Vols.: Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, ⅩⅢ, ⅩⅣ, ⅩⅤ, ⅩⅤⅠ

Today’s musical accompaniment will be relevant further down the post.

Games

Interview with Satoshi Yokokawa — Ashley Rojas

Cool interview with the enemy designer of Sonic 3 & Knuckles. I’ve always thought that the badniks in Sonic 3 had a more industrial look to them compared to the enemies from the previous games and I’ve always really liked that about it and it pleases me to hear the intent behind that being articulated. I also love Mecha Sonic’s design and it’s really lovely to hear him appreciate the fan art and reinterpretations of his designs. Also look at this short fan animation, it’s really cool.

Given that setting, since the Death Egg had suffered enormous damage from crashing due to Sonic's attack in "Sonic 2," I thought the mecha production facilities inside the fortress must also have been heavily damaged, making it difficult to carry out production as before.

From there, I arrived at the idea that Dr. Eggman, needing a fighting force to oppose Sonic under conditions where the production facilities weren't functioning properly, would gather up usable parts and hastily assemble machines to deal with the situation.

mantle.nes breakdown blog part 1 — Melon

First of (so far) two posts where Melon breaks down the development of their NES recreation of the “original game” in Deltarune chapter 3.

I had previous experience working on NES games already - at least, I had tinkered a little bit and had enjoyed enormously Pikuma’s course on beginning-to-end gamedev with 6502 assembly on the NES a few years back, so I felt confident I could pull it off! Even if the journey seemed daunting, I just had to go one step at a time…

The Web

Self-censorship practices as anti-shibboleth — Laura Michet

Oh do I hate algospeak. I stopped talking to a therapist once in part because I lost a massive amount of respect for him for using the word “unalive”.

In my experience, self-censoring adult terminology on that site in particular is a great sign that you're dealing with someone so incurious, with such a limited experience of online conversation, that they don't understand where they are, or who they're dealing with, or who's accountable for maintaining the peace in the community where they're speaking. I do not want to read the things these people write, and I do not want to talk to them. I'd rather not be the person who teaches them to be curious.

Hulagirl.txt — Deli

An investigation into the origin of a classic, old web GIF.

Perhaps enough time has passed that she is merely an inconsequential sighting to the average webuser, a rarity of a signal overlooked in the noise. There was once a time that she danced her way across webpages all over geocities and brought a small injection of joy and energy to whatever page she graced. Early on, she was a known quantity but the passage of time and memory made her mysterious. Stayed mysterious for a long while since, honestly, who really cares about the provenance of a free-to-use gif that is barely 5kB?

I Found Evidence Of My House Spinning — Blackle Mori

Some fiction for once, recommended by Laura Michet again. Interesting use of HTML as a medium.

This is the story of the most inexplicable thing to ever happen to me. It still keeps me up at night, just rolling it around in my head as I fail to make it make sense. This is the story of how I took a video from inside a recurring dream.

Animating Bad Apple with no JS, no CSS, & minimal HTML — Vivian

Explainer of Vivan’s very cute little Bad Apple animation using a technique similar to Geocities HTML Chat.

I wanted to show the Bad Apple animation without JS or CSS, with an impressively minimal set of HTML tags, by abusing slow chunked response, forcing the browser to load the page piece-by-piece. That's happening now (unless you're reading some archive) but how can we use it for animation?

The Crawler Zoo

Less of an article and more of a cool website: The Crawler Zoo monitors and categorises bots that scrape the site. Visitors can even watch bots wander an infinitely generated maze of junk pages.

Every request that reaches the site is examined at the gate. Bots are identified, named, drawn and filed into an enclosure; people are waved through and counted only as an anonymous daily total. Everything you see is live: the figures update as the bots arrive.

Irish

What to use: the “w” or “v” difference in dialects

Improving my Irish is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but found difficult to sustain long-term, but I do still have occasional bursts of enthusiasm. In this case I found this article, and especially the videos linked within, a good crash course in improving my understanding of Irish phonetics.

When learners come across this difference in pronunciation, they are usually looking at words like “bhfuil” (i.e. “an bhfuil”) and “mháthair” (i.e. “mo mháthair”). How you pronounce it largely depends on which dialect you choose.

The tale behind the Irish translation of Dracula is something to really get your teeth into — Darach Ó Séaghdha

I’ve written about the Irish translation of Dracula before, so of course I was interested to learn a tiny bit more about the history of the book.

Should the Free State find exciting new literary voices working as Gaeilge and bring them to a wider audience, or should they focus on translating bestselling titles that readers had already heard of?

Finance Minister Ernest Blythe took the latter view. In particular, Blythe was very interested to discover that the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works had a clause at the time regarding translation rights.

