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.
Set Side B 2025 Wrap-Up
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 is a step up from that, right?
To start off, a bit of site history. Set Side B began on April 5th, 2022 with me, Josh Bycer’s Game Wisdom series, Statue (who to date has done but one post but we love them anyway), and Phil Nelson, of RetroStrange, who set up and maintains the site and cheers us on from the sidelines.
We did monthly wrap-up posts for the first few months of the site’s life, before I started forgetting to do them. Also, they’re a fair bit of work for what still feels like filler. I like to have something new here for every day, working from the theory that consistency is what matters most for a blog such as this. We’ve had a couple of lapses, but never for more than a single day. For the most part, we’ve stayed pretty steady.
In the early days of the blog I did weekly news posts, but those too felt like filler. I came to think, if you wanted to see what Kotaku was saying, you’d probably already have seen it at Kotaku. (Pretend I pronounce “Koh-tahk-oo” like videogamedunkey would say it.)
Where do we get our posts from? Well I scour Youtube frequently, obviously. It’s algorithm is not super-terrific for finding things, but sometimes comes through. There’s also social media posts and RSS feeds. (Note: Set Side B has a RSS feed too!) Once in a while I’ll post something I found on venerable community weblog Metafilter, where I often hang out. But there’s always new things to find and places to look. If you know of something that you think we’d be interested in, let us know!
What is out traffic like? We have a couple of stats packages installed, but they give very different views. One tells me we average about 60,000 hits per day, from around 11,000 visitors, but how much of that traffic is bots and crawlers, like from people trying to build datasets for their infuriating generative AIs,is anyone’s guess. WordPress’ own stats display says we’ve gotten 64,000 visitors over the past six months, which isn’t bad I guess?
Our most popular posts seem to be my link to a beginner’s guide to Balatro, my comprehensive strategy guide for UFO 50’s Party House, a quick start guide to UFO 50’s Pilot Quest, another link to a Balatro explainer, links to a Mr. Saturn Text Generator and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles logo generator, and one to an explanation of why the Mario 64 star Snowman’s Lost His Head sucks so much.
Most of our traffic at the moment seems to come from Google searches. It’s been much remarked upon that Google is capricious and unreliable as a source of traffic, but it’s not doing badly for us at the moment, at least.
We started Set Side B with no clear ending in mind, and we continue to keep it going for as long as we can.
So, let’s get to the recap—
(BTW, I used that em dash specifically to prove wrong the people who think it’s a sign of AI text generation. Some of us like to use all the characters.)
Set Side B updates daily, and I don’t feel up to echoing every post we made over the last year, so I’m only going over some that I consider to be highlights. In some cases, the choice for what to leave out was very difficult. For the rest, I refer you to our archives, over in the sidebar.
On New Year’s Day of 2025 I posted about the bizarre but awesome R-Type parody GAR-TYPE, where you play ace space fighter pilot Jon Starbuckle fighting against a horde of giant Garfield-shaped space monsters, which I think is about as perfect a Set Side B subject as anything.
January 17: iobaseball.com is kind of like a solitaire successor to Blaseball, which we still hold dear in our memory. Development on it seems to have stalled for now, sadly, but it’s still playable online.
January 24 held a list of “Minesweeper-likes.”
January 27 was a link to a Roguelike Radio episode that I was in!
February 3 was about a Displaced Gamers video about them reprogramming NES Ghosts & Goblins to make it more stable.
On February 5, I hearkened back to an ancient Nethack spoiler listing the 50+ ways you could die in that game.
February 10: Rampart again.
February 18: Entertaining bits of the manual for the arcade Wizard of Wor machine.
February 24: A sad occasion, as I had finally learned that Matthew Green, online friend and booster of Set Side B from the start, and maintainer of both the website pressthebuttons.com and the podcast Power Button, had passed away two months before. Adding insult to fatality, since then long-time blogging platform Typepad shut down, and that took pressthebuttons offline too.
February 27: CSS Puzzle Box, a puzzle game implemented entirely in CSS stylesheets.
March 1: The amazing (if you know about its hardware limitations) Commodore 64 demo NINE.
March 6: An “arcade raid” in West Virginia, rescuing arcade machines from decay and collapse.
March 19: The basics of classic Sonic the Hedgehg physics.
March 21: On the free and open-source Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection, and my own tips on Dominosa, one of its many puzzles. If you’ve never heard of this brilliant piece of software you really should check it out, it’s available for nearly everything!
March 26: Long-running magazine Game Informer returns from the dead.
April 1: My own recovery and restoration of classic oldweb site Furnitures, the Great Brown Oaf.
