I know it’s great because it includes a few games already mentioned on this blog, like Gar-Type! Find it (the list) here! And consider following Dominic on Bluesky or (via BridgyFed) Mastodon!

(EDIT: Fixed misspelling in title argh.) Why are these a thing? Retro Game Attic takes a look at the secret Controller Pak menus included in many (all?) memory card supporting games for the Nintendo 64. (14 minutes) The N64 came out after the release of the Sony Playstation, which had already begun its meteoric rise. … Continue reading "Secret Controller Pak Maintenance Menus in N64 Games"

Gauntlet is one of the best games that Atari Games made, and is certainly one of the best known, but it’s interesting how little even people who played it know about it. Gauntlet has 100 levels, although seven of them take the form of an in-game tutorial. The first level has three exits; one if … Continue reading "10-hour Superplay of Arcade Gauntlet"

This is a preview of Void/Breaker played with a gamespass key. Footage shown is in early access and may not represent the current version.

We’ve linked to Iftkyro’s work before here, he created the mystifying (if you know much about how the C64’s video hardware works) demo Nine, where a system that should only be able to move eight sprites around appeared to display nine. How was that done? As it turns out, with great difficulty, and not a … Continue reading "A Technically Proficient Commodore 64 Demo Explained"

I’ve posted TerminalMontage’s “Something About” series of satirical game animation videos before. The Fruitless Quests of Nabiu (8 item playlist) is another thing from them, but unlike those it doesn’t refer to any specific game. It just uses the tropes of various JRPGs in its animation and storytelling. This allows it to be much more … Continue reading "Sundry Sunday: The Fruitless Quests of Nabiu"

Displaced Gamers’ Behind the Code series is back, with an under-the-hood look at another NES Capcom game, following their examinations of Ghosts & Goblins and Strider, links are to our previous pointers to their peerless product. G&G was implemented by popular early NES anonymous developer and target of player recrimination Micronics, but Commando can’t use … Continue reading "Wherefore Commando’s Jank?"

Last night at our weekly movie watch group we saw Tilt (1979), one of those fad exploitation movies that Hollywood used to make, about pinball hustling, and with a surprisingly sweet ending, which felt earned because the first half of the movie is pretty sleezy, with an aspiring musician getting the money to make a &#8230; <a class="more-link" href="https://setsideb.com/addams-family-pinball-tutorials/">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> "Addams Family Pinball Tutorials"</span></a>

Via Kottke on Mastodon.* Alex Harri wrote an image-to-ASCII renderer that can translate generated 3D models in realtime, and on this page they explain how it works and some of the finer points of that conversion, specifically how not to make the rendered images seem blurry, instead giving edges clean outlines. It&#8217;s worth a look &#8230; <a class="more-link" href="https://setsideb.com/a-deep-dive-into-ascii-image-rendering/">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> "A Deep Dive into ASCII Image Rendering"</span></a>

These days writing a command-line OS for 8-bit or 16-bit era computers is almost an old trick, but GNO/ME (any relation to GNOME is purely accidental) has the difference of both having Unix-like features like signals, pipes and multitasking, while also having been written back in the day, in the 90s. Author Jawald Bazyar shows &#8230; <a class="more-link" href="https://setsideb.com/unix-like-os-for-the-apple-iigs/">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> "Unix-like OS for the Apple IIGS"</span></a>

For this perceptive podcast, the YouTube channel Indie Enjoyer reached out to want to chat about covering indie games, and what it&#8217;s like to be a Youtuber today who enjoys talking about smaller and underrated games.

As I write this, I have paused a game of Pac-Man Forever, a freeware Pac-Man update/homage/clone by My Dude Studios available on itch.io, on Round 154. I have spent almost three straight hours of playing it. It&#8217;s pretty good, but I&#8217;ve been tired of it for the last hour of it. Yet, it keeps going. &#8230; <a class="more-link" href="https://setsideb.com/gamefinds-pac-man-forever/">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> "Gamefinds: Pac-Man Forever"</span></a>

I promised yesterday that the next Sundry Sundays were going to be great, and so they are. The official Sonic the Hedgehog Youtube channel, in association with podcast outfit Realm, is releasing a sequence of audio videos featuring the adventures of everyone&#8217;s favorite ridiculous video game detective agency, the Chaotix. Why are they called that? &#8230; <a class="more-link" href="https://setsideb.com/sundry-sunday-the-chaotix-case-files/">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> "Sundry Sunday: The Chaotix Case Files"</span></a>

