WARNING: This isn’t a Youtube video! It’s good old text, like Frog intended the internet to be!
Over on The Gamesoft Fun Club, David Cabrera explains how great arcade Ridge Racer is, that isn’t exactly like the Playstation version, in fact it runs on more powerful hardware. And he’s played so much of it, including on the recent Arcade Archives release, that he has one of the top 50 times in the world on it. He’s so enthusiastic about it that I think it may nearly rival my own obsession with arcade Rampart, although that’d be quite a lot of unhealthy focus indeed.
Image from the linked article.
Mind you, arcade Ridge Racer only has one course, although according to David it plays quite differently depending on your difficulty. There’s an extra section that opens up at the higher levels, and the course is designed so that higher speeds requires more skill to make it through without crashing.
It’s not really a long article so go give it a read? It’s the kind of thing that makes the web great.
Made in 1995 but not released until 2001, it’s really something. That is, it’s a thing, and there is some of it. Not only are the effects and acting somewhere beyond the line of rationality, it looks like it’s barely playable, even on the easiest difficulty. Imagine plunking down $50 for this in 2001 for your obsolete Sega CD, out of production for five years.
Huh…. on further reflection, that actually sounds awesome! The Playstation 2 had been released by that point! It’s certainly memorable, although I wouldn’t have wanted to buy it for purposes of playing it unironically.
Interactive Fiction blog Renga in Blue reports that a rare variant of classic Adventure, that was playable on Compuserve for many years and only went down when their game offerings went offline in the mid 90s, has been recovered and made playable online.
Promo image for this version of Adventure from Regna in Blue. You know it’s an adventure game in the70s & 80s when there’s a bunch of mostly naked people in the art.
It’s called Adventure 751 in reference to the number of available points there are to find. The post in turn links to Arthur O’Dwyer’s article on this version, and other versions, which seem to contain substantial added content from the original Crowther & Woods version.
It’s playable, but requires a lot of effort to get there, including compiling a PDP10 emulator and loading a disk image into it. I wish VCFMW wasn’t months behind me now, it’d have been a blast to see if someone there had access to a working PDP10, and if the game could have been transferred onto it!
As O’Dwyer mentions, there are plenty of games from this era that are just completely, utterly lost, with practically no chance of recovery. And even versions like this, that can technically be played, still hang on by just a thread. The people who created them often don’t have accessible archives, and the institutions who hosed them rare seem interest in preserving them. It’s a sorry state indeed, but at least there are a few survivals like this one.
Patrick Gillespie made this fun Youtube video showing what happens when you do an objectively silly thing: open JPEGs in a text editor. It’s only six minutes long:
I absolutely love doing crazy things like this. JPEGs are particularly interesting because, once you get past the magic sections that cause it to outright break, and the metadata areas that don’t change the image visibly at all, JPEGs are affected in all kinds of bizarre ways when you change random bytes!
One important take away is to not use Windows Notepad for your image editing adventures, because it’ll change many more bytes than just the ones you want to change, in the name of correcting and regularizing the file, and it’ll practically always result in a non-working image.
Hah, a bit late with this one, mostly because I was trying to solve it. Found by John Overholt over on Mastodon, It’s a big page full of 2,025 different items that you’re to sort, into 45 categories of 45 items each. Because the year 2025 just ended, of course.
Click on an item, then click on another item of the same type. The two will merge together into one item. When you get an item with all 45 of its type it’ll be replaced with a box with the name of its category.
This is far from all the items! They scroll off to the right and down!
Remembering the locations of the growing categories quickly becomes a major part of the puzzle! When you combine an item with another one, the combined group ends up at the location of the second one you clicked. Use this information to get the categories as close to the upper-left as possible. This will prevent them from moving around too often, and aid your creaking grey matter in recording their places.
Unless I miss my guess, you’ll progress smoothly for a while; you’ll complete one or two specific categories long before any of the others; then at about six to ten categories finished you’ll collide rudely with the taxonomical wall. I had to use Google to get through the last 20% (that’s about 400 items remaining!), and I really think you will too, since everyone has holes in their knowledge.
Below (in ROT13, since it’s a spoiler), I list some of the harder categories to pick up on:
Bluesky only released their Saved Posts feature about three months ago, but I’m such a link packrat that there’s plenty there to fill a multilink post for 2025. I hope you find some interesting things in here!
@thinkygames gave us a talk by Patrick Traynor, creator of the mindtwisting puzzle game Patrick’s Parabox, and how that game was programmed. Hey, I kind of know him!
videogameesoterica.bsky.social notes that a fan translation of SEGAGAGA, one of the last official Dreamcast games and a weird and hilarious museum of Sega content, is nearing completion.
fluffcopter.bsky.social, on a weird interaction in Caves of Qud that I’m not sure if they’re kidding about or not. They “poured warm static on my dog, it turned into a dromad trader that comes with guards and items. They are all my dog, the whole trade party and merchandise. I convinced my dog to sell me my dog for free while my dog, my dog, my dog and my dog were standing guard.”
