The Flipside of Gaming
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, … Continue reading "Sundry Sunday: More Misted Pigmeat"
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 … Continue reading "@Play: Musing on Classic Roguelikes, Directions to…
The title refers to an ongoing series with two videos so far. Part 1 (28 minutes) is about how the tokenizer works and how programs are stored in memory, and Part 2 (19 minutes) is on what the BASIC interpreter does to execute the program as it’s running. These are pretty detailed and a bit … Continue reading "Commodore History on How C64 BASIC Works"
I could link the things that everyone already knows about, that people in that wretched hive they call Reddit have already linked five times, that have blown up on social media, that there’s already a Youtuber or two making snide comments about. I mean, I’ve linked stuff like that before, pretty often really. They aren’t … Continue reading "Bluesky User Lists Practically Every IP, To Track Which…
We linked to a Skawo video yesterday, the one about flash card rumble motors activating when playing Link’s Awakening DX. Well I happened to have this one open, so here’s another: the last gasps of a failing PPU chip, shown off in several games. (5½ minutes) It starts out seeming to work okay, but it … Continue reading "More from Skawo: Demonstrating a NES’s Failing PPU"
The Game Boy doesn’t have a Rumble Pak. Of course it doesn’t; where would you slot it? But a few games were released for the Game Boy Color (and Game Boy Advance too) that have built-in rumble motors. Because of this, it’s impossible, with unmodified physical hardware, to separate the Rumble from the Pak. If … Continue reading "Skawo on Link’s Awakening DX’s Rumble Support"
It’s been possible for quite a while to increase the framerate of SNES Star Fox. Even during the SNES’ hardware release period, an updated version of the SuperFX chip that made it’s then-amazing 3D visuals possible was used that doubled its performance, and was used in other games like Yoshi’s Island. And now overclocking and … Continue reading "Increasing the Framerate of SNES Star Fox"
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 … Continue reading "Sundry Sunday:…
Dwarf Fortress has always been a game about failure. It’s right there in its motto, “Losing is fun!” It’s a game where you just muddle through, doing what you can, learning as you go, and your games slowly, on the average, get longer and longer the more you play. It’s not that there aren’t guides … Continue reading "Kitfox Games’ Official Dwarf Fortress Beginners Guide"
The C64 Appreciation Society continues their playthrough of the first Bard’s Tale. (23 minutes) If you want to start from the beginning, they’re collected in this playlist. (7 items) 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 … Continue reading "More From The Bard’s Tale…
Pinball is tricky enough on its own, but then you “lock” multiple balls in some location, the game’s sound system starts to go nuts, and uh-oh, now all those balls are on the table at once! Multiball is chaotic, and glorious for it, and it is not always possible to play one well. But you … Continue reading "Tim Sexton Explains How To Improve at Multiball"
First, to recap 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 … Continue reading "Let’s Try to Make More Loadstar!"
Today it’s a big talky thinky post, that doesn’t have much to do, directly, with video games. Sorry for that, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while and wanted to get off my chest. If you leave things like this spinning around your head for too long they begin to fester, and … Continue reading "Some Notes on Set Side B’s Linking Policy"
Recently we posted a link to an excellent video that took a look at every software product (Bandai-)Namco has made that had the temerity, the utter gall to call itself “Namco Museum.” Since then however, its creator Mythic Resonance became dissatisfied with how it turned out, so he took it down for a bit for … Continue reading "Namco Museum Museum Reviewed, Updated"
This video’s from Dorkly (3 minutes), which isn’t a source I often link from, but what I can say I’m a sucker for mockery of all this “AI” awfulness being foisted upon all us by every large tech company. Also its pretty well-written, and hey, Dr. Eggman has a terrific Bluesky account too (not related … Continue reading "Sundry Sunday: Dr. Robotnik Is All-In on AI"
Aaah such has been the rush that apparently I didn’t make a post yesterday! And today has been so tiring that, while a lot of fun things happened today, I feel like it’ll take more time to write them up than I do right now, half an hour after midnight on Saturday. VCFSE in Atlanta, … Continue reading "VCFSE Day 1"
Tomorrow begins is VCFSE, which stands for Vintage Computing Festival SouthEast, a three day celebration of retro computing. Not only will I be there, but I’ll have a table for Loadstar Compleat and also selling copies of Exploring Roguelike Games (I just brought two though; they’re heavy!) and ancient issues of Loadstar in their original … Continue reading "VCFSE 2026!"
