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

It’s another Legend of Zelda related video. The subtitle (in Japanese) of the Famicom game was “The Hyrule Fantasy,” and so is the title of this two minute animation from OUSM.C. (2 minutes)

Fantasy is a devalued currency these days. Light and beauty have given way to swords and fighting monsters. It’s hard not to blame Dungeons & Dragons for at least part of this, but The Lord of the Rings series put a heavy weight on war and battles over wonder, and the many other things people have appreciated about J.R.R. Tolkien for decades.

I appreciate this video for being focusing on the small moments of the Zelda series, even though, as a video game, it’s mostly been about slaying monsters and collecting items than taking a moment out to enjoy an alternate world, at least until Breath of the Wild came out.

Certainly a memorable run was Friday’s play by adef earning a “naneinf” in the solitaire poker roguelite Balatro (1 hour 16 minutes), a score high enough to overflow the game’s floating point math and become, for practical purposes, infinity. The word for this scoring bug is produced by another bug in Balatro’s string output function: it’s NaN (Not a Number) e (as in exponent) Inf (for Infinity), all together in lowercase with no spaces.

A standard game of Balatro goes for 24 Rounds (though some can be skipped) over eight Antes, of exponentially increasing score targets. After the player clears the last Ante, requiring usually 100,000 points, they may choose to keep going in “Endless Mode,” where the goals increase yet faster. In Ante 33 the goal reaches naneinf, a number that’s impossible to reach even if you earn a naneinf score yourself. By Balatro’s math code, Not a Number can never be greater than or equal to anything, even another Not a Number, so despite the literal words Endless Mode, all games of Balatro end there. Even the joker Mr. Bones won’t help, for it only saves the player’s run if they earn at least a quarter of the score requirement, and one-fourth of naneinf is still naneinf. It is the inescapable black hole of Balatro scoring, from which no value can escape.

The requirement for this game is a bit less than that. It’s to reach naneinf with the score somewhere along the way, not to reach Ante 33. There’s only a few ways to do this, and most of them require Perkeo, a Legendary joker that allows for building up unlimited free copies of consumable cards. Even

Perkeo isn’t enough to do it by itself, it needs help from a bunch of other cards, and because Balatro’s joker selection is entirely random, they may show up immediately, or never. Since Perkeo is a nearly essential element, to make the game marathon safe the run begins with a mod that searches for a random seed with an Ante 1 Perkeo and a guaranteed Overstock in the first shops. Everything else, as will eventually become painfully evident, is chance.

Despite adef having tons of play experience, and also having Youtube Balatro expert Roffle on his couch to advise, the tone of the run slowly decays from a jolly “let’s beat this as fast as possible” to a panicked “holy crap this is some bad luck how can we salvage this?” That’s much more drama than is typical for the SGDQ stage!

And that’s also the excuse I’m using for this one, which is about as far afield as you can get concerning computer “entertainment”: learning how to hack devices like smart cameras and routers.

This video, a presentation given by Andrew Bellini on this subject given at DEF CON 32 (54 minutes), is an inspiring pep talk that makes me want to go out and find some old device, rip its PCB out of its case, fin some likely unpopulated UART points, attach them into a USB plug and plug that into a computer, and snoop on the output messages that come in over the line. At least it makes me want to try such a thing; could you be the same? Whether I’d get any further than that seems unlikely, but it’d be nice to give it a shot.

It seems entertaining to me. That’s an advantage of posting daily: tomorrow there’ll be something else, and practically speaking, you’ll probably find it much more entertaining to you.

One of those universal early net touchstones was the Flash cartoon site Homestar Runner, and its true star Strong Bad. His name and look inspired by the early NES game Tag Team Wrestling, yes everyone knew about Strong Bad, and waited with bated breath for the weekly cartoon where he answered viewer email.

Email is much less of a thing now than it had been then, and the site updates much more sporadically these days, but Homestar and Strong Bad are still kicking for now, lovingly maintained by their creators the Brothers Chaps, Mike and Mark Chapman. The Chaps chaps have done other work since then: they once made a website (with a couple of cartoons) for the pizza chain Mellow Mushroom, collaborated with Telltale Games to make an excellent series of adventures, they created the Youtube series Two More Eggs (and we’re almost done following all of their Eggpo subseries here on SSB), they contributed to the Aquabats show back on pastel horse network The Hub, they wrote for incredibly awesome Disney Channel cartoon Gravity Falls, and more recently made a board game based on their breakout pretend man dragon Trogdor and a few computer games like Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate.

