How are we different? Although we’re given to the occasional frivolity, we’ve never tried to insult your intelligence here. If it seems like we post randomly from across the whole breadth of gaming (notably excepting the standard AAA production) that is not an accident, even if we do, admittedly, veer off to Nintendo-related topics frequently.

We already did a 2025 recap post, and a full blog recap should wait another year for the 5th anniversary, but I figured it was worth looking back on how far we’ve come, and where we are now in terms of visitor stats. All of these figures are from WP Statistics.

On the average, Set Side B gets about 435 visitors a day. Our most frequent search referral is still Google at 27,954 over the last month. We got 1,108 from DuckDuckGo, and 750 from the poor saps using Bing. Speaking of saps, Brave search brought us 93 links. Facebook brought 36, odd considering I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned SSB on Facebook. I try to avoid it generally when I can.

Device usage breakdown: Desktops at 10.4K (hooray!), Smartphones at 3.5K (eh), Tablets at 137 (huh), “Phablets” at 14 (wha), and “other” at 6. What is other supposed to mean? Game consoles? Fones? Wristtops? Cyberglasses? Compuhats? Supposiputers?

OSes. Windows at 8.8K; Android at 1.9K; iOS at 1.7K; Mac at 1.2K and others at 531. I’d like to think the Wii’s and 3DS’s old versions of Opera are in there somewhere. (The Wii-U’s browser is hopelessly modern by our standards.)

Most visits from countries are, in order: U.S., Viet Nam (second place somehow), China (third place, I’m guessing from AI training), then Brazil (we really need to do that retrospective on the Sega Master System and the Monica games eventually), the UK, India, Singapore, Canada (why so low, canucks?), Iraq(??) and Germany rounding out the top ten. The top city, inexplicably, is Hanoi in Viet Nam. Tokyo is 4th place. The top US city for visits is Ashburn, Virginia, down in 8th place.

Four years is a long time to do anything, but we don’t plan on quitting in the near future. Of course, as happened with our friend Matthew Green and Press The Buttons, all blogs fall silent someday. I hope that, when my day comes, if Set Side B is still around, that someone will take it over and keep it going as long as possible, so long as it stays true to its three categories of Retro, Niche and Indie gaming. So long as it’s true to those focii I think it won’t soon lose its way.

We love you! Please love us back, and spread the word about us! And of course, thanks for reading.

rodneylives

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.

rodneylives

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.

rodneylives

rodneylives (John Harris): I’ve been playing a lot of Once Upon A Katamari, a new release as of this moment. Last night I played a bit of Shovel Knight for the first time, yes the very first. (I can’t play everything! And a bundle of the first game and all its DLC is currently on sale on the Switch shop.)

There’s also been some Final Fantasy VI and I, UFO 50 (Party House, Rakshasa, Mini & Max and Valbrace) and Power Wash Simulator (2nd playthrough). On Nintendo Switch Online, I’ve been playing Mr. Driller 2 for the GBA. Oh, and training amiibo players in Smash Bros. Ultimate. I also picked up a “Game Dad,” as Dan Fixes Coin-Ops calls them, at VCFMW 2025, specifically a R36S, and on it I’ve been playing a few favored things, particularly arcade games like Robotron 2084 and Cadash. What I’m really looking forward to, as you might guess from recent posts, is Kirby Air Riders on Switch 2, which isn’t here yet but is rapidly approaching.

Keith Burgun: He recently ordered a much more capable device than mine, an AYN Thor, powerful enough, so he tells me, to run Switch games. It’s still on its way, so he’s been playing the PSP version of Final Fantasy Tactics on his Retroid Pocket 5. He’s enjoyed it, but deep into the game thinks he may be getting a bit bored with it.

GWBycer (Josh “Game Wisdom” Bycer) plays lots of indie games for his Game Wisdom Youtube channel, and as contributor many of his videos end up linked from here, so you’ll see those roughly as they happen. He does mention that, for his own enjoyment, he’s been playing Silent Hill f. Apparently, the ‘f’ is officially lowercase.

