The subject line says it all. It seems like it’ll still be possible to get funds into those shops for a while using a Switch, or using a funding card, but direct adding will be disabled after today.
Homebrew Atari VCS/2600 Arcade Ports
The long-running Atari fansite AtariAge sells a number of carts that run on classic Atari VCS systems that make it do things you might not expect that system could do. Some of the most impressive of these are remakes of classic arcade games that go far beyond what was possible at the time. A number of these were developed by Champ Games. Here are links to a number of videos showing them off, although sone of the may not currently be in their store:
“Galagon” – Wizard of Wor – Zoo Keeper – Avalanche – Scramble – Super Cobra – Mappy (especially this one!)
A few others, not from Champ Games: Aardvark (Anteater) – Venture Reloaded – Space Rocks (Asteroids) – Star Castle – Pac-Man – Draconian (Bosconian)
Link Roundup 5/22/22
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
From Marc Deschamps at comicbook, Epic bought Fall Guys studio Mediatonic, and as a result, when Fall Guys goes free-to-play, they’re removing it from Steam. People who had bought it on Steam will still have access to it there, and they plan to still support and update that version, but new copies will no longer be sold there.
Multiple places are reporting on a new game described as Stardew Valley meets Spirited Away. I’m choosing to link to Kate Gray’s post on NintendoLife on Spirittea. I get the sense that there is a PR department around this media blitz, although I certainly don’t begrudge them that, drebnar.
On April 7, Duncan Heaney at Square-Enix had an interview with the producer of Chrono Cross, Koichiro Sakamoto, about the recently-released remake of the game. It contains the revelation, hardly surprising, that the source code of the game had been lost, and they literally had to recreate the game from surviving materials and deducing the implementation logic of the original.
Chris Carter at Destructoid points us to a God of War mod that puts Homer Simpson, Bart Simpson and Ned Flanders into the game, complete with pretty accurate voice acting! They also linked to a YouTube video showing it off. The article mentions some people suggesting another mod with Peter Griffin fighting a chicken, about which, could I just suggest: please don’t.
At Ars Technica, Sam Machkovech calls Warner Bros’ Multiversus, their upcoming smashalike (I’m still trying to make that term happen!) “a compelling Smash Bros. clone.” I mean, it’s got Steven Universe and Garnet in it, so that’s a plus, but no Pearl or Peridot! Also: no Switch version yet.
Goomba Stomp is a website that’s been showing up in my searches more and more often lately, and Renan Fontes there has an essay discussing player character growth in The Legend of Zelda!
Damian McFerran at NintendoLife wrote about the troubled history of the Polymega retro gaming console last year, and now mentions that it may be getting Dreamcast support.
John Walker at Kotaku mentions Mysplaced, a game that looks an awful lot like Nintendo’s remake of Link’s Awakening, which is causing some concernation among fans. Liam Doolan at NintendoLife also chimes in. If you were to ask me? The whole dang industry is built off of copies of copies and copies, and to suddenly care about this one is kind of ridiculous. As if Zelda clones weren’t once like half the industry! Have they ever seen Neutopia? Golden Axe Warrior? They are not going to get sued because they don’t call these characters “Link,” “Zelda,” or “Ganon.” Next!
Jez Corden at Windows Central says Microsoft’s Activision/Blizzard acquisition is moving fast. I wonder if, way back in the early 80s, those bright young refugees from Atari suspected that, one day, the company they were founding would one day contribute to the value of a corporate behemoth?
Finally, in more serious news, Luke Plunkett at Kotaku notes that Epic Games contributed money to help Ukrainian developers working for Frogwares to be safer as Russia’s invasion of that nation continues. Good luck guys!
Sundry Sunday: MST3K & Rifftrax Gaming Clips
You’ve made it another Sunday! For making it this far, why not take a break with some fun things? The whole point of Sundry Sunday is to be a low effort thing for the end of the week, but to be honest I couldn’t resist putting in a little extra work on this one.
It might not be evident on the surface, but the classic riffing show Mystery Science Theater 3000 has roots deeply entwined with video games. The show’s staff were known to spend off hours playing Doom against each other on a company LAN they had made for that purpose. During the show, they produced a clip that was distributed on the PlayStation Underground magazine CDs in which they riffed on some of Sony’s artsy commercials from that time (above).
After the original run of the show ended, some of the cast and crew drifted for a bit, doing various projects. One was a short-lived web comedy magazine called Timmy Big Hands, which we might look at some day. Show leads Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett did a couple of other things together, like a four episode movie riffing project called The Film Crew, before they eventually settled into doing Rifftrax, a project the three of them work on to this day.
