Set Side B

Indie Games of VCF Southeast 2026

I never did make that post about what I saw at VCF (Vintage Computing Festival) Midwest, even though I still have all my photos. Some time soon!

In VCF Southeast a few weeks ago though, there were a number of hopeful indie developers who had their products on display, and were nice enough to show them off and let people play them, and I figure it would be a shame if I forgot to give them a post here. So here are a few things you might want to check out. Many of these games have been unfairly overlooked by the machine hearts of the internet’s various algorithms, may they rapidly rust into ruin, so please give them a few minutes of your time, and just maybe buy some or all of them.

Polyroll (Steam, Switch) from Spicy Gyro games is a Sonic-style platformer with great level design! It’s currently 70% off, selling for a scant $1.79 on Steam. It’s also on sale on Switch for $2.

They had coloring pages on site for kids to fill in.

A boss enemy in Polyroll; there is a collectable crystal high up in the sky above it, and you must repeatedly bounce off of the boss to get high enough to get it

The map screen lets you replay levels to find missed secrets

Venison County (Steam preview, demo) is an upcoming game from Cutter Oyster, a retro-styled FPS survival game. The game is played in a sequence of waves. The door to the cabin that ends a wave only opens once you’ve defeated the zombie enemies. You can pick up sigils that give you special powers, but each rune also increases the number and ferocity of enemy attacks. Between waves you can choose to discard your sigils, losing the powers but reducing the difficulty. You can also buy weapons and ammo between waves. Of special note, reloading is a little minigame, pressing a button while a bar is in a certain range, that you must manage while running from the zombies. It’s due out in full late 2027.

They put some effort into their table decoration

The rest cabin, where you can purchase new weapons

You have to hack or blast through the door to start the wave

It’s hard to get a good photo while you’re running for your life

Attack of the PETSCII Robots (sale page) wasn’t among the indie games, but I think it counts as one! It’s been for sale for a few years now.

Casey’s Gold (sale page) from Audacity Games is a terrific Atari 2600 game made in the Activision style, sold on cartridge by classic dev Dan Kitchen, brother of Garry Kitchen. I played through a few levels of this and it’s quite a bit deeper than you’d expect from a 2600 game, with secrets hiding in unexpected places. It rewards players willing to experiment, and with good observational skills.

Casey’s Gold is an action/exploration game set (mostly) atop and within train cars

That bent thing is a boomerang obstacle that you must carefully avoid

Going down inside a train car; there may be hidden exits from these places, but there’s a way to tell when they’re present….

Dan Kitchen himself was on hand to answer questions!

IsoMetro (itch.io, Steam $20) from Grimesoft is a grid-based city building game that will put many people to mind of the classic SimCity 2000. Electronic Arts bought out originating studio Maxis long ago and seems only to care about their properties so long as they’re about individual Sims instead of a whole city of them. IsoMetro certainly looks terrific, although I didn’t get a chance to play on the floor.

Hoverdrive (Steam preview) is about piloting a car through weird neon landscapes with changeable gravity, pulling off impossible stunts as you go. It’s not out yet, but it looks very cool!

Ad Blocker (Steam $6) is a player-vs-player action-puzzle game that feels a bit like Puzznic. Snogbert (Steam early access $8, free demo) is a platformer with randomized elements. Both are from Justin T. Alexander. I just have photos of the banners here unfortunately.

Nature’s Bidding (itch.io prototype, Steam preview) is a multiplayer battle platformer where you customize your character as you go with good and bad elements. The title comes from a phase before each fight where the players bid money to avoid taking on curses. You lose the money you bid regardless if whether you win or lose; the player with the lowest bid gets the curse. Once cursed, the curse sticks with you throughout the rest of the game, so you can get piled under a whole host of bad effects. And yet you still want to save money after the bidding phase to buy powerups to improve your character. It’s unforgiving, but fun to battle it out with your friends. The fighting feels like some of the minigames in Mario Party.

Business 98 (Steam $5, with a free demo) from Five Foot Games is a “cashier simulator” with an old school Windows look, with elements of roguelike deckbuilders.

