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.
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.
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!
