Multilink Monday 11/10/25

I’ve got a huge backlog of things to post about, so once a week I’m going to just dump a few of them into a post, preferably on a Monday without much discussion of the contents, just to get them out of my notes. I figured I’d do a new pixel art banner for this idea later, for now let’s get to the links!

  1. Video Games Chronicle interviews Hip Tanaka, a.k.a. Chip Tanaka, composer of Nintendo music going back to Metroid and Earthbound, president for a while of Pokemon company Creatures Inc., and current chiptune musician with many wonderful tunes.
  2. The podcast Eggplant: The Secret Lives of Games recently concluded a tour of every game in UFO 50;
  3. On Game Informer (welcome back), from February 2022, before their recent troubles, Inside the Nintendo Power Hotline.
  4. A wiki, Ukikipedia, is a knowledge resource for Super Mario 64 speedrunners.
  5. And from Kaze Emanuar, a video delving into the power of Mario 64’s sound engine, which can run code itself. (15 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: Recent Wigglewood

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

Presenting Wigglewood here is kind of a cheat, I suppose. It has the aesthetic of an old VGA MS-DOS game, with voice acting supplied on CD-ROM, but it’s really more of an animated fantasy cartoon. Its DOSness is more of a stylistic choice than something that really connects it with the world of interactive eclectic electronic entertainment (with the slightly fitting acronym IEEE).

But they’re fun anyway, and if I’m breaking the rules I was the one who set them to begin with. Here is The Quest, which finally advances whatever flimsy plot this series could be said to have. (2 minutes)

So the villain the barbarian and wizard are chasing is Wormdahl after all. Funny, although he hangs out with a succubus he doesn’t really seem that evil, even, as this video shows us, he has a vampire friend. He probably should find better friends. (also 2 minutes)

When these two groups finally meet up they’ll probably get into a slap fight, or maybe stub each others toes. I can’t wait.

TToOVG: Mario’s Death Animation

TToOVG is the initialism I’m trying out for Drew Mackey’s blog Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games, and they have an excellent post up about Mario’s death animation, in fact the death animation of lots of platformer characters, where the fall off the screen.

They turn to face the player, as if acknowledging for the first time that there’s a space alongside the strictly 2D in-profile world through which he traveled before the Nintendo 64 existed, and leaps out like an ant escaping an ant farm. Like this:

Image from linked blog (there, however, it’s animated)

Mario isn’t the only character to die this way. Other faller-deathers include Milon, the Doki Doki Panickers, Wonder Boy, Master Higgins, the Mice Mickey and Minnie, Little Nemo, Kid Dracula, Kirby, Sonic the Hedgehog, and even Scrooge McDuck, who really should be able to afford a more unique animation.

Think about how odd it is that so many games use this leaping out of the screen idea, and that we rarely question it. Then go read the post, where they interrogate the idea even further.

Nintendo eShop Deals (11/6/2025)

I am a sucker for a bargain. If something is 90% off I’ll often buy it if I have little interest in ever playing it (that’s how I ended up with the Borderlands games, don’t tell anyone). And if you keep your eyes open, you can build quite a game library that way.

I made a list of everything on my Nintendo Switch account: <b><u><i>two hundred and seventy-one items</i></u></b></ironicfakehtmltag>. Some day I’ll give you the list, but not today. But I figured it’d be useful to people if I reported on some notable deals happening on the eShop from time to time. Nintendo doesn’t pay me to do this, and any links you use earn me nothing, it isn’t advertising. And only items that catch my eye, and survive the crushing wave of ennui these tasks produce, make it into this list.

Note 1: I round off most prices. I count every keypress dearly, and typing “.99” over and over again pours caustic soda on my remaining nerve endings.

Note 2: I use em-dashes in this. That is not proof I am some idiotic LLM, you adjective[entire] derisive noun[breadbin].

Note 3: A foundational requirement for being included in this list is it must be at least half off.

Note 4: No screenshots or covers this time. I’ve just been up all night tracking down Japanese words in the Super Famicom version of Shiren the Wanderer, my neurons are floating in a thick soup right now.

Ahem:

General

The Wonderful 101 Remastered ($18, 55% off) — One of the most beloved games for the Wii-U, and contains a superhero character called Wonder Toilet, I say approvingly.