Now we come to their most recent electrowork, an add-on pack for VR putt-putt sim Walkabout Mini Golf called the Homestar Runner Distraction Pack, that features 18 H*R-themed holes and a whole lot of in-jokes.

But if you are like me, and not only have you never heard of Walkabout Mini Golf before, but don’t even have a VR headset, this might seem like a great pile of interesting content that you have no hope of ever seeing.

Well I can’t say that it’ll cease your longing for all that forbidden golf, but they did release a 53-minute promo play of the game, with WMG creator Lucas Martell playing with Matt Chapman and Strong Bad himself, as represented by a floating head.

No, not that floating head. You get that reference, right? ‘Course you do, this is the internet.

The always-excellent Hardcore Gaming 101 is currently working through the Star Fox series, due to the well-received remake of (the remake of) Star Fox 64, still generally regarded as the high-point of the series.

Star Fox has gone through a lot of variation through its life. Rail shooters, strategy dogfighting, whatever Assault was, and even Zelda-style adventure. The strategy dogfighting is interesting as it plays out completely differently from the original game, becoming a kind of RTS. It’s a really interesting style, and one that I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else. I’m a little upset that it’s not as popular as the rail shooter Star Foxes, because it’s really interesting from a design standpoint.

The original of this type, Star Fox 2 back on the SNES, was long known as an infamous unreleased game, shelved due to the immanent release of the impending release of the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation, and the flat polygons and low framerate of SuperFX Star Fox would have looked insufficient in comparison to soon-to-come 3D titles like Panzer Dragoon and Tomb Raider.

While it didn’t get released until the SNES Mini in 2017, it did get a sequel, before the original had been seen by anyone who didn’t either work at Nintendo or played one of two leaked prototypes. Star Fox Command for the Nintendo DS featured the return of series co-creator Dylan Cuthbert, and elaborated upon the gameplay in its nearly forgotten predecessor.

Star Fox Command served as a conclusion to the story thread began in Star Fox 64, and perhaps realizing that whatever became of Star Fox after that would involve rebooting the series, it takes some pretty major liberties with the story. In Star Fox Command, it’s revealed that Andross actually had valid reasons for leaving Corneria, and that General Pepper forced him into exile for political reasons. By the end (spoilers!) former team member Peppy takes over command of the Cornerian military. Kurt Kalata of HG102 expresses some displeasure about this revisionist take on the story, and I have to agree, but oh well, they’re just games, and it’s not like Pepper served much of a role before, other than to deliver mission briefings, or reacting in hilarious dismay if you sent him a huge bill by getting a high score in SF64.

But even weirder than that….

Star Fox Command has nine endings, depending on which two characters you play the game with, and each of them serving as its own conclusion to the Star Fox 64 saga. It’s kind of a choose-your-own-future setup. Depending on your selection, Pepper’s heel turn isn’t the only reversal in the offing.

The nine different conclusions are all shown off on vgmuseum.com, and as Kurt notes, some of them are insane. Some of the story outcomes are a bit odd, but at least they’re interesting! In one, you take Falco on a side mission, resulting in Fox and company saving the day in your absense, causing him to leave Star Fox in disgrace, team up with Kitt, and start his own team. In another, Star Wolf saves Corneria, gets their fugitive status lifted, and become the toast of Corneria.

Krystal, the rescuee from Star Fox Adventures, is the focus of many of the endings. At the start of the story she’s left the team due to strife with Fox. In a couple of endings she and Fox get back together; in a couple more she joins up with Wolf! In one she leaves the team, and the galaxy all together, goes all emo and changes her name to “Kursed,” and becomes a bounty hunter.

Probably the greatest ending is the one where Fox and Falco give up being space fighters and get into high-speed hovercraft racing called “G-Zero.” I remind you that one of the drivers in F-Zero X and GX is James McCloud, the name of Fox’s father, as a human but piloting a vehicle that looks an awful lot like an Arwing. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie isn’t the only one of their properties to cross into Nintendo’s Furry Universal Century.

The ninth part of our (Josh Bycer’s) coverage of Steam NextFest 2025 October edition.

00:00 Intro
00:26 Curtains the Clown
2:16 Archon Soul
4:09 Homura Hime
5:59 Malleus Maleficarum
6:52 Bottom Up Beatdown: Hostile Takeover
8:37 Smash it Wild
9:58 Broomstick Exorcist
12:03 Earth Must Die
13:38 Funky Heart

This video is on unused spaces in Legend of Zelda games. (24 minutes) If you want to see some weird developmental crap, it’ll fill the bill. Look and see:

There are loads of unused rooms in Zelda games! This video, despite being 24 minutes long, is more a highlight real than an exhaustive listing, but they do find some really interesting places, like an abandoned haunted house in Link to the Past, and the unused inside of the head at the top of Tingle’s Tower in The Wind Waker.

