Set Side B

News 7/22/22: Rumble Doujin Climber Winston

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

After a couple of pretty light reports,this time out we have quite a lot to go over, so let’s get started!

Chris Moyse at Destructoid says cult fighting game with a fun name The Rumble Fish is coming to consoles.

Those are some angry looking fish in that title logo.

At PC Gamer, Kerry Brunskill proses about how Steam greatly expanded the potential market for Japanese doujin releases like Touhou.

VGC’s Chris Scullion notes that the FCC may approve Microsoft’s buyout of Activision/Blizzard next month.

Ollie Reynolds at NintendoLife tells us that the team that made Mario Kart 64 almost included a no item mode, they say to appeal to F-Zero players.

At EventHubs, someone going by the name of Justin “Adaptive Trigger” Gordon, which, if you can get people to call you that then fine I’m not opposed, tells us about how the Ice Climbers, long an infuriating opponent to face in high-level Super Smash Bros. Melee, might be getting some of that tech in Ultimate.

That’s a background color that we here refer to as “spritesheet purple.”

At Kotaku, a site that will on every visit ask if you want to sign up for their newsletter, Ian Walker notes how romhackers are putting Winston, the fourth Ghostbuster played by Ernie Hudson who for some reason was left out of most of the series’ promotional material, into the Sega Genesis Ghostbusters game. The patch doesn’t seem to be out yet, mind you. The original story appears to be from Ghostbusters News. Great Floating Radioactive Astrojebus, it’s about time, even if it had to be done via an injection of code to be playable through quasilegal emulation. Man helped save New York City from ghosts twice, you’d think he’d get more respect. There’s also a hack to add him to HAL Laboratory’s Japan-only Ghostbusters II game for the Famicom.

And TechRadar’s Rhys Wood at TechRadar informs us that a lawsuit is being brought against Sony alleging overheating issues of the PS5 causing the console to spontaneously shut down.

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News 7/20/22: Pikmin Cracked Boy

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

Aaron Greenbaum at Den of Geek investigates, what was the last NES game released? Covers multiple territories, and both licensed and unlicensed titles, although in that later case recent releases stretch the premise considerably.

This might be our first link to comingsoon.net, reporting that Nintendo has purchased the studio that animated those charming Pikmin shorts from back in the Wii-U era. [Reminders: first, second, third] Maybe we should save those links for Sunday? Maybe we’ll just slip them in again some week.

We have a bit of animosity towards Cracked for how they treated several of their prior writers, although that did eventually result in the creation of both Behind The Bastards and Some More News, which are creator-owned. Still, bad scene Cracked. Currently working for them (for how long?) is Eli Yudin, and they wrote a list of 15 Gloriously Weird Genesis games. It contains ToeJam & Earl, Wiz & Liz, Rocket Knight Adventures, The Ooze, and Mutant League Football, among others.

At Stone Age Gamer they have a series about Game Boy sequels to NES games, and in that Chris Randazzo writes about Blaster Master Boy, which is really a Game Boy port of Robowarrior, which was originally known as Bomber King in Japan, where it was a spinoff of Bomberman! The source for that information: the dusty back corners of my beleaguered brain.

Callum Bains at TechRadar brings us news that a number of Bethesda and id Software games are playable for free, for a limited time, to people in the Xbox Insiders program.

Jody Macgregor at PC Gamer tells us that that fan remake of Ocarina of Time will get new features, including unlocked frame rate and adjustable difficulty.

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News 7/18/22: Fall Pac-Dwarf Unity

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

Jordan Middler at VGC noted of instances last week where Fall Guys players who had intended only to preview items were instead made to purchase them, and no refunds were offered. Since it became a big affair on social media developer Mediatonic reversed course and promised to refund the purchases, and that their customer support was lacking in this case. But it kind of makes you wonder about the errors that don’t make it big on social media, doesn’t it?

Unity has been in the news a lot lately! They merged with ironSource, a company that once made a malware installer (Jody MacGregor at PCGamer), and their CEO John Ricitiello criticized mobile game devs who had the temerity to not focus on monetization when they made games, calling them (focuses on page) “fucking idiots.” (Ian Walker, Kotaku) That second article, it’s beautiful and infuriating. Since then, Ricitiello has apologized for his statement on Twitter, and that tweet has itself made the rounds by now. As part of the fallout some developers are seeking out other packages, including site-favorite open-source gamedev system Godot.

PCGamesN (I’m too cranky right now to put the superscript on the N) writer Ian Boudreau presents news of the upcoming graphical Steam version of indie darling Dwarf Fortress, and how its trees change colors with the seasons! I seem to remember them doing this in ASCII mode too, but it’s nice to see it with non-terminal eyes. A lot more pictures are on this post on their Steam News page.

