The Flipside of Gaming
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
From Random Encounters fifteen years ago, it’s a four-minute musical starring people dressed up as Sonic the Hedgehog characters, though a full minute of it is credits. There is no guarantee that this will entertain you, but then there’s no guarantee that it won’t awaken something within you either.
Extra: Dr. Eggman has a hilarious Bluesky account (not for kids).
Now here’s something fascinating I had not heard of before Nicole Express recently wrote about it. Because of a law in Japan it was (maybe still is?) illegal to sell an arcade cabinet without a game in it.
When the market for replacement cabinets opened up, targets for upgrade kits without gutting an old machine to host them, they still had to have some game in them, even if everyone knew its PCB would be just be taken out and thrown away. It was also a way to assure a game center owner that the cabinet worked as advertised, as it could immediately be plugged and tested.
But games cost money to develop and need parts to implement, so these games have to be really simple. So there arose a micro-genre of games, usually a simplified remix of something from the cabinet manufacturer’s back catalog, using ancient processors, minuscule ROM and RAM, and the simplest means of driving the video signal possible, to fulfill this tiny and strange market need.
Nicole so far covers three such games: Sega’s Dottori-kun is a remake of their classic arcade game Head-On (remade before by Atari as Dodge ’em), a simple dot-eater where the player’s surrogate is a car that can only drive around a track one way. Taito’s Mini Vaders is a series of Space Invaders challenge boards, but with no enemy shots or sound. And most recently Konami’s Target Panic is a kind of fast reaction target shooting game, but using a joystick instead of a light gun.
Dottori-kun, a silent blue-and-white remake of a 1979 arcade game, was, via Sega’s Aero City cabinet line, a game they were publishing the year that also saw the release of their Super Scaler extravaganza G-LOC.
Nicole goes into detail about each of these games, possibly the most attention any of them has gotten outside of their creation, including their internals. She really knows her stuff, and dives into the implementation of each game. All three run on Z80s or variants. Only one of the three games, Mini Vaders, accepts coins. All three articles make for fascinating reading, at least to my fevered mind, so please click through
Over on the site vale.rocks Declan Chidlow has written up a complete rundown of every console web browser, and it’s certain to spark memories in many of you. Including web browsers in consoles used to be a useful way for a company to distinguish their system from others, but as they admit at the end of the article, now the web is with us constantly, on phones and tablets, and people are more likely to turn to game consoles to escape from it. I’m sad about that, there’s still a lot to like about the World Wide Web, it’s mostly the social media elements of it that suck.
The systems listed are the CD-i, the Sega Saturn, the Apple Bandai Pippin (wow really?), the Nintendo 64 (only in Japan with the 64DD add-on), the Game Boy Color (through the Mobile Trainer cartridge), Sega Dreamcast (I remember it well), the Wonderswan, Playstations 2-4, Portable and Vita, Nintendo DSes original, I, 3 and New 3, Xboxes 360, One, S and X, the Wii and Wii U (the Wii U had quite a cool browser, as the article explains), and technically speaking the Steam Deck (which can run lots of other software too). But please click through and read all about them!
Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles (vale.rocks)
I love Crazy Taxi! I think it’s one of the best arcade games Sega’s ever made, and obsessing over getting Crazy Licenses and beyond helped me get through the long sad years after my mother’s passing. I was once competitive on the Crazy Taxi scoreboards at Twin Galaxy, getting a score that would have been (if I had sent in my tape) 8th place in a contest they were having at the time. Others have long since surpassed what I once reached, of course, but my $69K score still looks pretty impressive to casual players who have difficulty getting to $5K and an S License.
birthbydrip over on Neocities (psst: yay!) has a terrific guide to getting to $20K and a Crazy License on the arcade course. It’s not for absolute beginners. If you don’t yet know how to perform a Crazy Dash/Limiter Cut your score is doomed to the $2K range until you learn that essential trick. But if you learn it, and nail the timing to spam it, then an S-license don’t look nearly so impossible any more, and then this guide is your golden path to getting to $20K, and racking up hour-long games on any aging Crazy Taxi machine you should encounter on your travels—assuming it’s well maintained that is. I encountered a machine at DragonCon a couple of years ago with a flaky gas pedal that made Dashes terribly inconsistent, grumble grimble gromble.