Politics

Europe’s centrists are finally paying the price of their extremism — Yanis Varoufakis

Valve Software’s former in-house hat economist weighs in on the consequences of “centrism”.

Everywhere, it is the same mechanism: Parties that called themselves sensible, pragmatic, and centrist have pursued one of the most doctrinaire economic programmes in European history – and pursued it with a rigidity, an intolerance of dissent, and a contempt for democratic contestation that the actual political extremes of the 20th century would have recognised as their own method, even if they had rejected the content.

As you can see from my games of each year list I don’t play many games with character creators and when I do I generally don’t get particularly attached to the characters I make in them. I couldn’t really tell you anything much about the characters I made for Dark Souls and even when I went through the character creator in Baldur’s Gate III recently¹ I made a dark elf woman without any particular thought to backstory or much else. I honestly don’t even remember what I named her². I do not have the making OCs bone I think. But I do have two old custom skins and a custom character that I have lying around on my computer I’d like to share.

Minecraft

Back seven billion years ago when I was in university and Minecraft was this weird, new thing I wanted to make my own custom skin for it. Being mostly into first person shooters and real time strategy games at the time my first thought about making a skin for a character in a game where you mine was to try and recreate the mining suit from Red Faction:

Pokémon Crystal Clear

I haven’t played a new Pokémon game since I was a child, but during covid lockdowns (before, y’know, every government just dropped all health measures for a debilitating disease that is still rampant) I tried to revisit the series via a hack called Pokémon Crystal Clear³. Crystal Clear adds a lot to Pokémon Crystal. You can choose your starting town (in either Kanto or Johto), play gyms in any order (they scale based on the number of badges you have), it fixes various bugs in the original games, allows you to set any pokémon as an overworld follower with every species having unique follower sprites, adds new areas and battles, new music, a lot of customisation options, and has ways to obtain all 251 pokémon without trading or events.

Sadly all of that was not enough for me to get over the simple fact that these games are too repetitive for me to want to bother with any more. I do not want to do dozens and dozens of nigh-identical battles over and over again. I never got very far in the game but I did make use make use of another feature: The ability to inject custom player sprites and custom starters (I started with a sandshrew). I actually posted one of the player sprites on here before when talking about drawing it in Wplace.

Sonic Forces

The last one is the closest thing that I have to a Sonic the Hedgehog OC: My avatar from Sonic Forces who I decided to call Blitz the Cat, both because she ended up being a little lightning-themed (and I used the lightning whip as my main weapon for a lot of that game) and to keep the alteration going with Blaze the Cat and Big the Cat⁴. I do not have any backstory for her but I like how she turned out.

I previously posted lists I’ve made picking one game and one film per year since 1990. 1990 acted as a good arbitrary stopping point as it’s a nice round number, it’s the year I was born and the number of games I’ve played at all from before then is pretty small, and it would be be fairly difficult to pick out shows for each year before then for me too. I’ve made a dedicated page on the site for these picks, made a few substitutions, added a pick for each for 2025 and added one series of television per year as well. All put into one table with the ability to toggle off which media you want to see selections for as well as some dynamic rearrangement based on screenspace, all done with (a horrendous mess of) Cascading Style Sheets and no Javascript.

These are not necessarily my favourite from each year. I have tried to be deliberate to give a spread of different styles and series I like as well including some weirder picks. Especially with games I spent a lot of time weighing choices for particular years based on what series I wanted to include and some years are just packed with formative games for me. 2001 has Metal Gear Solid 2, Silent Hill 2, Commandos 2 and Halo (and Grand Theft Auto 3 and Advance Wars and Worms World Party…). I eventually gave the year to Metal Gear Solid 2 after weighing up that I could have Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories covering some bases for Silent Hill 2, Shadow Tactics was spiritually taking up a place for the Commandos series and there’s already plenty of shooters there to justify dropping Halo.

Similarly Prey is spiritually covering for System Shock so that I can have a childhood favourite Soleil for 1994 and Half-Life would probably beat out Resident Evil 2 in a head-to-head but there’s already two Half-Life games on there and I wanted it to carry the survival horror water for both the aforementioned Silent Hill 2 and for the REmake that got booted out from the previous iteration to make room for Robot Alchemic Drive. And yes after going on about carefully spreading out my choices I did give three picks to Sonic games, one to another Sonic Team-developed game and two more to Sonic-inspired indie games (and four different series of Doctor Who for the TV list). I will not be taking feedback on this.

Again the page is here and the lists are also on my Letterboxd, Serializd and Backloggd accounts as well as a second Letterboxd list covering the years 1970-1989.

sranked Eggmanland

I have been waxing nostalgic about PAL versions of games lately but I will acknowledge that in some regards we did get the short end of the stick. As much as I fond of the slower version of the game’s music I don’t think Sonic the Hedgehog running one sixth slower than it was designed to was a good thing and the game manuals we got here seemed to be made as cheaply as Sega could get away with.

