This is a review of Zefyr: a Thief’s Melody, played with a press key provided by the developer.
Sundry Sunday: Mike Fallek’s Internet Instructions
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
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” in video chat, and something called an “e-mail cli-ent.” Please enjoy, and learn! (What follows should be a Newgrounds embed. It doesn’t preview well for me. If it doesn’t work, I must refer you to the “sarcastic internet instructions” link, above.)
MikeFallek is also the creator of something I linked a couple of years ago, the sublime Sonic History Class For Aliens.
An Arcade Ridge Racer Obsessive Explains How to Play Well
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 on the recent Arcade Archives release, that he has one of the top 50 times in the world on it. He’s so enthusiastic about it that I think it may nearly rival my own obsession with arcade Rampart, although that’d be quite a lot of unhealthy focus indeed.
Mind you, arcade Ridge Racer only has one course, although according to David it plays quite differently depending on your difficulty. There’s an extra section that opens up at the higher levels, and the course is designed so that higher speeds requires more skill to make it through without crashing.
It’s not really a long article so go give it a read? It’s the kind of thing that makes the web great.
AGDQ 2026’s Awful Block, with Bug Blasters
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 the unquestionable highlight has to be the obscure SegaCD game Bug Blasters: The Exterminators, at 42 bizarre FMV minutes:
Made in 1995 but not released until 2001, it’s really something. That is, it’s a thing, and there is some of it. Not only are the effects and acting somewhere beyond the line of rationality, it looks like it’s barely playable, even on the easiest difficulty. Imagine plunking down $50 for this in 2001 for your obsolete Sega CD, out of production for five years.
Huh…. on further reflection, that actually sounds awesome! The Playstation 2 had been released by that point! It’s certainly memorable, although I wouldn’t have wanted to buy it for purposes of playing it unironically.
Resurrecting Sinistar
Resurrecting Sinistar: A Cyber-Archeology Documentary is a 166-minute, that’s approaching three hours long, documentary about the effort to recover the source code of the Williams arcade classic, made by SynaMax.
SynaMax also made a modified version of the game that makes the notoriously difficult arcade game easier in various ways, in interesting ways.
I’ve been watching Awful Block on AGDQ, so that’s all I have for you today. Hopefully that’ll hold you over, although I suggest that you might want to watch AGDQ too, while it lasts.
Adventure 751, from Compuserve, Recovered and Playable
Interactive Fiction blog Renga 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 there are to find. The post in turn links to Arthur O’Dwyer’s article on this version, and other versions, which seem to contain substantial added content from the original Crowther & Woods version.
It’s playable, but requires a lot of effort to get there, including compiling a PDP10 emulator and loading a disk image into it. I wish VCFMW wasn’t months behind me now, it’d have been a blast to see if someone there had access to a working PDP10, and if the game could have been transferred onto it!
As O’Dwyer mentions, there are plenty of games from this era that are just completely, utterly lost, with practically no chance of recovery. And even versions like this, that can technically be played, still hang on by just a thread. The people who created them often don’t have accessible archives, and the institutions who hosed them rare seem interest in preserving them. It’s a sorry state indeed, but at least there are a few survivals like this one.
Editing JPEGs in a Text Editor
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 the metadata areas that don’t change the image visibly at all, JPEGs are affected in all kinds of bizarre ways when you change random bytes!
One important take away is to not use Windows Notepad for your image editing adventures, because it’ll change many more bytes than just the ones you want to change, in the name of correcting and regularizing the file, and it’ll practically always result in a non-working image.
The Sound And Music of Games (Part 2)
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.
Sundry Sunday: Lore Sjöberg Rates 1st Gen Pokemon + AGDQ 2026 Begins Today
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
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 is sadly offline now.
About a year ago Lore started making web humor again, for a short while anyway, and one of the things he did was four more installments of The Ratings, one of the most popular features of old Brunching, once so popular that he collected many of them into a book. He even did a few video ratings during the time he 𝙼𝙰𝙳𝙴 𝙲𝙾𝙽𝚃𝙴𝙽𝚃 for Wired Magazine. I once linked to his ratings of Legend of Zelda weapons, which is still as funny as when he recorded it 17 years ago.
Well, about a year ago, during the brief revival of teh raitngs at badgods.com, he rated a few 1st Generation Pokemon, and what do you know, he’s still got it. An example:
HITMONCHAN
I’m deeply disappointed Niantic didn’t continue with the Hitmonchan/Hitmonlee naming scheme. That could have given us Hitmonsegal, Hitmonyeoh, and Hitmonvandamme.
If you enjoy it, or have ever enjoyed Lore’s work through the years, you can currently find him on Bluesky. Now that there’s not a thriving ecosystem of blogs to link to his work, he’s kind of hard to find now. Help the algorithm realize he’s a treasure, and go have a look!
The Ratings: First Generation Pokemon (badgods.com)
ALSO, I just found out, AGDQ 2026, the week-long charity speedrunning marathon, begins today at Noon Eastern Time! Right off the bat it starts with Super Mario Sunshine and Jet Set Radio, and around 11:30 that night will be running the new Katamari game, Once Upon A Katamari! And from there there’s more great runs to watch, with the typically-hilarious Awful Block this year taking place midnight to sunrise Thursday morning. Here’s the full schedule.
2,025 Item Categories Puzzle
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 click on another item of the same type. The two will merge together into one item. When you get an item with all 45 of its type it’ll be replaced with a box with the name of its category.
Remembering the locations of the growing categories quickly becomes a major part of the puzzle! When you combine an item with another one, the combined group ends up at the location of the second one you clicked. Use this information to get the categories as close to the upper-left as possible. This will prevent them from moving around too often, and aid your creaking grey matter in recording their places.
Unless I miss my guess, you’ll progress smoothly for a while; you’ll complete one or two specific categories long before any of the others; then at about six to ten categories finished you’ll collide rudely with the taxonomical wall. I had to use Google to get through the last 20% (that’s about 400 items remaining!), and I really think you will too, since everyone has holes in their knowledge.
Below (in ROT13, since it’s a spoiler), I list some of the harder categories to pick up on:
Gbz Unaxf zbivrf, Tbbtyr cebqhpgf, Gbyxvra punenpgref, “jrngure jbeqf,” pbyyrpgvir abhaf, HF ICf, xvaqf bs cnfgn (whfg ubj znal xvaqf NER gurer?!), “jrngure jbeqf,” Zneiry Pvarzngvp Havirefr punenpgref, pbzchgre ynathntrf, ynetr pbzcnavrf, ybtvpny snyynpvrf, purrfrf, shpxvat PBPXGNVYF (V qba’g qevax) naq, zbfg vashevngvat bs nyy vs lbh’er abg n ynjlre, yrtny qbpgevarf.
TheZZAZZGlitch’s Lists of Interesting Pokemon Things
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 exploring glitched, out-of-bounds Pokemon boxes. These can cause writes to unexpected regions of memory, and very strange glitches indeed. But one in particular, if it happens, causes a write to a region of memory that causes an unexpected bankswitch, meaning, suddenly a whole swath of the game ROM isn’t what the code expects. In 99% of cases this would cause a sudden game crash end of story, but in THIS case the code that ends up executing doesn’t immediately crash the game, and not only that later in the code path, the bank gets switched back, and the code path is in such a place that it actually recovers, and the primary effect is just some glitched graphics, all completely by chance. Huh!
Here is that video, and if it’s interesting, the others (9 video playlist link) might be to your liking too.
The Weirdest Star Wars Game
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.