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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General Chaos was the product of a couple of ex-Midway developers, and creators of some of their most iconoclastic hits, Brian Colin and Jeff Nauman. They were the creators of Rampage, one of the standouts of the Silver Age of arcades, and the basis of a certain popular movie. They tend to dwell in the shadow of the likes of Ed Boon and John Tobias, creators of Mortal Kombat, and Mark Turmell of NBA Jam and NFL Blitz. Yet there’s a strong argument that could be made that NBA Jam wouldn’t have existed without the similar-in-play Arch Rivals from the same company, which was from Colin and Nauman.

In addition to Arch Rivals and Rampage, Colin and Nauman worked on Spy Hunder, Xenophobe and Pigskin 621 AD, before leaving Midway and striking out on their own under the banner of Game Refuge. And that’s where they made General Chaos for the Genesis, published by Electronic Arts. And hey, Game Refuge still exists, while Midway is currently a locked cabinet full of IP somewhere in a basement of either Warner Bros. Entertainment, or the company currently called “Light & Wonder,” (I don’t know Pete I don’t think I buy it) but contains such multitudes as “Scientific Games,” “Autotote Corporation,” “Shuffle Master,” “WMS Industries,” “Bally,” or even other totemic brands that once saw better days. These days they mostly sell to casinos, may they speedily pass on their way to hell.

General Chaos isn’t one of their best known titles, but it has a certain something. It’s a cartoony, comedic take on deadly warfare. The Kickstarter calls it a predecessor of the real-time strategy genre, and there is some of that there certainly, but truthfully General Chaos is something entirely unique. It’s an intrinsically two-sided battlefield action combat game where the warzone is made of single screens, and where each player controls a team of five soliders with different abilities (with one exception I’ll mention in a bit). In action it feels a bit like Mattel’s classic tank combat games Armor Battle for the Intellivision and Armor Ambush for the Atari 2600, in that a single player must command multiple units, but with much more depth.

There is also quite a bit of General Chaos essence in Team Fortress 2, even though it’s not an FPS, for both its comical, satirical atmosphere and its array of characters which each have substantial differences from each other. There are gunners, rocket launchers, grenadiers, flame throwers and dynamite chuckers. Most of the time characters are controlled indirectly: control a cursor to point at a location and press the B button to send your current character to it. C changes characters, and A tells all your units to fire their weapons. They automatically pick their targets.

When opposing soldiers get near each other the battle pauses and they engage in hand-to-hand battle, in the form of a simple fighting game. Combatants who are knocked down can be revived by pointing at them with the cursor and pressing A to call in one of a limited number of Medics. Characters who fall too often will eventually turn into a pile of bones and vanish. Additional Medic uses can be found on the battlefield, and are also awarded for reaching certain point totals.

As an alternative playstyle, a side can choose to field a pair of Commandos. If one player is using Commandos they must divide their attention between them, but two players can also play co-op with a Commando apiece. Commandos don’t use the indirect method of control, and instead control directly. This can make them much more effective warriors, but comes at the cost of only being two people to a squad, instead of a full team of five. Commandos can call in Medics too, but must reach their teammate in person to do so.

There are lots of worthy games from the 16-bit era that didn’t receive their due, and while I don’t know how well it sold, General Chaos always struck me as a bit of a sleeper hit. Video game genres were already becoming locked-down, and Electronic Arts was already showing signs of abandoning their reputation for nurturing talent and becoming the grotesque behemoth they are today. I’m surprised they don’t outright own the rights to General Chaos, but it appears they do not, or maybe Game Refuge bought it back from them.

The Kickstarter page makes it clear that Colin and Neuman have spent a lot of time thinking about how their classic wargame could be improved. There are more characters planned, more control options, between battle upgrades and most interesting of all, the ability to “go commando” and take direct control of any unit on your side. Home turf battles come with extra units on a given side, “expendables” that have limited abilities but help to give defenders a slight edge. There’s an array of stretch goals, with an especially interesting one at $200k: an arcade version. I think General Chaos was always destined for the arcade, and now it may finally happen.

So if all of this seems interesting to you, please consider supporting their project. Because war is a deadly serious business, so the best thing any of us can do is to laugh at it.

