Making it much easier is that there’s a lot of ways to gain experience in CoQ without killing anything, so you aren’t stuck at level 1 the whole game. If you play a mutant character you can pick which mutations you begin with, with Force Bubble, Phasing and Precognition being a few that help you escape many forms of danger. And CoQ has a variety of items that you can use to overcome tricky situations, like mechanical wings, and a spiral borer for digging staircases.

Going for a bigger victory would be harder. The ultimate victory requires dealing with all seven of the Girsh Nephilim, which can be done without killing them but requires a special (somewhat spoilery) trick. I should save more explanation for that eventual article series on Qud….

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It’s been some time since I obsessed in detail about KARs (my acronym for the sequel, it’s KAR with a plural y’see) here. I haven’t had the chance to play much of it, but I still like watching other people play, and the player who made the video, Moip, doesn’t just rank highly in the competitive scene, but she has logged 2,485 hours in it.

2,485 hours! I think that’s more than I played Animal Crossing New Horizons! It’s more than I logged in Smash Ultimate when I was running experiments on amiibo, running the game overnight with CPU players beating each other up! Both of those figures are over 1,000 hours, I think, but they aren’t as much as that, and I had far longer to log them; KARs has only been out a little less than a year so far.

Will any of you care that much about it? I don’t know, but I care about it, and I write on this blog, so you’re along for the ride. Even so, 5½ hours is a whole lot of obsession. The advantage to posting daily, as I say every so often, is if you don’t care about one day’s subject you can just come back tomorrow.

Even if you are interested in Air Riders though, 5½ hours is a formidable amount of time, even if you turn the speed up to double. Here are the basics of what they say about each machine:

Warp Star:
Doesn’t like, pretty weak generally.

Wing Star:
Really fragile, while not as fragile as Paper Star but being slower on the ground makes it easier to attack

Shadow Star:
Great for City Trial for the combo of flight ability and offense. It’s got low defense, and lift is poor though, you probably won’t make it to sky islands on its own.

Wagon Star:
The “master of being decent at most things.” One of the most solid generalists in City Trial, so long as you don’t care, at all, about flying.

Slick Star:
If you can control it it’s pretty fast, not as fragile as Shadow, but has trouble breaking boxes.

Formula Star:
Great for going straight. Recommended in City Trail to go for Boost and Turn. Being on Formula can make you a target.

Bulk Star:
They love Bulk Star, but say they’d never take it in City Trial. Moip says it is good for keeping legendary pieces.

Rocket Star:
Hard to control, but great boosts. Becomes hard for others to kill you because your movement is unpredictable. Low turn in the air.

Swerve Star:
Feels good to break things with it and collect stats, but bad for PvP. You instantly stop when breaking, and being absolutely still is dangerous in City Trial.

Turbo Star:
A favorite generalist pick. You can do something they call a “wall bounce” with it, which they explain in the video.

Jet Star:
Very bad for heavyweights, but a good generalist pick for lightweights.

Wheelie Bike:
Moip’s favorite generalist for City Trial. She explains you have to know how to build it: avoid Weight and look for Turn early. This gives you a lot of control and makes it safer to go for other stats. Takes some practice to get used to.

Rex Wheelie:
Similar to Wheelie Bike. A risky pick with low stats. Very hard to control, go for Boost and Charge to make up for it. Has really good Top Speed scaling. Benefits from Turn too. A top pick for offense.

Wheelie Scooter:
Great in City Trial early game due to high manueverability. Fragile though, and top speed is a little low.

Hop Star:
Low acceleration, needs Boost.

Vampire Star:
Normal state, it’s sluggish but has strong boost. Blood state: stats scale to extremes, and becomes the best machine in the game but for only a few seconds. Also it can steal items.

Paper Star:
Extremely good flyer. The master of air farming and going for islands, but it’s very fragile. Great if you can stay in the air, but often dies in one hit.

Chariot:
Great generalist for ground characters.

Battle Chariot:
Great for battle, but Moip would only pick it as a generalist with a lightweight.

Tank Star:
Aim for Boost and Turn. Makes it difficult for other players to tell where you’re turning. Pretty fast.

Bull Tank:
Loves taking it with lightweights.

Transform Star:
In wheel form, a mixture of Wheelie Bike and Wheelie Scooter. Too much Weight makes it hard to turn without stopping. Generally for wheeled machines, Weight increases grip and slows you down, so it’s important not to go for it too early.

Dragoon:
A Legendary. Moip notes it can actually be a bit squishy for a Legendary. If completed early, says it’s best to farm air rings and sky islands.

Hydra:
A Legendary. Extremely high offense, tends to one-shot most other machines.

Leo:
A Legendary. Very maneuverable, generally high stats. Not invincible though, high offense machines can still kill you.

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It’s the good and pure kind of web game that used to be much more common. Maybe it’s inevitable that things like this will eventually sell out, like Neopets did, and become a cesspool, so please enjoy it while it lasts.

Dog Online is in open beta, and it’s a little difficult to see how to get started. The Explore link just took me to the homepage until I created an account and adopted a dog. To do that, first you must go to the Dogtown Pound.

There you can pick one of three randomly-chosen pals, like this oddly-colored fellow:

When naming your dog you can’t name it after another dog that already exists in the game, and it took me several tries before I managed to adopt Plurpel.

Once there, you can buy plant seeds with coins (not real money!) from the Farmer’s Market, then plant them at the Farm. You can find tokens to play the Gatchpon Machine. You can buy bait from the Fishing Mart and fish at the Fishing Spot. You can play a couple of puzzle games at the Temple of Dog.

Part of the fun of this kind of website is exploring and finding everything there is to do. There’s a simple action game under the Games menu, Mimi’s Countless Children.

It’s the most fun if you’re a kid, but unlike Neopets Dog Online seems to be here mostly as a simple fun thing to do, without any visible profit motive. Again, it’s always possible that it’ll get ruined some time in the future, and these kinds of things do tend to either disappear or get ruined eventually, so please find as much joy as you can in its transitory nature.

Dog Online (free, browser)

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But you know, I personally have just come off a 92 game win streak in Balatro. Sure it was on White Stake, and in specific circumstances, while Dr. Spectred has 100+ win streaks on Gold Stake. Yes you forced me to admit it, I’m nowhere near as good as they are! But I am one of the 0.54% of players who’s earned Completionist++ on Android, that’s got to be worth something, right? Right?

So, here is some information that may help you play, in case it’s useful. This is oriented towards winning, that is finishing Ante 8, not towards getting astronomical scores or reaching naneinf.

1. I think the easiest deck is Checkered Deck. It makes it nearly guaranteed that you’ll be able to get a couple of Flushes. All you need is a one card hand size increase, and a Flush becomes a certainty. The tradeoff is that Flush is the weakest five-card hand, only worth 15 chips, but it still delivers +4 Mult. One of the difficulties with getting a run started is getting past the early Antes, and Checkered Deck makes that simple. If you can put together a hand of at least four face cards or tens, you’ve made the first round’s requirement right there. On Checkered Deck Jupiter is the best Planet card of course, but Neptune also helps.

2. Even if you don’t pick Checkered Deck, it’s best to find a single hand you can make consistently and focus on it. It takes fewer resources to build levels and Jokers for more than one kind of hand.

3. Early money is extremely important. Money makes all other things possible. With enough money you can not only buy things you need, you can reroll to find more. Aim at getting full interest (normally at $25) every round, and then keep that much unless something really valuable comes up. Sometimes this means you have to make a hard decision between a useful Joker and building interest. Survival comes first, but you don’t get any benefit from blowing past score requirements.

4. Attack all of the game’s benefits simultaneously: Jokers, Planets and card modifications. Each of these things by themselves can win the game, but you’ll have to take them to such excess that you probably won’t get everything you need in time.

5. Planets are probably the hardest tool to use well, but are very important. Planets get you hand levels, which increases both base Mult and Chips. Since hand levels form the base of scoring, they all help empower Times Mult. This makes Telescope one of the best vouchers, and Trance one of the best Spectral cards. I like to open Standard Packs when I can to get cards with Blue Seals, even on Checkered Deck if it’s not a Heart or Spade, which is usually a really bad idea.

5. Prioritize Jokers for the phase of the game you’re in. Early Antes: plus Mult, plus Chips. Late game: times Mult. If you’re struggling in the first three Antes, it’s better to get a good source of flat Mult or Chips than to go for a Times Mult Joker, until you manage to get your base Mult up a bit. But remember, the higher your main hand level, the more powerful Times Mult becomes.

6. If you have the spare money to fill them, empty Joker slots are liabilities. If you have the cash for it, there is little reason not to fill all your Joker slots. There are exceptions, like with Joker Stencil or Madness, or of course Rentals or Eternals on high Stakes, but lots of Jokers have no downside other than cost. Remember that selling a joker gets you half its price back. This is a reason why Perishable Jokers in higher stakes aren’t all that bad: you can always sell it even if it expires, and you’ll get half your money back.

