NeoGamer on Youtube has an entertaining, not to mention loooong, video with short clips from 200 strange games they’ve played in their channel. (1 hour 27 minutes) Right off the bat they start out weird, and they don’t let up. Please consume responsibly.

This is a double review of No Players Online and Blippo+ played with review keys. (Editor’s note: I [John Harris] wrote about Blippo+ some time ago.)

00:00 Intro
00:20 No Players Online
3:35 Blippo+

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

Ah yes, this is exactly the kind of nonsense that Sundry Sunday was intended to showcase. I’m telling you, quality randomness like this don’t come down the intertubes that often. From TheIridiumic138, it’s just a bunch of clips from NBC television, that’s the National Broadcasting Company, but presented in the form of a WarioWare video game collection (3 minutes). It’s exactly as simple, as stupid, and as brilliant as that. It’s even filled with deep cuts like the old animated NBC peacock segments, which were before even my time! And it ends with a perfect Conan O’Brien bit to cap it off. You really have to see it to believe it, so why not watch/realize now:

That I haven’t played Big Walk, I should say, isn’t entirely for my own fault. The biggest thing that limits Big Walk’s adoption is the fact that you must have at least two players on-hand to play it, at all. There is no solo mode, and it’d largely miss the point of the game to try it. Beyond that it’s an even better experience with more people: Big Walk supports up to 12. Most of my friends don’t usually play video games together, and the one that usually does play with others is a FPS enthusiast, and not too into a game fundamentally about communication, and getting lost in a wilderness. Throw in the fact that it’s a game starring weird gourd people, and I imagine he might actually get ill if he tried playing it.

Matthw Haughey, founder of Metafilter and owner of the newsletter and blog A Whole Lotta Nothing, has a typically fine piece about the joys of Big Walk. He mentions that the greatest challenge of the game is simply starting it, finding a number of friends who are motivated to try such a quirky experience and can all schedule time to play it together. Fortunately it doesn’t all have to be finished in one session.

I’m itching to try it, maybe some time soon. I’ll be at DragonCon in a week. If any of you are there, maybe we could meet up somewhere and go for a Big Walk?

Honestly I don’t know that much about them, but the page says you can play DOS games in your browser there. I know they’re not the only people who offer that (heck, the Internet Archive even does it), but the barest examination of their site doesn’t show any intrusive ads, paywalls or scammy behavior, so I’m happy to give them the link.

Of course, I reserve the right to remove the link later if they suddenly morph into Trantor the Malware Demon. But barring that, please enjoy!

In VCF Southeast a few weeks ago though, there were a number of hopeful indie developers who had their products on display, and were nice enough to show them off and let people play them, and I figure it would be a shame if I forgot to give them a post here. So here are a few things you might want to check out. Many of these games have been unfairly overlooked by the machine hearts of the internet’s various algorithms, may they rapidly rust into ruin, so please give them a few minutes of your time, and just maybe buy some or all of them.

Polyroll (Steam, Switch) from Spicy Gyro games is a Sonic-style platformer with great level design! It’s currently 70% off, selling for a scant $1.79 on Steam. It’s also on sale on Switch for $2.

Venison County (Steam preview, demo) is an upcoming game from Cutter Oyster, a retro-styled FPS survival game. The game is played in a sequence of waves. The door to the cabin that ends a wave only opens once you’ve defeated the zombie enemies. You can pick up sigils that give you special powers, but each rune also increases the number and ferocity of enemy attacks. Between waves you can choose to discard your sigils, losing the powers but reducing the difficulty. You can also buy weapons and ammo between waves. Of special note, reloading is a little minigame, pressing a button while a bar is in a certain range, that you must manage while running from the zombies. It’s due out in full late 2027.

Attack of the PETSCII Robots (sale page) wasn’t among the indie games, but I think it counts as one! It’s been for sale for a few years now.

Casey’s Gold (sale page) from Audacity Games is a terrific Atari 2600 game made in the Activision style, sold on cartridge by classic dev Dan Kitchen, brother of Garry Kitchen. I played through a few levels of this and it’s quite a bit deeper than you’d expect from a 2600 game, with secrets hiding in unexpected places. It rewards players willing to experiment, and with good observational skills.

IsoMetro (itch.io, Steam $20) from Grimesoft is a grid-based city building game that will put many people to mind of the classic SimCity 2000. Electronic Arts bought out originating studio Maxis long ago and seems only to care about their properties so long as they’re about individual Sims instead of a whole city of them. IsoMetro certainly looks terrific, although I didn’t get a chance to play on the floor.

Hoverdrive (Steam preview) is about piloting a car through weird neon landscapes with changeable gravity, pulling off impossible stunts as you go. It’s not out yet, but it looks very cool!

Ad Blocker (Steam $6) is a player-vs-player action-puzzle game that feels a bit like Puzznic. Snogbert (Steam early access $8, free demo) is a platformer with randomized elements. Both are from Justin T. Alexander. I just have photos of the banners here unfortunately.

Nature’s Bidding (itch.io prototype, Steam preview) is a multiplayer battle platformer where you customize your character as you go with good and bad elements. The title comes from a phase before each fight where the players bid money to avoid taking on curses. You lose the money you bid regardless if whether you win or lose; the player with the lowest bid gets the curse. Once cursed, the curse sticks with you throughout the rest of the game, so you can get piled under a whole host of bad effects. And yet you still want to save money after the bidding phase to buy powerups to improve your character. It’s unforgiving, but fun to battle it out with your friends. The fighting feels like some of the minigames in Mario Party.

Business 98 (Steam $5, with a free demo) from Five Foot Games is a “cashier simulator” with an old school Windows look, with elements of roguelike deckbuilders.

Inky in the Alien Aquarium (itch.io, $12) from Pocket Pulp is written for the Gameboy Advance. It’s a challenging block-pushing game where you have to learn the rules as you go, in the spirit of The Witness.

Asta Pool (website, Steam $15) from Cheesy Face Productions has turn-based modes that work like traditional pool, but also real-time levels where you influence the pool balls more directly. It boasts over 40 modes!