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Here’s their playlist of their many item trivia videos, which include the (so far) six videos on Assist Trophies (16 videos, total length, about 6 hours):

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6

Just some of interesting facts revealed about Assist Trophies:

• Some Assist Trophy characters have their own HP, and if players deplete it with attacks they can even be KOed with a strong enough attack. This earns the defeating player a point, although it doesn’t cost the player who picked up the trophy a point.
• Usually the owning player can’t attack their own trophys, but if the trophy has started glowing, a state they get into when very low on health, the trophy will actually become vulnerable to attacks even by the player who collected it. This is so they can earn the point before another player earns it.
• The trophy with the highest health is Mother Brain, with a base health of 120 HP.
• “Base health,” what’s that? Assist Trophys that have health get more health the more players are in the game! This goes up to twice their usual health if there’s eight players.
• A good number of trophies have health, and can be attacked, than you’d might think. For example, in the trophy of Color TV Game 15, an early Pong-clone Nintendo made in 1977, the paddles are vulnerable to attack. Each has only 15 HP, but the trophy is defeated if either paddle is defeated.
• The Starman trophy, if it’s defeated, displays the SMAAAAASH!! message from Earthbound!
• Each Assist Trophy has a list of stages is can’t appear on. Very few trophies can appear on absolutely any stage. One of them is Lyn from Fire Emblem.
• There are even trophies that get blocked by Omega or Battlefield versions of certain stages. Usually these are trophies that reside in the background in some way, like Midna or the Moon from Majora’s Mask.
• Each Assist Trophy also has a list of items, and other Assist Trophies, that it disables, that can’t generate while it’s active, and alternatively, if that item or trophy currently exists in the world, that prevent it from appearing.
• Referring to that last point, “existing” can mean many things. Like, an item held in Isabelle’s pocket still exists in the world, and so will block all the items that can’t generate while it’s instantiated almost indefinitely.

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They’ve been diversifying a bit since, and their most recent video is on alternative communication in games. (21 minutes) How so alternative? As in, ways to talk to players without talking to them, either via speech or direct text.

They give a few examples. The first is when Blizzard changed the /spit emote so that it couldn’t be used to specify someone to spit on, when players used that means to express disgust over people who bought a $70 paid mount. The second is the piecemeal phrase building system used to leave environment messages for people in Souls games, also known as template messages. And third, canned messages from Smash-style and modded Smash games.

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2. Computers don’t have to be electronic (Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace’s Difference Engines; here’s a video about it [5½ minutes], with some clips of one in operation)

3. Computers don’t have to be electronic (The Digi-Comp 1 kit from 1963, computing with rubber bands; here’s a video about it, 16 minutes)

4. Computers don’t have to be electronic (Turing Tumble, a kit and game you can get that does computations with the action of falling marbles; here’s their Getting Started video [5 minutes])

5. Computers don’t have to be electronic (The 8-Bit computer built of K’NEX parts called the MechaDigit-1, bits posted here twice before; here’s video of it [18 minutes]; and here’s an older project called the K’nuter [10 minutes])

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But I’d much rather link something interesting that’s basically unknown. Help spread the word about it! The only problem there is, how do you find that stuff in the first place? It’s a bit of a chicken-or-David-Egger. I think that’s what you’d call it, sure.

So when I saw someone I follow on Bluesky wrote out nearly every Nintendo video game property, including those that appeared on niche platforms like Virtual Boy and Satellaview, primarily so they could boldface the ones that have arrived on Nintendo Music, I had to run directly here to link to it.

I don’t vouch for its total accuracy, but it still could be a useful resource. In fact I know there are some things that are missing, like their early arcade games Sheriff or Radar Scope, just for starters. But if the idea is to present things that realistically could present soundtracks included in Nintendo Music, it’s a pretty good list.

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But which kinds of failure are the most fun? After spending several minutes setting up your expedition getting eaten by wild animals immediately off the wagon is a harsh start to play, especially if it happens repeatedly. Fortress destruction via dragon is scary, but it’s also hilarious; everyone dying on the surface before even digging your first warren is less auspicious.

Dwarf Fortess recently celebrated its 20th birthday, and in celebration Kitfox Games, its Steam publisher, has released a new official beginners video, made by BlindiRL. (34 minutes) It is a good way to move your fortress endings more towards the entertaining end of the scale.

And I’d like to point out, at the end of the video, we’re told that ending a fortress doesn’t quite mean it has to be a failure. If you decide to “finish” a fortress, but then start a new fortress in the same world and of the same faction, then it’s possible for your old dwarfs to decide to emigrate to it. This is something I’ve never tried myself, but it’s a good reason to keep playing in the same world, as you continue to write the saga of your game.

