Gamebits: Recent Episodes
Ken Gagne of Gamebits
PAX East 2026 presented an unparalleled and long-awaited opportunity: my participation in the Omegathon.
After submitting my interest this year, I was finally called to be an Omeganaut, competing in three games and a mystery fourth game. I answered the phone when it rang, said "YES!", signed the contract, and revealed that I had placed second in the region's Nintendo World Championships in 1990, and I was looking forward to reclaiming my glory.
"I did not know I was calling a ringer when I called you," replied Travis Eriksen, executive director of Child's Play and Omegathon coordinator. I had all the confidence in the world.
… Then I was informed the first game would be Rocket League.
I hate Rocket League. Cars are the absolute worst way to play soccer, and I failed to see any of the appeal. I knew I'd be knocked out in the first round, failing to progress to Codenames, Jumping Jazz Cats, and whatever the final round would be.
(Fun fact: Travis hates Rocket League, too, and had railed for years against it being a part of the Omegathon. My luck that this was the year he lost that battle.)
Nonetheless, I redownloaded the game and practiced, both the week before and the day of on my Switch. The 32 Omeganauts were being paired into 16 teams, and I didn't want to let my teammate down.
When game time came, I successfully scored a goal! But I also permitted more goals than I made, and my team failed to progress to the second round.
I'm slightly heartened that the team that beat me ultimately won the final round, which was Super Battle Golf. Clearly we lost to the superior opponent!
I competed in many other fun tournaments this year: Fire Tower, Azul, and Codenames (twice! Got knocked out in a first round, then made it to the final round), in the tabletop area; and TowerFall, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, F-Zero 99, Balatro, and Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition in the console and handheld areas. I did as poorly as I expected in most of them — and as awesome as expected in the Nintendo World Championships, placing first.
Seems my promise to Travis came true, after all!
That small win, losing at the Omegathon, and meeting Cissy Jones (Firewatch's Delilah), were the highlights of this year. Enjoy those moments and others in the below photos!
Waiting for our Omegathon orientation.PAX East 2026 Omegathon: Rocket LeagueI made it to the first round of the Omegathon!… and no further. ?“You think I need an AI summary of the things i do for fun with the people I love? What the fuck?" —TaylorAnjali: “My career is ‘SQUIRREL’!”“I really like dopamine.” —Cissy JonesCissy Jones, the voice actor who plays Delilah in Firewatch!This captivating, rotating statue greeted all entrants in the main lobby.“It’s a legitimate choice to be less good at games.” -Dr. Elizabeth KilmerA very strange poster for this vendor to sport.Matthew Kroll & Jenna StoeberDeath Stranding 2, Persona 5, Celeste, Control, Until Dawn, GTA V https://east.paxsite.com/en-us/schedule/schedule-item.html?gtID=927251&panel-name=But-is-it-Ethical-Therapy-in-Games-13-and-Hylians know how to accessorize!Worcester vs. Syracuse minor league baseball at Pink TacoScreenshotI came in first place in the Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition tournament for Switch!Geekgirlstrong.comWell, this isn't terrifying. ?Leila, a three-month-old blue heeler/Jack Russell mix we met at Pressed Cafe.Leila, a three-month-old blue heeler/Jack Russell mix we met at Pressed Cafe.Leila, a three-month-old blue heeler/Jack Russell mix we met at Pressed Cafe.PAX East 2026The post PAX East 2026 photos first appeared on Gamebits.
Nintendo has again given us an annual reflection on our gaming habits through their year in review — except this time, they waited until January, so that December could be properly accounted for.
Ironically, my summary still had only eleven months, as apparently all of September came and went without me turning on my Switch 2 once. (September was also my slowest month in 2024, when I used my Switch for only one hour.)
The result: I played 39 games for 146 hours total — which is remarkably consistent with last year, when I played 40 games and 142 hours.
And to capture some of that data in a more readable format, here's a table charting my gameplay habits over the year:
| Month | Total Hours | Top Game | Hours | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Jan | 7 | It Takes Two | 2 | | Feb | 33 | Chained Echoes | 17 | | Mar | 12 | Ori and the Will of the Wisps | 5 | | Apr | 15 | Ori and the Will of the Wisps | 11 | | May | 13 | Child of Light Ultimate Edition | 4 | | June | 42 | Metroid Prime Remastered | 22 | | July | 1 | Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition | 1 | | Aug | 15 | Thimbleweed Park | 12 | | Sep | n/a | n/a | n/a | | Oct | 2 | Tetris Effect: Connected | 3 | | Nov | 4 | Mario Kart World | 2 | | Dec | 4 | I Am Dead | 1 |
For even more detail, here is full list of every game I bought or played in 2025.
The post My Nintendo Switch stats for 2025 first appeared on Gamebits.
After six years of nomadic travel, I've noticed a pattern: most of my gaming occurs when I'm overseas. In those environments, I'm isolated by the language, the absence of a social network, and the lack of mobility (since I left my car and bicycle behind to fly somewhere). Without those pursuits, I turn to gaming.