7. Grab onto Common Joker combos. Some of the best combos involve Hanging Chad (retriggers first scoring card twice), which applies to any effect that triggers on individual cards. Hanging Chad and Photograph are both Commons, yet are still worth a total 8x Mult if your first scoring card is a face card. Or Hanging Chad and any Glass card, but be prepared to replace it.

8. The best card modifications vary depending on your jokers and where in the game you are, but really great are: any Seal but Blue and Red especially, Holographic, Steel, Gold and Glass. The worst modifications are Wild, +4 Mult and Stone, but Stone has uses in certain cases.

9. Most Building Jokers are better the earlier in the game you get them. Building Jokers are the ones that increase in power in some way depending on your actions. Green Joker increases by +1 Mult every hand you play, but decreases by 1 when you discard. Some of these Jokers require special play like this to make them powerful, and some have significant drawbacks: Ride The Bus and Obelisk can lose all their built-up power instantly. Supernova and Fortune Teller are building Jokers that don’t have to be bought early, because they are empowered by your actions even before you get them. The best ones naturally are the ones that raise Times Mult, which can be valuable even if you get them in later Antes.

10. After you win and pass into Endless Mode, most builds top out around Ante 13. The score requirement for the Small Blind of Ante 13 is 47 billion, over 100 times the requirement for the Small Blind of Ante 12, and they rocket up even faster beyond that point. Fortunately the last score achievement is for reaching Ante 12. There are ways of playing past that point, but I must refer you back to Balatro University for such rarefied air.

So now that I’ve won 92 games in a row, I’ve uninstalled the game. I’m not going to try to top that… at least, not until the long-awaited content update comes up. LocalThunk, please take your time….

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If you’ve asked yourself how well would City Trial work as an e-sport-like competition, well we made a post here with examples of that last year. There is a pretty nice community of Kirby Air Ride fans that have created their own variant of the game, with play tweaked and unfavored events removed, that meets in a Discord. I refer interested players there.

The community on the Discord also plays Kirby Air Riders, which is a much expanded game with many customization options.

If you’d like to see how it works, here is a three game match (31 minutes) from a currently-running tournament. It makes, in my opinion, for interesting viewing, with some unexpected upsets.

I’ve already explained how City Trial works in detail before, but here is an overview that should help explain the above video. A number of players, up to 4 in Air Ride and 16 in Air Riders, roam around a sandbox city environment for a period of time, usually five minutes. The city contains a variety of different vehicles to switch to, stat upgrades to collect and time-limited powerups to use. They explore the same city, and can attack each other during this time, sniping at each other with a viciousness belied by the riders’ cutesy appearance; Grand Theft Auto isn’t nearly this chaotic or cutthroat.

Different events happen during the Trial, some of them helping everyone, some of them detrimental, and some of them a mixture of the two. There are also Legendary Machine parts that sometimes appear, and a player who manages to collect all three to one machine gets to ride it, and become extremely overpowered for the rest of the match.

When time runs out, the players’ stats are revealed to everyone, then they’re thrown into a random Stadium event. The players don’t usually know what the event will be, but sometimes the game drops them a hint. Sometimes, in Air Riders, they don’t all get the same event. Sometimes they get to vote on the event. There’s lots of Stadiums, and they each test the player’s stats, vehicle, and playing skill in different ways. You could end up with a Stadium extremely well suited to your machine and stats, or you could end up stuck with a fragile paper airplane in a demolition derby.

The randomness is part of the fun, but if you’re playing to maximize your wins you can’t usually risk putting all of your statistical eggs in a single hoped-for Stadium basket. Even completing a Legendary Machine is no guarantee of success. The ups and downs of Air Ride and Riders make for exciting viewing, but it’s largely without the posturing and negativity of many e-sports. I recommend watching a match or two, either the above-embedded video or one from the recent Skyah Summer Slam event, whether you’re interested in playing it or not.

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We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

It’s Spooky Season, and the best cartoon for that time of year has to be Patrick McHale’s Over The Garden Wall. If you haven’t seen it, go seek it out: it’s only ten episodes, each 11 minutes long, and tells a complete story.

If you’ve done that, or have already seen the show, then this will be of the most interest to you. About a year ago for the show’s 10th anniversary Julia Minimata used Adventure Game Studio to make a very short adventure game starring the show’s main characters Wirt and Greg.

It’s free to play in your web browser! It features the voice of Elijah Wood (yes, Frodo!) at Wirt, returning to the role, and music by the people who did the excellent music from the show, The Blasting Company. Another thing made by Julia is the longer adventure game The Crimson Diamond, so why not check that out too?

Wirt gets himself stuck in an apple tree (although he claims not to be), and it’s up to the whimsical Gregory to get him down. There’s only two rooms, but there’s an interesting connection between them to figure out. See for yourself.

The Round-About Orchard (by Julia Minimata, free to play in browser on itch.io)

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Here’s Roguelike Celebration’s Youtube channel, which has archives of past talks, including those of the preview event they had last month. And here’s this year’s schedule. And you can get a ticket here, which has a suggested cost of $30 but you can pay what you want, and they won’t turn anyone away who can’t pay.

Every year has great talks, it really is an amazing place. It even has a chatroom attached to the video stream, and the chat is designed like a MUD! I can’t impress on you enough how awesome this all is. Come by if you’re of that inclination.

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Until 2016, the 1993 JRPG had never been officially localized into English in any form, but then in 2024 Square-Enix made one of their upgraded remakes of it, giving it the whole modern-day spit-and-polish. As someone born in 1973, I refuse to use the term “glow up,” and am only camel-casing the title because it’s essential to the series identity. That’s the kind of thing that happens when someone with an English degree writes about video games.

If you’ve never played a SaGa game before, well, you might actually have, as the first three games in the series were renamed Final Fantasy Legend and released for the Gameboy. The words “Final Fantasy” at that time had a degree of name recognition in the US, paid for by Nintendo when they published the original Final Fantasy for NES. Nintendo wasn’t then, and has never been an altruistic company, as any publisher from the NES era would have told you, but it was good of them to sponsor this one, and the original Dragon Warrior, even if it was with future profits shining in their dollar-sign-studded eyes… and then both Square and Enix jumped ship to the Playstation because of Hiroshi Yamauchi’s refusal to use optical media for the N64. It wenteth around, and yea verily, around cometh it back.

The SaGa series has always labored in the shadow of its terminal cousin, despite it sharing some of the same talent in its origins. Generally SaGa games are much lighter on story, taking on a more simulationist approach. I’d say the games look generally more like a Western style RPG than Final Fantasy, so naturally the Romancing trilogy didn’t see US shores until they started rereleasing them. Instead we got Secret of Evermore. I tell you, there is no justice.

SaGa, famously, doesn’t use experience levels. Generally characters improve in statistics through use. In Romancing Saga 2, this takes the form of a system of weapon and magic skills, which each themselves have levels. When a character uses one in battle, it gets some points. The stronger the enemy, the more times it’s used, whether it defeats an enemy, even if it was a different character who used the skill, all of these things seem to factor in. Higher levels mean more damage, and also give the character a chance to learn better skills that use that weapon.

There is something you should know if you decide to play it, which is alluded to in the description on the eShop page but it’s possible not to realize it. At the start of the game you’re asked to pick one of two character models, one visibly male and one female. You don’t immediately play as either of them, however. You won’t see either of them until nearly the end of the game. Instead, you start out playing as Leon, the head of a small nation called Avalon, and his son and successor Gerard. The kingdom is beset by one of the Seven Heroes who are the major villains of the story, and both Leon and Gerard’s brother Whats-His-Name get killed. Gerard goes off and gets revenge on the scoundrel, and keeps going for a while, but eventually the game declares “XXX years pass,” where XXX is a number over 100.

Surprise! All of your characters are gone! Gerard too! The stories they had been a part of are just left hanging. I guess at some point Gerard got tired of avenging his family and saving the world, and decided to just do emperor stuff at home for the rest of his life.

I can’t emphasize how sudden and jarring this is. If you know it’s coming it’s not so bad, but up to this point it seems like the game had been gearing up for you to play Gerard for the full runtime, but no it really isn’t that kind of game. You’re given a choice of several successors, each one of them of the different characters you have available to you at that point in the game. You pick one, and the are given all of the skills that Gerard had. This happens many times during the game, each advancing the game clock a hundred years or so. If you pick a different class than the previous one, they gain its starting skills in addition to what they had before, so eventually your emperor becomes the most versatile member of your party.

After the start, the game is truly non-linear. You can explore the world largely as you wish. In the original I understand it made things feel aimless, but this version offers to keep track of quests for you, and show markers on the screen so you’ll know where to go. After beating the first of the Seven Heroes who are the antagonists, you can attack the others in different orders. While I usually like the classic style of these games, Romancing SaGa 2 is so far-flung and varied that you’ll be playing for many many hours even with the game showing you destinations, and while the quest markers can be disabled I recommend leaving them on.