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I’ve already introduced The Bard’s Tale in prior posts, so in brief: The original Bard’s Tale trilogy were all Wizardry-style dungeon exploration RPGs in the classic style, called by some “blobbers.” Indeed they did a lot to define that style. A few things that Wizardry did weren’t adopted by later blobbers, especially its particular form of permadeath, its simulation of “Out” parties and retrieving lost characters from the dungeon, and its willingness to obliterate your entire group instantly and permanently if you teleported into solid stone.

The Bard’s Tale, on the other hand, looks exactly what the standard picture of a classic blobber looks like today. So long as you have the cash to revive a character there is no real penalty for dying, there is no absolutely solid stone to teleport into, and there’s no concept of “Out” parties, for if your party wipes their corpses get mysteriously teleported back to the Adventurer’s Guild, where if there’s enough gold in their cold pockets you, I guess in the capacity of being a caring guardian spirit, can tell the priests to bring them back to life.

But while not as eager to annihilate members of your group, neither is The Bard’s Tale an easy game. Compensating for the lack of permadeath, dungeons tend to be much more diabolical in design, with magical darkness, teleporters, spinners and antimagic zones in evidence. Dungeon levels are bigger than Wizardry’s, there are more of them, and most significantly to a new player, “Town,” here named Skara Brae, isn’t a simple menu of options but an entire level of its own to explore! And at the start of the game, you don’t know where anything except the Adventurer’s Guild is! You have to do significant mapping before you can buy equipment, recharge your spell points, or even raise your experience level.

In this 7th installment of the video series, the player finds and begins to explore the third of the game’s dungeons, finds some interesting items, suffers from disk corruption and loses some progress, earns it back, and fights a jabberwock.

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Multiball is chaotic, and glorious for it, and it is not always possible to play one well. But you can learn to improve your chances at it, with practice and a decent strategy. For the latter, Tim Sexton explains how to go about it in an 18 minute video.

If multiball were easier, or less chaotic, it wouldn’t be as much fun! And even once you learn some decent tactics to lessen its complexity, like by learning to trap all but one ball on a single flipper and making shots with the remaining ball on the other one, it can still be fun sometimes to just try to make shots. Sometimes that works for me! But learning to play pinball consistently well means not taking on any unnecessary risk, and that’s certainly risky.

Tim’s video not only covers basic multiball tips, but it also examines some specific games, both new and old, and at the end presents examples of multiball play in progress. If you’re interested in improving at pinball, it’s worth a look!

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Way back in 1984, having had success with their first product Softdisk, the nascent Softdisk Publishing released the first issue of Loadstar, a “magazine-on-disk” for Commodore 64 microcomputers.

Softdisk is mostly known these days as being the former workplace of several people who would go on to found Id Software, creators of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. Softdisk published, as the Id guys’ last work for the company, Catacomb 3D using the Wolf3D engine, and a Commander Keen episode.

Softdisk released other products too, but Loadstar eventually proved to be something special. Early on they assumed that their PC and Mac products would be their legacy, but then Microsoft and then the internet came along and it suddenly became much harder to make a go of it with a monthly paid software collection. Softdisk became an ISP; they got bought out by a bigger ISP; nowadays they don’t exist really, except as a bag of rights owned in pieces by Piko Interactive and/or Catacomb Games, who bought their Id-related assets.

But some time before then Loadstar and its relevant assets had left the company. Defying expectations and buoyed by the large userbase of the Commodore 64 (quick googling suggests they sold 70 million units), Loadstar was still doing fairly well for itself. It was no longer sustaining the whole company like it once had, but it was too large an audience to ignore. So Softdisk spun Loadstar off to J&F Publishing, under the captaincy of its longest-serving Managing Editor Fender Tucker, and they kept the lights on a while longer.

When Fender retired from Loadstar at the dawning of the year 2000, he passed managing editorship over to Dave Moorman, who kept it going for 49 more issues. It was starting to become hard to find new things to keep Loadstar going at this point. While Dave had some regulars sending in new things, a large back catalog to mine for material, and skill enough to write some software for Loadstar himself, its release rate slowly dropped from monthly to, in 2007, two issues in that year. Then a tornado his his house and destroyed the tools he used to make Loadstar. One more issue made it out in the following year, that had been in production and finished by Ricky Derocher in 2008. And that is where Loadstar’s story ended.

Next, what I’ve been doing

A year or so ago, with the permission of Fender who still owns Loadstar and J&F Publishing, I threw together something called Loadstar Compleat. A prior product also called that had been sold by Fender for some time, a CD-ROM with the 199 issues from before and during his run, along with the 42 issues of another magazine, Loadstar 128, and various other products and odds and ends.

