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!!):

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.

Some of the corrected facts therein:

• Metroid’s famous JUSTIN BAILEY password was not a secret hardcoded password included by the developers, the fact that it worked was completely accidental.
• Secret of Evermore didn’t use Secret of Mana’s engine (despite apparent simularities), and was never intended to be a sequel to Secret of Mana, nor did it replace Seiken Densetsu III in Square’s US release schedule.
• The Mega Drive II (released in the US as the Genesis, as opposed to the Sega Genesis) did not remove the original’s Z80 co-processor, it just used a smaller version of it in a different package.
• The Atari Jaguar didn’t claim its system was “64-bit” by adding up the bits of two 32-bit processors, it was a lot more complicated than that and the system contained 16, 32 and 64-bit components. (Measuring by bitness is often misleading anyway.)
• There was a claim that Satoru Iwata himself implemented compression in Pokemon Gen 2 (Gold/Silver/Crystal) that allowed the Kanto region from Gen 1 to be included as well. Iwata did implement compression for Gen 2, but it was to increase decompression speed, not to save more space.
• Eternal Darkness: Challenge From the Dark Side on Sega CD didn’t use an Amiga-like Hold-And-Modify mode to display 256 colors at once. This game doesn’t display that many colors anyway, it uses dithering to increase the apparent number of colors onscreen.
• And finally, a pretty well-known fact now: the mirror room in Super Mario 64 doesn’t reflect the room that Mario is in, but just renders another copy of Mario that echoes his movements, reversed.

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

Tay Zonday was the Chocolate Rain guy (5 minutes, over 143 million views!), and his voice is still as deep as ever. He’s made a new song, (5½ minutes) with Dave Days and Gary Brolsmo, reminding us all about the long and strange journey the internet has carried us through. It’s only had 19 thousand views so far, but maybe we can do something about that?

It’s yet another of those times of year again! The specific moment to look forward to? It’s the preview event for Roguelike Celebration 2026, taking place online tomorrow (Sunday)! You can get a free ticket for it here. Although tickets are free, you will still need to get one to attend.

The preview event this year happens on September 13th from 2 to 4 PM Pacific Daylight Time, meaning 5 to 7 PM on the US East Coast. The talks this year are:

• Ancient Roguelikes: The Pre-History of Roguelike Games by Martin Pichlmair
• Bitwise Black Magic: How to Computer, Better Faster Stronger by Greg L
• Don’t Save The @: What Roguelikes Teach Us About Story Structure by Jamie Brittain

The full conference is happening online from October 17-18. You’ll need to get a ticket for it too; they nominally aren’t free, but you can usually receive one gratis if you can’t afford it and ask nicely. For more information please check out the homepage for Roguelike Celebration here.

‘@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

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.

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.

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

Still DragonCon. Still low effort posts. Here’s ProZD on why he doesn’t play fighting games (23 seconds).

Tomorrow is the last day. Back at it then. Richard Garriott is at DragonCon again this year, maybe I’ll be able to make a post about his talk.

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

It’s Saturday and DragonCon is now in Day 3, so here’s another quick post that I prepared ahead of time.

Estimania is a simple web quiz game that asks you five numeric questions every day. It doesn’t expect you to absolutely know any of them, although in the rare chance that happens you’ll get a perfect score of 100 for that question. Most of the time though you’ll have to guess, making a good estimate of the answer, and the closer you are the closer to 100 your score for it will be.

After five questions you’ll be told your total score, and how your answers rank among the others who have taken that quiz for that day.

It’s quick and fun! It also lets you try the previous day’s quiz, although your score won’t be counted in the stats for that day, or its leaderboard.

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:

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.

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.

This is a double review of No Players Online and Blippo+ played with review keys. (Editor’s note: I [John Harris] wrote about Blippo+ some time ago.)

