I know it’s great because it includes a few games already mentioned on this blog, like Gar-Type! Find it (the list) here! And consider following Dominic on Bluesky or (via BridgyFed) Mastodon!
Dominic Tarason’s Huge List of Free PC Games
Tag: Bluesky
Multilink Monday: Bluesky Leftovers for 2025
Bluesky only released their Saved Posts feature about three months ago, but I’m such a link packrat that there’s plenty there to fill a multilink post for 2025. I hope you find some interesting things in here!
@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.
Sundry Sunday: Metal Gear Nonsense
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
othatsraspberry is a hilarious maker of comics and has a Bluesky account. One of the things they’ve made comics about is the Metal Gear games, a surpassingly fertile ground for visual weirdness, because the games themselves are often very weird. (FISSION MAILED)
That’s right, no video today! We can do other things on Sundays than linking to video! And not Nintendo either! Let us rejoice in a world without Mario, for 24 hours at least!
Here is one comic, to give you a taste. For more, hie the away to that Bluesky feed or comic page!
An extra for you. We’ve had two items on Kirby Air Ride lately so I figured I wouldn’t devote a whole post to this, but if you still have room for more (Kirby always has room for more), the first game in this tournament match between Awsm_599 and heynoww has to be seen to be believed. The full video is 23 minutes, the relevant section is the first 7½ minutes, but if you stick around it also ends in an unexpected way. It’s a demonstration of why it’s important not to be too careless when playing City Trial. (I notice that I had linked to the end of that first round in the last KAR post, but the whole game is a nailbiter.)
As it turns out, I linked a video today after all. It’s a hard habit to break.
Sundry Sunday: Pugberto Dancing Universe
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Not a Youtube link this time! Over on Bluesky (“blu-skee”) there exists the manifestly ludicrous account Pugberto Dancing Universe, in which a Photoshopped pug animated to various pieces of game music that, I’d say, greatly improves them.
Embeds don’t work as well from Bluesky as from Youtube, so I’m just going to have to link them and insist that they’re worth the clickthrough. Here’s the music from the first level of Super Bomberman:
Select Your Heroes (“I Wanna Take You For A Ride”) from Marvel vs. Capcom 2:
The jazzy “Corkboard” game select music from Kirby Super Star:
And the character select music from Metal Slug 3:
There, wasn’t I right about how great Pugberto is? There’s a lot more in that Bluesky feed.
Okay one for the road:
A Bluesky User Points Out Excellent Indie Adventure Games
It was posted by Francisco González, who laments that people rue the death of the adventure game genre, when, as he says, there are more great adventure games being made now than ever before. Perhaps what we’ve lost is the big publisher, the press that will call attention to them, or maybe just the narrow field of releases that allows single specific games to stand out above a handful of peers. Although I notice that many of these games have positive Eurogamer and Rock Paper Shotgun reviews!
So Francisco posted links to some games that he personally likes. A lot of these games have a pixel art style to them, in ways that purposely evoke the Sierra and Lucasarts games of the 80s and 90s. You can read Francisco’s post on Bluesky. I’ve called out a few below, but encourage you to check the post!
Death of the Reprobate: An adventure through real Renaissance portraits by John Richardson, creator of comedy adventure games Four Last Things and The Procession to Calvary.
Near-Mage: You play as a student who’s just discovered she’s a witch, and has been sent to study magic in Transylvania. Maybe a bit of a Harry Potter vibe, although with more vampires and less of Rowling’s transphobia. Its description states, “A game about about Transylvania made by Transylvanians!”
PRIM: A “cute and creepy” aesthetic suffused this game about a girl who finds out she’s Death’s daughter. Discworld vibes, perhaps?
Francisco’s own Rosewater: A quest for fame across an alternate world version of the old west.
Perfect Tides: Set in the year 2000, follow an internet obsessed teen through a year of her life on an island paradise.
Paradigm: A surreal game with bizarre character art, starring a mutant fighting against (adjusts glasses, reads) “a genetically engineered sloth that vomits candy.”
Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard: Another game set in a world of anthropomorphic animals, the art has a VGA vibe to it and a strong classic Lucasarts vibe.
(And let’s not forget, World of Goo 2 has a change-up last chapter that’s actually an adventure game!)
Nintendo’s Unusual Structure
Over on Bluesky there’s an extremely interesting thread by Max Nichols, that reveals a number of groups that are often thought of as divisions of Nintendo are, in fact, separate companies!
It’s a good idea to click through and read the whole thread, and there’s a number of people among the respondents, as well as Max Nichols himself, who are likely worth following if you’re on that platform. One of them, Hyrule Interviews, has this quote from old Nintendo of America employee, and idol of millions of preteen NES addicts, Howard Phillips:
SRD is such a strange case. When Phillips talks about working with external programming teams to develop arcade games, they’re talking about companies like Ikegami Tsushinki, who programmed Donkey Kong for them based off of Shigeru Miyamoto’s design. Brought into context with Nintendo’s “independent subsidiaries,” it becomes evident that they never really stopped doing that, but became more careful that they had the rights over whatever was produced.
It’s also interesting to put this into context with:
- Rare, who came to work very closely with Nintendo for Donkey Kong Country and all during the N64 era, but then parted ways and was bought out entire by Microsoft. Rare still made games for other platforms during the 16-bit era, releasing Championship Pro-Am for the Genesis and versions of Battletoads for SNES, Genesis, and even for arcades.
- Argonaut Software, who worked with Nintendo to make the 1st party release Star Fox and then-unreleased Star Fox 2.
- Intelligent Systems, developers of Advance Wars, Fire Emblem and Paper Mario, among other games.
- HAL and Game Freak, which are other companies Nintendo has close relationships with but are technically separate. HAL has released mobile games like Part-Time UFO; Game Freak made Drill Dozer and Pocket Card Jockey.
- And as pointed out in the thread, Masahiro Sakurai, creator of Nintendo’s megahit series Kirby and Super Smash Bros., has never been a Nintendo employee! He created both series while working for HAL, then broke away and worked as a freelance game director.
It causes one to wonder: is Nintendo’s reluctance to staff up on the people who actually construct their games old-fashioned, very modern, or just idiosyncratic of them?