I took the issues from there, replaced some bad copies with better ones provided by Ricky Derocher, added in the 51 later issues from Dave Moorman’s editorship, and added a kind of shell program to make browsing and searching through them all easier. I packaged this all together and threw it up on itch.io as Loadstar Compleat for $15. Since then I’ve now also given three talks on Loadstar and its history, in person at VCFMW 2025, virtually for TPUG, and three days ago also in person at VCFSE 2026. (There should be video of that soon, I’ll link to it here when it enters my notice.)

Now, possibly, the future

Dave has always said he wanted Loadstar to last to its 256th issue, to make it an even binary number (2⁸, or 100000000). Even though Loadstar only had about 100 subscribers left by that point he was still committed to doing it, and only the fury of nature prevented him from making it.

I mentioned this at VCFSE, musing that perhaps I could finish the task he had started, making a final six issues of the venerable disk magazine, and a couple of people there thought that it might be a good idea. And I think I have enough knowledge now of Loadstar’s underpinnings that I might be able to accomplish this. With all the tools available for producing software for retro platforms now (I have an upcoming article on those in the works), it is arguably easier to make C64 software than it’s ever been, and now that there’s the Ultimate64 and Maxi65, the size of the C64 platform is growing once again.

So, let’s start making plans for how this could happen. In addition to doing whatever needs to be done to understand Loadstar’s file formats to get its Presenter system to fulfill our purposes, I figure we need:

• Contributors, and contributions. Commodore 64 software, hi-res artwork (at least one image for each issue for the loading image), SID music (at least one piece per issue for the Presenter background music), articles and anything else we’d need to keep up Loadstar’s standards according to the systems they used in their late period, which used a polished Presenter menu program written in machine code, a text reader to display documentation and articles, and miscellaneous other niceties.
• Means to compensate them. We aren’t sure if this can support itself financially yet. For right now, we need to keep our options open. If we get a lot of interest it’s not out of the question that this could mean a bit of actual money, but for now free issues are what we’re considering.
• A means to produce physical disks. These issues would be sold digitally (as .d64 and .d81 disk images for emulators), but it feels like to be a real disk magazine, there must be actual Commodore-formatted 5 1/4″ and/or 3 1/2″ disks to sell too. You can still get 5 1/4″ disks. Amazon sells them ten for $25.

We’re currently discussing ways to accomplish these things. I’ve started a thread at loadstarce.com to discuss this project. We are fortunate that many of the Loadstar editors are still around, including Fender Tucker, his associate editor Jeff Jones, and Dave Moorman, as well as people who care about Loadstar’s memory like Ricky Derocher.

There are two things we need right now. The first is indication of interest. Would you be interested in buying something like this? How about spreading the word about our little venture?

The other thing we need is “content”: software, writing, art and music, in formats appropriate for the Commodore 64. C64 art must be hi-res VIC-II format. Music can’t just be any old SID tune but in the format its Presenter used (more information on that as I determine it). Software doesn’t have to be machine code, for Loadstar published many BASIC programs, and multiple BASIC extensions too, including one, Dot.BASIC Plus, that still has a website and working downloads!

Are you any of you interested in, and capable of, providing these things? I don’t know how much we can pay you yet. For my part I will make the rounds online and approach people who might be interested in helping revive Loadstar, if just for a little while.

And who knows, if this proves popular enough, maybe we could go past issue 256? Shooting for 512 seems like a ludicrous dream, certainly not something I could do in my remaining lifetime, but who knows for sure? Let’s dare to dream.

If you want to be involved in the continuation of the frankly improbable legacy of Loadstar, you can reach me:

• on Mastodon, at either @setsideb@mstdn.games or @rodneylives@mefi.social.
• on Bluesky, at @rodneylives.bsky.social.
• via email, at johnwh (at) gmail.com.
• on Metafilter, via MeMail to JHarris.

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This is a double review of Astro Prospector and Legends of Dragaea played with a review key and press key respectively.

00:00 Intro
00:20 Astro Prospector
2:57 Legends of Dragaea

Josh Bycer

Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”

game-wisdom.com/

The game simulates the passing of time, which affects a number of things. Every week (five game days) you get income from the king of the realm, but also must pay your troops and other miscellaneous expenses. There is a time limit (determined by the game’s difficulty level), preventing you from passing weeks for income. While you’ll probably fight hundreds of battles in a typical game, technically speaking you can win without fighting any: bringing villains to justice earns you pieces of a map, a depiction of one screen of the game’s vast scrolling area, and the win condition is to find that screen and search for a lost scepter on its center location. While the maps are the same every game, nearly all the locations of the wandering monsters, treasures, villains and other important elements are randomly placed each game, giving King’s Bounty tremendous replayability.

