Presented largely as a curiosity, but an entertaining one. An itch.io user named The Great Foohachi went through the trouble of converting background and character graphics from beloved SNES Squaresoft JRPG Chrono Trigger to Gameboy format, and from there put them to work as window dressing for a fairly rudimentary single-player Othello clone, a.k.a. Reversi, using GB Studio, which is rapidly becoming a go-to tool for this kind of monkeyshine. I would expect that 90% of the 256K ROM space goes into the art, which is really only there to give it some prologue cutscenes.

How does it play? Once you get to the game portion, fairly slowly, but it works. I played a round on Normal difficulty and won pretty easily. The thing to remember is, try to look ahead a move or two, don’t set up your opponent for huge moves, and if possible don’t let your opponent get a corner spot, while trying all you can to get them yourself.

Here’s a few screenshots. P.S. If you try this, you’ll want to turn the sound off.

You can’t play as Robo because he’s the opponent, natch.

Othello Trigger (by The Great Foohatchi, Gameboy ROM on itch.io, $0)

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This “ultimate” talk is ultimately about the hardware, its internals and quirks, and tricks that can be pulled off in it. Sure, it’s very technical and extremely geeks, but that’s pretty much the standard around these parts. Enjoy!

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The games and effects covered this time:

• Art of Fighting on the PC Engine, zooming in and out from the fighters as they approach and draw away from each other
• Road Rash on the SMS, which created a startling effect of a road undulating and going over hills for 8-bit hardware
• Ranger-X on Genesis/Mega Drive, artillery shots firing into the distance in the background and multi-plane parallax scrolling
• The Lawnmower Man on Genesis, SNES and Gameboy, fast 3D virtual reality scenes (well, slower on Gameboy)
• Donkey Kong Country 3 on SNES: vertical stretching of a boss
• Contra 3 on SNES: rotating both a large boss, the background and the player on the screen at once when the SNES only had one hardware scroll background layer
• Super Metroid: the Power Bomb explosion effect

If you enjoyed this you’re in luck, for they’ve done many other videos like this one. They’re all in this 21-item playlist.

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The video mentions that powering the clock and oscillator causes Pokemon Gold, Silver and Crystal cartridges to run out of battery power, and lose their saved game data, much faster than other Gameboy carts with save game battery. Sorry to break it to you; your Pokemon are probably gone by now. Poor out a health potion for Pikachu.

Another interesting fact revealed is, the clock works by recording raw time since the game was last powered on, and the actual date and time are fully updated when the game is started up. If you wait a long time between plays, over 511 days, the timer can wrap around and lose track of how long it’s been.

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The problem: you’ve made something you think is pretty darn great. Maybe you’d like to distribute it for people to use easily without having to set up an emulator, like it were some kind of native application? Maybe you’d even want to sell what you’ve made, and participate in the equatable exchange of goods and services you’ve heard people talk about in huddled whispers, but never thought you might engage with yourself?

The solution: Use EASTPIXEL‘s NESbag or GBCbag!

The indicated programmacalities* take a supplied rom image (even if said image never came from actual ROM chips) and erect a software box around it. Then you can distribute that package to other people, and they can double-click it to run it, just like it were a standard desktop executable, and it’s even rumored to be Steam Deck compatible.

A pre-built version is supplied for Windows. For Linux you’ll probably have to compile some code, if just because there’s so many distributions. For Mac, you’ll have to compile it yourself as well, but the process is rumored to be pretty simple.

* Feel free to use this word in your own conversations! People will love it!

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Now there’s a heavily-modified version of GB Studio, called BB Studio, that produces NES roms in a similar manner! It’s made by Michel Iwaniec, and can be gotten from Github here. It’s recommended that you be familiar with GB Studio first, and to read the list of caveats on the page. Particularly, the NES supports fewer sprites per scanline than the Gameboy hardware does, and runs at a slower clock speed. BB Studio is also “early alpha software,” meaning, it might or might not work well for you at the moment.

While we’re on the topic I should also mention NES Maker, which isn’t free, but it also isn’t “early alpha software,” and at $36 isn’t expensive either, and is custom-built for generating runnable NES games.

