Category: Uncategorized

ABAgames’ “Good Old Game Sound Generator”

Kenta Cho is a brilliant game maker, and he’s come up with a couple of generators that can generatively make short stretches of music, suitable for classic-inspired arcade games.

Short VGM Generator is on itch.io, and works by taking a pre-existing piece of music and attempting to make another piece of a similar style.

The Good Old Game Sound Generator is on GitHub, but for playing around you might be more interested in its Demo page. It takes a bit more effort to make something with it, but it’s a much more flexible tool. I must leave you to your own devices to make something of value, or at least of interest, using it.

The process that let him to create these tools is up on a page he made on dev.to. If you’re interested in generative music you should take a look!

Kimimi: Bounty Sword and Wild Card

Kimimi the Game-Eating She Monster (great handle!) has a knack for finding awesome Japanese games that Western shores missed 0ut on, and one such game is Bounty Sword, a Super Famicom JRPG with real-time combat, muted colors, and let’s not forget a fairy playing the role of player cursor. It’s worth your time to read, and maybe to contribute to her Ko-Fi!

Since I wrote that, she’s posted a review of another extremely interesting Squaresoft game, for the WonderSwan, Wild Card!

Memory Machine 57: Preserving 70s Arcade Machines

The Memory Machine podcast has a new episode talking about the preservation of 70s arcade machines. Guests include Ethan Johnson, Kate Willaert, Dale Geddis, and Kevin Bunch of Atari Archive.

Games from the classic (Space Invaders onwards) and later eras of arcade machines tend to be preserved fairly well, or at least have MAME watching their backs, but there was a whole era of arcades before that time, that pose special challenges for preservation. Atari/Kee’s early release The Quiz Game Show, for instance, their first game using a processor, read questions off of special data tapes that may not even exist nowadays. Many games from that era had no processor, and were constructed out of discrete logic components.

When I wrote part one of We Love Atari Games, I was surprised by how many games from this era are so little known now. Atari’s Football, for example, sold extremely well, even keeping up with Space Invaders for a little while (until Super Bowl season that year ended), but I barely even heard of it before I started working on the book.

These games are important to preserve too, but the difficulty in emulating them, their great rarity, and the inescapable arrows of time and entropy present huge challenges. Please listen to the podcast for more information, from people who know much more about them than me.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe

It’s hard to believe that the original The Stanley Parable, one of the weirdest games in memory, is nine years old. It’s just gotten an expanded version with even more disturbingly hilarious narrative metatextuality. Or, if you wish, hilariously disturbing metatextuality narrative. Metatextually narrative disturbing hilarity?

Now there’s an Ultra Deluxe version, which is described as a “re-imagining.” It’s a third-off on Steam for the moment, putting its price close to that of the original, which is still listed on Steam, waiting to trick people into buying it who don’t know there’s an expanded version on the same store. This version also has ports to Switch, the two most recent PlayStations, and the current/past three Xboxes. I’d hate to be in charge of that build chain.

So once again prepare to pilot Stanley through an FPS without any combat or weapons, experiencing* a story, and a narrator, who reacts to your actions in entertaining ways. The original game had so many riffs on its subject that it might be worth picking up the new version just to see what further milk they can extract from its thematic teat.

(* “And the prize for the Most Generic Verb goes to….”)

Video: Atari Archive

Atari Archive is one of those projects that seeks to document every game released for some platform. In this case, it’s for the Atari VCS. That’s the original one, the real one, CX2600, not the one made by the company that currently wears the skin of the old Atari like a gruesome shroud.

The Atari VCS/2600 wasn’t the first programmable video game console, but it was certainly the most popular early console. (I had my own look at a few interesting examples of its software in a book of my own.)

Atari Archive is currently up to Episode 57, on Kaboom! Episodes tend to be in the 10-15 minute range, making it easy to find out about specific games in a timely fashion. Here are a few popular games to get you started:

#56: Warlords – #54: Missile Command – #33: Adventure – #32: Space Invaders – and, of course, #1: Combat

Link Roundup, 4/19/2022

Sega looks to revive Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio properties

On using a serial port SD card reader on a Sega Dreamcast

How a Sonic fanfic writer ended up leading Sonic Frontiers

A roguelite that looks like an 80s Saturday Morning cartoon

Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games could be coming to Switch Online

Old Super Mario Bros. anime restored in hi-def quality and available to stream or download

The anime appears to have the “sucked into gameworld” premise used in Captain N: The Game Master and Bug tte Honey
Cameo by special guest star Gamera!

An Indie Dev Showcase

Hello everyone. I’m Josh from Game-Wisdom and I’ll be uploading my video series, the Indie Dev Showcase here for Set Side B, along with indie game reviews. Each week, I cover indie games on my youtube channel and then use these videos to highlight the many games I play. If you’re an indie dev with a game you would like me to look at, please reach out. This one, in particular, is my 100th video in the series, and I’m taking a look back at the many great and hidden gems of the indie space I covered, which is perfect for a site like this.

  • 0:00 Introduction
  • 1:14 Alwa’s Legacy
  • 1:48 Lumote
  • 2:54 BoyandBox
  • 4:11 Sky Racket
  • 5:08 Intergalactic Fishing
  • 6:38 What the Golf
  • 7:25 The Hex
  • 8:35 PokeyPoke
  • 9:48 Shapez.Io
  • 11:08 Keen One Girl Army
  • 12:34 Candy Raid The Factory
  • 14:06 Gloom
  • 15:32 Final Upgrade
  • 16:46 Professor Lupo: Ocean
  • 18:02 Webbed
  • 19:06 Dojoran
  • 20:08 Kunai
  • 21:17 Leap of Fate
  • 22:35 Quantum Protocol
  • 24:05 Time Break Chronicles
  • 25:09 Vision Soft Reset
  • 25:56 Morkredd
  • 26:50 Siralim Ultimate
  • 27:53 Loveland
  • 28:40 The Dungeon Beneath
  • 29:39 Hoplegs
  • 30:16 Boy Beats World
  • 30:59 Turbo Overkill
  • 31:40 Prodigal
  • 32:46 Ghostlore

The Mana World is coming to Steam!

The ‘Mana Launcher’ App appeared on Steam. Slated to be release on December 1st, this open source MMO has entered a new phase of development.

The Mana World (TMW) is a free 2d open-source MMORPG. With a team of volunteer developers, it has been a labor of love for a decade, and on April 5th they celebrated officially getting on Steam.

Explore the multiple unique universes. The Mana world team is focused on building detailed worlds, unique quests using classic retro graphics. Currently you will find four unique universes that are being developed into it’s own unique world.

It is my hope the community will blossom with its release to steam.

I am quickly reminded of Tibia online or Nexus: The Kingdom of Winds as I was learning the ropes. I was greeted with a few players willing to help me warm up to the universe and get started. TWM has a unique retro style questing system and a magic system not for the casual gamer. If you are looking for a new 2d home I would recommend exploring ‘The Mana World.’

It even works on ARM computers!


If you can’t wait until December 1st for the release of ‘Mana Launcher’ on Steam, you can download the client today at The Mana World and explore the magic of this retro-style MMO.