Tag: linkroundup

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Nicole Clark at Polygon wants us to know of a free video card game based on Pokemon that isn’t derived from the physical CCG! It’s called Pokemon Crystal League, it’s free on itch.io, and it’s instead inspired by the first portion of Inscryption. As with anything so directly related to a Nintendo property, you should probably look into getting this before it’s too late-assuming it even makes it to press time!

Also at Polygon: Cian Maher’s 14 “most exciting” games of the summer, which contains a Gloomhaven computer game update, Super Mario Strikers, Capcom Fighting Collection, and Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course.

At CBR, Gina notes evidence that the character of Magil in Chrono Cross is actually Magus from Chrono Trigger incognito, something fans had long suspected.

Back once again to the crossover fighter genre. Zack Zwiezen at Kotaku looks at WB’s Multiversus and asks, with some justification, if all pop culture is merging into a thick homogeneous paste. It is, after all, a game in which The Iron Giant can team up with Velma from Scooby-Doo to fight against Batman and Tom & Jerry. Space Jam: A New Legend certainly seems to imply WB is heading in that direction.

D. Hardawar at Engadget tells us that EVE Online can now be played streaming with just a web browser and a strong-enough internet connection. The new format is called EVE Anywhere. I mean, why not? The game is already sometimes derisively refereed to as a spreadsheet simulator, so why not build Google Docs support into it too?

At NintendoLife, Liam Doolan points to a Twitter post from the account of Sonic Mania developer Headcannon, where they state, while some of their work appears on the upcoming Sonic Origins, they did not directly work on it themselves.

Also from Liam Doolan: Nintendo files a patent for a method to fight online cheating and software modification. We take the view here that all software patents are bad by definition, but at least they’re trying to do something about cheating in their games? While the article has an illustration from a Splatoon game, there is actually nothing to say which games will utilize this technique.

While we’re talking about software patents, Sony got one for adding trophy support to classic games. Owen S. God at Polygon says that feature is coming to the rerelease of Syphon Filter on Playstation Plus, and, presumably, to other games afterward. (I wonder if the RetroArch achievements server counts as prior art here?)

Ryan Dinsdale, a freelancer working for IGN (hey! hire him!), tell us that Marcus Nebelong at Dreams developer Media Molecule has recreated the Unreal Engine 5 train station demo in that software.

Finally, from way over on Video Games Chronicle, Jordan Middler mentions that Xbox S sales in Japan exceeded PlayStation 5 sales last week. It’s the first time something like this has happened in eight years! It seems likely that the limited number of PS5s available to be sold might explain the difference. The PS5 still has a higher install base in Japan compared to the Series S, by 8-to-1, but in the past year the Series S has exceeded the entire lifetime sales of the Xbox Series X. Since the release of the original Xbox back in the PS2/Gamecube era, only 2.3 million units have been sold across the entire line, most of them being sales of the 360.

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

From Marc Deschamps at comicbook, Epic bought Fall Guys studio Mediatonic, and as a result, when Fall Guys goes free-to-play, they’re removing it from Steam. People who had bought it on Steam will still have access to it there, and they plan to still support and update that version, but new copies will no longer be sold there.

Multiple places are reporting on a new game described as Stardew Valley meets Spirited Away. I’m choosing to link to Kate Gray’s post on NintendoLife on Spirittea. I get the sense that there is a PR department around this media blitz, although I certainly don’t begrudge them that, drebnar.

On April 7, Duncan Heaney at Square-Enix had an interview with the producer of Chrono Cross, Koichiro Sakamoto, about the recently-released remake of the game. It contains the revelation, hardly surprising, that the source code of the game had been lost, and they literally had to recreate the game from surviving materials and deducing the implementation logic of the original.

Chris Carter at Destructoid points us to a God of War mod that puts Homer Simpson, Bart Simpson and Ned Flanders into the game, complete with pretty accurate voice acting! They also linked to a YouTube video showing it off. The article mentions some people suggesting another mod with Peter Griffin fighting a chicken, about which, could I just suggest: please don’t.

At Ars Technica, Sam Machkovech calls Warner Bros’ Multiversus, their upcoming smashalike (I’m still trying to make that term happen!) “a compelling Smash Bros. clone.” I mean, it’s got Steven Universe and Garnet in it, so that’s a plus, but no Pearl or Peridot! Also: no Switch version yet.

Goomba Stomp is a website that’s been showing up in my searches more and more often lately, and Renan Fontes there has an essay discussing player character growth in The Legend of Zelda!

