The Flipside of Gaming
Continuing our coverage of the best games from Steam NextFest October 2025 edition.
00:00 Intro
00:16 Wall World 2
1:51 Lyara
3:32 Neverawake: Flashback
5:08 Umigari
7:51 Sisyphus is a Bug
9:32 Skate Story
11:44 Odd Town
12:51 Relic Abyss
14:02 One Rotten Oath
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Part 2 of my (Josh Bycer’s) favorite demos from Steam Next Fest October 2025 edition. EDITOR’S NOTE: is that a certain bobcat we all know in the preview image?
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
This is the first part of my (Josh Bycer’s) collection of videos of my favorite demos from Steam Next Fest, October 2025.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
This post isn’t about any game specifically, but rather about an awesome Substack blog, Rings of Saturn, that examines the code of games from what they call the “32-bit era,” around the time of the Saturn to the Playstation 2, which includes the original Playstation, Dreamcast, and Gamecube, with a handful for the Nintendo 64, 3DO, Xbox and even the PSP along the way. They load them up in like Ghidra and search for unpublished codes, they look through demos and prototypes for ways to unlock features (sometimes ones that aren’t present in the finished game) and they make hacks to make unreleased features usable. All are very worthy activities that should be of interest for the kinds of people who would visit Set Side B. (You know who you are.)
A few selected items: a mod for Burning Rangers to play it two-player co-op, playing as Sonic in Christmas NiGHTS Into Dreams, enabling a secret English translation in Kingdom Grandprix, a debug mode in Grandia II, a patch to unlock the entire first Clockwork Knight game in Clockwork Knight 2, a code to unlock some extra cartoon artwork in Cotton Boomerang, extra options in Radiant Silvergun, a cheat code for Parappa the Rapper, and much more!
Really, if you’re a fan of games from this era, you’re almost bound to find something on this site of interest to you. Have a look!
This is part 6 of my favorite demos from next fest 2024.
0:00 Intro
00:20 Stonemachia
2:41 Letalis
4:34 Wild Woods
5:57 Strategem Lost
7:52 Everwarder
10:16 Bioweaver
12:16 Mother’s Sword
13:55 Unless
15:20 Break the Line
17:17 Heritage: A Dragon’s Tale
18:47 VinDefiant
original streams parts 1 and 2 .
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Here’s the first part of my coverage of Steam Next Fest June 2024 looking at upcoming and updated demos of games.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Friday night at SGDQ 2022 the TAS Block show demonstrated something special. After a recording of a Portal 2 run that predictably demolished that game, they moved on to a rather more esoteric show.
In past shows, TAS Bot has some off some pretty ridiculous sights, using something called Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE). Essentially, using certain well-understood exploits, the runner (usually, but not always, a set of scripted inputs) writes a sequence of instructions into the machine’s RAM, and then transfers the code execution to that sequence, allowing for “arbitrary behavior,” meaning, almost anything that can be written into that RAM. TAS Bot at AGDQ 2014 wrote Pong into memory during a run of Super Mario World and ran it (6 minutes):
This technique has also been used to run a variant of Flappy Bird, and even a bona fide hex editor into the save RAM of Super Mario World, without even needing scripts, entirely by a human player. But this is beside the point.
In 2017, TASbot demolished the NES Classic, NES games and pulled off other very weird shenanigans (59 minutes).
There’s several of these videos, which I leave it to you to search out. They’re pretty easy to find on YouTube with the search terms “games done quick” and “tasbot”.
The point of this post is to bring you news of how players finally “obtained” the Triforce in Ocarina of Time after 23 years. The video of the show has yet to be uploaded to YouTube (it has been since I wrote this! scroll to the end), but until it shows up, Retro Game Mechanics EX has a video explaining how it was done (34 minutes):
SwankyBox has his own explainer video that’s 22 minutes. Of course, it’s all an elaborate show, but it runs on the Ocarina of Time beta cartridge found back in January of last year.
EDIT: Here it is, the whole 1-hour 13-minute epic!
