Slowly making headway against a year’s worth of accumulated links. Please enjoy whatever takes your interest.
1. Sega’s One-Sided History, from The History of How We Play, about the tensions between Sega’s Japanese and American management.
2. From Mugen Gaming, working on a translation of Japanese TTRPG Sword World, with a crowdfunding campaign to begin in 2026. Included here because Sword World is soaked in video game influences. It really is a case of back-and-forth around the world: Wizardry and Ultima inspired Dragon Quest, Dragon Quest inspired other JRPGs, and then those JRPGs influenced Sword World. And to go with it, a nearly-complete fan translation of a Super Famicom Sword World game.
4. At Retroevolve, Mandy Odoerfer describes the charm of bootleg Pokemon games, games like 2003 Pocket Monster Carbuncle and Pokemon Vietnamese Crystal.
Image from the article, up on Retroevolve
5. The Splatterhouse Homepage, an oldschool webshrine, is still updating, and has a new page on the recent dumping of an unreleased sequel to Splatterhouse Wanpaku Graffiti, called Splatterworld, although I notice that one of its downloads is actually dated to 1993. Hmm, curious!
YES I KNOW, yet another Nintendo thing. Nintendo Adults are the video game version of Disney Adults, in so many ways. One more way now because there are actual Nintendo theme parks.
I maintain that I am not a Nintendo Adult. But they have had a long history of making inventive and interesting games. I thought they’d been failing a bit at that lately, but then comes Kirby Air Riders, as weird and distinctive game as they’ve ever published. (By the way, did you know that they’ve put up Christmas decorations on the Kirby Air Riders menu screen and paddock area?)
It’s a weird bit of console gaming lore than Sony was so proud of the PS2’s Cell processor that they actually officially ported Linux to it. All you had to do was buy the “Linux Kit,” which contained two DVDs, a module that added monitor-capable video out and Ethernet ports, and a “gigantic” 40GB hard drive.
As it turns out, the PS2 was actually all that great a Linux machine, and it was soon outclassed by PCs. That hasn’t stopped there from being a Playstation Linux community, with a website that sadly announces that it most soon close down in a post dating to 2009. It feels a bit like one of those “Closing Liquidation” signs that sometimes stores that have no plans of shutting down put up, in the hopes of attracting some extra customers. Oh well, I’m sure it’ll perish eventually, such is the way of all things. I just hope they can hold out a few extra decades.
Buying a complete unopened PS2 Linux box nowadays can cost you well over $1,000.
It was released in 2002; Linux itself was first created in 1991.
It’s based on the Japanese distribution Kondara, which itself was based off of Red Hat, and it shows due to it using RPM for its package format.
It runs WindowMaker for its GUI, which is based off of NeXTSTEP, the predecessor of the GUI used in current-day macOS.
In 2025 this is very much a Stupid Computer Trick, or perhaps a Stupid Console Trick, but ActionRetro has so much fun running OSes on various unexpected hardware that it’s difficult to fault him for it.
Wow, Ocarina of Time has some bizarre glitches. There is one where if you talk to a character with a specific object in hand, you get absolutely the wrong item in return. I need to pin down the details so I’ll talk about that one later.
In the meantime, here’s another ridiculous glitch, explained by Skawo. (7 minutes) Skawo’s style is to use onscreen text to do the talking, which I can appreciate since I usually have subtitles on anyway.
In brief, due to the way the game handles weather, if you enter Kakariko Village during a certain story event, then leave it immediately, it starts raining heavily, then doesn’t have the chance to stop. The game handles lighting separately for each time of day and each kind of weather. Kakariko has a table for the specific kind of weather for that event, HEAVY_RAIN, but most places don’t, so the game refers to a table of garbage data to provide lighting for places. That causes Hyrule Field to take on a bright purple hue, among other places. Have a look!
3. Read Only Memo on a recompilation of Dinosaur Planet, Rare’s N64 game that got reconfigured into Star Fox Adventures on Gamecube, their last game made for Nintendo before Microsoft bought them. (They did make some portable games after that, like It’s Mr Pants for Gameboy Advance and a port of Diddy Kong Racing for the DS.)
