Year: 2025

Sundry Sunday: DOOM Music A Cappella

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

Been focused so hard on the Loadstar Compleat project over the past couple of weeks that my brain can burn ANTS with just the power of SUNLIGHT. So have a quick one minute video of some people performing the music to the famous first level of DOOM, but with just the sound of their mouths.

Best of Next Fest February 2025 Part 10)

We’re just one more part left for my (Josh Bycer‘s) best of Steam Next Fest February 2025 showcase.

00:00 Intro
00:22 As We Descend
3:28 Olaf the Boozer
4:52 Zombieville USA 3D
6:00 Which Way Up: Galaxy Games
7:00 Seekers of Eclipse
8:50 Wanderstop
10:59 Inkborn
12:16 Muffles’ Life Sentence

Michael MJD Shows Off Nintendo Promotional Web Browsers

The Internet was really turning into a big thing in the early 2000s, and a lot of companies hopped onto it to hawk their products. Nintendo was a little more standoffish about it than Sega, remember that the Sega Dreamcast had a built-in dial-up modem, and came with a web browser disk, while the Gamecube had no online functionality without the LAN adapter.

Web browsers would come to Nintendo platforms with the DS and Wii, and there are hints that they had at least considered it with the Gamecube (we’ll look into that tomorrow). But Nintendo did release PC web browsers, in order to help hype their games among internet savvy kids.

Michael MJD examines the phenomenon in a 19-minute video, here:

The programs in question were produced by Media Browser, who tried to turn branding-soaked web browsers into a viable business model. Media Browser is long gone (they lasted just two years), but some parts of their website are preserved on the Wayback Machine. Customized browsers produced were themed after Mario Tennis, Paper Mario, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Pokémon and Nintendo Power (thought it’s more of a Banjo-Tooie theme).

After Media Browser went out of business, another company, Braun Communications, stepped in and made three more browsers, it seems using the same software Media Browser did, for Metroid Prime and two more Pokémon games.

Under the hood they’re all reskins of Internet Explorer 5.0, so Media Browser/Braun wasn’t actually distributing web browsers per se as fancy borders to put around the browser that was already on Windows users’ machines. It also meant that Mac and Linux users weren’t allowed to have a Legend of Zelda web browsing experience: Ganondorf wins again. These were all free browser skins, but some of them showed ads to you, so you were essentially installing an ad banner directly to your machine for no useful benefit. Bonzi Buddy, eat your heart out.

So! What is using Nintendo’s branded web browsing solutions like today? Well first, even if you dig up the version of Windows they support (Win 95-98-ME era), they demand to be registered before use, and that site is long dead, so it’ll require a registry hack to put them through their paces. All of these browsers still exist on the Internet Archive, as linked on the video’s description section. Here’s direct links to the pages: one, two, three, four. If you look through them you might find some extras, like screensavers of the different properties. Those should still work, right?

Best Next Fest Demos Part 8

The latest part of my (Josh Bycer’s) coverage of Next Fest 2025 February edition. (Editor’s note: I’ve been working through a backlog of these review posts; this one was made three months ago!)

00:00 Intro
00:15 Vilde
1:08 Mountain Boy
1:55 Grand Shooter
3:14 Ghost Hand
4:18 Mecha Knights Legends
5:35 Kejora
7:03 Tilemancer Dungeon

The Miracle of C64 Salamander

The Commodore 64 has many great games, but it tends to be best suited for computer-style games. When you compare it to the NES, for instance, it’s usually for Japanese-made action games. In Japan, hundreds of programmers had the Famicom boom to get better at the platform, and the system itself has an entire off-screen area of the screen to use as a scroll buffer. The C64 only had eight pixels of scroll buffer. There were scrolling games on the C64, even fast ones (I point to Andrew Braybrook’s Uridium and Paradroid that show the Commodore at its scrolling best), but it’s just a fact that the Famicom/NES was just better at it, and it was a time when there were lots of scrolling games coming in out of arcades.

I would like to highlight a particular case where the C64 acquits itself fairly well: its version of Konami’s Salamander, a.k.a. Life Force in some territories.

There’s a ton of scrolling C64 games that don’t hold up well. Take Strider, for instance. It tries to be a lot more like the arcade game than the NES version, I’ll give it that, but at the cost of all of its bosses, most of its speed, and it doesn’t even end very well, it just stops, feeding the player a line about having passed a test. Urk! If you want to see what I mean, have a look (11 minutes), but frankly why would you want to?

Here’s C64 Strider, but if you’re played the arcade version it’ll only make you sad.

There are good arcade, and arcade-style, games on the platform, and when they’re done well they can make the platform, quite literally, sing–the C64 has a terrific sound synthesizer chip. Ghosts & Goblins is often held aloft as a good example of a good C64 conversion, but although it has an iconic song, it only has one song, it’s not the classic tune from the arcade game, and it’s only got four levels. It plays a lot more smoothly than the NES version (7 minutes), but c’mon, Micronics made that one.

It runs at a good frame rate, has a great and spooky tune, and it manages to load four levels into the C64’s RAM at once, but it’s missing the last two levels and its two major bosses. And yet, it’s still a technical feat on the C64. BTW, there’s a 2015 port of GnG to the Commie (download) that’s better than the NES version in just about every way.

