Tag: news

News 6/9/2022: Multiversus, Pinball, Roguelikes

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

We’ve been distracted here at the news desk lately. A couple of our planet’s moons regularly collide with each other, causing both to reverberate and flex in a disconcerting way that causes them to warm appreciably, and will inevitably cause them both to disintegrate, resulting in major tidal trauma on the planet’s surface that our scientists insist “is nothing to worry about.” It’s still difficult not to be concerned, but I’m sure things like that happen on Earth all the time. Let’s get to the important stuff: video game news.

This building, the Sega Sammy corporate HQ, appears to be made of glass. They’d better not throw any stones! (image from Wikipedia, owned by TarkusAB and used under CC BA-SA 4.0)

Ollie Reynolds at NintendoLife notes that Sega Sammy’s finances are looking up this quarter, due both to the release of Sonic Origins (yay) and pachinko machines (boo). Jeepers Horatio Chrysler, it’s like gambling is slowly swallowing up every aspect of computerized gaming. It’s devoured most of Konami and all of former gaming stalwarts Bally, Williams, and Midway, is responsible for gacha mechanisms in mobile, and is behind several of the most odious aspects of that whole NFT thing. At least Sonic Origins is doing well.

Owen S. Good at Polygon chimes in with this week’s legally-mandated Multiversus news, noting that it’s getting ranked and arcade modes. I mean, on one hand it’s completely obvious that the game is the result of the same kind of soulless corporate mandate that resulted in the execrable Space Jam: A New Legacy, a movie that somehow took a 90s movie based off of a series of sneaker commercials and made the concept worse, but on the other hand it’s got Steven Universe in it. With the parent company in disarray, cancelling nearly complete $90 million dollar movies in order to take a tax writeup, it’s amazing WB, now WB Discovery, can do anything right at the moment.

At Ars Technica, Sam Machkovech reports on 1Up’s new pinball cabinet, which provides emulated (well, simulated) versions of several classic Bally/Williams games in digital form. No video pinball game can hold a candle to real pinball, because of framerate limitations, because of the importance of nudging the machine, and because pinball is cool because it’s a physical ball shooting around the table. Still though, most people can’t afford to pay thousands of dollars for a real table. The unit is one of three pinball products they’re releasing, with this one offering 10 games running Zen Studio’s engine. The headliner is Attack From Mars, but most of the games are really solid, including some underrated classics like Junk Yard and No Good Gofers. Sadly, Machkovech reports that White Water suffers from stuttering and input lag, which speaking as a habitué of Wet Willie’s, is unacceptable for that game. For the record, the other games are Fish Tales, Medieval Madness, Road Show, Hurricane, and Tales of the Arabian Nights. So, no Funhouse. I dunno, for $600 you’d think they’d just include all the games they had the license for?

Not mentioned in the article: NetHack

Cameron Bald at PCGamesN was just asking for our rancorous commentary when he wrote what he claims are the best roguelikes and roguelites on PC. I mean we host @Play now, honor demands that we chime in! The list is Hades, The Binding of Isaac, Darkest Dungeon, Dead Cells, Don’t Starve, Downwell, Into The Breach, Slay the Spire, and Spelunky 2. While, yeah, they’re all good games and I’ve nothing bad to say about any of them, they’re all commercial roguelites. Nothing about NetHack or Angband or anything. Oh well.

Whew, that’s a high commentary-to-link ratio. Let’s continue the list next time. Toodles!

News 8/4/2022: Nier Automata, Sega Channel, OH WOW

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

We’ve been busy here lately, so it’s pretty light this time, just some links left over from last time.

Ash Parrish at The Verge reports on that doorway that was found in Nier Automata: it was a hoax, a mod. The people responsible are quoted as saying, “We have been loving all the discussions and theories — it has been an amazing journey.” Ha ha yes wait you lied to us. Not forgiven. Next!

Kayla Dube at SlashGear writes that the Sega Channel was ahead of its time. Yep, it was.