Keepsake Country (Steam preview) is billed as “A Midwestern Stealth Game,” and is still in development.

A few more:

Mouseward (Steam preview with demo, itch.io preview) is a “soulslike collectathon” with non-linear levels, hidden passages and cryptic clues.

Godless Avalon (Steam demo, itch.io demo) is a J-styled sci-fi fantasy/comedy RPG with guns. I don’t think it was playable on-site.

Aethelria Cross-Dimensions (Steam preview) is an upcoming sci-fi fantasy arena shooter (that is, an FPS). It has appealing character art, but I didn’t see it playable on the floor.

And Crypt Sweeper (itch.io name your price), from Pocket Pulp who made the above Inky in the Alien Aquarium, is a real standout, a Gameboy Advance remake of the popular DragonSweeper with some new quirks. (The got permission from DragonSweeper’s creator to remake it, but only if they changed some things, which they did!) It was playable at the show but I got so into playing it that I forgot to take pictures!

There we go, that’s everything I managed to take notes on. My apologizes to anyone I’ve left out. Thanks for coming to VCFSE and showing off your work, and I hope this drives a few eyes your way!

I took more pictures than just these, I’ll make another post later with some of the other great exhibits on display and games that were playable at the show.

Access Software made other games, and would eventually begin the Tex Murphy series, but unquestionably their greatest legacy was their line golf sims, which began on the C66 with Leaderboard Golf (16 minutes). They’d move on eventually to making PC golf games, especially the Links series, which were so well-regarded that Microsoft bought the company specifically to make more golf games.

Eventually their work on computer golf would result in the formation of a subsidiary called TruGolf that made golf simulators, consisting of a huge screen and set of sensors that detects how you swing clubs and shows you your ball’s flight afterward, in a kind of deluxe version of Wii Sports Golf. Although Access would be eventually sold to Take-Two and is now no more, TruGolf survives to this day, and now they make simulators for other sports than golf, such as bowling and baseball.

In April we’ll have been doing this for five years, and I am set to continue bringing new things to you into the future even after that. Some days it’s hard to find something new to post; some days I have multiple things that I want to bring to you, and it’s a hard decision which to present first.

But I understand that the sheer variety of things that SSB presents may be bewildering. I mention sometimes that our three watchwords are Retro, Indie and Niche. If you’re interested in just one of these three, to the exclusion of the others, then you probably want to read a specific category. Nearly everything posted here goes into one of the three categories Retro, Indie or Niche, or else on Sundays when we relax the format a bit, into SundaySundry. In this way, Set Side B is really like four blogs in one, five if you count the rarely-used news and blognews categories (this post falls under blognews). You can find all the categories on a post beneath its author box in the left sidebar <-.

Let me break these down:

• By “Retro” I mean older games generally. I am of an age that I consider anything before the N64 era to be Retro, but I am considering updating that to before the Playstation 2 era. I judge that the PS2/Xbox/Nintendo Gamecube/Dreamcast era is around when game graphics reached the point, on casual observation, where you had to stop and look for a sec to notice that it wasn’t photorealistic, where increases in graphical quality hit the point of diminishing returns. I’m not saying that graphics didn’t improve after that point, far from it, but that we reached the point where capabilities increased, but didn’t enable completely new kinds of things. Evolutionary, not revolutionary. So I think the PS1/N64/Saturn age is where we’ll draw the line at what Retro means.
• On to “Indies,” these are the province of my co-blogger Josh Bycer, who runs the Game Wisdom channel on Youtube. Note that, if you go by the raw text of the category name, a spurious decision made early in the blog’s history means that the category name is plural, so, “indies”. These are small-team, or even solo developers, which is where, due to the immense reluctance to rock the boat that most AAA developers have, much of the energy in pushing forward the frontiers of gaming reside now. It’s not solely Josh’s province though, and I also find things to add to this pile from time to time, often, suitably enough, under the gamefinds tag.
• I’ll admit that the “Niche” category is a bit of a cheat, a way to include some things that don’t fall under the other two. Intended to spotlight games that are interesting takes on a genre, especially roguelikes, often it’s the feed that gets all the Nintendo-related stuff. Nintendo is often considered an AAA developer, but they still have the potential to surprise sometimes. If Microsoft or Sony decided to pack it in and leave game publishing then it’d be a blow, sure, but the loss of Nintendo, and their weirdly-persisting toymaker vibe, would be disastrous. In my opinion, of course.
• “SundaySundry” is where our weekly collection of game culture finds, mostly videos, goes. Again, because of a decision made early on, usually this group is presented as Sundry Sunday, with the order of the words reversed from the category.
• There are some other categories too, which overlap with these. Probably the most important of these is @Play, the continuation of my old GameSetWatch columns on roguelikes. This is mostly the same as the roguelike category, and both are subsets of Retro for the most part. You can also find lots of cool stuff in the romhacks category.

In addition to categories, I’m a strong believer in tagging, and all of the categories listed are also tags. Tags are a much more fine-grained system though. Game series, titles, developers, and individual content makers each get their own tags. The way Set Side B’s Mastodon autoposter works, it tries to include as many tags as it can in the body of the post, even to the exclusion of much of its description, but whatchu gonna do? Because of all the tags I add to posts, you can get around pretty well just by using tags! There’s a list of our most common tags in our tag cloud in the right sidebar, but so you won’t have to search for the link it here it is again.

The right sidebar is also where you’ll find the sign-up for our email-based, very non-Signal newsletter. That’s working now right? I should ask the always-wonderful Phil Nelson, who maintains the site and pays the bills, is that’s operational now. We’ve considered adding the odd extra thing exclusively for the newsletter. When it’s working, that is.

So there you have it. If you’re only, only interested in roguelikes, you now have the means to only see material relating to that. If your lifeblood is indie gaming, then you can get that too, and may I congratulate you on your worth as a human being. If you just want to see silly video stuff about games, then away with you to the back alley of Sunday Sundry, where the disreputable sorts who dispense with that kind of stuff lurk, as with that sunglasses-wearing frog who hands out romhacks.

