If you’ve been reading us for a while, you’ll know that I have an inordinate fondness for the early days of this here World Wide Web. I have become disenchanted with social media, the infinite scroll, and not just Web 3.0, but even Web 2.0. React.js and other frameworks. Gimmie that good old HTML religion. You can have some CSS if you promise not to go crazy with it.
You might wonder how many of these websites can be left. It was just in April that the long-decaying webhosts Tripod and Angelfire finally and suddenly went dark. How many of these old pages remain? Well, going by the link count at Early Web Links, at least 12,000 of them.
There’s actually many more than that out there, but they’ve been neglected, abandoned by the money web. Good luck finding sites like these in Google, they’re much more apt to send you to Reddit or Youtube. All the big social media sites actively downrank sites with the temerity to include links in them, for if you follow them, you’ll be leaving the lucrative walled gardens of Facebook, or the fascist-supporting castle walls of “X the everything app.” The rise of more healthy social media like Mastodon and Bluesky is a counter to that, but they’re still dwarfed in size by the likes of Instagram and Threads.
If you want to find interesting, independent Web 1.0 sites like these, your best bet is a directory like Early Web Links. Despite the name not all of these sites are old ones, many are quite new. They’re “early web” links because the sites are done in the style of the oldweb, and presented from a link directory not dissimilar to the fertile environment that, decades ago, was the mulch that supported the roots of Yahoo and its improbably-lasting multimedia empire.
Of course, that was decades ago. If you’re looking to make a fortune now then these sites aren’t going to provide it to you. But what they can give you is honest, earnest enjoyment, not tied to an algorithm or funding billionaires. Go have a look! We’ll be here when you’re done.
We collect literally hundreds of links in compiling stuff to you, far more to give everything its own post. Here’s a scattershot collection of some of it, we hope that one or two of them might strike your discriminating fancy.
As often happens, I find out about something cool right as it ending, and so it is with Good Internet Magazine. However its archives are still up at the moment! There’s cool things to find there like Build The Web You Want To See. I found out about it from this post on brennan.day, which is announcing an upcoming site called Long Horizon.
Along those lines, for three years now Robert Birming has been organizing Junited on his blog, which is just an excuse for bloggers to link to each other. I think people should link things all the time, for any excuse, at the drop of the hat (that’s largely what I do over on Metafilter), but if some people need an excuse to do it for a month I can get behind it!
Returning to the subject of cool things ending, it didn’t get mentioned much in my online circles, but both Tripod and Angelfire, two of the biggest remaining free/low cost webhosts from the early days of the web, have called it quits. Parent company Lycos continues to soldier on, free of one more of those pesky legacy services they couldn’t be bothered to preserve. Bah.
On Mashable, Chris Taylor has a piece about the backlash against generative AI. I’m glad it’s being noticed how much people detest it! Let the anger flow through you! It’ll give you cool lightning powers!
I’ve talked here before about my efforts to preserve and make available the archives of the long-lived disk magazine Loadstar. Please forgive me for linking to that once again, but sales of it help me obtain food: Loadstar Compleat. If you want to see more past posts on Loadstar, you can check the helpful Loadstar tag.
Loadstar and its side project Loadstar 128 were made for the Commodore 64 and 128 home microcomputers. They were disk magazines, a niche of publisher Softdisk, distributed by mail, and for a while even on newsstands. Even after it became untenable to keep distributing by retail Loadstar managed to retain enough subscribers to keep going for a while longer.
Loadstar lasted 22 years, from 1985 to 2007, an amazing run lasting well into the Internet Age. It hasn’t been 22 years since 2007 yet. In that time they published more than 6,700 items. Sure, it had its ups and downs, and towards its end its last editor, Rev. Dave Moorman, had to struggle to find things to fill its four disk sides with. Its last year only saw two issues, but Dave was determined to keep it going, aiming for 256, the number of possible values in a byte. Sadly a tornado hit his home and destroyed his issue-making setup. (We talk sometimes about reviving Loadstar and making the last six or seven issues ourselves to fulfill Dave’s ambition. We have most of the tools, and it’s much easier to find new Commodore software now than in 2007.)
