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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During much of the NES’s life, Nintendo has no distribution deal to release consoles or games in Brazil, leaving the market open for a legion of bootleg cartridge manufacturers. The video author had some of these games, which were usually straight dumps of the originals, but their version of Battletoads was not.

It had been slightly localized, with its intro text translated into Portuguese. But there were some other minor changes too. Players started with an extra life, and had infinite continues. But also, for an unknown reason, the game completely skipped the second level, the one right before the game’s infamous Turbo Tunnel.

Was it a change in the game’s code, or a malfunction caused by his NES hardware? chirinea had a bit of an adventure in figuring out how to get the code off of his cartridge into an emulator so it could be compared with the official release, and ultimately found out that yes, the code was different, and it was probably done to avoid problems with Brazilian bootleg NESes crashing on level two.

It’s an interesting journey, and worth the fairly brief runtime to find out how he did it.

What’s wrong with this Brazilian bootleg Battletoads? (Youtube, 13 minutes)

EDIT: Pronoiac offers this logo for the post and video, from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Logo Generator! You see, the internet is still full of things!

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The 60-in-1 is often recognizable by its distinctive menu system, but it can actually be set to play one of its games in a stand-alone mode, in which case its menu never appears. It’s actually an ARM board running MAME, which means its games have distinctive quirks. All the information is there, so go acquaint yourself with ubiquitous gray-market arcade hardware!

Link: The World’s Most Popular Arcade Board?

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