April 4: On my favorite part of Mario Kart games, the growing number of fictional sponsors in the games.
April 12: On efforts to restore Faceball 2000’s lost 16-player mode.
April 18: More on Mario Kart World’s fake ads.
April 19: My own project to present the archives of Loadstar, classic Commodore 64 magazine-on-disk. I had a busy April. More was posted about this on May 8 and June 4.
April 27: A particularly fun Sundry Sunday find, The Legend of Beavis.
May 10: Youtube game disassembly deep-dive channel has been sleeping lately, but before they passed out they posted a gigantic and exhaustive video explaining the level format of Super Mario Bros. 2.
May 19: PAPApinball’s demonstration of expert play in Addams Family Pinball.
May 24: 8-Bit Show-And-Tell finds fake C64 programming books on Amazon.
May 27: On a particularly awesome game from that Loadstar compilation, jason Merlo’s Jed’s Journey, a Zelda-like for the C64.
May 29: I list out a whole bunch of gaming websites you should be following.
June 2: A web-wide effort to solve every 5×5 Nonogram (a.k.a. Picross) puzzle. (Update: since then the effort has been successful! Now they’re trying to solve every unique 5×6 puzzle.)
June 5: It was launch day for the Switch 2, and I was standing in line with a number of other people at the Statesboro, GA Gamestop. I was inspired, while standing, to write my own addition to the oldweb “Private Skippy” meme, listing things they (Judging by pre-existing lore, Skippy is definitely non-binary) are not allowed to do while standing in line.
June 6: I exulted Kenta Cho’s, aka.ABAgame’s terrific BLASNAKE, playable for free at itch.io! On June 25 they released another great game with Labyracer!
June 12: I wrote a piece on old-school computer type-in magazines, a major way software was distributed before the internet.
June 17: Another find from the tracks and sectors of Loadstar, Nick Peck’s terrific shooter Zorphon.
June 19: “Oh God, The Donkey Kong Country CG Cartoon Show’s On Youtube.”
June 21: The Coolest Thing In The World Is CP/M for 6502. CP/M was the OS that MS-DOS copied from. If you have a CP/M 6502 implementation for your machine, any CP/M 6502 program will run on it, ranging from the C64 to the SNES!
June 30: I had been planning to present Video Games 101’s extensive and entertaining series of retro game walkthroughs for a long while, and on this day I finally did it.
July 8: ZoomZike’s series on Identifying Luck in Mario Party is actually an extremely in-depth and thorough examination of the whole series, still in progress. Some of their videos are several hours long, and best digested in pieces.
July 9: Primesweeper is a game where your knowledge of prime numbers makes the game easier.
On July 14 I linked to Kirby Air Ride Online’s competitive scene for playing City Trial. Since then Air Riders was released, and the whole world has had the chance to see what they knew all along.
July 15: Chipwits, a remake of the classic Mac programming puzzle game, entered full release on Steam!
July 17: A guide to the various “new media” websites out there, from Defector to Second Wind.
July 23: Multiplayer Balatro!
August 1: I presented my website where I extracted all of Jerry Jones’ recipes from off of Loadstar, food recipes, and made a website for them all.
August 2: Jean and Zac’s 100 Facts about Gauntlet Dark Legacy.
August 6: Digital Eel’s Bandcamp Albums.
August 9: Nothing short of eye-popping, a madperson is had build a Wolf3D-style 3D ray tracing engine for the Commodore PET, a machine not only without bitmapped graphics, but whose character set is locked in ROM. Later on August 27, we found a PETSCII platformer.
On August 15, we started carrying a small ad image in the upper-right of the page. We don’t receive any money from this at the moment, and probably never will, but the ad is from a small-site network, one that mostly links webcomics, and it felt like a way to do our part to help spread the word about little sites. This is also the day where more news came to light about a bug I had long known about, in the NES port of Pac-Man.
September 10: Use a Gameboy Advance as a controller on the Nintendo Switch, for real, no wiring or unofficial hardware needed, although you do need quite a lot of official hardware, including a Gameboy Advance to Gamecube cable and the USB Gamecube controller adapter.
September 20: A talk on how to turn a boring Chromebook into a full laptop.
September 23: Oh, nothing. Just a Minecraft server written in bash.
September 25: Someone found an old-time penny arcade in Yorkshire and tried out a lot of their games, most of them ancient electro-mechanicals. The next day we saw one of Konami’s weirder redemption machines, the unexpectedly cool Picadilly Gradius.
September 29: Long-time classic Final Fantasy and Squaresoft fansite Caves of Narshe! On October 4 I linked to three more old Final Fantasy sites.
September 30: Adrian’s Digital Basement found a long-dormant cheat for NES Galaxian that makes it much more fun to play!
