The video I’d like to point out today is this one on the dungeon generation in the first Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game (19 minutes), which basically lays bare the entire scheme by which nearly all Mystery Dungeons construct their procedural death labyrinths.

I’ve played quite a few Mystery Dungeon games, including nearly all of the many versions of Shiren the Wanderer (Rainbow Labyrinth is the only one I’m missing), and these dungeon level types keep coming up again and again. I’d be very surprised if essentially the same code, or close to it, wasn’t used in all of them. The beginning of the dungeon generation explainer is at 5:03.

One interesting thing is that the dungeons generated by the various routines often create maps that can be seen as variations upon the dungeons from the original roguelike, Rogue itself. Rogue used a distinctive 3×3 grid of rooms. Sometimes a “room” might be a winding corridor, a dead-end or a dark maze, but it doesn’t take much playing to see the patterns used, and the Mystery Dungeon games obviously use a similar system for most of its floors, using differently-sized grids. Sometimes extra dead-ends are generated, and there are a few extra styles, but in its overall plan it’s Rogue-standard. It’s what the video calls the “standard generator.”

This isn’t all that the video explains, for just one example it goes over the details of how the game’s random number generators work, and also how they can be abused (the dungeon RNG is seeded to 1 at boot, which can be used to ensure dungeons generate the same way). I think it’s essential viewing for any Mystery Dungeon enthusiast.

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grub (properly lowercase) is a bootloader for some Linux machines. I can’t tell you if it’s easy to add it to a computer’s startup files, but if you know how to do such things, please enjoy.

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Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

About 3½ years ago, when I started doing this blog and Sundry Sundays, I would post a greater variety of thing here.

One thing I delighted in posting were video game-related ratings from web comedy master Lore Sjöberg, whose name I will always treasure from his work on earlyweb humor magazine The Brunching Shuttlecocks, which is sadly offline now.

About a year ago Lore started making web humor again, for a short while anyway, and one of the things he did was four more installments of The Ratings, one of the most popular features of old Brunching, once so popular that he collected many of them into a book. He even did a few video ratings during the time he 𝙼𝙰𝙳𝙴 𝙲𝙾𝙽𝚃𝙴𝙽𝚃 for Wired Magazine. I once linked to his ratings of Legend of Zelda weapons, which is still as funny as when he recorded it 17 years ago.

Well, about a year ago, during the brief revival of teh raitngs at badgods.com, he rated a few 1st Generation Pokemon, and what do you know, he’s still got it. An example:

HITMONCHAN

I’m deeply disappointed Niantic didn’t continue with the Hitmonchan/Hitmonlee naming scheme. That could have given us Hitmonsegal, Hitmonyeoh, and Hitmonvandamme.

If you enjoy it, or have ever enjoyed Lore’s work through the years, you can currently find him on Bluesky. Now that there’s not a thriving ecosystem of blogs to link to his work, he’s kind of hard to find now. Help the algorithm realize he’s a treasure, and go have a look!

The Ratings: First Generation Pokemon (badgods.com)

ALSO, I just found out, AGDQ 2026, the week-long charity speedrunning marathon, begins today at Noon Eastern Time! Right off the bat it starts with Super Mario Sunshine and Jet Set Radio, and around 11:30 that night will be running the new Katamari game, Once Upon A Katamari! And from there there’s more great runs to watch, with the typically-hilarious Awful Block this year taking place midnight to sunrise Thursday morning. Here’s the full schedule.

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In the most recent of these (the ninth, 10 minutes long) one of the examples has to do with exploring glitched, out-of-bounds Pokemon boxes. These can cause writes to unexpected regions of memory, and very strange glitches indeed. But one in particular, if it happens, causes a write to a region of memory that causes an unexpected bankswitch, meaning, suddenly a whole swath of the game ROM isn’t what the code expects. In 99% of cases this would cause a sudden game crash end of story, but in THIS case the code that ends up executing doesn’t immediately crash the game, and not only that later in the code path, the bank gets switched back, and the code path is in such a place that it actually recovers, and the primary effect is just some glitched graphics, all completely by chance. Huh!

Here is that video, and if it’s interesting, the others (9 video playlist link) might be to your liking too.

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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.

3. Martin Piper takes a look at the 3D wireframe driving game Stunt Car Racer for the Commodore 64. (45 minutes) From 1989, it did a number of things that you wouldn’t have thought possible on an unmodified C64, and he pieces through its programming.

