The weirdnesses continue…. The cartridge has mock-up art on it that looks like the “black-box” trade dress early NES games had. The chips on the cart are mask ROMs, not EPROMs. In the attract more scroll, arcade names are used for some of the fighters, like Pizza Pasta, Piston Hurricane and Vodka Drunkinski.

The original Bard’s Tale, not the PS2 action RPG reboot, and not the more-recent continuation either, created by Michael Cranford, is not as harsh as Wizardry, but is still a tough game, and one that demands that you map it out as you go. Instead of a menu-based town like in Wizardry, you have to actually explore the town of Skara Brae to find important locations within it like Garth’s Equipment Shop, Roscoe’s Magic Emporium or even the Review Board where you gain experience levels, and surviving the town’s random monsters long enough to do those things is your first major challenge. Yet despite, or maybe because of, that difficulty, the series sold more than a million copies, and was an important early hit for both developer Interplay and publisher Electronic Arts.

The C64 Appreciation Society is working through the original Bard’s Tale in an in-progress series of videos, ranging from 10 to 15 minutes in length, and they’re excellent both for an introduction to the classic series, and for understanding what made the game so popular.

The playlist is in reversed order, so if you watched it from that you’d start with the episode 4 and then watch 3, 2 then 1, and it’s really for the best to watch them in the correct sequence, so here those are: Episode 1 – Episode 2 – Episode 3 – Episode 4. Embedded here is the first of those episodes:

Because of this, I just have to assume that this 16½-minute video from Cat’s Eye and Cybershell finding many (although they admit not all) of the songs that the musicians behind the Japanese version of Sonic CD drew samples from is on the up and up. The Japanese version’s soundtrack was by (looking up spelling on Sonic Retro) Naofumi Hataya and Masafumi Ogata. They mostly don’t seem to touch the US version, which had mostly different music by Spencer Nilsen and David Young, maybe because of those many musical references. Whichever you prefer is mostly a matter of taste, and how well you can handle an intro track for a game about a cartoon hedgehog with lyrics about “leather and lace” and “toot toot sonic warrior.” (Didn’t I make a post about that at one time? A search suggests no, but I was sure I had….)

Lots of names and bands that I’ve never heard of, and songs that I’ve never heard! Look, I know, it’s a huge area to be ignorant of, but at this point I don’t feel like I could possibly do it any justice, so I guess I’ll just go back to my CD of Flood. (Starts absentmindedly singing the lyrics to Particle Man for the hundredth time….)

Extra: this Sonic Retro forum post where The Sunshine Feeler dove into figuring out who did the vocals on the Japanese version, which reveals the amazing fact that the artist who did the rap portion of the intro song, Casey Rankin, also sang the remix of the DK Rap for Smash Bros. Melee!

But MK7 actually means them. The vehicle speeds are actually derived from the CC number in that game. 100 CC is actually twice as fast as 50 CC, because the acceleration multiplier is double, and 150 CC is triple.

Meaning, if you hacked the game, or else made a mod, like CTGP-7, that let you set the CC number, by changing that one value you could affect the whole game, and try ridiculously fast, or slow, game speeds never intended by the designers.

But there is no need to stop there. CC is just a float. PabloMK7 hacked the hack and tried weird floating-point values for CC that shouldn’t rightfully work, like infinity, and NaN (“Not A Number”) , just to see what would happen. (5½ minutes) And then very high finite CC values, and infinitesimally small CC values, like point-lots-of-zeros-then-one CC, causing the engine to break in amusing, and somewhat frightening, ways.

So then, what would happen? Take a look for yourself:

But the bug isn’t always at fault. The 1541 disk drive takes over a minute and a half to format a disk, but as it turns out it had good reason to, and the time consumed had nothing to do with the C64’s code because the drive does all the work itself; the Commodore 64 just waits throughout the process.

Commodore History goes into considerable detail on the process here (16½ minutes). During formatting the drive wipes out all the data that had been on the disk, lays down syncing structures, writes the disk ID to every sector, puts down the directory track and sets up the Block Allocation Map (BAM), and more. It’s an interesting, if not too useful these days, exploration of what disk drives at the time had to do to make the disk’s magnetic surface usable for data storage.

How are we different? Although we’re given to the occasional frivolity, we’ve never tried to insult your intelligence here. If it seems like we post randomly from across the whole breadth of gaming (notably excepting the standard AAA production) that is not an accident, even if we do, admittedly, veer off to Nintendo-related topics frequently.

We already did a 2025 recap post, and a full blog recap should wait another year for the 5th anniversary, but I figured it was worth looking back on how far we’ve come, and where we are now in terms of visitor stats. All of these figures are from WP Statistics.

On the average, Set Side B gets about 435 visitors a day. Our most frequent search referral is still Google at 27,954 over the last month. We got 1,108 from DuckDuckGo, and 750 from the poor saps using Bing. Speaking of saps, Brave search brought us 93 links. Facebook brought 36, odd considering I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned SSB on Facebook. I try to avoid it generally when I can.

Device usage breakdown: Desktops at 10.4K (hooray!), Smartphones at 3.5K (eh), Tablets at 137 (huh), “Phablets” at 14 (wha), and “other” at 6. What is other supposed to mean? Game consoles? Fones? Wristtops? Cyberglasses? Compuhats? Supposiputers?

