Click on an item, then click on another item of the same type. The two will merge together into one item. When you get an item with all 45 of its type it’ll be replaced with a box with the name of its category.

Remembering the locations of the growing categories quickly becomes a major part of the puzzle! When you combine an item with another one, the combined group ends up at the location of the second one you clicked. Use this information to get the categories as close to the upper-left as possible. This will prevent them from moving around too often, and aid your creaking grey matter in recording their places.

Unless I miss my guess, you’ll progress smoothly for a while; you’ll complete one or two specific categories long before any of the others; then at about six to ten categories finished you’ll collide rudely with the taxonomical wall. I had to use Google to get through the last 20% (that’s about 400 items remaining!), and I really think you will too, since everyone has holes in their knowledge.

Below (in ROT13, since it’s a spoiler), I list some of the harder categories to pick up on:

Gbz Unaxf zbivrf, Tbbtyr cebqhpgf, Gbyxvra punenpgref, “jrngure jbeqf,” pbyyrpgvir abhaf, HF ICf, xvaqf bs cnfgn (whfg ubj znal xvaqf NER gurer?!), “jrngure jbeqf,” Zneiry Pvarzngvp Havirefr punenpgref, pbzchgre ynathntrf, ynetr pbzcnavrf, ybtvpny snyynpvrf, purrfrf, shpxvat PBPXGNVYF (V qba’g qevax) naq, zbfg vashevngvat bs nyy vs lbh’er abg n ynjlre, yrtny qbpgevarf.

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And so ends another year here are the weird pixel-art alien planet that our blog is based from, which for some reason concerns itself with Earth retro, niche and indie games. Hey, I never promises that our blog was thematically consistent! My first idea for its name and art theme was “Fairies and Robots,” this is a step up from that, right?

To start off, a bit of site history. Set Side B began on April 5th, 2022 with me, Josh Bycer’s Game Wisdom series, Statue (who to date has done but one post but we love them anyway), and Phil Nelson, of RetroStrange, who set up and maintains the site and cheers us on from the sidelines.

We did monthly wrap-up posts for the first few months of the site’s life, before I started forgetting to do them. Also, they’re a fair bit of work for what still feels like filler. I like to have something new here for every day, working from the theory that consistency is what matters most for a blog such as this. We’ve had a couple of lapses, but never for more than a single day. For the most part, we’ve stayed pretty steady.

In the early days of the blog I did weekly news posts, but those too felt like filler. I came to think, if you wanted to see what Kotaku was saying, you’d probably already have seen it at Kotaku. (Pretend I pronounce “Koh-tahk-oo” like videogamedunkey would say it.)

Where do we get our posts from? Well I scour Youtube frequently, obviously. It’s algorithm is not super-terrific for finding things, but sometimes comes through. There’s also social media posts and RSS feeds. (Note: Set Side B has a RSS feed too!) Once in a while I’ll post something I found on venerable community weblog Metafilter, where I often hang out. But there’s always new things to find and places to look. If you know of something that you think we’d be interested in, let us know!

What is out traffic like? We have a couple of stats packages installed, but they give very different views. One tells me we average about 60,000 hits per day, from around 11,000 visitors, but how much of that traffic is bots and crawlers, like from people trying to build datasets for their infuriating generative AIs,is anyone’s guess. WordPress’ own stats display says we’ve gotten 64,000 visitors over the past six months, which isn’t bad I guess?

Our most popular posts seem to be my link to a beginner’s guide to Balatro, my comprehensive strategy guide for UFO 50’s Party House, a quick start guide to UFO 50’s Pilot Quest, another link to a Balatro explainer, links to a Mr. Saturn Text Generator and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles logo generator, and one to an explanation of why the Mario 64 star Snowman’s Lost His Head sucks so much.

Most of our traffic at the moment seems to come from Google searches. It’s been much remarked upon that Google is capricious and unreliable as a source of traffic, but it’s not doing badly for us at the moment, at least.

We started Set Side B with no clear ending in mind, and we continue to keep it going for as long as we can.

So, let’s get to the recap—

(BTW, I used that em dash specifically to prove wrong the people who think it’s a sign of AI text generation. Some of us like to use all the characters.)

Set Side B updates daily, and I don’t feel up to echoing every post we made over the last year, so I’m only going over some that I consider to be highlights. In some cases, the choice for what to leave out was very difficult. For the rest, I refer you to our archives, over in the sidebar.