Inky in the Alien Aquarium (itch.io, $12) from Pocket Pulp is written for the Gameboy Advance. It’s a challenging block-pushing game where you have to learn the rules as you go, in the spirit of The Witness.

Asta Pool (website, Steam $15) from Cheesy Face Productions has turn-based modes that work like traditional pool, but also real-time levels where you influence the pool balls more directly. It boasts over 40 modes!

Keepsake Country (Steam preview) is billed as “A Midwestern Stealth Game,” and is still in development.

A few more:

Mouseward (Steam preview with demo, itch.io preview) is a “soulslike collectathon” with non-linear levels, hidden passages and cryptic clues.

Godless Avalon (Steam demo, itch.io demo) is a J-styled sci-fi fantasy/comedy RPG with guns. I don’t think it was playable on-site.

Aethelria Cross-Dimensions (Steam preview) is an upcoming sci-fi fantasy arena shooter (that is, an FPS). It has appealing character art, but I didn’t see it playable on the floor.

And Crypt Sweeper (itch.io name your price), from Pocket Pulp who made the above Inky in the Alien Aquarium, is a real standout, a Gameboy Advance remake of the popular DragonSweeper with some new quirks. (The got permission from DragonSweeper’s creator to remake it, but only if they changed some things, which they did!) It was playable at the show but I got so into playing it that I forgot to take pictures!

There we go, that’s everything I managed to take notes on. My apologizes to anyone I’ve left out. Thanks for coming to VCFSE and showing off your work, and I hope this drives a few eyes your way!

I took more pictures than just these, I’ll make another post later with some of the other great exhibits on display and games that were playable at the show.

rodneylives

Notes on How To Read Set Side B

You might not believe this from our unassuming appearance, but I consider Set Side B to be “The Real Deal.” I work hard to present something, anything, to you on the subject of computer entertainment each and every day. Often it’s a simple link to something someone has written, or a video they made. Sometimes, when time and energy allows, it’s a longer piece that one of us has made ourselves. We try to keep it on the site of things you’re less likely to find elsewhere, but you’ll find lots of crazy random stuff here, and that’s by design. And please know that, if something doesn’t go up at 10 AM on a day, it’s because something has gone wrong.

In April we’ll have been doing this for five years, and I am set to continue bringing new things to you into the future even after that. Some days it’s hard to find something new to post; some days I have multiple things that I want to bring to you, and it’s a hard decision which to present first.

But I understand that the sheer variety of things that SSB presents may be bewildering. I mention sometimes that our three watchwords are Retro, Indie and Niche. If you’re interested in just one of these three, to the exclusion of the others, then you probably want to read a specific category. Nearly everything posted here goes into one of the three categories Retro, Indie or Niche, or else on Sundays when we relax the format a bit, into SundaySundry. In this way, Set Side B is really like four blogs in one, five if you count the rarely-used news and blognews categories (this post falls under blognews). You can find all the categories on a post beneath its author box in the left sidebar <-.

Let me break these down:

By “Retro” I mean older games generally. I am of an age that I consider anything before the N64 era to be Retro, but I am considering updating that to before the Playstation 2 era. I judge that the PS2/Xbox/Nintendo Gamecube/Dreamcast era is around when game graphics reached the point, on casual observation, where you had to stop and look for a sec to notice that it wasn’t photorealistic, where increases in graphical quality hit the point of diminishing returns. I’m not saying that graphics didn’t improve after that point, far from it, but that we reached the point where capabilities increased, but didn’t enable completely new kinds of things. Evolutionary, not revolutionary. So I think the PS1/N64/Saturn age is where we’ll draw the line at what Retro means.
On to “Indies,” these are the province of my co-blogger Josh Bycer, who runs the Game Wisdom channel on Youtube. Note that, if you go by the raw text of the category name, a spurious decision made early in the blog’s history means that the category name is plural, so, “indies”. These are small-team, or even solo developers, which is where, due to the immense reluctance to rock the boat that most AAA developers have, much of the energy in pushing forward the frontiers of gaming reside now. It’s not solely Josh’s province though, and I also find things to add to this pile from time to time, often, suitably enough, under the gamefinds tag.
I’ll admit that the “Niche” category is a bit of a cheat, a way to include some things that don’t fall under the other two. Intended to spotlight games that are interesting takes on a genre, especially roguelikes, often it’s the feed that gets all the Nintendo-related stuff. Nintendo is often considered an AAA developer, but they still have the potential to surprise sometimes. If Microsoft or Sony decided to pack it in and leave game publishing then it’d be a blow, sure, but the loss of Nintendo, and their weirdly-persisting toymaker vibe, would be disastrous. In my opinion, of course.
“SundaySundry” is where our weekly collection of game culture finds, mostly videos, goes. Again, because of a decision made early on, usually this group is presented as Sundry Sunday, with the order of the words reversed from the category.
There are some other categories too, which overlap with these. Probably the most important of these is @Play, the continuation of my old GameSetWatch columns on roguelikes. This is mostly the same as the roguelike category, and both are subsets of Retro for the most part. You can also find lots of cool stuff in the romhacks category.