OSes. Windows at 8.8K; Android at 1.9K; iOS at 1.7K; Mac at 1.2K and others at 531. I’d like to think the Wii’s and 3DS’s old versions of Opera are in there somewhere. (The Wii-U’s browser is hopelessly modern by our standards.)

Most visits from countries are, in order: U.S., Viet Nam (second place somehow), China (third place, I’m guessing from AI training), then Brazil (we really need to do that retrospective on the Sega Master System and the Monica games eventually), the UK, India, Singapore, Canada (why so low, canucks?), Iraq(??) and Germany rounding out the top ten. The top city, inexplicably, is Hanoi in Viet Nam. Tokyo is 4th place. The top US city for visits is Ashburn, Virginia, down in 8th place.

Four years is a long time to do anything, but we don’t plan on quitting in the near future. Of course, as happened with our friend Matthew Green and Press The Buttons, all blogs fall silent someday. I hope that, when my day comes, if Set Side B is still around, that someone will take it over and keep it going as long as possible, so long as it stays true to its three categories of Retro, Niche and Indie gaming. So long as it’s true to those focii I think it won’t soon lose its way.

We love you! Please love us back, and spread the word about us! And of course, thanks for reading.

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.

There are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of quirky little games and things on itch.io. Lots of them are worthless, some are mere cash-ins, and a few are really nice, but good luck finding them with the towering piles of meh blocking view of the horizon, or indeed anything else.

So it’s nice when you find something through the browse feature that’s a joy to play, and such a game is Emlise’s Conservation of Bass. At first glance it looks like it’s going to be another game of the type that bitsy makes it easy to construct. Nothing against bitsy or its games, but most of them are pretty simple, leaning more into the fun of exploring a little world than offering challenging gameplay.

But as it turns out Conservation of Bass only looks like it’ll be an exercise in pure exploration. It’s actually a completely linear platform-puzzler, and it requires a surprising amount of skill to get far into it. Your walking fish protagonist can only jump one space high, and can’t move very quickly, so sharp jukes in the air won’t save you. As is the custom for these kinds of puzzle games now there’s no penalty for failure, it immediately resets the puzzle for another try.

The fish’s special trick is, it can swap spaces with blocks exactly two spaces away from it with the X button, if they’re the same size as it. It can do this in all for cardinal directions, by pressing that arrow key. These are the same keys that move the fish, and allow it to jump, and it can even do this in mid-air. That’s where the control skill comes in, even if you have a solid plan for how to solve the puzzle, putting it into effect may take you a few tries, as the timing window for swapping a falling fish with a block over safe ground is pretty demanding.

Helping out is a special property of that X button that’s unveiled to you a short way in: holding it down freezes time, and lets you then use the arrow keys to decide which direction you want to swap in at a bit without needing split-second accuracy, so long as you pressed X with that same accuracy to begin with.

This is another of those games where you’re introduced to its elements slowly, which is great because the puzzles get hard fast. I got to the early levels of Chapter 3 before my pending deadline forced me to set it aside and write it up. See if you can get beyond that.

Conservation of Bass (itch.io, $0, playable on the web with optional download)

The Wizard stars Fred Savage of The Wonder Years, a popular show that you barely hear anything about any more. Like thirtysomething, remember that? I don’t either.

Many of my nights lately have been consumed with trying to play enough Caves of Qud so that I don’t embarrass myself too badly when I finally decide to talk about it. Most of my early explorations were in permadeath Classic Mode, but I have come to realize that playing it that way would mean I would need several years to finish it. I may not actually finish it before I write on it. On Nethack I had the advantage of being obsessed with it for years, had read many spoilers on it and participated on the Nethack Usenet group. These days much discussion of that nature has moved onto Reddit, which I have strong moral qualms about visiting now, not to mention that its app sucks on toast.

Well, back at it. Send fresh water.

For most of the episode we try to treat the game as if all that skeevy stuff doesn’t exist, but don’t close it when it seems like it’s over….

As for the skeeve, the game’s official website has a section marked OPPAI, which I do not link to directly from here, in case it gets Set Side B on some kind of list.

I don’t make many @Play posts these days, and I’m sad that I have to drag out the tag for something like this. I am working on a lot of discussion about Caves of Qud (if I can link to Omega Labyrinth Life here I can certainly call out Qud), but the game is so blasted huge! Hopefully I can bring you something on that front soon.

I’m not happy with the clickbait title The Game Display chose for this video, claiming they found a “golden mushroom” in Super Mario Bros. 3 like it’s some actual thing. What it is is a 1-Up mushroom with a weird palette. But it’s still a video worth linking (11 minutes), and seeing, because to find it you have to learn about an unlikely secret mechanic in Mario 3 involving the map screen and the wandering Hammer Bros. You can watch it, but I’ll give you the gist down below.

Remember those map Hammer Bros. in Mario 3? They walk around after you finish a level or lose a life, adding a bit of extra uncertainty to the map screen, and giving you a stored powerup if you beat them.

But did you ever notice that sometimes the blocks in the battle arena where you fight the Hammer Bros. have powerups in them too, but only sometimes? And it isn’t something to do with the Hammer Bros. themselves, the same fight might have a powerup one time, but no powerup another. What determines whether it’ll be there or not? Is it random?

