recap – Set Side B

Set Side B 2025 Wrap-Up

rodneylives — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 15:00:00 +0000

And so ends another year here are the weird pixel-art alien planet that our blog is based from, which for some reason concerns itself with Earth retro, niche and indie games. Hey, I never promises that our blog was thematically consistent! My first idea for its name and art theme was “Fairies and Robots,” this is a step up from that, right?

To start off, a bit of site history. Set Side B began on April 5th, 2022 with me, Josh Bycer’s Game Wisdom series, Statue (who to date has done but one post but we love them anyway), and Phil Nelson, of RetroStrange, who set up and maintains the site and cheers us on from the sidelines.

We did monthly wrap-up posts for the first few months of the site’s life, before I started forgetting to do them. Also, they’re a fair bit of work for what still feels like filler. I like to have something new here for every day, working from the theory that consistency is what matters most for a blog such as this. We’ve had a couple of lapses, but never for more than a single day. For the most part, we’ve stayed pretty steady.

In the early days of the blog I did weekly news posts, but those too felt like filler. I came to think, if you wanted to see what Kotaku was saying, you’d probably already have seen it at Kotaku. (Pretend I pronounce “Koh-tahk-oo” like videogamedunkey would say it.)

Where do we get our posts from? Well I scour Youtube frequently, obviously. It’s algorithm is not super-terrific for finding things, but sometimes comes through. There’s also social media posts and RSS feeds. (Note: Set Side B has a RSS feed too!) Once in a while I’ll post something I found on venerable community weblog Metafilter, where I often hang out. But there’s always new things to find and places to look. If you know of something that you think we’d be interested in, let us know!

What is out traffic like? We have a couple of stats packages installed, but they give very different views. One tells me we average about 60,000 hits per day, from around 11,000 visitors, but how much of that traffic is bots and crawlers, like from people trying to build datasets for their infuriating generative AIs,is anyone’s guess. WordPress’ own stats display says we’ve gotten 64,000 visitors over the past six months, which isn’t bad I guess?

Our most popular posts seem to be my link to a beginner’s guide to Balatro, my comprehensive strategy guide for UFO 50’s Party House, a quick start guide to UFO 50’s Pilot Quest, another link to a Balatro explainer, links to a Mr. Saturn Text Generator and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles logo generator, and one to an explanation of why the Mario 64 star Snowman’s Lost His Head sucks so much.

Most of our traffic at the moment seems to come from Google searches. It’s been much remarked upon that Google is capricious and unreliable as a source of traffic, but it’s not doing badly for us at the moment, at least.

We started Set Side B with no clear ending in mind, and we continue to keep it going for as long as we can.

So, let’s get to the recap—

(BTW, I used that em dash specifically to prove wrong the people who think it’s a sign of AI text generation. Some of us like to use all the characters.)

Set Side B updates daily, and I don’t feel up to echoing every post we made over the last year, so I’m only going over some that I consider to be highlights. In some cases, the choice for what to leave out was very difficult. For the rest, I refer you to our archives, over in the sidebar.

On New Year’s Day of 2025 I posted about the bizarre but awesome R-Type parody GAR-TYPE, where you play ace space fighter pilot Jon Starbuckle fighting against a horde of giant Garfield-shaped space monsters, which I think is about as perfect a Set Side B subject as anything.

January 17: iobaseball.com is kind of like a solitaire successor to Blaseball, which we still hold dear in our memory. Development on it seems to have stalled for now, sadly, but it’s still playable online.

January 24 held a list of “Minesweeper-likes.”

January 27 was a link to a Roguelike Radio episode that I was in!

February 3 was about a Displaced Gamers video about them reprogramming NES Ghosts & Goblins to make it more stable.

On February 5, I hearkened back to an ancient Nethack spoiler listing the 50+ ways you could die in that game.

February 10: Rampart again.

February 18: Entertaining bits of the manual for the arcade Wizard of Wor machine.

February 24: A sad occasion, as I had finally learned that Matthew Green, online friend and booster of Set Side B from the start, and maintainer of both the website pressthebuttons.com and the podcast Power Button, had passed away two months before. Adding insult to fatality, since then long-time blogging platform Typepad shut down, and that took pressthebuttons offline too.