Loadstar wasn’t Softdisk’s only product. I can legally distribute Loadstar because of a special carve-out for it. Loadstar is still owned by its longest-running editor, Fender Tucker, who used to sell physical CDs of the issues, with an old version of VICE on it to run them in emulation. I have one of those CDs myself, and it serves as the base of the version of Loadstar Compleat we sell with Fender’s permission.
The company that originally published Loadstar was called Softdisk Publishing. Founded in 1981 by Jim Mangham, it was a similar product to Loadstar but for computers in the Apple II line. It was also successful, lasting (I believe) for 166 issues (Loadstar went for 249), and given the popularity of Apple IIs could probably have lasted a bit longer, but for a lamentable fact: Apple IIs were refreshed several times during the series’ life, as Apple II+s, Apple IIes. Apple IIcs and then Apple IIGSes. Early issues don’t even run on Apple IIs after the + line; later machines, especially the GS, have much greater capabilities than the original, so a stock II owner would have to upgrade to get the most use out of the final issues. Unlike Commodore 64s which cost $200 for most of their life, Apple IIs were always pricey, and eventually an owner would have to decide whether to invest more money in a line of computers even its manufacturer didn’t seem too interested in anymore, or switch to one of the teeming IBM PCs types that were everywhere by then.
I’d like to tell you more about Softdisk the magazine, but I’ve never used it! Just now, today, I’ve finally been able to obtain a mostly complete set of issues from the Internet Archive, in Softdisk Supreme. Doing so was an adventure involving an ISO using the Mac HFS filesystem (so standard ISO-manipulation tools proclaim the disk image to be corrupt), the website Infinite Mac, and having to dodge several annoying quirks of both Infinite Mac and Classic Mac OS itself.
Softdisk Supreme was the product of a company called Syndicomm. Distributed on CD much as Loadstar Compleat was, Syndicomm was owned by Eric Shepherd, who transferred it to Tony Diaz in 2011. Diaz passed away in 2021 (source), leaving ownership of Softdisk’s properties uncertain.
Or are they? There is a note in a PDF supplied with Softdisk Supreme that tells us that Syndicomm didn’t own Softdisk the Magazine, but just licensed it from the company:
According to Wikipedia, “Softdisk, LLC” is another name for the company of Softdisk Publishing, probably adopted after they stopped making disk magazines and settled into their late life as an ISP.
Softdisk made more magazines than just Softdisk and Loadstar. For the PC they made Big Blue Disk and Gamer’s Edge. I’ve found a mention online that parts of Softdisk’s legacy were sold in pieces to other companies. My Abandonware doesn’t distribute several notable games from BBD’s issues that were made by the id Software people, like Catacomb 3D, pointing people (but not directly) to GOG. Here is a direct link. It’s $6 for six games, and in the style of GOG retro releases they’re packaged with an emulator capable of playing them out of the box.
Catacomb 3D is listed as made by “id Software, Softdisk Publishing” and “Catacomb Games.” It’s the only product by Catacomb Games on GOG. They have a website. They’ve opened the source code to the whole series and uploaded it to Github. While their website doesn’t list a point of contact, their Github account page has an email address, which I sent a polite request to just a few minutes ago. I hope they can clear up the question of ownership, and if they can, that it’ll illuminate a path towards offering a package similar to Loadstar Compleat for Softdisk’s other products.
I believe that all software has value, but Softdisk’s output easily exceeds that low bar. The Catacomb games don’t need my pitiful efforts at preservation, but Softdisk published lots of other stuff that’s in serious danger of being lost forever. In addition to the work of their in-house programmers they accepted submissions, and bought software from a wide range of programmers. Many of those coders are aging, or are no longer with us. Attention must be paid! They cared about their work, and so must we. Wish me luck.
Over on the site vale.rocks Declan Chidlow has written up a complete rundown of every console web browser, and it’s certain to spark memories in many of you. Including web browsers in consoles used to be a useful way for a company to distinguish their system from others, but as they admit at the end of the article, now the web is with us constantly, on phones and tablets, and people are more likely to turn to game consoles to escape from it. I’m sad about that, there’s still a lot to like about the World Wide Web, it’s mostly the social media elements of it that suck.