The diabolical thing is that it turns out the map intersection spaces, the little coin-like locations that Mario/Luigi can stand on but don’t contain levels, Toad Houses or anything that can normally be entered, are actually valid gameplay locations! They’re only loaded as battle arenas when you fight enemies encountered on the map screen on that spot. Although most of those locations look the same on each world, some of them have powerups in a specific block, and some don’t. The qualification for whether you can find it or not is where you fight the Hammer Bros., not which one you fight.

In the sky portion of World 5, there is one specific map screen spot where, if you can lure that area’s lone Hammer Bros. onto it and fight it there, you can find that 1-Up mushroom with the weird palette. It requires a lot of tricky actions to find it, since the Hammer Bros. icon can’t travel up one of the only two ways to that spot, and you also have to avoid clearing a couple of levels using Jugem’s Cloud, because if you clear a level normally, the M or L space that is produced blocks the movement of map screen enemies. You also have to avoid fighting and defeating the Hammer Bros. early of course, and you have to avoid turning the enemy into a Treasure Ship. That might seem like an unlikely thing to have to watch for, but it is a issue encountered in the video. Watch it and you’ll see.

It’s so cryptic and precise that it seems like it must be an intentional secret, the one non-level map screen spot with a 1-Up in it. Given how many infinite life tricks Super Mario Bros. 3 has, I can’t say that it’s particularly useful, but that isn’t the point. It’s a little nod by the developers to the obsessed player, a way of saying, we see what you did there.

Variable Screen Position, or VSP, is basically an abuse of the C64 hardware, a way to make its VIC-II graphics chip do something it’s really not meant to do, a way to get it to get its graphics data from memory in such a way that it does rest on the bedrock of 1K memory boundaries. Perhaps best known for its use in the 1993 classic Mayhem in Monsterland (video, 59 minutes), and more recently the homebrew C64 port of Super Mario Bros.

Without VSP, scrolling on the C64 beyond an eight pixel range is extremely processor intensive, and in fact cannot be done for the full screen in a video frame’s time on unmodified original hardware if moving color RAM is required too. Here is a page that describes it, and how to do it safely, that is, how to live with the memory corruption it causes on some hardware. I had mentioned before that it had to do with messing with the VIC-II memory refresh timing, but this page claims that it’s actually due to the VIC trying to access memory at a time when a read hasn’t stabilized.

Well anyway, here’s video of that C64 port of Super Mario Bros., so you can marvel as the system doing something that’s much easier on the NES.

Why is it misunderstood? Because it received several ports to other platforms around the time it was popular, they all lacked the special something of the original game, and in more recent times the game has been unfairly derided on the strength of those ports.

What is it that makes Dark Castle great on original Macs? It’s a combination of super-sharp art, responsive and unique controls (it’s a platformer but you attack enemies by throwing rocks at them with the Macin-mouse) and character. The game has gotten more worthy remakes in the current era, but still faces difficulties. One of the best modern versions sadly became unplayable on later-day macOSes when Apple decided to no longer support 32-bit software, a decision that I can’t possibly attribute to Steve Jobs, but somehow it still feels like it has to be his fault, somehow.

Now, as the video tells us, there’s a new remake programmed in Unity, released on the Mac App Store but also Steam, and is finally playable in a decent port for non-Apple platforms. It even got a whole episode of Retronauts about it, which I can’t link because, ha ha, it’s paywalled. I’m sure this video will give you enough information to decide if it’s worth your time, and even if it isn’t, it’ll fill you in one one of those many secret little corners of video game history that Set Side B exists to point out to you.

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

This is the kind a strange and pointless thing that Sundry Sunday was envisioned as hosting, a guy, account name Speedbag Bard sure why not, punching a bag in time with the Mortal Kombat-themed song “Techno Syndrome.” I don’t know if I’d call it a theme song; I’m not sure Mortal Kombat has a theme song. Maybe the movie has one.

Oh, the video! It’s here (3½ minutes), uncovered by Faintdreams over on Metafilter. I like his Buc-ee’s shirt!

Fewer people know that Sonic CD goes a step farther. If you wait three minutes without moving Sonic, he’ll say aloud “I’m outta here!” (his first voiced line in the series!) and jump off the screen. What’s more, this ends your game. As Sonic abandons his journey, the game will deduct all of his lives, and the GAME OVER notice appears immediately. The hedgehog has been offended! Learn to pause the game next time, player.

The gag seems like it may have been hastily programmed, because there are a lot of quirks to the animation that play around oddly, and conflict in some ways, with the other aspects of the game. Camamania shows off all the bugs and glitches around the joke in a 7½-minute video.

Among the cases are when Sonic’s jump causes him to trigger a boss fight, to enter an acceleration tube, and when it causes him to cross the level-end sign. Some of them only apply to the MegaCD original, having been fixed in the US version, and some have different behavior in the 2011 remake. Interesting behavior, so says I!

Please reach out if you would like to submit a game for a future Showcase. All games shown are either press keys, demos, or games from Josh Bycer’s own collection.

00:00 Intro
00:14 Windswept
1:32 Sacre Bleu
2:45 Stand Alone EP.O
4:09 Nairi Rising Tide
5:29 Boyce the Voice
6:25 Poradora vs. Monsters of the World

Can you read those? There’s a good chance you can! If you can’t (like if they all show up as hollow boxes) it’s because the font you’re reading this post in doesn’t support those kinds of characters, which are from the math symbols section of the Unicode character set.