4. At Retroevolve, Mandy Odoerfer describes the charm of bootleg Pokemon games, games like 2003 Pocket Monster Carbuncle and Pokemon Vietnamese Crystal.

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!

6. Userlandia exhaustively explored everything at VCFMW this year! (1 hour) I agree: there was a right ton of stuff there to explore!

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There’s this Korean person who goes by Sanago on Youtube who used 3D pens to make models of various pop culture characters, and some of them are of video game characters. Here’s Sonic (11 minutes):

Here’s Tails (16 minutes):

Some others: Shadow the Hedgehog (15m), Psyduck (11½m), Sir Fetch’d (10m), Pikachu (13m), and a Minecraft Chest that’s also an Airpod case (11m). There’s probably more, but I’m going to go ahead and end it there and get some sleep. See you tomorrow! Zzzzz….

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Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

From TerminalMontage, who’s shown up here multiple times before. I thought maybe I might have already posted this, but a quick search seems to indicate that I haven’t, and it’s a useful intersection between Nintendo things, roguelike things, and silly things.

Specifically, this Something (5½ minutes) is About the original releases of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Rescue Team, Red and Blue. And you’ll probably best see what all the About is about if you’ve played the original.

I’ll throw in some notes about the references in this video:

• The rescue mechanic, which involves teleporting rescued Pokemon. How the hell does it work?
• Kecleons, the shopkeepers in PMD, are as scary as depicted here. To think that this would be a lasting legacy of the Nethack Devteam’s Izchak Miller.
• The music in the volcano segment is from the game, and it does the thing that the kids these days call “slaps.”
• Make sure to fast forward through the credits for a final closing gag, where we find out who Cyndaquil really is.

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The video mentions that powering the clock and oscillator causes Pokemon Gold, Silver and Crystal cartridges to run out of battery power, and lose their saved game data, much faster than other Gameboy carts with save game battery. Sorry to break it to you; your Pokemon are probably gone by now. Poor out a health potion for Pikachu.

Another interesting fact revealed is, the clock works by recording raw time since the game was last powered on, and the actual date and time are fully updated when the game is started up. If you wait a long time between plays, over 511 days, the timer can wrap around and lose track of how long it’s been.

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Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

I never got into the Pokemon Trading Card Game scene. I never got into Magic either. The thing about trading card games, I’ve always said, sometimes twice in a row even, is they seem more like a business model than a game.

It’s not that they don’t have good design, really, but that the purpose of that game is to make it so that players buy more cards. And despite that, whenever I bring this up among obsessed players, they say it doesn’t take money to win. No, but it makes winning much more likely. More money gets you more cards, and statistically, that means you get better cards. More money means you can outright buy better cards from traders. Money rules all, just like it does in the actual real physical world, and that’s something I play games to escape.

Recently the Pokemon Company released a second app version of their money-printing game. This one promises streamlined rules, and lets you get booster packs without paying cash, although being “free to play,” monetization is sadly a big part of the game.

Word is, it is also infuriatingly difficult to win at, an experience that TerminalMontage, creator of the “Something About” series of animations, captures aptly in their new animation. (8 minutes)

My opinion of the Something About cartoon is scattered. There’s some funny episodes in there, but it also relies a lot on the “earsplitting scream EXPLOSION” gag. It happens at least once in this video. And sometimes it substitutes hyper-energy for actual jokes. Yet, hidden amidst the LOLrandom, the good ones really are good. Will you find this one to be so? There’s but one way to find out.

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Multiple long ages of the internet ago, famed nethacker Boudewijn Wayers wrote a spoiler called To Die: 50 Ways to Leave Your Game. It was published on his long-gone Nethack Home Page, but copies of it remain scattered around the internet, although currently I can only find one copy on Google, from a page on tecfa.unige.ch. I’m quite sad that this venerable piece of hack lore is in danger of extinction, at least to people who don’t know the magic codes to enter on the Wayback Machine.

To Die is a wonderful bit of roguelike lore, so great that I’m posting it in full here soon to help preserve it. But today’s focus is on a more recent variation of it: a Youtube video from TheZZAZZGlitch listing every way to die in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue and Red Rescue Team. (21 minutes)

In the spirit of the communal spoiler files of old, I enter the list of death causes here, in easy-to-search-for text. For the details, I refer you to the video. Note that every source of damage in the game that has the potential to reduce the player’s HP to zero has a corresponding entry in this list, so it serves as a map to every cause of harm in the game’s Pokeverse.