rodneylives

• There are two arcades on side. One (on the ground floor of Peachtree Center, accessible from the outside) is a temporary offshoot of Joystick Gamebar. They’re mostly retro games; their newest title, I think, is TMNT II: Turtles in Time. They have a great selection of games, including several really good pinball machines: Twilight Zone, White Water, High Speed and High Speed II: The Getaway, Funhouse and more.
• Notably, the Joystick location has a Gauntlet. They also have Mortal Kombat II, X-Men, Dig Dug, Centipede, Donkey Kong, a sped-up Ms. Pac-Man, Joust, Sinistar and others.
• The other is run and maintained by Save Point, and while they have a handful of older games, they’re mostly concerned with more recent Japanese games. This means an overbearing emphasis on rhythm games, with names like “Sound Voltex,” and fighting games.
• The best games here I think that aren’t in those well-represented categories are Bombergirl (and they sell memory cards at the maintenance desk for saving your progress) and Gun Bullet X, a new installment of Bandai Namco’s variety shooting game known more often in the US as Point Blank.
• Upstairs at Westin in Thursday is a gameroom set up for Gamecube games, and I think they’re open the whole con? It was there that I saw they had set up that utmost rarity, a four-machine Kirby Air Ride LAN network. Such a set up requires f0ur copies of Kirby Air Ride, four Gamecubes, and most significantly four Gamecube Network Adapters or third-party workarounds. There were also quite a few other Gamecubes running Smash Melee, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, F-Zero GX and others.

Oops, gotta run! More tomorrow!

rodneylives

No seriously, while we’re testing some ways to bring in at least a little income (maybe a podcast?), we don’t expect to make more than a few dollars from the sidebar ad, which is provided by the ComicAd Network. But ComicAd has some things about it that I like. It was inspired by Ryan North’s late, lamented Project Wonderful, a terrific little ad system that used to adorn the sidebar of Metafilter for readers who weren’t logged in.

It’s about as unobtrusive as you can get for ads, it doesn’t track users (that’s really big in this privacy-conscious era), and the things it advertises are small projects, like ours. I think that good ads can provide a useful service, both to sites and users, provided no one gets too greedy. Lots of the excesses on the internet nowadays are caused by just that, greed, driving people to excess. A small image advertising a webcomic isn’t that bad, and may even be fun. Blanketing sites with ads for a vast exploitive Microsoft-sponsored AI company that drinks up rivers and floods the world with slop, that’s what we who like to put judgemental names on things call evil.

It also matters how they’re presented. Something I personally loathe is the suddenly-appearing, page-covering dialog box, usually with a big SUBSCRIBE button, and a tiny almost-invisible X in a corner somewhere. I notice with some annoyance that even the new batch of creator-driven new web media sites do this a lot. Anyway. I place that qualm onto a small boat made of folded paper, and with my breath I push it out into the ocean. Fwoooo!

This is an experiment, and it might disappear in the coming weeks, or change form. If you have an ad blocker and decide you don’t want to see it, that is fine. As I said, we’re not getting much money from this, at least not right now. If you have comments, concerns, qualms, caveats, issues, problems, etc., please use the comment form below to let us know. Thank you.

rodneylives

If you’re just coming in from social media and wondering what we’re about, Set Side B is a daily blog that covers what we call “the Flipside of Gaming” (notice the tasteful use of our tagline), specifically in the Retro, Niche and Indie fields. All of that basically gives us license to chase after whatever gaming information we enjoy, which is usually the antithesis of AAA gaming. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we do cover games sometimes that might be called Triple-A, the Legend of Zelda series comes up a lot and they’re often considered headliners, but Nintendo generally tends to have rather a different approach to gamedev than other companies. I’m not going to say they’re perfect, frog knows they have their faults, but they still manage to surprise us from time to time.

So, let’s get on to that recap. Posts marked Sundry Sunday are finds from gaming culture, usually funny Youtube videos. Posts that largely include original content by me are marked Original. I might have misapplied that signifier in places, because I often include extra commentary on posts, and even after spending two hours constructing this behemoth of a list, I have gone mostly by memory and not reviewed every post here. I’m certain that you’ll find something interesting, if you have a look. Set Side B’s archives are unusually rich with wonders, mostly found but sometimes made, and I’m sure if you take a spelunk through our mines, you will be rewarded.

JANUARY

JAN 1: Mario Kart’s catch-up system

JAN 2: FM-synth enhanced version of the Space Harrier theme on Japanese Master System hardware

JAN 5: The many fan revivals of Toontown Online

JAN 6: Dialup AOL-era Neverwinter Nights

JAN 9: Original — The 10th-Key scatter bug in NES Pac-Man

JAN 12 & MAY 20: Hempuli’s many riffs on Sokoban – Part 1, Part 2

JAN 15 & 16: Dark Arts of Pinball – Bang Backs and Deathsaves

JAN 21: AGDQ highlight: Playing Gyromite, but with a dog in place of R.O.B.