Dokapon: Sword of Fury ($12.50, 50%) — new entry in the cult JRPG-styled board-and-party game series.

SteamWorld Heist II & Build Bundle ($18, 60% off) and SteamWorld Build & Dig Bundle ($14, 60% off)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed ($16, 60% off)

Save Me Mr Tako: Definitive Edition ($3, 80% off): A rerelease of another Switch game that, I hear, was sabotaged by its original publisher. A challenging-yet-cartoony pixel art platformer with Game Boy graphics about an octopus hero, with a more involved story than you might expect. It’s three bucks, what have you got to lose?

Capcom

Resident Evil 4 ($10, 50% off) — The entry on the site spells “Resident Evil” all in lowercase for some stupid marketing reason. It’s widely acknowledge that this port of a Gamecube title is a high-point in the series, and contains zero percent zombies by weight. A lot of Resident Evil games seem to be on sale right now in fact, along with the Monster Hunter series, but I’ll leave those for you to seek out if you want them.

Street Fighter 6 (Switch 2 version, $20, 50% off) — After a dalliance with SoulCalibur back on the Dreamcast, and a ridiculous amount of time spent training amiibo fighters in Smash Ultimate, I’ve largely stayed away from fighting games. Still, it’s nice to see a classic series survive.

Devil May Cry, Devil May Cry 2, Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition (all individually $10, 50% off) — I never got into these, finding them a bit too preposterous, but I understand a lot of people like them, and hey, they’re here.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy ($10, 66% off) & Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy ($25, 50% off) — Why is Apollo Justice more expensive than Nick’s games? I don’t know, but it’s a good reason to get it now before its price shoots back up.

Atari

AKKA ARRH ($6, 70% off): To think AKKA ARRH finally saw commercial release decades after the old Atari passed on producing its prototype, and this version was developed by Jeff Minter himself. But how do you pronounce it? Like a pirate? ARRRRRH.

In fact, a lot of Atari games are on discount right now, including multiple titles in its Recharged series of updated arcade remakes. A few others: Head Over Heels ($2, 80% off), Asteroids Recharged ($3, 80% off), Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration ($18, 55% off), Atari Flashback Classics ($12, 70% off), Atari Mania ($6.24, 75% off) and Centipede Recharged ($3, 70% off), among many others.

SquareEnix

A lot of SquareEnix games are on sale at the moment. Collection of Mana ($16, 60% off) — Three games, Final Fantasy Legend (Game Boy), the beloved Secret of Mana (SNES) and the heretofore unreleased-in-English Seiken Densetsu III, now christened Trials of Mana. Sadly Trials, unlike Secret, doesn’t support three human players, not even in its original version, but it does offer a lot of replay value with multiple scenarios to complete.

A while bunch of Final Fantasy games are currently on sale, too many to link them all. VII is $6.39 (60% off); IX is $8.39 (also 60% off). On the Enix side of the building, Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age ($20, 50% off) is interesting. There’s also four Kingdom Hearts games with typically silly names, like HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMIX ($16, 60% off), but be careful, many of them are cloud versions that won’t work without an internet connection. There’s also Octopath Traveler and its sequel (both $24, 60% off) and Romancing SaGa 2 ($7.50, 70% off), among others.


Jeremy Parish on Castlevania Rondo of Blood & Ghouls ‘n Ghosts

Isn’t it the way? I made a Halloween post on Castlevania games, including the various videos and pages friend-of-the-blog Jeremy Parish has done on that beloved series, but wouldn’t you know it? That very day, after my post here went live, he released a new video on one of the most beloved Castlevania games, Rondo of Blood.

It might be a bit late for Halloween posts, but isn’t Halloween something we hold in our hearts year long? If we don’t, we should. Here’s that video, which is pretty long by his standards at 25 minutes:

And just yesterday he published another new video about an appropriately spooky game, Ghouls ‘n Ghosts for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, which as it turns out was ported by Yuji Naka himself! (19 minutes)

Last Moments for Kickstarter for Dancing With Ghosts

Set Side B usually updates at 10 AM Eastern time every day, but this post needs to go out right now, since it only has 18 hours to go….

Dancing With Ghosts is the next production by Greg Johnson and Humanature Studios, producers of site favorite ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove, and Doki Doki Universe. Johnson is also the designer of the classic DOS and Genesis game Starflight, and also co-designed Star Control II, a.k.a. The Ur-Quan Masters!