On New Year’s Day of 2025 I posted about the bizarre but awesome R-Type parody GAR-TYPE, where you play ace space fighter pilot Jon Starbuckle fighting against a horde of giant Garfield-shaped space monsters, which I think is about as perfect a Set Side B subject as anything.

January 17: iobaseball.com is kind of like a solitaire successor to Blaseball, which we still hold dear in our memory. Development on it seems to have stalled for now, sadly, but it’s still playable online.

January 24 held a list of “Minesweeper-likes.”

January 27 was a link to a Roguelike Radio episode that I was in!

February 3 was about a Displaced Gamers video about them reprogramming NES Ghosts & Goblins to make it more stable.

On February 5, I hearkened back to an ancient Nethack spoiler listing the 50+ ways you could die in that game.

February 10: Rampart again.

February 18: Entertaining bits of the manual for the arcade Wizard of Wor machine.

February 24: A sad occasion, as I had finally learned that Matthew Green, online friend and booster of Set Side B from the start, and maintainer of both the website pressthebuttons.com and the podcast Power Button, had passed away two months before. Adding insult to fatality, since then long-time blogging platform Typepad shut down, and that took pressthebuttons offline too.

February 27: CSS Puzzle Box, a puzzle game implemented entirely in CSS stylesheets.

March 1: The amazing (if you know about its hardware limitations) Commodore 64 demo NINE.

March 6: An “arcade raid” in West Virginia, rescuing arcade machines from decay and collapse.

March 19: The basics of classic Sonic the Hedgehg physics.

March 21: On the free and open-source Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection, and my own tips on Dominosa, one of its many puzzles. If you’ve never heard of this brilliant piece of software you really should check it out, it’s available for nearly everything!

March 26: Long-running magazine Game Informer returns from the dead.

April 1: My own recovery and restoration of classic oldweb site Furnitures, the Great Brown Oaf.

April 4: On my favorite part of Mario Kart games, the growing number of fictional sponsors in the games.

April 12: On efforts to restore Faceball 2000’s lost 16-player mode.

April 18: More on Mario Kart World’s fake ads.

April 19: My own project to present the archives of Loadstar, classic Commodore 64 magazine-on-disk. I had a busy April. More was posted about this on May 8 and June 4.

April 27: A particularly fun Sundry Sunday find, The Legend of Beavis.

May 10: Youtube game disassembly deep-dive channel has been sleeping lately, but before they passed out they posted a gigantic and exhaustive video explaining the level format of Super Mario Bros. 2.

May 19: PAPApinball’s demonstration of expert play in Addams Family Pinball.

May 24: 8-Bit Show-And-Tell finds fake C64 programming books on Amazon.

May 27: On a particularly awesome game from that Loadstar compilation, jason Merlo’s Jed’s Journey, a Zelda-like for the C64.

May 29: I list out a whole bunch of gaming websites you should be following.

June 2: A web-wide effort to solve every 5×5 Nonogram (a.k.a. Picross) puzzle. (Update: since then the effort has been successful! Now they’re trying to solve every unique 5×6 puzzle.)

June 5: It was launch day for the Switch 2, and I was standing in line with a number of other people at the Statesboro, GA Gamestop. I was inspired, while standing, to write my own addition to the oldweb “Private Skippy” meme, listing things they (Judging by pre-existing lore, Skippy is definitely non-binary) are not allowed to do while standing in line.

June 6: I exulted Kenta Cho’s, aka.ABAgame’s terrific BLASNAKE, playable for free at itch.io! On June 25 they released another great game with Labyracer!

June 12: I wrote a piece on old-school computer type-in magazines, a major way software was distributed before the internet.

June 17: Another find from the tracks and sectors of Loadstar, Nick Peck’s terrific shooter Zorphon.

June 19: “Oh God, The Donkey Kong Country CG Cartoon Show’s On Youtube.”

June 21: The Coolest Thing In The World Is CP/M for 6502. CP/M was the OS that MS-DOS copied from. If you have a CP/M 6502 implementation for your machine, any CP/M 6502 program will run on it, ranging from the C64 to the SNES!

June 30: I had been planning to present Video Games 101’s extensive and entertaining series of retro game walkthroughs for a long while, and on this day I finally did it.

July 8: ZoomZike’s series on Identifying Luck in Mario Party is actually an extremely in-depth and thorough examination of the whole series, still in progress. Some of their videos are several hours long, and best digested in pieces.