It’s a command-line version of a web Unicode text converter, of the sort found at the other end of this link. It’s written in Python, and the source is at the end of this post. I saved it to a file named “fancypants” and put it in my home directory’s bin directory (which you’ll probably have to make first), where many Linux distributions are configured to look for things to execute if you type their names at the command prompt. (Yes, all of this assumes you’re running Linux. It’s not just for supergeeks anymore! If you’re running Windows you’ll have some adjustments to make, including figuring out how to add the script’s home to your path. It should work on Macs, although I don’t know if it’ll look in your home’s bin either.)

Oh, you will have to run a chmod +x fancypants on it. And the script as written assumes Python is at /usr/bin/python, where most distros will put it.

The script expects to be executed in the form:

fancypants [style] [text to convert]

The text should probably be in quotes if there’s any spaces in it, as should the style just in case. So to produce the first text mentioned at the start of the post, I entered:

fancypants "=" "This weird text was constructed with the utility mentioned in the title."

Usable style specifiers are “=” for double-stroke, “/” for script, “!” for a boldface kind of thing, “f” for the medieval script-looking fractur, and a few others that you can pretty easily see in the source code below. In fact each specifier has some synonyms if the single-character versions are too obscure for you to remember. And hey, if you don’t like the names I gave them you can use your own! The moment you paste it into a text file, this all becomes yours to do with as you please. Think of it as the blog version of a type-in program from an 80s computer magazine.

As a bonus, the names “r”, “rot” or “rot13” will perform a ROT13 code on the letters, useful for encoding spoiler text that readers can decode at ROT13.com. There are utilities that you can use to send the generated text directly to the clipboard, for pasting wherever you want, but since those differ if you’re using X.org or Wayland for your display manager (or, sure, Windows or Mac) I’ll leave those for you to figure out.

And if you can’t read the characters above, then I’m sorry that you’re missing out on the fun. It’s all pretty whimsical really, it’s not some huge thing that you’re missing. Come back tomorrow, I’m sure we’ll have a post about Mario or somesuch.

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys

base = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890!@#$%^&*()-_=+[]{};':\",./<>?~"
equals = "𝔸𝔹ℂ𝔻𝔼𝔽𝔾ℍ𝕀𝕁𝕂𝕃𝕄ℕ𝕆ℙℚℝ𝕊𝕋𝕌𝕍𝕎𝕏𝕐ℤ𝕒𝕓𝕔𝕕𝕖𝕗𝕘𝕙𝕚𝕛𝕜𝕝𝕞𝕟𝕠𝕡𝕢𝕣𝕤𝕥𝕦𝕧𝕨𝕩𝕪𝕫𝟙𝟚𝟛𝟜𝟝𝟞𝟟𝟠𝟡𝟘!@#$%^&*()-_=+[]{};':\",./<>?~"
script = "𝓐𝓑𝓒𝓓𝓔𝓕𝓖𝓗𝓘𝓙𝓚𝓛𝓜𝓝𝓞𝓟𝓠𝓡𝓢𝓣𝓤𝓥𝓦𝓧𝓨𝓩𝓪𝓫𝓬𝓭𝓮𝓯𝓰𝓱𝓲𝓳𝓴𝓵𝓶𝓷𝓸𝓹𝓺𝓻𝓼𝓽𝓾𝓿𝔀𝔁𝔂𝔃1234567890!@#$%^&*()-_=+[]{};':\",./<>?~"
bold = "𝐀𝐁𝐂𝐃𝐄𝐅𝐆𝐇𝐈𝐉𝐊𝐋𝐌𝐍𝐎𝐏𝐐𝐑𝐒𝐓𝐔𝐕𝐖𝐗𝐘𝐙𝐚𝐛𝐜𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐠𝐡𝐢𝐣𝐤𝐥𝐦𝐧𝐨𝐩𝐪𝐫𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐯𝐰𝐱𝐲𝐳𝟏𝟐𝟑𝟒𝟓𝟔𝟕𝟖𝟗𝟎!@#$%^&*()-_=+[]{};':\",./<>?~"
bolditalic = "𝑨𝑩𝑪𝑫𝑬𝑭𝑮𝑯𝑰𝑱𝑲𝑳𝑴𝑵𝑶𝑷𝑸𝑹𝑺𝑻𝑼𝑽𝑾𝑿𝒀𝒁𝒂𝒃𝒄𝒅𝒆𝒇𝒈𝒉𝒊𝒋𝒌𝒍𝒎𝒏𝒐𝒑𝒒𝒓𝒔𝒕𝒖𝒗𝒘𝒙𝒚𝒛1234567890!@#$%^&*()-_=+[]{};':\",./<>?~"
monospace = "𝙰𝙱𝙲𝙳𝙴𝙵𝙶𝙷𝙸𝙹𝙺𝙻𝙼𝙽𝙾𝙿𝚀𝚁𝚂𝚃𝚄𝚅𝚆𝚇𝚈𝚉𝚊𝚋𝚌𝚍𝚎𝚏𝚐𝚑𝚒𝚓𝚔𝚕𝚖𝚗𝚘𝚙𝚚𝚛𝚜𝚝𝚞𝚟𝚠𝚡𝚢𝚣𝟷𝟸𝟹𝟺𝟻𝟼𝟽𝟾𝟿𝟶!@#$%^&*()-_=+[]{};':\",./<>?~"
block = "𝗔𝗕𝗖𝗗𝗘𝗙𝗚𝗛𝗜𝗝𝗞𝗟𝗠𝗡𝗢𝗣𝗤𝗥𝗦𝗧𝗨𝗩𝗪𝗫𝗬𝗭𝗮𝗯𝗰𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗴𝗵𝗶𝗷𝗸𝗹𝗺𝗻𝗼𝗽𝗾𝗿𝘀𝘁𝘂𝘃𝘄𝘅𝘆𝘇𝟭𝟮𝟯𝟰𝟱𝟲𝟳𝟴𝟵𝟬!@#$%^&*()-_=+[]{};':\",./<>?~"
fraktur = "𝕬𝕭𝕮𝕯𝕰𝕱𝕲𝕳𝕴𝕵𝕶𝕷𝕸𝕹𝕺𝕻𝕼𝕽𝕾𝕿𝖀𝖁𝖂𝖃𝖄𝖅𝖆𝖇𝖈𝖉𝖊𝖋𝖌𝖍𝖎𝖏𝖐𝖑𝖒𝖓𝖔𝖕𝖖𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖚𝖛𝖜𝖝𝖞𝖟1234567890!@#$%^&*()-_=+[]{};':\",./<>?~"
rot = "NOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLMnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm1234567890!@#$%^&*()-_=+[]{};':\",./<>?~"
tilde = len(equals)-1