Some fun links are good once in a while, am I right drebnar? Hackaday’s Orlando Hoilett links us to monseley’s Instructables page about an LCD matrix they cobbled together that shows animations of Pac-Man characters, and how you can make one yourself. It’s even set to make the ghost blue when it’s cold and red when it’s warm! Us one-celled organisms have always felt a certain kinship with ol’ Pacs, I tell you.

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News 7/16/22: Bayonetta, Cuphead, and Gamestop NFTs

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

Pretty light on mill-grist today. With all the bad non-gaming news floating around I can’t say that I mind too much. By the way, I almost titled this post “Nude Cuphead NFTs!” in our usual silly style, but realized that it could have been taken For Real.

Kenneth Shephard at Fanbyte lets us know upcoming horny witch simulator Bayonetta 3 will have a selectable option to reduce nudity. You know, in case you’re playing in public. I’m told that’s something of concern for your species. I wouldn’t know: my kind reproduces by asexual fission! We do have a strong cultural taboo against depicting things being split in two, though. Cooking shows can only be shown after 10 PM.

Gematsu’s Sal Romano reports that Cuphead’s DLC has surpassed a million sales, and within two weeks of launch! It’s true, everyone loves those two porcelain knuckleheads and their undead lady friend! Everyone except that guy, they’d better watch their backs!

Over at Kotaku, Ethan Gatch says Gamestop is planning NFT releases while simultaneously laying off more workers. It’s pretty obvious now that NFTs are pretty much a bastion for scoundrels. They appear to be leaning in to their status as a meme stock, perhaps seeing it as their only chance at relevance, even if it’s impossible for that to work in anything approaching the long term. Does it ever seem to you that, lately, our world’s most reliable economic resource are easily swayed people without critical thinking skills?

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News 7/14/22: Genesis Zim Breakers BBS

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

Matthew Byrd of Den of Geek lists 20 Genesis/Mega Drive games that were ahead of their time. Some interesting choices, like Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday, and they did notice Naughty Dog’s Rings of Power unlike that previous list. They also mention ToeJam & Earl, although they diss it a bit, boo. They also give nods to King’s Bounty, Starflight and Herzog Zwei, which are all fine games. No mention of Might & Magic II though!

Ollie Reynolds at Nintendo Life writes of modders adding color to B&W Gameboy titles.

At first, Sorrel Kerr-Jung’s article at CBR about Invader Zim’s voice being recast, and series creator Jhonan Vasquez being upset about it, doesn’t seem like it fits in with our theme. Even hearing about it being in SMITE, which is one of those MOBAs a particular breed of older kid might be enthused with… well, I’ve never heard of SMITE. But when I found out it was because they wanted to avoid voice actor Richard Horvitz’s union, and yeah, that’s the kind of terrible behavior we can get behind telling people about. The developers responsible are Hi-Rez Studios and Titan Forge Games. Also, whose idea was it to put Invader Zim in a MOBA?

At Nintendo Everything, Brian notes about upcoming asymmetric multiplayer game Dragon Ball: The Breakers, where some players play as DB side characters, and others of villains like Cell, Frieza and Kid Buu. The developers were unsure anyone would want to play weak characters like Oolong and Bulma. Geez, those are some of my favorite characters! Vegeta is cool and all but he’s kind of one-note, and let’s face it, Goku is probably insane.

Sad news that’s been going around: popular niche puzzle makers Zachtronics is closing up shop. They’re making one last game though, Last Call BBS, which Vice’s Renana Price calls “a beautiful vision of the 90s internet.” It’s basically a collection of smaller puzzles with a framing story about maintaining a friend’s website. Like all of Zachtronics’ products, it looks very interesting. It’s available on Steam.

rodneylives

News 7/12/22: Yu-Gi-Market Contraction, Oh!

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

It’s a rare day that we get to link to the Washington Post, in this case a piece by Michael Cavna on the death of Yu-Gu-Oh! creator, mangaka Kazuki Takahashi. Hey there Michael! Bet you never thought your work would be linked by a single-celled pixel-art organism! Can you ask them to do something about their ludicrous paywall drebnar? Yu-Gi-Oh! is only tangentially part of our purview here but there have been enough video games from that series that we can probably make room for it under Retro, plus it’s published by Konami. One of my favorite facts is that the card game includes several cards that officially refer to the Gradius series, including cards of the Vic Viper and Big Core.

Elliot Williams at Hackaday challenges us: You think you know how Mario Kart works? I think so? You supply electric potential through a wire to a console loaded with some game software, which sends signals to a video screen, and you use a wired controller to interact with it. Yes, I win! His article just links to a video (see above) about how the AI drivers work. This subject has been thought of so much that there’s a patent on such drivers granted to Lyle Rains for his work back in the early days of Atari, in 1979! That it took 20 years for that to expire is a blight on the history of game programming, drebnar!