Probably the first console web browser, on the Phillips CD-i. (image from the site)
The systems listed are the CD-i, the Sega Saturn, the Apple Bandai Pippin (wow really?), the Nintendo 64 (only in Japan with the 64DD add-on), the Game Boy Color (through the Mobile Trainer cartridge), Sega Dreamcast (I remember it well), the Wonderswan, Playstations 2-4, Portable and Vita, Nintendo DSes original, I, 3 and New 3, Xboxes 360, One, S and X, the Wii and Wii U (the Wii U had quite a cool browser, as the article explains), and technically speaking the Steam Deck (which can run lots of other software too). But please click through and read all about them!
Proclaiming something for sure in the realm of vidyagaems is just asking to be challenged and possibly humbled. Yet it seems likely that the first true video RPG, as pointed out by -Eclipse14- in this video (10½ minutes), is the Atari 2600/Supercharger game Dragonstomper.
I have played Dragonstomper, in fact I wrote about it in an ebook on 2600 games here, and it’s quite an interesting game. Defining an RPG these days is rife with complication, but then it a bit more obvious: statistics, character building, equipment, exploration and turn-based combat. Dragonstomper has all of these things and more.
The Supercharger was a peripheral that allowed games to be loaded off of cassette tape. The unit itself housed an amount of RAM that held the games that the system would run. The Atari 2600 didn’t have write lines leading out to the cartridge, so the Supercharger had to load the code itself, which looked like normal inflexible ROM to the Atari. But the Supercharger could handle multiload games, making it much easier to make large games for the console. Dragonstomper was stored on the tape in three segments, corresponding to three stages of the quest.
The first section, and the most open-ended, involved exploring the kingdom, fighting monsters, finding items and trying to build your character’s power. A complication to this is that five magic items, a Charm, a Cross, a Potion, a Ring, a Staff, have randomized functions that change every time you begin a game. (There is no saving; the Atari has no way of writing to the tape.)
To get to stage two, you must get past the guard to town, either by showing him an ID, by bribing him, or by defeating him in combat. (They have more health than the dragon!) Town is kind of a break area where you shop for items to help you in the final part of the quest: the tunnel to and fight against a dragon waiting for you in its cave.
There’s all kinds of interesting things you can do, that helps give the game a lot of replayability. For example, you can hire fighters in town to accompany you against the dragon. There are traps around but also items that can reveal their locations to you. You can fight the dragon in melee, or by firing a longbow at it, or you can even avoid fighting it all together by figuring out how to get the gem its guarding without fighting it. There is a GameFAQs guide to it (contributed as late as 2023) that gives a good rundown of how to play and win.
Oh joy, it’s another Nintendo Direct, full of games I don’t have much interest in.
In the past I’ve done brief takes on every game in a Direct, but I feel like this time I’d be reduced to either saying the same thing about many of them that I’ve said before, or else be forced to resort to the same kinds of loathsome cliches most game enthusiast sites use. No thanks.
Oh look! Yet another grandiose and pretentious anime-themed combo-based melee combat RPG, how original. Is there an omininously Latinish-named evil force? Are we destroying God again? Are there Disney characters in this one?
Most game players, it’s true, are either kids or recently-kids, and I remind you that I haven’t been either of those for a long time. Think of me what you want for saying this, but these base and juvenile depictions of coolness are things I outgrew long ago. But I suspect at least some of you think that way too, so here then are the few games that I’m genuinely interested in from the recent Direct.
Rhythm Heaven Groove
This is the big one, the game from the show I’m most likely to actually get when it’s released. All the Rhythm Heaven games are big gooey piles of joy and this’ll be the first new entry in an age. (Example from a prior game: Packing Pests.) The footage we saw yesterday only confirms my anticipation. A day one purchase for me.