We promise not to judge you. Much.

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

anothermartz made a couple of Parappa the Rapper videos that look and sound very close to the original, albeit in its remastered Playstation 4 incarnation. Listen these!

Note: anothermartz admits to the use of “AI” to match the texture of his voice to the originals. Even though they say it was an open source model and locally-hosted, this is usually a strike against an item for inclusion here, but I learned about it late. I considered scrapping the whole thing and starting over, but at 2:30 AM one wants to just conclude matters and get to bed.

The first one is more timeless and generally better, it stars the vaguely disreputable flea market denizen Prince Fleaswallow, teaching the young Parappa a bunch of questionable facts, as well as one that is, sadly, true. (2 minutes).

The other, also by anothermartz, is a lot more timely, replacing the put-upon Inspector Mooselini with Nigel Farage (2 minutes), the UK MP being investigated on corruption charges who’s so disliked and disrespected now that he called an election with mere months left to go in his term to stall that investigation, but as a result had to defend his office from a surprisingly credible threat from Count Binface, a joke candidate space overlord who would have been a much better MP than he has been. We only rarely touch upon political topics here, not for lack of interest but because they’re usually a distraction for us, with the whole retro/niche/indie thing, but this nicely aligns with gaming, so here you are.

General Chaos was the product of a couple of ex-Midway developers, and creators of some of their most iconoclastic hits, Brian Colin and Jeff Nauman. They were the creators of Rampage, one of the standouts of the Silver Age of arcades, and the basis of a certain popular movie. They tend to dwell in the shadow of the likes of Ed Boon and John Tobias, creators of Mortal Kombat, and Mark Turmell of NBA Jam and NFL Blitz. Yet there’s a strong argument that could be made that NBA Jam wouldn’t have existed without the similar-in-play Arch Rivals from the same company, which was from Colin and Nauman.

In addition to Arch Rivals and Rampage, Colin and Nauman worked on Spy Hunder, Xenophobe and Pigskin 621 AD, before leaving Midway and striking out on their own under the banner of Game Refuge. And that’s where they made General Chaos for the Genesis, published by Electronic Arts. And hey, Game Refuge still exists, while Midway is currently a locked cabinet full of IP somewhere in a basement of either Warner Bros. Entertainment, or the company currently called “Light & Wonder,” (I don’t know Pete I don’t think I buy it) but contains such multitudes as “Scientific Games,” “Autotote Corporation,” “Shuffle Master,” “WMS Industries,” “Bally,” or even other totemic brands that once saw better days. These days they mostly sell to casinos, may they speedily pass on their way to hell.

General Chaos isn’t one of their best known titles, but it has a certain something. It’s a cartoony, comedic take on deadly warfare. The Kickstarter calls it a predecessor of the real-time strategy genre, and there is some of that there certainly, but truthfully General Chaos is something entirely unique. It’s an intrinsically two-sided battlefield action combat game where the warzone is made of single screens, and where each player controls a team of five soliders with different abilities (with one exception I’ll mention in a bit). In action it feels a bit like Mattel’s classic tank combat games Armor Battle for the Intellivision and Armor Ambush for the Atari 2600, in that a single player must command multiple units, but with much more depth.

There is also quite a bit of General Chaos essence in Team Fortress 2, even though it’s not an FPS, for both its comical, satirical atmosphere and its array of characters which each have substantial differences from each other. There are gunners, rocket launchers, grenadiers, flame throwers and dynamite chuckers. Most of the time characters are controlled indirectly: control a cursor to point at a location and press the B button to send your current character to it. C changes characters, and A tells all your units to fire their weapons. They automatically pick their targets.

When opposing soldiers get near each other the battle pauses and they engage in hand-to-hand battle, in the form of a simple fighting game. Combatants who are knocked down can be revived by pointing at them with the cursor and pressing A to call in one of a limited number of Medics. Characters who fall too often will eventually turn into a pile of bones and vanish. Additional Medic uses can be found on the battlefield, and are also awarded for reaching certain point totals.

As an alternative playstyle, a side can choose to field a pair of Commandos. If one player is using Commandos they must divide their attention between them, but two players can also play co-op with a Commando apiece. Commandos don’t use the indirect method of control, and instead control directly. This can make them much more effective warriors, but comes at the cost of only being two people to a squad, instead of a full team of five. Commandos can call in Medics too, but must reach their teammate in person to do so.

There are lots of worthy games from the 16-bit era that didn’t receive their due, and while I don’t know how well it sold, General Chaos always struck me as a bit of a sleeper hit. Video game genres were already becoming locked-down, and Electronic Arts was already showing signs of abandoning their reputation for nurturing talent and becoming the grotesque behemoth they are today. I’m surprised they don’t outright own the rights to General Chaos, but it appears they do not, or maybe Game Refuge bought it back from them.

The Kickstarter page makes it clear that Colin and Neuman have spent a lot of time thinking about how their classic wargame could be improved. There are more characters planned, more control options, between battle upgrades and most interesting of all, the ability to “go commando” and take direct control of any unit on your side. Home turf battles come with extra units on a given side, “expendables” that have limited abilities but help to give defenders a slight edge. There’s an array of stretch goals, with an especially interesting one at $200k: an arcade version. I think General Chaos was always destined for the arcade, and now it may finally happen.

So if all of this seems interesting to you, please consider supporting their project. Because war is a deadly serious business, so the best thing any of us can do is to laugh at it.