But Dancing With Ghosts (Kickstarter, free demo) is a different thing from all of those. It’s the story of a troubled young girl who can see ghosts, and the departed girl who she befriends. I’ve played through a lot of the demo, and I think it’s wonderful. It’s also inspired by the look of Studio Ghibli’s movies.

There’s less than a full day left, so please have a look and give some thought to whether you can help chip in. It’s already made its goal, and then some, but every bit will help out the production. Thanks for listening!

The “Officialist” SkiFree Homepage

SkiFree was part of one of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack releases for Windows 3.1, part of their limited gaming output before the went in on Xbox. Who knows, at the rate they’re going, maybe they won’t be doing Xbox much longer.

It’s a simple game where you guide a skier down through a scrolling course, avoiding obstacles, and trying to get a good time. After finishing the course and registering a time you could keep skiing, just for the fun of it, although eventually a yeti will chase your skier down and swallow them whole. Closing times on this slope are strictly enforced.

Its creator Chris Pirih maintains a homepage for SkiFree, along with history (it’s a port of a VAX terminal game he had written in Fortran), downloads (including one of an updated, 32-bit vesion), and other info. It’s the kind of page I’m surprised to see is still up, and hope remains up for decades to come.

Link Roundup 3/25/2025

Hello! John “rodneylives” Harris here. Let me quickly explain this before I get into it.

I have an overabundance of games links to present through Set Side B. My usual style of doing this is to pick one of them, then maybe write a bit of text introducing it, maybe a bit of a preview, a media embed of it’s a video somewhere (nearly always Youtube), and that’s a complete post. One a day, for approaching four years now. (SSB launched on April 5th, 2022.)

But working this way, I’ve developed quite a backlog! Not all of them are really worthy of a whole post, maybe, or I don’t have a full post’s worth of context to coax out of it.

So in an effort to clean up my link collections, I think I’m going to make regular posts, maybe one a week, that’s just several things that might be interesting. I post them, my link folder get slightly shorter, each individual person might be interested in one or two items in it each, then we move on to more of the usual kind of thing the rest of the week.

Got all that? Here we go:

1. Dave’s Garage interviewed Commodore 64 chip designer Albert Charpentier three years ago (it’s about an 1 hour):

2. On Mastodon, there’s an account, @everybodyvotes@social,miyaku.media, that posts every poll published on the Wii’s “Everybody Votes” channel, back in the days when Nintendo would do fun, free things just for the sake of doing them. You can even vote on them again, using Mastodon’s polling feature.

3. On Balatro creator LocalThunk’s blog, they’ve published a timeline of its history, from original concept to launch, whereupon LocalThunk earned more money than he had ever had before in their entire life.

4. Back on Youtube, speedrunner Kosmic expresses disbelief on the current state of Super Mario Bros. speedrunning (24 minutes), which is more active than you’d think it’d be for a game that’s so old, and has had so much attention poured onto it.

Sundry Sunday: Link Gets Bullied

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

Waverly Films used to be one of the foremost sketch comedy groups on Youtube, when sketch comedy was pretty common there, along with other groups like Barats & Bereta.

Link Gets Bullied was from MTV’s “Gaming Week,” a long-forgotten (much like MTV itself) feature where they pandered to game players for seven excruciating days. It’s just a minute long, and demonstrates why you shouldn’t take mythical, evil-destroying weapons lightly.

To think that people once cared about MTV! Is there anything about it now that isn’t just like any other channel? Like how The Discovery Channel is now mostly about fakey reality series? Remember MTV News? Remember when they had a decently respectable website?

Musing About the Animal Crossing New Horizons Update

Years after Nintendo announced that Animal Crossing New Horizons wouldn’t get any updates following the 2.0 one that also introduced the Happy Home Paradise DLC, and underlined it by not even releasing any New Years arches after 2021, they’ve gone back on that statement, announcing that in January there’ll be a Nintendo Switch 2 paid upgrade (only $5 this time), as well as a free 3.0 feature update. As they tend to do now, they announced it in a video, not a Nintendo Direct video, but still (12½m).

There was a time when I would have been thrilled to hear about this. I did, after all, write a guidebook to AC:NH, the “Black Book of Animal Crossing New Horizons,” which I still sell at itch.io. It contains an absurd amount of material. I suppose now I’ll have to update it again, but I’m feeling ambivalent about going back to the island paradise, despite the fully-upgraded house and tens of millions of bells I’ve left there.