Let’s compare manuals of the Japanese, North American and European release of the same game, called Ragnacënty, Crusader of Centy and Soleil respectively in each region.

This is fairly typical of what European Mega Drive manuals were like. Fully black and white, printed in in a landscape orientation, arranged in thin columns, having little interior artwork other than screenshots that are so squashed down it’s hard to tell what they’re even showing and cutting everything down to the bare minimum details. The character bios aren’t included at all. This little bit of narration from the perspective of the protagonist is the closest thing. The whole manual is only 17 pages compared to 30 for Ragnacënty and 40 for Crusader of Centy.

And Soleil’s manual’s layout seems downright roomy compared to a lot of games. You might have wondered why the manuals might have that strange multi-column landscape layout? Well Soleil had separate manuals printed for each language the game was released in but that wasn’t always the case. Compare it to Tails’ Adventure for the Game Gear which across each pair of pages has separate columns in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish and Dutch.

But even this is still worth preserving. Soleil and its manual were precious artefacts for me for a very long time. I still had the game cartridge and manual up until a few years ago when I did a big clearout of all my old games (mementos are precious, but so is space and I live in a small house) but even when I sold it on I actually cut out the cover of the manual as a keepsake. Had I known as a child the stark difference between those pages and that of Rangacënty I might have held it in less regard, but it was still a piece of my childhood and worth preserving along with the other versions.

Vols.: Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, ⅩⅢ, ⅩⅣ, ⅩⅤ, ⅩⅤⅠ

Did you know that due to the differences in power grid standards the Mega Drive CPU ran at 50 Hz in Europe and Australia rather than its original 60 Hz? That means that if the programming for the games didn’t compensate for it that meant they ran one sixth slower, even the music. This is what the original Sonic the Hedgehog sounded like to me as a child and most of these songs still sound strange to me at full speed. And following on from that…

PAL retro games deserve to be preserved, respected, and re-released — Kimimi

In most cases these aren’t the games an entire continent (and beyond) grew up with, and we need to seriously consider how successfully the industry’s caring for its past by so quickly and easily throwing out the likes of Castlevania: The New Generation (Bloodlines), Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer’s Call (Nocturne), and Kirby’s Fun Pak (Kirby Super Star). For millions of us there is no preservation to be found in these otherwise excellent re-releases nor any chance to revisit a childhood favourite, because the games we played often aren’t even mentioned, let alone included.

Yes I have a bee in my bonnet about this. There’s another interesting thing to note here: PAL versions of Japanese games also often had quite different English translations to the North American releases. As a child I played Soleil on my Mega Drive, saving the world with Johnny the dog, Charlie the cheetah and Penguy the Penguin, while a girl in Canada playing Crusader of Centy on her Genesis would have met Mac, Flash and Chilly instead¹. Nintendo did this as well and for a lot longer than you might expect. The most recent game that I know off the top of my head that had two different English translations for PAL and NTSC regions was Splatoon in 2015.

Overview of my Sun Microsystems Type 7 Keyboard and a little Guide on how to use the Compose key in Linux — Pom

I haven’t bound all of them, but having extra keys to do with as you please is sooooooo nice. I really wish I could get, like, relegendable keycaps where I can write down what alternate functions I have them mapped to. (this is where the Type 5 would kinda come in handy, since that has MX switches, that I could easily put relegendable ones on). So far I’ve mainly have them mapped to window controls, like Stop and Undo each move windows between my monitors. The Help key is one I’m kinda unsure on, since I’ve often hit it by accident instead of Escape so I don’t want something else pop up in situations where this happens. Maybe I could map something to hitting Help along with a modifier? I’m not sure.

I haven’t done much manual key remapping myself but on the Manjaro install on my main desktop I have keyboard layout set to an Irish Cló Gaelach layout that gives me easy access to writing vowels with síntí fada and consonants with poncanna séimhithe using the AltGr key but a lot of other handy or cute little key combinations for different characters, including smart quotes, en and em dashes, and the Tironian et (⁊) which is still sometimes used in place of an ampersand in Irish and Scottish Gaelic and is appropriately on AltGr+⇧ Shift+7.

Blaugust Notes on Comments — Rabbit

“If you don’t have comments enabled, then you’re just preaching your truth. You don’t want to have a conversation.”

Correct.

Okay, no, not really–but why is that so bad? If you believe this, why do you think it’s a bad thing for someone to opt out of other people’s viewpoints on it? It’s their blog. A blog or personal website is intrinsically a different thing than a social media account. It is entirely customizable and on your terms. Why is it a bad thing to have full ownership of your space in an era of the internet where we own so little?