Space Quest Historian showed off some of the changes in a video recording of a stream they did (8 minutes), and it’s worth your while to see, if just to glimpse sights like this:

Youch. Here is the video:

Here’s their playlist of their many item trivia videos, which include the (so far) six videos on Assist Trophies (16 videos, total length, about 6 hours):

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6

Just some of interesting facts revealed about Assist Trophies:

• Some Assist Trophy characters have their own HP, and if players deplete it with attacks they can even be KOed with a strong enough attack. This earns the defeating player a point, although it doesn’t cost the player who picked up the trophy a point.
• Usually the owning player can’t attack their own trophys, but if the trophy has started glowing, a state they get into when very low on health, the trophy will actually become vulnerable to attacks even by the player who collected it. This is so they can earn the point before another player earns it.
• The trophy with the highest health is Mother Brain, with a base health of 120 HP.
• “Base health,” what’s that? Assist Trophys that have health get more health the more players are in the game! This goes up to twice their usual health if there’s eight players.
• A good number of trophies have health, and can be attacked, than you’d might think. For example, in the trophy of Color TV Game 15, an early Pong-clone Nintendo made in 1977, the paddles are vulnerable to attack. Each has only 15 HP, but the trophy is defeated if either paddle is defeated.
• The Starman trophy, if it’s defeated, displays the SMAAAAASH!! message from Earthbound!
• Each Assist Trophy has a list of stages is can’t appear on. Very few trophies can appear on absolutely any stage. One of them is Lyn from Fire Emblem.
• There are even trophies that get blocked by Omega or Battlefield versions of certain stages. Usually these are trophies that reside in the background in some way, like Midna or the Moon from Majora’s Mask.
• Each Assist Trophy also has a list of items, and other Assist Trophies, that it disables, that can’t generate while it’s active, and alternatively, if that item or trophy currently exists in the world, that prevent it from appearing.
• Referring to that last point, “existing” can mean many things. Like, an item held in Isabelle’s pocket still exists in the world, and so will block all the items that can’t generate while it’s instantiated almost indefinitely.

They’ve been diversifying a bit since, and their most recent video is on alternative communication in games. (21 minutes) How so alternative? As in, ways to talk to players without talking to them, either via speech or direct text.

They give a few examples. The first is when Blizzard changed the /spit emote so that it couldn’t be used to specify someone to spit on, when players used that means to express disgust over people who bought a $70 paid mount. The second is the piecemeal phrase building system used to leave environment messages for people in Souls games, also known as template messages. And third, canned messages from Smash-style and modded Smash games.

This is the final part of my look at steam next fest October 2025 and the great demos I (Josh Bycer) played.

00:00 Intro
00:23 House 2
2:27 Goblin Sushi
4:06 Saga of Yurina
4:58 Hermit and Pig
6:36 The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time
8:20 Idosra: The Electric Renaissance
10:49 Uncle Lee’s Cookbook: Five Recipes of Disaster
11:56 Obelus Manor
13:19 Requiem of Reuinis
16:29 Shadows of the Afterland
18:06 The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike
20:35 Humanica
22:16 Nighthawks

2. Computers don’t have to be electronic (Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace’s Difference Engines; here’s a video about it [5½ minutes], with some clips of one in operation)

3. Computers don’t have to be electronic (The Digi-Comp 1 kit from 1963, computing with rubber bands; here’s a video about it, 16 minutes)

4. Computers don’t have to be electronic (Turing Tumble, a kit and game you can get that does computations with the action of falling marbles; here’s their Getting Started video [5 minutes])

5. Computers don’t have to be electronic (The 8-Bit computer built of K’NEX parts called the MechaDigit-1, bits posted here twice before; here’s video of it [18 minutes]; and here’s an older project called the K’nuter [10 minutes])

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

Three more entries from the long-lived Steamed Hams Simpsons meme that has charmed hearts and rotted brains for many years now.

#1: Chalmers is a Robot Running Classic Mac OS (3 minutes), by Dress Up Geek Out. The shortest of the three.

#2: The Graphic Adventure Game (7 minutes). It’s an actual game by neodement, in the classic Lucasarts SCUMM style, on GameJolt, which posting channel MS-DOS Friends credited but didn’t link to.

#3: As a Mobile Game Ad (30 seconds). By Tyrone Deise, it makes me twitch just watching it, so I’m glad it’s so short. I think you will be too.

#4: A last-minute addition, Recreated in Japan-Only N64DD Talent Maker (8 minutes). Prepare for an unforgettable bludgeon! And an unexpected few seconds of Totaka’s Song!

Extra: Another Steamed Hams Game, by MonsterJail on itch.io. No video that I could find for this one.

‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.

I’ve been thinking about classic roguelikes, by which I mean old games from the 80s and 90s. What usually calls themselves roguelikes these days is a debased currency. Some of these games are very good (Spelunky! Balatro!), but they aren’t things that would have been recognized as roguelikes in the age of the coinage of that term, which was probably the naming of the Usenet group rec.games.roguelike. This has resulted in such things as Punished Backlogs’s “Objectively Correct” Ratings of the best roguelikes having, as a requirement, being “stage-based” and to have “great music.” Whether it’s nice to have or not, a true jedi craves not these things.

Every so often I start musing over what the “main” roguelikes, the ones that are most fitting to bear the banner of the genre, should be. When I was writing @Play for GameSetWatch, the games I settled on were Rogue (1980), Moria (1983), Hack (1982), Angband (1990) and NetHack (1987). Soon after I added Dungeon Crawl (1997), Larn (1986), Omega (1988), ADOM (1994) and Brogue (2009). Nowadays I’d add Alphaman (1995), the adventurer mode of Dwarf Fortress (2004) and Caves of Qud (2010). (If you want to see some more recent things I’ve written on roguelikes here, look into the @Play tag.)

There are some more games that deserve inclusion probably. There are some “lost roguelikes,” lost because they were written for ancient Unixes (Unices?) and were hard to preserve or their implementation relied on those old OSes. There have been attempts at preserving these games, like the Roguelike Restoration Project (GitHub), although its last update is from 2011. UltraRogue, infamously, saved games by doing a memory dump of the process space, and loading it back off of disk when time to resume the game. Some other games it lists are Advanced Rogue, XRogue and Super-Rogue.