At Retro Dodo, Brandon Saltalamacchia tells about the OH WOW, a Linux-based gaming handheld from the US, not China, somehow. Power: probably enough to emulate Dreamcast games. Price: Under $200. Date: November 2022.

News 7/31/22: Overwatch Tournament, Vestaria Saga, C64OS

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

Shaun Prescott at PC Gamer notes that Steam going forward is banning the use of award icons and review scores in the main graphical assets within their store. This is the “key art,” which I believe is the stuff that heads a store page. Readability is a given concern, in order not to shrink the game’s logo to make room for a muddle of icons and text, and also to be more considerate of non-English speaking users.

Luke Plunkett at Kotaku: it seems Blizzard changed the rules during an Overwatch tournament, making a set that was intended to be best-of-seven into best-of-five while it was going, causing players to refuse to play in protest. In retrospect it seems like it may have been a result of confusion among the event’s organizers.

Graham Smith at Rock Paper Shotgun: the original creator of Fire Emblem has been making games in its style independently, Vestaria Saga and Vestaria Saga II. They’re designed by Shouzou Kaga working with volunteers over the internet, using a package called SRPG Studio, which is represented in the article as free, but costs $60 on Steam. Similarly, while Vestaria Saga II is free in Japanese, a translated English version is on Steam for $20.

Ollie Reynolds at NintendoLife makes a case that Super Mario Sunshine is the best 3D Mario game. It is quite underrated! For those who haven’t kept up, that’s the Gamecube version, which was also included in the limited release Super Mario 3D All-Stars on Switch and nowhere else.

Screenshot from Hackaday

And it’s not strictly gaming-related, but Bryan Cockfield at Hackaday keeps us appraised of the progress of a modern-ish OS for Commodore 64 computers! It’s called C64OS. People who have followed the 64 since olden times know this isn’t the first, or even the second, time this has happened. This project uses a character-based display to show its buttons and windows. It’s worth noting that it isn’t out yet, and it’s intended to be a paid offering, not something which one can just download and tinker with, which may limit its reach. Still though, it’s an interesting idea, and one that can take advantage of some of the C64’s more advanced peripherals, like mice, ram expansions and WiFi modems.

News 6/28/22: Chack’n Dwarf

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

Here’s all the most important gaming news for protoplasmic organisms! Fortunately our interest sphere intersects well with Earth gaming culture for some reason on which I will not speculate!

The Verge, Jay Peters: Steam now supports Nintendo classic controllers, the ones they released to support their Nintendo Switch Online service and are only sold to members of that service. This includes all of the controllers they released, including SNES and N64, which are probably the most interesting for general use.

IGN, Ryan Dinsdale: a fan is remaking The Simpsons: Hit and Run, and in the process is making hand-drawn versions of the cutscenes. That’s the one that was inspired by the 3D Grand Theft Auto series, not the one that was inspired by Crazy Taxi and is said to have been taken off the market due to a Sega patent on the gameplay (that one was Road Rage). It’s especially worth noting that according to this video, the game will never be made available for download, leading one to wonder… why are so many people posting about it, then? That’s a lot of animation work for one person’s enjoyment, I have to say.

Destructoid, Chris Moyse: Bubble Bobble predecessor Chack’n Pop is coming to the Arcade Archives series. You can get some information on it from Jeremy Parish’s NES Works video on the NES port. BTW, I’d like to just shout out to Jeremy for being one of the most watchable, least strident and obnoxious, YouTube content producers out there. Anyway, Chak’n Pop. It’s a much less interesting game than B[u,o]bble, and only supports one player in any format, but you might find it interesting? But, is it $8 worth of interesting? (Eight whole dollars? Really?)

Image from Polygon article, ultimately from Bay 12 Games

At Polygon, Charlie Hall expresses appreciation for the greatness of Dwarf Fortress‘ upcoming pixel art in its eagerly-anticipated Steam version, by artist Neoriceisgood. It seems like nearly everyone involved with gaming has a non-zero quantity of evil in their soul in some place, but Tarn and Zack Adams are as pure as you can find. I hope this works out for them. It’s so difficult to make it as an indie developer, especially one with such a niche following like DF. We wish them all the best.