PC Gamer’s Rich Stanton tells us that Yuji Naka is still angry at Square Enix for removing him from the Balan Wonderworld project. He accurately notes that the degree of acrimony from Naka about this is unprecedented-Naka is pissed and doesn’t care who knows it. The article suggests listening to both sides here. Here at Set Side B we admit, we tend to take the word of developers over those of gigantic corporations, especially when the developer is someone of Yuji Freaking Naka’s standing! We may be wrong, and if the word comes out that we are we’ll cheerfully admit to it, but it is easy for me to believe, in Naka’s words, that Square Enix “doesn’t care about games.”

Zack Zaiezen at Kotaku writes that Take Two is going after another Grand Theft Auto modder. Boo! Hiss! News like that fills up my angry sac!

It’s a good day for linking to non-gaming sites! At CNBC, Ryan Brownie warns of a coming contraction of the games industry, partly due to it coming down off the boost caused by the pandemic, and also from bottlenecks produced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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News 7/9/22: Shop Channel Live-A-Live Playdate

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

Found on Nintendo Everything and reported by Brian, the Wii shop channel is back online after an absence of months. It had been down for “maintenance.” Mind you, it’s still impossible to buy software that hadn’t been purchased before 2019. It’s still just a way to reacquire things you had already bought. Sigh.

Ed Smith at PCGamesN notes a speedrunner at this year’s SGDQ has admitted to faking parts of his run, passing off a played-back video instead of performing it in real time, and has been banned from future events. While SGDQ was held in person this year, a few of their runs were still done remotely, and the faked run was one of those. The player in question is Mekarazium, and the run was for Metal Gear Rising (focusing eyes on paper) “Revengeance.”

At NintendoLife, Alana Hauges reviews Square Enix’s remake of the classic Japan-only JRPG anthology Live-A-Live, which I’m given to understand is pronounced like “Lighve Alive,” with long-I sounds. It’s been given the Octopath Traveler treatment, with pixel art akin to the original game placed in a 3D environment. It’s structured like a collection of short stories, all greatly different from the others. I have experience with the original game, and it contains several extremely interesting sections, including a space mystery, a Wild West puzzle segment, and a hugely complex and interesting ninja infiltration scenario where the player has to make many choices that each affect the outcome. While in the end all of the stories are linked together, on their own each is a small complete game in its own right. It’s long been a shame that the game as been unknown outside of Japan, and I’m excited to see it getting a chance elsewhere.

CBR’s Zachary Pilon rhetorically asks, why are roguelikes so popular? WHY INDEED IT IS AN MYSTERY. (Note: rodneylives spent like four years writing about them back at GameSetWatch.)

At The Verge, Andrew Webster states that the Playdate’s launch was a unique opportunity for small dev. People who bought the device have access to a number of games released periodically in a “season,” but software can also be loaded onto the system separately, and itch.io has an active community of these developers.

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News 7/6/2022: Technoblade Overwatch Amico Shlorp

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

It’s everywhere, but Kacee Fay at Dot Esports is one of the many to note: Mojang adds a tribute to popular deceased Minecraft YouTuber Technoblade to their splash screen. We posted about Technoblade’s passing a few days ago.

TechRadar’s Callum Bains reports that social features are coming to Overwatch 2. The news broke in a Reddit AMA with its dev team.

Hopping over to Kotaku, Luke Plunkett finds a site with downloads for every English-language SNES manual. Here’s the site itself. The files are hosted on archive.org, and the formats include PDF and PDF with OCR’d text.

The news has been going around the web, but the first place we saw it was Nintendo Life, where Ollie Reynolds wrote about the trademark expiring for the Intellivision Amico. It’s looking increasingly likely that it’s just not going to come out.

Ed Nightingale at Eurogamer brings word that Twitch will soon allow streamers to identify their streams with custom tags, which I’m like, welcome to the entire rest of the galaxy for well over a decade? We here at Set Side B add tags to our posts quite profusely. It’s part of the major religion on my home planet, drebnar! “Thou shalt always add all the tags ye can think of to thine content,” Book of Shlorp, 12:2.

And at GamingBible in the UK, Mark Foster reveals that Sony has filed for a patent relating to using PS3 peripherials on the PS5. So, they’re patenting having their devices work with their own systems? That’s pretty cool, I guess. The implication of it is that Sony is moving forward on their plans to offer PS3 emulation. The patent doesn’t mention all the devices by name, but includes illustrations of a variety of gadgets including the EyeToy and the PSP Go.

rodneylives

News 7/4/2022: Gilbert’s Sonic Pac-Mom

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

Jay Peters at The Verge reports that, sadly, personal attacks from griefers have caused Ron Gilbert to stop posting updates on the development of his upcoming Monkey Island game. Booo! Don’t be a Gripe Monster, friends!