00:00 Intro
00:20 No Players Online
3:35 Blippo+

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

Ah yes, this is exactly the kind of nonsense that Sundry Sunday was intended to showcase. I’m telling you, quality randomness like this don’t come down the intertubes that often. From TheIridiumic138, it’s just a bunch of clips from NBC television, that’s the National Broadcasting Company, but presented in the form of a WarioWare video game collection (3 minutes). It’s exactly as simple, as stupid, and as brilliant as that. It’s even filled with deep cuts like the old animated NBC peacock segments, which were before even my time! And it ends with a perfect Conan O’Brien bit to cap it off. You really have to see it to believe it, so why not watch/realize now:

That I haven’t played Big Walk, I should say, isn’t entirely for my own fault. The biggest thing that limits Big Walk’s adoption is the fact that you must have at least two players on-hand to play it, at all. There is no solo mode, and it’d largely miss the point of the game to try it. Beyond that it’s an even better experience with more people: Big Walk supports up to 12. Most of my friends don’t usually play video games together, and the one that usually does play with others is a FPS enthusiast, and not too into a game fundamentally about communication, and getting lost in a wilderness. Throw in the fact that it’s a game starring weird gourd people, and I imagine he might actually get ill if he tried playing it.

Matthw Haughey, founder of Metafilter and owner of the newsletter and blog A Whole Lotta Nothing, has a typically fine piece about the joys of Big Walk. He mentions that the greatest challenge of the game is simply starting it, finding a number of friends who are motivated to try such a quirky experience and can all schedule time to play it together. Fortunately it doesn’t all have to be finished in one session.

I’m itching to try it, maybe some time soon. I’ll be at DragonCon in a week. If any of you are there, maybe we could meet up somewhere and go for a Big Walk?

Honestly I don’t know that much about them, but the page says you can play DOS games in your browser there. I know they’re not the only people who offer that (heck, the Internet Archive even does it), but the barest examination of their site doesn’t show any intrusive ads, paywalls or scammy behavior, so I’m happy to give them the link.

Of course, I reserve the right to remove the link later if they suddenly morph into Trantor the Malware Demon. But barring that, please enjoy!

In VCF Southeast a few weeks ago though, there were a number of hopeful indie developers who had their products on display, and were nice enough to show them off and let people play them, and I figure it would be a shame if I forgot to give them a post here. So here are a few things you might want to check out. Many of these games have been unfairly overlooked by the machine hearts of the internet’s various algorithms, may they rapidly rust into ruin, so please give them a few minutes of your time, and just maybe buy some or all of them.

Polyroll (Steam, Switch) from Spicy Gyro games is a Sonic-style platformer with great level design! It’s currently 70% off, selling for a scant $1.79 on Steam. It’s also on sale on Switch for $2.

Venison County (Steam preview, demo) is an upcoming game from Cutter Oyster, a retro-styled FPS survival game. The game is played in a sequence of waves. The door to the cabin that ends a wave only opens once you’ve defeated the zombie enemies. You can pick up sigils that give you special powers, but each rune also increases the number and ferocity of enemy attacks. Between waves you can choose to discard your sigils, losing the powers but reducing the difficulty. You can also buy weapons and ammo between waves. Of special note, reloading is a little minigame, pressing a button while a bar is in a certain range, that you must manage while running from the zombies. It’s due out in full late 2027.

Attack of the PETSCII Robots (sale page) wasn’t among the indie games, but I think it counts as one! It’s been for sale for a few years now.

Casey’s Gold (sale page) from Audacity Games is a terrific Atari 2600 game made in the Activision style, sold on cartridge by classic dev Dan Kitchen, brother of Garry Kitchen. I played through a few levels of this and it’s quite a bit deeper than you’d expect from a 2600 game, with secrets hiding in unexpected places. It rewards players willing to experiment, and with good observational skills.

IsoMetro (itch.io, Steam $20) from Grimesoft is a grid-based city building game that will put many people to mind of the classic SimCity 2000. Electronic Arts bought out originating studio Maxis long ago and seems only to care about their properties so long as they’re about individual Sims instead of a whole city of them. IsoMetro certainly looks terrific, although I didn’t get a chance to play on the floor.

Hoverdrive (Steam preview) is about piloting a car through weird neon landscapes with changeable gravity, pulling off impossible stunts as you go. It’s not out yet, but it looks very cool!