While clunky, buggy and sometimes glitchy, there is still a strong appeal for these old games, from a time when roguelikes were a hyper-obscure niche mostly of interest to current and former computer science students. In the early days of the web, the worthy Boudewyn Waiyers maintained the first major Roguelike Home Page on the internet (Wayback Machine links: first archived version, last version there, final home).

A few other games that it mentions are:

• Crossfire (which is multiplayer)
• Morgul, a variant of Moria
• IMoria, another variant, the only copy I could find is on the voluminous ArchiveRL on the Internet Archive
• PMoria, also in ArchiveRL and possibly nowhere else
• Ragnarok, a DOS game (download from Wayback Machine but it’s available from abandonware sites)
• Rogue’s Quest (1996, seems to be preserved on the Internet Archive)
• Saladir (see ArchiveRL)
• and URW, or “UnReal World,” which has an interesting story behind it. Unlike the other games in this list, it’s still in active development, and while it’s much changed its focus it still seems to be a roguelike. I think this should be a forthcoming @Play subject

Not mentioned on the dusty archives of the Roguelike Home Page is Elona, a roguelike from Japan. I’ve bounced hard off of this in the past (its got some objectionable content), but hell, I’ve survived the likes of Omega Labyrinth Life. There’s also Castle of the Winds, an early Windows roguelike which is slated to be republished on Steam soon.

I must say, ArchiveRL on the Internet Archive is amazing, a 25-gigabyte collection of hundreds of roguelikes, many of them defunct and otherwise forgotten. If you’re looking for something ancient, esoteric and probably terminal-based, you’ll find lots of things in its murky depths.

I’ve played a fair bit of Caves of Qud recently and I have quite a few notes on it. I think my next subjects should be that, UnReal World and Elona. Are there any suggestions for directions to explore? I mean besides down, deeper into the earth, of course.

Some extra links from the videos, a disassembly of the C64 BASIC ROM from pagetable.com, and the open-sourced by Microsoft code of their generalized BASIC interpreter. It should be noted that the original version of Microsoft BASIC were written for the Altair 8800 kit computer by Bill Gates and Paul Allen themselves.

I’ll distill the basics of the videos for you. Commodore BASIC is a dialect of Microsoft BASIC. It puts the loaded program at the bottom of memory, starting at 2049, or $0801 in hex. (The custom on the C64 is to denote hex numbers with a dollar sign.) When lines are written, the C64’s screen editor start from the beginning looking for a line number, and if it’s found tries to tokenize the rest of the line. Unrecognized keywords are still stored as PETSCII characters (which will cause a syntax error when run).

Commands are matched against a list of keywords stored in ROM. All the keywords are stored as “tokens,” single bytes, to conserve program space and to help with execution speed. At runtime, the tokens are detected by their high bit being set, then run through a lookup table. It pushes the high and low bytes of the command’s address in memory then does an RTS, which then jumps to the routine by acting like it’s returning from a JSR. Notably, the short routine that gets the next byte of BASIC text to act upon, CHRGET, is actually copied into zero page RAM to run, to take advantage of faster zero page versions of some instructions, but also because it’s self-modifying.

But I’d much rather link something interesting that’s basically unknown. Help spread the word about it! The only problem there is, how do you find that stuff in the first place? It’s a bit of a chicken-or-David-Egger. I think that’s what you’d call it, sure.

So when I saw someone I follow on Bluesky wrote out nearly every Nintendo video game property, including those that appeared on niche platforms like Virtual Boy and Satellaview, primarily so they could boldface the ones that have arrived on Nintendo Music, I had to run directly here to link to it.

I don’t vouch for its total accuracy, but it still could be a useful resource. In fact I know there are some things that are missing, like their early arcade games Sheriff or Radar Scope, just for starters. But if the idea is to present things that realistically could present soundtracks included in Nintendo Music, it’s a pretty good list.

It starts out seeming to work okay, but it isn’t long before it becomes obvious that something very wrong is happening. If you ever wondered what a failing graphics chip looks like, well, this will show you one example of it happening. Chips can fail in any number of ways, and there’s no guarantee that another PPU in the process of expiring will expire in the same way, but this is the kind of thing that can happen.

Except. Some people discovered, if you put Link’s Awakening DX onto some flash carts with a rumble motor included, there is a point during the game where the rumble will activate. Skawo on Youtube looked at the game’s code and sought an answer as to why. (10 minutes)

The tl;dw: GBC rumble motors are controlled via a MBC5 chip, a chip not dissimilar to the now-famous MMC line of chips on the NES/Famicom. Writes to ROM space are caught by the chip and used to activate functions. The main purpose for these chips is to switch between memory banks, but one bit in the written byte activates or deactivates the motor. Link’s Awakening DX uses a MBC5 and a miscoded write that activates any included motor. The MBC5 usually ignores these writes because it checks the cartridge header to see if it includes rumble support, a check that fails for this game, but GBA flash carts run will use an emulator to run GBC games, and if the emulator is inaccurate it might trigger rumble motor regardless of any header.

So why is the value written anyway? I’ll leave that for the video to explain, but it has to do with the additional save information added for the Color Dungeon, and an issue in the game when it saves puzzle completion data for areas that aren’t in dungeons.

But there’s a problem with speeding up Star Fox this way. The game wasn’t designed that the frame rate can be separated from the gameplay or animations. If you speed up the chip, you’ll speed up everything else in the game too, rapidly making it unplayable.

Some progress has been made recently towards improving the framerate without making it a twitchy stuttery mess. Tyler Loch made a video of his efforts (3½ minutes), and to people used playing Star Fox’s at its original 15fps it’s a wonder to behold:

Because the code has to be adjusted in many different places, there are parts of the game that are obviously incorrect. Falling pillars, you’ll notice, tilt over much faster, bosses move and fire much more rapidly and are more dangerous as a result, and the engine of the player’s Arwing spaceship flashes at a rate that some people may not appreciate. And the video shows off only the first level, because the full game isn’t finishable yet. But much progress has been made! Let us hope Tyler’s momentum holds up through the rest of the project.