A true classic strategy wargame, King’s Bounty was widely ported, to DOS, the Mac, the Atari ST, even to the Commodore 64 (that must have been a difficult job), and there’s also a surprisingly good rendition for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive that might be the best version, and was implemented in-house by New World Computing themselves (they did a similarly great version of Might & Magic II for that system).

Dan Heskett has recreated the engine of King’s Bounty and put the code on Github. You’ll need the files of the original DOS disks to use his code, but if you don’t care to go that route you can instead play it in your web browser. The keys are the same as the DOS version; use this PDF of the manual to learn how to play. The Github Readme has a wealth of information, not just on how to build the recreation but of the internals of King’s Bounty. It even includes two autoplayers, one that simulates a game as a human would play it, the other a game played with perfect knowledge of the game world.

Note: I have noticed a couple of bugs in this project. I am giving this project the benefit of the doubt that it was not generated by an AI system. If I discover otherwise, I will mention that fact here.

Here’s a few more screenshots:

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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.

Another little fun indie puzzle game! And it’s based on Sokoban too, and it was also pointed out on Metafilter, this time by user Cogito in a comment. So let’s get our warehouse gloves on and get back to pushin’. It’s Samuel’s Sickoban!

It’s implemented in Pico-8, and should run wherever it runs. As typical in this burgeoning puzzle genre, you have a pusher character (of boxes not drugs), whose job is to set objects in the right places. Here the objects you move are round spheres, a fact that becomes important later on….

In the screenshot above, the striped spot is a button, of the video game type with a broken spring, that must be held down in order to keep being pressed. The black square is a pit. You shouldn’t step on that part. Holding down the button with the ball causes the wall to the north to vanish, allowing you to move into the next room.

Already Sickoban seeks to earn its name. This might seem like a simple room to pass, there isn’t even anything to push. But something is amiss… there are walls that don’t line up with the checkerboard. The exit is half off your movement grid vertically. You’ll have to find a way to get yourself off of it too, by pushing against a half-aligned wall.

Actually, you’ll have to do that more than once to compete this puzzle, and the large pit won’t help in that. Fortunately, you only fall into a pit if you’re completely over it. You’re allowed to hang on by just a sliver of your square, if your movement allows for it.

Figure that one out and you’ll probably feel pretty pleased with yourself. But Samuel’s Sickoban wants to make sure you’re learned your lesson, so this horror is next. And that’s only room three! What will follow after this? I won’t tell, but it’ll probably make you break out in tears. “Happy” solving!

Samuel’s Sickoban, by spratt (itch.io, $0)

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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.

Pointed out in a post on Metafilter by long-time user pwnguin, Soko Striker is fun, and not excessively challenging, free Soccer-themed Sokoban game by Axylaric on itch.io.

The idea is to get all the balls (up to three in a level) into the goal net. The ball slides when you kick it, continuing to move until something interacts with it. We could call these “ice block” style Sokoban pieces. One wrinkle in this is that the balls can’t cross the white lines at the edges of the board, or it’s a foul and you have to start over. There is no undo command, only a retry, so think carefully before making a move. You yourself can walk outside the line freely, and will often have to.

Those yellow barriers in the screenshot above are simple blockers, mere walls that the ball will collide with and come to a halt.

Later on you find these other players on the checkerboard pitch. If the ball rolls into an arrow, the player will automatically kick it in that arrow’s facing direction. You can adjust the direction a player faces by kicking them, a trick you’ll have to use a lot.

Near the end of the game’s 30 puzzles you’ll find these traffic cones. You can push them a single space at a time by kicking them, much like how one would move a Sokoban crate. Other players can kick crates too. A cone can block a ball and stop it a single time.

There’s a few other tricks you’ll have to learn too, but Soko Striker introduces them to you itself fairly gradually. Many of its puzzles are simple tutorials, and the difficulty doesn’t get very high until near the end. The last puzzle will take you at least a few minutes to figure out, but I think you can probably handle it. One note that might be helpful: the scoreboard that shows you the level number looks as if it might be solid and block soccer balls, but it doesn’t. You can even walk through it! That’ll be helpful to you eventually.

Soko Striker by Axylaric (itch.io, $0)

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Kenji Eno (Wikipedia), the creator of horror games D and Enemy Zero, and other iconoclastic games like You, Me and the Cubes (Wikipedia). He passed away from a heart attack in 2013.