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).

It’s one of those two times of year again. Games Done Quick, the bi-annual week-long charity speedrunning marathon, begins at 12:30 PM (“Noon Thirty”) Eastern Time on Sunday, July 5th, that’s tomorrow. The day after today, the 250th occurrence of that particular US holiday some people make a fuss about.

This one is SGDQ, where the S stands for Summer. If my recollection is accurate, AGDQ, the one that happens in January, is the home of Awful Block, speedruns while SGDQ hosts Silly Block. You can keep track of them by the first letter: AGDQ for Awful, SGDQ for Silly. Even so though there’s a lot of leakage between the two, and many of the games in Silly Block this time would fit in well in its Awful relative, including the infamous Snoopy game on Commodore 64, Mega Man for DOS and The Legend of Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon.

The schedule is here. A few games of interest, I think, are Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Kirby Air Riders (only Air Ride mode though), No More Heroes, a couple of games from UFO 50, the SNES version of Ogre Battle, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Vs. Super Mario Bros, Earthbound Beginnings, What The Golf?, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Randomizer, Gauntlet and Castlevania both for NES, and a naneinf run of Balatro, among many others.

The cool thing is, while they’re much faster now denser now, and faster, and we have much simpler ways of interacting with them, and storage, both chip and magnetic, hold much more data, and each of these things has improved by a factor of billions or even trillions, computers still basically operate on these same principles.

This video mostly concerns itself with explaining how basic computer circuts are made. It makes for fairly dry viewing if you don’t know anything about electronics or circuit diagrams, but maybe it’ll be interesting anyway, from a historical perspective.

From Nick C:

From Ammnontet (this is just image 1 of 2):

From “Steeeve Duffy,” who has many great comics, but whose name has too many e’s:

And from Deltarune, “New Video Game Advisor“:

We still mourn the end of Blaseball, which sustained some people’s hunger for a sports-like communal experience during Covid lockdown, but can understand that without everyone staying at home it wasn’t possible to sustain it.

It’s not Blaseball, but kind of similar in a way, if you look at it sideways and with unfocused eyes, is Ribbie, which takes real baseball games, being played live, and presents them in a style not dissimilar to a video game. By its nature Ribbie is properly enjoyed while games are in progress, but there is a demo available that presents an archived match.

There’s no rogue umpires, black holes or resurrected players, but it is an entertaining presentation. There is sound too, though off by default, so if you don’t want to experience games in deathly silence be sure to turn it on.

Part 8 of my (Josh Bycer’s) coverage of Steam NextFest, October 2025 edition.

00:00 Intro
00:20 The Doppel
1:27 Terror Type Alchemy
3:09 The Spirit Lift
4:45 The People of Sea, Sun, and Salt
6:17 Terraformental
8:28 Heaven Does Not Respond

This situation may seem impossible to resolve, and it’s true that you have some chance of losing no matter how you deal with it. But there are sometimes ways to improve your odds and clear up the uncertainty without making a move that’s a 50% chance of losing. Mine Bouy calls this “breaking a 50/50.” (8 minutes)

Their strategy has to do with not picking one of the two questionable spots if you can help it. It relies on realizing that picking an adjacent spot with lower odds of failure may give you a chance to give you information that could reveal which spot has the mine. It trades even odds of exploding a mine with a greater chance that a spot is mine-free, and also revealing which of the 50/50 spots hides the boobytrap. Clever!

Two other helps linked from the video’s description are a browser-based Minesweeper analysis tool by MSCoach, which offers a no guessing mode that guarentees no 50/50s will be generated, and a Google Docs paper (by Scar) on the basics of 50/50s and the many forms they may take. You can play Minesweeper on the internet at Minesweeper Online, which also offers a no-guessing option.

There’s already a good number of links to explore, so take a look when you have a moment!

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

Submitted for your perusal: a version of classic game tune The Death That I Deservioli, the epic Lap 2 music from Pizza Tower that plays if you’re cocky enough to ignore the exit gate and be transported to the end of the level to escape again within the time remaining.