Agree wholeheartedly with xir on this. I do have comments on here but I mostly just hope for the occasional nice little comments for my friends. This is my website and I am fully and unapologetically in control of what appears on it. I am not averse to feedback or discussion but if you try to post a comment I don’t like I will simply delete it.

Further Notes on the Death of the Author — Rabbit

We watched this during critique in class and sat afterwards in horror, none of us willing to be the first person to speak up, until finally someone broke and said, “Is this a film advocating for suicide?”

She was upset with us for thinking such a thing when, to her mind, this was a film about getting in touch with nature to brighten your life. Obviously. Unfortunately, no matter what her intentions were, she had definitely just made a film that was pro-suicide. She was too unskilled at that time to be able to make a film that met her intentions, and also too unskilled to identify what the film was actually about.

Some more notes from Rabbit.

if you love it, download it — Erysdren

this post started out as a rant about the current state of media preservation on the modern internet… but ranting and complaining rarely helps anything.

so instead, i have written a few short guides and notes about ways you can help contribute to media preservation by doing it your damn self. most of the guides lean very technical, but i try to give appropriate explanations and links to the tools and documentation where i can.

I think that every blog that I currently follow that does its own little post roundups has already linked to this but I will add my voice to the choir as someone who was recently struggling to download and preserve something myself.

Laura Michet also recommended a few other downloaders.

Let's stop pretending that managers and executives care about productivity — Baldur Bjarnason

Today, big chunks English-language management and executive culture are effectively the opposite of what we know works when managing organisations.

One example are open offices: these have been proven many times over to harm productivity, focus, collaboration, and employee well-being. They only improve real estate costs and employee surveillance.

I love the efficient allocation of resources under capitalism.

An infodump on vaginal sex, by a lesbian — Elilla

Lately the bottoms I've had the privilege of bedding all have described my fingers with the word “magic”, so I figured I must be doing something right. Might as well write down what I've learned from a lifetime of chasing skirt.

I already linked to this on my own recent post on penile sex and might as well throw it in here too.

I’ve been playing the “open network test” demo for Sonic Racing: Crossworlds and having a good time. I am not much of a kart racer gal but I did really like Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed and that is going to be my main point of comparison. The quick version is that it’s fun but I am not spending 70-bloody-€ on this.

One thing that is immediately apparently compared to Transformed is that Crossworlds is much more chaotic. The game is a constant sensory overload. The central gimmick is that the second lap of each race sends you to a random other track and the last lap of each track also adds new items, hazards and shortcuts to the track, so things are constantly changing every race and items feel more powerful and far less easily dealt with than in Transformed. That game’s blue shell created a minefield in front of the lead player, something that is going to slow you down a little but was avoidable with some care, while Crossworlds has two different items that directly target the lead player and seem nigh-undodgeable. The three different homing attacks also feel significantly harder to get away from with a well-timed boost than they did in Transformed (or perhaps I am just very rusty) with the constant sensory overload of the game not helping there. There are also three different catchup items that automatically send you forward in position on top of the monster truck super transformation and regular boost powerups which also help anyone who has fallen behind rejoin the clusterfuck in the middle of the pack.

Of course my impressions also being coloured here by the fact that I mostly played the single-player mode of Transformed while this demo of Crossworlds, being a network test, has very limited singleplayer options with only one grand prix with three tracks¹ to play singleplayer and many more tracks available to experience in online play so I have mostly been sticking to that. I am a bit disappointed that there doesn’t seem to be much character dialogue when playing multiplayer. The grand prix mode assigns you a rival character who will banter with you as you race other racers might talk to you as you interact (i.e. attack each other). I can understand that people eventually get sick of repeated dialogue in online matches but I wouldn’t mind the option to toggle it on and maybe even toggle on assigning other random players (or friends that you are partying up with) as rivals for a race.

The character I’m most interested in terms of these voice lines is Sage, who was only introduced in Sonic Frontiers and hasn’t interacted with most of the wider cast at all yet. I’m curious as to how they handle the context that she exists in outside of the plot of that game. She is not available in the demo, though, and I have been playing almost exclusively as Cream (because Blaze also isn’t available in the demo).

One thing that Crossworlds does have over Transformed is the vehicle customisation. It’s done a little strangely and there’s not a huge amount of depth to it—you are not swapping out spoilers or other individual parts, only the front and back halves of various vehicles—but it’s still fun to play around with. Layering decals on top of the paintjobs does give you some more freedom but even this is pretty restrictive – you can’t overlap decals and they tend have a large transparent zone around the main image that stops you using them to create more detailed shapes. I imagine that this might be intentional to try to stop people making anything offensive with them but I did try my best on my extreme gear design to combine some basic shapes to make a depiction of Rocky behind where the rider stands.