October 7-11 was a week of tips for classic arcade games. Oct 7: Phoenix and Centipede. Oct 8: Donkey Kong. Oct 9: Robotron 2084. Oct 10: Defender. Oct 11: Q*bert. A few days later on October 14, Mappy. And returning to Donkey Kong on October 30, how to beat those damn springs.
October 17: The great homebrew game Mega Q*bert for Genesis/Mega Drive.
October 21: The charming, award-winning text adventure Lost Pig (And Place Under Ground).
October 29: A Korean Youtuber uses a 3D pen to make excellent models of video game characters.
October 31: On Halloween, Castlevaniastravaganza!
October 5: The official SkiFree homepage. And also, the Kickstarter for Greg Johnson’s Dancing With Ghosts, which was successful!
November 13: A completely different madperson than the 3D engine on a PET one did a respectable port of OutRun to the Amiga.
November 20: Eamon, classic Apple II community-made modular text adventure RPG series.
November 22: I fear it’s a Kirby Air Riders Review.
November 29: Mechanical hand-held games.
December 3: Websites about Conway’s Game of Life.
December 6: Yacht and Panic’s wonderful 90s cable TV simulation (on another planet) Blippo+!
December 12: Jamey Pittman’s tutorial on grouping Pac-Man’s ghosts, an essential skill to develop to get high scores without patterns.
December 17: In Ocarina of Time, leaving Kakariko village at the wrong moment during a rainstorm makes Hyrule go crazy.
And on December 27, a rare recording of a talk given by several microcomputer luminaries, including Steve Wozniak and Jack Tramiel
Thanks for reading Set Side B in 2025! We look forward in 2026 to bring you more from the Flipside of Gaming.
The Sound (and Music) of Games With Mark Benis Part 1
For this perceptive podcast, I (Josh Bycer) spoke with composer Mark Benis who has worked on a number of game soundtracks to discuss his role and what it’s like creating original scores for games and how indie devs can understand the job when thinking about getting music created for their titles. This is a two-parter as we spoke at length about composing music.
Multilink Monday: Bluesky Leftovers for 2025
Bluesky only released their Saved Posts feature about three months ago, but I’m such a link packrat that there’s plenty there to fill a multilink post for 2025. I hope you find some interesting things in here!
@blueribbs.bsky.social and their magic bikini comic.
@gohbilly.bsky.social presents the babies (from the Babalities) of Mortal Kombat:
@shcontest.bsky.social, the account of the yearly Sonic Hacking Contest, and their thread of winners and honorable mentions of the 2025 contest.
@katch.bluesky.social enjoyed Aiden Moher’s book on JRPGs, Fight, Might, Items.
@edwardodell.bsky.social made a post that’s only very slightly game-related, but is hilarious, imagining if Orson Welles found out about Dragonball-Z:
@johnlearned.bsky.social links to shmuplations’ translation of an archive of Hideo Yoshizawa tweets about NES Ninja Gaiden.
@gamehistoryorg.bsky.org presents unused voice lines from MLB Slugfest 20-03 that were rejected by Major League Baseball.
@raycarrot.bsky.social explains how Rayman’s password system works.
@tykenn.games is working on a project called “Trees Hate You,” and, well, see for yourself.
@jongraywb.bsky.social found a hilarious and tragic caption to someone in a Kirby suit on the news.
@thinkygames gave us a talk by Patrick Traynor, creator of the mindtwisting puzzle game Patrick’s Parabox, and how that game was programmed. Hey, I kind of know him!
@historyofhyrule.com, a great account generally, presents the originals of some of the Legend of Zelda manual artwork.
@skeet.bets calls out one of the more evocative Dwarf Fortress bug reports:
@jasonkoebler.bsky.social notes one of the most significant problems with virtual pinball tables.
@kekeflipnote.bsky.social, a.k.a. Kekeflipnote, a popular artist who uses Nintendo’s DSi Flipnote app as their medium, posts Kirby’s reaction to a photo of a highly questionable part of Kirby-licensed fuzzy slippers.
@spacecoyote.com, a.k.a. Nina Matsumoto, shows off her Undertale artwork for the cover of Famitsu!