Ad Blocker (Steam $6) is a player-vs-player action-puzzle game that feels a bit like Puzznic. Snogbert (Steam early access $8, free demo) is a platformer with randomized elements. Both are from Justin T. Alexander. I just have photos of the banners here unfortunately.

Nature’s Bidding (itch.io prototype, Steam preview) is a multiplayer battle platformer where you customize your character as you go with good and bad elements. The title comes from a phase before each fight where the players bid money to avoid taking on curses. You lose the money you bid regardless if whether you win or lose; the player with the lowest bid gets the curse. Once cursed, the curse sticks with you throughout the rest of the game, so you can get piled under a whole host of bad effects. And yet you still want to save money after the bidding phase to buy powerups to improve your character. It’s unforgiving, but fun to battle it out with your friends. The fighting feels like some of the minigames in Mario Party.

Business 98 (Steam $5, with a free demo) from Five Foot Games is a “cashier simulator” with an old school Windows look, with elements of roguelike deckbuilders.

Inky in the Alien Aquarium (itch.io, $12) from Pocket Pulp is written for the Gameboy Advance. It’s a challenging block-pushing game where you have to learn the rules as you go, in the spirit of The Witness.

Asta Pool (website, Steam $15) from Cheesy Face Productions has turn-based modes that work like traditional pool, but also real-time levels where you influence the pool balls more directly. It boasts over 40 modes!

Keepsake Country (Steam preview) is billed as “A Midwestern Stealth Game,” and is still in development.

A few more:

Mouseward (Steam preview with demo, itch.io preview) is a “soulslike collectathon” with non-linear levels, hidden passages and cryptic clues.

Godless Avalon (Steam demo, itch.io demo) is a J-styled sci-fi fantasy/comedy RPG with guns. I don’t think it was playable on-site.

Aethelria Cross-Dimensions (Steam preview) is an upcoming sci-fi fantasy arena shooter (that is, an FPS). It has appealing character art, but I didn’t see it playable on the floor.

And Crypt Sweeper (itch.io name your price), from Pocket Pulp who made the above Inky in the Alien Aquarium, is a real standout, a Gameboy Advance remake of the popular DragonSweeper with some new quirks. (The got permission from DragonSweeper’s creator to remake it, but only if they changed some things, which they did!) It was playable at the show but I got so into playing it that I forgot to take pictures!

There we go, that’s everything I managed to take notes on. My apologizes to anyone I’ve left out. Thanks for coming to VCFSE and showing off your work, and I hope this drives a few eyes your way!

I took more pictures than just these, I’ll make another post later with some of the other great exhibits on display and games that were playable at the show.

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.

In April we’ll have been doing this for five years, and I am set to continue bringing new things to you into the future even after that. Some days it’s hard to find something new to post; some days I have multiple things that I want to bring to you, and it’s a hard decision which to present first.

But I understand that the sheer variety of things that SSB presents may be bewildering. I mention sometimes that our three watchwords are Retro, Indie and Niche. If you’re interested in just one of these three, to the exclusion of the others, then you probably want to read a specific category. Nearly everything posted here goes into one of the three categories Retro, Indie or Niche, or else on Sundays when we relax the format a bit, into SundaySundry. In this way, Set Side B is really like four blogs in one, five if you count the rarely-used news and blognews categories (this post falls under blognews). You can find all the categories on a post beneath its author box in the left sidebar <-.

Let me break these down:

• By “Retro” I mean older games generally. I am of an age that I consider anything before the N64 era to be Retro, but I am considering updating that to before the Playstation 2 era. I judge that the PS2/Xbox/Nintendo Gamecube/Dreamcast era is around when game graphics reached the point, on casual observation, where you had to stop and look for a sec to notice that it wasn’t photorealistic, where increases in graphical quality hit the point of diminishing returns. I’m not saying that graphics didn’t improve after that point, far from it, but that we reached the point where capabilities increased, but didn’t enable completely new kinds of things. Evolutionary, not revolutionary. So I think the PS1/N64/Saturn age is where we’ll draw the line at what Retro means.
• On to “Indies,” these are the province of my co-blogger Josh Bycer, who runs the Game Wisdom channel on Youtube. Note that, if you go by the raw text of the category name, a spurious decision made early in the blog’s history means that the category name is plural, so, “indies”. These are small-team, or even solo developers, which is where, due to the immense reluctance to rock the boat that most AAA developers have, much of the energy in pushing forward the frontiers of gaming reside now. It’s not solely Josh’s province though, and I also find things to add to this pile from time to time, often, suitably enough, under the gamefinds tag.
• I’ll admit that the “Niche” category is a bit of a cheat, a way to include some things that don’t fall under the other two. Intended to spotlight games that are interesting takes on a genre, especially roguelikes, often it’s the feed that gets all the Nintendo-related stuff. Nintendo is often considered an AAA developer, but they still have the potential to surprise sometimes. If Microsoft or Sony decided to pack it in and leave game publishing then it’d be a blow, sure, but the loss of Nintendo, and their weirdly-persisting toymaker vibe, would be disastrous. In my opinion, of course.
• “SundaySundry” is where our weekly collection of game culture finds, mostly videos, goes. Again, because of a decision made early on, usually this group is presented as Sundry Sunday, with the order of the words reversed from the category.
• There are some other categories too, which overlap with these. Probably the most important of these is @Play, the continuation of my old GameSetWatch columns on roguelikes. This is mostly the same as the roguelike category, and both are subsets of Retro for the most part. You can also find lots of cool stuff in the romhacks category.

In addition to categories, I’m a strong believer in tagging, and all of the categories listed are also tags. Tags are a much more fine-grained system though. Game series, titles, developers, and individual content makers each get their own tags. The way Set Side B’s Mastodon autoposter works, it tries to include as many tags as it can in the body of the post, even to the exclusion of much of its description, but whatchu gonna do? Because of all the tags I add to posts, you can get around pretty well just by using tags! There’s a list of our most common tags in our tag cloud in the right sidebar, but so you won’t have to search for the link it here it is again.

The right sidebar is also where you’ll find the sign-up for our email-based, very non-Signal newsletter. That’s working now right? I should ask the always-wonderful Phil Nelson, who maintains the site and pays the bills, is that’s operational now. We’ve considered adding the odd extra thing exclusively for the newsletter. When it’s working, that is.

So there you have it. If you’re only, only interested in roguelikes, you now have the means to only see material relating to that. If your lifeblood is indie gaming, then you can get that too, and may I congratulate you on your worth as a human being. If you just want to see silly video stuff about games, then away with you to the back alley of Sunday Sundry, where the disreputable sorts who dispense with that kind of stuff lurk, as with that sunglasses-wearing frog who hands out romhacks.

We promise not to judge you. Much.

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

anothermartz made a couple of Parappa the Rapper videos that look and sound very close to the original, albeit in its remastered Playstation 4 incarnation. Listen these!

Note: anothermartz admits to the use of “AI” to match the texture of his voice to the originals. Even though they say it was an open source model and locally-hosted, this is usually a strike against an item for inclusion here, but I learned about it late. I considered scrapping the whole thing and starting over, but at 2:30 AM one wants to just conclude matters and get to bed.

The first one is more timeless and generally better, it stars the vaguely disreputable flea market denizen Prince Fleaswallow, teaching the young Parappa a bunch of questionable facts, as well as one that is, sadly, true. (2 minutes).

The other, also by anothermartz, is a lot more timely, replacing the put-upon Inspector Mooselini with Nigel Farage (2 minutes), the UK MP being investigated on corruption charges who’s so disliked and disrespected now that he called an election with mere months left to go in his term to stall that investigation, but as a result had to defend his office from a surprisingly credible threat from Count Binface, a joke candidate space overlord who would have been a much better MP than he has been. We only rarely touch upon political topics here, not for lack of interest but because they’re usually a distraction for us, with the whole retro/niche/indie thing, but this nicely aligns with gaming, so here you are.

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.

Space Quest Historian showed off some of the changes in a video recording of a stream they did (8 minutes), and it’s worth your while to see, if just to glimpse sights like this:

Youch. Here is the video:

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.

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.