Damian McFerran at NintendoLife wrote about the troubled history of the Polymega retro gaming console last year, and now mentions that it may be getting Dreamcast support.

John Walker at Kotaku mentions Mysplaced, a game that looks an awful lot like Nintendo’s remake of Link’s Awakening, which is causing some concernation among fans. Liam Doolan at NintendoLife also chimes in. If you were to ask me? The whole dang industry is built off of copies of copies and copies, and to suddenly care about this one is kind of ridiculous. As if Zelda clones weren’t once like half the industry! Have they ever seen Neutopia? Golden Axe Warrior? They are not going to get sued because they don’t call these characters “Link,” “Zelda,” or “Ganon.” Next!

Jez Corden at Windows Central says Microsoft’s Activision/Blizzard acquisition is moving fast. I wonder if, way back in the early 80s, those bright young refugees from Atari suspected that, one day, the company they were founding would one day contribute to the value of a corporate behemoth?

Finally, in more serious news, Luke Plunkett at Kotaku notes that Epic Games contributed money to help Ukrainian developers working for Frogwares to be safer as Russia’s invasion of that nation continues. Good luck guys!

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Greetings Earth creatures from the dark depths of space! Let’s get down to bidness.

People Make Games on YouTube reminds us about “VRChat, the ‘Metaverse’ people actually like.” Ooh, burn! (39 minutes)

More burning! Martin Robinson at Eurogamer says the new PlayStation Plus feels like a missed opportunity. Mwa ha ha! It fills my veins with life-giving phlegm!

Minyea at NicheGamer tells us that, despite being sold off by Square-Enix, the Tomb Raider series has now topped 88 million in lifetime sales.

Ari Notis in today’s lone Kotaku item: Cyberpunk 2077 Totally Misunderstands Subways, According To A Transit Expert.

It seems that the people making Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl have asked some to stop calling it a Smash-killer. As for me, I’m still trying to make smashalike happen, drebnar!

Gryson from Mega Drive Shock translates an article from a Japanese newspaper in 1996 expressing worries about falling 16-bit sales, and expressing worries of a second “Atari shock,” a Japanese term for the U.S. Game Crash of 1983.

Alana Hagues at NintendoLife anticipates the upcoming Switch release of Guild of Dungeoneering, a game where you build dungeons, not to kill characters outright, but to try to keep them alive.

Alex Cranz at Verge podcast The Vergecast (natch) has an episode about Microsoft’s Adaptable Controller, a super-configurable controller made with accessibility in mind. He speaks with one of its inventors, Bryce Johnson. It’s 33 minutes long.

Jake Gable writing for Cultr lists his 10 favorite PlayStation 2 games. For the details you should read the article, but from 10th to 1st, they are Kingdom Hearts, Virtua Fighter 4, Medal of Honor: Frontline, The Getaway, James Bond 007: Nightfire, Pro Evolution Soccer 5, Ratchet & Clank, Gran Turismo 4, The Simpsons Hit & Run, and Grand Theft Auto Vice City and San Andreas, cheating a bit by combining two games into one item.

Rich Stanton at PC Gamer says Cave Story is now a roguelike. Why not? Make everything a roguelike! Let’s burn it all down! We won’t rest until you can play an @-sign in Animal Crossing and swing a parenthesis at K.K. Slider! Well back in boring old reality, this is actually a fangame called Doukutsu Randamu: The Cave Story Roguelike. It’s free on itch.io!

Darren Allan of TechRadar tells us that AMD has new GPUs, they’re in stock, and priced “strictly at retail.” Sounds like they’re adamant about not chasing the crpyto-mining market, hooray!

Anthony Wallace at Retro Dodo tells us of seven interesting recent Pokemon Emerald romhacks! Romhacks haven’t shown up on Set Side B much yet but we’re fully in favor of them here, so, look out for more on this subject in the future!

GamesRadar’s Hope Bellingham tells us of a game in development using Unreal Engine 5 involving a realistic squirrel armed with a powerful handgun bigger than it is! Kind of the thinking that went behind Skatebird, but more lethal? It’s being developed by @QuiteDan.

TraynoCo at RetroRGB wrote about a SD card-based Dreamcast VMU in the works created by hardware creator Chris Diaoglou. It offers many improvements over the original unit, including expanded capacity, a rechargeable battery, and a backlight!

And Natalie Clayton at PC Gamer has a long article telling how the pandemic helped some game companies to embrace working from home.