While at Rifftrax, they’ve produced at least two game riffing clips. The first was made for sadly-departed gaming site Joystiq, and riffs on Mega Man, Final Fantasy X, Sonic the Hedgehog and, especially, something from the Metal Gear Solid series, which I would think is the perfect fodder for such video merrymaking:
Afterward they made another short clip for IGN riffing on Gears of War 3:
Rifftrax makes their living producing and selling clips making fun of shorts and movies, and one of those is the 1993 schlockfest Super Mario Bros. I call it schlock, but it’s one of those movies that critical opinion has slowly been coming around on over the years since its release. More and more it’s being seen as a competently-made and entertaining kids’ sci-fi fantasy movie perfectly of a piece with the era in which it was made-it’s just not a very good adaptation of the games with which it shares a title.
Rifftrax sells the whole Super Mario Bros. riff, complete with the movie on which it’s based, on their site. I highly recommend it, but IGN presents a nine-minute clip teaser from it on YouTube:
ABAgames’ “Good Old Game Sound Generator”
Kenta Cho is a brilliant game maker, and he’s come up with a couple of generators that can generatively make short stretches of music, suitable for classic-inspired arcade games.
Short VGM Generator is on itch.io, and works by taking a pre-existing piece of music and attempting to make another piece of a similar style.
The Good Old Game Sound Generator is on GitHub, but for playing around you might be more interested in its Demo page. It takes a bit more effort to make something with it, but it’s a much more flexible tool. I must leave you to your own devices to make something of value, or at least of interest, using it.
The process that let him to create these tools is up on a page he made on dev.to. If you’re interested in generative music you should take a look!
Link Roundup 5/20/22
“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.
History of Hyrule, Legend of Zelda art in print
This is a collection, made by Melora, of various Japanese publications related to The Legend of Zelda and its sequels, including manuals, hint books, strategy guide and manga. There’s a lot to go through! Some of it is translated, a lot isn’t. But it’s all nice to leaf through. There’s four heads to this particular Gleeok: a home page, a blog, a Twitter feed, a Flickr image archive with tons of images, and a substantial amalgamation on the Internet Archive. If you’re as familiar with Zelda games as I am, you might not even particularly need the strategy guides translated!
I still remember the first substantial thing I read about Zelda, long ago, a review in, of all places, Games Magazine. I must have been about 13 at the time. It seemed like an awesome thing to my games-addled brain, but at that moment I didn’t even have an NES. When I first played it, it was amazing. I spent months uncovering every item and secret (finding Level 7 in the second quest was a major roadblock).
So, when I think of The Legend of Zelda, I think of challenging game play, exploring a huge world, finding deviously hidden secrets, and overcoming a formidable challenge purely by my own efforts. All of these side various comics are a bit lost of me, as it is not often that I get into the lore of the series (The Wind Waker was a major exception), but I understand that a lot of other people do, and I think that’s terrific.
I have not had that the kind of experience I got from The Legend of Zelda from many other things since the era of the NES, but two places I did get it from were Breath of the Wild, of course, and Fez. I hear Tunic‘s pretty good, I probably should look into that soon….
Some more images, from various materials related to the first game. All are from this Flickr album, and were uploaded (and many of them, scanned) by Melora of History of Hyrule:
The Indie Dev Showcase 5/18/22
The indie showcases highlight the developer submitted games and demos I play for Game-Wisdom. Please reach out if you would like me to play your game.
- 0:00 8 Bit Adventures 2
- 1:30 B.ark
- 3:09 Omno
- 5:53 Poker Quest
- 8:24 Clown in a House
- 9:59 Vesper
Commodore 64 Ads Retrospective
Bryan Lunduke has a collection of old ads for what is still the best-selling model of personal computer of all time, the Commodore 64. No doubt it retains that title today on the basis of a number of technicalities, like PCs are atomized among many different makes that still all run the same OS, and people not considering an iPhone to be a computer somehow.
I’d like to draw your attention in particular to the ad for GEOS on that page, the early C64 windowed operating system that breathed new life into the system. In the end it was probably doomed due to a number of factors: Apple’s head start and much better marketing, the fact GEOS had to be booted from disk while Mac OS was partly ROM-resident, and a bit of clunkiness. But you can do rather a lot with GEOS all by itself, and it comes with a capable word processor in GeoWrite. GEOS, and its weird legacy, probably deserves a post of its own eventually.
The image above is for a fake ad, but it’s based off of an iconic, and slightly disturbing, television ad from Austrailia, Keeping Up With The Commodore:
Link Roundup 5/18/22
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Ron Amadeo at Ars Technica tells us that estimates are that the Google Play and Apple App Store culls to take effect will each remove over half a million apps. This will result in the permanent destruction of a huge amount of software from the beginning of the smartphone era to two years before the present. It’s yet another example of how corporations are awful stewards of software preservation, drebnar! (What? Don’t editorialize? Is that how they do it on Earth?)
Dean Takahashi, writing for VentureBeat subsite GamesBeat, recently interviewed former Nintendo of Amercia president Reggie Fils-Aime about a number of topics, including recent allegations of overuse of contract employees and why they seem to have abandoned F-Zero.