One criticism I have of the car customisation is that when it comes to horns and decals they don’t seem to have given much thought to the Sonic the Hedgehog theming. The horn options sound like they came unaltered from a stock asset pack. There is one labelled “spring” and it is not the Sonic spring noise, just a generic cartoon spring. There is a decal in there of Sonic’s face (which looks quite funny) but really none for rings or Chaos Emeralds? None of the other characters’ silhouetted extra life icons? The “auras” you can apply to the cars also all look like shit and just add to the visual noise of the game.

Your custom paintjob also gets overriden in the game’s time-limited festivals, in which players are put into themed 4v4v4 teams in races with special rules, with the winning team for each race earning points. The festival for the network test is Persona 5-themed with Team Joker, Team Violet and Team Mona. This sounds like a Splatfest but it is not—it’s a battle pass. You do not choose a team you are randomly assigned one every race, making them utterly pointless other than what colour your car is going to be for the next five minutes and points simply go to unlocking Persona-themed decals that I will never use. Joker himself, one of the future DLC characters for the game, was also temporarily unlocked for this which just highlighted how much of a lazy cashgrab the cross-promotional characters are, lacking any voicelines or even a full set of animations. From what they’ve shown of the game so far the only voiced DLC character is going to be Hatsune Miku, the one that they don’t have to pay a voice actor for. Even the Werehog pre-order bonus doesn’t have any lines and he’s just Sonic with a gruffer voice. They have Roger Craig Smith voicing Sonic and Omega in the game already could they not have him do this too at least? But if you want to race as a completely silent Spongebob Squarepants be sure to buy the season pass.

Also the final lap music for a lot of stages is really bad.

I am probably going to wind down using Wplace. It was fun to mess around with for a few days, flex my pixel art muscles, see what other people are drawing, see how the canvas evolves, but it’s very much a flash in the pan thing that most people are going to move on again from quickly, myself included. I have dotted down a few more things on the map, this time putting some larger pieces of other people’s art in a few places rather than my own pixel designs.

I put down the Pico-8 logo and a few characters near the Pico Pico Café in Kichijōji, Tokyo. This is a busy area and it has quickly been drawn over again, but all of this is ephemeral.

One of my past brief obsessions was St. Bride’s a strange mock-Victorian girl’s school holiday destination in Ailt an Chorráin, Donegal that in the 1980s promised a total disconnect from modern society and modern technology. They advertised that they had no electricity and did not believe in such things and also published a series of text adventure games for the ZX Spectrum. That is a rabbit to save for a future post, perhaps. I planted a shrunk-down recreation of the title screen of the game The Secret of St. Bride’s in the village where the school was based.

I started using the Blue Marble user script for these which helped with planning out size and position for these larger drawings a lot, as well as speeding up the actual drawing. I dropped a little art of Transy east of Bournemouth. It’s modified from a comic panel but this is the art from this lot that I can probably take the most credit as being “mine”.

I also draw the character select art for Snolf that I originally commissioned from Mars Gainsboro and decided to arbitrary place them on the Isle of Skye Golf Club.

Finally, I also contributed my pixels to my friend Ruby’s big rendition of the art for the P-Model album In a Model Room in Tsukuba, a hotbed for artwork of Susumu Hirasawa. She contributed to helping draw my art a lot as well.

I exhibited at a showcase for local game makers yesterday. It was the first time I had done something like that and it was extremely fun and utterly exhausting. Working on games is an occasionally hobby; I don’t intend to make it my job and I haven’t worked on any game projects since the game jam last year, but I dusted off Snolf Robo Blast 2 and Conway’s Garden and set them up with some controllers for people to try out.

I had not thought about how exhibiting these would work before the event but I quickly realised that I was going to have to give a lot of context to people as to what they were playing. The vast majority of people attending never heard of Sonic Robo Blast 2 before so I had to give a quick rundown to everyone on what it was and sometimes the concept of fangames and mods.

Even with that explained, though, it became apparent how awkward it was to try to convey what the mod is doing when people seeing it do not have a context of the base game and how the mod is creating an experience on top of that. They are coming in and seeing and playing this game for the first time and expecting it to be a coherent whole, not this deliberate awkward layer on top of a base game. You don’t have the context that the joy in it is that you are playing the game “wrong”, layering a control scheme and method of play that the world was not intended for. Many people when seeing it as a golf-type thing started looking for a hole or guidance on where they are shooting for. The levels have a fairly legible linear structure when played normally, but when you have never seen them before and can freely shoot yourself much farther and higher than the levels for designed for, bouncing every which way, it is become very difficult to parse the structure of the space. More than one person suggested there should be guiding arrows of some sort to help.