Timeskips happen whenever you pass a major quest milestone, but can also happen when you finish a number of subquests. Some subquests can only be done by specific kinds of emperors, like a male one (boo) or a Corsair, and you’ll be locked out of them until you have one that fits the bill.

One important thing about timeskips is eventually you’ll be looking forward to them, because of another of Romancing SaGa 2’s little features. Every character, including the emperors, has a limited number of life points, or LP. When a character runs out of HP, they lose one LP permanently. There are also some attacks, I hear, that affect LP directly. Some characters have buckets of LP (I’ve so far seen up to 26), but some being with as few as 6. When a character reaches 5 LP the number is displayed in red from then on. When a character runs out of LP they die permanently.

It’s not quite permadeath in the roguelike sense, you can always go back to a previous save if you wish, but it does mean you have to make a choice: abandon all the progress you’ve made since the last save (this version of RS2 autosaves on area changes), or keep going without that character. The game will generate a new character for you to fill in the role of the departed, who can then be added at a tavern. If your emperor character runs out of LP you have to pick a successor immediately. I don’t know if a timeskip also happens in that case, but it probably does. Whatever causes a timeskip, all of the next generation of characters will have a new supply of life points, and you’ll be grateful for it.

Losing even one LP hurts, because Romancing SaGa 2 is shockingly hard! I’ve been playing on the “Hard” difficulty, which is the difficulty of the original, and characters run out of HP all the time. Frequently a monster will decide on hate this day, and make a single attack that drops a character to very low HP, or even knock them out in one move. I don’t know if it’s that bad on lower settings, but I enjoy the challenge of scraping through every battle. If you too choose hate, and play on Classic, be prepared to use every advantage to its utmost.

I haven’t yet exhausted the things to tell you about Romancing SaGa, but I have run out of time to write things down about it. I’m sure I’ll be back to tell you more soon.

Plus:

• Combat is genuinely fun and challenging. A game like this, I think, challenge is the point of it. There are three difficulty levels, “Casual” (you are supposed to sneer when you say it), “Normal” and “Hard,” a.k.a. Classic. Normal is intended for experienced RPG players… but Classic is harder than that, and is the difficulty of the original Super Famicom game. It is truly difficult, and it’s the one I’m playing on. I hear two more, even harder, difficulties are unlocked after completing it, for players who enjoy bashing their heads into solid brick walls.

Minus:

• I can’t emphasize enough how the game sets you up to think it’s one kind of game, then without warning throws those characters and their story away. Do not get attached to Gerard, he’s a nice boy but he won’t be with us long.
• The succession system, which periodically replaces your entire party with descendants of similar skill, sometimes causes subquests to break. Sometimes you can restart them, but I’m not sure if you always can.
• As you advance the story and fight monsters, the “enemy strength” rises too, which makes all the monsters stronger. As a result, a time-honored tenet of battle RPG systems, that your characters get stronger, is overturned. The world increases in power as your characters do. Due to this, it seems if you build your characters so they’re generalists you’re shooting yourself in the foot, as it means they won’t have a way to keep up with the rising enemy difficulty. It’s better to raise them each to specialize in something and stick with it, and switch your party composition to meet different challenges. I consider this to be a grievous design sin in an RPG (I was not a fan of Final Fantasy VIII) and it’s the worst thing about Romancing SaGa 2, but there’s a lot else here to recommend.

Weird:

• All of the Seven Heroes have goofy French names.

Romancing SaGa 2 ($50 on Nintendo eShop)

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Among lots of other things:

• it’s mentioned that in one player mode in the original Japanese version dying causes you to reset back to a checkpoint, Gradius-style,
• that the game is known to increase the health of boss enemies if you have the blue Laser weapon,
• that the game is generally easier if you play in the Player Two position,
• that to begin the game with the lowest difficulty rank, it’s best to start the game when attract mode is showing Stage 7 (a space level),
• and that the Player One position increases the game rank faster if you have the blue Laser weapon, while the Player Two position increases rank faster if you have the red Vulcan weapon.

A lot of sylvie’s strategy comes from rank management, and manipulating aspects of the game to make it more manageable, which is much more interesting to learn about than to just be told to “git gud.”

Have a look if you like, and if you don’t care about the commentary and just want to watch her deathless Raiden run without any of those pitiful human words, watch this video instead.

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100 Rogues was lots of fun, but the thing about app store apps is, if you don’t keep them updated and pay their access fee, they eventually fall out of publication. This is an awful fact about mobile gaming, and because of it 100 Rogues has been very difficult to play for over a decade. Well, no more: it’s now available on Steam for $7 from Paw Games, and it’s currently 25% off too!

Well, almost no more. The Steam version currently says it can’t find the executable “100 Rogues.exe”. I am running CachyOS Linux and the problem might be related to that somehow. I do find that if I go to the game’s home folder, ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/100 Rogues, and run 100_rogues_3_0_21.x86_64 out of it, it starts right up. I’ve notified Keith of the problem and they’re working on it. It may be a Linux-only issue, I don’t know if it’ll work right out of the box on Windows. If you get it and it won’t start, that is probably why. They just released this version, so I expect the glitch will be ironed out soon.

100 Rogues is a fun game from years ago that still has some interesting differences from the standard roguelike formula. Characters can’t move diagonally, and attacks happen before movement, so you can walk up to enemies without them attacking you immediately, and walking away from enemies lets them get a free attack at you! Roguelike gameplay has been so iterated upon in its standard form, since 1980, that kinds of bold changes help keep play fresh, to not fall into the same old patterns.

Long time roguelikers might find it a bit easy, at least on normal mode, but there’s a challenge mode included too. Give it a try!

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A few of the cases covered:

• Tatl the fairy’s information on a couple of the bosses changes as you progress through their fights.
• The guards blocking the exits to Clock Town usually use the presence of your sword to determine whether they will let you leave, but if your sword was stolen or is being forged they’ll notice and let you leave anyway. They also give you different hints on which dungeon to do next.
• The Astronomer has special dialogue if you speak to him as a Goron or a Zora.
• The residents of Clock Town each have their own little story of how they’re handling their impending destruction. The Swordsman especially has interesting reactions that change as the clock ticks down.
• The Swordsman also, like the Happy Mask Salesman, has a reaction to every mask you can wear to his shop. The lady in the Treasure Chest game and the both the proprietor of the Trading Post and his employee have unique reactions to some of the masks.
• If Deku Link can shoot bubbles they can play the archery game, not even needing a bow!

What’s great about all of these cases is none of them are necessary to win the game! It’s there for the players who try to experience Majora’s Mask’s story from every angle. Disable used a text dump to chart out all of the game’s dialogue on a web page here.

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‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.

The opening to NAQBU, a free web game, certainly makes all the right references. Its name first shows up as MORIA, and its similarities to Robert Alan Koeneke’s early roguelike are obvious. If you sit at its title screen, it also shouts out to the makers of Rogue, Hack, Larn, NetHack, Omega, Angband and ADOM. I feel like this game was made for me directly: I’ve played all of them.

I promised creator Luke Steuber that I’d write an essay with my opinions on Naqbu, and I’m not one to write something big without getting as much mileage out of it as I can, so here they are:

Your job is to descend into The Dungeon and beat the boss monster down there, as @-signs have done since time immemorial, which for the purposes of roguelikes is 1980. I would tell you what it’s called, but a lot of the monsters and items have non-English names that don’t fit easily into my memory. I don’t think they’re procedurally generated, some objects and monsters have names taken, or else derived from, from Mesopotamian mythology, and don’t seem to change from game to game.

Naqbu right now is a very young game, so any of this could change, but right now it plays like a very simplified Moria, with only ten levels and without its vaguely Tolkienesque theming. Like Moria, above the dungeon is a small town with various amenities, and also like Moria each level of the dungeon is regenerated when you enter it. A couple of its enemies even make cameo appearances, like the white worms of the early levels.

While Naqbu (mostly) uses ASCII characters for its graphics, it isn’t a terminal game. It uses a terminal-like appearance as an aesthetic choice, which is also an approach used by some versions of Dwarf Fortress and Caves of Qud. Naqbu then applies a layer of extra glitz on top of that, which reminded me a lot of the terminal emulator cool-retro-term. Magic items produce character-based animations around you when used, and some dungeon levels have display gimmicks. This is sometimes a little distracting; an effect I encountered later in the game offset the player symbol a few pixels to the right, and so made it a bit difficult to figure out just where they were standing. A few monsters have screen-warping effects around them that also make it hard to target them with attacks sometimes. (A few of the screenshots included here are a bit distorted because of them.)

Moria-likes vs Hack-likes

Being a Moria-like, Naqbu is a tactical game about fighting monsters. In Moria-likes, such as UMoria and Angband, even though they have some item identification such as in Rogue, the creatures that live in the dungeon are the chief obstacle of the game. The alternative are Hack-likes, where it’s more like the dungeon itself is your true enemy, and the monsters that live in it, while a big part of the challenge, are just one aspect of it. Naqbu doesn’t even have traps in its current form, and only a few kinds of bad item.