More displeasure at Nintendo, Ollie Reynolds at NintendoLife mentions rumors that some at Retro Studios weren’t pleased to be brought in to work on Mario Kart 7.
C.J. Andriessen at Destructoid lists three upcoming characters for smashalike Nickelodeon’s All-Star Brawl: Jenny from My Life As A Teenage Robot, Rocko from Rocko’s Modern Life, and… Hugh Neutron, the dad of Jimmy Neutron? Well anyway, it’s another avenue to allow kids and former-kids to have their favorite characters beat the ever loving crap out of each other, as we have all dearly wished for many times!
Najam Ul Hassan of Exputer, a newcomer to our little report, notes that Elden Ring’s concurrent player base has dropped by 90% in the three months since launch, which is pretty much to be expected, given how so many games tend to launch with a burst of interest that rapidly trails off over the following months.
Researchers Bruno Sauce, Magnus Liebherr, Nicholas Judd & Torkel Klingberg, in a peer-reviewed paper for the journal Nature, say there is evidence that playing video games leads to cognitive improvement among kids of ages 9-10. It takes a lot of effort to power through the writing though, as usual for these kinds of papers.
Lauren Morton of PC Gamer begs, and I agree, to please stop making Discord servers for things that shouldn’t be Discord servers! The public web is a wonderful thing, and to block off information among insular, private communities makes it difficult both to find and preserve. Although, if you’re going to make a wiki, please consider alternatives to Fandom, as they have their own problems.
Over on Tom’s Hardware, Ash Hill writes about a “drop-in” kit to put a Raspberry Pi into an old Game Boy case!
In the Rich Tasty Schadenfreude department, we are alerted by Ethan Gach at Kotaku that cryptocurrency-based Pokemon clone Axie Infinity’s breeding potion currency has dropped in value to less than a penny.
Also at Kotaku, Ari Notis writes that Halo Infinite pro Tyler “Spartan” Ganza refuses to play due to mistrust of teammates, and his team, eUnited, refuses to release him from his contract. Another player lobbied to have a teammate of his that he gets on with especially well replaced, and it did not go down well with Spartan.
The gaming web has been abuzz about a demake of Portal that runs on real Nintendo 64 hardware. It’s on GitHub!
An official Sega Twitter feed has offered new footage of the upcoming Sonic Origins. Revealed: a mission mode, a drop dash move, Knuckles and Super Sonic in Sonic 1, Sonic CD gameplay, and especially interesting, a new Hidden Palace zone in Sonic 2!
Brad Linder, Liliputing: The AYA Neo line of portable gaming PCs from China is getting a new model, the AYA Neo Air.
NintendoLife’s Thomas Whitehead notes that over the past 12 months, the Switch has received twice as many first-party exclusives as either PlayStation or Xbox.
I. Bonifacic at Engadget brings news that the makers of Genshin Impact have a another free-to-play exploration game on the way, called Zenless Zone Zero. That’s certainly a title.
Andy Chalk at PC Gamer mentions that Kerbal Space Program 2 is being delayed for the fourth time, and is being handed to its third developer, Take-Two’s Intercept Games, which was formed specifically to work on it.
Jeremy Peel at Rock Paper Shotgun presents an interesting article noting that some notable Eve Online players are actually successful at real-world business.
Finally, here at the Set Side B News Desk, we don’t often get to chime in on what many would consider to be “real news,” such as the furor over the pending U.S. Supreme Court decision once again allowing states to pass laws restricting or even banning abortion. But sometimes it leaks in. Ted Litchfield at PC Gamer writes about Insomniac planning to support abortion rights with a $50,000 contribution, to be matched by their parent company Sony, but with Sony management wanting to keep the donations a secret from the public. Sony has also forbidden their fiefdoms from publicly stating an opinion on abortion rights. This is good reporting on an important issue, and I encourage you to follow the link for more information!
Franken
Franken has made the internet rounds the past few days, being praised by Derek Yu and Video Game Dunkey. I was pointed to it by our own Kent Drebnar, the one-celled gaming organism who does news posts for us. It’s a free and short and free JRPG styled thing up on itch.io. It’s inspired by Final Fantasy VI, For The Frog The Bell Tolls, Moon, and Grow RPG! It’s made with OHRRPGCE, itself a fun, quirky and free RPG creation program.
It’s not really so much as game as a humor delivery mechanism and strongly-guided system of battles. There’s only one choice for actions throughout all the fights, but it’s more of a silly and good-hearted story that you experience through a Dragon Quest play system. It reminds me a lot of another JRPG homage for 3DS and Switch, Fairune, although without its sometimes maddening secret-finding, and with lots of quirky characters, which feel like they were imported from Undertale.
It’s only about an hour long, and did I mention it’s free, so I figure it’s well worth your time and money!
Trek to Yomi Review
Trek to Yomi just came out a few weeks ago and I went through it on stream, and while it certainly had style, the substance was lacking.