“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Greetings Earth creatures from the dark depths of space! Let’s get down to bidness.
People Make Games on YouTube reminds us about “VRChat, the ‘Metaverse’ people actually like.” Ooh, burn! (39 minutes)
More burning! Martin Robinson at Eurogamer says the new PlayStation Plus feels like a missed opportunity. Mwa ha ha! It fills my veins with life-giving phlegm!
Minyea at NicheGamer tells us that, despite being sold off by Square-Enix, the Tomb Raider series has now topped 88 million in lifetime sales.
Ari Notis in today’s lone Kotaku item: Cyberpunk 2077 Totally Misunderstands Subways, According To A Transit Expert.
It seems that the people making Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl have asked some to stop calling it a Smash-killer. As for me, I’m still trying to make smashalike happen, drebnar!
Gryson from Mega Drive Shock translates an article from a Japanese newspaper in 1996 expressing worries about falling 16-bit sales, and expressing worries of a second “Atari shock,” a Japanese term for the U.S. Game Crash of 1983.
Alana Hagues at NintendoLife anticipates the upcoming Switch release of Guild of Dungeoneering, a game where you build dungeons, not to kill characters outright, but to try to keep them alive.
Alex Cranz at Verge podcast The Vergecast (natch) has an episode about Microsoft’s Adaptable Controller, a super-configurable controller made with accessibility in mind. He speaks with one of its inventors, Bryce Johnson. It’s 33 minutes long.
Jake Gable writing for Cultr lists his 10 favorite PlayStation 2 games. For the details you should read the article, but from 10th to 1st, they are Kingdom Hearts, Virtua Fighter 4, Medal of Honor: Frontline, The Getaway, James Bond 007: Nightfire, Pro Evolution Soccer 5, Ratchet & Clank, Gran Turismo 4, The Simpsons Hit & Run, and Grand Theft Auto Vice City and San Andreas, cheating a bit by combining two games into one item.
Rich Stanton at PC Gamer says Cave Story is now a roguelike. Why not? Make everything a roguelike! Let’s burn it all down! We won’t rest until you can play an @-sign in Animal Crossing and swing a parenthesis at K.K. Slider! Well back in boring old reality, this is actually a fangame called Doukutsu Randamu: The Cave Story Roguelike. It’s free on itch.io!
Darren Allan of TechRadar tells us that AMD has new GPUs, they’re in stock, and priced “strictly at retail.” Sounds like they’re adamant about not chasing the crpyto-mining market, hooray!
Anthony Wallace at Retro Dodo tells us of seven interesting recent Pokemon Emerald romhacks! Romhacks haven’t shown up on Set Side B much yet but we’re fully in favor of them here, so, look out for more on this subject in the future!
GamesRadar’s Hope Bellingham tells us of a game in development using Unreal Engine 5 involving a realistic squirrel armed with a powerful handgun bigger than it is! Kind of the thinking that went behind Skatebird, but more lethal? It’s being developed by @QuiteDan.
TraynoCo at RetroRGB wrote about a SD card-based Dreamcast VMU in the works created by hardware creator Chris Diaoglou. It offers many improvements over the original unit, including expanded capacity, a rechargeable battery, and a backlight!
And Natalie Clayton at PC Gamer has a long article telling how the pandemic helped some game companies to embrace working from home.