Naqbu has a lot of little comfort features. When you find a piece of equipment in the dungeon that’s better than what you’re currently using, the game will equip it to you automatically. That’s possible because none of the weapons or armor have any special functions at the moment, and there are no cursed items. There’s not much question whether one item is better than another, since it mostly comes down to numbers. Equipment power thus is largely the result of how much exploring you’ve done, and how deep. You can find scrolls of enchant weapon and enchant armor, and there is some minor strategy around whether you use them immediately or to wait until you’ve found a really good item, but with the game’s current difficulty I didn’t have any problems winning it on my first try even using them as soon as I found them.

Naqbu uses a Moria-like item identification system, which seems kind of like it plays lip service to Rogue’s challenging identification. There are a small number of bad items that give the ID system some teeth, there’s only three kinds of bad potions and just one bad scroll. All of the bad potions can’t be sold in the town shops, a pretty obvious tell that they’re useless. None of the bad items inflict any permanent harm on you either, so it’s a matter of saving potions until you have three with prices of 0, using one of each of them on the town level to identify them, then you’ll never be fooled by them again for the rest of the game. There aren’t a lot of different kinds of magic items anyway, making it a simple matter to learn what they all are, despite the complete lack of identify scrolls in the game.

The Dice Are In Charge

There’s a phenomenon in roguelikes where, after a certain point, it’s like the random number generator plays your character, where it determines your character’s strength more than your playing strategy does. All the best equipment is found in the dungeon, and how much you can boost them depends on how many enchant scrolls you find. For the most part it’s obvious how to make use of these items. There are no real decisions to be made there.

Rogue had some interesting risk/reward aspects with its items. There were monsters and traps that could decay your weapons and armor, but leather armor couldn’t be rusted, meaning every scroll of enchant armor that went into one was permanent, but otherwise it was the weakest armor.

You could wear a ring of maintain armor, but those were rare, and also increased your hunger rate slightly. You had a hard choice to make: did you hope to find strong banded mail or plate mail and put all of your enchant armor scrolls into them then try to preserve it, or did you pile them all into leather armor? What happens if you put on cursed armor then? Enchant armor scrolls will uncurse it, but you’ll then still have mostly-bad armor with a single plus added. Alternatively you could hope to find a scroll of remove curse, then switch to a suit that’s a better home for that plus.

Potions of raise strength drunk when at maximum strength raised that maximum, but rattlesnakes could drain strength and you might not ever find a potion of restore strength to get you back up to maximum. And all of these items had to be identified to know when to best use them. If it’s easy to identify items, then it becomes a lot more obvious what the optimum moves are. That’s what I mean by the random number generator playing the character: if you find an improvement item, you just use it right away, because there’s no reason not to. Hard item choices make the challenging combat more interesting by giving a player a way to blunt the monsters’ claws and teeth, but it’s not something that’s a real part of Naqbu.

It’s true that identification helps you know what to keep and what to drop, but there isn’t much drawback in using the bad items anyway. They certainly won’t harm your player’s long-term state, like Hack’s scroll of destroy armor or potion of sickness can. In practice, you use all the potion and scroll types once, and from then on you just never pick up the bad ones. In my run of Naqbu, I knew all the bad items by dungeon level two, so there was no strategy to it at all.

All of this is usually true of Moria-style games anyway. Because the dungeon levels can be regenerated endlessly, there is no real limit to the number of state-improving items that can be generated. This means that, at some point, the design expects the player to have spent time improving their state up to maximum or close to it. This is a reason why I tend to prefer Hack-likes, which generally don’t let players generate endless items, and tend to become broken when they do, as with Nethack’s exploit (now fixed I think) of farming black puddings. I’m not sure what can be done to reconcile this, but maybe Naqbu’s creator Jason Steuber can think of something? Or maybe he doesn’t see it as an issue that needs to be solved, I’d say that’s valid, but more on that further down.

Metagame Elements

Maybe Naqbu’s most interesting features come from its inheritance system. As you play and build up gold, you can improve your house to store more items, and expand your pack to carry more. Your house persists between lives: later characters will be able to take advantage both of stored items and its increased size. There’s also a bank where you can save money between lives, and even pays you interest for money saved, a notably Larn-like feature. A new character also inherits a percentage of earned experience points from

Now I should note that I won my first game of Naqbu, so I can’t say if any of these features work. I’m taking the game’s word for it, and making some assumptions about them too. As it stands now the game is too easy for these features to matter for that much. Now, it’s a good thing that you don’t have to use them to win, it’s possible to go too far in that direction, which is a problem I had with Rogue Legacy.

Building a Better Dungeon

Right now Naqbu is unbalanced in the player’s favor. It’s really too easy. It’s possible to die, yes, but with proper care and timely item use the game is very winnable. Please don’t take me as some kind of final authority in roguelike design, but I have played a lot of them. I think what Naqbu could use is a general tuneup, a lot of different game systems tightened up a bit.

Naqbu has scrolls of recall, which teleport you back to town after a delay of around 20 turns, and for 3,000 gold you can build an obelisk at your house that will teleport you down to the deepest level you’ve been to. That eliminates a lot of traipsing through the same dungeon levels, which is important when the monsters on the early levels are no longer a significant challenge. But nothing prevents you from doing it anyway if you need to restore your stocks of items. The dungeon levels are rebuilt every time you reenter one, complete with a new stock of items to find, so it’s an endless source of supplies. There are shops on the town level, but it’s unlikely that you’ll need them much beyond the first couple of levels.

Items don’t have weight themselves, it seems: you can carry multiple suits of armor to sell in town without issue. Naqbu has Moria-style inventory limits. That means items of the same type automatically get pulled together into stacks, and carry limits are by slot, so you can have as many potions of a type in a stack as you can scrounge up. By around dungeon level 8 I had a stack of like 40 cure light wounds potions, and a not-insignificant number of stronger types. I also had a big stack of short-range teleport scrolls for getting out of scrums, and a few potions of speed, an underrated resource in many games, to tip combat odds in my favor. There are some nicely challenging monsters in the deeper dungeons, but by the time you reach them you have so many help items from exploring the earlier levels that you’re never in much danger.

If I were to try to improve Naqbu, I would tighten up each of its game systems a little bit. Maybe limit item stacking a bit. Implement a better state improvement system, where the choices aren’t all obvious. Add traps. Lessen the item generation so the player has an incentive to use the shops on the town level. Add some more kinds of items, so the player will have to choose between what to carry, and to make identification harder. Make equipment power more from intrinsic properties than just increasing their numeric power. Give more early-game monsters interesting properties besides just hitting you.

Maybe some of these problems I identify are from my own dissatisfaction with Moria-style design, but Moria makes up for it by having a lot of really mean monsters too. I think there’s room for Naqbu to make an identity for itself, not by making the monsters harder, but by making itself a bit more Hack-like and getting its challenge there, making it harder to build the player’s state.

It’s possible that’s my own biases speaking. There are lots of people who prefer Moria-style play, but if Naqbu wants to remain on that route, I think the monsters will have to get harder to make up for it. Naqbu currently limits player experience level to 25, which I reached by dungeon level 9. When you can’t grow the player character through experience any longer, there is a lot less incentive to explore the dungeon, and the focus on the game moves almost entirely to gaining more items, and if you have enough items to win by that point there’s really nothing else left to do. There is no more improvement in state left to gain.

Naqbu maintains a universal score list. At the moment there are only fifteen players on it, and five of them are winners. This proves pretty handily that the game isn’t very difficult. My own game is currently 4th place on the list as I write this.

I feel like there’s more I could say, but it’s almost 5 AM as I write this, and it’s already really lengthy. I threw it together quickly and obsessively. I wanted to get something out there, not just to contribute my opinions to the author while the design is still malleable, but also to get the news about the game out quickly. I think it’s a shame that there’s only been 15 players of Naqbu so far. I think all of its problems are due to the fact that the game’s only a couple of days or so old as of this writing, and that it has lots of potential. I have so many things to keep a watch for that I find it hard to make promises, but I’ll try to set aside a little sliver of my overtaxed brain to check on Naqbu’s progress in the coming weeks.

Naqbu (by Luke Steuber, web, $0, no AI use)

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There is a project to make it viable though, called PureDarwin. It has a small but devoted cadre of people working on it. One of them, up until November of last year, was project leader Cliff Sekel, a.k.a. InsaneDarwin. Sadly he didn’t lay down the keyboard because of growing tired of it, but instead he passed away after an illness. Here’s an memorial from the PureDarwin website.

Lots of projects would age into irrelevance after a key figure leaves it, but it seems there is yet some life in PureDarwin, with code running on x86_64 and ARM64. I can’t speak for how viable it is to run yourself, for the most part it seems to be terminal-only, but work is progressing towards giving it a GUI for the first time in almost 20 years.