This one is incredible. The Monkey Ball games are as hardcore as they come, and, for the most part, have reasonably accurate physics that’s consistent under normal circumstances. But normal circumstances do not apply at extremely high speeds, where weird edge cases in the engine become much more likely to affect the ball’s travel.
Nambo created a video that showcases every Super Monkey Ball glitch, for the first two games at least. The video title calls them techniques, but I think glitches more accurately describes what’s being explicated here.
The video is amazingly complete and is 42 minutes long. It takes some kind of ridiculous ultrageek to watch the whole thing. Yes, I did that, why do you ask? Are you going to do it too? If you don’t it’s no skin off of your nose, maybe just watch enough of it to get some idea of how deep the Super Monkey Hole goes?
EDIT: I said that Jeremy didn’t have an N64 initially, and I thought he said that, but later on he said he got it at launch. My mistake.
I still don’t know how Jeremy Parish can finish all of his video game history subseries before the year 2084, when the Robotrons revolt and destroy human-kind, but he’s making good time. He’s at last started on his examination of the Nintendo 64 era, with N64 Works #000. (22 minutes)
He admits that the N64 era was one where he originally didn’t have the Nintendo console for that generation, opting instead for the Playstation. I was in college at the time and had both, but got the N64 first, and got far more use out of it overall. Maybe I had weird tastes? Jeremy does admit that Super Mario 64 looked really impressive on all those demo kiosks.
Back then, Mario 64 looked like an impossible feat. Nowadays, through the efforts of people like pannenkoek, Kaze Emanuar and others, we know that Super Mario 64 was a creation combining long cycles of iteration, a bunch of outright hackery, and a whole lot of work. I hope someday that the full story of Mario 64’s creation can be told. Maybe Jeremy’s eventual examination of the game will help to pull back the curtain?
Falcom’s Popful Mail is one of those games that takes after classic anime. It’s almost the perfect anime-styled light RPG, with appealing and fun characters on a quest that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It got a good number of ports, and they all have something a bit different about them. In the US we only got the Sega CD version, ported by the prolific-but-controversial Working Designs, but in Japan there was a PC-88 original, and ports to the PC-98, PC Engine CD and Super Famicom. Hardcore Gaming wrote them up here.
I could go on about its very light RPG elements (there’s no experience system at all), its comedic story, its characters and music, and I will someday. But until then, please be content with what the Basement Brothers had to say about the original PC-88 version of Popful Mail, which is the version for the weakest machine, but still fun. (39 minutes)
Falcom had developed a reputation for making hardcore, unique and system-heavy RPGs like Dragon Slayer and Xanadu, so Popful Mail was a departure. It was designed to be an early multimedia game, with animations and even voice acting in some versions. This version, however, was distributed on floppy disk, and for a underpowered system, so it couldn’t rely on audio-visual splendor. It still did pretty well for itself, as the Brothers demonstrate.
It’s always saddened me that Popful Mail was a one-off. It’s a property that seems ripe for sequels and animation, but to my knowledge it never happened. Maybe Falcom will ease their stream of Ys sequels someday and look at updating more of the other games in their history, and maybe then they’ll return to Mail and her cartoony comrades. Here’s hoping.
The field of electronic entertainment, our self-selected area of exploration, is vast. On one end you have visceral creations that we don’t even bother with, games that are mostly about pointing at people in a virtual world and shooting them. On the other, we have esoteric creations of pure mathematics like Conway’s Game of Life.
How well-known would you consider Conway’s Life to be? By one measure it’s incredibly obscure, in that if you ask a random person on the street if they know about it they’ll probably at best think you’re talking about Hasbro’sGame of Life, a simple board game where players pilot colored pegs riding in a tiny plastic car down a winding road from birth to retirement, a buffet of unexamined assumptions with a long history which itself may be worthy of exploration here itself some day.
But by another yardstick, few games are more well-known than Conway’s Life. It was created 55 years ago, in 1970, by British mathematician John Horton Conway, meaning it’s Older than Pong. It’s not technically just a computer game, but its explorations have grown so huge that practically everyone who cares simulates it on a computer.