def convert(convertchar, intext):
  outlist = []
  match convertchar:
    case "=" | "equal" | "equals":
      clist = equals
    case "/" | "slant" | "script":
      clist = script
    case "!" | "bold":
      clist = bold
    case "!/" | "bolditalic" | "boldital":
      clist = bolditalic
    case "m" | "mono" | "monospace":
      clist = monospace
    case "b" | "block" | "mathbold":
      clist = block
    case "f" | "fraktur":
      clist = fraktur
    case "r" | "rot" | "rot13":
      clist = rot
    case _:
      raise ValueError("Unknown charset " + convertchar)
      return intext
  for char in intext:
    try:
      index = base.index(char)
    except:
      outlist.append(char)
      continue
    outchr = clist[index]
    if outchr != "~":
      outlist.append(outchr)
    else:
      outlist.append(base[index])
  return "".join(outlist)

if __name__ == "__main__":
  convertchar = sys.argv[1]
  intext = sys.argv[2]
  print(convert(convertchar, intext))

grub (properly lowercase) is a bootloader for some Linux machines. I can’t tell you if it’s easy to add it to a computer’s startup files, but if you know how to do such things, please enjoy.

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.

Expedition Sasquatch is a homebrew Gameboy Color rom that can be played on itch.io in your browser for free, or you can pay five bucks to download the rom image to support the makers and play it wherever you like.

It’s a short game that’s like Pokemon but without the battling. You go out and catch creatures in various ways, then take them back to the museum to sell them for cash to get better equipment. Your ultimate aim is to find and kill the sasquatch that’s been sighted nearby. It’s left unclear if this is possible, but it’s fun playing the early game at least.

Expedition Sasquatch is made by Andrew Roach (Mastodon) of New Ellijay Television and Elvies, and is based off of a podcast and local access TV show. It’s a nifty little use of your time. Here’s a few screens:

Expedition Sasquatch ($0 for browser play, $5 for the ROM, itch.io)

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

Creator Gooseworx really made something terrific with TADC, which seems nearly universally adored. It might be too popular, as she had to put up, as sometimes happens with people who make much admired things, with some amount of harassment online about it, with her saying she might retreat from internet circles once it’s done. I’m reminded of some of the flak Rebecca Sugar caught for making Steven Universe, they simply couldn’t do right with some people, or so it seemed.

This is the eighth episode (32 minutes) of the Youtube, now also Netflix, series. It’s produced by Glitch Productions, who also made Murder Drones and are making the upcoming Knights of Guinevere. The premise: a number of human beings have been shanghai’d into a circus-themed virtual world without their consent, existing there as wacky and whimsical-looking characters who greatly want to leave. Their existence there is made even more difficult by Caine, the circus’ AI overseer and ruler.

Caine’s purpose is to keep the humans sane in their imprisonment by giving them videogame-like adventures (which is why we’re talking about it here). Caine has up til now desperately tried to please his inmates with fun and entertaining activities, but is in way over his head, and inflict various types of trauma on them.

As their adventures have continued, Caine’s gotten more and more anxious by the fact that the humans don’t seem to be enjoying his efforts. When a human being becomes so distraught with their inability to leave the virtual world they abstract, becoming a big unthinking glitchy eyeball-monster that Caine disposes of by putting them in “the Cellar,” a big dark empty space. It’s known that this has happened several times before, and the series has dropped hints as to what the characters were like before.

If you haven’t watched the series up to this point, you really should watch the eight episodes before this one first (221 minute playlist):

As the first episode revealed, abstracted characters are dangerous to the objects in the world and to the other humans, but Caine has instantly fixed any character who’s been attacked.

The human characters don’t all get along either. The newest one, Pomni, had difficulty adjusting to the circus, to say the least. Easygoing Ragatha is sort of a punching bag for Jax, a snarky Bugs Bunny type who loves to antagonize the others, especially Gangle, an insecure ribbon-and-mask creature, and Zooble, whose body is made out of various interchangeable parts.