It’s a deserved-ioli popular piece of game music. Here, it’s played with stepper motors (3 minutes), in a cover written by Jonathan Kayne:

If you’re not familiar with the terrific Wario Land 4-inspired Pizza Tower, here’s the same piece from the game.

It was for the original Playstation that Namco first started rereleasing home compilations of their classic-era arcade hits, in the six well-known and respected Namco Museum titles. But then their rereleases became rerereleases, and then, rerererereleases. So many collections, so many trips around the block, so many recreations, so so many. Going by the series’ Wikipedia page, the most recent entries have been for modern home consoles, the Evercade handheld retro console, and even a standalone unit.

I would despair of ever understanding all the Namco Museum releases, but for the tireless efforts of Mythic Resonance on Youtube. He has constructed an epic two hour review of every Namco Museum version, called The Namco Museum Museum! It took him over 2½ years to make! And as of this writing it only has 1.9K views, which I view as a darn shame, even if it is, right now, only nine hours old.

I don’t know how many of you have the stamina to watch all of an epic overview of these dozens of game collections, but some of you have got to be up for it, I’m sure. Good luck on retaining your sanity while weathering this massive onslaught of game information!

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

The existence of this feature implies that the PPU was intended for greater things at some point in its development. A lot of the limitations of classic hardware end up being due to economic and complexity tradeoffs prevalent at the time of their making. I find it intriguing to imagine the PPU’s chip designers anticipating a future where it could have been daisy-chained like this.

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.

sylvie’s Games Don’t Have To Be Good To Be Good is an interesting little browser game where the point is figuring out how to play, then what to do. It’s really short! You can probably finish it in five minutes.

The description calls it a manifesto, and I can see that, and also agree with it. (And it’s an entry in Manifestø Jam 2026 too.) My belief about game worth is that there can be a hundred things wrong with a game, and everyone can agree that they’re wrong, but if there’s one really really good thing about it, just one powerful elemental spark of awesome, if it’s strong enough, it can make all the “wrong” things meaningless.

It’s points to one of the great problems with game journalism as it’s currently practiced. The traditional lists of flaws, the reporting of how “smooth” it is, of how realistic the polygons are and the other excuses a reviewer gives not to play something, none of those things matter. Not if the game has something really good going for it, and to obsess over trivialities will blind you to many worthwhile things.

It’s why it took forever to get the gaming press to notice roguelikes! The genre of classic roguelikes feels like it was designed to be a koan, a seemingly-impossible question that prompts thought, meditation and eventually enlightenment. Classic roguelikes (or as I’m coming to call them, true roguelikes) look entirely unlike everything magazines and websites told players they were supposed like. They rejected everything that being good meant. So why are they fun? Please contemplate that with me now. Ooommmm….

Coming back to Games Don’t Have To etc., it does push the boundaries of enjoyability a bit, but overcoming its purposeful vagueness turns out to be a puzzle to solve. And you can do it! Please give it a try. It might not be an all-time classic, but it’s an enjoyable use of five minutes. See if you agree.

Games Don’t Have To Be Good To Be Good, by sylvie (itch.io, web, $0)

The details of the story are that this only involves the copyrights, not the trademarks. But trademarks are different from copyrights, they must be continuously defended and expire if not utilized. Every so often Electronic Arts attempts to do something new with the Ultima name, but none of them usually turn out that successful. The sole remaining example of classic Ultima is the venerable MMORPG Ultima Online, older than World of Warcraft, even older than Everquest. It’s possible that EA could use its unbelievable continued existence as a pretext to keep hold of the Ultima trademark, but UO is incredibly ancient itself nowadays and doesn’t have the large userbase it once did.

I have no love for the monstrosity Electronic Arts has become, the memory of their enlightened early years under Trip Hawkins fading after decades of stagnating sports lines chained to big leagues licenses, and piles of brown and gray military shooters. They sit on countless classic computing properties, doing nothing with them while people who fondly remember them age and die off. Yet I choose to believe this isn’t out of spite, more that they can’t be assed to do anything with properties that aren’t gigantic sellers.

Ultima is one of the few cases where a piece of their gigantic lucite block of IP shows a crack that could be broken away. Richard Garriott has maintained his wealth from the time of Ultima’s success, and may have the resources to fund a revival. Whether it would be successful… I can’t say. Garriott has tried making multiple games since leaving behind Ultima with varying degrees of quality. His Tabula Rasa from NCSoft, from nearly 20 years ago, didn’t do well; I’m not apt to hold that against Garriott though, considering how badly they treated City of Heroes.