July 9: Primesweeper is a game where your knowledge of prime numbers makes the game easier.

On July 14 I linked to Kirby Air Ride Online’s competitive scene for playing City Trial. Since then Air Riders was released, and the whole world has had the chance to see what they knew all along.

July 15: Chipwits, a remake of the classic Mac programming puzzle game, entered full release on Steam!

July 17: A guide to the various “new media” websites out there, from Defector to Second Wind.

July 23: Multiplayer Balatro!

August 1: I presented my website where I extracted all of Jerry Jones’ recipes from off of Loadstar, food recipes, and made a website for them all.

August 2: Jean and Zac’s 100 Facts about Gauntlet Dark Legacy.

August 6: Digital Eel’s Bandcamp Albums.

August 7: If you read the town sign in the original Animal Crossing while holding a damaged axe, it’ll reset it’s durability.

August 9: Nothing short of eye-popping, a madperson is had build a Wolf3D-style 3D ray tracing engine for the Commodore PET, a machine not only without bitmapped graphics, but whose character set is locked in ROM. Later on August 27, we found a PETSCII platformer.

On August 15, we started carrying a small ad image in the upper-right of the page. We don’t receive any money from this at the moment, and probably never will, but the ad is from a small-site network, one that mostly links webcomics, and it felt like a way to do our part to help spread the word about little sites. This is also the day where more news came to light about a bug I had long known about, in the NES port of Pac-Man.

September 10: Use a Gameboy Advance as a controller on the Nintendo Switch, for real, no wiring or unofficial hardware needed, although you do need quite a lot of official hardware, including a Gameboy Advance to Gamecube cable and the USB Gamecube controller adapter.

September 20: A talk on how to turn a boring Chromebook into a full laptop.

September 23: Oh, nothing. Just a Minecraft server written in bash.

September 25: Someone found an old-time penny arcade in Yorkshire and tried out a lot of their games, most of them ancient electro-mechanicals. The next day we saw one of Konami’s weirder redemption machines, the unexpectedly cool Picadilly Gradius.

September 29: Long-time classic Final Fantasy and Squaresoft fansite Caves of Narshe! On October 4 I linked to three more old Final Fantasy sites.

September 30: Adrian’s Digital Basement found a long-dormant cheat for NES Galaxian that makes it much more fun to play!

October 7-11 was a week of tips for classic arcade games. Oct 7: Phoenix and Centipede. Oct 8: Donkey Kong. Oct 9: Robotron 2084. Oct 10: Defender. Oct 11: Q*bert. A few days later on October 14, Mappy. And returning to Donkey Kong on October 30, how to beat those damn springs.

October 17: The great homebrew game Mega Q*bert for Genesis/Mega Drive.

October 21: The charming, award-winning text adventure Lost Pig (And Place Under Ground).

October 29: A Korean Youtuber uses a 3D pen to make excellent models of video game characters.

October 31: On Halloween, Castlevaniastravaganza!

October 5: The official SkiFree homepage. And also, the Kickstarter for Greg Johnson’s Dancing With Ghosts, which was successful!

November 13: A completely different madperson than the 3D engine on a PET one did a respectable port of OutRun to the Amiga.

November 20: Eamon, classic Apple II community-made modular text adventure RPG series.

November 22: I fear it’s a Kirby Air Riders Review.

November 29: Mechanical hand-held games.

December 3: Websites about Conway’s Game of Life.

December 6: Yacht and Panic’s wonderful 90s cable TV simulation (on another planet) Blippo+!

December 12: Jamey Pittman’s tutorial on grouping Pac-Man’s ghosts, an essential skill to develop to get high scores without patterns.

December 17: In Ocarina of Time, leaving Kakariko village at the wrong moment during a rainstorm makes Hyrule go crazy.

And on December 27, a rare recording of a talk given by several microcomputer luminaries, including Steve Wozniak and Jack Tramiel

Thanks for reading Set Side B in 2025! We look forward in 2026 to bring you more from the Flipside of Gaming.

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@blueribbs.bsky.social and their magic bikini comic.

@gohbilly.bsky.social presents the babies (from the Babalities) of Mortal Kombat:

@shcontest.bsky.social, the account of the yearly Sonic Hacking Contest, and their thread of winners and honorable mentions of the 2025 contest.

@katch.bluesky.social enjoyed Aiden Moher’s book on JRPGs, Fight, Might, Items.