Shigeru Miyamoto (for form’s sake, Wikipedia) is of course the legendary game designer and producer at Nintendo, creator of Donkey Kong and Mario, and designer of Super Mario 64, among other titles. He’s still with us.

The interview happened shortly after the release of Mario 64, and is interesting because Eno is not unduly laudatory of it. He says it’s a good game, but feels it was missing something from its Space World presentation. Miyamoto agrees somewhat, that the free exploration of the prototype version was not as much in evidence, and thought it lost something by giving the player more direction, but that the demands of the marketplace, and the need for Nintendo to have a big hit to promote their new console, forced their hand. (Aside: the Space World version of SM64 has never turned up, not even in the infamous “Gigaleak” from 2020. shmuplations notes that The Preservation project (patch, github) is a fan attempt to recreate it.)

It’s an incredibly revealing interview, not the least reason being it discusses Nintendo’s hopes for the 64DD. I think you’ll find it very interesting, if you’re the kind of person I think you are.

shmuplations also did an interview Kenji Eno did with toy inventor and early video game producer for Nintendo Gunpei Yokoi.

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Here’s an extra, one last piece of SDGQ 2026 content….

Every year (well, twice a year) the Mastodon account of Alex Zandra posts a thread of fun out-of-context things heard during Games Done Quick. Here is the thread for the recently-concluded program. A few call-outs, but mind I’ve left out a lot of good ones on purpose:

I was told to keep this short because I’m a yapper

who here had a childhood?

the hexahedron, more commonly known as the cube

sometimes you wanna change your hair color to match the elf that lives inside your head

I think a helicopter could be an egg

before fighting shaft and dracula I’m gonna equip buffalo stars in both hands

who’s ready for the overstimulation chamber?

it’s like a cat face, but very determined

shoutout to easy bosses named François

what will happen when armadillos inevitably spread to the NBA

you can drive either a kangaroo or a dinosaur

we love glitched meat here

wark or kweh?

there could not be a more deserving stack of fifteen animals

thanks to your donations, we will be eating the drywall

please don’t hit me jerk bird o/~
please don’t hit me jerk bird o/~
please don’t hit me jerk bird o/~
please don’t hiiiit me o/~

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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.

SGDQ 2026 has concluded, having raised $2,400,000 this year for Doctors Without Borders.

Each event there are many runs of possible interest for people—and I must remind you, GDQ is far more than just AGDQ and SGDQ*.

I’ve collected a number of them in the list below. Of course I’ve picked and chosen those I found the most appealing, but they all can be found in their video archive on Youtube. Times gives are the video length, not the length of the run.

The Legend of Zelda

A Link to the Past (no major glitches, 1h33m)
The Wind Waker Randomizer Race (2h41m)
Tears of the Kingdom (1h7m)
The Wand of Gamelon (silly block, 58m)

Arcade Games

Ghosts ‘n Goblins (20m)
Vs. Super Mario Bros (24m)
Total Nuclear Annihilation (pinball, 39m)

NES Games

Castlevania (1HKO, 15m)
Gauntlet (16m)
Clash at Demonhead (30m)

16-Bit

Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen (1h13m)
Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest (1h44m)
SNES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 4: Turtles in Time (23m)
Sonic 3 & Knuckles (40m)

Kirby

Kirby Air Riders (Air Ride races, 43m)
Kirby’s Dream Land 2 (42m)
Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland race (48m)

UFO 50

Rail Heist (19m)
Vainger (Cherry goal, 35m)
Mystery Tournament (offstage, 3h22m)

Indies

Pizza Tower (tag-team Peppino & Noise, 1h11m)
Hollow Knight Silksong (1h54m)
Rift of the Necrodancer (48m)
Environmental Station Alpha (31m)
Slay the Spire II (55m)
Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair (22m)
Supraland (48m)
VVVVVV (16m)
Stardew Valley (race, 47m)

Miscellaneous

Super Mario Maker 2 (1h34m)
Mario 64 (120 star TAS, 1h19m)
Metroid Dread (1h12m)
Elden Ring (3h16m)
Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix (2h24m)
Banjo-Tooie (54m)
Pokémon FireRed (3h47m)
Super Princess Peach (1h38m)
Wario World (53m)
No More Heroes (1h35m)
Fire Emblem: Three Houses (1h29m)
Wii Sports (28m)
Earthbound Beginnings (35m)
Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time (1h33m)
Wario World (54m)
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (with a guitar controller, 56m)