JAN 24: Original — On Stephen’s Sausage Roll

JAN 27 & 29: Displaced Gamers’ Behind the Code on Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Part 1 and Part 2

JAN 31: Gamefinds — Cosmic Collapse, a Suika Game-style remake in Pico 8, but with better play

FEBRUARY

FEB 1: The “no fire” bug in arcade Galaga

FEB 2: The inefficiency of Super Mario World’s score display

FEB 3: Mario Paint’s Data Over Flow error, when you draw an image that can’t be saved

FEB 11: Sundry Sunday — BitFinity’s song + animation Megalixir

FEB 15: Fans used computer tools to reconstruct lost BS F-Zero tracks from a VHS recording, then made a romhack around them

FEB 17: Chrontendo #64!

FEB 20: Project to finish every non-hacked Mario Maker 1 level enters home stretch

FEB 22: Original — Nintendo Direct quick takes

FEB 23: Popular Science magazine, of all places, explains how you can make old-style WordArt in current versions of MS Word

FEB 24: Gamefinds —A Pico 8 remake of DOOM

FEB 25: Sundry Sunday — various versions of the music from Gyruss

FEB 26: Original — How to play Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On (with a video tutorial!)

FEB 29: GifCities

MARCH

MAR 6: Fans fix the Garfield PC game

MAR 7: Speedrunners get custom N64 control sticks to make up for the infamous dust of death

MAR 14: Displaced Gamers on why NES Tetris crashes at extremely high levels

MAR 20: Winning at arcade Dragons Lair

MAR 24: Sundry Sunday — Baldur’s Gate 3 has gone too far

MAR 28: 4D Golf releases on Steam

APRIL

APR 3: Sharopolis on Youtube looks into NES games that perform particularly skillful technical feats

APR 4: Nintendo’s old corporate headquarters is a hotel now, and Before Mario stayed there

APR 7: Sundry Sunday — The crazy trailer to lost 3DO music game Duelin’ Firemen

APR 13: Original — On the New York Times’ Connections puzzles

APR 16: Annotated video playthrough of maddening arcade hit (in Japan) The Tower of Druaga

APR 17: Atari (not the same as the old Atari) makes arcade games with Food Fight Frenzy

APR 18: PannenKoek spends nearly four hours explaining Mario 64’s many glitchy invisible walls

APR 22: Nintendo Monopoly depicts Mario in the style of Rich Uncle Pennybags

APR 27 & JUN 25: Original — On Dungeon, a 30-year-old CRPG system for the Commodore 64, and my own attempts to rerelease it. The original and efforts to revise it.

APR 29: Commodore Free Magazine

MAY

May 2: Moviecart, adapting films to play on an Atari 2600

MAY 3: The history of KidPix

MAY 5: Sunday Sunday — Animated Lego breakfast with Super Mario

MAY 6: Retro Game Mechanics explains how to glitch out Super Mario World by stomping Wigglers

MAY 9: Which version of Wizardry to play?

MAY 15: Original — Comparing the character sets of microcomputers

MAY 16: Original — A directory of U Can Be Video Games’ videos

MAY 23: Nintendo uncensors Vivian’s transness in the remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

MAY 24: Original — @Play: Which is better, ring mail or splint mail?

MAY 25: Dani Bunten’s early classic computer game Wheeler Dealers has been preserved

MAY 30: Awesome Donkey Kong romhack compilation

MAY 31: Ocarina of Time timer bug, taking advantage of extremely low health

JUNE

JUN 4: The esports scene around Farming Simulator

JUN 7: Hardcore Gaming 101 thread on obscure arcade secrets

JUN 9: Sundry Sunday — Bing Bang, an awesome animation for a Splatoon 3 song

JUN 10: Why does Pac-Man’s split screen happen? Video explainer, with a lengthy text explainer-explainer by me

JUN 13: Complete but abandoned Tarzan Atari 2600 game recovered after 40 years

JUN 14: On Game Dads, small, inexpensive yet capable handheld emulation machines

JUN 16: Sundry Sunday — Mexican Flyer (that song from Space Channel 5) and its history

JUN 22: Dan Olsen of Folding Ideas discusses James Rolfe, the Angry Video Game Nerd

JUN 28: Mattel’s handheld Dungeons & Dragons LCD game

JULY

JUL 2: Website for generating animated Earthbound battle backgrounds

JUL 5: Original — On the history of Wizardry

JUL 8: The marquee and instruction card for Vs. Super Mario Bros (including a rather different official illustration of Mario than you usually see from Nintendo)