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Dungeon of Hank (itch.io, free)

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A good old-fashioned website! It’s hope to information on the construction of a wide variety of console platforms! Docs on the NES, the Sega Master System, the PC Engine (a.k.a. Turbografx 16), the Mega Drive (a.k.a. Genesis), Gameboy, SNES, Saturn, Playstation, Virtual Boy (yes), Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, Playstation 2, GBA, Gamecube, Xbox, DS, PSP, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii and Wii U.

The Copetti site: Architecture of Consoles

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All the gaming bigsites have been talking about Grimace’s Birthday, a promotional Gameboy Color game sponsored by McDonalds and made by Krool Toys. Here it is on IGN, and here it is on Kotaku. And, here it is on Gizmodo, and here it is on Retro Dodo.

AND, here it is on Boing Boing (still exists in 2023!), and here it is on Destructoid.

AND ALSO, here it is on Gamespot. And the mandatory ResetEra thread.

TOO, GoNintendo, NintendoWire, GameRant, KnowYourMeme (already??), MSN (also still exists) and (groan) Ycombinator.

Ars Technica linked to it as well. I love their title. It reads, “For reasons no one can fathom, McDonald’s has released a new Game Boy Color game.” Well, I think I know why. It’s an advergame. Judging by how many websites have stories about it, I think the why is freaking obvious. It’s so obvious that I would be surprised if an ad agency weren’t behind this flurry of interest by half the bigweb.

Some notes. I’ve seen people say it’s the first “official” Gameboy Color game since the system died. I suppose that’s true, but that’s really tricky language. It’s official in that McDonalds sponsored it, and it uses the McDonaldland characters with their blessing. It’s not official in that it’s supported by Nintendo. It doesn’t have the “Official Nintendo Seal,” and it’s not being released on physical media. Although it was made as a Gameboy Color rom, and can be played on actual hardware using a flashcart or if someone put it on chips (in such a way as to get past Nintendo’s hardware check) and made a cartridge of it, but nearly everyone will play this as a webgame, on maker Krool Toys’ website.

(Why the bay, take a look at the site design on both of those pages, they’re totally earlyweb relics! I am not complaining; in fact, I love them fiercely. Do not get between me and those sites!)

All of this is of course part of McDonalds’ promotion where they’re cerebrating ^the Grimace’s birthday, an affair that involves purple milkshakes. In a whole post of surprising revelations, the biggest one is that they remember they have McDonaldland characters to begin with, as they’ve been gathering dust for over a decade.

Anyway, it’s not a bad game. It’s mostly interesting for the novelty value. It won’t win any rewards, but it’s a perfect ordinary timed GBC inertial platformer. It’s mostly notable for McDonalds’ temerity in sponsoring it, but I suppose Nintendo doesn’t much care anymore about the integrity of their (oh frog) twenty-five year old hardware’s library.

Boo the hey: no one paid us for this post, but we’re not against making thousands of dollars. McDonalds, call us.

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This time though he is looking at retro gaming with a more general focus, pointing out interesting titles from decades past. They’re not making nearly as many 8-bit titles as they used to, so finding a cool old game you’ve never tried is almost as good as if they were making them now!

The games covered are:

• Konami’s Getsu Fuuma Den, Japanese horror for the Famicom,
• Rod Land, a single-screen arcade platformer with a good Famicom port,
• Kickmaster, a deep combat action game for the NES,
• Lunar: Walking School for Game Gear, a Game Arts-produced spinoff JRPG of the main Lunar series that doesn’t have much to do with its origin, and has a happy slice-of-life anime feel,
• Psychic World for the Sega Master System, a neglected platformer where you pick up magic-like powers as you progress, which got a Game Gear port with unexpected differences, and both deriving from a Japan-only MSX version with its own differences,
• Power Blade and Power Blade 2 for the NES, and the Japanese version of the first one, Power Blazer, stylish action platformers akin to Mega Man, but staring an Arnold Schwarzenegger clone who wields boomerangs, except in Japan where you play as a serious-looking little kid,
• Cave Noire, a roguelite game for Game Boy that I’ve written about in the past, and personally vouch for,
• Daikatana for Game Boy Color, a 2D and rather improved version of the infamous 3D PC game,
• Power Strike II for the SMS, or its Game Gear remake that’s completely different, but they’re Compile shooters so you know they’re going to be awesome, and really you can’t go wrong with any Power Strike/Aleste game, or ZANAC or The Guardian Legend on NES come to mention it,
• Queen Fighters 2000, a bootleg game for Gameboy Color that outright cribs the style from Gals Fighter for NeoGeo Pocket Color, but also includes a bunch of random characters from other properties for the hell of it, since being a bootleg game anyway why not,
• Aliens Neoplasma is a 2019 release for the Spectrum that makes excellent use of that system’s graphical quirks to increase the game’s atmosphere,
• the action RPG Dark Arms for the NeoGeo Pocket Color,
• early survival RPG Survival Kids for the Game Boy Color,
• Phantis, a cross-genre sci-fi game for the Spectrum,
• Shatterhand for the NES, which feels inspired by Batman on the same system, and
• Kabuki Quantum Fighter, also for the NES, which also seems inspired by Batman in its play style, and was also developed by Hal Laboratory.