Some people, though, did gel with it straight away and were delighted by blasting Snolf around, which was really nice to see. I was quick to give credit to the SRB2 team for the game itself and Dr. Melon for the concept. A line I fell into saying that got a laugh from a lot of people is that “all I did was make the controls worse.” A lot of people also got a kick out of it when I pointed out that the game was technically an extremely heavily modified version of Doom. Some people did have more of a concept of an antigame and compared it to QWOP and Getting Over It when I tried to explain the awkwardness of it not being entirely unintentional and the other game makers there generally got it and found it interesting. There were a few parents who brought children, including a Sonic fan or two, and they gravitated over to it being one of the more brightly coloured, exciting looking things on display, only to get pretty frustrated with it. For the kids at least I did quickly quit back to the main menu and restart the game with normal Sonic so that they could have a bit of fun trying it out and gave on the details of SRB2 to their parents if they were interested in it, pointing out that it was free. I think if exhibiting it again it would be useful to have a second computer set up with the unmodified version of the game, both to give context and to allow any child who sees Sonic and gets excited to play something that would actually be fun for them.

Similarly for Conway’s Garden I had to let people know that there wasn’t really any goal or point to it and it was more of a piece of art and a challenge to make something in a tiny amount of code. I had the code open in a second in a second window to the side so people could see how small it was for themselves. A lot of people, quite fairly, lost interest in it quickly, but some people were fascinated by the highly condensed code and the idea of tweetcarts and Pico-8 itself and a surprising number of people were already familiar with and recognised Conway’s Game of Life.

There was one man in particular I had a lovely chat with who was unfamiliar with games generally (he had to ask to clarify if “mods” was short for “modifications”) but enthusiastic about discussing the things on display as art. He said the mix of chaotic generation with the player’s simple, deliberate movements in Conway’s Garden reminded him of Joseph Beuys’s I Like America and America Likes Me and immediately recognised the Sisyphean nature of Snolf.

I don’t know if I will do anything like this again any time soon (and I won’t be working on anything new to show for the moment) but I had a great time and met some very cool people.

Sonic Frontiers: The Final Horizon was a fascinating coda to Sonic Frontiers, a very experimental expansion to a game where Sonic Team was already going outside of their comfort zone to do new things with the series. The world map threw together Only Up!-esque climbing challenges, playable Tails, Amy and Knuckles very different movesets to how they have worked in past, an absurdly fast and powerful dropdash for Sonic in 3D and wildly more difficult combat than the base game. I streamed it to some friends when it came out and one of them remarked “this is the least designed game ever made.” I couldn’t really disagree with her. So much of this is janky and half-broken in various ways and it was incredibly fun. It made me hopeful that Sonic Team was happy to keep experimenting with what worked for the series and keep allowing more player freedom in future games¹.

In keeping with this, while the levels in the base Sonic Frontiers were almost entirely reused from previous games the ones in The Final Horizon were much more experimental, being very clearly thrown together with very basic assets rather than having their own sculpted level geometry but also with much fewer guardrails and much less guided than a normal Sonic level and with new, bespoke mechanics and side missions, some of which required more slow, careful exploration than high-speed platforming.

Early on, while playing one level, 4-D, I noticed an exclamation mark appearing over Sonic’s head in certain locations, accompanied by a beeping. You cans see it at about a 1′18″ in in this video. It would turn red and beep faster as I approached a certain spot. When I saw this the first thing that came to mind was Knuckles’ emerald-hunting missions from the Sonic Adventure games and thought it might be part of one of the level’s optional missions. I actually had a bit of trouble finding the source of the beeping but once I zeroed in on it and finally found it I was greeted to Sonic being blown up into the air by a mine, his hands held down protecting his singed arse. This was a very sudden gear-shift in my head and in my confusion, still processing what I was seeing, I screamed “I’M MARIO BURNT ASS?!”² into my microphone, which caused myself and my friend Ruby who was watching to double over laughing till we couldn’t breath and then Ruby set my display name on the Discord server to Mario Burnt Ass for a month. It was funny.

That’s the story.

Thanks.

I don’t watch game streamers much but one of the few who I have enjoyed a lot is Videochess (a.k.a. Chess). She doesn’t stream regularly at the moment but she has wonderful chaotic energy and a propensity for “crimes”, a term she uses for playfully exploring the mechanics of and pushing at the boundaries of games and seeing what is possible if one strays from the designated path. This can manifest as things like impromptu sequence breaking but not for the purposes of speedrunning or anything like that, just to see where it goes and tease out the foibles of a game. And sometimes she does things like collecting every star in Super Mario 64 while playing the game with a DJ Hero controller.

There are two main places to find her videos, her own Youtube channel that has her streams up until 2022 and another unofficial but endorsed channel that has archived more recent streams. One of her most popular series is an Ocarina of Time randomiser with GGDG but below I will share some of her videos that have had the largest influence on me.