WAYS TO KICK THE POKEBUCKET (33 possible causes)

was defeated by (attacker)’s (move) (this is the most common cause of adventure ending)
missed a Jump Kick and wiped out.
missed a Hi Jump Kick and wiped out.
fainted from the foe’s Destiny Bond. (an instadeath)
fainted, covered in sludge.
fainted from a move’s recoil damage.
fainted from damage it took bouncing.
was defeated by a foe’s pent-up energy.
fainted from stepping on spikes.
fainted from a bad burn.
fainted, unable to bear constriction.
fainted after the poison spread.
fainted while still being wrapped.
was felled by a curse.
was drained to nothing by Leech Seed.
fainted from hearing Perish Song. (another instadeath)
fainted while in a nightmare.
was felled by a thrown rock.
fainted from hunger.
disappeared in an explosion.
tripped a Chestnut Trap and fainted.
fell into a Pitfall Trap and fainted.
was defeated by a Blast Seed’s damage.
was transformed into an item. (instadeath)
fainted from being knocked flying.
was felled by a Pokemon sent flying.
gave up the exploration. (quitting the game, not explicitly a death, but serves the same purpose)
was blown out by an unseen force. (spent too long on a single floor and was expelled by the Winds of Kron)
returned with the fallen partner. (your sidekick fainted, so you left too, automatically)
fainted due to the weather.
failed to protect the client Pokemon. (FISSION MAILED)
fainted from a Wonder Orb.
fainted from an item.

Unattainable but still used in the code, waiting for a moment that can never come (7 causes):

was transformed into a friend. (what?)
left without being befriended. (hwat?)
was defeated by debug damage. (nooo not debug damage)
was felled by a thrown item.
was deleted for the sake of an event. (oh okay then)
went away. (so long)
was possessed. (spooky)

Three messages exist in the code but with no way to activate them, even theoretically:

fainted from a debug attack.
was defeated by a powerful move.
fainted due to a trap’s damage.

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Some of cases shown:

• In Punch-Out!! on the Wii, off-camera, Piston Hondo is reading a Sailor Moon manga in a between-round cutscene.
• On the original Pikmin’s title menu, the name of the menu programmer is off-camera to the left.
• There’s a cartoon drawing of a Goomba as a texture beneath Pinna Park in Super Mario Sunshine. This has been given the name “Kug,” and there’s more information on it on Supper Mario Broth and The Cutting Room Floor.
  • Noki Bay in Sunshine has a model of a book locked in an unreachable area. There’s more info on it on The Cutting Room Floor.
  • This one’s relatively well known: the trophy of Princess Daisy in Super Smash Bros. Melee has a texturing error that gives her a third eye, hidden beneath her hair on the back of her head. The trophy for Meta Ridley also has a hidden heart texture inside of it.
  • In Earthbound, if you can clip outside of the terrain in the upper-right corner of Onett, you can reach the ultimate upper-right corner of the whole map. (All of the areas in Earthbound are connected on a single huge map!) Interacting with the corner there can access a debug menu left in the game.
  • There’s a secret control room beneath the island in Donkey Kong 64.
  • Another well known glitch, the video mentions the glitch that lets Samus get inside the level terrain in Metroid by rolling into a ball and coming out of it repeatedly while a closed door surrounds her. This is the means by which people can get to the glitchy “secret worlds” mentioned in an early issue of the Nintendo Fun Club News.
  • At the end, the video reminds of the “Minus World” glitch in NES Super Mario Bros.

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In terms of depth, this post is rated 4 out of 5: highly detailed information for obsessed fans and game designers.

The first (28m):

And, the second (44m), it goes further into the weeds and is longer:

So, here’s a tl;dw overview of the first video. Despite the length, this is really only a brief summary! Some Body got their information by reverse engineering the games’ code, so it should be considered authoritative.

PMD has three times of actions, moving, attacking and using items. First they try to use an item–if there is no item to use, or the situation isn’t appropriate, or there’s a random component and they choose not to, they fall through to attacking. If there’s no one appropriate to attack, they fall through to moving or wandering. If they’re not pursuing a target and aren’t wandering, they wait in place.

Awake Pokemon try to reach a target: team members try to reach the leader (you)*, enemies try to reach a party member of yours. If they are following someone, they try to reach the target by default moving diagonally before moving orthogonally. This is good to know, and an effective strategy, since it’s harder to escape a cardinal-adjacent Pokemon than a diagonal-adjacent one. If a Pokemon has a target in sight but can’t move towards towards it, it doesn’t move.

(* Note: for teammates, this assumes the “Let’s Go Together” tactic is in effect. Generally, tactics settings are covered in the second video.)