And then there’s Kinger, the one who’s been there the longest, and the least stable. Over time it’s been gradually revealed that Kinger isn’t really who he seem to be, that he has a special place in the VR world that he’s forgotten about. He was greatly affected by the abstraction of his wife Queenie, and is hugely forgetful, but seems to calm down and become more lucid in dark places, like inside a pillow fort that he spends his time in between adventures. At odd moments he’s been known to just create things, like a healing butterfly in the FPS-themed episode. And despite being around the longest, Kinger has never abstracted himself.

In episode 7, the characters were approached by a character named Abel, who claimed to be a human that Caine forgot about. Abel offered them a way to escape the circus, and while it didn’t pan out, it did reveal Caine’s inner sanctum, where he keeps the VR worlds that he makes and sends the human characters into.

Now, in the penultimate episode, Caine is driven to anger and madness by how the trapped humans don’t appreciate his efforts. Gooseworx has said that the show was inspired by Harlan Ellison’s story I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, saying the premise is similar but one where the VR overseer isn’t a wrathful entity of anger but more of a wacky happy little guy, and the comparison becomes explicit in this episode. And it ends on a fateful note.

Goosework made a number of excellent Youtube animations before this one, like Little Runmo, and I hope they haven’t been too put off by online harassment and continue to create new things.

Here’s the list of games covered:

Missing In Action (Green Beret sequel, arcade)
Rush’n Attack: ExPatroit (another Green Beret sequel, this time in 3D, released much later on PS3)
Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (Diablo-like sequel, PS2, Xbox)
Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 (PS3, Xbox 360)
Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 (PS3, Xbox 360) also mentioned were the Bionic Commando games for Gameboy and Gameboy Color
Heart of the Alien (sequel to Out Of This World, SegaCD version)
Fade to Black (3D Flashback: Quest for Identity sequel for Playstation and DOS)

This is a video review of Cultic Chapter 2 played with a press key.

In brief:

Mode 0: Up to four independently movable backgrounds, but with some pretty serious color limitations. Mostly got used for title screens.

Mode 1: Up to three backgrounds, two with more colors. The SNES’s most-used mode.

Mode 2: Two backgrounds, with “offset per tile” on one of them that lets the system move columns of tiles vertically by arbitrary amounts. Used for certain special effects, like (along with raster-based scanline placement) the waving flag in Battlemaniacs, Super Turrican 2’s worms and rockets stages and Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack’s rising game boards. Horizontal offset per tile was also possible, but much less used due to the coarseness of the scroll.

Mode 3: Two backgrounds, one of them gets either 256 colors or, using direct color, being able to specify colors without palettes, with 8 bits of RGB value. Often used for high-color stills. Earthbound’s “THE WAR AGAINST GIYGAS!” screen uses it.

Mode 4: Has the high color first layer of Mode 3, and the offset-per-tile effect from Mode 2 for its second layer (which has fewer colors than in Mode 3). Rarely used. Puzzle Bobble uses it for gameplay, to independently shift the playfields from the rest of the gackground.

Mode 5: Two backgrounds, with 16 and 4 colors per tile respectively, but supports high resolution with 512 pixels per scanline. Can’t do transparency (but can kind of fake it with dithering). Notably, the high res menu screens in Secret of Mana use this.

Mode 6: Only one layer, hi-res like the second layer in Mode 5, but supporting offset-per-tile. Often considered completely unused, White_Pointer Gaming found out that Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals does use it during the credits.

Mode 7: The famous mode that supports scaling, shearing and rotation of a single background layer, used for special effects and fancy 3D effects in games like F-Zero, Pilotwings and Super Mario Kart. Supports 256 paletted colors or direct 8-bit RGB color.

Notably though, Mode 7 can’t actually do 3D effects on its own; it has to use another feature called HDMA. It uses a raster effect to change the horizontal scale of the background on each scanline. As it turns out, the calculations to do this on each line are substantial, which is probably why so many games that use Mode 7 to a significant degree use one of the SNES’ coprocessor chips, like the DSP or SA-1, to help the processor out. The video then rounds out with a discussion of the Mosaic function used in such places as the map transitions in Super Mario World and Final Fantasy IV (II).

Elsewhere, Retro Game Mechanics Explained did a 16-part series covering the SNES’ hardware feature in considerable depth.

We’re a gaming site sure, but I think our broader focus is on using computers for entertainment purposes, and it’s not as if sites like Digg and its aggregation successor Reddit don’t gameify their workings to a significant extent, what with the reputation and the karma and the scoring and whatnot.

Digg has been restarted before, in fact several times! Some history is called for here.

A Timeline of Digg’s Several Graves

2004 Digg is launched, let’s call this Digg 1
2005 Reddit is launched; at first it’s much the underdog
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010 “Digg v4” happens, a badly handled redesign (I call it Digg 2), a mass exodus to Reddit begins
2011
2012 Digg’s traffic has fallen by 90%; Digg redesigns again (Digg 3), changing over to entirely editorially-curated content; Digg’s IP is sold in two chunks
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018 Digg’s remaining assets are sold to a company called “BuySellAds,” which should give you some indication of where their priorities lay; later it’s sold to the even more hilariously evilly-named “Money Group”; Digg 4
2019 Lemmy, a Fediverse alternative to sites like Reddit and Digg, is launched
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025 June: Digg relaunched in private beta, Digg 5 why not
2026 January: Digg goes public; March: then is taken offline yet again a couple of months later

Yes, Digg is a year older than Reddit, and yes, at first it was the obvious frontrunner. Nowadays Reddit could definitely stand to have some more challengers, but it looks like it’s not going to come from Digg, at least not in the near future.

