Tag: retro

Romhack Thursday: Laszlovania

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Been awhile since we did a romhack, and this one is pretty cool. Someone used an editor to turn one of the DS Castlevania games (probably Portrait of Ruin, I’m guessing) into an homage to the comedy vampire sitcom What We Do In The Shadows, starring Laszlo Cravensworth the vampire. You can play it in your browser, or pay five bucks for a downloadable ROM that you can transfer to a physical Nintendo DS, if you have the means, or play in a standalone emulator.

I should warn you that saves don’t seem to survive page reloads in the browser version, but if you run out of HP you can continue from your save as long as you remain on the page. The game’s really short and can be easily completed in one session.

The great thing about this hack is the writing, it reads very much like an episode of the show, down to the frequent profanity and grotesque content like peeing werewolves, so this one’s for adults only. It follows on from the end of the show, after Guillermo had given up on becoming a vampire and learned to stand up for himself a bit, and Nandor the Relentless decided he was going to try out being a superhero.

There is a bestiary with descriptions for all the enemies you’ve seen, and a few secrets to find. It even has one of the celebrity cameos the show was known for, near the end. The game does sometimes hand you a new ability only to take it away later, but the true draw here is the dialogue anyway, and the game’s so short.

It’s difficult to take screenshots while a game is in progress, so all my images are from moments when the game is paused in some way, but it looks pretty nice, at least when the werewolves aren’t peeing. Here are a few more images.

A mocking reference to AI generated images. The game itself uses no “AI” produced content.

P.S. Sorry for forgetting to make a post Tuesday, but if you live in the U.S. I’m sure you realize that something really important and distracting was happening that day.

\Laszlovania, by Edward La Barbera (itch.io, free to play in browser or $5 for playable DS ROM file)

Set Side B’s Favorite Games as of October 2026

We think a lot about games here in the neon pixel halls of Set Side B.

You probably already know that three of my personal faves are Rampart, Party House, Balatro and Kirby Air Ride City Trial so I’ll set them aside for this. What else?

For me this isn’t a complete list by any means, but there are some games that come to mind, that stick out in my memory. All screenshots from MobyGames.

Nethack, of course, because it’s Nethack, and Rogue for similar self-referential reasons. A lot of classic roguelikes would get a place on my personal list: ADOM, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Brogue and the more recent Caves of Qud. But these would also go into the obvious list except that I haven’t talked about them here so much lately (except maybe Qud).

Cadash, a terrific early 90s multiplayer platformer RPG from Taito, is a whole class on game design in itself. It’s also a game that is almost unplayable in its original form, because none of its emulations, either open or commercial, support its linked-cabinet mode. (Also: the Capcom D&D beat-em-up games.)

Not to make all of these RPGs, but there’s also Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, especially Digital Eclipse’s remake of it. Lots of interesting ideas from the classic age of CRPGs have been wrong left behind. I blame internet culture’s relentless browbeating of anything that they don’t understand. The remake of PGotMO doesn’t wholly escape that, but there’s a lot of what once addicted hundreds of thousands of Apple II users remaining there. (Also: the Ultima series.)

A true list of my favorites at any moment will naturally ebb and wane, but a few other that I am fond of right now: Capcom’s arcade games Black Tiger and Magic Sword, Hempuli’s Baba Is You, Cruise Elroy’s Annalynn, Castlevania and Castlevania III of course, most of the Shiren the Wanderer series but I prefer the earlier ones, Gradiuses II and III, Pocket Card Jockey (the 3DS one edges out the Switch remake), Herzog Zwei, Athena (really!), the original Legend of Zelda and Zelda II, and Advance Wars II.

Josh Bycer of Game Wisdom, who’s reviews of indie games appear here every week or so, offers these:

Astlibra: Revision: The definition of a passion project, Astlibra is an homage to the action rpgs of the YS series, made over many years, it’s a game of high action, and lots of systems and exploration. You’ll never be able to tell where this game is going to go and just how many bosses one could fit into a single game. We may never get a sequel at this point, but it’s still one of my favorite games for all the ways that you can play it.