Every so often Richard Garriott comes up with some new concept, but truthfully it’s been a while since he’s made waves. I personally sat at a talk he gave at DragonCon a few years ago where confidently held forth on the direction that he saw gaming going, but then failed to go. I’ve tried Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues recently, he was involved with it but has long since left it. I bounced off. I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but Garriott’s most recent project involved NFTs, which seems like a huge danger sign.

My personal opinion is that Richard Garriott should immediately approach Digital Eclipse, developers of the terrific remake of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, and together start making something along those lines. Richard, if you’re somehow reading this, please consider it! They do great work. Maybe something involving Ultima III, IV or VII? Any of those would be amazing and could open up this long-neglected series for a new generation of players.

I’ve heard that Garriott is going to be at DragonCon again this year. I plan on reporting on it on-site. Despite what you might think from what I wrote two paragraphs above I’m still rooting for him. Ultima is the most shamefully neglected classic RPG franchise out there right now, and I’m excited to think that it might make a comeback, no matter how unlikely that might seem right now. I didn’t think Wizardry could make a comeback either! Let’s all clutch our ankhs tightly and hope.

This is part 7 of my (Josh Bycer’s) favorite demos from Steam NextFest, October 2025 edition.

00:00 Intro
00:23 Servant of the Lake
1:25 Painted in Blood
3:47 Jackal
5:28 Hold the Mine
7:28 Amnyam
9:19 Keys of Fury
10:01 Prince of Darkness Jr
10:55 Checkmage!

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

Two items this week. One is this simple yet charming video of someone who made a crank organ (festooned with plush parrots and a decorative octopus) and configured it to play the ending music, titled simply “Staff Roll,” to Super Mario 64. It’s very nice to listen to, and it’s only about three minutes long. Please enjoy!

The other thing? Oh, the final episode of The Amazing Digital Circus, which released to theaters a couple of weeks ago, finally hit Youtube. Everyone probably knows that already! It didn’t to badly in theaters (I saw it there myself for the first time), but now that it’s on Youtube the saga Pomni and her friends in their weirdly video game-like world is over. There’s laughs, quite a bit of sadness, and a hopeful tone at the end. I greatly enjoyed it! If you haven’t seen it yet here it is (58 minutes).

Will we ever see the Circus and its denizens again? Who knows? Creator Gooseworx has said she’s tired of working on it, but she seemed to leave open the possibility that production company Glitch could do something. The characters are interesting and unique, and we should be happy with what we have. But who knows?

The CRPG Addict has come around to reviewing the original Multi-User Dungeon, the first of many. Because PLATO predated so many networked computer games it wasn’t the first online multiplayer game, but it was one of the first that could be played by many people. The Addict links to an extensive Digital Antiquarian article from 2017 explaining MUD’s history.

That Antiquarian article is pretty amazing. In the original MUD, if you got enough experience points you could become a wizard, basically a moderator yourself. If you killed another player they had to start over from scratch, and you got 1/24th of their experience points. Other ways to gain points was to find treasure and drop it into the swamp. Once treasure was swamped it was gone until the next server reset, which only happened when nearly all the treasure was so disposed. While you could find and use weapons, there was a limited number of most of those in the game so most players had to be satisfied with basic stick weapons.

But despite these limitations, players managed. Wizards could crash the game easily (there was a command specifically for doing so!), so mostly they didn’t. Customs were decided on; it was improper to kill a player more than two levels below yours. The game continued, and players largely came up with their own solutions to social problems.

The CRPG Addict explains that the original MUD is still in operation at british-legends.com, and that you can even join him there to play today! Times are in his post.

I think the most interesting thing however has to do with GC’s Animal Crossing limits. Although the system clock extends out to 2099, the calendar of the game itself only supports dates up to 2030! When the date rolls on at midnight, December 31st 2030, the game will advance to 2031, apparently as normal, but on saving and reloading the year will become 2030 again.

The video was made two years ago in 2024. It’s now 2026, so you only have about four-and-a-half years to play Gamecube Animal Crossing in the intended way. All the AC games have date limits like this. The Switch version, New Horizons, is said to be able to even open save files from 2061 and later, so that’s one edge the Gamecube version has over it.

You might wonder how many of these websites can be left. It was just in April that the long-decaying webhosts Tripod and Angelfire finally and suddenly went dark. How many of these old pages remain? Well, going by the link count at Early Web Links, at least 12,000 of them.