In addition to categories, I’m a strong believer in tagging, and all of the categories listed are also tags. Tags are a much more fine-grained system though. Game series, titles, developers, and individual content makers each get their own tags. The way Set Side B’s Mastodon autoposter works, it tries to include as many tags as it can in the body of the post, even to the exclusion of much of its description, but whatchu gonna do? Because of all the tags I add to posts, you can get around pretty well just by using tags! There’s a list of our most common tags in our tag cloud in the right sidebar, but so you won’t have to search for the link it here it is again.

The right sidebar is also where you’ll find the sign-up for our email-based, very non-Signal newsletter. That’s working now right? I should ask the always-wonderful Phil Nelson, who maintains the site and pays the bills, is that’s operational now. We’ve considered adding the odd extra thing exclusively for the newsletter. When it’s working, that is.

So there you have it. If you’re only, only interested in roguelikes, you now have the means to only see material relating to that. If your lifeblood is indie gaming, then you can get that too, and may I congratulate you on your worth as a human being. If you just want to see silly video stuff about games, then away with you to the back alley of Sunday Sundry, where the disreputable sorts who dispense with that kind of stuff lurk, as with that sunglasses-wearing frog who hands out romhacks.

We promise not to judge you. Much.

rodneylives

The Weekly Indie Shortcase (8/24/26)

This is the weekly collection of indie games I (Josh Bycer) am covering on my indie short showcase series on the Youtube channel.

Josh Bycer

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”

game-wisdom.com/

A Kickstarter for A Sequel to General Chaos

Again, a Kickstarter for a sequel to General Chaos. I frankly can’t believe this is happening. It’s a sequel to a little-known, yet brilliant, Genesis/Mega Drive combat game with serious developer star power behind it. How did this get started? Are there other people in the world who love General Chaos as much as I do? Perhaps even more than I do? The prospect makes me wonder.

Promo image for Major Snafu, from the Kickstarter page.

General Chaos was the product of a couple of ex-Midway developers, and creators of some of their most iconoclastic hits, Brian Colin and Jeff Nauman. They were the creators of Rampage, one of the standouts of the Silver Age of arcades, and the basis of a certain popular movie. They tend to dwell in the shadow of the likes of Ed Boon and John Tobias, creators of Mortal Kombat, and Mark Turmell of NBA Jam and NFL Blitz. Yet there’s a strong argument that could be made that NBA Jam wouldn’t have existed without the similar-in-play Arch Rivals from the same company, which was from Colin and Nauman.

In addition to Arch Rivals and Rampage, Colin and Nauman worked on Spy Hunder, Xenophobe and Pigskin 621 AD, before leaving Midway and striking out on their own under the banner of Game Refuge. And that’s where they made General Chaos for the Genesis, published by Electronic Arts. And hey, Game Refuge still exists, while Midway is currently a locked cabinet full of IP somewhere in a basement of either Warner Bros. Entertainment, or the company currently called “Light & Wonder,” (I don’t know Pete I don’t think I buy it) but contains such multitudes as “Scientific Games,” “Autotote Corporation,” “Shuffle Master,” “WMS Industries,” “Bally,” or even other totemic brands that once saw better days. These days they mostly sell to casinos, may they speedily pass on their way to hell.