Xpiratez: I’ve always loved the X-Com formula, but hated how paper thin and limited the beginnings always were. With XCOM from Firaxis, I’ve often thought it would be close to one of my favorite games, but XPiratez, despite being a mega mod, nails the concept of a very fleshed out, all-consuming, take on the X-Com formula. Maybe by the year 3000 I’ll be able to finish a complete run of it.

Zeroranger: The only shmup I’ve managed to get a 1 CC on, it is an amazing game with a great story, fantastic music, and does a fantastic job of being a challenging shmup without going into the levels of Touhou mastery.

The World Ends With You: My all-time favorite RPG and it’s one that doesn’t play like anything else out there. Another amazing combination of gameplay and music, if you talk to anyone who has played TWEWY, they either love the game or completely hated it. It represents for me the peak of the DS era — a game that is entirely original and could have only existed on the platform.

Displaced Gamers Explains Mario’s Physics

Displaced Gamers’s Behind the Code series is one of the best code explainers on Youtube, and here they describe, in 35 minutes worth of no-nonsense detail, how Mario in Super Mario Bros. moves, runs, skids and jumps.

Super Mario Bros. basically created an entire genre of video games, but it probably wouldn’t have happened without its exacting attention to how Mario moves, which is a large portion of the gameplay. A few of the details:

  • Mario’s position and velocity are stored in pages, pixels and subpixels, but acceleration is handled additionally using fractions of a subpixel.
  • When Mario is facing a direction other than he’s moving, his acceleration doubles! Speedrunners actually take advantage of this fact.
  • When Mario runs with the B button, he doesn’t slow immediately when it’s released, but waits for ten frames before he drops back to walking speed. This is why he doesn’t slow down when throwing fireballs when running, and also helps players who slide their finger to the A button to jump.

GameHut Reveals Graphics Tricks Used in Genesis Adventures of Batman & Robin

It’s been quite a while since GameHut, a Youtube channel run by Jon Burton, 29-year director of Traveler’s Tales and an old maven of Genesis/Mega Drive effects, posted a video. I’m not sure Burton himself worked on this game in this one, but he does a fine job of explaining (14 minutes) how the developers used the Genesis’ catalog of technical tricks to make one of the most visually striking games on that platform, The Adventures of Batman & Robin, pulling off realtime effects that might seem impossible on a system with no hardware scaling.

The primary trick used is the old raster interrupt on HBLANK, manipulating graphics registers while the beam is part of the way down the screen, abetted by the Genesis/Mega Drive’s speedy, for its time, Motorola 68000 processor and 7.87 mHz clock speed. Change horizontal scroll registers midway down and shear the background. Swap palettes on vertical stripes and create a checkerboard pattern. It’s not the only trick used, but its versatility sure made it impressive when it showed up.

A Ten Hour Documentary on Pool of Radiance

MrEdders123 on Youtube went way way beyond the call of duty and made a video on nearly every aspect of SSI’s classic RPG Pool of Radiance, the first official D&D product to attempt to adapt the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons tools to computer play with any degree of completeness and the first in the legendary “Gold Box” series. It’s nearly ten hours long.

It’s true that the length is kind of ludicrous, but in its description there is a helpful directory of chapters to get you to jump around it to the places most appealing to you. And what a monumental task they’ve accomplished! Included you’ll find a history of unofficial attempts to adapt D&D (many games cribbed from its rules in the early days), the licensed Intellivision D&D games, TSR’s own computer products, SSI’s becoming the official D&D company for computer games, the history of the Gold Box line, the play of the game itself, the ports of Pool of Radiance (including the Famicom release) and three fan remakes in different engines.

White_Pointer Gaming Tracks Down Serious Retro Bugs

WPG’s big thing lately has been finding out how various games, especially 16-bit games, pull off their graphics tricks. This one’s a bit different; they’ve found game-crashing bugs in several 8- and 16-bit titles and investigated their causes, and figuring out how to fix them. (30 minutes)

The five specific bugs they examine are:

  • The Battletoads second-player control lockout that happens near the end of the game.
  • The PRG0 version of NES Castlevania crashing hard when too many objects are on the screen. I’ve been bitten by this one several times, and it even happens in the US version of Castlevania in the recent console compilations.
  • Joe & Mac 2 crashing early in the game if you’re riding a dinosaur while unlocking a door with a key.
  • NES Rainbow Islands crashing during the ending cutscene.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog crashing if the control pad is held in the down direction after passing the sign at the end of Labyrinth Zone Acts 1 or 2.

sylvie’s Explainer of Arcade Raiden Strategy

sylvie is the creator of a number of light and entertaining Itch games, but this deathless playthrough of the first loop of classic arcade shooter Raiden (36 minutes) has little to do with them. Usually playthroughs with commentary aren’t appealing to me, but this one discusses lots of interesting tricks and hidden details of how it operates, and how to lessen its high difficulty. It’s worth watching if you’re at all interested in Raiden.