No Pokemon can move towards a target they can’t see. Sight in Blue & Red Rescue Team is two spaces around them, or throughout a lit room they are in plus one space into corridors. Of course, invisible targets can’t be seen, even if they’re nearby. Note, a quirk of the Mystery Dungeon series generally: when standing in the first space of a corridor, you can only see slightly into the room, but everyone in the room can see you. While your default sight range in darkness is two spaces in the PMD1 games, instead of MD’s standard 1 space, you’re still a bit blind when moving into rooms. Notably, that two space distance around you is a square, so in corridors with bends in them you get a bit extra sight distance.

Now comes the interesting part (to people who are as obsessed with roguelikes as I am): what happens if a Pokemon loses sight of its target? In PMD1, it considers the last four locations the Pokemon was in, and tries to go to the one it was visible in most recently. Note in bent corridors, it becomes harder for a character to lose its target.

If the target is four turns outside of the follower’s sight, it has lost track of it, and the follower begins wandering randomly. This can happen if the Pokemon has never had a target (none has come into sight), or the target or follower teleports, the target moves over terrain the follower cannot cross, or the target moves away when the follower is occupied, or, due to the variety of events that can happen in the Mystery Dungeons, other ways.

Followers without targets wander randomly. When they spot a target, they cease moving randomly and pursue it. But if still wandering, in rooms, they pick a random exit, go to it and go down the corridor. In a corridor, they follow it until they reach a room (then entering it), or they reach an intersection. At an intersection, we see an interesting behavior: PMD1 occured before Chunsoft switched over to making wanderering monsters pick random directions at corridor intersections! In later Mystery Dungeon games, including later Pokemon Mystery Dungeons, wandering monsters go straight in intersections if they can. This is behavior that can be relied upon, but not in PMD1.

Outmatched Pokemon can decide to flee, essentially, moving away from their targets instead of towards. In rooms, they pick the exit furthermost from their pursuer, unless they moves them towards that pursuer; then they just try to get away as best they can, likely remaining in the room. A quirk of this: sometimes a fleeing monster breaks for an an exit that is more distant from the target, but not away from at attacker, giving it a free hit. The circumstances around this are complicated: the explanation begins at 7:16 in the first video.

For attacking, Pokemon have up to four moves, and a normal “attack.” This generic attack is not part of the main Pokemon game series. It was present in the first two PMD games, but after that became less effective. In the fourth and fifth PMD games, the normal attack only does five points of damage, and in the Switch remake of Rescue Team, it does no damage at all; it’s only a tool for passing time. But we’re still in the realm of PMD1, where “normal attacks” are not only useful but frequently used, because they don’t consume any PP.

Attacks are chosen based on a weighted average of all the usable moves. Each move has its own weight value; the normal attack weight’s varies according to the number of other moves available.

Ranged attacks are an interesting case. If a Pokemon has a ranged attack, and an enemy that can be attacked at a distance, it triggers the attack routine, where it picks a move from those available, but then only actually performs the move if the attack can reach its target. This can result in an attacker passing up opportunities to attack while an opponent approaches it. Out of fairness, room-range attack moves are only used by the AI when adjacent to an enemy.

Items have a bunch of minutiae associated with their use by the AI, but a lot of it is pretty ordinary. A few highlights: teammates can throw held negative status equipment at enemies, wild Pokemon start using items at Level 16, and there is only one Orb that wild Pokemon can use, and teammates can’t use it: the Rollcall Orb, for them, summons a number of other wild Pokemon into adjacency with them.

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I usually steer well clear of the hard sell, or “prompt for engagement,” when it comes to asking you to follow links and view videos from here. I figure if you’re interested you’ll click through, and if you’re not, then maybe tomorrow. But I’m breaking through that reserve just this once, as this place is amazing. You really have to see this if you have any interest in Nintendo, APE, Pokemon, Dragon Quest or their histories (12 minutes):

Our Private Tour of the Top Secret Nintendo Game Developer Hangout in Tokyo (Youtube, 12m)

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What kind of obsession produces an effort, not just to complete Pokemon Platinum, which after all was sold to kids with the expectation that they would be able to beat it eventually. No, what about an effort to finish every possible game of Pokemon Platinum, using a script that works on every possible random seed, of over four billion, that the game can generate? And also operates mostly on “Nuzlocke Challenge” constraints, where any defeated Pokemon (here, after the first battle) have to be released? But that’s okay, because after that first fight, the player is never defeated?