And Liam Doolan at NintendoLife notes that video board game developer Asmodee Digital is, due to the closure of an important networking back end service (because of Amazon), ending online multiplayer for its Catan implementation. They’re also taking Pandemic off of the Switch eShop on July 31 (just three days from now!), although they seem to be hinting that it’ll be back in an improved and retooled version eventually. People who have already bought it will still be able to download it, but it won’t be sold to new users.

News 7/26/22: Tactics Risk of Space Jam

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

Kenneth Seward Jr. at Kotaku tells us about things he wished he knew before starting Multiversus, the Space Jam: A New Legacy of fighting games. Besides that Steven and Garnet are best characters? Not due to gameplay properties, just because.

In further X is the Y of Z news, at Polygon, Mike Mahardy makes the claim that Risk of Rain 2 is the Super Mario 64 of (their word) roguelikes. Blogmate rodneylives once did a Q&A with the Risk of Rain folks back at Game Developer, when it was Gamasutra. It’s cool!

Risk of Rain 2, image from developer’s site

Kite Stenbuck of SiliconEra confirms Nintendo’s confirmation that the 3DS and Wii-U eShops will be closing in March 2023. This is further after they stop accepting cash for points at the end of August. Yay for forced obsolescence! Wait, no, not yay! Boo, in fact!

Next, at Eurogamer, Victoria Kennedy tells us that Stray‘s robot language has been deciphered. I mean, this is a surprise? It’s just a substitution cipher. People do those for fun! It’s not exactly the Codex Seraphinianus, is it? No word on whether cat language has been decoded yet, in its infinite complexity. (MEOW = “Gimmie food!”)

IGN: Logan Plant posts about a split-screen mod for Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In fairness, they’re stretching the definition of mod a lot with this one: “of course” it’s not playable on console. It does link to an old 2017 post of fun Breath of the Wild mods that include a playable Waluigi.

Image blatantly scraped from The Verge

And Wes Fenlon at PC Gamer tells us about changes made to the upcoming remake of Tactics Ogre, many of which undo changes made to the previous remake of Tactics Ogre. I wish someone would remake my old Tactics Ogre Disk 2 on PS1, which snapped clean in half when I sat on it. I cried for fifteen minutes.

News 7/18/22: Fall Pac-Dwarf Unity

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

Jordan Middler at VGC noted of instances last week where Fall Guys players who had intended only to preview items were instead made to purchase them, and no refunds were offered. Since it became a big affair on social media developer Mediatonic reversed course and promised to refund the purchases, and that their customer support was lacking in this case. But it kind of makes you wonder about the errors that don’t make it big on social media, doesn’t it?

Unity has been in the news a lot lately! They merged with ironSource, a company that once made a malware installer (Jody MacGregor at PCGamer), and their CEO John Ricitiello criticized mobile game devs who had the temerity to not focus on monetization when they made games, calling them (focuses on page) “fucking idiots.” (Ian Walker, Kotaku) That second article, it’s beautiful and infuriating. Since then, Ricitiello has apologized for his statement on Twitter, and that tweet has itself made the rounds by now. As part of the fallout some developers are seeking out other packages, including site-favorite open-source gamedev system Godot.

PCGamesN (I’m too cranky right now to put the superscript on the N) writer Ian Boudreau presents news of the upcoming graphical Steam version of indie darling Dwarf Fortress, and how its trees change colors with the seasons! I seem to remember them doing this in ASCII mode too, but it’s nice to see it with non-terminal eyes. A lot more pictures are on this post on their Steam News page.

Lookin’ good, Blinky

Some fun links are good once in a while, am I right drebnar? Hackaday’s Orlando Hoilett links us to monseley’s Instructables page about an LCD matrix they cobbled together that shows animations of Pac-Man characters, and how you can make one yourself. It’s even set to make the ghost blue when it’s cold and red when it’s warm! Us one-celled organisms have always felt a certain kinship with ol’ Pacs, I tell you.