You might be interested in a video that Clean Retro Tech recently made getting an old version of Darwin running on a Pentium III (17 minutes). It might be interesting for the kind of people who obsessively watch Action Retro, which regularly dusts off old hardware units and tries to get old OSes working on them. Hey, it’s a kind of computer entertainment! I am entertained by it at least, and you can’t say that it isn’t niche.

PureDarwin (https://puredarwin.org/)

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The scene: Lon Lon Range. The time: Adult Link’s period. The event: rescuing Epona from farm usurper Ingo. To do it, you have to beat Ingo in two races, each two laps, around the pasture.

The basic gise is that, in the 3DS version only, for some reason walking away from the race while it’s still going on can allow you to still win. Skawo demonstrates the phenomenon in their video.

So, how? In the N64 version, race progress is tracked by checking for Link and Ingo passing through three spheres in order, then a finish line. Both games contain a provision to prevent Ingo from despawning when far away, so Ingo does go around the track twice. In both versions a horse’s position is tracked by the center ground point of its model. In the 3DS version, however, for just the final finish line check, the game instead checks the draw position of each horse’s front-most hoof instead, to avoid cases where a horse’s front leg and its center point might disagree on which crossed the line first.

The issue is, if Ingo isn’t on screen, his horse isn’t drawn, and its legs’ position isn’t updated, so Ingo can’t win the race if he isn’t on camera. He can still win by default, if Link takes more than three minutes to finish.

The full details are in the video. It is interesting how unintended consequences like this can sabotage a programmer’s best intentions. I’m left wondering, now that terrible “AI” coding agents are being allowed to program things on their own, how many such bugs will creep into programming of all times? My own coding experience make me sure it’s going to be many.

I also wonder how many silly errors like this are going to sneak into the Switch 2 remake of Ocarina of Time, whether it’s coded by a human or a big pile of linear algebra?

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We already announced Roguelike Celebration’s preview event a couple of weeks ago, but the main event is Saturday the 171h and Sunday the 18th. They’ve posted their lineup for this year. Just to remind you, you’ll need a ticket to attend, which cost $30, but you can usually get a free ticket if you ask nicely. I encourage you to pay if you can however, since it allows them to pay for their human-provided text transcription, to pay their speakers, and to keep the server running.

A interesting thing about Roguelike Celebration is that while it’s mostly about roguelikes, naturally, they also have other interesting talks, and they always seem to find good subject. A few highlights this year, Andrew Plotkin is giving a talk about mazes in games, there’s a talk about randomness in a Fire Emblem game, and “stealing roguelike mechanics from Microsoft Word.” There’s one about recovering and modernizing one of the original Hack games (I suggested that one!) and one about cellular automation in roguelikes. Oh, and the Caves of Qud people are talking about localizing their procedurally generated texts.

There’s always a bunch of interesting talks each year, and although they go online after the conference, if you show up you can offer questions to the speakers, talk with them yourself in a MUD-based conversation space, and talk with the other attendees, who tend to be crazy intelligent types themselves. It’s all a lot of fun, and if you’re reading Set Side B, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy being there, so please consider giving it a try!

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It’s just $25, but it’s packed with information, from the original Torneko through to Shiren 6: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island, with absolutely no generative “AI” (always use the scare quotes) used in its creation. This edition has stuff on Shiren 6 and a huge new section on the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games! Thanks to Jeremy Parish for helping edit this monster into existence!

And since it’s unofficial we don’t toe any company lines in making this. This does mean some idiosyncratic terminology, sure (I call monsters advancements “promotions,” which I think I got from the Nethack source code?), but it also means I’m not coy about which games I think are good and which aren’t. And I try to at least mention every game, including weird ones like Nightmare of Druaga and the Japan-only Etrian Odyssey II. There’s also Rainbow Labyrinth, a free-to-play mobile game which I only know about from a page from a Mystery Dungeon wiki, and which never left beta!

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If you don’t know what that is, and I’d admit it’s meaning is sorta inside baseball…. A hexcrawl is a kind of RPG adventure that’s either partly or totally undirected. A large expanse of terrain is marked out on a hexagonal grid, secretly on a gamemaster’s sheet. The players of his game may have their own hexagonal grid, either completely unmarked or with only the most obvious features pre-inscribed upon it.

In the GM’s notes, some, many or possibly even all the hexes are keyed to a list of contents, waiting for an unsuspecting party of adventures to wander through/blunder into it. There might be deadly monsters, friendly allies, neutral NPCs, dungeons, lairs or treasures to find there, or some combination of these things. Just walking into a hex doesn’t guarantee finding what’s hiding there, if hiding something is, it may require a concerted search; or, the party might find it easily. It’s inherently a sandbox style of play, but the randomness of finding adventure, and the possibility that whatever might be there could be missed, multiplies the sense of possibility in the game world. A group might travel through a hex many times before a well-hidden encounter might get noticed.

This is the style of gameplay that the inspired creator seeks to bring to Donkey Kong Island, site of the 16-bit SNES classic Donkey Kong Country and its sequels. The inspiration is the same kind that craftsdwarfs in Dwarf Fortress get, referred there as a strange mood. Those moods can turn out well or badly, but if successful they produce wonders.

It’s an amazing idea, and a bit awe-inspiring, and at least a little bit ridiculous. But lots of things that I thought were ridiculous became immensely popular, Kingdom Hearts is proof enough of that. Actually, I still think Kingdom Hearts is ridiculous, and more ridiculous than this.

The nom de net of the creator of this is Farmer Gadda, and they have both a Neocities blog and a Bluesky presence, which is where I found out about this. A project like this, I’d have it pegged for a Mastodon announcement, but at least I found out about it somewhere.

There are two posts so far, an introduction and a page of system considerations. They’ve thought about it at least that hard, and I can respect that kind of maddened obsession, since after all have I not harbored a not-very-secret Rampart obsession for decades, since before Donkey Kong Country’s release even? (Checking facts: Rampart was 1990; DKC was 1994.)

So I say, shine on you improbable diamond! Keep on doing what no one’s done before! We eagerly await word of your efforts, and if you the reader would like to help support this crazy endeavor, you can hear evidence of its progress a week early by contributing to their Patreon.

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We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

(EDIT: I put the wrong banner on this post on first publishing! It’s fixed now.)

Violarium is another of that prolific genre of puzzle game, the grid- and turn-based series of progressively-harder problems where you learn the rules as you go, and new complications turn up periodically, until suddenly they’re all done and you’re looking at the credits.

Often this style of game takes the form of a block-pusher, but not this time. Each puzzle here is made of a number of dice blocks, their pips representing digits up to six. You must trigger each of the blocks in order: the 1, the 2, the 3 and then the 4 (and the 5 and 6 too, if they’re present). Each must be triggered once, and not more than once, or they all reset and you have to start it over.

You trigger a block partly by standing next to it, but that’s not the only requirement. Your facing matters too, but your character can only face left or right, and can’t turn in place unless you move into a wall. You can also trigger dice by moving next to them vertically, but the rules are subtly different. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how they’re different, but as you might expect, by the end you’ll have to have completely mastered the implications of this system, and some other devices too, before your purple pixel person can retire to his petite pixel pad.

Of note: I have noticed that the combination of Linux (and Wayland?), Vivaldi and this game is a bit unstable, I figure maybe due to the Unity browser runtime. That’s just a guess, but the game screen continually freezes up for me when running in that browser. I’ve not tried it in Chrome, but Firefox is okay, so try using that.

Violarium ($0, by EasyYogi on itch.io)

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Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

When I put it like that in the title it sounds like it’s going to be salacious but it really isn’t, it’s just anthropomorphized representations of the various enemies in Wii Play Tanks.

Okay… you don’t know what that is…. I’ll explain.

Wii Play was a mini-game collection on the Wii natch, a burgeoning genre on that system. It was an excuse to release a bunch of Wiimote experiments as an inexpensive package. As often happens with Nintendo, some of them were better than you’d expect. Three of them had some real longevity to them. Table Tennis was like a faster version of Wii Sports Tennis; Billiards was an excellent pool simulation; and then there was Tanks.

Tanks put you through a series of 20 single-screen levels where you piloted a tiny tank around destroying various other enemy tanks set around each board. As you passed level after level the game would introduce new tanks with various personalities and powers, like laying land mines, firing rocks, aiming bank shots off of walls and, eventually, invisibility.

If you were playing along you had limited lives, but it also had a two-player co-op mode, where each player only had one life, but destroyed players got revived so long as the other player survived to finish the level.

After you finished the 20-level version you unlocked a 100-level version, which threw in a couple of new tank types. There’s some nice grace notes in the design, like how the background music adds different tracks depending on which kinds of enemies are in play. It was a lot of fun, and deserves to be remembered as more than just the best game in Wii Play. Here’s a marathon playthrough of the whole thing. It’s a surprising hour and 22 minutes long, but just a couple of minutes of it will suffice to give you the idea.

This week’s find is a much shorter, 3½ minute animation presenting cartoon representations of all the enemy tanks in the game, by NCHProductions.