That this is possible at all is because of Pokemon Platinum’s use of a PRNG, a pseudo-random number generator. While figuring out how, mathematically, to beat over four billion possible games is a formidable challenge, it’s still better than beating every possible conceivable random sequence of events, which can’t ever be done conclusively.

So, that’s what MartSnack did. They found out how to swim through the deep-yet-discrete sea of probability to obtain just the Pokemon, and Pokemon stats, they needed to complete the game, regardless of any random event the game could throw at them, with the same sequence of button presses. It’s a journey that requires frequent synchronization, to make sure no one possible play breaks free of the others, sending that branch of fate down a rogue path. How is this possible at all, I leave it to you to discover in their Youtube video, an interesting hour and five minutes found by MeFi user (and former owner) cortex, here:

Beating Every Possible Game of Pokemon Platinum At The Same Time (Youtube, 1h5m)

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Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

If you’re familiar with Pokemon creatures, you might understand this sequence of four short animations from NCHProductions a little better, but really, it won’t be that helpful. They’re weird, but fun, but weird. They relate a sequence of events, which I say because I can’t bring myself to call it a story.

#1: Eevee Tries a Lemon (1 minute)

#2: Eevee Disassembles a Magnemite (2 minutes)

#3: Magmemites (who are also bodybuilders for some reason) evolves into Magneton, and also Umbreon’s there (1 1/2 minutes)

#4: Eevee eats fried chicken (1 1/2 minutes)

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It’s 39 minutes long, and it might prove difficult to get through for some, but it’s good and interesting information:

I will give you an overview:

When the original Pokemon games generate a random encounter with wild Pokemon in the overworld, they refer to one of two lists in RAM memory, copied there from ROM. One list is for “grass” Pokemon, that are generated when walking through tall grass, and one is for “water” Pokemon, that are generated when in riding a Pokemon using Surf over water tiles. The lists are copied when entering a new region, with a differing enemy generation table.

Due to an oversight in the tile checking code, a different subtile is checked when generating a Pokemon from each list. This means it’s possible, on some shores, to generate a Pokemon from the grass list when actually on the water. If one of the lists has a Pokemon generation rate of 0% for its type, then its list doesn’t actually get copied. Some regions that are largely aquatic aren’t intended to ever generate grass Pokemon, and so have a 0% grass encounter rate, and so never copy a grass Pokemon encounter table. The Pokemon generated come from whatever was in memory before, which may be all zeros, or may be whatever used the memory in that area previously. Pokemon has little RAM to work with, so the Pokemon generation table memory has other things that use that memory, and one of those is data for the trainers you trade Pokemon with.

If you use Fly to fast travel to Cinnabar Island, you can reach a region where the grass encounter table won’t have been initialized, but you can still cause grass encounters to happen by Surfing on the shoreline. The contents of that table can be manipulated by doing something else that uses that memory beforehand. As a result, you can cause an encounter with an undefined Pokemon, which has the name MISSINGNO and has various glitch attributes.

Because the Pokemon has faulty definitions for some of its attributes, like appearance and cry, it’s possible to crash the game or wreck your save data from playing around with MISSINGNO. But if you run from it, this damage can be minimized. And when it tries to mark that you’ve seen MISSINGNO in the bit array that records which Pokemon you’ve seen, it overshoot that table and actually sets a bit in the memory that follows it, which usefully, is your inventory. Generate the right version of MISSINGNO and run from battle, and you may suddenly find yourself with over a hundred of an item in a specific slot in your inventory. If you put the Rare Candy there before, you now can give your Pokemon over a hundred experience levels, or you could create stat-gain items this way, or lots of Master Balls.

Glitches such as these seems like they’re rare, but really, there’s lots of games that have them. It’s one of the perils of coding your game in assembly, really.

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

Let’s make it quick this week-

Oli Welsh at Polygon tells us what we already knew, that No Zelda Game is Closer to Breath of the Wild Than The 1986 Original. We can’t recommend it whole-heartedly though because it gets in some digs on the older game, saying it’s nowhere near as much fun as Link to the Past, a statement I disagree with.

Hope Bellingham at GamesRadar tells us that U.S. Customs wrecked a sealed-in-box copy of Pokemon Yellow valued at over $10,000. I rather disagree with that valuation too. I thought all the misguided young people were losing their money in crypto these days? (Note: GamesRadar is one of those sites that waits until you start reading an article then puts up a blocking box begging you to subscribe. Hint to GamesRadar: NO, and if I were interested in subscribing my generous impulse would have been destroyed by your prompt!)