February 27: CSS Puzzle Box, a puzzle game implemented entirely in CSS stylesheets.

March 1: The amazing (if you know about its hardware limitations) Commodore 64 demo NINE.

March 6: An “arcade raid” in West Virginia, rescuing arcade machines from decay and collapse.

March 19: The basics of classic Sonic the Hedgehg physics.

March 21: On the free and open-source Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection, and my own tips on Dominosa, one of its many puzzles. If you’ve never heard of this brilliant piece of software you really should check it out, it’s available for nearly everything!

March 26: Long-running magazine Game Informer returns from the dead.

April 1: My own recovery and restoration of classic oldweb site Furnitures, the Great Brown Oaf.

April 4: On my favorite part of Mario Kart games, the growing number of fictional sponsors in the games.

April 12: On efforts to restore Faceball 2000’s lost 16-player mode.

April 18: More on Mario Kart World’s fake ads.

April 19: My own project to present the archives of Loadstar, classic Commodore 64 magazine-on-disk. I had a busy April. More was posted about this on May 8 and June 4.

April 27: A particularly fun Sundry Sunday find, The Legend of Beavis.

May 10: Youtube game disassembly deep-dive channel has been sleeping lately, but before they passed out they posted a gigantic and exhaustive video explaining the level format of Super Mario Bros. 2.

May 19: PAPApinball’s demonstration of expert play in Addams Family Pinball.

May 24: 8-Bit Show-And-Tell finds fake C64 programming books on Amazon.

May 27: On a particularly awesome game from that Loadstar compilation, jason Merlo’s Jed’s Journey, a Zelda-like for the C64.

May 29: I list out a whole bunch of gaming websites you should be following.

June 2: A web-wide effort to solve every 5×5 Nonogram (a.k.a. Picross) puzzle. (Update: since then the effort has been successful! Now they’re trying to solve every unique 5×6 puzzle.)

June 5: It was launch day for the Switch 2, and I was standing in line with a number of other people at the Statesboro, GA Gamestop. I was inspired, while standing, to write my own addition to the oldweb “Private Skippy” meme, listing things they (Judging by pre-existing lore, Skippy is definitely non-binary) are not allowed to do while standing in line.

June 6: I exulted Kenta Cho’s, aka.ABAgame’s terrific BLASNAKE, playable for free at itch.io! On June 25 they released another great game with Labyracer!

June 12: I wrote a piece on old-school computer type-in magazines, a major way software was distributed before the internet.

June 17: Another find from the tracks and sectors of Loadstar, Nick Peck’s terrific shooter Zorphon.

June 19: “Oh God, The Donkey Kong Country CG Cartoon Show’s On Youtube.”

June 21: The Coolest Thing In The World Is CP/M for 6502. CP/M was the OS that MS-DOS copied from. If you have a CP/M 6502 implementation for your machine, any CP/M 6502 program will run on it, ranging from the C64 to the SNES!

June 30: I had been planning to present Video Games 101’s extensive and entertaining series of retro game walkthroughs for a long while, and on this day I finally did it.

July 8: ZoomZike’s series on Identifying Luck in Mario Party is actually an extremely in-depth and thorough examination of the whole series, still in progress. Some of their videos are several hours long, and best digested in pieces.

July 9: Primesweeper is a game where your knowledge of prime numbers makes the game easier.

On July 14 I linked to Kirby Air Ride Online’s competitive scene for playing City Trial. Since then Air Riders was released, and the whole world has had the chance to see what they knew all along.

July 15: Chipwits, a remake of the classic Mac programming puzzle game, entered full release on Steam!

July 17: A guide to the various “new media” websites out there, from Defector to Second Wind.

July 23: Multiplayer Balatro!

August 1: I presented my website where I extracted all of Jerry Jones’ recipes from off of Loadstar, food recipes, and made a website for them all.

August 2: Jean and Zac’s 100 Facts about Gauntlet Dark Legacy.

August 6: Digital Eel’s Bandcamp Albums.