General Chaos isn’t one of their best known titles, but it has a certain something. It’s a cartoony, comedic take on deadly warfare. The Kickstarter calls it a predecessor of the real-time strategy genre, and there is some of that there certainly, but truthfully General Chaos is something entirely unique. It’s an intrinsically two-sided battlefield action combat game where the warzone is made of single screens, and where each player controls a team of five soliders with different abilities (with one exception I’ll mention in a bit). In action it feels a bit like Mattel’s classic tank combat games Armor Battle for the Intellivision and Armor Ambush for the Atari 2600, in that a single player must command multiple units, but with much more depth.

Gameplay from General Chaos. This and all following screenshots are from Mobygames.

There is also quite a bit of General Chaos essence in Team Fortress 2, even though it’s not an FPS, for both its comical, satirical atmosphere and its array of characters which each have substantial differences from each other. There are gunners, rocket launchers, grenadiers, flame throwers and dynamite chuckers. Most of the time characters are controlled indirectly: control a cursor to point at a location and press the B button to send your current character to it. C changes characters, and A tells all your units to fire their weapons. They automatically pick their targets.

When opposing soldiers get near each other the battle pauses and they engage in hand-to-hand battle, in the form of a simple fighting game. Combatants who are knocked down can be revived by pointing at them with the cursor and pressing A to call in one of a limited number of Medics. Characters who fall too often will eventually turn into a pile of bones and vanish. Additional Medic uses can be found on the battlefield, and are also awarded for reaching certain point totals.

As an alternative playstyle, a side can choose to field a pair of Commandos. If one player is using Commandos they must divide their attention between them, but two players can also play co-op with a Commando apiece. Commandos don’t use the indirect method of control, and instead control directly. This can make them much more effective warriors, but comes at the cost of only being two people to a squad, instead of a full team of five. Commandos can call in Medics too, but must reach their teammate in person to do so.

There are lots of worthy games from the 16-bit era that didn’t receive their due, and while I don’t know how well it sold, General Chaos always struck me as a bit of a sleeper hit. Video game genres were already becoming locked-down, and Electronic Arts was already showing signs of abandoning their reputation for nurturing talent and becoming the grotesque behemoth they are today. I’m surprised they don’t outright own the rights to General Chaos, but it appears they do not, or maybe Game Refuge bought it back from them.

The Kickstarter page makes it clear that Colin and Neuman have spent a lot of time thinking about how their classic wargame could be improved. There are more characters planned, more control options, between battle upgrades and most interesting of all, the ability to “go commando” and take direct control of any unit on your side. Home turf battles come with extra units on a given side, “expendables” that have limited abilities but help to give defenders a slight edge. There’s an array of stretch goals, with an especially interesting one at $200k: an arcade version. I think General Chaos was always destined for the arcade, and now it may finally happen.

So if all of this seems interesting to you, please consider supporting their project. Because war is a deadly serious business, so the best thing any of us can do is to laugh at it.

rodneylives

One More Collection of Fantastic Demos from Next Fest

This is the final part of my look at steam next fest October 2025 and the great demos I (Josh Bycer) played.

00:00 Intro
00:23 House 2
2:27 Goblin Sushi
4:06 Saga of Yurina
4:58 Hermit and Pig
6:36 The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time
8:20 Idosra: The Electric Renaissance
10:49 Uncle Lee’s Cookbook: Five Recipes of Disaster
11:56 Obelus Manor
13:19 Requiem of Reuinis
16:29 Shadows of the Afterland
18:06 The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike
20:35 Humanica
22:16 Nighthawks

Josh Bycer

game-wisdom.com/

Kitfox Games’ Official Dwarf Fortress Beginners Guide

Dwarf Fortress has always been a game about failure. It’s right there in its motto, “Losing is fun!” It’s a game where you just muddle through, doing what you can, learning as you go, and your games slowly, on the average, get longer and longer the more you play. It’s not that there aren’t guides and tutorials already out there, but the kind of game it is, it halfway feels like they rob something of the player. While I can understand not wanting to start from zero, the sooner the player learns that failure is the end mode of fortresses, the more they’ll understand that the intended way to play is to be audacious.

