You might not believe this from our unassuming appearance, but I consider Set Side B to be “The Real Deal.” I work hard to present something, anything, to you on the subject of computer entertainment each and every day. Often it’s a simple link to something someone has written, or a video they made. Sometimes, when time and energy allows, it’s a longer piece that one of us has made ourselves. We try to keep it on the site of things you’re less likely to find elsewhere, but you’ll find lots of crazy random stuff here, and that’s by design. And please know that, if something doesn’t go up at 10 AM on a day, it’s because something has gone wrong.
In April we’ll have been doing this for five years, and I am set to continue bringing new things to you into the future even after that. Some days it’s hard to find something new to post; some days I have multiple things that I want to bring to you, and it’s a hard decision which to present first.
But I understand that the sheer variety of things that SSB presents may be bewildering. I mention sometimes that our three watchwords are Retro, Indie and Niche. If you’re interested in just one of these three, to the exclusion of the others, then you probably want to read a specific category. Nearly everything posted here goes into one of the three categories Retro, Indie or Niche, or else on Sundays when we relax the format a bit, into SundaySundry. In this way, Set Side B is really like four blogs in one, five if you count the rarely-used news and blognews categories (this post falls under blognews). You can find all the categories on a post beneath its author box in the left sidebar <-.
Let me break these down:
- By “Retro” I mean older games generally. I am of an age that I consider anything before the N64 era to be Retro, but I am considering updating that to before the Playstation 2 era. I judge that the PS2/Xbox/Nintendo Gamecube/Dreamcast era is around when game graphics reached the point, on casual observation, where you had to stop and look for a sec to notice that it wasn’t photorealistic, where increases in graphical quality hit the point of diminishing returns. I’m not saying that graphics didn’t improve after that point, far from it, but that we reached the point where capabilities increased, but didn’t enable completely new kinds of things. Evolutionary, not revolutionary. So I think the PS1/N64/Saturn age is where we’ll draw the line at what Retro means.
- On to “Indies,” these are the province of my co-blogger Josh Bycer, who runs the Game Wisdom channel on Youtube. Note that, if you go by the raw text of the category name, a spurious decision made early in the blog’s history means that the category name is plural, so, “indies”. These are small-team, or even solo developers, which is where, due to the immense reluctance to rock the boat that most AAA developers have, much of the energy in pushing forward the frontiers of gaming reside now. It’s not solely Josh’s province though, and I also find things to add to this pile from time to time, often, suitably enough, under the gamefinds tag.
- I’ll admit that the “Niche” category is a bit of a cheat, a way to include some things that don’t fall under the other two. Intended to spotlight games that are interesting takes on a genre, especially roguelikes, often it’s the feed that gets all the Nintendo-related stuff. Nintendo is often considered an AAA developer, but they still have the potential to surprise sometimes. If Microsoft or Sony decided to pack it in and leave game publishing then it’d be a blow, sure, but the loss of Nintendo, and their weirdly-persisting toymaker vibe, would be disastrous. In my opinion, of course.
- “SundaySundry” is where our weekly collection of game culture finds, mostly videos, goes. Again, because of a decision made early on, usually this group is presented as Sundry Sunday, with the order of the words reversed from the category.
- There are some other categories too, which overlap with these. Probably the most important of these is @Play, the continuation of my old GameSetWatch columns on roguelikes. This is mostly the same as the roguelike category, and both are subsets of Retro for the most part. You can also find lots of cool stuff in the romhacks category.
In addition to categories, I’m a strong believer in tagging, and all of the categories listed are also tags. Tags are a much more fine-grained system though. Game series, titles, developers, and individual content makers each get their own tags. The way Set Side B’s Mastodon autoposter works, it tries to include as many tags as it can in the body of the post, even to the exclusion of much of its description, but whatchu gonna do? Because of all the tags I add to posts, you can get around pretty well just by using tags! There’s a list of our most common tags in our tag cloud in the right sidebar, but so you won’t have to search for the link it here it is again.
The right sidebar is also where you’ll find the sign-up for our email-based, very non-Signal newsletter. That’s working now right? I should ask the always-wonderful Phil Nelson, who maintains the site and pays the bills, is that’s operational now. We’ve considered adding the odd extra thing exclusively for the newsletter. When it’s working, that is.
So there you have it. If you’re only, only interested in roguelikes, you now have the means to only see material relating to that. If your lifeblood is indie gaming, then you can get that too, and may I congratulate you on your worth as a human being. If you just want to see silly video stuff about games, then away with you to the back alley of Sunday Sundry, where the disreputable sorts who dispense with that kind of stuff lurk, as with that sunglasses-wearing frog who hands out romhacks.
We promise not to judge you. Much.