Silly Block

DOS Mega Man (silly block, 13m)
C64 Snoopy, 9 loops (silly block, 17m)
Grandma, No! (silly block, 22m)
Dryway Eating Simulator (silly block, 21m)
Power Shovel (silly block, 13m)
Bait & Tackle (silly block, 18m)
WHAT THE GOLF? (silly block, 19m)

For the embedded video, which will become the video included in the social media posts, I choose DingoYabuki’s Ghosts ‘n Goblins arcade run, because it’s short and impressive:

When AGDQ 2027 comes around it’ll be in Atlanta, and I hope to be able to bring you coverage live, on the ground from the event itself! Let’s keep our fingers crossed and our expectations low!

* As an aside, just today GDQ was doing a stream with SNK, which they abruptly cancelled 30 minutes in, when they learned about SNK’s relationship with the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund. I’ve heard some people react bitterly that they were going to do the stream at all, but I have to say wow, calling it off while it’s in progress takes rather a lot of guts! I think cutting people like GDQ at the first iota of disapproval might be going too far, that people who realize their mistakes should be cut some slack, especially when it’s so rapid. I say, be prepared for positive action and reward it appropriately.

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Certainly a memorable run was Friday’s play by adef earning a “naneinf” in the solitaire poker roguelite Balatro (1 hour 16 minutes), a score high enough to overflow the game’s floating point math and become, for practical purposes, infinity. The word for this scoring bug is produced by another bug in Balatro’s string output function: it’s NaN (Not a Number) e (as in exponent) Inf (for Infinity), all together in lowercase with no spaces.

A standard game of Balatro goes for 24 Rounds (though some can be skipped) over eight Antes, of exponentially increasing score targets. After the player clears the last Ante, requiring usually 100,000 points, they may choose to keep going in “Endless Mode,” where the goals increase yet faster. In Ante 33 the goal reaches naneinf, a number that’s impossible to reach even if you earn a naneinf score yourself. By Balatro’s math code, Not a Number can never be greater than or equal to anything, even another Not a Number, so despite the literal words Endless Mode, all games of Balatro end there. Even the joker Mr. Bones won’t help, for it only saves the player’s run if they earn at least a quarter of the score requirement, and one-fourth of naneinf is still naneinf. It is the inescapable black hole of Balatro scoring, from which no value can escape.

The requirement for this game is a bit less than that. It’s to reach naneinf with the score somewhere along the way, not to reach Ante 33. There’s only a few ways to do this, and most of them require Perkeo, a Legendary joker that allows for building up unlimited free copies of consumable cards. Even

Perkeo isn’t enough to do it by itself, it needs help from a bunch of other cards, and because Balatro’s joker selection is entirely random, they may show up immediately, or never. Since Perkeo is a nearly essential element, to make the game marathon safe the run begins with a mod that searches for a random seed with an Ante 1 Perkeo and a guaranteed Overstock in the first shops. Everything else, as will eventually become painfully evident, is chance.

Despite adef having tons of play experience, and also having Youtube Balatro expert Roffle on his couch to advise, the tone of the run slowly decays from a jolly “let’s beat this as fast as possible” to a panicked “holy crap this is some bad luck how can we salvage this?” That’s much more drama than is typical for the SGDQ stage!

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And that’s also the excuse I’m using for this one, which is about as far afield as you can get concerning computer “entertainment”: learning how to hack devices like smart cameras and routers.

This video, a presentation given by Andrew Bellini on this subject given at DEF CON 32 (54 minutes), is an inspiring pep talk that makes me want to go out and find some old device, rip its PCB out of its case, fin some likely unpopulated UART points, attach them into a USB plug and plug that into a computer, and snoop on the output messages that come in over the line. At least it makes me want to try such a thing; could you be the same? Whether I’d get any further than that seems unlikely, but it’d be nice to give it a shot.

It seems entertaining to me. That’s an advantage of posting daily: tomorrow there’ll be something else, and practically speaking, you’ll probably find it much more entertaining to you.

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One of those universal early net touchstones was the Flash cartoon site Homestar Runner, and its true star Strong Bad. His name and look inspired by the early NES game Tag Team Wrestling, yes everyone knew about Strong Bad, and waited with bated breath for the weekly cartoon where he answered viewer email.

