Best Games From Next Fest Part 6

This is part 6 of my (Josh Bycer’s) favorite demos from Steam Next Fest June 2025 edition.

00:00 Intro
00:25 Soulblaze
2:54 Randomice
5:48 Cleared Hot
7:12 Forgotten Fragments
8:44 Pigface
10:12 Dice Gambit
12:14 Astro Prospector

Sundry Sunday: Attack of the Pepsimen

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

Something has come up. I’m no longer at DragonCon. This weird animation (3 minutes), another done in the style of an old DOS game, will have to suffice for this Sunday. I’d have trouble describing it anyway, so I’ll burn it today on a day where I really can’t describe much of anything.

DragonCon Game Stuff So Far

The reason this is a low effort week is because DragonCon is this weekend, and I am there. Some happenings:

  • There are two arcades on side. One (on the ground floor of Peachtree Center, accessible from the outside) is a temporary offshoot of Joystick Gamebar. They’re mostly retro games; their newest title, I think, is TMNT II: Turtles in Time. They have a great selection of games, including several really good pinball machines: Twilight Zone, White Water, High Speed and High Speed II: The Getaway, Funhouse and more.
  • Notably, the Joystick location has a Gauntlet. They also have Mortal Kombat II, X-Men, Dig Dug, Centipede, Donkey Kong, a sped-up Ms. Pac-Man, Joust, Sinistar and others.
  • The other is run and maintained by Save Point, and while they have a handful of older games, they’re mostly concerned with more recent Japanese games. This means an overbearing emphasis on rhythm games, with names like “Sound Voltex,” and fighting games.
  • The best games here I think that aren’t in those well-represented categories are Bombergirl (and they sell memory cards at the maintenance desk for saving your progress) and Gun Bullet X, a new installment of Bandai Namco’s variety shooting game known more often in the US as Point Blank.
  • Upstairs at Westin in Thursday is a gameroom set up for Gamecube games, and I think they’re open the whole con? It was there that I saw they had set up that utmost rarity, a four-machine Kirby Air Ride LAN network. Such a set up requires f0ur copies of Kirby Air Ride, four Gamecubes, and most significantly four Gamecube Network Adapters or third-party workarounds. There were also quite a few other Gamecubes running Smash Melee, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, F-Zero GX and others.

Oops, gotta run! More tomorrow!

Obscure Mylstar Arcade Prototype: Wiz Warz

I’ve lamented how Atari Games shut down lots of interesting prototypes over their operation because they didn’t perform well on test, or maybe other reasons.

Well other game companies did it too, and one was Mylstar, a.k.a. Gottlieb, the makers of Q*Bert and a number of other classics. I found out about a very interesting little game called Wiz Warz that I’d have loved to have found in a classic arcade (if I had been able to visit many classic arcades back then). Insert Coin has a nice demonstration of it (9½ minutes). It’s kind of like Tempest, but you can fire at any direction into the playfield, and there’s lots of other unique elements too. We’re still in a low effort mode this weekend, so have a look, and speculate about a game that could have been.

Nintendo’s “My Mario” Cartoons

Nintendo has released a series of short animations starring Mario in various inoffensive, vaguely humorous situations. They average at a little less than a minute each, are nearly wordless except for Mario’s vaguely-Italian noises, and are obviously intended for children. Hey, it’s a low-effort week. Consider yourselves informed.

The first:

Number two:

Tres:

One interesting thing bout them, they’re on Nintendo UK’s YouTube channel, and I think on Nintendo of Japan’s, but they’re not on Nintendo of America’s channel. I wonder why?

A PETSCII Platformer

Some weeks ago I linked to a Wolfenstein 3D-like shooter by jimo9757 with a rendering engine implemented entirely in PETSCII, the only kind of graphics a Commodore PET, their first computer, was capable of producing. It was pretty shocking to see it in action, even if the best-looking version of it was the one made for a Commodore 64.

Well, here’s another video shenanigan along those lines, a platformer, one styled much like Super Mario Bros., also implemented with PETSCII graphics, and also from jimo9757. First the PET version (15 minutes, all eight levels), then the one made for the Commander X16 (3 minutes, a demonstration):

While other retro computer systems had their own distinctive fonts, including MS-DOS’s nigh-legendary code page 437, I think PETSCII is among the best. The PET could only do graphics at all using it, but it had quite a lot of foresight put into its character set. Among its characters are are seven different heights and widths of solid block, diagonal lines, balls, slopes, playing card symbols, box drawing borders of two different types, enough corners to make for decent low-res images, and reverse video versions of all of the above. Later 8-bit Commodore computers didn’t have to use PETSCII for graphics, but its presence made for a good baseline for amateur programmers without having to start messing around with POKEs (which every other kind of graphics on a C64 or VIC-20 required).

Hunter R’s Curosities of Animal Crossing City Folk

Still in a low-effort mode due to upcoming events out here, but we love gaming esoterica, so here’s Hunter R’s newest video on Animal Crossing, here about the Wii version, City Folk. (14 minutes)

Highlights are details on City Folk’s letter scoring system, music in the game that can be heard but is really hard to listen to, a couple of softlock bugs, and info on how Nintendo distributed custom items via WiiConnect 24, and its unexpected relevance to The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

How to Dodge Blue Shells in Mario Kart World

It’s a low-effort week coming up for me, but I wanted to say a few words about Kibako’s video on all the ways Blue Shells can be dodged in Mario Kart World (6½ minutes). Even through most of the words are Japanese, the idea comes across pretty well.

You may remember that Blue Shells couldn’t be dodged at all before MK8. Well if you could figure out a way to become invincible you could avoid getting clobbered and the likely loss of position, but you never get invincibility stars in first place, they only show up if you’re badly trailing, so it doesn’t often come up.

But then people found out that if you used the Super Horn item just before getting hit by a Blue Shell, it’d destroy it, and Horns can generate when you’re in the middle of the pack. And then they found out, if you used a turbo-powered Super Mushroom in a brief window before the shell hit, you could actually zip out of its explosion without getting caught in it.

But now, there’s even more ways to dodge what had, since the Mario Kart 64 days, become legendary for being the inevitable, the Grim Reaper of Mario Kart. There are now three items that make you invincible, or at least invulnerable enough to thwart the Blue Meanie. And if you’re willing to use the new rewind feature and have the presence of mind to use it, you can more generally avoid getting hit. You’ll be sent back to an earlier place on the track, but used at the right moment and for just long enough, you actually come out ahead relative to the time lost from getting pasted.

Super Horns and Mushrooms (and Mushroom’s variants, the Triple Mushroom and Golden Mushroom) can still thwart the spiny menace. But… what about zippers? What about the turbo effect from Dash Food? For the answer to that, and some other possible options, I refer you to the video.

Muffin Man: How to Draw a Space Invader

Posted on both Metafilter and Waxy, a blog post on creating Space Invader-like aliens, along with a little web applet that creates them randomly!

It’s an interesting problem. One interesting is the pixelization is an intrinsic part of it. The less obvious the pixels are (like, if the invader is too large), the less aesthetically pleasing it tends to be.

Posts will be a bit lighter for a week and a half or so, as I travel to and attend DragonCon again this year. If you’re going too, let me know!