News 7/14/22: Genesis Zim Breakers BBS

“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.

News 7/12/22: Yu-Gi-Market Contraction, Oh!

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

It’s a rare day that we get to link to the Washington Post, in this case a piece by Michael Cavna on the death of Yu-Gu-Oh! creator, mangaka Kazuki Takahashi. Hey there Michael! Bet you never thought your work would be linked by a single-celled pixel-art organism! Can you ask them to do something about their ludicrous paywall drebnar? Yu-Gi-Oh! is only tangentially part of our purview here but there have been enough video games from that series that we can probably make room for it under Retro, plus it’s published by Konami. One of my favorite facts is that the card game includes several cards that officially refer to the Gradius series, including cards of the Vic Viper and Big Core.

Elliot Williams at Hackaday challenges us: You think you know how Mario Kart works? I think so? You supply electric potential through a wire to a console loaded with some game software, which sends signals to a video screen, and you use a wired controller to interact with it. Yes, I win! His article just links to a video (see above) about how the AI drivers work. This subject has been thought of so much that there’s a patent on such drivers granted to Lyle Rains for his work back in the early days of Atari, in 1979! That it took 20 years for that to expire is a blight on the history of game programming, drebnar!

PC Gamer’s Rich Stanton tells us that Yuji Naka is still angry at Square Enix for removing him from the Balan Wonderworld project. He accurately notes that the degree of acrimony from Naka about this is unprecedented-Naka is pissed and doesn’t care who knows it. The article suggests listening to both sides here. Here at Set Side B we admit, we tend to take the word of developers over those of gigantic corporations, especially when the developer is someone of Yuji Freaking Naka’s standing! We may be wrong, and if the word comes out that we are we’ll cheerfully admit to it, but it is easy for me to believe, in Naka’s words, that Square Enix “doesn’t care about games.”

Zack Zaiezen at Kotaku writes that Take Two is going after another Grand Theft Auto modder. Boo! Hiss! News like that fills up my angry sac!

It’s a good day for linking to non-gaming sites! At CNBC, Ryan Brownie warns of a coming contraction of the games industry, partly due to it coming down off the boost caused by the pandemic, and also from bottlenecks produced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

News 7/4/2022: Gilbert’s Sonic Pac-Mom

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

Jay Peters at The Verge reports that, sadly, personal attacks from griefers have caused Ron Gilbert to stop posting updates on the development of his upcoming Monkey Island game. Booo! Don’t be a Gripe Monster, friends!

On NintendoLife, Damien McFerran mentions an piece in the next issue of pay fanzine Lock-On by Undertale and Deltarune creator Toby Fox, about the impact of the Japanese series Mother, known in the US as Earthbound.

Destructoid’s Chris Moyse mentions the remake of Pac-Man World mentioned at Nintendo’s indie-focused Direct has Pac-Mom instead of Ms. Pac-Man, pushing her further down the memory hole. The issue seems to be a rights issue around the character, who was not created by Namco but instead by classic indie arcade designer GCC, who has licensed her exclusively to AtGames.

It was a few days ago, but at Kotaku Jeremy Winslow posted about Simon Thomley, a.k.a. “Stealth,” of Sonic Mania developer Headcannon, about how he has complained that their work on Sonic Origins was done under time crunch, and they were not allowed to debug their work before release, and even that integration with the final product introduced new bugs they were not responsible for.

News 7/1/2022: Doom Ring Dungeon Pinball Theremin

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

Sam MacKovech at Ars Technica writes about Doom RPG, a pre-iPhone game that has been ported to PC by fans.

At TechRadar, Callum Bains describes that SNES-style Elden Ring demake that’s been making the rounds. It’s just an animation though; not playable.

Over at GameSpot, Jordan Ramée interviews Endless Dungeon creative director Jean-Maxime Moris about the design of their roguelite action game.

Skanda Hazarika at XDA Developers points us to the creation of an Android port of the old Windows 3D Pinball game that was produced by Maxis!