INCREDIBLE 8-BIT Hidden Gems You Never Played (Youtube, 41 minutes)

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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

Welcome shlorbs and foobs to our mostly-weekly text-based internet news program! I hope you enjoyed our techno/bicycle horn fusion theme song! It’s the number one chart-topper on my homeworld, but admittedly my species doesn’t have ears. Images includes in this post are ultimately from Mobygames.

Emily Olson at NPR (swanky!): Google’s shares dropped by $100… (holds paper in front of eyes, reads twice to make sure I see it right)… billion after a disastrous AI demonstration. As a wise cartoon butler once said, “You people have too much money!” I guess we see where everyone’s looking for the next unsupportable tech bubble now that crypto’s in what I understand humans call “the crapper!” I never understood that saying personally. It isn’t the thing that craps!

Liam Doolan at Nintendo Life tells us that the game lineup on the Japanese version of the new Game Boy game collection on Nintendo Switch Online is different than the Western lineup. Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare replaces video mahjongg player Yakuman. Interestingly the article tells us that Japan-only classic For The Frog The Bell Tolls is coming eventually, although it doesn’t say if it’ll see U.S. release, let alone if it’ll come out on my planet, drebnar!

Also, Andrew Webster of The Verge says that the addition of the Game Boy games make Nintendo Switch Online the ultimate retro subscription. I mean it’s pretty good, but how was it that Gameboy titles were what pushed it over the line?

Matt Bassil of Wargamer brings us the surprising news that Bank of America thinks that Hasbro is harming its business by over-monetizing Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. When a bank thinks you’re too money-grubbing you might want to sit down with some hot tea and reflect on your life.

Kotaku. Luke Plunkett. Sony claims before court that Microsoft’s request for documentation goes so far that it’s “obvious” harassment. I mean I am at a point in my blobular life that I don’t see anyone representing a corporation as saying a single syllable that isn’t mathematically calculated to four decimal places to improve their balance sheet, so who the hell knows if it’s true. Maybe it is? I am staying neutral in this fight. Acids and bases hurt my cell wall.

Oli Welsh of Polygon really likes the HD remake of Metroid Prime that Nintendo put on sale a few days ago, noting that it includes the pointing interface improvements introduced with the Wii rerelease.

Will Shanklin of Engadget tells us that a “Minecraft mad scientist” has recreated The Legend of Zelda in Minecraft, and in true mad scientist fashion is holding the work hostage, refusing to release it unless a video demonstrating it hits 5,000 Youtube likes. The article said it was at 500 likes; at our own press time it was up to 4.5K, so by the time you read this it should have enough. I will pass it along to Editorial as possible blog fodder (“blodder”) for Set Side B!

Ron Amadeo brings us the news that with the switch to monthly updates of Android 14, Google will begin just blocking apps on it made for versions of Android before 6. The reason given is security, but bah to that, old software and its preservation simply isn’t a priority for megacompanies like Google. Does anyone remember the days when it seemed like they might be a different kind of tech company? Me neither.

Nicole Clark at Polygon says Okami is the best Zelda-like. Sal Romano at Gematsu reveals that M2 is planning a collection of Toaplan shooters, including the infamous Zero Wing, the game whose U.S. translation brought us the “All Your Base” meme a 100 billion years ago. And Justin Carter at Game Developer reveals that Double Fine has made a documentary about the making of Psychonauts 2. Drebs out!

