In summary:

For a long long while, there have been ultrarare mounts in World of Warcraft. Most items, a 1% drop rate is as rare as they go, but a few mounts are generated much more rarely than that. People have spent years grinding for a specific mount and never gotten it. It was dropped by a world boss called “The Sha of Anger.” (Hey, I didn’t name it.)

One such ultrarare item is The Reins of the Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent, which allows the very lucky acquirer to summon a nifty glowing black-and-white flying dragon to ride. So popular, and rare, are these items that when they go up on auction they regularly go for the maximum supported price: 9,999,999 Gold.

Players had long rued the immensely high odds of acquiring this item, and others, but had put up with it because Blizzard was the kind of company to just rule things like that to happen, and what you gonna do? Go to City of Heroes?

Early in the item’s existence, however, players noticed that the item wasn’t just generating hardly ever, but in fact, entirely never. A bug in the game meant no one had gotten it. It was just so rare that everyone assumed they just hadn’t seen it yet. Oops!

Much more recently, however, due to another bug, the item became much more common to players of a certain race. The players who had discovered this faced conundrum: be responsible and report the bug to Blizzard, or hoard the knowledge to prevent Blizzard from knowing about it, keeping it off of forums as long as they could, which resulted in the greater player base not realizing it was possible, in order to allow the precious loophole to persist for as long as possible.

If this kind of thing is fascinating to you, and if it isn’t then I wonder why you’re reading this blog, it’s one of the best pieces of game reporting I’ve seen lately.

PC Gamer: How World of Warcraft’s new dragon race brought a 10-year-old loot system to its knees

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

After a couple of pretty light reports,this time out we have quite a lot to go over, so let’s get started!

Chris Moyse at Destructoid says cult fighting game with a fun name The Rumble Fish is coming to consoles.

At PC Gamer, Kerry Brunskill proses about how Steam greatly expanded the potential market for Japanese doujin releases like Touhou.

VGC’s Chris Scullion notes that the FCC may approve Microsoft’s buyout of Activision/Blizzard next month.

Ollie Reynolds at NintendoLife tells us that the team that made Mario Kart 64 almost included a no item mode, they say to appeal to F-Zero players.

At EventHubs, someone going by the name of Justin “Adaptive Trigger” Gordon, which, if you can get people to call you that then fine I’m not opposed, tells us about how the Ice Climbers, long an infuriating opponent to face in high-level Super Smash Bros. Melee, might be getting some of that tech in Ultimate.

At Kotaku, a site that will on every visit ask if you want to sign up for their newsletter, Ian Walker notes how romhackers are putting Winston, the fourth Ghostbuster played by Ernie Hudson who for some reason was left out of most of the series’ promotional material, into the Sega Genesis Ghostbusters game. The patch doesn’t seem to be out yet, mind you. The original story appears to be from Ghostbusters News. Great Floating Radioactive Astrojebus, it’s about time, even if it had to be done via an injection of code to be playable through quasilegal emulation. Man helped save New York City from ghosts twice, you’d think he’d get more respect. There’s also a hack to add him to HAL Laboratory’s Japan-only Ghostbusters II game for the Famicom.

And TechRadar’s Rhys Wood at TechRadar informs us that a lawsuit is being brought against Sony alleging overheating issues of the PS5 causing the console to spontaneously shut down.

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Rich Stanton at PC Gamer: Atari shocks the world with decent-looking game, Atari Mania! He compares it to the Japan-only Segagaga, but what the gameplay description really brings to my protoplasmic mind is NES Remix. We’re pretty harsh on the company that calls itself Atari on this site, but it’s really nice to see something genuinely interesting coming from them, that respects and pays homage to their paid-for name instead of just cashing in on it!

Ana Diaz, in the virtual pages of Polygon, says that Netflix subscribers should download Poinpy, a short and fun game that’s free to subscribers. It’s a game about climbing and making smoothies for hungry monsters!

Liam Dawe of GamingOnLinux writes about Proton 7.0-3 further improving Windows games on Steam Deck and Linux running Steam. I anxiously watch for the day when Windows 10 reaches end-of-life, since none of my current machines officially supports Windows 11, drebnar.

Noelle Warner at Destructoid relates that crowdfunded indie game A Frog’s Tale looks great, with play inspired by games like Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga.

We usually steer away from speculative news here, but the piece by Jess Reyes at Inverse is too interesting to ignore, that Breath of the Wild 2 leaks suggest Zelda might be playable and a New Game Plus mode. Now that’s some meaningless hype that we can appreciate, drebnar!

Martin Robinson at Eurogamer suggests that Street Fighter 6‘s Smash Bros-like control system might be its best new feature. I’ve mentioned here in the past a personal grudge I have against fighting games, having never grown to cotton to them back when I was a teenage blobby, but it’s nice to see the series working to make itself more accessible to new players, even if the article’s tone verges slightly on the over-enthusiastic, in my amoebic opinion.

Adam Conway at XDA, on how Quake was ported to the GBA. A quick summary: “with much difficulty.” But truly, it’s a very interesting article, with the added detail that the unreleased rom has been preserved! There’s an attached YouTube video.

Alana Hagues with the one NintendoLife link we’re allowing ourselves this time, a reminder that it’s been five years since last word of progress on Pikmin 4.

And, honestly, a lot of the pieces that make the page here are light and fluffy, but here’s one a bit more important than usual. I love the headline applied to Ethan Gach’s bit for Kotaku, entitled Activision Blizzard Clears Itself of Any Wrongdoing. And the tagline reads, “The Call of Duty publisher says it’s the victim of an ‘unrelenting barrage of media criticism'” I WONDER WHY THAT IS, ACTIVISION BLIZZARD. HOW COULD THAT HAPPEN?

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Tyler Wilde of PC Gamer: Activision/Blizzard shareholders approve Microsoft buyout.

Alice O’Connor of Rock Paper Shotgun tells us about Backpack Hero, a demo with a lot of buzz around it. I’ve played it, it’s cool, drebnar!

Liam Doolan of Nintendo Life points us to a Kickstarter for a Game Boy Advance add-on that lets you play games on an HDTV television. It does require opening up your device, though! Gizmodo has its own report. What it is is basically an alternate case for the guts of a Game Boy Advance, that provides it with output ports.

One of the humorous bits about Facebook’s (I refuse to call them Meta) Metaverse thing is that it’s dragging out all the dumb old corporate internet tie-ins, just like it did when the web became big, and again when they tried to make a go of Second Life. So the wheel turns again, as Ryan Gilliam tells us on Polygon, with “The Metaverse’s first Coke product,” Byte, which is reputed to be “pixel-flavored.” The only thing it’s missing is an NFT. All the news sites are talking about it, because all the news sites have space to fill and read press releases, drebnar. It comes with a QR code with “an AR game unlock.” The kids still care about those things, right?

Some emulation news: 3DS emulator Mikage is in development again, as is PS4 emulator GPCS4.

Matthew Carlson of hackaday.com brings us news that long-time fangame editor Zelda Classic now runs in web browsers! Zelda Classic can do a lot, so it’s great to see developments in that area! Here’s the technical details.

Andy Brown writing for NME tells us that the time is right for a remake of Simpsons Hit & Run.

And Jeremy Winslow at Kotaku points out the point-and-click adventure game Perfect Tides.

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