It’s the good and pure kind of web game that used to be much more common. Maybe it’s inevitable that things like this will eventually sell out, like Neopets did, and become a cesspool, so please enjoy it while it lasts.

Dog Online is in open beta, and it’s a little difficult to see how to get started. The Explore link just took me to the homepage until I created an account and adopted a dog. To do that, first you must go to the Dogtown Pound.

There you can pick one of three randomly-chosen pals, like this oddly-colored fellow:

When naming your dog you can’t name it after another dog that already exists in the game, and it took me several tries before I managed to adopt Plurpel.

Once there, you can buy plant seeds with coins (not real money!) from the Farmer’s Market, then plant them at the Farm. You can find tokens to play the Gatchpon Machine. You can buy bait from the Fishing Mart and fish at the Fishing Spot. You can play a couple of puzzle games at the Temple of Dog.

Part of the fun of this kind of website is exploring and finding everything there is to do. There’s a simple action game under the Games menu, Mimi’s Countless Children.

It’s the most fun if you’re a kid, but unlike Neopets Dog Online seems to be here mostly as a simple fun thing to do, without any visible profit motive. Again, it’s always possible that it’ll get ruined some time in the future, and these kinds of things do tend to either disappear or get ruined eventually, so please find as much joy as you can in its transitory nature.

Dog Online (free, browser)

Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival 2026 (adamgryu, itch.io, $0, for Windows, Mac and Linux)

But you know, I personally have just come off a 92 game win streak in Balatro. Sure it was on White Stake, and in specific circumstances, while Dr. Spectred has 100+ win streaks on Gold Stake. Yes you forced me to admit it, I’m nowhere near as good as they are! But I am one of the 0.54% of players who’s earned Completionist++ on Android, that’s got to be worth something, right? Right?

So, here is some information that may help you play, in case it’s useful. This is oriented towards winning, that is finishing Ante 8, not towards getting astronomical scores or reaching naneinf.

1. I think the easiest deck is Checkered Deck. It makes it nearly guaranteed that you’ll be able to get a couple of Flushes. All you need is a one card hand size increase, and a Flush becomes a certainty. The tradeoff is that Flush is the weakest five-card hand, only worth 15 chips, but it still delivers +4 Mult. One of the difficulties with getting a run started is getting past the early Antes, and Checkered Deck makes that simple. If you can put together a hand of at least four face cards or tens, you’ve made the first round’s requirement right there. On Checkered Deck Jupiter is the best Planet card of course, but Neptune also helps.

2. Even if you don’t pick Checkered Deck, it’s best to find a single hand you can make consistently and focus on it. It takes fewer resources to build levels and Jokers for more than one kind of hand.

3. Early money is extremely important. Money makes all other things possible. With enough money you can not only buy things you need, you can reroll to find more. Aim at getting full interest (normally at $25) every round, and then keep that much unless something really valuable comes up. Sometimes this means you have to make a hard decision between a useful Joker and building interest. Survival comes first, but you don’t get any benefit from blowing past score requirements.

4. Attack all of the game’s benefits simultaneously: Jokers, Planets and card modifications. Each of these things by themselves can win the game, but you’ll have to take them to such excess that you probably won’t get everything you need in time.

5. Planets are probably the hardest tool to use well, but are very important. Planets get you hand levels, which increases both base Mult and Chips. Since hand levels form the base of scoring, they all help empower Times Mult. This makes Telescope one of the best vouchers, and Trance one of the best Spectral cards. I like to open Standard Packs when I can to get cards with Blue Seals, even on Checkered Deck if it’s not a Heart or Spade, which is usually a really bad idea.

5. Prioritize Jokers for the phase of the game you’re in. Early Antes: plus Mult, plus Chips. Late game: times Mult. If you’re struggling in the first three Antes, it’s better to get a good source of flat Mult or Chips than to go for a Times Mult Joker, until you manage to get your base Mult up a bit. But remember, the higher your main hand level, the more powerful Times Mult becomes.

6. If you have the spare money to fill them, empty Joker slots are liabilities. If you have the cash for it, there is little reason not to fill all your Joker slots. There are exceptions, like with Joker Stencil or Madness, or of course Rentals or Eternals on high Stakes, but lots of Jokers have no downside other than cost. Remember that selling a joker gets you half its price back. This is a reason why Perishable Jokers in higher stakes aren’t all that bad: you can always sell it even if it expires, and you’ll get half your money back.