The C64 version of Life Force also only has four levels, but they’re very remarkable levels, impressively like the arcade game. It has a different tune for each stage! They actually sound like the arcade game! And one of the levels is the “Prominence Stage,” the most eye-catching part of the arcade and NES games, and it holds up (11 minutes), the flaming solar surfaces are animated, and the solar flares are just as deadly as in the other versions. It even exceeds the NES version in a couple of ways: your ship tops out at three Options instead of the NES’s two, and the Ripple and Laser beams are impressively flicker-free, since they’re drawn with background tiles, a feat the NES has trouble duplicating due to its background tile drawing limitations.

Is it equal to the NES version? Well… I can’t say that it is. And the Famicom version lets you have three Options, so the C64 version loses ground there too. But look at it! For the levels it has, the C64 really does its best to match the arcade. (If you’re surprised that the second level is different, the Famicom/NES puts the vertical mountain level there; the C64 sticks more closely to the arcade game, where the second stage is an asteroid belt.)

So even though the C64 port is about as good as you can expect from a 1983 computer with only eight hardware sprites, the Famicom/NES port is also great. Oh well, C64 users can content themselves to having a much better version of M.U.L.E., the NES version stinks.

Best of February Next Fest Part 7

This is part 7 of my (Josh Bycer‘s) look at Steam Next Fest February 2025 edition.

00:00 Intro
00:18 Leftovers KO
1:28 Once Upon a Puppet
3:19 Demon Dust
5:02 Nice Day for Fishing
6:23 Skin Deep
7:54 Electro Bop Boxing League
9:30 Is this Seat Taken?
10:50 Water Maid
12:03 Upstream
13:16 The Alpinist
14:51 Spellbrew Express
16:10 Red Rocket Defencism
17:15 Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3
18:48 Hypogea

Space Quest Secrets

If it seems that a lot of the “niche” items here ending up being about Nintendo things, you’re not wrong. The fact is, lots of people talk about Nintendo, both the Nintendo of old (N64, Gamecube, GBA, DS), the Nintendo of very old (NES, Gameboy, SNES), the Nintendo of very old (Donkey Kong, Game & Watch), and once in a while, the Nintendo of even older than that. They have been making gaming equipment since the 1800s, after all!

With all that Nintendo talk, I’m positively desperate to find non-Nintendo things older than a certain age. And once in a while, I even find them.

That’s what’s served up today, a video list of 11 secret things about the Space Quest games. The absence of Space Quest games in the current era is one of the worst things about it, if there was any DOS-era game series that could stand a comeback that is IT. But in that terrible absence, here is a 27 minute collection, from Space Quest Historian, of interesting things about those games:

Included items:

  • The Cave Squid in Space Quest II doesn’t actually chase you: it’s a set encounter in a specific location.
  • In SQ6, in the German and French localizations, designer Scott Murphy rerecorded some lines he spoke as himself, in those languages.
  • A cheat to skip some of the Scumsoft area in SQ3.
  • In the Aptitude Test in SQ5, you can either look over the shoulder of another test taker to get the answers… or just answer the last choice for each question. That’ll also get you past that sequence.
  • Some planet names in SQ5 are obvious jokes, but one of them that seems to be a jab at rival adventure maker Lucasarts is instead (or maybe, also) a reference to the last name of a couple of employees.
  • A Sarien guard in SQ1, if you talk to them many times, will eventually reveal that they’re a Kings Quest fan, and six points are locked behind this easter egg, making it difficult to score a perfect game without prior knowledge. As it turns out, Ken Williams put this gag in the game himself.
  • Space Quest Historian insists that the games, in general, were not made harder to sell hint books. Instead, it was to increase the length of the game, as if you know exactly what to do a typical Sierra adventure can be finished in less than an hour.
  • The Datacorder puzzle in SQ6 wasn’t intended as copy protection. It was supposed to be clued in the game itself, but an oversight meant it was left out of the game, so the clues were printed in the manual.
  • In SQ5, there was an unexpected case of the game taking it easy on the player. If you don’t complete a necessary puzzle, at the very end, before escaping a spaceship set to self-destruct, the game won’t kill you as a final punchline, but actually put you back for another try.
  • The Duracell Bunny, better known to US players as the Energizer Bunny, in SQ4… they actually got permission to include the joke, but from the wrong people. Still they were never sued, possibly because the inclusion flew under the owner’s radar.
  • Rereleases of Space Quest games sometimes changed some of the pop culture references to make them less legally actionable. In all but one case, however, this was done preemptively, and no legal threat was actually made. It was just their lawyers playing it safe. The one time they got a Cease and Desist was when they included likenesses of ZZ Top in the VGA release of SQ1. They fixed this in a novel way: the interpreter program scans the play directory for alternate resource files, and if it finds them, will include them as alternate animations. They “patched” the game for later pressings by putting alternate versions of the singers, shrunk down so far as to be unrecognizable. This seemed to satisfy the group’s lawyers. But the original graphics are still in the game; if the alternate resource files are deleted (or just moved out of the directory), the ZZ Top parody will reappear.

If all of this is interesting to you, I encourage you to watch the video, where all of these things are illustrated in-game, and explained in far greater detail. Look and see!

OSZAR »