Animal Crossing New Horizons holds a special place, not just in the series history, but in video gaming history. Incredibly, it’s the second best selling game on the Switch, at over 48 million copies, and it has the pandemic and the concomitant lockdown to blame for it. It outsold all of the other Animal Crossing games put together, going all the way back to Gamecube (and, in Japan, the N64) because a lot of people, for a time, used AC:NH as a replacement social scene, a kind of mini-MMORPG, focused not on fighting fake monsters in a bullshit fantasy world, but on decorating fake houses and islands, in a different kind of bullshit fantasy world.

And I think that’s okay, despite my use of profanity! Of course video game worlds are bullshit; that’s what they are made of. They’re all fake, they’re mere bits and bytes, but if you have a group of friends who pretend they’re real, then they gain reality from it, substance granted from their shared experience.

Well, the people are gone. I can’t expect that even a small fraction of the players it had back then are still invested in it. A few will return for this, surely, but without another lockdown it’s impossible to expect it’ll come anywhere close to it.

And even if they did… I think I’m done with Animal Crossing. Not just New Horizons, but Animal Crossing in general, even with the idea of Animal Crossing. The grandmothers who famously played the various versions, who the media happily reported on as a kind of uplifting story, they’re gone now. What happened to their memory cards, I wonder? Do their descendants load them up from time to time, pretending to be their grandmum, to falsely reassure the animals they still love them? Do they keep it as a kind of museum? Do they put it in the attic, maybe for future generations to discover, assuming their consoles still work, or sell them?

These are all troubling thoughts for me. Recent events have reminded me that life is finite. I still play video games, for my own reasons, but I don’t think I can appreciate, that I can afford, another huge timesink game like Animal Crossing, whether it be New Horizons or anything else . If I knew many other people who still played then maybe I could muster the will. I was on a Discord of Metafilter members who all played, but I left it over a year ago, before I knew they’d revive it, to clean up my server list. (Discord limits the number you can be a member of, you know. It’s higher if you play for their much-loathed “Nitro” feature, but I condemn that to extra hell.)

If this changes, I’ll let you know. The book could still use updating. But the joy in it has left me. Sorry critters; it was fun for a while.

Halloween 2025: Castlevaniastravaganza

From “Kin no Tori,” or “The Golden Bird,” an anime movie. This alchemist witch character and her cat-bat minions are so much fun!

It’s Halloween today! Boo! I don’t mean that in a bad way, I mean it enthusiastically! Boo, I say!

Growing up I was never a big fan of Halloween, other than the opportunity to get candy. I never wore a costume out. This has changed a bit in recent years, I still don’t dress up but I do try to observe the season. Today I’m running a video marathon of various things over on cytu.be. If you know me, you might know where to look to find it, if you’re interested in such things, but this isn’t really the place for it.

While waiting for trick or treaters, here’s a few vids to help you pass the time.

MrMatthews reviews all the Gameboy Castlevania titles (29m), a collection that rates from pretty good to abysmal. But that’s not what he says, he pretty much likes them all, even Adventure and Legends.

U Can Beat Video game’s walkthrough of NES Castlevania (35m), and Video Games 101’s walkthrough of the same game (26m). There’s UCBVG’s run of Castlevania Bloodlines (2h14m). My favorite though is UCBVG’s run of Castlevania III, a 2 hour, 22 minute epic that covers all characters and routes, which is what I’m embedding here. Note, though, that it doesn’t go through the more difficult second loop….

If your tastes run a bit more academic, Jeremy Parish has some dives into the Castlevania games: the original (16m) II: Simon’s Quest (15½m), Super IV (17m) and Circle of the Moon (23m). He hasn’t done III yet it seems. His old design discussions of the NES Castlevania games at anatomyofgames.com are still up, marred a bit by the fact that the site’s been hacked to host links to casino sites. Earlier this month Jeremy appeared on the Still Loading podcast to talk about the ‘Vainia, which you can listen to on the site, or on Youtube (1h33m). The embeds below are of the original and the podcast:

To finish off, an early Sundry item, TerminalMontage’s “Something About Castlevania” animation (4m). This is basically Simon Belmont’s whole personality: violence.