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While most sites have already regurgitated the news into your waiting beaks, this time we’re recounting the release dates chronologically, so you’ll know what order to expect everything. Specific games of possible interest to a hazy mirage that I imagine to be our readers are in bold:

FEBRUARY
8th: Nintendo Switch Online Gameboy & GBA Support, Fire Emblem Engage Expansion Pass, Metroid Prime Remastered
15th: Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Expansion Pass DLC volume 3
22nd: Metroid Prime Remastered on cartridge
24th: Octopath Traveler II, Kirby’s Return to Dreamland Deluxe

MARCH
6th: Dead Cells Return to Castlevania DLC
17th: Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon
20th: Spring begins. Releases for Spring: Splatoon 3 Expansion Pass, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe DLC Wave 4,

APRIL
11th: Tron: Identity
21st: Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp
27th: Omega Strike

MAY
12th: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

JUNE
Some time in June: Harmony: Fall of Reverie
1st: Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection
2nd: We Love Katamari REROLL + Royal Reverie (what is it with the word “reverie” this month?)
21st: Summer begins. Releases for Summer: New Samba de Amigo, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, Baten Kaitos I & II HD Remaster

JULY
21st: Pikmin 4
28th: Disney Illusion Island

AUGUST
29th: Sea of Stars

Some time in 2023: Fashion Dreamer, Decapolice, Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, Professor Layton and the New World of Steam

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Well, actually, yes, if you always want a perfect image. Sebastian Staacks (an awesome name) figured out a way to do it that mostly works. It’s a cartridge that goes into the Gameboy, that itself has a slot into which you plug the cartridge that you wish to play. Simple, right?

No, no, wait. There’s a problem. The Gameboy doesn’t expose its video through the cartridge port. There is no pin leading out providing a video signal that can be converted for display. There’s no way this could work!

Well, there is a way, kind of. The device contains a Raspberry Pi that runs its own Gameboy emulator, that it tries to keep synced with the version running on physical hardware. It does this by watching bus activity exposed to it through the cartridge port!

But while there’s a lot that it can do with this information, there’s also a lot it can’t see. It can’t, for example, see directly what buttons are being pressed. However, by watching how the cartridge reads the cart ROM, it can deduce what inputs were pressed.

The process is not perfect. While it can spy some memory accesses, a few things escape its inspection. While it can recreate the layout of the starting blocks in Tetris Game B, it can’t catch their randomized appearances. Also, while a Raspberry Pi is much faster than a Gameboy, it’s not fast enough to carry out its display in the same frame as the main unit, so it lags behind a couple of frames. Still though, it’s a very clever idea, and it’s amazing that it works as well as it does!

Sebastian made a Youtube video explaining and showing off his work, here. (It’s the same one embedded above.)

There Oughta Be A Game Boy Capture Cartridge

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We’re brought up U Can Beat Video Games before (here’s all of the videos they’ve done to date, and here is their home page with a merch store), but this time they’ve covered Super Mario Bros. 3 in their typically completionist style, covering every level and every secret in the entire game. Sometimes they split a long game into two or even three videos, but not this time, this one video goes through the whole game, and it’s three hours and 23 minutes long! The other reason to link them this time is it’s their 100th video!

They’ve done some other interesting games since the last time we linked them, which was when they covered A Link To The Past. Some particular games they’ve done in the meantime:

• Castlevania 3, every route and every stage, in two hours, 22 minutes and 22 seconds
• Ghouls ‘N Ghosts on the Genesis (45 minutes)
• The surprisingly long Gameboy action RPG Final Fantasy Adventure in two videos, #1 (1:36) and #2 (2:57)
• Final Fight on SNES (1:05)
• Ninja Gaiden III (1:03)
• Battletoads & Double Dragon on NES (50 minutes)
• The rather underrated The Lone Ranger (57 minutes)
• Super Star Wars on SNES (1:49)
• The also underrated Nightshade (1:15)
• Shinobi on Genesis (55 minutes)
• The very underrated, not to mention very difficult, Cobra Triangle (33 minutes)
• All of Dragon Quest II in two videos: #1 (1:50) and #2 (3:45)
• Hudson’s Adventure Island on NES (1:27)
• Gradius on NES (31 minutes)
• Metroid II on Gameboy (2:05)
• Solstice (39 minutes)
• and Mega Man IV (1:19)
• They’ve also done Shadowgate on NES (1:33), interviewed its designer Dave Marsh in a separate video about a secret room and working at ICOM (15 minutes), and also recently covered its sibling game The Uninvited (1:43).