August 7: If you read the town sign in the original Animal Crossing while holding a damaged axe, it’ll reset it’s durability.

August 9: Nothing short of eye-popping, a madperson is had build a Wolf3D-style 3D ray tracing engine for the Commodore PET, a machine not only without bitmapped graphics, but whose character set is locked in ROM. Later on August 27, we found a PETSCII platformer.

On August 15, we started carrying a small ad image in the upper-right of the page. We don’t receive any money from this at the moment, and probably never will, but the ad is from a small-site network, one that mostly links webcomics, and it felt like a way to do our part to help spread the word about little sites. This is also the day where more news came to light about a bug I had long known about, in the NES port of Pac-Man.

September 10: Use a Gameboy Advance as a controller on the Nintendo Switch, for real, no wiring or unofficial hardware needed, although you do need quite a lot of official hardware, including a Gameboy Advance to Gamecube cable and the USB Gamecube controller adapter.

September 20: A talk on how to turn a boring Chromebook into a full laptop.

September 23: Oh, nothing. Just a Minecraft server written in bash.

September 25: Someone found an old-time penny arcade in Yorkshire and tried out a lot of their games, most of them ancient electro-mechanicals. The next day we saw one of Konami’s weirder redemption machines, the unexpectedly cool Picadilly Gradius.

September 29: Long-time classic Final Fantasy and Squaresoft fansite Caves of Narshe! On October 4 I linked to three more old Final Fantasy sites.

September 30: Adrian’s Digital Basement found a long-dormant cheat for NES Galaxian that makes it much more fun to play!

October 7-11 was a week of tips for classic arcade games. Oct 7: Phoenix and Centipede. Oct 8: Donkey Kong. Oct 9: Robotron 2084. Oct 10: Defender. Oct 11: Q*bert. A few days later on October 14, Mappy. And returning to Donkey Kong on October 30, how to beat those damn springs.

October 17: The great homebrew game Mega Q*bert for Genesis/Mega Drive.

October 21: The charming, award-winning text adventure Lost Pig (And Place Under Ground).

October 29: A Korean Youtuber uses a 3D pen to make excellent models of video game characters.

October 31: On Halloween, Castlevaniastravaganza!

October 5: The official SkiFree homepage. And also, the Kickstarter for Greg Johnson’s Dancing With Ghosts, which was successful!

November 13: A completely different madperson than the 3D engine on a PET one did a respectable port of OutRun to the Amiga.

November 20: Eamon, classic Apple II community-made modular text adventure RPG series.

November 22: I fear it’s a Kirby Air Riders Review.

November 29: Mechanical hand-held games.

December 3: Websites about Conway’s Game of Life.

December 6: Yacht and Panic’s wonderful 90s cable TV simulation (on another planet) Blippo+!

December 12: Jamey Pittman’s tutorial on grouping Pac-Man’s ghosts, an essential skill to develop to get high scores without patterns.

December 17: In Ocarina of Time, leaving Kakariko village at the wrong moment during a rainstorm makes Hyrule go crazy.

And on December 27, a rare recording of a talk given by several microcomputer luminaries, including Steve Wozniak and Jack Tramiel

Thanks for reading Set Side B in 2025! We look forward in 2026 to bring you more from the Flipside of Gaming.

rodneylives

Set Side B 2024 in Review

rodneylives — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 15:00:00 +0000

We used to do monthly summary posts, but they ended up being a lot of work to keep up, and often there would be something interesting I’d want to post about that would preempt them. So in their place, and in recognition of Set Side B’s new Bluesky feed (which supplements, but doesn’t replace, our Mastodon feed), here’s a recap of what I consider to be just some of the more-interesting blog posts we published in 2024.

If you’re just coming in from social media and wondering what we’re about, Set Side B is a daily blog that covers what we call “the Flipside of Gaming” (notice the tasteful use of our tagline), specifically in the Retro, Niche and Indie fields. All of that basically gives us license to chase after whatever gaming information we enjoy, which is usually the antithesis of AAA gaming. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we do cover games sometimes that might be called Triple-A, the Legend of Zelda series comes up a lot and they’re often considered headliners, but Nintendo generally tends to have rather a different approach to gamedev than other companies. I’m not going to say they’re perfect, frog knows they have their faults, but they still manage to surprise us from time to time.