7. Grab onto Common Joker combos. Some of the best combos involve Hanging Chad (retriggers first scoring card twice), which applies to any effect that triggers on individual cards. Hanging Chad and Photograph are both Commons, yet are still worth a total 8x Mult if your first scoring card is a face card. Or Hanging Chad and any Glass card, but be prepared to replace it.

8. The best card modifications vary depending on your jokers and where in the game you are, but really great are: any Seal but Blue and Red especially, Holographic, Steel, Gold and Glass. The worst modifications are Wild, +4 Mult and Stone, but Stone has uses in certain cases.

9. Most Building Jokers are better the earlier in the game you get them. Building Jokers are the ones that increase in power in some way depending on your actions. Green Joker increases by +1 Mult every hand you play, but decreases by 1 when you discard. Some of these Jokers require special play like this to make them powerful, and some have significant drawbacks: Ride The Bus and Obelisk can lose all their built-up power instantly. Supernova and Fortune Teller are building Jokers that don’t have to be bought early, because they are empowered by your actions even before you get them. The best ones naturally are the ones that raise Times Mult, which can be valuable even if you get them in later Antes.

10. After you win and pass into Endless Mode, most builds top out around Ante 13. The score requirement for the Small Blind of Ante 13 is 47 billion, over 100 times the requirement for the Small Blind of Ante 12, and they rocket up even faster beyond that point. Fortunately the last score achievement is for reaching Ante 12. There are ways of playing past that point, but I must refer you back to Balatro University for such rarefied air.

So now that I’ve won 92 games in a row, I’ve uninstalled the game. I’m not going to try to top that… at least, not until the long-awaited content update comes up. LocalThunk, please take your time….

If you’ve asked yourself how well would City Trial work as an e-sport-like competition, well we made a post here with examples of that last year. There is a pretty nice community of Kirby Air Ride fans that have created their own variant of the game, with play tweaked and unfavored events removed, that meets in a Discord. I refer interested players there.

The community on the Discord also plays Kirby Air Riders, which is a much expanded game with many customization options.

If you’d like to see how it works, here is a three game match (31 minutes) from a currently-running tournament. It makes, in my opinion, for interesting viewing, with some unexpected upsets.

I’ve already explained how City Trial works in detail before, but here is an overview that should help explain the above video. A number of players, up to 4 in Air Ride and 16 in Air Riders, roam around a sandbox city environment for a period of time, usually five minutes. The city contains a variety of different vehicles to switch to, stat upgrades to collect and time-limited powerups to use. They explore the same city, and can attack each other during this time, sniping at each other with a viciousness belied by the riders’ cutesy appearance; Grand Theft Auto isn’t nearly this chaotic or cutthroat.

Different events happen during the Trial, some of them helping everyone, some of them detrimental, and some of them a mixture of the two. There are also Legendary Machine parts that sometimes appear, and a player who manages to collect all three to one machine gets to ride it, and become extremely overpowered for the rest of the match.

When time runs out, the players’ stats are revealed to everyone, then they’re thrown into a random Stadium event. The players don’t usually know what the event will be, but sometimes the game drops them a hint. Sometimes, in Air Riders, they don’t all get the same event. Sometimes they get to vote on the event. There’s lots of Stadiums, and they each test the player’s stats, vehicle, and playing skill in different ways. You could end up with a Stadium extremely well suited to your machine and stats, or you could end up stuck with a fragile paper airplane in a demolition derby.

The randomness is part of the fun, but if you’re playing to maximize your wins you can’t usually risk putting all of your statistical eggs in a single hoped-for Stadium basket. Even completing a Legendary Machine is no guarantee of success. The ups and downs of Air Ride and Riders make for exciting viewing, but it’s largely without the posturing and negativity of many e-sports. I recommend watching a match or two, either the above-embedded video or one from the recent Skyah Summer Slam event, whether you’re interested in playing it or not.

This is my (Josh Bycer’s) coverage of the Latin American Games Showcase from October 2026, all games shown are either demo builds or creator fest access.