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
Some time back, I don’t remember how long, I made a Metafilter post about Nickireda’s weird and fun mixup game Return to Castle Monkey Ball, free on itch.io.
In a place like Metafilter, it’s not always obvious what will work and what won’t. Presentation matters for a whole lot, and there is also a random aspect to it. While no one said anything negative about it, I remember it being one of the least favorited-posts I’d ever made on the site. (Favorites are one measure I use to see if people liked a post or not. Sometimes comments just don’t tell the whole story.)
It’s a shame because the game is a perfect mixture. Not as punishing as either original game, its levels are procedural generated so a lot of rolling on your feet is required. You get a time bonus for defeating a guard. While you don’t have a weapon, you do just enough damage at full tilt to take one out in a single hit, and it feels great to do it.
There’s only eight levels (at least in the first “episode”) so it doesn’t take long to get through either. In the first version they kept Wolfenstein 3D’s graphics unchanged, meaning unfortunate reminders of Bad Person and his Stupid Symbol. Those have been removed since, which makes it less accurate to Wolf3D but also less saddening to play.
I was reminded of EFCMB by Vinesauce having recently streamed it. (13½ minutes) I don’t often return to a Gamefinds game, but given that I had made an attempt at telling people about it before I feel a slight bit of ownership here, and my previous attempts at spreading the word slightly predated Set Side B, so please go enjoy if you think you’d like it. It really is brilliant, and it runs in a web browser, even on my Raspberry Pi 5.
Escape From Castle Monkey Ball (by Nickireda on itch.io, $0)
The Shining series, published by Sega but developed by lots of different people, is all over the map regarding gameplay styles. I’d say that more people have heard of the second game, the great Shining Force (it’s sort of like lighter Fire Emblem with town scenes and no permadeath) than the first one, Shining in the Darkness (a first-person dungeon step-oriented crawl with premade characters). All the games are set in a fantasy world (but not all necessarily the same fantasy world) and have a cartoony art style that helps keep things lively, but beyond the dungeon crawls and tactical battles there have been Diablo-style combat, action RPGs, Zelda-style exploration with bump combat, more general strategy and even a fighting game.
Ashley Day at Time Extension rated all 23 of them, and their opinions seem pretty decent to me. So you know, #1 was Shining Force III (the infamous one released on three sold-separate Saturn disks, of which only one made it to the US), #2 was Shining Force II, and #3 was the confusingly-titled “Shining the Holy Ark” also in Saturn. #5 is Shining Force I, and #4 is its GBA remake. Many of the lower-placed games on the list are various later installments, which is fair. The Shining games seem like they’ve fallen off lately, but it’s not like you can’t go back and play the originals… through some, um, means or other….
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I promised yesterday that the next Sundry Sundays were going to be great, and so they are. The official Sonic the Hedgehog Youtube channel, in association with podcast outfit Realm, is releasing a sequence of audio videos featuring the adventures of everyone’s favorite ridiculous video game detective agency, the Chaotix. Why are they called that? Who knows.
Actually I do know, because the three of them were introduced in the 32X game, and one of the few reasons to have gotten a 32X during its short lifespan, Knuckles Chaotix, suggested tagline: “It’s not great, but it is very weird.”
That game had absolutely nothing to do with detectives. I think the detective angle was added with the lore behind Sonic Heroes. From then on, they’ve popped up at random times, usually being pretty hapless. But all three of them are adorable, even and especially Vector the Crocodile, and mean well.
So for now there’s three things having to do with the Chaotix Case Files, a trailer (2 minutes):
…an introductory Episode 0 (9½ minutes):
…and a full Episode 1 (26 minutes).
And here is a link to it as a podcast. They’re roughly of a Saturday Morning Cartoon level of maturity, which I should be clear, is absolutely perfect for these guys, so pour a bowl of Trix, inundate that vessel with milk, and let the part of you that’s still ten years old listen in and enjoy it.
They even got Rebecca Sugar, creator and runner of Steven Universe, to write their theme song!
I’m a bit late to the trough on this one, but it’s worth calling back to the Video Game History Foundation’s recent release of over 100 ROMs and other data from the Sega Channel, that short-lived service that allowed subscribers with a model peripheral to play downloaded games over a cable TV line. It was kind of like a terrestrial version of Nintendo’s Satellaview service, but also one that wasn’t locked to Japan.