So, let’s get on to that recap. Posts marked Sundry Sunday are finds from gaming culture, usually funny Youtube videos. Posts that largely include original content by me are marked Original. I might have misapplied that signifier in places, because I often include extra commentary on posts, and even after spending two hours constructing this behemoth of a list, I have gone mostly by memory and not reviewed every post here. I’m certain that you’ll find something interesting, if you have a look. Set Side B’s archives are unusually rich with wonders, mostly found but sometimes made, and I’m sure if you take a spelunk through our mines, you will be rewarded.

JANUARY

JAN 1: Mario Kart’s catch-up system

JAN 2: FM-synth enhanced version of the Space Harrier theme on Japanese Master System hardware

JAN 5: The many fan revivals of Toontown Online

JAN 6: Dialup AOL-era Neverwinter Nights

JAN 9: Original — The 10th-Key scatter bug in NES Pac-Man

JAN 12 & MAY 20: Hempuli’s many riffs on Sokoban – Part 1, Part 2

JAN 15 & 16: Dark Arts of Pinball – Bang Backs and Deathsaves

JAN 21: AGDQ highlight: Playing Gyromite, but with a dog in place of R.O.B.

JAN 24: Original — On Stephen’s Sausage Roll

JAN 27 & 29: Displaced Gamers’ Behind the Code on Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Part 1 and Part 2

JAN 31: Gamefinds — Cosmic Collapse, a Suika Game-style remake in Pico 8, but with better play

APR 27 & JUN 25: Original — On Dungeon, a 30-year-old CRPG system for the Commodore 64, and my own attempts to rerelease it. The original and efforts to revise it.

APR 29: Commodore Free Magazine

MAY

May 2: Moviecart, adapting films to play on an Atari 2600

MAY 3: The history of KidPix

MAY 5: Sunday Sunday — Animated Lego breakfast with Super Mario

MAY 6: Retro Game Mechanics explains how to glitch out Super Mario World by stomping Wigglers

MAY 9: Which version of Wizardry to play?

MAY 15: Original — Comparing the character sets of microcomputers

MAY 16: Original — A directory of U Can Be Video Games’ videos

MAY 23: Nintendo uncensors Vivian’s transness in the remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

MAY 24: Original — @Play: Which is better, ring mail or splint mail?

MAY 25: Dani Bunten’s early classic computer game Wheeler Dealers has been preserved

MAY 30: Awesome Donkey Kong romhack compilation

MAY 31: Ocarina of Time timer bug, taking advantage of extremely low health

JUNE

JUN 4: The esports scene around Farming Simulator

JUN 7: Hardcore Gaming 101 thread on obscure arcade secrets

JUN 9: Sundry Sunday — Bing Bang, an awesome animation for a Splatoon 3 song

JUN 10: Why does Pac-Man’s split screen happen? Video explainer, with a lengthy text explainer-explainer by me

JUN 13: Complete but abandoned Tarzan Atari 2600 game recovered after 40 years

JUN 14: On Game Dads, small, inexpensive yet capable handheld emulation machines

JUN 16: Sundry Sunday — Mexican Flyer (that song from Space Channel 5) and its history

JUN 22: Dan Olsen of Folding Ideas discusses James Rolfe, the Angry Video Game Nerd

JUN 28: Mattel’s handheld Dungeons & Dragons LCD game

JULY

JUL 2: Website for generating animated Earthbound battle backgrounds

JUL 5: Original — On the history of Wizardry

JUL 8: The marquee and instruction card for Vs. Super Mario Bros (including a rather different official illustration of Mario than you usually see from Nintendo)

JUL 12: Snafuru’s extensive Wizardry fanpage

JUL 13: The MAD Magazine type-in program

JUL 16: Blade & Bastard, the (current!) Wizardry novel/manga

JUL 19: Dune author Frank Herbert’s book on 80s microcomputers, “Without Me You’re Nothing”

JUL 20, 25: Original — Getting Started in Digital Eclipse’s remake of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, Part 1 & Part 2