Among lots of other things:

  • it’s mentioned that in one player mode in the original Japanese version dying causes you to reset back to a checkpoint, Gradius-style,
  • that the game is known to increase the health of boss enemies if you have the blue Laser weapon,
  • that the game is generally easier if you play in the Player Two position,
  • that to begin the game with the lowest difficulty rank, it’s best to start the game when attract mode is showing Stage 7 (a space level),
  • and that the Player One position increases the game rank faster if you have the blue Laser weapon, while the Player Two position increases rank faster if you have the red Vulcan weapon.

A lot of sylvie’s strategy comes from rank management, and manipulating aspects of the game to make it more manageable, which is much more interesting to learn about than to just be told to “git gud.”

Have a look if you like, and if you don’t care about the commentary and just want to watch her deathless Raiden run without any of those pitiful human words, watch this video instead.

Non Vibe-Coded Retro Decompilations

Just a quick one today, WumpaGem’s list of decomps that aren’t Clauded or anything, hosted on Backloggd. There’s a lot of them, of varying degrees of completeness: some are done, some are in alpha, some are only planned. Interesting, Twilight Princess and Majora’s Mask are playable, but Ocarina of Time is only planned, probably because Ship of Harkinian stole a lot of its energy but turned out to have been made with AI coding. Particularly, Mario 64 has five different recomps.

Disable’s Recounting of Obscure Dialogue in Majora’s Mask

I’ve seen some of these weird little messages (34 minutes), edge cases that appear when you talk to someone or witness an event at an unexpected time in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask’s three-day cycle, or do it while one of the game’s many masks.

A few of the cases covered:

  • Tatl the fairy’s information on a couple of the bosses changes as you progress through their fights.
  • The guards blocking the exits to Clock Town usually use the presence of your sword to determine whether they will let you leave, but if your sword was stolen or is being forged they’ll notice and let you leave anyway. They also give you different hints on which dungeon to do next.
  • The Astronomer has special dialogue if you speak to him as a Goron or a Zora.
  • The residents of Clock Town each have their own little story of how they’re handling their impending destruction. The Swordsman especially has interesting reactions that change as the clock ticks down.
  • The Swordsman also, like the Happy Mask Salesman, has a reaction to every mask you can wear to his shop. The lady in the Treasure Chest game and the both the proprietor of the Trading Post and his employee have unique reactions to some of the masks.
  • If Deku Link can shoot bubbles they can play the archery game, not even needing a bow!

What’s great about all of these cases is none of them are necessary to win the game! It’s there for the players who try to experience Majora’s Mask’s story from every angle. Disable used a text dump to chart out all of the game’s dialogue on a web page here.

Twinetroid

DidYouKnowGaming posted a video in 2021 with the provocative title “The Japan Only Metroid Game That Changed The Series,” (8½ minutes) and as is usually the case with clickbait titles like that, it’s leaving out important information: the game in question is a gamebook, not a video game at all.

I don’t often like rewarding clickbait, although doing it to some extent is largely unavoidable now. Here is the video embedded, if you want to see it for yourself.

The gamebook is called Metroid: Zebes Invasion Order, an example of gaming ephemera of the same stature as the Worlds of Power series of books. The video enthuses about how it foreshadowed elements that would appear in later games, although both the games and the book would have been inspired by the same pop cultural elements, the Alien movies, so it makes sense they would vibrate with a similar frequency.

Illustration of our hero, Samus Aran, from Twinetroid, ultimately from the gamebook

You can watch the video if you want to know more about it. Here are some salient facts.