@edwardodell.bsky.social made a post that’s only very slightly game-related, but is hilarious, imagining if Orson Welles found out about Dragonball-Z:

@johnlearned.bsky.social links to shmuplations’ translation of an archive of Hideo Yoshizawa tweets about NES Ninja Gaiden.

@gamehistoryorg.bsky.org presents unused voice lines from MLB Slugfest 20-03 that were rejected by Major League Baseball.

@raycarrot.bsky.social explains how Rayman’s password system works.

@tykenn.games is working on a project called “Trees Hate You,” and, well, see for yourself.

@jongraywb.bsky.social found a hilarious and tragic caption to someone in a Kirby suit on the news.

@thinkygames gave us a talk by Patrick Traynor, creator of the mindtwisting puzzle game Patrick’s Parabox, and how that game was programmed. Hey, I kind of know him!

@historyofhyrule.com, a great account generally, presents the originals of some of the Legend of Zelda manual artwork.

@skeet.bets calls out one of the more evocative Dwarf Fortress bug reports:

@jasonkoebler.bsky.social notes one of the most significant problems with virtual pinball tables.

@kekeflipnote.bsky.social, a.k.a. Kekeflipnote, a popular artist who uses Nintendo’s DSi Flipnote app as their medium, posts Kirby’s reaction to a photo of a highly questionable part of Kirby-licensed fuzzy slippers.

@spacecoyote.com, a.k.a. Nina Matsumoto, shows off her Undertale artwork for the cover of Famitsu!

@castpixel.bsky.social‬ has great mockup pixel artwork for a fictional Gameboy Pac-Quest game, starring “Pac-Girl,” who seems to be intended to be a younger Ms. Pac-Man:

videogameesoterica.bsky.social notes that a fan translation of SEGAGAGA, one of the last official Dreamcast games and a weird and hilarious museum of Sega content, is nearing completion.

kriswolfhe.art (Bluesky) reminds us that, whatever the game’s faults might have been, judging by how the title character was drawn, the character artist for the Grinch GBC game was suspiciously into his subject.

fluffcopter.bsky.social, on a weird interaction in Caves of Qud that I’m not sure if they’re kidding about or not. They “poured warm static on my dog, it turned into a dromad trader that comes with guards and items. They are all my dog, the whole trade party and merchandise. I convinced my dog to sell me my dog for free while my dog, my dog, my dog and my dog were standing guard.”

chrisdeleon.bsky.social warns us not to lose faith in Santa Claus, or he’ll turn into a monster:

And, most recently, almondsquirrel.bsky.social reminds us that Disney Solitaire, a game with dark patterns, real money transactions and lootboxes, is PEGI rated 3+, while Balatro has none of that, but is rated 18+ because of its nebulous Poker theming.

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1. Sega’s One-Sided History, from The History of How We Play, about the tensions between Sega’s Japanese and American management.

2. From Mugen Gaming, working on a translation of Japanese TTRPG Sword World, with a crowdfunding campaign to begin in 2026. Included here because Sword World is soaked in video game influences. It really is a case of back-and-forth around the world: Wizardry and Ultima inspired Dragon Quest, Dragon Quest inspired other JRPGs, and then those JRPGs influenced Sword World. And to go with it, a nearly-complete fan translation of a Super Famicom Sword World game.

3. Martin Piper takes a look at the 3D wireframe driving game Stunt Car Racer for the Commodore 64. (45 minutes) From 1989, it did a number of things that you wouldn’t have thought possible on an unmodified C64, and he pieces through its programming.

4. At Retroevolve, Mandy Odoerfer describes the charm of bootleg Pokemon games, games like 2003 Pocket Monster Carbuncle and Pokemon Vietnamese Crystal.

5. The Splatterhouse Homepage, an oldschool webshrine, is still updating, and has a new page on the recent dumping of an unreleased sequel to Splatterhouse Wanpaku Graffiti, called Splatterworld, although I notice that one of its downloads is actually dated to 1993. Hmm, curious!

6. Userlandia exhaustively explored everything at VCFMW this year! (1 hour) I agree: there was a right ton of stuff there to explore!

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Of course, Kirby Air Riders has been the main thing for me. I just finished the “true ending” of its story mode, Road Trip, a few minutes ago. It’s bombastic and loud, true, but it was nice to see O², Nightmare and Marx as bosses again, and Galactic Nova, from way back in Kirby Super Star, make a return as part of Kirby’s weird lore. For a series originally about beating up a penguin with royal pretensions because he took everyone’s food, Kirby’s certainly killed a lot of Cthulhus.