Even if you don’t have an interest in seeing these games taken apart so thoroughly, many people enjoy using their videos as background while doing other things. In a Youtube environment where video makers feel encouraged to go nuts with editing and fill their footage with distracting noises, UCBVG is a model for how to create interesting and informative videos. They are great! And they have a couple of adorable dogs who appear in every video, too!

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On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Kirby’s first adventure was, famously, a Gameboy game. Since that system is black and white, it’s been heard that Shigeru Miyamoto didn’t know Kirby was supposed to be pink until his second major game, Kirby’s Adventure, was released as a swan song for the Famicom/NES. The last main world in Kirby’s Adventure, as a nod to its Gameboy roots, is monochrome.

Kirby games tend to have distinctive graphics, and Dream Land is no exception even if it is monochrome. But what would they look like if they were in color? Well we don’t have to wonder any longer, because of a romhack constructed by GreenAndACat. It ports the game to the Gameboy Color hardware, and it looks pretty darn great! They resisted the urge to make it too fancy, instead giving background elements broad swaths of primary color that look great when applied to the game’s simple yet iconic graphics. Have a look:

Kirby’s Dream Land DX, on romhacking.net.

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But even if you don’t hack it, it’s a nice thing just to have? It’s got a great screen for one thing. And as reports were on release, there is a light-up LED Triforce that shows up through the back case when it’s on that’s just a nice touch. The games are largely as they were on their original release, although with flashing effects toned down to avoid triggering seizures in photo-sensitive sufferers of epilepsy.

Of new features though, the standout is the clock mode, which I’ve not seen a lot of people talking about! It self-plays a kind of weird version of The Legend of Zelda via AI. Monsters are generated, the AI destroys them, then more monsters are generated. They drop items, but rupees don’t seem to matter. Every two minutes, Link moves to a new screen. Every 30 minutes or so he changes location between the overworld or a dungeon. He finds items, he beats bosses, he gets heart containers, he slowly collects Triforce pieces, and at noon and midnight he defeats Gannon and starts all over again. There are even secret staircases to find, although the AI seems to know where they are.

At any time during this show, you can press A and B at the same time to take control of Link yourself. He controls exactly like he does in the NES version, with enough nuance (like, the edges of the screen are a safe zone like in the console version) that I wonder if this isn’t a hugely hacked-up version of the game’s rom that’s providing the show. The sound is just ticking by default, but if you hold the A button down for five seconds it enables the sound from the game too.

If you choose to control Link, you can’t access the subscreen, but you can switch items using the Select button. If you run out of hearts Link respawns almost immediately. Also you can’t move to a new screen yourself, instead the game advances to a new area after two minutes regardless of how well either you or the AI player does. If you leave the controls alone for a couple of seconds the AI will take back over for you.

I don’t know if the world map that Link travels through is mappable. I’d be very interested to know if it’s a hack, and if it is, if someone could break it out of the software. If it isn’t, maybe the game world could be recreated in a hack of the original Zelda rom?

There is also a special version of Zelda II. When you activate the Timer function, the version of Link from that game will automatically fight enemies, and you can take over from its AI too. This version is more explicitly game-like: it tracks high scores earned (by either human or AI) in each of its ten time limits and on each of three enemy sets, plus one more, a special mode where it records the time a human player can defeat a number of enemies. (Hold A for five seconds from the timer set screen to activate it.) And there’s a version of the old Game & Watch title Vermin included, with Link instead of its generic character that was later christened Mr. Game & Watch.

A note about the combat implementation of Zelda II in the timer game. Ironknuckles show up here, but the trick familiar to people who have played a lot of the NES game, of jumping before an Ironknuckle and stabbing as you’re coming down, as of slashing through the top of the enemy’s head, which always gets past the shield, does not work in it. Instead, to get past an Ironknuckle’s defenses, you must rely on the fact (in this game) that they can’t movie their shield while they’re attacking with their own sword.