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Ron Amadeo at Ars Technica tells us that estimates are that the Google Play and Apple App Store culls to take effect will each remove over half a million apps. This will result in the permanent destruction of a huge amount of software from the beginning of the smartphone era to two years before the present. It’s yet another example of how corporations are awful stewards of software preservation, drebnar! (What? Don’t editorialize? Is that how they do it on Earth?)

Dean Takahashi, writing for VentureBeat subsite GamesBeat, recently interviewed former Nintendo of Amercia president Reggie Fils-Aime about a number of topics, including recent allegations of overuse of contract employees and why they seem to have abandoned F-Zero.

More displeasure at Nintendo, Ollie Reynolds at NintendoLife mentions rumors that some at Retro Studios weren’t pleased to be brought in to work on Mario Kart 7.

C.J. Andriessen at Destructoid lists three upcoming characters for smashalike Nickelodeon’s All-Star Brawl: Jenny from My Life As A Teenage Robot, Rocko from Rocko’s Modern Life, and… Hugh Neutron, the dad of Jimmy Neutron? Well anyway, it’s another avenue to allow kids and former-kids to have their favorite characters beat the ever loving crap out of each other, as we have all dearly wished for many times!

Najam Ul Hassan of Exputer, a newcomer to our little report, notes that Elden Ring’s concurrent player base has dropped by 90% in the three months since launch, which is pretty much to be expected, given how so many games tend to launch with a burst of interest that rapidly trails off over the following months.

Researchers Bruno Sauce, Magnus Liebherr, Nicholas Judd & Torkel Klingberg, in a peer-reviewed paper for the journal Nature, say there is evidence that playing video games leads to cognitive improvement among kids of ages 9-10. It takes a lot of effort to power through the writing though, as usual for these kinds of papers.

Lauren Morton of PC Gamer begs, and I agree, to please stop making Discord servers for things that shouldn’t be Discord servers! The public web is a wonderful thing, and to block off information among insular, private communities makes it difficult both to find and preserve. Although, if you’re going to make a wiki, please consider alternatives to Fandom, as they have their own problems.

Over on Tom’s Hardware, Ash Hill writes about a “drop-in” kit to put a Raspberry Pi into an old Game Boy case!

In the Rich Tasty Schadenfreude department, we are alerted by Ethan Gach at Kotaku that cryptocurrency-based Pokemon clone Axie Infinity’s breeding potion currency has dropped in value to less than a penny.

Also at Kotaku, Ari Notis writes that Halo Infinite pro Tyler “Spartan” Ganza refuses to play due to mistrust of teammates, and his team, eUnited, refuses to release him from his contract. Another player lobbied to have a teammate of his that he gets on with especially well replaced, and it did not go down well with Spartan.

The gaming web has been abuzz about a demake of Portal that runs on real Nintendo 64 hardware. It’s on GitHub!

An official Sega Twitter feed has offered new footage of the upcoming Sonic Origins. Revealed: a mission mode, a drop dash move, Knuckles and Super Sonic in Sonic 1, Sonic CD gameplay, and especially interesting, a new Hidden Palace zone in Sonic 2!

Brad Linder, Liliputing: The AYA Neo line of portable gaming PCs from China is getting a new model, the AYA Neo Air.

NintendoLife’s Thomas Whitehead notes that over the past 12 months, the Switch has received twice as many first-party exclusives as either PlayStation or Xbox.

I. Bonifacic at Engadget brings news that the makers of Genshin Impact have a another free-to-play exploration game on the way, called Zenless Zone Zero. That’s certainly a title.

Andy Chalk at PC Gamer mentions that Kerbal Space Program 2 is being delayed for the fourth time, and is being handed to its third developer, Take-Two’s Intercept Games, which was formed specifically to work on it.

Jeremy Peel at Rock Paper Shotgun presents an interesting article noting that some notable Eve Online players are actually successful at real-world business.

Finally, here at the Set Side B News Desk, we don’t often get to chime in on what many would consider to be “real news,” such as the furor over the pending U.S. Supreme Court decision once again allowing states to pass laws restricting or even banning abortion. But sometimes it leaks in. Ted Litchfield at PC Gamer writes about Insomniac planning to support abortion rights with a $50,000 contribution, to be matched by their parent company Sony, but with Sony management wanting to keep the donations a secret from the public. Sony has also forbidden their fiefdoms from publicly stating an opinion on abortion rights. This is good reporting on an important issue, and I encourage you to follow the link for more information!

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Ethan Gach from Kotaku reminds us that Nintendo still hasn’t publicly commented on allegations for their crappy workplace practices, especially their over-reliance on contractors. Stephen Tolito at Axios has more writing on this topic.