JUL 23: The Mr. Saturn text generator

JUL 29 & AUG 5: Looygi Bros tests various glitches in the Nintendo World Championships game, Part 1 & Part 2

JUL 31: A presenter at RustCon explains why MISSINGNO happens in Pokemon

AUGUST

AUG 2: Original — Review of World of Goo 2

AUG 6: Shmuplations translates an interview with a programmer on arcade Donkey Kong

AUG 13: Original — Science facts from No Man’s Sky

AUG 14: Comparing versions of Space Harrier

AUG 15: How randomness is used in Ms. Pac-Man

AUG 17: Complete Youtube playthroughs of the original Zork trilogy

AUG 19: A blog about Sega’s Flicky

AUG 20: Hidden Dialogue in Earthbound

AUG 21: The game Mission: Impossible on CP/M

AUG 24: Sunsoft’s Hebereke cartoons on Youtube

AUG 28, 29 & SEP 2, 4 & NOV 19: Original — How to play Atari Games’ Rampart, and also someone other than me talking about Rampart, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, someone else

SEPTEMBER

SEP 3: Obit for Andrew Greenberg, co-author of Wizardry

SEP 7: Hidden flags in Earthbound, the Mole Playing Rough, and the Game Over Glitch

SEP 9: Balatro University’s beginner’s guide to extremely high scores

SEP 10: Spelunky on the Commodore 64

SEP 15: Balatro (intentional) deck-peeking involving Misprint

SEP 18: Gamefinds — Blob the Klex

SEP 19: Kaze Emanuar on misapplied optimizations in Super Mario 64

SEP 20: Why hasn’t Nintendo implemented achievements?

SEP 22: Sundry Sunday — The Untitled Goose Programme

SEP 25: Katamari Damacy turns 20

SEP 26: Nicole Express investigates incompatibility between Guardic Gaiden (The Guardian Legend) and the Twin Famicom

SEP 30: The Rogue Archive

OCTOBER

OCT 2: Ed Logg on creating Gauntlet

OCT 4: Original — Getting Started in Pilot Quest (UFO 50 game # 44)

OCT 5: A walkthrough of Barbuta (UFO 50 game #1)

OCT 6, DEC 22: Sundry Sunday — The Amazing Digital Circus, Parts 1-3, Part 4

OCT 8: On the maddening difficulty of “Snowman’s Lost His Head” in Super Mario 64

OCT 9: Aftermath’s Chris Person on web forums in 2024

OCT 11: Whatever happened to Toadsworth?

OCT 12: Masahiro Sakurai on Satoru Iwata

OCT 15: HTML for People, an online book about learning to make websites for themselves, as intended

OCT 18: Displaced Gamers on the awfulness of NES Ikari Warriors

OCT 22: Original — My talk on Mystery Dungeon games for Roguelike Celebration 2024

OCT 23: UFO 50 Showcase

NOVEMBER

NOV 7: Randomly-occuring debug mode in Super Mario All-Stars’ version of Mario 3

NOV 8: Blaster Master & Wing of Madoola’s unreleased and lost arcade versions

NOV 14: Tomato’s excellent game translation blog Legends of Localization shows fitful signs of activity

NOV 17: Remake of the DK Rap by Grant Kirkhope and Substantial

NOV 18: Score keeping on the NES

NOV 21: Super Mario Bros. Mini on the Pico 8

NOV 22: Retro365 on Little Computer People

NOV 23: How many Bokoblins are in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom?

NOV 26: Almost Something on game rental lawsuits and photocopying instruction manuals

NOV 28: Original — A deep strategy guide to Party House (UFO 50 game #25)

NOV 29: Moving Miis from the Wii to the Switch

NOV 30: Someone has written a script that will defeat ANY game of Pokemon Platinum

DECEMBER

DEC 2: The Zelda Timeline is updated to account for Echoes of Wisdom

DEC 6: Game making IDEs GB Studio and BB Studio

DEV 11: Kit & Krysta take a tour of a secret gamedev hangout in Tokyo

DEC 13: Intro videos for Caves of Qud

DEC 14: Info from a data scrape of the entire Steam storefront

DEC 15: Sundry Sunday — An old cartoon, “Microcomputers: An Introduction”