This is a double review of Astro Prospector and Legends of Dragaea played with a review key and press key respectively. 00:00 Intro00:20 Astro Prospector2:57 Legends of Dragaea
While it’s seen more than one revival since its original release by New World Computing (the Heroes of Might & Magic series, and the 2008 series titled King’s Bounty by Katauri Interactive), that first version is still a fine game to play even today. Players explore four continents raising armies, fighting hordes of monsters, building … Continue reading "A Reimplementation of DOS King’s Bounty"
The world is full of traps for the unwary. There’s a whole genre of movie, mockbusters, that exists purely to try to catch people who are only vaguely familiar with some media property, and they make enough money that by cutting their costs extremely thin they can be profitable. Mobile app stores are full of … Continue reading "The Bad Game Hall of Fame Covers Sonic Jam: Game.com Version"
This week it’s simple. It’s easy. I won’t say it’s pure, I won’t insult your intelligence by going that far, but I will insult your intelligence with a video game music done in the Seinfeld theme song style round up. Let’s go. Note that these are game music compositions done in the style of the … Continue reading "Sundry Sunday: Seinfeld Stufffeld"
Three finds on consecutive days. This is another in a particularly beloved genre for me, the elaboration upon Pac-Man, which I like so much I wrote one myself back in 2013. This one’s interesting in that it takes the most after Jr. Pac-Man, the last of the Pac-Man versions in the old style in arcades. … Continue reading "Gamefinds: The Pac-Man Brothers"
Another little fun indie puzzle game! And it’s based on Sokoban too, and it was also pointed out on Metafilter, this time by user Cogito in a comment. So let’s get our warehouse gloves on and get back to pushin’. It’s Samuel’s Sickoban! It’s implemented in Pico-8, and should run wherever it runs. As typical … Continue reading "Gamefinds: Samuel’s Sickoban"
Pointed out in a post on Metafilter by long-time user pwnguin, Soko Striker is fun, and not excessively challenging, free Soccer-themed Sokoban game by Axylaric on itch.io. The idea is to get all the balls (up to three in a level) into the goal net. The ball slides when you kick it, continuing to move … Continue reading "Gamefinds: Soko Striker"
Displaced Gamers‘ Behind the Code series, and its companion Talkin’ Code, are probably the best technical examinations of NES games on Youtube. They take games that were the bread and butter of the Famicom/NES in its heyday, products of skilled programmers some of whom had gotten started working on arcade games, and disassemble them, revealing … Continue reading "Behind The Code Examines NES…
A recent Retronauts episode looked back upon the history of Buckner and Garcia’s 45-year-old video game novelty song Pac-Man Fever. Host Drew Mackie also runs Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games, and it just as recently linked in passing a pair of ancient websites devoted to its album, Lee Seitz’s Pac-Man Fever Forever and 52 … Continue reading "Webdepths: Pac-Man Fever Forever"
This is a review and preview of two incremental games, Progress Racer RPG and Maktala. Played with a retail key and demo build, respectively.
Porky Draws gives us (by which I mean, gives the world, not us particularly, we’re just pointing to it as usual) an epilogue to the Banjo-Kazooie games (2 minutes) where persistent enemy Gruntilda (who is active and alive and everything) casts spells on Banjo and Kazooie’s internet connections. It’s pretty short, but I feel the … Continue reading "Sundry Sunday: Gruntilda’s Revenge"
I hope you’re ready for something pleasingly pointless. Let’s review. I’m only sad they didn’t do the version with the Conveyor Belt level.
White Pointer Gaming is the Youtube channel that examines games and figures out how they pull off the graphical tricks they do, and we’ve linked them to those several times before because they almost always find some interesting tricks to explain, like when the Genesis/Mega Drive pulls off something which looks like scaling, which happens … Continue reading "White_Pointer Gaming Explains SNES…