So, it’s time to make an embarrassing admission. This is at least the seventh time I have legally owned the original Legend of Zelda. I had its NES cartridge, the Virtual Console rereleases for Wii, Wii-U and 3DS, the GBA rerelease, and the one on the Gamecube bonus disk for pre-ordering Wind Waker. I’ve probably forgotten at least one other version along the way-I had Gamecube Animal Crossing, which has the rom of The Legend of Zelda on its disk too, although it was never made available without hacking, and I subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online, meaning I can also play it there if I were to be of that mind. Now, I own a yet another device that can play The Legend of Zelda. Most of that time I could have played it for free via emulation, yet I keep buying it.

My response to people who are somehow in favor of Nintendo’s draconian legal response to pirates is, why do I keep doing that, continually giving them money for a game I’ve bought many times, when if I had the mind I could probably have gotten a hundred copies off the internet? Am I just stupid, or is there some other motive at work here? I am open to either possibility.

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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

Aaron Greenbaum at Den of Geek investigates, what was the last NES game released? Covers multiple territories, and both licensed and unlicensed titles, although in that later case recent releases stretch the premise considerably.

This might be our first link to comingsoon.net, reporting that Nintendo has purchased the studio that animated those charming Pikmin shorts from back in the Wii-U era. [Reminders: first, second, third] Maybe we should save those links for Sunday? Maybe we’ll just slip them in again some week.

We have a bit of animosity towards Cracked for how they treated several of their prior writers, although that did eventually result in the creation of both Behind The Bastards and Some More News, which are creator-owned. Still, bad scene Cracked. Currently working for them (for how long?) is Eli Yudin, and they wrote a list of 15 Gloriously Weird Genesis games. It contains ToeJam & Earl, Wiz & Liz, Rocket Knight Adventures, The Ooze, and Mutant League Football, among others.

At Stone Age Gamer they have a series about Game Boy sequels to NES games, and in that Chris Randazzo writes about Blaster Master Boy, which is really a Game Boy port of Robowarrior, which was originally known as Bomber King in Japan, where it was a spinoff of Bomberman! The source for that information: the dusty back corners of my beleaguered brain.

Callum Bains at TechRadar brings us news that a number of Bethesda and id Software games are playable for free, for a limited time, to people in the Xbox Insiders program.

Jody Macgregor at PC Gamer tells us that that fan remake of Ocarina of Time will get new features, including unlocked frame rate and adjustable difficulty.

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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

Matthew Byrd of Den of Geek lists 20 Genesis/Mega Drive games that were ahead of their time. Some interesting choices, like Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday, and they did notice Naughty Dog’s Rings of Power unlike that previous list. They also mention ToeJam & Earl, although they diss it a bit, boo. They also give nods to King’s Bounty, Starflight and Herzog Zwei, which are all fine games. No mention of Might & Magic II though!

Ollie Reynolds at Nintendo Life writes of modders adding color to B&W Gameboy titles.

At first, Sorrel Kerr-Jung’s article at CBR about Invader Zim’s voice being recast, and series creator Jhonan Vasquez being upset about it, doesn’t seem like it fits in with our theme. Even hearing about it being in SMITE, which is one of those MOBAs a particular breed of older kid might be enthused with… well, I’ve never heard of SMITE. But when I found out it was because they wanted to avoid voice actor Richard Horvitz’s union, and yeah, that’s the kind of terrible behavior we can get behind telling people about. The developers responsible are Hi-Rez Studios and Titan Forge Games. Also, whose idea was it to put Invader Zim in a MOBA?

At Nintendo Everything, Brian notes about upcoming asymmetric multiplayer game Dragon Ball: The Breakers, where some players play as DB side characters, and others of villains like Cell, Frieza and Kid Buu. The developers were unsure anyone would want to play weak characters like Oolong and Bulma. Geez, those are some of my favorite characters! Vegeta is cool and all but he’s kind of one-note, and let’s face it, Goku is probably insane.

Sad news that’s been going around: popular niche puzzle makers Zachtronics is closing up shop. They’re making one last game though, Last Call BBS, which Vice’s Renana Price calls “a beautiful vision of the 90s internet.” It’s basically a collection of smaller puzzles with a framing story about maintaining a friend’s website. Like all of Zachtronics’ products, it looks very interesting. It’s available on Steam.

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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

The gaming internet has been abuzz with the Wholesome Games Direct presentation, a huge collection of low-key and adorable amusements that only want your love! Please adopt one today!

The most notable thing I noticed about Patrick Arellano’s article for CBR.com about 10 games that inspired copycats is, Rogue isn’t one of them!