The subject of this post is Elie D&#8217;s 13 minute video about one of the mascot characters in Nintendo&#8217;s Mario universe thing. Here: I could launch immediately into a tirade that people shouldn&#8217;t invest self-worth into what amounts to, not just a cartoon character, but a corporate-owned cartoon character. But I don&#8217;t really want to? &#8230; <a class="more-link" href="https://setsideb.com/everyone-is-normal-about-princess-daisy/">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> "Everyone Is Normal About Princess Daisy"</span></a>

I&#8217;m a bit late to the trough on this one, but it&#8217;s worth calling back to the Video Game History Foundation&#8217;s recent release of over 100 ROMs and other data from the Sega Channel, that short-lived service that allowed subscribers with a model peripheral to play downloaded games over a cable TV line. It was &#8230; <a class="more-link" href="https://setsideb.com/recovered-games-and-data-from-the-sega-channel/">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> "Recovered Games and Data from the Sega Channel"</span></a>

Did you know there are seven of them? Really! Super Mario World has way more moons than you need to win the game, by a large margin, but it still feels special to find one of these secret collectables. MarMax Gaming points out all their locations in this video (10 minutes). There&#8217;s not a huge &#8230; <a class="more-link" href="https://setsideb.com/all-the-3-up-moons-in-super-mario-world/">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> "All the 3-Up Moons in Super Mario World"</span></a>

There was once a time when Compute&#8217;s Gazette, the Commodore 64 type-in magazine, was nearly the center of the computing world. An important source of low-cost computer software from the age before the internet, Compute&#8217;s Gazette distributed a variety of software, including a couple of games each issue. They also distributed Speedscript, an important early &#8230; <a class="more-link" href="https://setsideb.com/the-frantic-fisherman-from-computes-gazette/">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> "The Frantic Fisherman from Compute&#8217;s Gazette"</span></a>

I was just thinking a few days ago, It&#8217;s been quite some time since we&#8217;ve heard from Retro Game Mechanics Explained. In fact, looking at their channel, it&#8217;s been eight months since their last deep dive into video game internals, their terrific (if somewhat dry) look into how Super Mario Bros. 2 stores and constructs &#8230; <a class="more-link" href="https://setsideb.com/about-arcade-game-startup-displays/">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> "About Arcade Game Startup Displays"</span></a>

The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games we check out on the (Game Wisdom) channel. Please reach out if you would like to submit a game for a future one. All games shown are either press keys, demos, or games from my own collection. 00:00 Intro00:14&#160;Dobbel Dungeon1:58&#160;Entanglement3:43&#160;Parry Nightmare5:07&#160;Extreme Evolution Drive to Divinity6:46&#160;Ultros9:09&#160;Sniper Killer

This one’s an intersection between two weird and highly idiosyncratic cultural phenomena. (6 minutes) Please attend. Earthbound is, of course, the classic SNES JRPG, known in Japan as Mother 2, created by Shigesato Itoi. It has my vote for the greatest JRPG of all, for while it isn’t as popular as Dragon Quest or Final … Continue reading "Sundry Sunday: Earthbound Flying Man Animation Collaboration"

A second webgame in a row, Urjo is a logic puzzle game about choosing which of each space in a grid should be red or blue, with the following conditions: 1. Every row and column must contain the same number of red and blue spaces. 2. Every numbered space must have the same number of … Continue reading "Gamefinds: Urjo"

words.zip is a fun word search kind of game. It’s an infinite field of random letters. You try to find words snaking through the array. Words can twist and turn, and can also go backwards, but can’t go diagonally, cross themselves, or intersect with any other word that someone else has ever found. There is … Continue reading "Gamefinds: words.zip"

A quick one today, busyman demonstrates six ways to crash Scribblenauts games. To remind: Scribblenauts is a game where you have a magic notebook that creates things you write in it, if you just know the word for it. It’s one of a very small number of games that attempt to be exhaustive over some … Continue reading "Crashing Scribblenauts"

The gameplay of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is famously limited to three days. After three days the moon crashes into the town, destroying it. You have to go back in time before then (which also saves the game) and continue completing subquests in a non-linear, atemporal kind of way. But as it turns … Continue reading "Playing Majora’s Mask on Day 4: What and How"

This is a review of Incision played with a press key provided by the publisher.