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

Hello. Here is a jazz cover of the Balatro song. I don’t say Balatro theme song because it only has one song. Here is the jazz cover (8 minutes). Enjoy responsibly.

Until 2016, the 1993 JRPG had never been officially localized into English in any form, but then in 2024 Square-Enix made one of their upgraded remakes of it, giving it the whole modern-day spit-and-polish. As someone born in 1973, I refuse to use the term “glow up,” and am only camel-casing the title because it’s essential to the series identity. That’s the kind of thing that happens when someone with an English degree writes about video games.

If you’ve never played a SaGa game before, well, you might actually have, as the first three games in the series were renamed Final Fantasy Legend and released for the Gameboy. The words “Final Fantasy” at that time had a degree of name recognition in the US, paid for by Nintendo when they published the original Final Fantasy for NES. Nintendo wasn’t then, and has never been an altruistic company, as any publisher from the NES era would have told you, but it was good of them to sponsor this one, and the original Dragon Warrior, even if it was with future profits shining in their dollar-sign-studded eyes… and then both Square and Enix jumped ship to the Playstation because of Hiroshi Yamauchi’s refusal to use optical media for the N64. It wenteth around, and yea verily, around cometh it back.

The SaGa series has always labored in the shadow of its terminal cousin, despite it sharing some of the same talent in its origins. Generally SaGa games are much lighter on story, taking on a more simulationist approach. I’d say the games look generally more like a Western style RPG than Final Fantasy, so naturally the Romancing trilogy didn’t see US shores until they started rereleasing them. Instead we got Secret of Evermore. I tell you, there is no justice.

SaGa, famously, doesn’t use experience levels. Generally characters improve in statistics through use. In Romancing Saga 2, this takes the form of a system of weapon and magic skills, which each themselves have levels. When a character uses one in battle, it gets some points. The stronger the enemy, the more times it’s used, whether it defeats an enemy, even if it was a different character who used the skill, all of these things seem to factor in. Higher levels mean more damage, and also give the character a chance to learn better skills that use that weapon.

There is something you should know if you decide to play it, which is alluded to in the description on the eShop page but it’s possible not to realize it. At the start of the game you’re asked to pick one of two character models, one visibly male and one female. You don’t immediately play as either of them, however. You won’t see either of them until nearly the end of the game. Instead, you start out playing as Leon, the head of a small nation called Avalon, and his son and successor Gerard. The kingdom is beset by one of the Seven Heroes who are the major villains of the story, and both Leon and Gerard’s brother Whats-His-Name get killed. Gerard goes off and gets revenge on the scoundrel, and keeps going for a while, but eventually the game declares “XXX years pass,” where XXX is a number over 100.

Surprise! All of your characters are gone! Gerard too! The stories they had been a part of are just left hanging. I guess at some point Gerard got tired of avenging his family and saving the world, and decided to just do emperor stuff at home for the rest of his life.

I can’t emphasize how sudden and jarring this is. If you know it’s coming it’s not so bad, but up to this point it seems like the game had been gearing up for you to play Gerard for the full runtime, but no it really isn’t that kind of game. You’re given a choice of several successors, each one of them of the different characters you have available to you at that point in the game. You pick one, and the are given all of the skills that Gerard had. This happens many times during the game, each advancing the game clock a hundred years or so. If you pick a different class than the previous one, they gain its starting skills in addition to what they had before, so eventually your emperor becomes the most versatile member of your party.

After the start, the game is truly non-linear. You can explore the world largely as you wish. In the original I understand it made things feel aimless, but this version offers to keep track of quests for you, and show markers on the screen so you’ll know where to go. After beating the first of the Seven Heroes who are the antagonists, you can attack the others in different orders. While I usually like the classic style of these games, Romancing SaGa 2 is so far-flung and varied that you’ll be playing for many many hours even with the game showing you destinations, and while the quest markers can be disabled I recommend leaving them on.

Timeskips happen whenever you pass a major quest milestone, but can also happen when you finish a number of subquests. Some subquests can only be done by specific kinds of emperors, like a male one (boo) or a Corsair, and you’ll be locked out of them until you have one that fits the bill.