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

Wario and Waluigi should need no introduction. (Wario shouldn’t anyway; Waluigi has not gotten most attention since the early 2000s.) After establishing them as the Nintendo-flavored version of “Bizarro,” we are informed by Michael McWhertor of Polygon that Camelot, the originator of Waluigi, had brainstormed up a wa-version of Peach too, which was rejected by Nintendo because they hate awesomeness.

It’s been two years since that article came out, and soon after fan material regarding this quasi-evil apparition began to appear. On DeviantArt (that place), user Niko–Neko has made to date 95 images of the princeless-waif, some just artwork, some comics, often involving her partners-in-wa, Wario and Waluigi. (Note: some images slightly NSFW, nothing explicit, but there’s at least one image where she’s wearing her cape and little else.)

I’ll leave you to explore Niko–Neko’s renditions of her hapless adventures on your own, as they’re not the actual point of this post, not directly at least. Instead, I invite you to partake in gawking at GabaLeth’s playlist of eight of those comics with voice-acting. (Total length about 4½ minutes)

I now leave you to dream about lovably incompetent dark princesses and the things they might do to you if they got you in their clutches. “Yow, it hurts so good! How may I serve you, oh Mistress of Darkness….”

Um… forget you read that.

But which kinds of failure are the most fun? After spending several minutes setting up your expedition getting eaten by wild animals immediately off the wagon is a harsh start to play, especially if it happens repeatedly. Fortress destruction via dragon is scary, but it’s also hilarious; everyone dying on the surface before even digging your first warren is less auspicious.

Dwarf Fortess recently celebrated its 20th birthday, and in celebration Kitfox Games, its Steam publisher, has released a new official beginners video, made by BlindiRL. (34 minutes) It is a good way to move your fortress endings more towards the entertaining end of the scale.

And I’d like to point out, at the end of the video, we’re told that ending a fortress doesn’t quite mean it has to be a failure. If you decide to “finish” a fortress, but then start a new fortress in the same world and of the same faction, then it’s possible for your old dwarfs to decide to emigrate to it. This is something I’ve never tried myself, but it’s a good reason to keep playing in the same world, as you continue to write the saga of your game.

I’ve already introduced The Bard’s Tale in prior posts, so in brief: The original Bard’s Tale trilogy were all Wizardry-style dungeon exploration RPGs in the classic style, called by some “blobbers.” Indeed they did a lot to define that style. A few things that Wizardry did weren’t adopted by later blobbers, especially its particular form of permadeath, its simulation of “Out” parties and retrieving lost characters from the dungeon, and its willingness to obliterate your entire group instantly and permanently if you teleported into solid stone.

The Bard’s Tale, on the other hand, looks exactly what the standard picture of a classic blobber looks like today. So long as you have the cash to revive a character there is no real penalty for dying, there is no absolutely solid stone to teleport into, and there’s no concept of “Out” parties, for if your party wipes their corpses get mysteriously teleported back to the Adventurer’s Guild, where if there’s enough gold in their cold pockets you, I guess in the capacity of being a caring guardian spirit, can tell the priests to bring them back to life.

But while not as eager to annihilate members of your group, neither is The Bard’s Tale an easy game. Compensating for the lack of permadeath, dungeons tend to be much more diabolical in design, with magical darkness, teleporters, spinners and antimagic zones in evidence. Dungeon levels are bigger than Wizardry’s, there are more of them, and most significantly to a new player, “Town,” here named Skara Brae, isn’t a simple menu of options but an entire level of its own to explore! And at the start of the game, you don’t know where anything except the Adventurer’s Guild is! You have to do significant mapping before you can buy equipment, recharge your spell points, or even raise your experience level.

In this 7th installment of the video series, the player finds and begins to explore the third of the game’s dungeons, finds some interesting items, suffers from disk corruption and loses some progress, earns it back, and fights a jabberwock.

Multiball is chaotic, and glorious for it, and it is not always possible to play one well. But you can learn to improve your chances at it, with practice and a decent strategy. For the latter, Tim Sexton explains how to go about it in an 18 minute video.

If multiball were easier, or less chaotic, it wouldn’t be as much fun! And even once you learn some decent tactics to lessen its complexity, like by learning to trap all but one ball on a single flipper and making shots with the remaining ball on the other one, it can still be fun sometimes to just try to make shots. Sometimes that works for me! But learning to play pinball consistently well means not taking on any unnecessary risk, and that’s certainly risky.

Tim’s video not only covers basic multiball tips, but it also examines some specific games, both new and old, and at the end presents examples of multiball play in progress. If you’re interested in improving at pinball, it’s worth a look!

Way back in 1984, having had success with their first product Softdisk, the nascent Softdisk Publishing released the first issue of Loadstar, a “magazine-on-disk” for Commodore 64 microcomputers.

Softdisk is mostly known these days as being the former workplace of several people who would go on to found Id Software, creators of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. Softdisk published, as the Id guys’ last work for the company, Catacomb 3D using the Wolf3D engine, and a Commander Keen episode.

Softdisk released other products too, but Loadstar eventually proved to be something special. Early on they assumed that their PC and Mac products would be their legacy, but then Microsoft and then the internet came along and it suddenly became much harder to make a go of it with a monthly paid software collection. Softdisk became an ISP; they got bought out by a bigger ISP; nowadays they don’t exist really, except as a bag of rights owned in pieces by Piko Interactive and/or Catacomb Games, who bought their Id-related assets.

But some time before then Loadstar and its relevant assets had left the company. Defying expectations and buoyed by the large userbase of the Commodore 64 (quick googling suggests they sold 70 million units), Loadstar was still doing fairly well for itself. It was no longer sustaining the whole company like it once had, but it was too large an audience to ignore. So Softdisk spun Loadstar off to J&F Publishing, under the captaincy of its longest-serving Managing Editor Fender Tucker, and they kept the lights on a while longer.