Mat Jones at IGN informs us there’s a fad going where concert-goers record the event with their 3DSes! Pshaw, back in my time we used Game Boy Cameras!

At Nintendo Life, Ollie Reynolds has noticed that Konami has had its most profitable year ever, which might seem strange to us considering how they seem to have left many of their properties to lie fallow. Two products are responsible it seems: Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel, and, in Japan, Momotaro Dentetsu: Showa, Heisei, Reiwa mo Teiban! It does mention the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection as an expected source of future profit.

Also from Ollie Reynolds comes word about Limited Run games asking users to destroy their DOOM cartridges! It comes down to a bug on some carts, and rather than shipping them back and getting a replacement, with all the effort and expense that entails, they’re just asking that they break their carts, and then to send proof, before getting a replacement. I mean, I understand why they’re doing that, but destruction offends me deep down in my protoplasmic soul? Some day I’m sure an economist will write a paper on this. Oh, in making my diatribe I almost forgot the point! The article is actually about them creating a little Doomguy diorama with the pieces of the cart.

Kazuma Hashimoto at SiliconEra has news of the next in an unending series of Final Fantasy VII sequels, Ever Crisis. In this one, Cloud Strife goes Hawaiian! That may not be true, but can you be sure? Can you??

Destructoid has a kusoge series going, and in the most recent installment Zoey Handley becomes the seventeenth person to talk about that abysmal Popeye game stinking up the Switch eShop.

Anne-Marie Ostler, another writer on Nintendo Life, tells us Hollow Knight has broken its player count record (on Steam) despite having been out for five years! The reason might have to do with a recent 60%-off sale.

Also from Nintendo Life, Roland Ingram explains how he wrecked his Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ island’s economy with haxx!

J. Trew of Engadget likes the Ayn Odin Android-based handleld!

And Callum Bains at TechRadar relates news that the Xbox Series S could be getting a way to play physical game releases, kind of, sort of? Microsoft is patenting a way to prove to the console that you’ve bought a physical disk, effectively turning it into a glorified access pass for the downloadable version.

We’re back at Nintendo Life again, with Alana Hauges’ article about Hitoshi Akamatsu, the creator of the NES Castlevania games and series as a whole, who left the company and now no one seems to know what happened to them. Some trash talking from a former co-worker is in there. Their star descended a bit at Konami when the third Castlevania game underperformed, which is a gigantic shame now that the game is widely recognized as one of the high points of the Famicom/NES. There’s no justice, either on Earth or in the icy reaches of outer space, I tell you. It seems more information can be found in Wireframe Issue #62, and in a 2019 article also in Nintendo Life.

Also from Alana Hauges at Nintendo Life (slow it down a bit please, my tentacles can only type so fast!), news that the 3DS had more games released in 2021 than in 2020!

Sean Hollister at The Verge sends word that the Steam Deck is getting customizable per-game performance settings.

Ollie Reynolds at Nintendo Life, again, relates the words of former employees of Retro Studios lauding Metroid Prime‘s camera.

We mentioned it in the roundup of Nintendo’s Indie World presentation, but Michael McWhertor at Polygon enthuses more about Another Crab’s Treasure!

Ian Evenden at Tom’s Hardware says Nvidia is finally going to open source their Linux drivers!

Home stretch! Robert Zak at PC gamer writes about a fangame in the works called Metroid 64. This will certainly go well and not be ceased-and-desisted by Nintendo the moment it attains any actual popularity!

Yahtzee Crowshaw, the Zero Punctuation guy (remember him?), still at The Escapist, talks about Rogue Legacy 2 in one of his video essays!

Lauren Aitken at PC Gamer tells us more about Disney Dreamlight Valley, their crossover self-insert lifesim game of Disney characters and you, their best friend.

Another thing from PC Gamer: Andy Chalk on a guy turning the tables on an annoying Elden Ring player.

Andy Chalk also mentions the creator of Stardew Valley not being able to believe his game has sold 20 million copies.

Let’s see what else what else oh! Finally: Russell Adderson of PC Gamer tells us that EverQuest players playing on a legacy server wake up a fearsome boss and, in the process, forever denying later players from gaining special equipment. I’m kind of amazed that EverQuest still exists, but it seems like it has much more heart than World of Warcraft has. And don’t forget that, in a back corner of the internet, Ultima Online is still running!

That’s it from me, drebnar. I’m off to imbibe nutrient fluids, later earthpeeps!