Email is much less of a thing now than it had been then, and the site updates much more sporadically these days, but Homestar and Strong Bad are still kicking for now, lovingly maintained by their creators the Brothers Chaps, Mike and Mark Chapman. The Chaps chaps have done other work since then: they once made a website (with a couple of cartoons) for the pizza chain Mellow Mushroom, collaborated with Telltale Games to make an excellent series of adventures, they created the Youtube series Two More Eggs (and we’re almost done following all of their Eggpo subseries here on SSB), they contributed to the Aquabats show back on pastel horse network The Hub, they wrote for incredibly awesome Disney Channel cartoon Gravity Falls, and more recently made a board game based on their breakout pretend man dragon Trogdor and a few computer games like Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate.

Now we come to their most recent electrowork, an add-on pack for VR putt-putt sim Walkabout Mini Golf called the Homestar Runner Distraction Pack, that features 18 H*R-themed holes and a whole lot of in-jokes.

But if you are like me, and not only have you never heard of Walkabout Mini Golf before, but don’t even have a VR headset, this might seem like a great pile of interesting content that you have no hope of ever seeing.

Well I can’t say that it’ll cease your longing for all that forbidden golf, but they did release a 53-minute promo play of the game, with WMG creator Lucas Martell playing with Matt Chapman and Strong Bad himself, as represented by a floating head.

No, not that floating head. You get that reference, right? ‘Course you do, this is the internet.

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The always-excellent Hardcore Gaming 101 is currently working through the Star Fox series, due to the well-received remake of (the remake of) Star Fox 64, still generally regarded as the high-point of the series.

Star Fox has gone through a lot of variation through its life. Rail shooters, strategy dogfighting, whatever Assault was, and even Zelda-style adventure. The strategy dogfighting is interesting as it plays out completely differently from the original game, becoming a kind of RTS. It’s a really interesting style, and one that I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else. I’m a little upset that it’s not as popular as the rail shooter Star Foxes, because it’s really interesting from a design standpoint.

The original of this type, Star Fox 2 back on the SNES, was long known as an infamous unreleased game, shelved due to the immanent release of the impending release of the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation, and the flat polygons and low framerate of SuperFX Star Fox would have looked insufficient in comparison to soon-to-come 3D titles like Panzer Dragoon and Tomb Raider.

While it didn’t get released until the SNES Mini in 2017, it did get a sequel, before the original had been seen by anyone who didn’t either work at Nintendo or played one of two leaked prototypes. Star Fox Command for the Nintendo DS featured the return of series co-creator Dylan Cuthbert, and elaborated upon the gameplay in its nearly forgotten predecessor.

Star Fox Command served as a conclusion to the story thread began in Star Fox 64, and perhaps realizing that whatever became of Star Fox after that would involve rebooting the series, it takes some pretty major liberties with the story. In Star Fox Command, it’s revealed that Andross actually had valid reasons for leaving Corneria, and that General Pepper forced him into exile for political reasons. By the end (spoilers!) former team member Peppy takes over command of the Cornerian military. Kurt Kalata of HG102 expresses some displeasure about this revisionist take on the story, and I have to agree, but oh well, they’re just games, and it’s not like Pepper served much of a role before, other than to deliver mission briefings, or reacting in hilarious dismay if you sent him a huge bill by getting a high score in SF64.

But even weirder than that….

Star Fox Command has nine endings, depending on which two characters you play the game with, and each of them serving as its own conclusion to the Star Fox 64 saga. It’s kind of a choose-your-own-future setup. Depending on your selection, Pepper’s heel turn isn’t the only reversal in the offing.

The nine different conclusions are all shown off on vgmuseum.com, and as Kurt notes, some of them are insane. Some of the story outcomes are a bit odd, but at least they’re interesting! In one, you take Falco on a side mission, resulting in Fox and company saving the day in your absense, causing him to leave Star Fox in disgrace, team up with Kitt, and start his own team. In another, Star Wolf saves Corneria, gets their fugitive status lifted, and become the toast of Corneria.

Krystal, the rescuee from Star Fox Adventures, is the focus of many of the endings. At the start of the story she’s left the team due to strife with Fox. In a couple of endings she and Fox get back together; in a couple more she joins up with Wolf! In one she leaves the team, and the galaxy all together, goes all emo and changes her name to “Kursed,” and becomes a bounty hunter.

Probably the greatest ending is the one where Fox and Falco give up being space fighters and get into high-speed hovercraft racing called “G-Zero.” I remind you that one of the drivers in F-Zero X and GX is James McCloud, the name of Fox’s father, as a human but piloting a vehicle that looks an awful lot like an Arwing. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie isn’t the only one of their properties to cross into Nintendo’s Furry Universal Century.

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