DEC 16: Nintendo’s weird corporate structure

DEC 17: Some Body lays out how the AI works in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red & Blue Rescue Team

DEC 19: Grouping ghosts in Ms. Pac-Man

DEC 24: The conclusion of the backstory of Team Fortress 2

DEC 25: A program that plays Animal Crossing music and weather noises in the backgroun on your computer

DEC 30: Hunter R. explains the letter grading system in Gamecube Animal Crossing

rodneylives

Josh’s Favorite Games of 2022 – Puzzle

Josh Bycer — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 23:00:00 +0000

For this entry in my best of 2022 series, my favorite puzzle games, which is separate from adventure.

Josh Bycer

Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”

game-wisdom.com/

Josh’s Favorite Games of 2022 — Horror

Josh Bycer — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 23:00:00 +0000

And now we turn to the horror genre, which had some fantastic games this year.

Josh Bycer

game-wisdom.com/

Josh’s Favorite Games of 2022 – Platformers

Josh Bycer — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 23:00:00 +0000

For this category, these are my favorite platformers I had a chance to play in 2022.

Josh Bycer

game-wisdom.com/

Josh’s Favorite Games of 2022:Adventure

Josh Bycer — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 23:00:00 +0000

It’s time to talk about my favorite games that made me ponder while I was pointing (and clicking).

Honorable Mention Sucker For Love

I’m pretty sure everyone forgot that this game even came out this year. What started as a project for a Dread X Collection, transformed into its own visual/novel meets adventure game. The premise alone is enough to turn heads — as you try to romance three very eligible women who just so happen to be elder gods who can tear apart the fabric of reality.

This is a game that fully commits to its premise, and while it’s not the hardest game in the genre, the complete package stands out as one of the most strangely charming games I’ve played. I don’t know if we’ll get a sequel to it, but it’s an overall great title.

#3 Lucy Dreaming

Lucy Dreaming harkens back to the golden age of Lucasarts-styled adventure games, with its own verb list and wacky logic. Combining the waking and dream world sections did lead to some interesting puzzles. While it can be on the harder side due to its structure and logic, it is definitely a must-play for any fan of old-school adventure games.

#2: The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow

Adventure games oftentimes either land on the side of challenging puzzles or focus more on the story and mood. With the Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, we have one that does both — a gothic horror point and click adventure with some very striking cutscenes. The game, at times, feels like an episode to one of the many anthology horror shows in the past, as the player explores a mysterious village, has creepy visions and dreams, all leading up to the surprising ending. The puzzle difficulty stays on the easier side until the very end, with the final chapter being the most puzzle-filled out of anything else.

I really like the charm and the story of this one, with the world feeling both familiar and alien at the same time. If you slept on this one, and in the mood for a mysterious adventure, then don’t miss this game.

#1: Brok the Investigator

Brok the Investigator manages to combine beat-em-up gameplay with point and click adventuring and puzzle solving to deliver one of the most original takes on the adventure genre. You are free to approach your problems by using your brain or your fists, with the story and ending changing based on your process.

The story itself is also very well done, and despite featuring a goofy talking alligator, there is a lot of heart to this game. Brok is trying to do right by his adoptive son, earn a living, and the push and pull between doing the right thing, and to keep going is an interesting one. This is one of those games I know a lot of people slept on, but this one gets my recommendation as a game worth playing.

Josh Bycer

game-wisdom.com/

Josh’s Favorite Games of 2022 – Action Games

Josh Bycer — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 23:00:00 +0000

I’m doing my best of 2022 series over on Game-Wisdom and I’ll be posting the videos over here, starting with my favorite action games.

Josh Bycer

game-wisdom.com/

Set Side B September 2022 Recap

rodneylives — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 14:00:00 +0000

Some of the posts we published last month:

Sept 1: We only had one @Play post in September as other things competed with my time, but it was a good one, on the history of Angband!

I probably was at this locale unveiling! Up in the cloud with an eye on it, in the top-right corner! We could usually only have six avatars physically in a locale back in those days but the robed ones (called oracles) could override that limit.

