Set Side B

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.

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.

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News 7/6/2022: Technoblade Overwatch Amico Shlorp

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

It’s everywhere, but Kacee Fay at Dot Esports is one of the many to note: Mojang adds a tribute to popular deceased Minecraft YouTuber Technoblade to their splash screen. We posted about Technoblade’s passing a few days ago.

TechRadar’s Callum Bains reports that social features are coming to Overwatch 2. The news broke in a Reddit AMA with its dev team.

Hopping over to Kotaku, Luke Plunkett finds a site with downloads for every English-language SNES manual. Here’s the site itself. The files are hosted on archive.org, and the formats include PDF and PDF with OCR’d text.

The news has been going around the web, but the first place we saw it was Nintendo Life, where Ollie Reynolds wrote about the trademark expiring for the Intellivision Amico. It’s looking increasingly likely that it’s just not going to come out.

Ed Nightingale at Eurogamer brings word that Twitch will soon allow streamers to identify their streams with custom tags, which I’m like, welcome to the entire rest of the galaxy for well over a decade? We here at Set Side B add tags to our posts quite profusely. It’s part of the major religion on my home planet, drebnar! “Thou shalt always add all the tags ye can think of to thine content,” Book of Shlorp, 12:2.

And at GamingBible in the UK, Mark Foster reveals that Sony has filed for a patent relating to using PS3 peripherials on the PS5. So, they’re patenting having their devices work with their own systems? That’s pretty cool, I guess. The implication of it is that Sony is moving forward on their plans to offer PS3 emulation. The patent doesn’t mention all the devices by name, but includes illustrations of a variety of gadgets including the EyeToy and the PSP Go.

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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.

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!

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.

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