JUL 12: Snafuru’s extensive Wizardry fanpage

JUL 13: The MAD Magazine type-in program

JUL 16: Blade & Bastard, the (current!) Wizardry novel/manga

JUL 19: Dune author Frank Herbert’s book on 80s microcomputers, “Without Me You’re Nothing”

JUL 20, 25: Original — Getting Started in Digital Eclipse’s remake of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, Part 1 & Part 2

JUL 23: The Mr. Saturn text generator

JUL 29 & AUG 5: Looygi Bros tests various glitches in the Nintendo World Championships game, Part 1 & Part 2

JUL 31: A presenter at RustCon explains why MISSINGNO happens in Pokemon

AUGUST

AUG 2: Original — Review of World of Goo 2

AUG 6: Shmuplations translates an interview with a programmer on arcade Donkey Kong

AUG 13: Original — Science facts from No Man’s Sky

AUG 14: Comparing versions of Space Harrier

AUG 15: How randomness is used in Ms. Pac-Man

AUG 17: Complete Youtube playthroughs of the original Zork trilogy

AUG 19: A blog about Sega’s Flicky

AUG 20: Hidden Dialogue in Earthbound

AUG 21: The game Mission: Impossible on CP/M

AUG 24: Sunsoft’s Hebereke cartoons on Youtube

AUG 28, 29 & SEP 2, 4 & NOV 19: Original — How to play Atari Games’ Rampart, and also someone other than me talking about Rampart, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, someone else

SEPTEMBER

SEP 3: Obit for Andrew Greenberg, co-author of Wizardry

SEP 7: Hidden flags in Earthbound, the Mole Playing Rough, and the Game Over Glitch

SEP 9: Balatro University’s beginner’s guide to extremely high scores

SEP 10: Spelunky on the Commodore 64

SEP 15: Balatro (intentional) deck-peeking involving Misprint

SEP 18: Gamefinds — Blob the Klex

SEP 19: Kaze Emanuar on misapplied optimizations in Super Mario 64

SEP 20: Why hasn’t Nintendo implemented achievements?

SEP 22: Sundry Sunday — The Untitled Goose Programme

SEP 25: Katamari Damacy turns 20

SEP 26: Nicole Express investigates incompatibility between Guardic Gaiden (The Guardian Legend) and the Twin Famicom

SEP 30: The Rogue Archive

OCTOBER

OCT 2: Ed Logg on creating Gauntlet

OCT 4: Original — Getting Started in Pilot Quest (UFO 50 game # 44)

OCT 5: A walkthrough of Barbuta (UFO 50 game #1)

OCT 6, DEC 22: Sundry Sunday — The Amazing Digital Circus, Parts 1-3, Part 4

OCT 8: On the maddening difficulty of “Snowman’s Lost His Head” in Super Mario 64

OCT 9: Aftermath’s Chris Person on web forums in 2024

OCT 11: Whatever happened to Toadsworth?

OCT 12: Masahiro Sakurai on Satoru Iwata

OCT 15: HTML for People, an online book about learning to make websites for themselves, as intended

OCT 18: Displaced Gamers on the awfulness of NES Ikari Warriors

OCT 22: Original — My talk on Mystery Dungeon games for Roguelike Celebration 2024

OCT 23: UFO 50 Showcase

NOVEMBER

NOV 7: Randomly-occuring debug mode in Super Mario All-Stars’ version of Mario 3

NOV 8: Blaster Master & Wing of Madoola’s unreleased and lost arcade versions

NOV 14: Tomato’s excellent game translation blog Legends of Localization shows fitful signs of activity

NOV 17: Remake of the DK Rap by Grant Kirkhope and Substantial

NOV 18: Score keeping on the NES

NOV 21: Super Mario Bros. Mini on the Pico 8

NOV 22: Retro365 on Little Computer People

NOV 23: How many Bokoblins are in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom?