@castpixel.bsky.social has great mockup pixel artwork for a fictional Gameboy Pac-Quest game, starring “Pac-Girl,” who seems to be intended to be a younger Ms. Pac-Man:
videogameesoterica.bsky.social notes that a fan translation of SEGAGAGA, one of the last official Dreamcast games and a weird and hilarious museum of Sega content, is nearing completion.
kriswolfhe.art (Bluesky) reminds us that, whatever the game’s faults might have been, judging by how the title character was drawn, the character artist for the Grinch GBC game was suspiciously into his subject.
fluffcopter.bsky.social, on a weird interaction in Caves of Qud that I’m not sure if they’re kidding about or not. They “poured warm static on my dog, it turned into a dromad trader that comes with guards and items. They are all my dog, the whole trade party and merchandise. I convinced my dog to sell me my dog for free while my dog, my dog, my dog and my dog were standing guard.”
chrisdeleon.bsky.social warns us not to lose faith in Santa Claus, or he’ll turn into a monster:
And, most recently, almondsquirrel.bsky.social reminds us that Disney Solitaire, a game with dark patterns, real money transactions and lootboxes, is PEGI rated 3+, while Balatro has none of that, but is rated 18+ because of its nebulous Poker theming.
Sundry Sunday: Dr. Light Resorts to Violence
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
HyperVoiceActing is a Youtube channel that frequently posts humorous vignettes, often involving video game characters, and hey that’s what Sundry Sunday mostly presents, so here’s one of theirs!
Dr. Wily and Dr WrLight have had a long rivalry, but usually their battles are by proxy, Wily through Robot Masters, Light through RockMega Man. One has to wonder if their time in grad school prepared them for this.
This video presents a scenario in which Light has had enough, and calls out Dr. Wily for what is refrered to in robotics circles as an ass-whoopin. The interesting things about that is, first, Dr. Wily seems worried that Dr. Light might actually get squished by his latest skull machine. This should properly be seen as a sop to the shippers, but I’m not annoyed, it’d probably happen anyway. Wily obviously cares deeply about what Dr. Light thinks, otherwise he wouldn’t rail* against him so much.
Second, Wily actually takes Dr. Light up on his challenge to settle their rivalry with fisticuffs. As for the outcome, well…. (2 minutes)
* Note: Completely platonic meaning for “rail”
Old Vintage Computing Research Presents Rare 2007 Talk On C64
This is one of the rare times where I won’t embed the video myself, because the blog Old Vintage Computing Research presented it as a link to their readers, and the video itself is unlisted on Youtube, so it won’t turn up in searches or through discovery features. So I hope I can help spread the word about this wonderful find.
Here is their post, and here is the video (1 hour 33 minutes). It’s a link to the Computer History Museum’s symposium on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, and has Steve Wozniak (creator of the Apple II), William Lowe (“father” of the IBM PC), Adam Chowaniec (Vice President of World Product Development at Commdore) and Jack Tramiel (founder of Commodore and key to the success of the Commodore 64).
Since this talk was given, three of the four have passed away, leaving only Steve Wozniak, probably by virtue of his youth when he invented the Apple. Please enjoy!
Zelda Day 2025
“Zelda Day” is a random thing over at Metafilter. One day long ago, on December 26th, there was a day in which three Legend-Of-Zelda-themed posts were made in one day. Since then I’ve commemorated the event by making another Legend of Zelda post on the same day each following year.
Here is this year’s post, but you don’t have to follow it because I’ve included the links in this post too.
They’re all videos this year. These first links are to videos by Skawo:
In Minish Cap, there are certain names you can’t put on your save file due to a checksum bug. (11 minutes) The same bug can result in a valid save file being declared corrupted:
I think I mentioned this one before, but again, in Ocarina of Time, if you go back the way you came during the event in Kakariko Village, the world will become a glitchy mess (7 minutes):
In early versions of Ocarina, holding down R while talking to King Zora when he gives you the Blue Tunic causes him to give you a different item instead (14 minutes):
Also in Ocarina of Time, in some areas there’s a mysterious square in the upper-left corner of the screen (6 minutes):
When fighting pairs of Stalfos enemies, the game starts to lag heavily when you defeat one of the two, before the other one is beaten (9 minutes):
Capsyst Animations made three fake commercials for early Zelda games, in the style of the evocative illustrations from the manual. There’s the original Zelda, Zelda II and Link to the Past (all 1 minute long):
And, finally, here are two strange commercials for the Zelda 1 on NES, the Zelda Rap, and whatever this is supposed to be (both ½ minutes):
Sonic on the Amiga: Mega Drive Sprite Pushing
It’s Christmas Day! So naturally the best thing to do is to settle in for a deep dive on programming sprites on an Amiga (20 minutes), from the guy who recently ported Outrun to the Amiga, reassembler.
The Amiga has hardware sprites, but they’re fairly limited. Most programmers prefer to use its powerful blitter hardware to simulate sprites, drawing them to screen memory much more rapidly than non-blitter hardware can. For more information, I refer you to the video.
That’s it for today, but there be something more substantial tomorrow….