There’s actually many more than that out there, but they’ve been neglected, abandoned by the money web. Good luck finding sites like these in Google, they’re much more apt to send you to Reddit or Youtube. All the big social media sites actively downrank sites with the temerity to include links in them, for if you follow them, you’ll be leaving the lucrative walled gardens of Facebook, or the fascist-supporting castle walls of “X the everything app.” The rise of more healthy social media like Mastodon and Bluesky is a counter to that, but they’re still dwarfed in size by the likes of Instagram and Threads.

If you want to find interesting, independent Web 1.0 sites like these, your best bet is a directory like Early Web Links. Despite the name not all of these sites are old ones, many are quite new. They’re “early web” links because the sites are done in the style of the oldweb, and presented from a link directory not dissimilar to the fertile environment that, decades ago, was the mulch that supported the roots of Yahoo and its improbably-lasting multimedia empire.

Of course, that was decades ago. If you’re looking to make a fortune now then these sites aren’t going to provide it to you. But what they can give you is honest, earnest enjoyment, not tied to an algorithm or funding billionaires. Go have a look! We’ll be here when you’re done.

There are some locations in a few levels that have four invisible spots in the background that can detect your presence. If you touch the four in order, the extra life appears. They’re found throughout the game, and they’re supported in code to the extent that, if you find one in a level, the game sets a flag for that level so it won’t appear again in that play session. You have to exit your game and load it back up again before you can get another extra life by this means from that level.

Many of these locations are arranged so that to trigger them in order, you’ll have to move in a loop around some location. This is similar in concept to the stakes in Super Mario 64 that, if you run around them a few times, cause them to generate coins to collect. Another kind of weird secret in a Mario game. I feel like Shigeru Miyamoto must have been lying awake at night brainstorming ever more obscure things to put into them.

More of my series looking at the best demos from Steam NextFest October 2025 edition.

00:00 Intro
00:21 Repel the Rifts
2:59 Reanimal
4:28 Bloodright
6:39 Lady Dracula
8:17 Ambrosia Sky
10:25 Light Odyssey
12:16 A Game About Feeding a Black Hole
13:08 Eventide Matter
13:26 Outhold

We collect literally hundreds of links in compiling stuff to you, far more to give everything its own post. Here’s a scattershot collection of some of it, we hope that one or two of them might strike your discriminating fancy.

• As often happens, I find out about something cool right as it ending, and so it is with Good Internet Magazine. However its archives are still up at the moment! There’s cool things to find there like Build The Web You Want To See. I found out about it from this post on brennan.day, which is announcing an upcoming site called Long Horizon.
• Along those lines, for three years now Robert Birming has been organizing Junited on his blog, which is just an excuse for bloggers to link to each other. I think people should link things all the time, for any excuse, at the drop of the hat (that’s largely what I do over on Metafilter), but if some people need an excuse to do it for a month I can get behind it!
• On that site I found an Indie Web webring. Remember webrings?
• Returning to the subject of cool things ending, it didn’t get mentioned much in my online circles, but both Tripod and Angelfire, two of the biggest remaining free/low cost webhosts from the early days of the web, have called it quits. Parent company Lycos continues to soldier on, free of one more of those pesky legacy services they couldn’t be bothered to preserve. Bah.
• a2central is a site about Apple II computing.
• Juiced.GS is a quarterly Apple II magazine. My searches for issues of Softdisk has had me in an apple-y frame of mind lately.
• One useful page on that site is a rundown of Apple II emulators.
• On Mashable, Chris Taylor has a piece about the backlash against generative AI. I’m glad it’s being noticed how much people detest it! Let the anger flow through you! It’ll give you cool lightning powers!

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

They can’t all be winners here on Sundry Sunday, but sometimes I find something pretty darn cool, and that’s the case this week with this spot-on Wallace & Gromit parody/Legend of Zelda parody. (4½ minutes)

One of the most defining characteristics of W&G is its gentleness, and it’s a feel that smooshes into the fields of Hyrule fairly well. Wallace is Link of course, though a more verbose Link that we’ve ever seen in the games. It means the silent Gromit is Navi, so it’s like the roles were mixed up. Wallace is more concerned with finding his breakfast cheese than saving the princess, but at least his quest ends with him finding three golden triangles.

It’d probably have been too much to ask for it to have been made in stop-motion clay, but neither was it made using AI video generation either. The description tells us that creator “Tommy” spent seven months in Blender working on it. Wallace’s voice is pretty close to the shorts and movies, and I found the slight differences there are easy to overlook. Make sure to pause a few times to catch the many in-jokes scattered throughout, like the various objects in Wallace’s house and the titles of the books on his shelves.