Snolf

Her truly Sisyphean streams of Melon’s Snolf hacks inspired me to make my own Snolf Robo Blast 2 mod for Sonic Robo Blast 2 as well as a chat control mod that Chess ended up playing herself.

Discovering new games

I have also learnt about games and mods that I have since played or are now on my (long) list of things I want to get around to.

Robot Alchemic Drive I still have not gotten around to playing but seems fascinating. I love games with weird controls and especially when there is a diegetic basis for them. Having to remote control a giant robot from the perspective of someone on the ground who has to watch it from a distance rather than getting a camera from the perspective of the robot itself or even a cockpit is an incredible concept. You may be familiar with the game from clips that get shared online showcasing the best value greengrocer or Nanao having a miserable time.

I had only vaguely heard of Cave Story before watching her play “Cave Story Normal Regular”¹, i.e. Sonic Story, a mod that replaces the main character of the game, Quote, with Sonic the Hedgehog. Yes, I know this is a massively important and influential game. No, I never bothered looking into it at all despite having had the Steam version in my library for years from some Humble Bundle or another. I have played both Cave Story and Sonic Story since and I can attest that Sonic Story perfectly replicates the feeling of how Mega Drive Sonic games control. It’s not just a reskin it is is playing as Sonic the Hedgehog in the wrong game in a way that is wonderful and silly.

For the opposite she has played Mario put into a Sonic game with the SM64 Generations mod, which uses libsm64. She has also played some other games using libsm64 as well as other regular normal Mario 64 mods.

Willy Wombat

I also became obsessed with Willy Wombat for a while after watching her play it. It is a fascinating, experimental 3D platformer with an isomorphic perspective with maps that have the same limitations as a Doom level: There are no slopes and not only are there no floating platforms but it’s impossible to have a floating platform in this game. Like Doom the levels are defined by floor sectors with designated heights. There are pillars and walls that rise out of the ground for vertically, but you can never go under anything. It leads to some unique level design, especially as the game progresses to areas were the developers had clearly gotten much more comfortable with their tools. The only thing I can think of that is similar (though lacking the top-down perspective) is older versions of Sonic Robo Blast 2 and that is literally a fork of Doom.

It’s also one of those bygone ’90s games that is fully voiced in English with a script penned and directed by a Japanese crew, giving it a surreal quality that is aided by a post-apocalyptic setting with jarring name choices and very little up-front exposition. Above is a fan animation I adore of a cutscene of Notes and Mail talking about “the peace and eternal life of Prison.”

I have a page on this website dedicated to my cat Easóg where you can see a video of her trying to kill Willy while I am watching Chess play the game and mushroom32x made a fun little Neocities webpage for the game’s 20th anniversary.

There’s plenty more

That’s enough for now. If you want to watch more check out the official and unofficial Youtube channels to dig through yourself.

Steam Grid DB is a website that hosts artwork for customising game libraries. I learnt a little while ago that it has a tool called Boop that lets you apply art to Steam games much faster by clicking a button directly on the website.

This reminded me that I actually used to make quite a few custom banners for games on Steam myself and I decided to upload my old work to the website. You can find those on my Steam Grid DB profile and I will include a selection of them here:

Half-Life 2

Some of the first ones I made were a set of matching banners for Half-Life 2 and its episodes. I’m still pretty happy with these.

Some classics

I made some for a few classic games, usually from a still of the title screen, sometimes with some variants.

Megagames 6

At the time I had a Retrode and would dump my own game cartridges. Two of the old Mega Drive carts I had were two different 6-in-1 game packs, so I decided to make custom artwork for them too.

ROM hacks

And of course some ROM hacks.

And a few others

Games that weren’t even in the database

Some games I had to submit to Steam Grid myself because they didn’t have the games listed at all. These all have links if you click on the banners. The Monokuro: From Here and Back is actually new and I haven’t gotten around to playing it yet. The process of uploading these banners made me want to make a new one and I had the game added as a shortcut on Steam without any artwork. Somari 3D Blast 5 wasn’t accepted by Steam Grid DB, sadly.

One last joke

These are a pair of banners that I made for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Gamecube and Wii versions, respectively. It was a little private joke and I didn’t bother submitting them to Steam Grid DB.

In Sonic Unleashed the name Jungle Joyride doesn’t really work for the werehog version of the level, where the gameplay is much slower and combat-focused. Instead they should have called the nighttime version of the level Jungle G.B.H.

I adore that the Sonic Spinball options menu theme is now Surge’s unofficial theme song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uPJqSA-in4

Because of Nathalie Fourdraine’s video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVFGeuenBc4

Easóg

Easóg is the Irish word for stoat and also the name of my cat. There are a couple layers to this name. The first is simply I find it funny to call animals by the wrong species and I have a fondness for the Irish language. The second is she is a thin, white thing and I think sometimes she somewhat resembles a stoat in its winter coat (though stoats in Ireland don’t actually have winter coats).