Some of these games were never released outside of the Sega Channel, and the VGHF also has unreleased prototypes for public perusal through their own archived collection and an association with Gaming Alexandria. Two particular finds are a hitherto undiscovered variant of a Garfield game and a Genesis Flintstones game that, at a glance, seems to be based off of the John Goodman movie. An abandoned project also in the collection is a Sega Genesis web browser, which would have been quite a thing to see back then. Notably, Gaming Alexandria’s torrent of the complete data is only 147 megabytes, which isn’t such a large download all told.
The VGCF prepared a 58-minute promo video for their project here, with commercials and other content that are, ah, very nineties in style.
As an aside, I was shocked to see the company General Instrument come up early in this video. Weren’t those the people who made chips for pre-VCS dedicated game consoles back in the 70s? As it turns out, yes they were (PDF link)!
Slowly making headway against a year’s worth of accumulated links. Please enjoy whatever takes your interest.
1. Sega’s One-Sided History, from The History of How We Play, about the tensions between Sega’s Japanese and American management.
2. From Mugen Gaming, working on a translation of Japanese TTRPG Sword World, with a crowdfunding campaign to begin in 2026. Included here because Sword World is soaked in video game influences. It really is a case of back-and-forth around the world: Wizardry and Ultima inspired Dragon Quest, Dragon Quest inspired other JRPGs, and then those JRPGs influenced Sword World. And to go with it, a nearly-complete fan translation of a Super Famicom Sword World game.
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!
This one is incredible. The Monkey Ball games are as hardcore as they come, and, for the most part, have reasonably accurate physics that’s consistent under normal circumstances. But normal circumstances do not apply at extremely high speeds, where weird edge cases in the engine become much more likely to affect the ball’s travel.
Nambo created a video that showcases every Super Monkey Ball glitch, for the first two games at least. The video title calls them techniques, but I think glitches more accurately describes what’s being explicated here.
The video is amazingly complete and is 42 minutes long. It takes some kind of ridiculous ultrageek to watch the whole thing. Yes, I did that, why do you ask? Are you going to do it too? If you don’t it’s no skin off of your nose, maybe just watch enough of it to get some idea of how deep the Super Monkey Hole goes?
This Youtube video is a follow-up to Choa’s 40 Sonic Adventure 2 Facts, which we posted about recently. Unlike the standard lists of this nature that litter the internet, most of the ones in these two videos are genuinely interesting, and paint a picture of a team trying a lot of things to make their take on the Sonic series work, while pressed for time.
Here is the video, all 29 minutes of it:
For those not acquainted, Sonic Adventure had a weird structure, with free-exploration Adventure Fields, with permanent powerups to find, NPCs to talk to, and even a few subquests; and more demanding Action Stages. Each action stage had an entrance somewhere in an Adventure Field. Sonic Adventure had six playable characters, each with an entirely different style of gameplay! Sonic running, Tails racing with Sonic, Knuckles treasure hunting, Amy being chased by robots, Omega (itself one of Eggman’s robots!) blowing things up, and Big the Cat… fishing.
What a weird game. And you can tell just from playing it, the weirdness extended to its development. Characters can enter parts of courses intended for other characters. There are secret areas that seem like a holdover from early development, that sometimes can still be entered. Voice lines and animations that are very obscure, or even impossible to trigger without mods, remain in the game. Choa’s video is not a complete listing of these oddments, but it’s certainly a good introduction to them.
It’s a really strange game even without the context that your protagonist, a fan-waving Japanese guy running around from sunglasses-wearing agents, and occasionally celebrities like Michael Jackson (probably his first role in a Sega game) and a barrel chasing him around mazes, is based on a real person, Kakuei Tanaka, a prime minister in Japan in the early 70s who was taken down by a bribery scandal. When he gets caught by the suits, they put on S&M garb and Tanaka gets whipped by them! Here’s Kim Justice’s report on it (19 minutes). Here’s about five minutes of gameplay.
I can vouch that it’s playable in MAME, and it’s not even that bad a game, certainly better than Abscam, a pretty terrible Pac-Man bootleg that’s probably our closest version of it.