and its mod Terror From the Void. I didn’t know anything about it until I saw his message about it. Lot of strategy floating around in the air, with Air Riders thrown in to cut it with pure chaos.
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.
The reason this is a low effort week is because DragonCon is this weekend, and I am there. Some happenings:
There are two arcades on side. One (on the ground floor of Peachtree Center, accessible from the outside) is a temporary offshoot of Joystick Gamebar. They’re mostly retro games; their newest title, I think, is TMNT II: Turtles in Time. They have a great selection of games, including several really good pinball machines: Twilight Zone, White Water, High Speed and High Speed II: The Getaway, Funhouse and more.
Notably, the Joystick location has a Gauntlet. They also have Mortal Kombat II, X-Men, Dig Dug, Centipede, Donkey Kong, a sped-up Ms. Pac-Man, Joust, Sinistar and others.
The other is run and maintained by Save Point, and while they have a handful of older games, they’re mostly concerned with more recent Japanese games. This means an overbearing emphasis on rhythm games, with names like “Sound Voltex,” and fighting games.
The best games here I think that aren’t in those well-represented categories are Bombergirl (and they sell memory cards at the maintenance desk for saving your progress) and Gun Bullet X, a new installment of Bandai Namco’s variety shooting game known more often in the US as Point Blank.
Upstairs at Westin in Thursday is a gameroom set up for Gamecube games, and I think they’re open the whole con? It was there that I saw they had set up that utmost rarity, a four-machine Kirby Air Ride LAN network. Such a set up requires f0ur copies of Kirby Air Ride, four Gamecubes, and most significantly four Gamecube Network Adapters or third-party workarounds. There were also quite a few other Gamecubes running Smash Melee, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, F-Zero GX and others.
We figured it was time to ca$h in on our burgeoning popularity and put ad$ in the $idebar! Wahhaha! We are to be gazillionarie$!
No seriously, while we’re testing some ways to bring in at least a little income (maybe a podcast?), we don’t expect to make more than a few dollars from the sidebar ad, which is provided by the ComicAd Network. But ComicAd has some things about it that I like. It was inspired by Ryan North’s late, lamented Project Wonderful, a terrific little ad system that used to adorn the sidebar of Metafilter for readers who weren’t logged in.
It’s about as unobtrusive as you can get for ads, it doesn’t track users (that’s really big in this privacy-conscious era), and the things it advertises are small projects, like ours. I think that good ads can provide a useful service, both to sites and users, provided no one gets too greedy. Lots of the excesses on the internet nowadays are caused by just that, greed, driving people to excess. A small image advertising a webcomic isn’t that bad, and may even be fun. Blanketing sites with ads for a vast exploitive Microsoft-sponsored AI company that drinks up rivers and floods the world with slop, that’s what we who like to put judgemental names on things call evil.
It also matters how they’re presented. Something I personally loathe is the suddenly-appearing, page-covering dialog box, usually with a big SUBSCRIBE button, and a tiny almost-invisible X in a corner somewhere. I notice with some annoyance that even the new batch of creator-driven new web media sites do this a lot. Anyway. I place that qualm onto a small boat made of folded paper, and with my breath I push it out into the ocean. Fwoooo!
This is an experiment, and it might disappear in the coming weeks, or change form. If you have an ad blocker and decide you don’t want to see it, that is fine. As I said, we’re not getting much money from this, at least not right now. If you have comments, concerns, qualms, caveats, issues, problems, etc., please use the comment form below to let us know. Thank you.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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!
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!
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….
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