Now that my excuse to talk about that again is out of the way, I’ve been playing more of Party House and Rakshasa in UFO 50. I’ve already said enough about Party House, and I’m working on a revision of my strategy guide; Rakshasa is also something that should have some things said about it, a very short, very hard take on Ghosts & Goblins with a spicy Indian flavor. It’s a game that revels in randomness, and it’s easy to get overwhemed if you don’t stay on your toes at all times. I actually think its big gimmick, that you don’t have lives, but instead must complete a minigame when you perish, of escalating difficulty each time, to be one of the less interesting things about it.

Besides that, I’ve been working my way through Dragon Quest III 2D-HD, which has some quite major design differences from the Famicom/NES game from 1988. Lots to say about that too—just, later. (BTW, if you think using em dashes means something is written by an “AI,” well, I won’t have much kind to say to you about that belief. Please read better writers.)

And then there’s Blippo+. (trailer above, 1¾ minutes) Published by Panic, who also published Untitled Goose Game and Thank Goodness You’re Here!, and first released for Panic’s little portable system that could, the Playdate, Blippo is simply a pitch-perfect rememberance of 90s TV, although as experienced on another planet. It has weird indulgent kids TV (“The Boredome”), classic MTV-style news programming (“The Rubber Report”), D&D-themed fantasy gameshows like from the UK (“Quizzard”) and even a scrambled porn channel, not real porn, but with a sexy lady’s hand caressing mice and monitors (“Tantric Computing”). It’s wrapped up in presentation that kind of looks like adjusting a satellite receiver, and all the shows are like one minute long. It’s weird, unexpected and fun, like everything else Panic makes.

Statue’s most recent focus has been Mechabellum, because as they told me, “I like games that trick me into doing math.” I think one could say that all turn-based strategy games are doing math in one form or another. Math is weird that way.

In addition to all the games they play to review on their Youtube channel Game Wisdom, GWBycer has been playing strategy game Phoenix Point, and its mod Terror From the Void. I didn’t know anything about it until I saw his message about it. Lot of strategy floating around in the air, with Air Riders thrown in to cut it with pure chaos.

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Wrapping up my (Josh Bycer’s) coverage of Debut Festival 2025 with more indie game demos.

00:00 Intro
00:24 Felbound
2:07 My Card is Better Than Your Card
4:23 Phase Zero
5:53 Beat, Heart, Beat
6:56 Automatic Kingdom
9:15 Legends of Castile
10:49 Kriophobia

Josh Bycer

Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”

game-wisdom.com/

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.

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This year it’s happening between Saturday and Sunday, October 25-26. That’s the day after tomorrow! There’s an unusually good roster this year, and I don’t just say that because I helped find speakers for it this year.

We’ve already had a preview event with a couple of great talks, including a real star, Jon Perry, who created two of the best games in UFO 50, Mini & Max and Party House. While I spent a lot of time with Mini & Max uncovering its many secrets, it’s but a small fraction of the time I’ve played Party House. (If you want to hear Jon Perry’s talk, from September, you can find it here, as well as Ezra Stanton’s talk on Synergy Networks in roguelikes, and Alexei Pepers’ Designing for System Suspense.)

I’ve already gushed voluminously about Party House here. Let’s move on to this year’s talk schedule. Times given here are Eastern/Pacific/GMT. (The later times in GMT are pushed into the following day.)

Saturday, October 25th

Sunday, October 26th

If some of these talks seem like they’re spaced closely together, some of them are “lightning talks,” very short. Those have their titles in italics in the above list.

If you follow indie gaming circles, there are a fair number of exciting speakers among the talks! Jeff Lait (homepage) has made twenty highly interesting roguelikes, many as 7DRLs. Nifflas of course is the creator of Within a Deep Forest, the Knytt games, Affordable Space Adventures and others. Dan DiIorio is the creator of the oft-mentioned (at least in my hearing) Luck be a Landlord, and Zeno Rogue makes the long-lived, and brain-bending, HyperRogue.

And make sure to have a look at the Redbubble and Steam links too! In this year’s Steam selection, MidBoss and Shattered Pixel Dungeon are already on sale.

