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.
Resurrecting Sinistar: A Cyber-Archeology Documentary is a 166-minute, that’s approaching three hours long, documentary about the effort to recover the source code of the Williams arcade classic, made by SynaMax.
SynaMax also made a modified version of the game that makes the notoriously difficult arcade game easier in various ways, in interesting ways.
I’ve been watching Awful Block on AGDQ, so that’s all I have for you today. Hopefully that’ll hold you over, although I suggest that you might want to watch AGDQ too, while it lasts.
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.
Lists are severely worked content delivery methods, but darn it if TheZZAZZGlitch’s video lists aren’t actually really interesting. These are all early Pokemon game glitches and their application, and usually go quite deep into their code.
In the most recent of these (the ninth, 10 minutes long) one of the examples has to do with exploring glitched, out-of-bounds Pokemon boxes. These can cause writes to unexpected regions of memory, and very strange glitches indeed. But one in particular, if it happens, causes a write to a region of memory that causes an unexpected bankswitch, meaning, suddenly a whole swath of the game ROM isn’t what the code expects. In 99% of cases this would cause a sudden game crash end of story, but in THIS case the code that ends up executing doesn’t immediately crash the game, and not only that later in the code path, the bank gets switched back, and the code path is in such a place that it actually recovers, and the primary effect is just some glitched graphics, all completely by chance. Huh!
Here is that video, and if it’s interesting, the others (9 video playlist link) might be to your liking too.
And we’re off! Let’s start 2026 off with Flandrew’s look at the weirdest Star Wars game, the Famicom-only one Namco made. (11 minutes) It’s kind of a meme at this point, but gosh it’s even weirder than the Star Wars Holiday Special.
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.
This is one of the rare times where I won’t embed the video myself, because the blog Old Vintage Computing Research presented it as a link to their readers, and the video itself is unlisted on Youtube, so it won’t turn up in searches or through discovery features. So I hope I can help spread the word about this wonderful find.
Here is their post, and here is the video (1 hour 33 minutes). It’s a link to the Computer History Museum’s symposium on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, and has Steve Wozniak (creator of the Apple II), William Lowe (“father” of the IBM PC), Adam Chowaniec (Vice President of World Product Development at Commdore) and Jack Tramiel (founder of Commodore and key to the success of the Commodore 64).
Since this talk was given, three of the four have passed away, leaving only Steve Wozniak, probably by virtue of his youth when he invented the Apple. Please enjoy!
“Zelda Day” is a random thing over at Metafilter. One day long ago, on December 26th, there was a day in which three Legend-Of-Zelda-themed posts were made in one day. Since then I’ve commemorated the event by making another Legend of Zelda post on the same day each following year.
Here is this year’s post, but you don’t have to follow it because I’ve included the links in this post too.
They’re all videos this year. These first links are to videos by Skawo:
I think I mentioned this one before, but again, in Ocarina of Time, if you go back the way you came during the event in Kakariko Village, the world will become a glitchy mess (7 minutes):
Capsyst Animations made three fake commercials for early Zelda games, in the style of the evocative illustrations from the manual. There’s the original Zelda, Zelda II and Link to the Past (all 1 minute long):
The Amiga has hardware sprites, but they’re fairly limited. Most programmers prefer to use its powerful blitter hardware to simulate sprites, drawing them to screen memory much more rapidly than non-blitter hardware can. For more information, I refer you to the video.
That’s it for today, but there be something more substantial tomorrow….
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!
It was a weird time. Around the time as the Famicom was just getting started, Hudson Soft struck a deal with Nintendo to release some of their games for the PC-88 Japanese personal computer platform.
Many of these games had weird differences from Nintendo’s originals. The best known of them is probably Super Mario Bros. Special, a very weird version with paged scrolling, which is to say, no scrolling at all, but just flipping forward one screen at a time. Super Mario Bros. Special isn’t on the subject page of this post, which is old enough that it’s only available on the Wayback Machine, but it is on the website World Of Stewart, and wonder of wonders that page is available on the living internet! Playthroughs of the whole game, in its clunky miscolored XOR-sprite glory, can also be seen on Youtube, here, for instance. (51 minutes)
You can tell the page is old because it has a Digg social media button. (Wait, what’s that? They’re trying to revive Digg?) Please excuse the Wayback Machine banner stuck in the middle of the screenshot, it’s an artifact of Firefox’s screenshot tool.
There was also Punch Ball Mario Bros., which took the basic premise of Mario Bros. and just, well threw it away, just tossed it right in the trash, and replaced it with punching a ball around to attack enemies. Gameplay of that is also on Youtube. (5½ minutes)
Another version of Mario Bros., Mario Bros. Special (which isn’t Super Mario Bros. Special but something else) It’s harder to find Youtube video of that because Google assumes you must be looking for the Super version, but it can be found. (8½ minutes) If you recognize the title screen music from that then you are really a supergeek! (I did recognize it, so yes, that includes me.) And the game, wow… it really doesn’t look fun to play.
Some other games listed include Excitebike (11 minute video), Ice Climber (7½ minute video), the (only slightly Nintendo and with janky music) HAL Hole-In-One Golf (15 minute video), and (the very non-Nintendo) Chack’n Pop (4 minute video). Hole-In-One is a predecessor of Nintendo’s Golf, if you’re looking for that Nintendo connection.
One thing all of these games, except maybe Hole-In-One, have in common is they look like they’re excruciating to play now! They either have way too fast or slow controls, or ear-tearing scratchy music, or both. But they are interesting as curiosities, so here they are. Curious!
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!