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Especially in the original game, Super Monkey Ball. (Okay, the original original was Monkey Ball, but that was only released in Japanese arcades, and is pretty similar to the arcade mode of Super anyway.) To truly beat S.M.B. you have to complete 50 stages of Expert, then the secret 10 stages of Expert Extra which only appear if you finish Expert without using a continue. This means doing it in three lives, plus whatever additionals you can scratch together by collecting 100 bananas, while completing levels like this:

It isn’t the focus of this post, but here’s a run through all of SMB1’s Expert, Expert Extra and Master stages. The thing about Super Monkey Ball is it’s very hard, but it looks even harder. Check out this utter insanity (34 minutes):

Being separated into discrete levels like this and being so exacting in execution, one might think that the incentive to cheat at this, by splicing together footage of different runs, would be high, but due to some interesting factors it’s not as easy to do this like one might

think. Goober13MD made a video (13 minutes) explaining why you can’t just edit together your best plays in Shotcut and present that as a world record run:

But that video is from eight years ago, and since then some people have, indeed, tried to cheat, and for quite some time succeeded at getting away with cheating at speedrunning this most ludicrous of games. Here’s GooberMD13’s exposé from four years ago at uncovering a cheater (48 minutes):

And two years ago they put together this epic 1 hour-6 minute video about ancient records revealed to be the probable work of cheaters:

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The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….

Microsoft pioneered a form of hypertext that came onto the scene around the same time that HTML, the format that web browsers read and display, did. As sometimes happens with Microsoft, they didn’t really understand what they had there, and relegated it to a format for help files, called WinHelp, which debuted on Windows 3.0.

HTML unquestionably won out over it, but the WinHelp format, extension .htp, and its successor Compiled HTML Help or CHM, has some advantages. Both are self-contained, bundling all of the individual pages of the help system into a single file, and didn’t need network access to read them. That ease of transport meant in the early days of the World Wide Web you could sometimes find downloadable Windows Help files, and that’s the format that the “Roadmap to the Information Superhighway” was released in.

In the early years of the Web it quickly became obvious that there was a great need to enhance findability, that the greatest website in the world was useless if no one knows it exists. The Roadmap, and the previous year’s upstart Yahoo (later called Yahoo Directory) were two attempts to combat the obscurity problem. I insist that this problem has always been with us, that the creation and rapid adoption of Google just made it less obvious for a while, and now that the Goog’s enshittified its bed, entering its dotage and embracing “AI,” it’s become more visible how difficult it is to find interesting things online. (It’s why I’m still a devoted Metafilter member and poster even now, 27 years after its creation.)

The Roadmap to the Information Superhighway (it calls itself the Official Roadmap) is mostly a list of tutorials and links. It is so old that it refers to “the Mosaic,” Mosaic being the first popular web browser. Yet even back then enshittification was still present in online spaces, and this edition of the Roadmap was deep into it, so some of the links you click on will open up, in its own window, an ad for its “Internet Yellow Pages.” They were double-dipping: the Roadmap itself cost money, $39 for a subscription, which is probably why it was supplanted by Yahoo, and even print listings of websites.

In 1995 the Web had only been around for five years or so, and substantial portions of it were still accessible only through protocols like News, Gopher, Telnet and even web BBSes, so a portion of its text went to explaining how to use these services. There’s even a page on how to use Finger, which being a very Unixy thing, was something a lot of people just didn’t use even then.

I’d like to someday go through all its links and find out what percentage of them, but even then there were a lot of websites, and yet I fear the proportion of them that are still active is depressingly low. I’ve complained here before how some people still seem to think the internet is forever, when it is really really not, we’ve lost countless pages and sites, and the Internet Archive’s collection of them is spotty. It’s a miracle that it exists at all, and they are well-deserving of your donation dollars, if you can spare a few. It’s a miracle that they host the copy of the Roadmap that I link above.

A hint to browsing the roadmap from WINE, at least one of its links, the one reading What Is the Internet Superhighway?, crashes its Help reader when I open it.

To return to the phenomenon of WinHelp, the original Windows Help stopped being bundled with Windows Vista, and Windows 10 completely dropped support for it. You can still load Help files, like the Roadmap, on Linux systems using WINE, and that’s where my screenshots come from. Isn’t it just like Microsoft to invent a technology that other people now support far better than they do?

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Here’s in the future. (3 worthwhile minutes)

Also recent (as recent as three months ago is recent) is nametags, for nameless people (1½ minutes), and i’m going off the map (4 minutes).

Wurtz has made lots of songs-and-videos like this, but perhaps his masterpieces only contain songs as components. There’s his history of japan (9 minutes) and history of the entire world I guess (19 minutes), and both are incredible, in the sense that I don’t believe anyone actually made them. No, it’s impossible, I shant accept it, I shant! They were found in a field some day and Bill Wurtz adopted them, raised and nurtured them as his own. But they existed before then, I’m sure of it, and he may have aided and abetted them but they arose from some weird natural process that’s entirely inhuman, and entirely non-AI either. See for yourself:

history of japan (86 million views!):

history of the world (184 million views!!):

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Even though it’s older than the World Wide Web that many people mistakenly see as the whole internet, Usenet has many lessons for us today. Like email and the Fediverse, no one owned or owns Usenet, it’s an ad hoc assemblage of many newsservers. And also like email, Usenet at one point was drowning in spam. In fact, one could argue that it drowned in spam, that rampant unsolicited commercial messages are why few use it today, even if it technically still exists. Sure, as some wrinkled ancient netheads will insist, Usenet had ways to stop spam, but if they didn’t get used, consistently and comprehensively, then their existence didn’t matter.

The big advantage that Fediverse services like Mastodon have over what Usenet used to be is a solution to spam. As was demonstrated a few years ago, Mastodon servers that start spewing potted meat product rapidly get defederated, or will be ideally, giving server maintainers an incentive to stamp down on them quickly. With megaservers like mastodon.social out there serving as the Fediverse home of a large portion of its users, who knows if maintainers will prove willing to defederate that whole bloc should it become a spam generator. But then the internet is primarily a mechanism for generating difficulties. Let’s hope for the best.

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‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.

EDIT: Fixed one of the notes ab0ut herbs not giving you fullness, they do, it’s a little sneaky about it is all.

Due to other things going on I haven’t done a recap of the recent Nintendo Directs, but there was one thing mentioned that was extremely relevant to this blog: at long last, Square Enix has released a localization of the first Mystery Dungeon game into English. Here’s a trailer. (2 minutes)

I’ve represented this game before as Taloon’s Great Adventure, and it’s long had a fan translation. Now it has an official way to play it, though it seems like Spike Chunsoft had nothing to do with this recreation. The play seems mechanically very similar to the original, just with much sharper graphics. The characters and monsters are still represented using the original 2D pixel art, just presented in 3D dungeons.

There are a few modern Mystery Dungeon niceties, like a bar showing progress towards the next experience level and an on-screen display for fullness, but other than that, and the graphics, and the names localized according to current Dragon Quest sensibilities (lots of onomatopoeia and puns), it’s presented as it was originally released back on the Super Famicom, only now there’s an option for English. (Japanese is still offered as a language option.)

While a surprising amount of Torneko 1 persists even into the most recent Mystery Dungeon game, Shiren 6, there were some minor rule changes that will catch players who haven’t played the earliest game:

• Equipping arrows uses a turn, even though it’s mostly a user interface help, for there is no play difference between using L to fire one or going into the menu to launch it.
• In more recent Mystery Dungeon games it is impossible for traps or pregenerated sleeping monsters to block the ways into rooms, but I’ve seen it happen three times here.
• Torneko 1 is the only Mystery Dungeon game to use Rogue’s idea that, you’re going down into the dungeon to get an item, and once you get it you have to come back out again, through all the levels, the monsters getting easier as you go but no items generating on the way back up. All the later games just have you progress through the dungeon to the goal.
• On changes I approve of, monsters are more likely to choose directions other than straight ahead in dark intersections, and character healing is much more in line with Rogue than in recent Shirens: it starts slow and increases as you gain levels, instead of starting fast, but decreasing in effect relative to your maximum HP as that goes up.

I always say that the first Torneko Mystery Dungeon game is a lot like Rogue, and the first Shiren is quite a bit like Hack. Well, Torneko is more like Rogue than Shiren’s like Hack. Many monsters have direct analogues. Drackys are much like Rogue’s Bats, Muddy Hands are like Venus Fly Traps, Mimics are similar in both games (some versions of Rogue call them Xerocs), Funghouls are similar to Rattlesnakes and Walking Corpses degrade shields similarly to Aquators degrading armor. And of course Torneko’s Green Dragons are like Rogue’s ordinary Dragons.

Torneko 1 is most interesting to play if you’re entirely new to the Mystery Dungeon series. Lots of great monsters and items would come in later games, but they’re all absent here. There are no dungeon shops, no pots/jars at all, no monster promotions (though they can gain levels), and no allies, dungeon NPCs or bosses.

The intended progression of Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon is to complete a “Minor Mystery Dungeon,” which teaches the basics. It can be pretty difficult for newbies, even though it’s just 10 levels.