Big Walk (cross platform) *
The first game from House House since Untitled Goose Game looks very interesting, basically just an excuse to wander around a big island wilderness with friends. Big Walk purposely eschews most of the concessions most games make when exploring large spaces, like fast travel, and the ones made when communicating with other players in large spaces, like being able to talk to people wherever they are. It doesn’t just this for realism’s sake though, many of its puzzles rely on overcoming communication difficulty. It’s wildly experimental, and my only real qualm with it is most of my friends aren’t the kind to explore such a game with me. For those who have them though, this is something to watch for.
Deltarune Chapter 5
I loved Undertale and Deltarune Chapter 1, but then fell away from playing the series myself. But I love watching other people play through them, so soon there’ll be another quirky and fun, yet entirely vicarious experience for me to watch.
Nintendo Switch Sports Resort
This is essentially the Switch version of Wii Sports Resort, the followup to the Wii pack-in Wii Sports released way back in 2006. I still have many fond memories of playing Wii Sports with friends back then, a perfect pack-in game if there ever was one, but each successive game was more complex, and that much harder to get friends interested in. The simplicity, perhaps even more than cheapness, of Wii Sports was what made it accessible to so many people. I’m sure when we reach the inevitable age of nursing home Wii Sports parties that the appeal of its simplicity will become even more important.
Final Fantasy Resonance
Not only is it the first Final Fantasy game to get the HD2D treatment, but the first (somewhat) new one to get it too. The brief glimpses we got of it show us a game that seems to take after the old-school 16-bit era battle systems that recent entries, and I find that more appealing than anything else about it. It’s not that I’m nostalgic for the way it was done, but there the quality of the experimentation seemed greater, there was less change for its own sake, and there were still attempts, even if just nominal ones, at simulating adventure above just throwing systems at the wall. But I’m old and grumpy about these things. Just give me five minutes and I’ll probably fall asleep in my rocking chair. Oof, here I go now… Zzzzzz…
It’s been a small eon, but ZoomZike is finally back with the latest in his epic series of video deep dives, Identifying Luck in Mario Party, with a 2½ hour entry on Mario Party 10, being for the Wii U probably one of the least played titles in the series.
We’ve linked to these several times before, and I claim directly to you that they’re about as good as you get when it comes to investigating game internals. PannenKoek goes more into specifics and implications maybe, but ZoomZike has much more ground to cover. He’s now done twelve Mario Party titles, all in this playlist, and as they’ve continued they’ve gotten even more complete and detailed. The shortest of all of them is for MP1 at 1½ hours long; the longest, for MP7, is nearly 5½ hours!
Each video covers all of its game’s boards and events, all of its items and how they work, and all of its minigames. While “Identifying Luck” is the title and ostensible purpose, what we get is more like a complete guide to the internals of each game, includingly the many ways the games put their thumbs on the scales, often in favor of the last-place player.
They take a long time to chew through, oh yes, but if you want to know how the masters of video board gaming put their long-running series together, I don’t think you can find a better source.
I love Crazy Taxi! I think it’s one of the best arcade games Sega’s ever made, and obsessing over getting Crazy Licenses and beyond helped me get through the long sad years after my mother’s passing. I was once competitive on the Crazy Taxi scoreboards at Twin Galaxy, getting a score that would have been (if I had sent in my tape) 8th place in a contest they were having at the time. Others have long since surpassed what I once reached, of course, but my $69K score still looks pretty impressive to casual players who have difficulty getting to $5K and an S License.
birthbydrip over on Neocities (psst: yay!) has a terrific guide to getting to $20K and a Crazy License on the arcade course. It’s not for absolute beginners. If you don’t yet know how to perform a Crazy Dash/Limiter Cut your score is doomed to the $2K range until you learn that essential trick. But if you learn it, and nail the timing to spam it, then an S-license don’t look nearly so impossible any more, and then this guide is your golden path to getting to $20K, and racking up hour-long games on any aging Crazy Taxi machine you should encounter on your travels—assuming it’s well maintained that is. I encountered a machine at DragonCon a couple of years ago with a flaky gas pedal that made Dashes terribly inconsistent, grumble grimble gromble.