I got in near the end of Digg’s private beta. I think I was one of its more prolific commenters, and I had considered starting a SetSideB community there. Ha ha, I’m glad I didn’t now! There were people on Digg making concerted efforts trying to push it rightward, trying to spread the meme that Reddit, the very site that once hosted TheDonald, was somehow far left-leaning. I’d tell you more about their odious arguments, but I blocked them as soon as I noticed them. Digg had good block button, at least.

There had been problems with AI bots trying to push content, yes, but Digg also used made a lot of use of AI itself. Moderation was handled partly by algorithm, and many pages would have Digg-generated AI summaries, marked “tl;dr.” I came to resent them.

Original co-founder Kevin Rose, in many ways the face of Digg, is back on board. He seems to come back every time they’re having problems, but never seems to stay for long. Digg’s apology message, which is now their entire website, came suddenly. We users were given absolutely no advance warning, the site, and all of our posts and comments and votes, were just gone entirely. Here one moment, gone the next. Good job there Rose.

I don’t think it’s right to say, as the front page now does, that “[t]he internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts.” That is true if you view it in terms of posters. But the web is mostly comprised of readers. One of Digg’s early ideas, lifted somewhat from Slashdot, was that users with good posts get more influence. That also became Digg’s downfall, as power users with high influence banded together to upvote each other’s posts, making themselves more and more powerful within that framework.

I wonder if AI agents could be used by nefarious actors to automate gaming such a system? I don’t know. At a certain point, the problems with a system start to look, not like fixable problems, but like inherent flaws. But anyway, my fondness is still for entirely human-curated sites, like my favorite hangout spot Metafilter. It certainly has problems, but it doesn’t have a runaway bot problem, or at least none that I’ve noticed so far.

Please support the human-made web. The whole online world depends on it. Thank you.

MARCHintosh has a website that organizes it, and even offers a style guide. It was created as a fruit-flavored adjunct of similar month-long pun-inspired retrocomputing celebrations DOScember (website currently down for a redesitn) and SepTANDY (doesn’t seem to have a home site at all). Should there be more? VICtober? JUNIX (thanx Ben Zuddist)? I vote yes, regardless of how terrible the pun is! Let’s fill the year with crackling, smoking old tech!

There is lots to find exploring the hashtag #marchintosh, this is just a few items. Level 2 Jeff emulated the original Macintosh on a microcontroller (15 minutes):

Michael MJD emulated Windows on a PowerPC Mac (32 minutes, but running, it should be said, OS/X, not classic MacOS):

Retro Repair Roundup did an hour-long video where they talked about old Macs:

It’s from back in 2019, but Ron’s Computer Videos showed off a Mystery Science Theater 3000 Hypercard stack! (1 hour 16 minutes) They have a whole MARCHintosh playlist too.

More MARCHintosh projects can be found through the #marchintosh tag on Bluesky and Mastodon.

MacOS Timeline

1976 Founding of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), release of Apple I
1977 Release of Apple II
.
. 6 years
.
1984 System 1, release of the original Macintosh
1985
1986 Systems 2–4 (sometime between 1985 and here)
1987 System 5
1988 System 6
1989
1990
1991 System 7, a.k.a. MacOS 7.6
1992
1993
1994 Switchover to PowerPC hardware
1995
1996
1997 MacOS 8
1998 Initial release of iMac, the beginning of the revival of Apple’s fortunes
1998 MacOS 9
1999
2000
2001 Mac OS/X 10.0 Cheetah (“OS 10,” now called MacOS), initial release of iPod
.
. 24 years
.
2026 Today

First, you have to know of a card game called One Handed Solitaire, as reported by Metafilter member ChurchHatesTucker here. CHT’s been on a tear in presenting various card games lately, here’s the other recent posts they’ve made on solitaire card games, with a dungeon crawl flavor: Clear the Dungeon, Tomb of the Four Kings, Scoundrel.

One Handed Solitaire is very simple, and an example of a “zero player game.” There are no decisions to make; winning or losing is completely down to the initial state of the deck. Here are the rules in text:

You start with a shuffled deck of cards. Draw four to form your hand. Your hand is considered to be in sequence, you must keep them in the order drawn. Now:

• If the first and fourth cards are the same suit, discard the second and third cards from your hand out of play. This of course moves the fourth card to be the second card.
• If the first and fourth cards are the same rank, discard the first four cards from your hand.
• If neither of these things are true, draw another card from the deck to the front of your hand. This makes a new first card, and changes which the fourth card is.
• When the deck runs out and you can no longer remove cards, the game is over. If you clear your hand and there’s still cards in the deck you’re not done, draw four more.

Your score (lower is better) is how many cards are in your hand when you run out of deck and can no longer discard cards. The average score is about 13.32 cards left. If you get a score of zero, that is you discard all of the cards from your hand and the deck is empty, you win.

Here are the rules demonstrated by Gather Together Games in a Youtube video (1¾ minutes):

ChurchHatesTucker ran a simulation of 200,000 runs and found the win rate of the game is close to 0.7%. I ran my own simulation, in a Python script, and found that out as well. I’ll put my code at the end of this post. No AI was used in its writing, and permission is not given to use it to train AIs. In fact, that’s true of all the text in this blog.