Boone Ashworth at Wired Magazine says Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, is slowing its hardware plans. I also hear from its parents that it’s putting away its leather jacket and sunglasses, but still plans to get that tattoo.

At Rock Paper Shotfun, Katharine Castle tells us about Stray, a game where you play as a cat in a post-apocalyptic world full of robots. Some are mean, but some are friendly, including one your kitty protagonist wears as a cute backpack! It mentions that the platforming involved is unique in that it prevents you from upsetting notions of feline grace by just not allowing you to make bad jumps. I mean, that’s okay most of the time, but what if I wanted to play as a kitty klutz? Believe me, they exist.

Interesting news from Muhammad Ali Bari at Twisted Voxel on Crash Bandicoot 5, being developed by the always-wonderful Toys For Bob!

We post a lot of articles from Nintendo Life here, we have noticed, to the degree that we are considering a limit to the number of times a single site can be featured in a single news post. Well, we haven’t done that yet, so the three Nintendo Life posts this time out:

• Liam Doolan mentions the find of an unreleased prototype of a Game Boy Advance port of Quake.
• Also from Liam Doolan, the former art director of the Pokemon games has a new studio, and a game in the works called Plucky Squire that seems like it might be fun.
• Kate Gray on the upcoming mining game Ground Divers.

Brian at Nintendo Everything presents a translation of some text from Nintendo’s recruitment site, talking about the creation of all the furniture in Animal Crossing New Horizons, much of it done by outsourced labor.

Video Games Chronicle notes, through the auspices of Jordan Middler, that Diablo Immortal has the lowest user Metacritic score in history: 0.2! It seems to be a huge pushback against its play-to-win aspects. There might be a bit of a pile-on effect going on there, but it’s a significant sign of how public reaction to it has turned.

CBR.com’s Patrick Arellano presents a list of ten mistakes that still haunt Sega. Many times these lists are pretty light, but this one makes some significant points, especially about the rancor between the Japan and U.S. branches of the company around the Genesis through Dreamcast era.

And Popkin at Boing Boing presents the Game Boy that survived a bombing. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.

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Gaming Hell is great! It’s an obscure game investigation site with some serious Oldweb power. They recently had a look at the Japanese-only Game Boy title For The Frog The Bell Tolls, known in its home territory as Kaeru No Tame Ni Kane Wa Naru, the game whose engine went on to serve as the basis for Link’s Awakening. (EDIT: As the article points out and I skipped over, and discovered after I wrote the preceding, while Kaeru no Tame Ni Kane Wa Naru has a number of aesthetic and gameplay similarities to Link’s Awakening, under the hood people note that the engine does not seem to be similar!)

There is a whole world of Nintendo games that never made it out of their home country on release, and the company only acknowledges exist in other territories with reluctance. Games like Captain Rainbow, Doshin the Giant, and Nazo No Murasame Jo. Once in while one might get a Virtual Console release, or a mention in a Smash Bros. or Nintendo Land, but other that it seems like strict radio silence.

Ant Cooke of Gaming Hell speculates on why this game didn’t make it to the US, that it has to do with some difficult to localize content. There may be something to this, but if I might offer? Kaeru No Tame Ni Kane Wa Naru also only got one rerelease in Japan. Maybe Nintendo saw its not featuring one of their large stable of marketable characters as a weak point? Likely it’s a combination of many factors that edged the game over into possibly-unprofitable territory on some obscure spreadsheet, somewhere.

One could spend hours speculating on why Nintendo does or doesn’t do a thing. Ultimately they are a huge company, not a monolith but composed of hundreds of people, and many people could doom a project if they chose. It is a shame in For The Frog The Bell Toll’s case. It’s not just their loss, but all of ours.

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U Can Beat Video Games (their YouTube channel) has only been around for a bit over a year, but they’ve already covered a lot of challenging games. It serves as a complete video playthrough, often revealing all the game’s secrets, and has remarkably restrained and helpful audio commentary by YouTube standards.

UCBVG videos cover the entire game, and can be long. The most recent, the covering A Link to the Past with a second part, is nearly two hours but it uses YouTube’s timeline annotations to mark any potential trouble spots you may have. Even if you’ve mastered the games he covers, I find it relaxing to watch anyway to refresh my memory on these decades-old amusements.