Yesterday’s post had a link to FamiBro, and while trying to balance male and female representations of gaming websites equally is subjective and doesn’t make much sense (especially since FamiBro doesn’t seem very bro-y), it does allow me to make a largely meaningless introduction to a blog post about the website FEMICOM. There, done!
One of the more recent additions to their collection is Parappa side-game and Set Side B fav UmJammer Lammy. Another is on Idol Hakkenden, for which you may remember we’ve written about a translation patch before.
‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.
Larn, created by Noah Morgan, may his name be sung by the bards forever, is a venerable classic roguelike game, from the same era as Moria and the first Hacks. It’s always been more obscure than the other games but was still popular, and it’s still played today. atsb, aka Gibbon, made a GitHub post commemorating its 40th anniversary, and noting the code has been ported to run on many systems, like Windows, Mac, Linux, DOS, OS/2, 68000, Alpha and many others. There they have both its source code and many precompiled binaries. We covered Larn once back on GameSetWatch, but GSW’s now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, and my Larn article from there is in the book Exploring Roguelike Games, so it seems a good opportunity to write of it again here.
You can download it from that page, but note that after unpacking it you should copy the files in the larnfiles directory into that of the executable, then edit larnopts to suit your playstyle (I’d change the player name, turn on color and pick a suitable gender.) If you don’t copy the files you won’t have in-game help; if you don’t edit larnopts your player will default to a male character named Gibbon.
I’ve only played a little of this version, but what I’ve seen is in keeping with the style of olde. Larn is a great game and worth trying. It makes a lot of different choices from its colleague games, which gives it a different feel. By default it’s easier than Rogue or Hack, but you can pick a higher difficulty if you want. High-difficulty games are ranked higher on the scoreboard.
Larn has a town level like Moria, but it includes features like a college that can teach you skills (but cost money and time) and a bank to save money at. It has two dungeons: a main dungeon that’s ten levels long, and a volcano that’s three levels and much stronger monsters. It has many random features, akin to Nethack’s fountains and thrones, that can do various things to your character, and it uses a code-based spell system. Press Shift-I from the spellcasting prompt (the c key) to be told what spells you know and what their codes are.
In the land of Larn many items cost lots of money, but you also find lots of money in the dungeon, there are lots of valuable gems there, and enemies frequently drop more. There are some things that are different from the Rogue and the Hack line of roguelikes that will need some adjustment:
One key that works the same is Question Mark for Help, which should give you enough information to start you on your way.
I haven’t tried using a numpad to play yet, but the help text doesn’t mention it. You might have to use the vi keys plus diagonals to move: h–j–k–l for left–down–up–right, and y–u–b–n for up&left–up&right–down&left–down&right.
While the standard keys < and > go up and down levels, to enter places from down you have to press Shift-E.
Monsters don’t follow you between dungeon levels, but the stairs, going both up and down, deposit you at a random place on the next level, so you can’t just retreat up if you find a dangerous monster on the next level.
Some dungeon features use letters of the alphabet in addition to monsters: a deep blue P is a pit you might fall down.
There is no key to put on or remove a ring, for they take effect automatically as you carry them. They’re identified immediately too.
Potions and books don’t get individual descriptions when unknown, like “scroll titled KIRJE” or “plaid potions,” but they do still have underlying identities, and get identified when you use them.
Lots of items, not just weapons and armor, have plusses, and you can even see them when the item type is unknown. What they mean, you’ll have to figure that out for yourself.
When you find gems, don’t sell them in the trading post. Take them to the bank and have them appraised there.
The flow of your quest is unusual to players expecting to collect an Amulet of Yendor some ways down and escape with it. The Eye of Larn is at the bottom of the main dungeon, but it won’t cure your daughter. But there is a way it can greatly further your quest, if you can figure out what that is.
A really distinctive thing about Larn is its time limit. Larn doesn’t use a food clock like many other classic roguelikes, but instead your daughter is dying of a mysterious disease whose cure is rumored to be somewhere in the land. As long as you progress slowly enough you can usually handle the monsters, and you can learn new skills in the College of Larn, but if you take more than 350 “mobils” you’ll fail your quest, although there is an item that can give you more time. If you manage to win the game, the Larn Revenue Service assesses you taxes based on your score before you can use the stores in subsequent games, and you can set a difficulty level before playing that affects the game in many ways: use the command-line option -# where # is the level, with 0 being the easiest.