When Fender retired from Loadstar at the dawning of the year 2000, he passed managing editorship over to Dave Moorman, who kept it going for 49 more issues. It was starting to become hard to find new things to keep Loadstar going at this point. While Dave had some regulars sending in new things, a large back catalog to mine for material, and skill enough to write some software for Loadstar himself, its release rate slowly dropped from monthly to, in 2007, two issues in that year. Then a tornado his his house and destroyed the tools he used to make Loadstar. One more issue made it out in the following year, that had been in production and finished by Ricky Derocher in 2008. And that is where Loadstar’s story ended.

Next, what I’ve been doing

A year or so ago, with the permission of Fender who still owns Loadstar and J&F Publishing, I threw together something called Loadstar Compleat. A prior product also called that had been sold by Fender for some time, a CD-ROM with the 199 issues from before and during his run, along with the 42 issues of another magazine, Loadstar 128, and various other products and odds and ends.

I took the issues from there, replaced some bad copies with better ones provided by Ricky Derocher, added in the 51 later issues from Dave Moorman’s editorship, and added a kind of shell program to make browsing and searching through them all easier. I packaged this all together and threw it up on itch.io as Loadstar Compleat for $15. Since then I’ve now also given three talks on Loadstar and its history, in person at VCFMW 2025, virtually for TPUG, and three days ago also in person at VCFSE 2026. (There should be video of that soon, I’ll link to it here when it enters my notice.)

Now, possibly, the future

Dave has always said he wanted Loadstar to last to its 256th issue, to make it an even binary number (2⁸, or 100000000). Even though Loadstar only had about 100 subscribers left by that point he was still committed to doing it, and only the fury of nature prevented him from making it.

I mentioned this at VCFSE, musing that perhaps I could finish the task he had started, making a final six issues of the venerable disk magazine, and a couple of people there thought that it might be a good idea. And I think I have enough knowledge now of Loadstar’s underpinnings that I might be able to accomplish this. With all the tools available for producing software for retro platforms now (I have an upcoming article on those in the works), it is arguably easier to make C64 software than it’s ever been, and now that there’s the Ultimate64 and Maxi65, the size of the C64 platform is growing once again.

So, let’s start making plans for how this could happen. In addition to doing whatever needs to be done to understand Loadstar’s file formats to get its Presenter system to fulfill our purposes, I figure we need:

• Contributors, and contributions. Commodore 64 software, hi-res artwork (at least one image for each issue for the loading image), SID music (at least one piece per issue for the Presenter background music), articles and anything else we’d need to keep up Loadstar’s standards according to the systems they used in their late period, which used a polished Presenter menu program written in machine code, a text reader to display documentation and articles, and miscellaneous other niceties.
• Means to compensate them. We aren’t sure if this can support itself financially yet. For right now, we need to keep our options open. If we get a lot of interest it’s not out of the question that this could mean a bit of actual money, but for now free issues are what we’re considering.
• A means to produce physical disks. These issues would be sold digitally (as .d64 and .d81 disk images for emulators), but it feels like to be a real disk magazine, there must be actual Commodore-formatted 5 1/4″ and/or 3 1/2″ disks to sell too. You can still get 5 1/4″ disks. Amazon sells them ten for $25.

We’re currently discussing ways to accomplish these things. I’ve started a thread at loadstarce.com to discuss this project. We are fortunate that many of the Loadstar editors are still around, including Fender Tucker, his associate editor Jeff Jones, and Dave Moorman, as well as people who care about Loadstar’s memory like Ricky Derocher.

There are two things we need right now. The first is indication of interest. Would you be interested in buying something like this? How about spreading the word about our little venture?

The other thing we need is “content”: software, writing, art and music, in formats appropriate for the Commodore 64. C64 art must be hi-res VIC-II format. Music can’t just be any old SID tune but in the format its Presenter used (more information on that as I determine it). Software doesn’t have to be machine code, for Loadstar published many BASIC programs, and multiple BASIC extensions too, including one, Dot.BASIC Plus, that still has a website and working downloads!

Are you any of you interested in, and capable of, providing these things? I don’t know how much we can pay you yet. For my part I will make the rounds online and approach people who might be interested in helping revive Loadstar, if just for a little while.

And who knows, if this proves popular enough, maybe we could go past issue 256? Shooting for 512 seems like a ludicrous dream, certainly not something I could do in my remaining lifetime, but who knows for sure? Let’s dare to dream.

If you want to be involved in the continuation of the frankly improbable legacy of Loadstar, you can reach me:

• on Mastodon, at either @setsideb@mstdn.games or @rodneylives@mefi.social.
• on Bluesky, at @rodneylives.bsky.social.
• via email, at johnwh (at) gmail.com.
• on Metafilter, via MeMail to JHarris.

Until recently I didn’t have a specific list of things I absolutely won’t give the privilege of a link from these halls. It was more an ad hoc judgement: “Oh, this thing is on Reddit. Do I really want to point people there?” It’s not that I have such a high opinion of ourselves, but that there are some internet entities that I don’t want to further in any way, whether it’s through added traffic or search engine rank. We may not have much influence on the web ourselves, but what we do have we should use wisely.

So now, in order to be consistent, I’ve started making a list, of places or things I don’t want to aid nor abet. Perhaps I won’t be able to avoid linking to them ever, depending on how available the content is from other sources, but we do try to veer away from these things. Maybe it’ll make you think about your own linking practices.

Remember, the thing that makes the internet great, always has and always will be, isn’t companies, it isn’t “AIs,” it’s the people on it, as commenters and linkers, as readers and as creators.

Generative AI

That leads us to probably the biggest of these things on the list: generative AI. I hate it.

I hate it, and I hate that so many people have uncritically adopted the moneyfolk’s naming it as if it were actual AI, the expert system type, decision-making neural networks and so forth. It has confused people on the difference between slop machines like ChatGPT and Claude, which work by constructing the semblance of actual work which may or may not be useful or even correct, and actual AI that does things like discovering new proteins. That kind of AI is doing real and important work; the text constructors that you ask to do homework for you, finish your presentation or write an app are not.