My first attempt found a win rate of 0.94%, but that turns out to be because I left out the aces from the deck! I tried a run with only 20 cards in the deck the 2-6 of each suit, and the win rate became about 7.5%.

If you want to try yourself, here’s the Python code I used. If you have Python installed, just paste it into a text file, give it the extension .py, and run it. It assumes you’re running it in a Linux or other Unix-like system; if you’re on Windows, you might have to change the “shebang” line at the front to point to where your Python is.

#!/usr/bin/python
import random

def draw(deck):
    if len(deck) > 0:
        return deck.pop(0)
    else:
        return None

def gameend(deck, hand, verbose):
    score = len(hand)
    if verbose >= 1:
        print("Deck exhaused. Final score:",score)
        if score == 0:
            print("Win!")
    if verbose >= 2:
        print("Deck state:",deck)
        print("Hand state:",hand)
    return score

def play(verbose = 0):
    deck = ["2H","3H","4H","5H","6H","7H","8H","9H","TH","JH","QH","KH","AH",
            "2D","3D","4D","5D","6D","7D","8D","9D","TD","JD","QD","KD","AD",
            "2C","3C","4C","5C","6C","7C","8C","9C","TC","JC","QC","KC","AC",
            "2S","3S","4S","5S","6S","7S","8S","9S","TS","JS","QS","KS","AS"]
    hand = []
    random.shuffle(deck)
    for a in range(4):
        hand.append(draw(deck))
    if verbose >= 3:
        print("Game starting--")
    while True:
        if len(hand) < 4:
            drawcard = draw(deck)
            if drawcard == None:
                return gameend(deck, hand, verbose)
            if verbose >= 2:
                print("Drew a",drawcard)
            hand.insert(0, drawcard)
            continue
        cardtop = hand[0]
        cardfourth = hand[3]
        if verbose >= 3:
            print("********: Deck length:",len(deck), "Hand length:",len(hand))
        if verbose >= 2:
            print("CARDS:", cardtop, cardfourth)
        # case 1: if the 1st and 4th cards match suit, discard the second and third cards
        if cardtop[1] == cardfourth[1]:
            d1 = hand.pop(1)
            d2 = hand.pop(1)
            if verbose >= 2:
                print("Discarded",d1,"and",d2)
            continue
        # case 2: if the 1st and 4th cards match rank, discard the top four
        if cardtop[0] == cardfourth[0]:
            d1 = hand.pop(0)
            d2 = hand.pop(0)
            d3 = hand.pop(0)
            d4 = hand.pop(0)
            if verbose >= 2:
                print("Discarded:",d1,d2,d3,d4)
            continue
        # case 3: if neither is true, draw a card
        drawcard = draw(deck)
        if drawcard == None:
            return gameend(deck, hand, verbose)
        else:
            if verbose >= 2:
                print("Drew a card")
            hand.insert(0, drawcard)
        # end of loop

if __name__ == "__main__":
    numgames = 10000000
    wins = 0
    scores = []
    scoresum = 0
    for count in range(numgames):
        score = play(verbose = 0)
        scores.append(score)
        scoresum += score
        if score == 0:
            wins += 1
            #print("A win on game #",count+1)
        if count % 500000 == 0:
            print("Played",count,"games...")
    print("Finished playing",numgames,"games")
    print("Wins:",wins)
    print("Win rate:",wins/numgames)
    print("Total score:",scoresum)
    print("Average score:",scoresum/numgames)
    print("Run compete.")

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

Maybe it’s weird this has never happened before. Both Earthbound and TMBG are both very weird and fun musically, after hearing this mashup of the two it’s surprising how well the two go together.

And I’m not sure which I should be more embarrassed about, that I know all these Earthbound songs so well, or that I know a good four-fifths of the They Might Be Giants tunes from these excellent mixtures from idiokiot (25 minutes).

The dislike for me here is the title, since Earthbound is so much more than “beating Giygas,” but I admit it’s a pretty good match of TMBG’s name.

They say that they have now managed to obtain the complete run of all the issues of the Game Player’s series, and all but one of them can now be browsed online, including Game Player’s Sports For Kids, which wasn’t about video games at all.

I remember Game Player’s as being the least of the game periodicals of the time, without the insider’s angle of Nintendo Power, the gonzo enthusiasm of Electronic Gaming Monthly or the slightly highbrow air of Video Games & Computer Entertainment. Yet it seems to have done quite well for itself.

The main fact I remember about Game Player’s was idly reading through the colophon one day (I was a weird kid) and seeing a familiar name: Richard Mansfield! I don’t remember what his capacity there was, but I do remember his days at Compute! and Compute’s Gazette, and that he wrote a couple of books on machine language for the Commodore 64. I always felt that Game Player’s must have felt like a step down for him. I hope he’s still around, out there somewhere, enjoying the current revival of interest in 8-bit computing.

On this site you can start games of Tic-Tac-Toe, Rock Paper Scissors and something called Bunkers, which on quick inspection appears to be an implementation of Scorched Earth. You start a game by sending out a Mastodon message to the game’s address. I haven’t tried any of them yet, so there’s a chance that these will just catch fire and burn down your house if you try them. That’s a thing that can happen, right?

This is a review of Beyond Sunset played with a press key.