One important thing about timeskips is eventually you’ll be looking forward to them, because of another of Romancing SaGa 2’s little features. Every character, including the emperors, has a limited number of life points, or LP. When a character runs out of HP, they lose one LP permanently. There are also some attacks, I hear, that affect LP directly. Some characters have buckets of LP (I’ve so far seen up to 26), but some being with as few as 6. When a character reaches 5 LP the number is displayed in red from then on. When a character runs out of LP they die permanently.

It’s not quite permadeath in the roguelike sense, you can always go back to a previous save if you wish, but it does mean you have to make a choice: abandon all the progress you’ve made since the last save (this version of RS2 autosaves on area changes), or keep going without that character. The game will generate a new character for you to fill in the role of the departed, who can then be added at a tavern. If your emperor character runs out of LP you have to pick a successor immediately. I don’t know if a timeskip also happens in that case, but it probably does. Whatever causes a timeskip, all of the next generation of characters will have a new supply of life points, and you’ll be grateful for it.

Losing even one LP hurts, because Romancing SaGa 2 is shockingly hard! I’ve been playing on the “Hard” difficulty, which is the difficulty of the original, and characters run out of HP all the time. Frequently a monster will decide on hate this day, and make a single attack that drops a character to very low HP, or even knock them out in one move. I don’t know if it’s that bad on lower settings, but I enjoy the challenge of scraping through every battle. If you too choose hate, and play on Classic, be prepared to use every advantage to its utmost.

I haven’t yet exhausted the things to tell you about Romancing SaGa, but I have run out of time to write things down about it. I’m sure I’ll be back to tell you more soon.

Plus:

• Combat is genuinely fun and challenging. A game like this, I think, challenge is the point of it. There are three difficulty levels, “Casual” (you are supposed to sneer when you say it), “Normal” and “Hard,” a.k.a. Classic. Normal is intended for experienced RPG players… but Classic is harder than that, and is the difficulty of the original Super Famicom game. It is truly difficult, and it’s the one I’m playing on. I hear two more, even harder, difficulties are unlocked after completing it, for players who enjoy bashing their heads into solid brick walls.

Minus:

• I can’t emphasize enough how the game sets you up to think it’s one kind of game, then without warning throws those characters and their story away. Do not get attached to Gerard, he’s a nice boy but he won’t be with us long.
• The succession system, which periodically replaces your entire party with descendants of similar skill, sometimes causes subquests to break. Sometimes you can restart them, but I’m not sure if you always can.
• As you advance the story and fight monsters, the “enemy strength” rises too, which makes all the monsters stronger. As a result, a time-honored tenet of battle RPG systems, that your characters get stronger, is overturned. The world increases in power as your characters do. Due to this, it seems if you build your characters so they’re generalists you’re shooting yourself in the foot, as it means they won’t have a way to keep up with the rising enemy difficulty. It’s better to raise them each to specialize in something and stick with it, and switch your party composition to meet different challenges. I consider this to be a grievous design sin in an RPG (I was not a fan of Final Fantasy VIII) and it’s the worst thing about Romancing SaGa 2, but there’s a lot else here to recommend.

Weird:

• All of the Seven Heroes have goofy French names.

Romancing SaGa 2 ($50 on Nintendo eShop)

There is a project to make it viable though, called PureDarwin. It has a small but devoted cadre of people working on it. One of them, up until November of last year, was project leader Cliff Sekel, a.k.a. InsaneDarwin. Sadly he didn’t lay down the keyboard because of growing tired of it, but instead he passed away after an illness. Here’s an memorial from the PureDarwin website.

Lots of projects would age into irrelevance after a key figure leaves it, but it seems there is yet some life in PureDarwin, with code running on x86_64 and ARM64. I can’t speak for how viable it is to run yourself, for the most part it seems to be terminal-only, but work is progressing towards giving it a GUI for the first time in almost 20 years.

You might be interested in a video that Clean Retro Tech recently made getting an old version of Darwin running on a Pentium III (17 minutes). It might be interesting for the kind of people who obsessively watch Action Retro, which regularly dusts off old hardware units and tries to get old OSes working on them. Hey, it’s a kind of computer entertainment! I am entertained by it at least, and you can’t say that it isn’t niche.

PureDarwin (https://puredarwin.org/)