It’s true, a couple of years ago I made a couple of posts using “AI.” (Always use the scare quotes if it isn’t clear you’re talking about the bad kind!) One was a link to someone’s generated image of Kirby, which was funny for how uncanny it was; the other was a mocking sequence where I asked it as many ridiculous questions I could think of, including asking it repeatedly if Biden was a vampire. (The most interesting thing it said was the word moose repeated many times.) There may have been a third time way back then, for I kicked its tires as many others did in the early days of Teh Hype. I won’t be doing that ever again, even for the purpose of mocking it. It’d be better for all of us if it just died.

Twitter

Another thing, or rather place, that I won’t link to is Twitter, a.k.a. “X.”

What a stupid name. What a stupid thing. Its overlord, an incredibly insecure man whose loathsomeness is only exceeded by the one in the White House at this moment, has at least given us an acid test of human quality. Are you still on Twitter even now, in 2026? Is reaching whatever audience remains there worth legitimizing, enriching, this awful human being and everything he stands for? Why are you there? Are you waiting for some other shoe to drop? Haven’t enough fallen already? Your presence conspires to give all those other people who haven’t left yet their own reasons to remain. Stop doing that!

You might be concerned about abandoning others, an established following, friends, conversation partners. Some of those are at least slightly understandable. But come on, there’s no lack of other ways to communicate now! Here is a partial list: email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Signal, Discord, Whatsapp, Instagram, Medium, Blogger, TikTok, Youtube, text messages, forums, IRC (it still exists), and others.

What is more though, I would say you need to think about what digital life means. Without exception, every long-lived, corporate-based popular internet service has betrayed its users in some fundamental way. Every single one! There are good companies out there, you may argue, and it may even be true, but it isn’t true of any big one, and the big ones are the ones everyone knows, and do the most damage, because chasing money and size to the exclusion of all else paints a certain route for your organization that naturally leads to enshittification.

So what other choices are there?

• The modestly-sized companies, who by definition are not trying to squeeze out every cent from users. They’re in a bit of a dilemma: people like them because they haven’t enshittified themselves yet, but the more popular they become the more tempting the drive to ruin their experience will be. Sooner or later they’ll fall: either they’ll just go out of business, the founders will betray their principles, they’ll get bought out or the people running it will just die.
• Free or community-run services. These are pretty good for the most part, but you may not be able to rely on them forever either. They have less incentive to ruin themselves for cash money dollars, but nothing says the good folk will stay in charge forever. Even decentralized services have their drawbacks. Mastodon servers tend to emerge, enlarge then pop like bubbles in a boiling pot. My personal Mastodon account has moved three times. On that note….
• Being a digital nomad. Never staying in one place for too long. Being ready to pull up stakes and transplant yourself to a new site at the first scent of shit. The plus: you can feel good about yourself, so long as you have the time and energy to do this. The minus: how will you ever build up a substantial audience if you keep having to move around so often.

It’s funny. None of those seem like perfect options! I don’t mean funny ha-ha; I mean it more like funny oh-no.

Fandom wikis

I’ve been making a list of alternatives to as many Fandom-based wikis as I can find, and I may share it with you some day.

Fandom got started as Wikicities (it’s old enough that, back then, having a Geocities-like name was considered an advantage), then it changed its name to Wikia, and now to Fandom. One of its founders was Jimmy Wales, yes, the guy on Wikipedia who’s always begging you to give them money.

You might not realize how far Fandom’s tentacles extend. They own Gamespot, GameFAQs, TV Guide, Metacritic, ComicVine and Fanatical!

The problems with Fandom are manyfold: they’re loaded with ads for one. For two their different wikis crosslink between themselves and give them all an artificially high Google rank, meaning one of their sites is much more likely to come up in search results than other people’s.

But probably their worst aspect is they suck much of the creative oxygen out of the web. Do you start your own website to tell the world what you know, or do you find one of their many tens of thousands* of innocent-looking Fandom sites, and contribute to that, thinking that you’re helping people out? But unlike Wikipedia, Fandom isn’t a non-profit, they’re owned by venture capital and are looking to put as many ads on your edits as they can. You’re giving of yourself, but they’re turning it into cash for their investors.

Back when they didn’t seem quite so rapacious they managed to shelter a couple of very high-profile sites under their umbrella, the Star Wars wiki Wookieepedia, and the Star Trek wiki Memory Alpha. Those two sites were probably the most prominent non-Pedia wikis on the internet, but now they’ve both been creatures of the Fandom empire for well over a decade. Imagine how much Google rank that gave them to spend.

* How many wiki sites does Fandom really have? Try this experiment. Take any even slightly famous entertainment media property you can think of, and search for it on Google. See if “fandom” is in the URL of one of the first page of results. I’d wager you’re very likely to find at least one, and that it’ll probably rank pretty highly. Fandom wikis seem to appear very readily, almost as if there’s an automatic process creating them.

A few other things that negatively affect my willingness to link to them

• As I mentioned above, Reddit is another place that I won’t link to, but I’ll save my diatribe against them for another time. Many of the Fandom arguments apply to them too.
• Paywalled pages are not completely off limits, but I don’t like sending visitors head-first into a paywall.
• Substack also has its problems, oh yes,but it isn’t a completely hard no yet, due to the sheer number of them. Of course, there’s lots of Fandom wikis too.

Notably, Youtube is not on this list. There’s just too much content that’s only on Youtube. I’d love to wean us off of it some day, however. Something to remember, in case the opportunity comes.

Since then however, its creator Mythic Resonance became dissatisfied with how it turned out, so he took it down for a bit for some editing. Well, it’s back now, and at 2 hours 23 minutes it’s even more complete and in-depth as it was originally.

We’re promised new entries, updated information and corrected errors. He admits that it may still not be absolutely perfect, but of course projects as lengthy and effort-intensive as this one will probably always have something about them that could still be improved. He says it took him 35 months in all to make it, so I’m willing to grant any deficiencies it still has, if just to help Mythic Resonance preserve his mental health.