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.

Along the same lines as videogamedunkey’s Explanation of Kingdom Hearts (previously) is this gloriously insane video that untangles all the non-linearity and heedless added backstory of the various Sonic the Hedgehog games and presents them temporally untwisted (9 minutes). Prepare to have your shameful ignorance of the ridiculously meandering basis of a video game cartoon … Continue reading "Sundry Sunday: The Universe of Sonic the Hedgehog"

There was an All ? Panels in Mario Kart World run at AGDQ this year, and it was great, but that’s not what this is. No, this world record was recorded (geez that phrasing annoys me) in the practice room at the event. (28 minutes, don’t bother following both link BTW they go to the … Continue reading "World Record: All ? Panels in Mario Kart World"

We appreciate all kinds of electronic entertainment here at Set Side B, and fun and interesting websites definitely fits that idiosyncratic bill. It’s a simple guestbook-style application. The whole site, including the OS, is served from a single 3½-inch floppy disk. The idea is, people can go there and enter a message for posterity, that … Continue reading "A Website Served From a Floppy Disk"

Mario Kart World, of course, has an open world mode, and much of the interest of an open world racing game is dynamic situations produced by the traffic. There’s been explorations into where the cars and NPCs come go, and we posted a video on that topic a while back. Sometimes they end up meandering … Continue reading "Trainspotting in Mario Kart World"

Really minor thing here, I’ve already mentioned it on social media in a couple of places, but here it’s a bit more auspicious? I mentioned Yacht and Panic’s entertaining 90s alien cable simulation Blippo+ before. Blippo+ has 11 weeks of programming, with the last week being mostly credits and outtakes for all the various shows. … Continue reading "Blippo+ Completion Patch"

This is a review of Zefyr: a Thief’s Melody, played with a press key provided by the developer.

The internet is a busy place. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a set of easy-to-understand instructions on how to operate it? Yes? Well, too bad. What you get instead is the sarcastic internet instructions of Newgrounds user MikeFallek (1½ minutes). There’s two parts, explaining things nobody has ever heard of before, the “vol-u-me con-trol” … Continue reading "Sundry Sunday: Mike Fallek’s Internet Instructions"

WARNING: This isn’t a Youtube video! It’s good old text, like Frog intended the internet to be! Over on The Gamesoft Fun Club, David Cabrera explains how great arcade Ridge Racer is, that isn’t exactly like the Playstation version, in fact it runs on more powerful hardware. And he’s played so much of it, including … Continue reading "An Arcade Ridge Racer Obsessive Explains How to Play Well"

AGDQ 2026 still has a day and a half to go, but a highlight so far has been Awful Block from early Thursday morning. Among other games they did Rock ‘n’ Roll Adventures (16 minutes), Golf With Your Grandmother (1 hour 33 minutes), The Running Man (16 minutes) and Terry Cavanagh’s Egg (12 minutes), but … Continue reading "AGDQ 2026’s Awful Block, with Bug Blasters"

Interactive Fiction blog Regna in Blue reports that a rare variant of classic Adventure, that was playable on Compuserve for many years and only went down when their game offerings went offline in the mid 90s, has been recovered and made playable online. It’s called Adventure 751 in reference to the number of available points … Continue reading "Adventure 751, from Compuserve, Recovered and Playable"

Patrick Gillespie made this fun Youtube video showing what happens when you do an objectively silly thing: open JPEGs in a text editor. It’s only six minutes long: I absolutely love doing crazy things like this. JPEGs are particularly interesting because, once you get past the magic sections that cause it to outright break, and … Continue reading "Editing JPEGs in a Text Editor"

This is the conclusion of my chat with composer Mark Benis about composing music for games. We talked more about working with designers, and how designers can best utilize composers for their games.

About 3½ years ago, when I started doing this blog and Sundry Sundays, I would post a greater variety of thing here. One thing I delighted in posting were video game-related ratings from web comedy master Lore Sjöberg, whose name I will always treasure from his work on earlyweb humor magazine The Brunching Shuttlecocks, which … Continue reading "Sundry Sunday: Lore Sjöberg Rates 1st Gen Pokemon + AGDQ 2026 Begins Today"

Hah, a bit late with this one, mostly because I was trying to solve it. Found by John Overholt over on Mastodon, It’s a big page full of 2,025 different items that you’re to sort, into 45 categories of 45 items each. Because the year 2025 just ended, of course. Click on an item, then … Continue reading "2,025 Item Categories Puzzle"

Lists are severely worked content delivery methods, but darn it if TheZZAZZGlitch’s video lists aren’t actually really interesting. These are all early Pokemon game glitches and their application, and usually go quite deep into their code. In the most recent of these (the ninth, 10 minutes long) one of the examples has to do with … Continue reading "TheZZAZZGlitch’s Lists of Interesting Pokemon Things"

And we’re off! Let’s start 2026 off with Flandrew’s look at the weirdest Star Wars game, the Famicom-only one Namco made. (11 minutes) It’s kind of a meme at this point, but gosh it’s even weirder than the Star Wars Holiday Special.

And so ends another year here are the weird pixel-art alien planet that our blog is based from, which for some reason concerns itself with Earth retro, niche and indie games. Hey, I never promises that our blog was thematically consistent! My first idea for its name and art theme was “Fairies and Robots,” this … Continue reading "Set Side B 2025 Wrap-Up"