Our policy to only link each site once per news post sometimes produces difficulties. This time our Nintendo Life post is by Ollie Reynolds, about the news that Zelda: Wind Waker was at first going to have a playable theremin. The news ultimately comes from a Do You Know Gaming video, which also mentions that Nintendo design guru Shigeru Miyamoto hated Wind Waker‘s cel-shaded art style at first, which in retrospect is one of the aspects of the game that’s held up the best:

And at Destructoid, Chris Moyse has news of the upcoming release of Ray’z Arcade Chronology, another of those arcade collections that have been popular lately, this about the Ray series of arcade shooting games, which are called either shmups or STGs, depending on which subcultures you’ve had the most exposure to. It is planned for release in 2023.

News 6/29/22: Steam Stolar Fall Gay Bob Hacking

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

K. Holt at Engadget says Valve has doubled production of Steam Decks, meaning those on the waiting list will have less waiting to do.

Bernie Stolar
Image from VentureBeat

At VentureBeat’s subsite GamesBeat, Dean Takahashi sadly reports that Bernie Stolar, former President at Sega of America, has passed away at the age of 75. Alana Hauges of NintendoLife notes that his early career was in co-op, before joining Atari and working on their Lynx portable system. Later at Sony, Stolar helped shepherd the Playstation and franchises such as Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, before leaving to help Sega launch the Dreamcast.

After going free-to-play, the player base of popular battle royale hit Fall Guys‘ has ballooned to 20 million! But Eric Van Allen at Destructoid tells us that there is some tension among long-time players over changes to its currency model. At GameRant, Rory Young has more, including an observation made by one of the players: under the new system, a player who loses five matches in the first round ends up making more than a player who wins a match after five rounds!

Space Bob vs The Replicons

Graham Smith at Rock Paper Shotgun tells tales of the 2018 indie game Space Bob vs The Replicons (Steam), described as like a 2D No Man’s Sky, but didn’t do well on its initial release. Its creator had a heart attack a week after it hit Steam, then left the games industry. But he’s back, and has announced a big update. Its developer is Intravenous Software, and they’re on Twitter!

Sharang Biswas at Eurogamer posts an essay for Pride month about fanfiction and mods made by the gay community. (Note: slightly NSFW image)

Jeremy Winslow at Kotaku tells us that Blizzard has announced that, when Overwatch 2 releases, it will replace the original game, making it unavailable to play! Progress will carry over, but 6V6 matches will be sunset in favor of the new version’s 5V5 teams.

Finally, we have received word that venerable roguelike NetHack has been inducted into the Museum of Modern Art, as part of its Never Alone exhibit! We’ve seen it mentioned on PC Gamer, Reddit, and Slashdot — remember them? DevTeam member Jean-Christophe Collet muses on the distinction on LinkedIn.

News 6/26/22: Path of the N64 Controller Minecart

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

Graham Smith of Rock Paper Shotgun lets us know that the team who made AM2R, which infamously Nintendo sent a cease-and-desist, are working on a new game that’s a Metroidvania, but has nothing to do with Metroid, called Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus. It’s awful that Nintendo did that, and it’s great that they didn’t let the experience sour them!

Over at wccftech, Aernout van de Velde writes of an N64 emulator plug-in that supports many advanced graphics features, such as ray tracing and 60 fps output! Ocarina of Time ran natively at just 20 fps, seeing it at 60 is like opening your eyes opened for the first time. Here’s the announcement tweet, with embedded demonstration video:

At Ars Technica, Sam Machkovech reviews Sonic Origins, and notes a discomfiting thing about it: it costs $40 for many fewer games than a standard Genesis rom collection, yet on top of that also locks features and music behind DLC charges. Boo!

Matt Purslow of IGN tells us that Microsoft is confirming shortages of Xbox controllers. I’m sure some people are already trying to figure out ways to blame this on Joe Biden.

Ollie Reynolds writing on Nintendo Life relates an interesting discovery about Super Mario RPG back on the SNES: during its minecart section, if you don’t touch the controls at all, the game will play itself, and complete it for you. They found the news from the Twitter feed of splendid Mario arcana site Supper Mario Broth!