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Log in, carve up a gourd with the easy mouse-based controls, and submit your new orange child to reside on the shelves for people to gawk at and wonder over.

And some of the pumpkins that were up when I logged in this year:

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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

Josh Bycer

Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”

game-wisdom.com/

This is part 4 of my (Josh Bycer’s) favorite demos from Steam NextFest, June 2025 edition.

00:00 Intro
00:16 Hellclock
2:38 Everdeep Aurora
4:01 Thysiastery
5:49 Chrono Gear Warden of Time
7:18 Synthetic Hopes

Josh Bycer

Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”

game-wisdom.com/

This is the first part of my (Josh Bycer’s) coverage of Steam Next Fest June 2025 edition.

00:00 Intro
00:21 Mina the Hollower
2:48 Moonlighter 2 The Endless Vault
6:11 Multiplanetary
7:12 Ninja Gaiden Ragebound
9:34 Undermine 2
11:04 Trainatic
12:41 Idle Boss Rush

Josh Bycer

Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”

game-wisdom.com/

This is a showcase looking at my (Josh Bycer’s) favorite demos from Cerebral Puzzle Showcase June 2025 Edition.

00:00 Intro
00:20 Öoo
1:50 Node: The Last Favor of the Antarii
3:56 Puzzle Depot
5:37 The Button Effect
07:17 Trackastrophe
8:40 Glowkeeper
10:15 Looking for Fael
12:05 Miss Paint
13:37 Chipwits

I’d like to point out that Chipwits is a game we’ve covered here before!

In other news… itch.io has come under a firestorm over the past couple of days over their delisting a whole bunch of games that covered adult subjects because of pressure from their payment processors. As it turns out, those processors themselves have been targeted by a campaign from right-wing “Christian” organization Collective Shout. I have tried to prioritize links to itch.io, and even distribute software and books through that site, but now I’m going to have to think hard about alternatives. PCGamer has a good overview of the situation.

Josh Bycer

Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”

game-wisdom.com/

“That’s right, it’s SGDQ!”

Here’s the schedule. This year they’re benefiting Doctors Without Borders, which is especially relevant right now. I’ve already suggested some interesting runs. Please enjoy, and give if you can afford it!

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While RC got its start as an in-person conference, when the pandemic hit they switched over to being entirely virtual, presented through video feed. All of their talks end up posted online, so anyone can see them for years after. But if you can attend during the conference you can participate in chat, ask questions of the speakers, and explore a very clever MUD-like chat interface!

I’ve tried to spread the word about Roguelike Celebration where I can, through social media and this very blog here. Every year they have several very interesting talks that, if you read Set Side B, I know you’d be interested in seeing. They’ve hosted Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress, the creators of the original Rogue, and many other thoughtful speakers.

This year Roguelike Celebration takes place October 25-26. They sell tickets, but they also let people who are strapped for cash apply for a free ticket. (If you can pay for admission though, please do, as it takes money to run an event like this.)

And if you have a roguelike, or even vaguely-related project, please please please answer their Call For Proposals, to apply to present your work to their devoted audience of extremely thoughtful attendees! The CFP site is here, and their deadline has been extended to July 20th, so you have about three weeks to get in your proposal!

Give it a shot, it’s a great way to spread the word about roguelike work, or about a procedurally-generated game you’re interested in, or just something you think the world should know about.

By volume most game players, let’s be frank, are interested in the big AAA productions. But there are lots of people out there who are willing to give indies a chance, which roguelike games often are, and we have to stick together. Not only to talk with each other and build those connections, but to do it in public, non-corporate venues. Reddit largely is a sham these days, more interested in monetizing their userbase, and Discord isn’t web-searchable, and requires navigating a maze of requests that you upgrade to “Nitro.”

I do not lie: little volunteer-run organizations like Roguelike Celebration are a lot closer to the true spirit of the internet, and the World Wide Web, than those are. So please keep them in your thoughts, if you can buy a ticket, and if you have something to present, answer their CFP! You won’t regret any of those things.

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It got by me this year, but the now 20-year-old 7 Day Roguelike Challenge, a gamejam where people try to construct a complete roguelike within a week’s time, finished up Saturday.

Not only has it been around a long time, but a number of games have come out of it that went on to greater things. Jupiter Hell got its start as a 7DRL project called DoomRL. The amazing Jeff Lait has made a ton of 7DRLs, and many of them have some awesome twist, like a game where you can make portals, but where the portals result in the world through them being rotated and possibly allowing you to get mixed up!