NOV 26: Almost Something on game rental lawsuits and photocopying instruction manuals

NOV 28: Original — A deep strategy guide to Party House (UFO 50 game #25)

NOV 29: Moving Miis from the Wii to the Switch

NOV 30: Someone has written a script that will defeat ANY game of Pokemon Platinum

DECEMBER

DEC 2: The Zelda Timeline is updated to account for Echoes of Wisdom

DEC 6: Game making IDEs GB Studio and BB Studio

DEV 11: Kit & Krysta take a tour of a secret gamedev hangout in Tokyo

DEC 13: Intro videos for Caves of Qud

DEC 14: Info from a data scrape of the entire Steam storefront

DEC 15: Sundry Sunday — An old cartoon, “Microcomputers: An Introduction”

DEC 16: Nintendo’s weird corporate structure

DEC 17: Some Body lays out how the AI works in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red & Blue Rescue Team

DEC 19: Grouping ghosts in Ms. Pac-Man

DEC 24: The conclusion of the backstory of Team Fortress 2

DEC 25: A program that plays Animal Crossing music and weather noises in the backgroun on your computer

DEC 30: Hunter R. explains the letter grading system in Gamecube Animal Crossing

rodneylives

You can get all 10 books for $25! It’s gone up lately but it’s still really worth it! All of the books have no DRM and can be read in most any reader, including Amazon devices! They can read EPUBs now! At last finally surprisingly at this late date!

StoryBundle is a wonder, they always present so much interesting stuff. I’m rather surprised they keep asking me back, so I try to make my own weird little contributions to it worth your while.

Gaming Feast StoryBundle (ends December 14th)

rodneylives

The world is a weird place.

Last week, our minor character Röq (pictured left), a barely disguised excuse to post Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom content on our blog, made a video about something that happened to them in the game. They posted it to Youtube. That video is embedded below:

They made a post containing it. The video itself is ten seconds long. It’s good for a few laughs. I’m going to drop character now, Röq is, after all, just me pretending.

Well, we keep getting comments on that video. It’s weird. So I went in and checked its view count.

The video has over 131,000 views on Youtube. Dear holy frog!

A couple of other posts have 4K and 11K views respectively. I guess there’s just a huge demand for Tears of the Kingdom meme posts right now? The odd one out is the Fish Songs video, about Marot, a Zora who “sings” the same “song” in her dialogue in both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, that video only has like 20-or-so views. There’s no accounting for musical taste.

Interesting information! If you have a video on Youtube that gets over 100,000 views, even though it has ads, and monetization isn’t available to you, what you receive is exactly bupkis.

There’s such a demand that I mused about going all-in on TotK memes, and… eh, I’m good? I’m not really a meme kind of person? I find all the jokes about Rauru trolling Link in the comments to be kind of tiresome? I’m not mad or upset at all, I’m just kind of numb to it. I’m glad people think its funny, but I feel like playing to this crowd is a dead-end for me. I’m not going to stop making videos, far from it, but there’s as good a chance it’ll be another post about something like Marot (who I adore).

If you’re reading this blog from the URL in the video comments: hello! Welcome to Set Side B! I work very hard to make daily posts about gaming matters. We have extensive archives on many topics. If you read us long enough you will find many strange and interesting things. Thanks for visiting!

rodneylives

Thanks for reading Set Side B! This year we’ve talked about roguelikes and classic arcade games and romhacks and silly game videos and even some more esoteric subjects, like Wordle clones and crossword puzzles, and all kinds of other things. We intend to bring you lots more, over the next year, from the Flipside of Gaming.

Might I suggest taking a moment to investigate some of our finely-sifted tags? There’s @Play, the continuation of my old GameSetWatch roguelike column, Arcade for Arcade Mermaid and other arcade gaming posts, Sundry Sunday for fun gaming memes and videos, and Romhack for Romhack Thursday and similar posts.

rodneylives

2nd: What are blobbers? Wizardry-style maze games, usually party-based dungeon crawls. How many has there been? At least 48, and definitely a lot more!

8th: A short post, but interesting. I found, from the official Nintendo SNES devguide on the Internet Archive, a list of things that could get a game rejected.

10th: It was all over the internet, but still, we reported on that hidden cheat code in Super Punch-Out!! that let you play it against a friend.

11th: The developer menu buried in arcade versions of Mortal Kombat and its sequels and how to access it from attract mode. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to show this off to multiple people in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and it never fails to impress.

12th: Mamesaver, the screensaver that uses the roms in your MAME folder.

13th: Revivals of old online services QuantumLink, AOL, and Prodigy. No word about Compuserve though.

15th: Arcade Mermaid visits Vs. Castlevania, in which a hard game gets much, much harder.

16th: Hyrule Interviews, a ton of information that the developers of Zelda games have revealed to the media.

17th: An old video but still fascinating, the last new Data East Jurassic Park pinball machine is opened on camera.

19th: Chasing the world record in Hatetris, a player-hostile Tetris variant.

22nd: NCommander on Youtube on why 3D Pinball was removed from Windows Vista.