But which kinds of failure are the most fun? After spending several minutes setting up your expedition getting eaten by wild animals immediately off the wagon is a harsh start to play, especially if it happens repeatedly. Fortress destruction via dragon is scary, but it’s also hilarious; everyone dying on the surface before even digging your first warren is less auspicious.

Dwarf Fortess recently celebrated its 20th birthday, and in celebration Kitfox Games, its Steam publisher, has released a new official beginners video, made by BlindiRL. (34 minutes) It is a good way to move your fortress endings more towards the entertaining end of the scale.

And I’d like to point out, at the end of the video, we’re told that ending a fortress doesn’t quite mean it has to be a failure. If you decide to “finish” a fortress, but then start a new fortress in the same world and of the same faction, then it’s possible for your old dwarfs to decide to emigrate to it. This is something I’ve never tried myself, but it’s a good reason to keep playing in the same world, as you continue to write the saga of your game.

rodneylives

Double the Incremental Fun

This is a double review of Astro Prospector and Legends of Dragaea played with a review key and press key respectively.

00:00 Intro
00:20 Astro Prospector
2:57 Legends of Dragaea

Josh Bycer

game-wisdom.com/

Gamefinds: The Pac-Man Brothers

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

Three finds on consecutive days. This is another in a particularly beloved genre for me, the elaboration upon Pac-Man, which I like so much I wrote one myself back in 2013.

This one’s interesting in that it takes the most after Jr. Pac-Man, the last of the Pac-Man versions in the old style in arcades. Like Ms. Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man was made by GCC and released by Bally-Midway, and like his mother isn’t recognized by Bandai-Namco, though his circumstance is different because Namco never really supported him, while Ms. Pac-Man sold so well that Namco themselves sold Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga arcade units for a long time.

Jr. Pac-Man differs from prior Pac-games by having large scrolling mazes. Most Jr. Pac-Man mazes have six energizers instead of the usual four, but if their wandering fruit reach an energizer it could potentially destroy it. Jr. Pac-Man is also much more difficult that most other arcade Pac-Man titles, actually it may be the hardest of them all.

The Pac-Man Brothers starts from Jr. Pac-Man and gives him a sibling, makes them both greasers, and arrays the four (or five) ghosts against them, making them greasers too. It’s kind of if the Fonz, or maybe Kunio-kun, ran around a haunted maze eating dots.

Pac-Man Brothers can be played either in one or two player modes. It’s not as difficult as Jr. Pac-Man, not only is it more forgiving in its ghost chase routines (they go into scatter mode more often and reverse direction when it happens as in Pac-Man), but they have a dodge move. Pressing the button causes your Pac-kid to rush ahead. When dodging no dots or energizers are eaten, but you can also pass through ghosts. If the ghosts are vulnerable dodging still still eat them, and it still eats fruits, so it’s a good way to catch up with a fleeting morsel. If a dodge runs your Pac into a wall, he’ll bounce backwards, which can easily cause you to rebound into a pursuing ghost. That can be frustrating, but it’s an acceptable balance for such a powerful ability.

The ghost behavior, as I said, is a lot more forgiving than Jr. Pac-Man. They seem to scatter more often, and for longer times. The scatter phase at the beginning of a board seems quite long.

One of the coolest aspects of Pac-Man Brothers is that the mazes are randomly generated. Random mazes have their drawbacks; they tend not to contain the one-way routes that made Pac-Man a much fairer game, and even if they did, if the mazes are different every time the player won’t know where they are, and can’t make effective use of them. But they do make it resistant to patterns (although Pac-Man Brothers seems to use Ms. Pac-Man’s random scatter periods anyway), and help to enliven the early game by giving a player who might be playing through level 1-1 for the hundredth time some different terrain to wind through.

One more interesting difference here from Pac-Normal is that Pac-Man Brothers uses a Universal-style extend system, where sometimes a vulnerable ghost will bear a letter in PACMAN, and if you collect them all you get an extra life. The update log gives the history of this feature, mentioning that it went through some revisions. Now the ghosts only generate PACMAN letters sometimes, at random, making them an unreliable way to earn bonuses.

