This is a review of Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo played with a press key provided by the developer.
Sundry Sunday: Sonic Gump
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
There’s a lot of game parody videos out there. Here in the Sundry Sunday department, we realize we could just throw anything up onto the page, and fill the requirement of the form. But we don’t want to do that.
A parody should ideally be something more than just, here’s a thing, floating around the culture, and we put game characters in it. The DragonCon T-shirt school of parody: “What if Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but Aliens?” A quote from The Office, but in the Star Wars title font. We are a never-ending font of contempt for that kind of crap.
This video, “Sonic Gump,” escapes that lowly category by the shared theme of its two characters: running. It starts with that, and then builds on it, casting the other Sonic regulars into expected (and unexpected) roles from the movie, and by the end it’s pretty effective. It’s on Newgrounds, but the embed here is to the Youtube version (1¾ minutes).
Webdepths: Three More Old Final Fantasy VI Sites
The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
We posted to the long-lived FFVI site (which a handful of old people may still think of as Final Fantasy III) Caves of Narshe a few days ago. In looking up stuff about it I ran across a few other sites too that I figured I might call out. Because while humans may read this site, Google reads it too, and if I can help those other sites somehow rank above the evil and exploitive Fandom sites, then I think I can devote a day’s post to that cause.
I am being hyperbolic when I say that video game sites used to be 10% of the internet by weight, but it doesn’t feel like it. And that used to be a good thing. Nowadays it seems like many of the people who were enthusiastic about both games and the internet also have strong opinions about Ethics In Game Journalism and 8chan. I don’t know if that’s true about the people I’m linking to now; I can only hope that it isn’t.
There’s Imzogelmo’s Final Fantasy III, who wrote game patches for the ROM, tools for examining it and investigations of how it works.
Djibriel’s page Collapse of Heaven and Earth is hosted by Caves of Narshe, and bears information on FFVI, FFV and a couple of other games.
Also hosted on CoN is Master ZED’s list of FFVI (III) patches. These patches are useless to people playing the remakes of course: the ones for Playstation, Gameboy Advance, mobile (which I hear are gone now, good job SquareEnix), Steam, Switch and probably other platforms. There are some guides here too. One entertaining one, if you are entertained by the kinds of things that I’m entertained by, is SharkESP’s Low Level FAQ, a monument to breaking the game.
Game Design Legend Rebecca Heineman’s Medical Issues
Not to repeat the title unnecessarily, but Time Extension reports that Rebecca Heineman has been diagnosed with cancer. This is a huge deal, her history in gaming goes back to the days of Electronic Games magazine! She was one of the founders of Interplay, programmed London Blitz for Avalon Hill’s nearly-forgotten computer game division, also programmed Wasteland and The Bard’s Tale (the original version), designed The Bard’s Tale III and (the greatly underrated) Dragon Wars, and a bevy of other accomplishments.
Time is awful, and the end comes for all of us eventually, but it’d be nice if this could be pushed back as far as it can be. Because she lives in the United States, and this bullshit excuse for a country believes that people should just die who can’t afford care, she’s setting up a GoFundMe for contributions. That’s what my recently-deceased brother did to try to pay for the medical care that could have saved his life. I think he got one contribution. Hopefully Rebecca Heineman will get a lot more than that. Please consider it if you can afford it.
Adrian’s Digital Basement Uncovers Famicom Galaxian Cheat
Let’s get the link out of the way right off (27 minutes).
Famicom Galaxian, never released in the US until Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1, is a tiny program, even by Famicom/NES standards. It may be the smallest Famicom game; the ROM is only 16K large, taking up just half of the addressable cartridge space.
But even such a little program can hide secrets. Adrian found a multicart with an alternate version of Famicom Galaxian with rapid autofire, and that he preferred to play that than the official one.
And I don’t blame him! Galaxian nowadays, whether a port of the arcade original, is a slow and clunky thing to suffer through, but even back then there were some people who scratched their heads at its popularity. One of them was Craig Kubey, author of the classic-era arcade book The Winner’s Guide to Video Games, who called it the Worst Popular Game. But these problems evaporate if you can just hold down the button and annihilate the aliens, like you were playing Centipede.
Namco must have realized how much better the game would play with more shots, as they made your ship in Galaxian’s successor Galaga fire faster, and can have two shots on-screen at once. four with the double ship. Maybe as a result, Galaga is a lot more fun to play, even today.
Adrian got to wondering about that alternate version, called “Galaxians” in the pirate cart’s menu. He found a ROM image of it online and had a look at its code in Mesen’s code analysis tools and found the first thing the “classic” version of the game on the cart does is write a zero to a specific address in zero page. This, as it turns out, is to ensure a secret cheat is disabled. If a one is written there instead, it produces behavior exactly like the rapid-fire version, which in addition to being able to fire much more quickly recolors the logo on the title screen red.