27: The absurdly weird and detailed romhack of the prototype of Monster Party, starring Elvira!

29th: The long (in both number of entries and runtime) Youtube series Identifying Luck in Mario Party, which is an amazing detailed look into the internals of those games.

30th: The Museum Monster presents a weird moment in video games: the Cleopatra bonus in arcade Star Force.

@Play: Reintroduction to Angband – Playing the game

Sundry Sunday:
Lore Sjoberg’s Alt Text: The Five Most Guilt-Inducing Video Games
Old Commercial for Pitfall!, with a young Jack Black
Strong Bad Email #94, Video Games
Cabel Sasser’s Buggy Saints Row: The Musical

Josh Bycer’s indie dev posts:
Store Page Review of Metroplex Zero
Interview with Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games
Interview with independent dev Brian Cronin
Interview with Gideon Griebenow of World Turtles
Store Page Review of Transcendence

Indie Game Showcase:
8/6: Mahokenshi, Gastova The Witches of Arkana, Castle Cardians, Transiruby, Vesper Ether Saga, BackBeat
8/12: Ancient Gods, Critadel, Deiland: Pocket Planet, Monster Tribe, Zoeti, Printersim
8/15: Spellbook Demonslayers, Mech Shuffle, Endling Extinction is Forever. Ginger the Toothfairy, Lightsmith, Myth of Mirka, Supernova Tactics, Fabled Lands, Kokoro Clover Season 1
8/22: Trinity Archetype, Green With Energy, Super Grave Snatchers, The Lightbringer, Happenlance, Timemelters
8/24: Affogato, Rogue Genesia, City Limits, The God Unit, Redshot, Combo Card Clashers
8/27: Evertried, Sands of Aura, The Shore, Infraspace, Rogue Spirit, Ruin Raiders
8/29: Hex of the Lich, So to Speak, It’s a Wrap, We Took That Trip, Eternal Remnant The First Chapter, The Mortuary Assistant

To find more interesting posts, please look through our over-full sidebar. We now have archives that you can browse from! Many posts you find here aren’t the sort to go obsolete, so as we put up more and more content, you’ll find more and more wonderful stuff to discover there.

Thanks for reading Set Side B through the month of August! We will continue bringing you the most interesting finds from the Flipside of Gaming.

rodneylives

1st: Popular Minecraft YouTuber Technoblade passes away.

2nd: The weird “Triforce%” run from SGDQ’s 2022’s TASbot presentation is explained.

5th: Review of games presented in SGDQ’s Silly Block.

7th: @Play: An early level FAQ for Omega. After doing a ton of posts the month before, we took it easy on @Play in July.

9th: Reviving the Ouya.

10th: A rare substantial Sundry Sunday post, a collection of YouTube videos that purport to explain Kingdom Hearts’ legendarily convoluted story.

11th: Arcade Mermaid: Pepper 2, ultrafast maze game from Exidy.

18th: A popular longpost we did about rebus crossword puzzles. Of special note, this is currently the Set Side B post with the most hits, with over a thousand pageviews.

21st: Obituary for Robert Koeneke, creator of Moria, the first non-Rogue roguelike.

23rd: Video review of Zachtronics’ final game, Last Call BBS.

27th: A weird find, GameSurge, a gaming website that hasn’t updated since 2005 but is still on the web.

28th: Scott Adams’ video Q&A about his career and his early parser-based games and company Adventure International.

Indie Dev Showcase archives

2nd: Monster Harvest, Recompile, The Night Is Grey, Space Tow Truck, Fire Tonight, Arboria.

23rd: Hack or Die, Batboy, Citizens Farlands, Alina of the Arena, Remnants of the Rift, Itorah.

30th: Moons of Ardan, Terror of Hemasaurus, Hex of the Lich, Firekeep, Aztech Forgotten Gods, and Tactical Galactical.

Developer Interviews

The Dark Heart of Balor

Chris Knowles

Videogame Fables

Sundry Sunday

Pixel Orson Welles Disses Game Characters, Summarizing Kingdom Hearts, Mario Frustration, Take Me Home Mario, Classics of Game

To find more interesting posts, please look through our well-stocked sidebar. We still need better archive browsing, I recognize, as we work to fill Set Side B full to overflowing with interesting and entertaining video game news and information on a daily basis, and most of our posts do not have an expiration date.

Thanks for reading Set Side B through the month of July! We will continue bringing you the most interesting finds from the Flipside of Gaming.

rodneylives

Not a bad start to our little endeavor! Here’s to many more!

rodneylives