While The Pac-Man Brothers is made for Windows, I played it on a Linux machine through WINE and it seemed to work okay. It requires Mono, but WINE prompted me to install it automatically. However, keyboard input didn’t work at all. I had to use a USB Xbox controller to play. I also found using the joypad to move caused Johnny Pac-Man to control a bit stiffly. Using an analog stick allowed J.P.M. to move with more smoothness. My high score so far is a little north of 100K, and my game ended on the eighth board. You may consider that a challenge score to aim for.

The Pac-Man Brothers, by ThatLeftHandMan (for Windows on itch.io, $0)

rodneylives

Gamefinds: Samuel’s Sickoban

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

Another little fun indie puzzle game! And it’s based on Sokoban too, and it was also pointed out on Metafilter, this time by user Cogito in a comment. So let’s get our warehouse gloves on and get back to pushin’. It’s Samuel’s Sickoban!

Depicting the famous Onion cartoon was pretty much mandatory.

It’s implemented in Pico-8, and should run wherever it runs. As typical in this burgeoning puzzle genre, you have a pusher character (of boxes not drugs), whose job is to set objects in the right places. Here the objects you move are round spheres, a fact that becomes important later on….

In the screenshot above, the striped spot is a button, of the video game type with a broken spring, that must be held down in order to keep being pressed. The black square is a pit. You shouldn’t step on that part. Holding down the button with the ball causes the wall to the north to vanish, allowing you to move into the next room.

Already Sickoban seeks to earn its name. This might seem like a simple room to pass, there isn’t even anything to push. But something is amiss… there are walls that don’t line up with the checkerboard. The exit is half off your movement grid vertically. You’ll have to find a way to get yourself off of it too, by pushing against a half-aligned wall.

Actually, you’ll have to do that more than once to compete this puzzle, and the large pit won’t help in that. Fortunately, you only fall into a pit if you’re completely over it. You’re allowed to hang on by just a sliver of your square, if your movement allows for it.

Figure that one out and you’ll probably feel pretty pleased with yourself. But Samuel’s Sickoban wants to make sure you’re learned your lesson, so this horror is next. And that’s only room three! What will follow after this? I won’t tell, but it’ll probably make you break out in tears. “Happy” solving!

Samuel’s Sickoban, by spratt (itch.io, $0)

rodneylives

Gamefinds: Soko Striker

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

Pointed out in a post on Metafilter by long-time user pwnguin, Soko Striker is fun, and not excessively challenging, free Soccer-themed Sokoban game by Axylaric on itch.io.

The idea is to get all the balls (up to three in a level) into the goal net. The ball slides when you kick it, continuing to move until something interacts with it. We could call these “ice block” style Sokoban pieces. One wrinkle in this is that the balls can’t cross the white lines at the edges of the board, or it’s a foul and you have to start over. There is no undo command, only a retry, so think carefully before making a move. You yourself can walk outside the line freely, and will often have to.

Those yellow barriers in the screenshot above are simple blockers, mere walls that the ball will collide with and come to a halt.

Later on you find these other players on the checkerboard pitch. If the ball rolls into an arrow, the player will automatically kick it in that arrow’s facing direction. You can adjust the direction a player faces by kicking them, a trick you’ll have to use a lot.

Near the end of the game’s 30 puzzles you’ll find these traffic cones. You can push them a single space at a time by kicking them, much like how one would move a Sokoban crate. Other players can kick crates too. A cone can block a ball and stop it a single time.

There’s a few other tricks you’ll have to learn too, but Soko Striker introduces them to you itself fairly gradually. Many of its puzzles are simple tutorials, and the difficulty doesn’t get very high until near the end. The last puzzle will take you at least a few minutes to figure out, but I think you can probably handle it. One note that might be helpful: the scoreboard that shows you the level number looks as if it might be solid and block soccer balls, but it doesn’t. You can even walk through it! That’ll be helpful to you eventually.

Soko Striker by Axylaric (itch.io, $0)

rodneylives