Sept 6: We linked to the Reno Project, which seeks to preserve information on early and foundational virtual worlds Lucasfilm Habitat, Club Caribe, WorldsAway and its variants and descendants, a matter of which I have some personal experience.

Sept 7: We pointed to Nicole Express’ post explaining NES Mappers!

Sept 8: A true classic of one-person gamedev tools, the Zelda Classic engine and its editor software ZQuest! It originated way back on DOS but is still being worked on today! Amazing!

Can you do it? Can you succeed at the internet’s ultimate challenge? Can you FIND THE SPAM?

Sept 9: I’ve been doing a lot of looking back on old web games personally as of late, and we look at a quick and very dry joke on the formula, probably going back to at least 1994, Find The Spam.

Sept 13: Final Fantasy IV has an unusual bug concerning how it handles doors leading into buildings that we examined, in a post on its Door Stack Glitch.

Sept 17: Sonic Retro’s guide to that series’ physics!

Sept 19: Also to do with Sonic the Hedgehog, did you know that game’s Chemical Plant Zone boss is much easier than it first seems?

GROW is GREAT!

Sept 28: Remember the GROW games, from EYEZMAZE and On?

Sundry Sunday:

Adam West in the PS1 Golden Nugget game! Crash Bandicoot commercials and live-action videos from Japan! Cutscenes from Pepsiman! Strong Bad plays DOS text adventure Vampire Castle, with illustrations made by The Cheat!

This song is an amazing earworm, even if you don’t speak Japanese at all

Josh Bycer’s indie dev posts:

Top games of Gamescom! Demo Spotlight – Video 1 – Video 2 – Video 3 – Video 4

Indie Showcases! 9/12 – 9/21 – 9/23 – 9/28

Zachtronic’s final game, Last Call – Fashion Police Squad – A review of Moonlander’s Steam store page – Rogue Command developer interview – Genfanad developer interview

Romhack Thursday, a new feature we began last month:

Advanced NES Rom Utility and Metroid romhack Junkoid

To find more invigorating posts, please look through our well-stocked sidebar. Many of our posts aren’t the sort to spoil, so as we put up more content, you’ll find more there to discover!

Thanks for reading Set Side B through the month of September! We will continue bringing you the most interesting finds from the Flipside of Gaming.

rodneylives

Set Side B August 2022 Recap

rodneylives — Sat, 03 Sep 2022 14:00:00 +0000

A spotlight on some interesting posts from August….

2nd: What are blobbers? Wizardry-style maze games, usually party-based dungeon crawls. How many has there been? At least 48, and definitely a lot more!

8th: A short post, but interesting. I found, from the official Nintendo SNES devguide on the Internet Archive, a list of things that could get a game rejected.

10th: It was all over the internet, but still, we reported on that hidden cheat code in Super Punch-Out!! that let you play it against a friend.

11th: The developer menu buried in arcade versions of Mortal Kombat and its sequels and how to access it from attract mode. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to show this off to multiple people in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and it never fails to impress.

12th: Mamesaver, the screensaver that uses the roms in your MAME folder.

13th: Revivals of old online services QuantumLink, AOL, and Prodigy. No word about Compuserve though.

15th: Arcade Mermaid visits Vs. Castlevania, in which a hard game gets much, much harder.

16th: Hyrule Interviews, a ton of information that the developers of Zelda games have revealed to the media.

17th: An old video but still fascinating, the last new Data East Jurassic Park pinball machine is opened on camera.

19th: Chasing the world record in Hatetris, a player-hostile Tetris variant.

22nd: NCommander on Youtube on why 3D Pinball was removed from Windows Vista.

27: The absurdly weird and detailed romhack of the prototype of Monster Party, starring Elvira!

29th: The long (in both number of entries and runtime) Youtube series Identifying Luck in Mario Party, which is an amazing detailed look into the internals of those games.

30th: The Museum Monster presents a weird moment in video games: the Cleopatra bonus in arcade Star Force.