After that’s over, you’re expected to play the normal Mystery Dungeon many times, dying often, but the money you earn going to increasing the size of your shop and the town around it, which adds more amenities to them and more conversations with NPCs there, who go on about their whimsical JRPG lives, engaging in their own petty adventures and dropping more hints to playing the dungeon.

There’s many of these shop upgrades you can earn, but if you know what you’re doing, if you’re experienced at playing Roguelikes in general and Torneko in particular, you can complete the main Mystery Dungeon quest quickly, even on your first try. The ending was written expecting you to have fully developed your shop by this point, so if you win before that point, when Torneko returns to town it’ll be instantly advanced to nearly its ultimate state, and characters you’ve never met will congratulate you on finishing the quest as if they were your oldest friends. All this was true of the original game too, and it was just as jarring there.

As a typical with Mystery Dungeon games, the main quest is not the biggest challenge. There awaits a bigger task, with more kinds of items and full item identification and that disallows taking items in with you, called the Major Mystery Dungeon. And both the normal and Major dungeons have 99 levels, so if you choose you can explore down to the bottom of both of them.

I should warn you about a problem that has caused great frustration in my experiences with this remake. Mystery Dungeon games let you hold the R button to constrain movement to diagonals. This is necessary because it is really difficult to press two directions on the control pad at once in a single frame. This Torneko remake has this feature, but by default it takes a half-second to kick in. This version plays more slowly than most MD titles, with enforced pauses after actions to make sure the player sees that the monsters don’t act simultaneously with you, that they take their turns after yours. This will make experienced players, like me, try to rush through, and that will result in them making unintended moves when the R button doesn’t kick in instantly, as it does in every other Mystery Dungeon game. This has directly caused me to lose at least two runs, and I hate it.

On top of that, probably the worst thing about this game, is its price: $25 for a glowed-up Super Famicom game. You can get its great-great-great-plus-several-more-greats-grandchild Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate (Switch, Steam), for five dollars less, before any discounts, and at this moment on Steam it’s only four dollars! All the Shiren games are much deeper games, loaded with extra content and bonus dungeons. The recently-made Shiren 6 for $36/$40 (Steam currently half off, Switch) is a pretty good version.

I note that the credits to this game have a section for AI content. I don’t think that necessarily means it was used to make this game. On one hand, it would explain that concerning problem with the R button, and a couple of other UI problems. But on the other hand the credits are very long, and seem like they must list every employee at Square Enix. So I don’t know if they used it, but if they do then that’s despicable, and if they did it in order to avoid hiring Spike Chunsoft to port the game they made then that would be extra despicable, and then to charge so much for it on top of that. But I don’t know if is true at this point, so I won’t pass judgement… yet. It might explain the R button problem, and a couple of other weird sloppy bits I’ve noticed.

There is a charm to Torneko, and there are some changes in the later Chunsoft Mystery Dungeons that I don’t approve of, but it’s obvious that Square Enix made it mostly for the nostalgia money. It still makes for a good introduction, but you might want to wait until it goes on sale unless you’re desperate to have it.

But yeah, I was desperate.

What follows is my obsessive notes on this version, largely unedited, in case you’re desperate too.

Some differences from the original:

• The game plays more slowly, with an enforced pause between player and monster turns
• Torneko doesn’t automatically turn to face attackers when struck
• The ‘R’ button doesn’t immediately constrain diagonals, it takes about a half second for it to activate, longer if there’s a message box on the screen (changing the setting “Lock Movement to Diagonal” to Either in Game Settings corrects this, but is annoying in other ways)
• You can change game balance options to customize your runs, although it might make run ineligible for high scores and achievements
• Items don’t have descriptions in their item menu like basically every other Mystery Dungeon game, including, I notice, the original. Instead, to find out an items function (provided that it’s identified), you press ZL while selecting it.
• In addition to the classic B+A button combination to pass turns in place, ZR also does it
• The game lets you retry a dungeon immediately after failing it, with a Large Loaf in your inventory
• Land mines destroy nearby items, which I don’t think happened until later Shiren games
• The options for naming items include a “guess” option that lets you pick from items discovered in all past runs, although it doesn’t seem to actually name the item, it just checks it off of a list
• In the Play Records menu in the dungeon, there are a number of interesting lists, including all the items and monsters you’ve found among all your runs.

Things it’s useful to know:

• Equipping arrows uses a turn, which is not common in Mystery Dungeon games
• High score tables return, a fun but largely unnecessary feature
• Misses are much more common, from both you and monsters, than in recent Shiren games, don’t be surprised if you miss four times in a row once in a while
• Herbs don’t give you any fullness (EDIT: this was incorrect; they do give 5 fullness, but it’s added immediately, right when you use the item, not along with the other effects of the herb)
• Enemies gain experience and can gain levels, but don’t promote into new species as in Shiren
• Some general advice: Ledgerdemen (a.k.a. Magicians) can easily end your adventure at DL2.

Some other points of interest:

• This remake borrows the minus-charges convention from recent Sirens, for use of unidentified wands; if you use an unknown wand, it’ll say it’s “-1,” or minus-one, but this is just to remind you how often it’s been used
• It also displays Fullness on the display, and an experience progress bar
• The game makes you escape the dungeon after collecting a goal item; carrying the goal item turns off hunger, as it did in Rogue when you found the Amulet of Yendor (and were wearing no rings)
• No pots or dungeon shops in this game
• Food items eaten at full do not increase maximum fullness
• Traps can be generated in room doorways, unlike more recent MD games.

A list of enemy properties:

• SLIME: weak
• DRACKY: weak, may move randomly
• MAULUSC: weak
• GHOST: moves fast
• PLATYPUNK: average
• DROOLING GHOUL: divides sometimes when attacked
• FUNGHOUL: may caused poisoning
• BODKIN ARCHER: fires arrows
• LEGERDEMAN: can put you to sleep, always generates asleep, hard to awaken
• MUMMY BOY: strong
• BAG O’ LAUGHS: steals money, leaves money if defeated, may warp away when attacked
• IMP: Steals an item
• RESTLESS ARMOUR: high defense
• WALKING CORPSE: rusts shield
• LUMP SHAMAN: may teleport player away
• POWIE WOWIE: generates in groups of four, moves and attacks fast, whole group wakes up when one does
• LIVING STATUE: looks like dungeon feature statues, remains inert until you approach it, strong
• ROCKBOMB: stops moving and attacking when low on HP, may explode if then reduced in health without killing it (10 HP left), reducing a nearby player to 1 HP (explosion range 2 spaces in all directions)
• MUD MANNEQUIN: may perform a weird dance that drains a level
• MUDDY HAND: may grab Torneko and prevent escaping
• GOLEM: strong
• MIMIC: looks like an item until awakened
• GIGANTES: strong
• FLOAT-O-COPIER: weak, looks like another kind of enemy but doesn’t have its properties or strength
• POCUS POPPET: can reduce player maximum strength by 1, or maximum HP by 5
• SILVAPITHICUS: fast to move and act
• WINKY: can mess with player controls, can affect from anywhere in sight
• ARCHDEMON: strong
• SHADOW: invisible, may move randomly; if you try to move into a space but can’t for some reason, it’s because a Shadow is in the way
• GREEN DRAGON: strongest monster, may breathe fire, worth 3,000 XP

A few items:

• PEEP SCROLL: this game’s name for the famous Scroll of Identify
• SUSTAINING RING: Torneko doesn’t get hungry!
• MOD ROD: Transforms target into another monster
• PROFITIER RING: sells for a lot, that’s all, no other effect
• SANCTUARY SCROLL: prevents adjacent monsters from attacking in melee
• SNOOZE WAND: puts target to sleep
• EVAC SCROLL: escapes the dungeon
• CHEST OF CHEER: Your objective

Some items that appear, unidentified at first, in the Major Mystery Dungeon:

• SANDS OF TIME SCROLL: resets the dungeon level (including your stats, inventory and level) to the state it was in when you first entered it
• WANDERFUL SCROLL: asks you to pick an item like the Peep Scroll does, but charges a wand
• BREAD SCROLL: asks you to pick an item like the Peep and Wanderful Scrolls do, but turns the selected item into a Large Loaf
• COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO RING: doesn’t keep you awake as you may expect it to do, instead monsters wake up when you enter or leave a room.
• GOBSTOPPIBG SCROLL: player cannot use their mouth, meaning, no eating food or herbs or reading scrolls
• REVEALING RING: Shows invisible things
• SAFETY RING: Prevents being caught in traps

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We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

Unexpectedly today SquareEnix not only announced but released a remake of the first Mystery Dungeon game, plus the first of the new Rifftrax Experiment episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 hit theaters, so it’s been a full day on top of recovering from DragonCon.

But I just noticed that Roger Dodger over on Metafilter posted a link to a daily cryptogram puzzle, and that seems like the kind of thing all of you may enjoy, maybe long enough to tide you over to tomorrow.