  • The gamebook is roughly of a type with the Fighting Fantasy books from the UK, giving you various situations to overcome and a basic battle system for fighting enemies.
  • Also like Fighting Fantasy, it’s pretty difficult.
  • The battle system uses dice, and asks that you record your exploration with a hand-drawn map, and record your inventory on a sheet of paper.
  • Secret rooms were handled in a novel way. As a gamebook in the same ballpark as Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure, you would sometimes be given a choice and a page number to turn to. Secret rooms would tell you only part of the page number, leaving you to search through the book for the right page. Important items were hidden this way.
  • The book has ballooned in price, with copies selling, in 2021 when the video was made, for around $2,000.

Yet scans of the book can be found online, and Devin Monnens used them to assemble, using Twine, a kind of play-like of the book, called Twinetroid and hosted at Metroid Database. It changes a few things for the format, automating combat and changing the mechanics of the secret room search. The instruction page mentions hidden hyperlinks, which is an interesting solution.

Combat example from Twinetroid

One interesting aspect of the game is that it largely recreates the play structure of the original game: the game world is divided into three major sections, you find items that increase you exploration ability, and you backtrack into earlier rooms to use those items to access new paths. There is an automap, but it doesn’t record anything about what’s in each room. You’ll probably need to take notes.

If Samus “dies,” you can still restart from a checkpoint with all the items you’ve found. Once you defeat the Mother Brain the game isn’t over yet though, becoming more of a traditional text adventure from that point, with a variety of endings. Give it a try, and experience an obscure piece of Metroid history.

Twinetroid (Twine-based text adventure, from Metroid Database)

ChibiAkumas’ Many Assembly Tutorials

You wanna know something? I think everyone should learn to program. I don’t mean using some, the word I usually use is cockamamie, “AI,” that will produce brittle, inefficient, unmaintainable code if it doesn’t mess it up, but actually code. I think most of the difficulty with coding is actually in the languages. Woe betide the person trying to learn to program in C++ from scratch these days. C is much better, but still obtuse. Python is better, but also not great for systems or performance work.

The solution? Why, learn to code in assembly of course!

Aaaaand 90% of readers just clicked away. Hah.

But the funny thing is, for many languages, assembly is actually a little easier than them I’d say. When you’re working directly with the hardware, all the weird abstractions you have to learn fall away. It does mean you have to do everything, and I mean everything, yourself. But on the other hand, programming is largely the process of connecting building blocks together, tiny routines comprising larger ones. It takes longer to do it in assembly, and working with a lot of current-day hardware is trickier because you have to jump through more hoops to use it. But its difficulty, I think anyway, is a little overblown.

Have my farcical words somehow swayed you? Does it sound like something you might like to try? Would you at least like to see what you’d be in for? Then I have a website for you: ChibiAkuma’s Assembly Tutorials. They also have Youtube channel.

There’s a wealth of material to peruse, including videos walking you through coding a bunch of different architectures, including 6502, 8086, Z80, 6809, 68000, and even ARM, among others. Even if you have no interest in actually coding for these multifarious* chips, just knowing out they work may be very interesting to you, if not be actually useful someday.

Here, to get some idea of how understandable this will be to you, take a look at his series on assembly coding for the C64 (Youtube playlist, 13 videos, about 170 minutes in all), beginning here:

* That’s 17 points with no bonuses, but 67 if a bingo

ChibiAkuma’s Assembly Tutorials (chibiakumas.com)

A Tale of Commodore: the Chessmate

It was brought to my attention by <b>scruss</b> over on Metafilter (Mastodon) that Peter Jennings, not the newscaster but an oldschool hardwre guy, has a long and great page on the creation of a standalone chess-playing computer for Commodore in its early days, we’re talking between the creation of the KIM-1 and the VIC-20.

It’s a terrific article that covers far more than just Jennings’ experience making the device, covering among other things a pitch to Mattel, meeting with 6502 designer Chuck Peddle, a story of Bobby Fisher, and the unfortunate news that Jack Tramiel, then the boss of Commodore, rarely paid vendors what they were due. Seems about normal for the man.

There’s even a long list of interesting links about the Chessmate at the end. I can’t recommend it enough!

The Commodore CHESSmate (Peter Jennings at benlo.com)