The final layer to this comes from the medieval Irish law, commonly known as Brehon law, or at least a little titbit about it in a book I read by Niall Mac Coitir titled Ireland’s Animals: Myths, Legends and Folklore, which says that for the purposes of determining legal penalties by offences commitid by a pet, a stoat was legally considered to be a type of cat. I sometimes amuse myself thinking about some exasperated judge who had to decide the original precedent about how to calculate damages when someone’s stoat killed a chicken.

I adopted her when she was, I was told, about eleven months old, though I never got a birthday for her. She’s a very timid creature and the morning after the first night I brought her home I couldn’t find her. I searched my flat top to bottom but she was nowhere to be seen. I was worried that she had somehow gotten out but suspected that she had found a hiding spot in the space under and behind the kitchen cabinets. I did have a look around outside and put up a few posters with my number on it in case anyone spotted her, but inside I left out food for her, sprinkled flour around it so that I could see any footprints she left if she went for it, and set up a webcam with some software to automatically capture video if it detected motion. Here is the first video captured of her.

This worked but sadly it was the only way that I saw her for three weeks. She would hide during the day when I was around and only come out at night to eat, use the litter tray that I had left out, and slowly start to explore her new home. There was no real way of getting to her hiding spot without dismantling the kitchen and that would have terrified her more anyway. Eventually she started to venture out when I was around and would explore other parts of the flat during the day (I left the doors open for her) but would keep her distance and flee back to her hole if I motioned towards her or even moved very quickly or made any noise at all.

Once she was tolerating my (distant) presence more I decided to try and make myself as unthreatening as possible. When she stepped out into the hallway I lay on the floor of the living room and waited for her to come back. When she did she very, very slowly and very, very carefully stalked up ot me then sniffed my hand before running away. Then she slowly came up again and sniffed my hair and ran away. I continued to lay still to not scare her but she very visibly relaxed at this point. She had been deathly silent in those weeks but now started to meow and take some experimental swipes at a mouse toy that I had left on the floor and rubbing her head against the furniture.

She left the room again and I decided to sit up with my legs crossed and wait for her again. When she came back again she sniffed at my hand and experimentally rubbed up against me before running off a short distance. When she came back to me it was like a switch had been flipped. She started rubbing up against me in earnest while purring loudly before headbutting my hand affectionately and licking the hell out of me as I pet her. When I eventually moved over to my desk she jumped up in my lap and settled in. My clothes were absolutely covered in white hair that evening.

To this day she is extremely affectionate (and vocal) and while she is still quite timid and doesn’t like sudden noises or movements she has gotten much more used to people.

I do spoil her a bit, though.

Also a friend pointed out to me that the character I made in Sonic Forces several years before adopting Easóg, who I called Blitz, is also a white cat with yellow eyes. Perhaps they are sisters.

The rest is just a photo dump.

in Shadow Generations the reason that you can use Doom Blast on the mass-produced Death Egg Robots is that they have black arms

it’s funny and very 2000s how the president in Shadow the Hedgehog keeps calling the worldwide alien invasion “terrorists”

The New York Times Tech Guild is on strike and asking people to boycott the paper’s online puzzles. I stopped doing Wordle a while ago as it was no longer finding it satisfying but I usually do the mini crossword and Connections.

If you usually do them and too and are lacking a daily puzzle here is a Connections/Only Connect/puzzle grid of my own devising below. You can also play in on Puzzgrid.

If you’re unfamiliar with this sort of puzzle: There’s sixteen words that make up four groups of four words through some sort of connection. Here is some easy ones on Puzzgrid to get the idea.

This one has a specific theme running through the whole puzzle and it does require some specialised knowledge on that subject. Check the hint to see what that is.

Inspired by BCJ doing the same which I saw via Mike Egan.

I cannot stop laughing at this line. (He is talking about Shadow’s inhibitor rings)

Game is great, though.

Snolf

Snolf is ROM hacks made by Melon for the Sonic series that replaces the normal controls with golf-game mechanics, making it a difficult-to-impossible to control nightmare. It’s great! Melon’s Snolf series consists of Snolf: The Sonic Golf Experience, Snolf 3 & Knolf, Snolf CD: A Snolf in Time, Snolf Zero: The Prequel, Snolf: Tournament Edition and Snolf Mania Requiem Ultimax.

Snolf has been featured in Awesome Games Done Quick 2022 and Summer Games Done Quick 2023 where both times it was run by Dowolf.

Me

I was bitten by the Snolf bug and made Snolf Robo Blast 2, the first 3D Snolf game. It can be found on the Sonic Robo Blast 2 message board.

Art