At the Guardian, the very British-named Oliver Wainwright reviews Super Mario World, not the game but the theme park in California, a part of Universal Studios Hollywood. The verdict: 8/10, good graphics, some replay value. I’ve been in a melancholy frame of mind as of late, so seeing those brightly-painted dioramas makes me wonder what they’ll look like in twenty years, when Universal Studios’ attentions have drifted to another big thing. Nothing ages quite as badly as a happy prop painted in primary colors.

I said I was going to make this quick, let’s keep moving. Maya Posch at hackaday talks about a project to build a Commodore 64 using new parts.

Ollie Reynolds found some Donkey Kong design documents on Twitter, from the days when it was planned to be a Popeye game. He found them retweeted by blogfriend Mike Mika of Digital Eclipse, who in turn found them looking through Mario history site Forest of Illusion.

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Casey Baseel at Soranews24 reports that the city of Yokohama in Japan has Pokémon-themed mailboxes! The article tells us that, in Japan, while there is home delivery of mail, pickup is only at public locations like post offices and mailboxes. It’s those mailboxes that have the characters affixed to them. Because we can’t resist spoiling things, the Pokémon present are Pikachu (as seen above), Eevee, and Piplup. The article has more information, including detailed information on where to find them if you’re in Yokohama!

Japanese town’s Pikachu, Eevee mailboxes are awesome

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Yet the PMD games are still Mystery Dungeon titles, and they play very similarly. They’re graphical roguelike dungeon-crawl games, just, you, your teammates, and your opponents are not generic fantasy creatures, but Pokemon. That is, specific fantasy creatures. Trademarked ones, in fact.

Because PMD’s fairly popular, you’re more likely to find investigations into its internals than the Shiren or other Mystery Dungeon games, just from the number of people who exist in its audience with both the will and skill to investigate. Yet, those internals are close enough to the MD standard that they even provide insight into how classic Mystery Dungeon operates.

YouPotato TheZZAZGlitch’s usualy video stomping grounds in Pokemon, but they have a fondness for PMD, so they’ve made a video on how the first generation (Red/Blue Rescue Team) generates its dungeons, and what do you know, many of these floor types are also very familiar to me from my time exploring the Shiren games, and it doesn’t seem a stretch at all to presume they’re run by the same, or at least a very similar, algorithm.

And YouTuber Some Body (who has a low number of subscribers, maybe folk should send them some love?) has two videos explaining how the AI in those games works. The first is of more general (well, less niche) interest (the one above), while the second is more about covering exceptions and edge cases.

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Do You Know Gaming’s subseries Region Lock has turned up a number of Pokemon games that they made for Sega systems in Japan! The Pico and Advanced Pico Beena systems were home to a few edutainment titles that taught through a variety of minigames. With no actual Pokemon gameplay, these titles are mostly curiosities today, but they are curious ones! Curious curiosities!

It’s pretty light as far as videos go, and more than a little click-bait-y, but it does show off some extremely obscure software.

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From the depths of Mastodon, in that land of elephant people, four years ago josef posted a brilliant combination of a Beatles classic with some 8-bit Pokeflair. While the video seems gone from its initial upload, he reposted it on YouTube, which is what is embedded above.

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

Cian Maher for IGN, on players who obsessively chase rare “shiny” variants of Pokemon.

Ted Litchfield for PC Gamer, on the disappointment of FFXIV‘s producer on player taunting.

Morgan Park of PC Gamer tells us Call of Duty has lost 50 million players in a year, a third of their base

Andrew Kiya of Siliconera noticed a tweet in which Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai revealed facts about the origins of the Kirby Dance (what dance? this dance).

Keith Stuart of The Guardian (wow, drebnar!) on why Sonic the Hedgehog is great.

Michael McWhertor for Polygon tells us that Yuji Naka was kicked off the Balan Wonderworld project six months before it finished, partly for bringing up quality issues. He mentioned possibly retiring from the games industry.

Steven Blackburn of Screen Rant informs us that some fans are working on a third season of the old Saturday Morning Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon show. That’s the “darker” one, with Princess Sally and Bunny Rabbot. The other one from the time, made for syndication, was sillier, and the podcast What A Cartoon did an episode on it with Ian Jones Quartey.

Jody Macgregor for PC Gamer on the D&D Gold Box games coming to Steam, and why they’re great.

And Jason Fitzsimmons of Ghostbusters News points us to a tweet about a fan project to hack the character of Winston Zeddemore into the Sega Genesis Ghostbusters game, where he had been originally excluded.

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