To date, UCBVG has covered 70 titles across the NES, SNES, Game Boy, and Mega Drive/Genesis. Some highlights include their videos on the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for NES (the first game on the channel), Mega Man I, II, and III, The Legend of Zelda, its second quest, and it’s sequel, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Legacy of the Wizard (a.k.a. Dragon Slayer IV), Castlevania and Simon’s Quest, Blaster Master, Punch-Out!!, Ninja Gaiden and its first sequel, Clash at Demonhead, Metal Gear, Crystalis, Wizards & Warriors and its sequel Ironsword, Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy (in two parts), Actraiser, The Guardian Legend, Kirby’s Dream Land (including Extra Mode!), the weird and unique The Magic of Scheherazade, Sonic the Hedgehog, and even the notorious Battletoads, among many other games.

They update weekly, so why not take a look!

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I figured I’d post all three of the major platform compilation projects I’ve been following. The second is Jeremy Parish’s Video Works, which is a collection of a number of mostly-ongoing subprojects: NES Works (1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, “Gaiden”), Game Boy Works (1989, 1990, Color 1998, Advance 2001, and Gaiden), SEGAiden, SNES Works (1991, Extra and Gaiden), and Virtual Boy Works (which is complete). The first link up there has everything; the others are in various states of completion.

What I appreciate most about Jeremy’s many series is how they’re informative without being dry (he knows his stuff!), interesting without being pedantic, and lively and entertaining without being obnoxious, obnoxiousness being a sin that I charge against many many gaming YouTube channels. If your videos whisk cut-out elements around the screen, their passage marked by swooping sound effects, then you are not going to get a link from me if I can in any way help it, so states the doom of rodneylives, and of Set Side B too if I have something to say.

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Sega looks to revive Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio properties

On using a serial port SD card reader on a Sega Dreamcast

How a Sonic fanfic writer ended up leading Sonic Frontiers

A roguelite that looks like an 80s Saturday Morning cartoon

Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games could be coming to Switch Online

Old Super Mario Bros. anime restored in hi-def quality and available to stream or download

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From Cat Graffam on Twitter, the Game Boy Camera Art Gallery is a Game Boy rom image, in the form of an RPG-style walkaround, showing off photos taken with Nintendo’s crazy and awesome little heavily-dithered, 4-color foray into 90s digital photography. It can be viewed in-browser or as a downloadable rom, or you can purchase a cartridge with it for use on your own Game Boy or Game Boy-compatible hardware! Here are a few works from the compilation:

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pmorinerie (on Mastodon @pmorinerie@mastodon.xyz) has been working on a full disassembly of the fourth Legend of Zelda game, Link’s Awakening on the Game Boy, and has a series of articles they’ve written about interesting technical aspects they’ve found.

One of their discoveries is of a hidden structure to the overworld of that game. Their discussion of this is fascinating, and should be referred to if you have an interest in such things. I will give a broad summary here.

The Game Boy was not given much VRAM for storing graphics. To avoid bus conflicts, the CPU that runs the system only has access to VRAM, to store new background tile information, either during VBLANK, a specific time each frame when the PPU circuitry isn’t accessing memory, or by blanking the screen entirely, which is only really feasible during major transitions, like through a door or into a hole. So, the system is limited in how quickly it can store new tiles during play.

Link’s Awakening stores two kinds of tiles in its VRAM. Most of them are from a set that’s used throughout the overworld, but a small number are overwritten, used for different purposes as Link explores the landscape. The overworld is separated into 2×2 blocks, and each can have its own set of these customized tiles.

There is a problem with this setup, however. When Link changes screens, like in the original Legend of Zelda and A Link to the Past, the screen transition scrolls smoothly between the areas. During the scroll, briefly, it’s possible for elements from two different screens to be displayed at once. How does the program handle situations where the custom tiles have two different definitions between screens?

The answer is that the overworld is cleverly designed so that there aren’t adjacent screens with walkable passages between them that use different sets of custom tiles. There are screens in the game that only use tiles from the main overworld set, and all of the places with passages between the screens with custom tiles have one of them, as a kind of memory airlock, to prevent glitches during transitions. It’s pretty clever.

If this is interesting to you, I encourage you to read the whole article, especially for the exceptional cases where the system breaks down and they had to find other ways to keep the screen from glitching.

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