And, most recently, almondsquirrel.bsky.social reminds us that Disney Solitaire, a game with dark patterns, real money transactions and lootboxes, is PEGI rated 3+, while Balatro has none of that, but is rated 18+ because of its nebulous Poker theming.
It’s Christmas Eve, and at the moment I’m maintaining a Christmas video watch thingy for friends, so not a lot of time to post something deep today. Here’s a video that’s been hanging around my linklist for a long time, Nostalgia Tech Lounge on Youtube musing on the lost are of joke programs. (12 minutes)
Slowly making headway against a year’s worth of accumulated links. Please enjoy whatever takes your interest.
1. Sega’s One-Sided History, from The History of How We Play, about the tensions between Sega’s Japanese and American management.
2. From Mugen Gaming, working on a translation of Japanese TTRPG Sword World, with a crowdfunding campaign to begin in 2026. Included here because Sword World is soaked in video game influences. It really is a case of back-and-forth around the world: Wizardry and Ultima inspired Dragon Quest, Dragon Quest inspired other JRPGs, and then those JRPGs influenced Sword World. And to go with it, a nearly-complete fan translation of a Super Famicom Sword World game.
4. At Retroevolve, Mandy Odoerfer describes the charm of bootleg Pokemon games, games like 2003 Pocket Monster Carbuncle and Pokemon Vietnamese Crystal.
Image from the article, up on Retroevolve
5. The Splatterhouse Homepage, an oldschool webshrine, is still updating, and has a new page on the recent dumping of an unreleased sequel to Splatterhouse Wanpaku Graffiti, called Splatterworld, although I notice that one of its downloads is actually dated to 1993. Hmm, curious!
YES I KNOW, yet another Nintendo thing. Nintendo Adults are the video game version of Disney Adults, in so many ways. One more way now because there are actual Nintendo theme parks.
I maintain that I am not a Nintendo Adult. But they have had a long history of making inventive and interesting games. I thought they’d been failing a bit at that lately, but then comes Kirby Air Riders, as weird and distinctive game as they’ve ever published. (By the way, did you know that they’ve put up Christmas decorations on the Kirby Air Riders menu screen and paddock area?)
It’s a weird bit of console gaming lore than Sony was so proud of the PS2’s Cell processor that they actually officially ported Linux to it. All you had to do was buy the “Linux Kit,” which contained two DVDs, a module that added monitor-capable video out and Ethernet ports, and a “gigantic” 40GB hard drive.
As it turns out, the PS2 was actually all that great a Linux machine, and it was soon outclassed by PCs. That hasn’t stopped there from being a Playstation Linux community, with a website that sadly announces that it most soon close down in a post dating to 2009. It feels a bit like one of those “Closing Liquidation” signs that sometimes stores that have no plans of shutting down put up, in the hopes of attracting some extra customers. Oh well, I’m sure it’ll perish eventually, such is the way of all things. I just hope they can hold out a few extra decades.
Buying a complete unopened PS2 Linux box nowadays can cost you well over $1,000.
It was released in 2002; Linux itself was first created in 1991.
It’s based on the Japanese distribution Kondara, which itself was based off of Red Hat, and it shows due to it using RPM for its package format.
It runs WindowMaker for its GUI, which is based off of NeXTSTEP, the predecessor of the GUI used in current-day macOS.
In 2025 this is very much a Stupid Computer Trick, or perhaps a Stupid Console Trick, but ActionRetro has so much fun running OSes on various unexpected hardware that it’s difficult to fault him for it.
Wow, Ocarina of Time has some bizarre glitches. There is one where if you talk to a character with a specific object in hand, you get absolutely the wrong item in return. I need to pin down the details so I’ll talk about that one later.
In the meantime, here’s another ridiculous glitch, explained by Skawo. (7 minutes) Skawo’s style is to use onscreen text to do the talking, which I can appreciate since I usually have subtitles on anyway.
In brief, due to the way the game handles weather, if you enter Kakariko Village during a certain story event, then leave it immediately, it starts raining heavily, then doesn’t have the chance to stop. The game handles lighting separately for each time of day and each kind of weather. Kakariko has a table for the specific kind of weather for that event, HEAVY_RAIN, but most places don’t, so the game refers to a table of garbage data to provide lighting for places. That causes Hyrule Field to take on a bright purple hue, among other places. Have a look!
3. Read Only Memo on a recompilation of Dinosaur Planet, Rare’s N64 game that got reconfigured into Star Fox Adventures on Gamecube, their last game made for Nintendo before Microsoft bought them. (They did make some portable games after that, like It’s Mr Pants for Gameboy Advance and a port of Diddy Kong Racing for the DS.)