Is this a disabled cheat function on the original cartridge? Maybe, but maybe not. Adrian found another version of the Galaxian ROM online that doesn’t have the cheat function, disabled or no. It’s unknown if this is an alternate official release, or the only official release. Maybe the version on the pirate cart was hacked to put the code in, or maybe it’s an obscure unreleased version, or else maybe it’s the Famicom Disk System version?
Geez, the mysteries abound concerning this sucky little game! Find out about it yourself here:
Kid Fenris on McDonald’s Treasure Island, Treasure’s First Game
Kid Fenris is an underrated little classic game review blog. Many of their posts deserve to be linked to, but we try to keep up a variety of sources, so I try to pick out when they have particularly interesting subject matter. So it is when they posted about McDonald’s Treasure Island for the Genesis/MegaDrive, which also turns out to be the first game Treasure developed as a company.
As the article reminds us, it wasn’t the first Treasure game released, that would be the game that in many ways announced to the world that they meant business: Gunstar Heroes, as brimming with ideas as it was.
Treasure seems largely to be in preservation mode these days, and their last title was released 11 years ago. Not all of their games have been as critically acclaimed as Gunstar Heroes, but they all have something interesting about them, and McDonald’s Treasure (heh) Island has it too.
Indie Showcase for 9/30/25
The weekly indie game showcases cover the many games we (Josh Bycer and friends) play each week on the channel. Games shown are either press keys, demos, or from my own collection.
00:00 Intro
00:14 exophobia
1:33 The Paradogx incident
2:48 RKGK
4:22 Rabbit and Steel
5:57 Battle Train
7:46 Knights of the Road
The Website Caves of Narshe
We love oldschool websites around here, and unlike Final Fantasy Kingdom, whose images are all broken and likely isn’t long for this world, Caves of Narshe has been kept up-to-date, its images and links all work, it’s got a good design, and is full of interesting info on Final Fantasies 1, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 9, plus Final Fantasy Tactics and Chrono Trigger. It’s loaded with good information, and best of all, it isn’t Fandom.com! I can’t even rightly give it the oldweb tag, because it’s modernized! May it last a thousand years.
What kind of focus image does a normal standard regular website get? Well how about a screenshot?
Sundry Sunday: Game Over by PES
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
(grumble grumble… stupid WordPress…)
PES is an acclaimed and Oscar-nominated stop motion animator. They’ve done terrific work. One of their videos is game-related, and additionally references classic-era arcade games. Have a look (1½ minutes):
Video Games 101’s Super Mario World Speedrun Guide
Between U Can Beat Video Games, Video Games 101 and other channels like that of the late SaikyoMog, there are _<i>lots</i>_ of video guides to classic games. If I linked to all of them here they’d overrun the channel. I’m considering making those links a weekly thing, like Sundry Sunday and (sporadically, these days) romhacks, to keep their numbers under control. We’ll see.
Many of these videos are very long, and sometimes multipart besides. This video, a speedrun guide for Super Mario World from VG101, is not. (18 minutes)
Of course Super Mario World is a game that’s been destroyed by speedrunning. If you set aside scripted, tool-assisted speedruns (TASes), which I usually do nowadays, there are people who have still taken advantage of glitches to warp directly to the credits from gameplay, and perform much weirder tricks besides. This video doesn’t rely on those: it’s just the most direct route from start to finish through its levels, as God and Tezuka intended.
Piccadilly Gradius
After yesterday’s exploration of a huge collection of antique electro-mechanical amusement machines, it seemed meet to drag out a little video I’ve been aware of for a while, a demonstration of a Piccadilly Circus-style redemption machine made by Konami, amusingly named Piccadilly Gradius (2 minutes).
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of this strange entry in the Gradius series on the internet, just a stub on a couple of wikis. Piccadilly Circus itself seems to be a Konami series, only a little older than Gradius really. Most of them seem to be simple roulette-style machines where you stop a light on a number to win a prize. The Gradius one makes it into a journey to get a spaceship to the end of a course.
Here’s a demonstration, I think, of one of the more-usual Piccadilly Circus games (3 minutes). It’s got charming anime-style art!
A huge old-timey penny arcade in Yorkshire
It’s hard to believe, but an “arcade” didn’t used to mean video games. Across “the pond,” to trade in ludicrous understatement, in “old blighty,” there is an amazing collection of old-style mechanical machines. Northern Introvert has an ‘alf-hour video exploration of them that makes for fascinating viewing!