On NintendoLife, Damien McFerran mentions an piece in the next issue of pay fanzine Lock-On by Undertale and Deltarune creator Toby Fox, about the impact of the Japanese series Mother, known in the US as Earthbound.

Destructoid’s Chris Moyse mentions the remake of Pac-Man World mentioned at Nintendo’s indie-focused Direct has Pac-Mom instead of Ms. Pac-Man, pushing her further down the memory hole. The issue seems to be a rights issue around the character, who was not created by Namco but instead by classic indie arcade designer GCC, who has licensed her exclusively to AtGames.

It was a few days ago, but at Kotaku Jeremy Winslow posted about Simon Thomley, a.k.a. “Stealth,” of Sonic Mania developer Headcannon, about how he has complained that their work on Sonic Origins was done under time crunch, and they were not allowed to debug their work before release, and even that integration with the final product introduced new bugs they were not responsible for.

rodneylives

News 7/1/2022: Doom Ring Dungeon Pinball Theremin

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

Sam MacKovech at Ars Technica writes about Doom RPG, a pre-iPhone game that has been ported to PC by fans.

At TechRadar, Callum Bains describes that SNES-style Elden Ring demake that’s been making the rounds. It’s just an animation though; not playable.

Over at GameSpot, Jordan Ramée interviews Endless Dungeon creative director Jean-Maxime Moris about the design of their roguelite action game.

Skanda Hazarika at XDA Developers points us to the creation of an Android port of the old Windows 3D Pinball game that was produced by Maxis!

Our policy to only link each site once per news post sometimes produces difficulties. This time our Nintendo Life post is by Ollie Reynolds, about the news that Zelda: Wind Waker was at first going to have a playable theremin. The news ultimately comes from a Do You Know Gaming video, which also mentions that Nintendo design guru Shigeru Miyamoto hated Wind Waker‘s cel-shaded art style at first, which in retrospect is one of the aspects of the game that’s held up the best:

And at Destructoid, Chris Moyse has news of the upcoming release of Ray’z Arcade Chronology, another of those arcade collections that have been popular lately, this about the Ray series of arcade shooting games, which are called either shmups or STGs, depending on which subcultures you’ve had the most exposure to. It is planned for release in 2023.

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Technoblade, Minecraft YouTuber, passes at 23

I saw on Metafilter a post from The corpse in the library (an unfortunate user name in context) that the popular streamer has passed away. Technoblade is one of the few channels to have reached over a billion views. He is remembered for his playing skill and his friendly rivalry with fellow Minecraft Youtuber Dream.

A message from his father:

Here is Technoblade’s Channel. His website, with merch. I don’t like linking to Fandom, but it hosts a good backgrounder on him and his life.

rodneylives

News 6/29/22: Steam Stolar Fall Gay Bob Hacking

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

K. Holt at Engadget says Valve has doubled production of Steam Decks, meaning those on the waiting list will have less waiting to do.

At VentureBeat’s subsite GamesBeat, Dean Takahashi sadly reports that Bernie Stolar, former President at Sega of America, has passed away at the age of 75. Alana Hauges of NintendoLife notes that his early career was in co-op, before joining Atari and working on their Lynx portable system. Later at Sony, Stolar helped shepherd the Playstation and franchises such as Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, before leaving to help Sega launch the Dreamcast.

After going free-to-play, the player base of popular battle royale hit Fall Guys‘ has ballooned to 20 million! But Eric Van Allen at Destructoid tells us that there is some tension among long-time players over changes to its currency model. At GameRant, Rory Young has more, including an observation made by one of the players: under the new system, a player who loses five matches in the first round ends up making more than a player who wins a match after five rounds!

Graham Smith at Rock Paper Shotgun tells tales of the 2018 indie game Space Bob vs The Replicons (Steam), described as like a 2D No Man’s Sky, but didn’t do well on its initial release. Its creator had a heart attack a week after it hit Steam, then left the games industry. But he’s back, and has announced a big update. Its developer is Intravenous Software, and they’re on Twitter!

Sharang Biswas at Eurogamer posts an essay for Pride month about fanfiction and mods made by the gay community. (Note: slightly NSFW image)

Jeremy Winslow at Kotaku tells us that Blizzard has announced that, when Overwatch 2 releases, it will replace the original game, making it unavailable to play! Progress will carry over, but 6V6 matches will be sunset in favor of the new version’s 5V5 teams.

Finally, we have received word that venerable roguelike NetHack has been inducted into the Museum of Modern Art, as part of its Never Alone exhibit! We’ve seen it mentioned on PC Gamer, Reddit, and Slashdot — remember them? DevTeam member Jean-Christophe Collet muses on the distinction on LinkedIn.

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