@Play: Reintroduction to Angband – Playing the game

Sundry Sunday:
Lore Sjoberg’s Alt Text: The Five Most Guilt-Inducing Video Games
Old Commercial for Pitfall!, with a young Jack Black
Strong Bad Email #94, Video Games
Cabel Sasser’s Buggy Saints Row: The Musical

Josh Bycer’s indie dev posts:
Store Page Review of Metroplex Zero
Interview with Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games
Interview with independent dev Brian Cronin
Interview with Gideon Griebenow of World Turtles
Store Page Review of Transcendence

Indie Stream Archive from 8/15

Indie Game Showcase:
8/6: Mahokenshi, Gastova The Witches of Arkana, Castle Cardians, Transiruby, Vesper Ether Saga, BackBeat
8/12: Ancient Gods, Critadel, Deiland: Pocket Planet, Monster Tribe, Zoeti, Printersim
8/15: Spellbook Demonslayers, Mech Shuffle, Endling Extinction is Forever. Ginger the Toothfairy, Lightsmith, Myth of Mirka, Supernova Tactics, Fabled Lands, Kokoro Clover Season 1
8/22: Trinity Archetype, Green With Energy, Super Grave Snatchers, The Lightbringer, Happenlance, Timemelters
8/24: Affogato, Rogue Genesia, City Limits, The God Unit, Redshot, Combo Card Clashers
8/27: Evertried, Sands of Aura, The Shore, Infraspace, Rogue Spirit, Ruin Raiders
8/29: Hex of the Lich, So to Speak, It’s a Wrap, We Took That Trip, Eternal Remnant The First Chapter, The Mortuary Assistant

To find more interesting posts, please look through our over-full sidebar. We now have archives that you can browse from! Many posts you find here aren’t the sort to go obsolete, so as we put up more and more content, you’ll find more and more wonderful stuff to discover there.

Thanks for reading Set Side B through the month of August! We will continue bringing you the most interesting finds from the Flipside of Gaming.

rodneylives

Set Side B July 2022 Recap

rodneylives — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 14:00:00 +0000

Favorite posts from July….

2nd: The weird “Triforce%” run from SGDQ’s 2022’s TASbot presentation is explained.

5th: Review of games presented in SGDQ’s Silly Block.

7th: @Play: An early level FAQ for Omega. After doing a ton of posts the month before, we took it easy on @Play in July.

9th: Reviving the Ouya.

10th: A rare substantial Sundry Sunday post, a collection of YouTube videos that purport to explain Kingdom Hearts’ legendarily convoluted story.

11th: Arcade Mermaid: Pepper 2, ultrafast maze game from Exidy.

18th: A popular longpost we did about rebus crossword puzzles. Of special note, this is currently the Set Side B post with the most hits, with over a thousand pageviews.

21st: Obituary for Robert Koeneke, creator of Moria, the first non-Rogue roguelike.

23rd: Video review of Zachtronics’ final game, Last Call BBS.

27th: A weird find, GameSurge, a gaming website that hasn’t updated since 2005 but is still on the web.

28th: Scott Adams’ video Q&A about his career and his early parser-based games and company Adventure International.

Indie Dev Showcase archives

2nd: Monster Harvest, Recompile, The Night Is Grey, Space Tow Truck, Fire Tonight, Arboria.

23rd: Hack or Die, Batboy, Citizens Farlands, Alina of the Arena, Remnants of the Rift, Itorah.

30th: Moons of Ardan, Terror of Hemasaurus, Hex of the Lich, Firekeep, Aztech Forgotten Gods, and Tactical Galactical.

Developer Interviews

The Dark Heart of Balor

Chris Knowles

Videogame Fables

Sundry Sunday

Pixel Orson Welles Disses Game Characters, Summarizing Kingdom Hearts, Mario Frustration, Take Me Home Mario, Classics of Game

To find more interesting posts, please look through our well-stocked sidebar. We still need better archive browsing, I recognize, as we work to fill Set Side B full to overflowing with interesting and entertaining video game news and information on a daily basis, and most of our posts do not have an expiration date.

Thanks for reading Set Side B through the month of July! We will continue bringing you the most interesting finds from the Flipside of Gaming.

rodneylives