When I say it’s a creation of pure mathematics, please don’t be scared off, because it’s really simple to understand. It was a popular subject of Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Recreations columns in Scientific American.
Imagine an infinite grid, a pocket universe that’s like an Excel spreadsheet that goes on forever. Each cell can contain a counter, which is considered “alive,” or nothing, which is considered “dead,” or just empty. From there, you use a simple process to simulate this universe.
You don’t have to worry about physics or gravity or free will. Instead, every counter on the grid with less than two neighbors dies (is removed) due to loneliness; every counter with more than three dies due to overcrowding; and on every empty space with exactly three neighbors is birthed a new counter. By “neighbors,” I mean on one of the eight spaces around it. By “birthed,” I note that reproduction in the world of Life is genderless and trinary.
So that’s how to do it. But why would you? It’s because despite its simplicity, Life patterns grow by unexpected and interesting processes. It’s a case of emergent complexity; like how DNA molecules ultimately produce living creatures in our world, simple origins create hugely complex results. That similarity of complexity to our universe is why it’s called a “game of life.”
A better introduction can be found at this page at Cornell University. It’s a type of cellular automation, a wider field with many game design implications. You could consider classical roguelikes to be a type of cellular automation, although not nearly as simple, or as elegant. Within the world of Conway’s Life there are Gliders, Oscillators, Wicks, Puffers, Guns, Methuselahs, Spaceships and more. While there aren’t physics as we consider them, there is a “speed of light.”
The website ConwayLife.com, created probably some time in 2009, is one of those many websites out there that invisibly hosts active communities that big media sites routinely ignore, the kind of thing that Set Side B carries both a banner and a deep affection for. There was a time where sites like this were a major focus of the World Wide Web, and it still is, even if the wider world fails to notice it. ConwayLife.com hosts a simulator on its homepage, a wiki of concepts, an active forum, a well-populated list of links, and even a Discord.
Please, those of you who read this, try to move your interest in the direction of exploring this strange but fascinating phenomena. Maybe it’ll bounce off of you, but maybe it won’t.
If you know where to look, there are many arcade machine restoration videos on Youtube, whole channels devoted to them. This Halloween-themed video from Electric Starship Arcade is only one of them. It’s mostly about the process of fixing up the cabinet and has very little gameplay, but it does end with a fun sequence where they dress up someone as a vampire and, driven in a hearse, bring him out in a coffin to introduce it! (40 minutes) And if you watch it, it’ll haunt your view history, and influence Youtube into recommending more restoration videos to you, in a suitably spooky fashion. Ooooooo!
File this under blasphemous acts of hackery, reported on by Video Game Esoterica (Youtube, 10 minutes) and Time Extension, a super-deluxe techno-nuts person going by malucard is trying to port Super Mario 64 to the original Playstation. They have a GitHub repo containing their efforts so far.
The growing number of fan-made decompilations of classic games is what make these hilarious affronts to the very idea of console exclusivity possible. But while ports of such games to PC platforms allow for much greater visual clarity and the resolution of long-standing deficiencies, this is almost a celebration of the idea of technical limitations—and I, for one, am all in favor. But you have to understand, I’ve given serious thought to the idea of picking up an old CP/M machine and coding on it in assembly. I’m crazy pants, is what I’m saying, and on things of this nature you probably shouldn’t be listening to me.
Just look at the footage in that video, and how it’s more glitch than game. It seems impossible that it’ll ever run like the N64 original, but we can dream, can’t we?
The Plush Girls Dozen is a collection of fantasy console games; that’s games for fantasy consoles, not fantasy games for consoles. 10 are for PICO-8, two for TIC-80.
I linked yesterday about an instance of the Gigantes legendary machine battle in Kirby Air Riders City Trial. Here’s a full game of it, from Gigantes’ point of view. (8 minutes) I hope this doesn’t become a frequent thing, it might be fun once in a while but not if every other game turns into a huge boss battle.