Cryptograms are a pretty old concept, taking the old idea of a Caesar cypher, a code where each letter throughout a message is replaced with a different letter consistently throughout the whole code, and making it into a puzzle. Although true Caesar cyphers shift the letters down the alpha instead of arbitrarily as in most cryptograms. By default punctuation and spaces are revealed from the start, but if you like your puzzles extra hard you can disable even these helps.

If you want a few tips?

• Single letters are probably A, or once in a while I.
• Every word is bound to have at least one A, E, I, O, U or possibly Y.
• The most common three-letter word is, of course, THE.
• There are only so many two-letter words likely to appear in a puzzle like this.
• Double letters are great for narrowing things down. Also be on the lookout for possible plurals.

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DragonCon bills itself as “the largest multi-genre and pop culture convention in the world.” That may seem artfully put, and it may be, but DC casts a very wide net of subjects. A few examples, it hosts an “Apocalypse Rising” track of world-ending fiction, a Military Sci-Fi track in addition to tracks for general sci-fi, Star Trek and Star Wars, a Digital Media track, a British culture and media track, Anime and general animation tracks, a puppetry track that’s a lot of fun, and much more.

DragonCon crosses with this blog’s umbrella via the Video Gaming track and associated events, including two arcades, a console gaming space, and (though it takes a bit of exploration to find) a couple of installations of Artemis Cosmos, formerly known at the Artemis Starship Bridge Simulator.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is not directly involved, but has a relationship with Electronic Frontier Georgia, and they maintain a small but informative presence there. Yet while there is are fair number of game-related activites there DragonCon is not generally thought of as one of the big video gaming conventions, in a field containing the PAXes, or even Southern Fried Gaming Expo, which takes place in the same city a month earlier, and has hundreds of video arcade and pinball machines.

This was the 40th anniversary of the convention, which had 80,000 attendees in 2017, and fills five hotels and multiple floors of two other buildings besides. This year they hosted Richard Garriott, a.k.a. Lord British, who was involved in multiple panels. Garriott was in fact a guest at the first DragonCon back in 1987, and has returned occaisionally since. I met him at one of his panels, and he said he’d answer my questions via email. I haven’t written them yet, and when he sees the kinds of things I ask he may have second thoughts about it. We’ll see.

Stephen Seitz once again ran his multiple Gamecube gaming panels at night, where people could pop in to play video games like Smash Bros. Melee and the original Kirby Air Ride, set up to play using the Gamecube’s little-used LAN mode. Air Ride is starting to look a little long in the tooth now, finally, that a greatly expanded sequel is out for the Switch 2, but the original is still very playable.

The two arcades at DragonCon this year, as in recent years, were the retro-themed Joystick Gamebar, serving alcoholic drinks and classic arcade games and pinballs, and Save Points mostly Japanese lineup. Of the two I enjoyed Joystick’s more this time. Arcade games at cons often end up a little cursed; for example, the Twilight Zone machine never felt like its flippers lined up well with ramp shots, and the upper flipper was a bit weak making it hard to hit the important Piano shot.

The best-playing pin at Joystick this year was White Water, a classic Williams machine with high risk/high reward play. At one point I had the Grand Champion score on the machine at 524 million, although I got edged out later on. I got to show off Ed Boon’s secret “EJB” menu in Mortal Kombat II a few times to interested players. A few other great games there this time were Joust, Gauntletn Atari Tetris, NBA JAM, Donkey Kong, Frogger and multiple Pac games.

Save Point’s arcade tends to skew heavily towards Japanese rhythm and fighting games, some of them recent, which aren’t my favorite types so I don’t have a great deal to say about them. In previous years they brought out the Japan-only arcade version of Rhythm Heaven, Sega’s weird Cosmic Smash, a Point Blank sequel and, most interesting of all, Rainbow Bombergirl. The most interesting games there this time out were Sega’s Monkey Ball (the predecessor of the console Super Monkey Ball series), a Japanese Tetris game, the original Space Invaders, a sped-up Ms. Pac-Man and, in the arcade area, Bally’s classic World Cup ’93.

Next year my plan is to volunteer in the board gaming and RPG tracks. I hope that I get in for, while I know a number of money saving tricks, DragonCon gets more expensive for me to attend every year. Here are some photos from this year’s convention, with commentary.

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Some of these services, which actually began off the internet itself, as features on private networks, are MUDs, or “Multi-User Dungeons,” the first form of what are now called MMORPGs. And one type of these is the graphical MUD, where you don’t have just a parser and a text crawl telling you your surroundings and what’s happening, but you can see your character and what lies around them.

To my knowledge the first graphical MUD is not a settled question. Here are a few early MUDs and MUD-like worlds: Habitat, Club Caribe, Isle of Kesmai, Neverwinter Nights (the AOL version). Before all of these though there were the multiplayer dungeons on ancient PLATO systems, which were frequently presented graphically. Some later graphical worlds include Worldsaway, The Palace, Ultima Online, the oft-forgotten Sims Online, Runescape, Legends of Kesmai, Everquest, Second Life, World of Warcraft (of course), Conan Exiles, Glitch, and a slew of other titles. Now I think it’s safe to say there have been more forgotten online graphical worlds than remembered. Some of these forgotten games were even popular. Who remembers Asheron’s Call? Dark Age of Camelot? City of Heroes? The answer: a cadre of former members who retain fond memories of it, even after Capitalism demanded that the world they once lived in sink beneath the cold waves.

One of these worlds was, and still is, called Nexus.tk. While Nexus continues to survive through the years, a while ago a number of players splintered off from it and started a new game along its lines, Chronicles of Samhan, which is now open for a “soft launch.” A friend-of-the-blog, the worthy Statue, is interested is involved in its running, and they care very deeply about it, and if they care, we care too. Here is a screenshot:

It has purposely pixel art-ish graphics, a tile-based game world, monsters to fight, items to earn and levels to gain. Right now there aren’t many players, but that itself is a point of interest, a way to get in early and gain wealth and stature when the competition is low. I know that Chronicles of Samhan is run on a shoestring budget, completely on the backs and out of the wallets of a handful of hobbyists. They are unlikely to go corporate and enshittify it to hell, and these days that’s another point in its favor.

There have been many of these worlds, hundreds of them, and there’ll probably be hundreds more before this Internet grinds to a halt. I think everyone should try a few of them. Joining up is free, so as I often say, why not give it a try?

A few images showing off the fairly large regions to explore:

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Here’s the gist. In the Smash Bros. series, Mr. Game & Watch has a move called Judge, where he holds up a sign with a number from 1 to 9, and depending on the number one of nine different effects can happen, with possibilities like dropping food, producing a fire effect, damaging G&W himself, or, if a 9 comes up, executing an extremely powerful attack like a slightly weaker version of the game’s famous Home Run Bat item, that usually KOs an opponent.

The number that appears, and so the effect product, for the most part seems random, and a good thing too with Number 9’s immense power. Judge never executes the same move twice in a row, so if a 9 wasn’t the last result produced, you have a ⅛th chance to get it the next time… usually.

It had been noticed by some that, in certain circumstances, Judge produces a 9 result much more often, like half the time, but the details of the phenomenon were not fully known. Through sheer bloody-minded experimentation, PKBeats found out that the result is largely due to whether Mr. G&W is behind in scoring, and not just behind, but far behind. I’ll let the video give the precise lowdown, but in essence Mr. Game & Watch must have half or less of lives (sorry, “stocks” in Smash lingo) remaining compared to his opponent, and there must be 30 seconds or less left in the match.

So: it’s yet another catch-up mechanic, a way for G&W to clear opponents rapidly if it looks like he’s going to lose. Since it only comes into play at the end of a match, it almost never can make a difference though unless G&W is on his last life, and his opponent has two lives left. In that scenario G&W has a good chance of getting off a 9 and taking off a stock immediately… putting both characters on their last stock, and now G&W has to run up his opponent’s percent in the short remaining time without the increased Judge 9 chances. Doesn’t seem too useful, but then if it were actually useful, someone out there would probably have built a strategy off of it, so I guess it’s for the best that it’s so infrequent.

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NeoGamer on Youtube has an entertaining, not to mention loooong, video with short clips from 200 strange games they’ve played in their channel. (1 hour 27 minutes) Right off the bat they start out weird, and they don’t let up. Please consume responsibly.

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Access Software made other games, and would eventually begin the Tex Murphy series, but unquestionably their greatest legacy was their line golf sims, which began on the C66 with Leaderboard Golf (16 minutes). They’d move on eventually to making PC golf games, especially the Links series, which were so well-regarded that Microsoft bought the company specifically to make more golf games.

Eventually their work on computer golf would result in the formation of a subsidiary called TruGolf that made golf simulators, consisting of a huge screen and set of sensors that detects how you swing clubs and shows you your ball’s flight afterward, in a kind of deluxe version of Wii Sports Golf. Although Access would be eventually sold to Take-Two and is now no more, TruGolf survives to this day, and now they make simulators for other sports than golf, such as bowling and baseball.

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