Larn has its own wiki with many play tips (a lot of them spoilers) at wiki.larn.org.
orz (a.k.a. orztetris on Youtube) makes videos to help people learn how to play Tetris better. It’s as simple as that.
The older a game gets, if it remains popular for all that time like Tetris has, the more people obsess over it. And if it’s a truly deep and challenging game, like Tetris is, there’s a lot to obsess over. So the nature of being “good” at Tetris has changed, and it’s the true obsessives who now push the frontiers of Tetris strategy, which is too bad for us casuals.
However it also means that those obsessives, ones like orz, can help us normies learn to play better. And there are places like TETR.IO that can help you build skills. One of orz’s videos (3 minutes) is on how to use their playback function to help yourself figure out what you’re doing wrong:
Here’s a longer video (24 minutes) on opening theory (I don’t know why an anime girl is in the title card):
And here’s one more video (12 minutes) from among those on his channel, on how to perform T-Spins, one of the more esoteric moves of modern Tetris.
Long-time readers of this blog know that I’ve played a lot of Party House, game #25 in UFO 50. I’m not the best player at it, I’ve heard there’s some with a random scenario win streak of over 130, but I have gotten up to 25. I wrote a strategy guide for it that’s one of the most searched-for pages here. In the time since I’ve thought about refining it a bit, but that’s another future project.
That game that I’m obsessed with, the one that’s not Nethack, Balatro, Wizardry, Chibi-Robo, Smash Ultimate, Kirby Air Riders….
That’s for the future; what about the now? Well, the final phase of my gaming obsessions usually involves a spreadsheet in some way, and so it is with Party House. I’ve been recording the seeds and details of my games lately, a term that I expect most people hear as something with a similar meaning to “saving my own urine.”
Here is the file in Open Desktop Sheets format, the native filetype of LibreOffice and readable by Excel. (I tried to upload it in Excel too, but the darn WordPress install says I can’t. SIGH.)
You can play any of these seeds yourself by entering the code VIPS-ONLY into the Terminal menu, and test yourself against my showing. I won 57 games of the 65, for a victory rate of slightly better than 7-in-8.
Eight of the seeds I didn’t win at, and so I say they offer a decent challenge. They are: 879007, 76918, 988273, 198638, 469055, 2974, 996289 and 107289.
What if you’d rather have an easy game instead? Two games I finished with 8 days left: 429459 and 154523. Two I finished in 7: 298866, 981042. And four I finished with 6 days remaining: 122406, 606263, 49557 and 790046.
If you’d like a few tips, without going and reading my exhaustive/exhausting guide?
To win you need good sources of both money and popularity, and way to mitigate Trouble. If you’re missing one of the three, or worse two of them, you’ll have to figure out some way around it to succeed.
Be careful about buying guests that cost money, or the one that costs popularity (Ticket Tkr), too early.
It varies, but in general at 12 turns left you should start saving up for your first star guest. At 8 you should be well on your way.
The easiest scenarios are those with a good source of income. Bartender, Auctioneer and Spy herald pretty easy games.
Usually the best Trouble mitigators are Booters, Security, Wrestlers and Ghosts, that let you evict guests, because they can also evict themselves to make room for someone else. But an exception….
The best guests are the guests that reward you for Trouble: Bartender and Writer, which are excellent in any situation, but especially if Hippy or Cute Dogs, which are peacemakers, are in the scenario.
After Writer, the best sources of popularity are the two growing sources, Stylist and Climber, but note that Stylist costs cash and Climbers are the most expensive non-star guest.
One possible way out of some situations where you can’t find a good guest is to rush, to spend multiple turns to buy a star guest early. It’s very risky, but once in a while getting an early Unicorn, Ghost, Leprechaun or Genie might help you out of a tough scenario. Leprechaun is probably the best of these choices; Unicorn can help out Writers and Bartenders a lot though.