There’s regular several very interesting games in the challenge each year! Its itch.io page is here. This year’s theme was, simply, “roguelike,” and 819 people have joined it so far! I can’t wait to see what they’ve made!

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It’s one of two GDQ marathons every year. The other SGDQ, usually happens in the middle of the year. I usually do an overview for each marathon of runs that I find interesting, but I feel like that’s more for me than anything you’d find useful? Still, there’s some terrific runs lined up this year. The complete schedule is on their website.

Of course GDQ does other speedrunning events throughout the year, including Frame Fatales and Hotfix, but the ceremony and energy of doing it before a large audience, both in-house and online, builds the hype to mammoth levels. Every year they raise millions of dollars for their chosen charities.

Here’s an informal list of things that I find to be highlights. When I mention times, I’m generally speaking from the context of US Eastern time.

Sunday launches with a run of Pikmin, a game that’s intrinsically suited to speedrunning, and soon after there’s one of Kirby Air Ride City Trial “Any%.” I’m not sure what that means (City Trial games are by their nature time limited anyway), but I presume it’s clearing off the checkboard, a huge list of achievements to aim for. Then there’s a Wind Waker Any% run near the end of Sunday that finishes it in a bit over an hour, that probably takes advantage of the late-game skips that have been found in the treacherous final room before the Ganondorf fight.

Monday leads off with two Alan Wake II DLCs, then Lego The Hobbit, which I’m sure will have much more entertainment value than the trilogy, somehow, of Hobbit movies. Later there’s a PC port of Turok 2, Super Lucky’s Tale, and a selection of retro games including Ninja Gaiden II, Snake Rattle N Roll, Dick Tracy and then a 42 minute Final Fantasy Legend II, which I’m sure will be as bizarre as that game’s storyline, followed by a bit of UFO 50. Approaching 1 PM there’s a more substantial UFO 50 set, followed by Super Meat Boy, Mario Maker for the 3DS, Sonic Origins and a Metroid Prime race. Then as a bonus game (one for which there’s a donation incentive), there’s Breath of the Wild, played with two players on one controller. The day concludes with several substantial runs: Red Dead Redemption Undead Nightmare DLC, Horizon Forbidden West and Yakuza.

Right after midnight Tuesday morning there’s Shenmue and Beat Slayer, and at 8:43 is VA-11 Hall-A. Later Castevania: Portrait of Ruin, Unicorn Overlord, Ys VIII, Spyro Reignited, then the amazingly difficult F-Zero GX, then Super Mario Bros. “Any% STA.” I’m not sure what STA means in this context. The last run of the night is the recent Silent Hill remake.

Wednesday morning there’s the Batman Forever arcade game and Gauntlet IV for the Genesis, which hews very closely to the arcade original, but in “quest mode,” a special console-only scenario. Other interesting games include two Sonic titles, a bonus inventive of all the romances in Fallout: New Vegas, a Super Mario 64 A Button Challenge TAS showcase and Rocket League workshop maps. Starting late at night and rolling into Thursday is what I presume to be “Awful Block,” since it leads off with the notoriously awful Superman 64.

Thursday has a surprisingly long run of Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, an all-dungeons run of Tears of the Kingdom, and Sega’s “Chunithm Luminous Plus” arcade rhythm game. There’s a number of longer runs in the later half of the day.

Friday has a sequence with Castlevania: Dracula X, Gimmick 2, Froggun Encore and No One Can Stop Mr. Domino, and later on FFVII Rebirth and GTA Vice City. Afterward look out for Nintendo World Championships (not the cart from the 90s, the recent Switch release), Tetris: The Grand Master and a PS1 “Mystery Vs. Tournament.” There’s Kaizo Mario World 3 as a bonus incentive, and a standard Mario World race late at night, and another arcade rhythm game.

Saturday is the last day, starting with Peggle Extreme, Metal Gear Solid, Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble and Mega Man 10. Around 10 AM is the traditional super long Pokemon run, this time a race of Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. (Are the runners playing different versions?) Then there’s two Elden Ring runs, then one I posted about before, the eagerly awaited Crazy Taxi with live backing band. (Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!)

The last three games are Ocarina of Time with a no logic randomizer, that is, the game mixes things up without regard to how finishable that makes the game, leaving it to the player to use glitches to overcome any blocks, then Echoes of Wisdom Any%, and finally a Super Metroid randomizer race.

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