The Flipside of Gaming
This is part 7 of my (Josh Bycer’s) favorite demos from Steam Next Fest, June 2025 edition.
00:00 Intro
00:19 Neon Inferno
1:44 Vampire’s Best Friend
4:05 Possessor(s)
6:10 Sping
7:25 Primland: The Magnus
9:15 Glaciered
11:13 Heroes Against Time
12:42 Rogue Eclipse
13:41 Jetrunner
14:50 Funi Raccoon Game
15:43 Hirogami
17:10 Gurei
18:51 Away From Home
Primm made a number of high resolution images of the system cursors the Wii uses, for use as desktop cursors on Windows, macOS and Linux, and in four colors corresponding to the four player Wii remotes. You can get them here!
This snuck up on me, and in fact I had thought I’d missed it, but it turns out it’s tonight! Roguelike Celebration‘s main event isn’t until October, but they’re having a preview event tonight with two long and one short talk. The schedule is here. It kicks off at around 3:00 PM Pacific time, which to convert is 6 PM Eastern, around 10 PM Greenwich, and Midnight CEST.
(EDIT: I had the Eastern times too late by an hour. The event will begin at 6 PM Eastern time.)
Tonight’s show is being done for free, but you still need a (costless) ticket for it, which you can get here. As has been usual the past few events, there will be a live MUD-like chatroom to participate in during the show, for interacting with other audience members, for submitting questions to the queue, and just for bumping around and exploring. The doors open a little before the talks begin, to let people get used to the space, and as a buffer against lateness.
I hope you can make it! Tonight’s talks are:
3:15 PM Pacific / 6:15 PM Eastern / 10:15 PM GMT / 12:15 AM CEST – 45 minutes
Fireside chat with Jon Perry: Host Alexei Pepers and Jon Perry will chat about game design and his contributions to UFO 50 such as Planet Zoldath, Party House, and Mini & Max! (Personal note: this is not one to miss. I have been obsessed with Party House, enough to write a gigantic strategy guide for it.)
4 PM Pacific / 7 PM Eastern / 11 PM GMT / 1 AM CEST – 30 minutes
Building Synergy Networks for better Roguelike Deckbuilders, with Ezra Szanton: Roguelike Deckbuilders live or die on the quality of the drafting decisions they present. When a player chooses between 3 cards, what is going through their head? This talk is about how to achieve deep but accessible drafting decisions which result in memorable games that excite players. Synergy Networks are a helpful lens for creating sets of cards that achieve these aims. Modeling the synergies between cards as a network allows us to use ideas from network theory like path length, density and hubs. Digressions will include characteristics of synergies, broad types of synergies useful for brainstorming, and why anti-synergy is just as important as synergy itself. This talk is informed by my work designing Hellscaper and Mr Magpie’s Harmless Card Game, two roguelike deckbuilders.
4:30 PM Pacific / 7:30 PM Eastern / 11:30 PM GMT / 1:30 AM CEST – 45 minutes
Designing for System Suspense, with Alexei Pepers: The host will give a talk which she gave at GCD and had previously been trapped inside the GDC Vault.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
So, Deltarune Chapter 4. After the mostly-comical adventures of Kris, Susie and Ralsei through three alternate-world dreamscapes, the fourth got a lot darker with the revelation that there’s an entity trying to revive Titans, huge evil monsters that could rip up the world.
During the battle with a Titan near the end of the chapter, a point is reached in the fight where none of your attacks can get through its defenses. That is where Susie, the bruiser of the group, has her idea.
You aren’t told what the idea is, it just shows up in the menu as Susie’s Idea and a little graphic of her face. Selecting it is necessary to win the battle; it causes Susie to grab Kris and jump directly into the Titan, reckless behavior sure, but that’s just who Susie is. And it works!
Susie’s Idea has become a meme, with at least enough standing to get its own Know Your Meme page. chorālunar made a Youtube video of many of these meme images with (mostly) quirky music, akin to the old collections of cursed images set to Earthbound music. It’s five minutes:
Kim Justice has done a few of these videos and they usually have interesting games to look into. They try to present machines that aren’t as well-known to current eyes, so you’ll probably find at least one new favorite in each of their videos. Here it is (32 minutes):
The games presented are: Mr. Do!, Frenzy, Anteater, Nibbler, Kangaroo, Bagman, The Pit, Blue Print, Jack the Giant Killer and Abscam. I personally vouch for Mr. Do, Anteater, Nibbler and Bagman. A surprising fact revealed is that Midway’s Blue Print was actually an early production of Tim and Chris Stamper, long before Rare, and even before Ultimate: Play the Game!
It’s a busy day for me coming up, so here’s one from my list of Youtube links: the Ultimate Gameboy Talk (1 hour 1 minute) by Michael Steil, but you don’t have to watch it on YT, as it’s also hosted on the website of Chaos Computer Club in various formats. The embed below is from Youtube though, since they usually have pretty good embedding:
This “ultimate” talk is ultimately about the hardware, its internals and quirks, and tricks that can be pulled off in it. Sure, it’s very technical and extremely geeks, but that’s pretty much the standard around these parts. Enjoy!
MADE is the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, a San Francisco-based video game museum loaded with playable examples. They’re trying to raise $500,000 to secure operations funding for the next three years. I’ve never been to it, but I’ve had at least one worthy person recommend them to me today, and so I decided to help spread the word. (Info link, fundraiser link)
The fundraising seems to be going slowly at the moment, which is a shame. They’re at just 2% of their goal. Please, if you have some spare change, you could probably do worse than to throw it their way. And spread the word if you can!
There’s this Youtube video (SHOCKING, I know) about “The Only Impossible Seed in Balatro*.” (49 minutes) The asterisk is their way of saying, “It’s not really impossible, but that wouldn’t have nearly as much impact as a title.” Yeah, unfair.
The video is interesting, if you sift through it, for an interesting fact: a bug in Balatro’s seed-based randomness generation code sometimes produces a situation where one of its many number sources will get bugged, and produce the same number over and over again. This is the cause of the now-infamous seeds where, if you’re playing the Erratic Deck, all your cards end up as the 10 of Spades, as well as seeds that affect which cards you draw, and one where all the Jokers generated are Rare. The video is most interesting, I think, for describing that mechanism, and that is why it is offered here:
To get to the meat, it turns out there is GitHub out there that explains much about these bugged seeds, here.
I am back from DragonCon, but got hit by a staggering blow from life (which I will not mention the details of here) that’s going to take me a long time to recover from. So in the meantime, please enjoy this 19 minute video in which someone on Youtube describes his plan to get arcade Commando (a.k.a. “Wolf of the Battlefield”) to play Ron Hubbard’s excellent soundtrack from the C64 port.
Arcade Command didn’t have bad music at all, but Ron Hubbard’s score is generally regarded to outshine it. The two hardware platforms are really different: the C64 has a 6502-workalike and the legendary SID chip, while the arcade version used a custom platform. This is a first video in a projected series, so at this point we don’t even know if he’ll be successful. Let’s hope.
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 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.
The reason this is a low effort week is because DragonCon is this weekend, and I am there. Some happenings:
Oops, gotta run! More tomorrow!