That's why the majority of my gaming in 2025 occurred in June and August, when I was in Prague and Anchorage, respectively. And as always, most of the games I played those months were older titles from my backlog, not the latest releases.
That didn't stop me from going on my usual buying spree: in 2025, I purchased 39 games (down two from last year) and spent $722.63 (up $197.96), at an average per-game cost of $18.53 (up $5.73). Twenty percent of that total expense was just two first-party Nintendo Switch 2 games in physical format: Mario Kart World and Metroid Prime 4. Those and Dragon Quest I+II are the only Switch 2 games I bought, and the only games I bought for more than $50, greatly skewing my totals. (The console didn't influence my playtime or gaming habits — just my expenses!)
Excluded from these totals are 16 NES, Famicom, and Super Famicom games that I picked up at events like RetroGameCon in Syracuse; eight Playdate games; one macOS game (Firewatch); one AppleTV game (Chrono Trigger); and nine Switch games downloaded for free as part of No Gravity's annual holiday giveaway. Any hardware purchases, such as Anthe Switch 2 itself and a Classiq II HD console, are also not included.
As always, all these games are tracked on my Trello board, and every game is for the Nintendo Switch family unless otherwise noted. Games listed in past years are not repeated unless they've changed categories. A change in a category's total from last year is represented parenthetically in the section header.
Finished (11 / -2)The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between WorldsI'd never played, let alone finished, a 3DS game before — but A Link to the Past is one of my all-time favorite games, and a friend lent me his handheld so I could finally play the sequel. It was great fun, but it reminded me how challenging playing on a small screen can be.LakeA cozy game about delivering mail in a sleepy lakeside town, Lake was ported very poorly to the Switch, with multiple bugs causing crashes, animation glitches, inexplicable traffic jams, and more.BlancI started this two-player monochromatic co-op game years ago, in which a deer and fox help each other rejoin their clans. My friend and I stopped playing when we were no longer on the same couch, but we picked it back up via online play to finish the last few levels. It was a delightful, sweet game that I recommend.Double Dragon NeonA modern beat-em-up with some interesting power-ups and leveling-up capabilities. As a one-player game, it grew monotonous, and I was glad when it was over.Ori and the Will of the WispsA sequel to a wonderful Metroidvania. The first game focused more on exploration, whereas this one was more action-oriented. I preferred the first.Pine: A Story of LossA bittersweet tale with minimal interactive elements. I backed this game on Kickstarter, and I recommend the final product, though it's not the sort of experience one revisits.Open RoadsI'd been waiting for this game ever since Keri Russell joined the cast and a former podcast guest joined the development team. Similar to Gone Home, it's a walking simulator that involves a lot of looking at environmental objects. I enjoyed the story, which went in unexpected directions.Child of LightHaving previously bought Child of Light for Wii U without playing it, I decided to second attempt was warranted on the Switch. Although this game is often billed as a light RPG, I found the battles sufficiently challenging (I was playing on Normal mode, not Easy). The watercolor art and the rhyming dialogue were lovely, artistic choices to complement a colorful cast of characters.Metroid Prime RemasteredWith Metroid Prime 4 finally releasing this year, I felt it was a good time to take this game out of my backlog. Having originally played Metroid Prime on GameCube, I don't remember the level design being so tedious. But any opportunity to play as Samus Aran is a good one.The Gardens BetweenI'd indefinitely paused this puzzle game years ago due to what felt like inscrutable game logic. But when I revisited it in 2025, everything suddenly made sense. Maybe I had a new perspective, but I was able to finish the last few levels with little difficulty.1979 Revolution: Black FridayA brief narrative game about the Iranian Revolution, the factors that led to it, and the difficult decisions that were made by everyday citizens. It was an insightful historical lesson, though I felt it ended somewhat abruptly.
Unfinished (3 / +1)Thimbleweed ParkI backed Ron Gilbert's Kickstarter for this point-and-click adventure game, which I proceeded to then purchase both digitally and from Limited Run Games. Unfortunately, despite the inclusion of an in-game hint system, the game's puzzles are still as enigmatic as LucasArts games of yore. Having to use the trampoline to get a joke book so the clown can win a joke contest and win a record that he then breaks into the radio station to play so the homeless man can fix a watch that opens a door? It's just too much.Moon HuntersA multiplayer, Gauntlet-like action-adventure game that I started playing with someone I'm no longer in touch with. I may finish it as a single player, or restart it with a new companion.I Am DeadA game I dusted off the backlog in the last days of 2025, it was unlikely I'd finish it by year's end. Players assume the role of a ghost who psychically relive people's memories of the recently deceased. It's very much a narrative game with some light, but optional, puzzle elements. I may skip the latter in order to focus on the story, which is more layered and nuanced than I expected.
Evergreen (1 / -1)Mario Kart WorldI didn't buy the Switch 2 bundle that came with a digital edition of game, as I preferred a physical copy — but as I'm a life-long Mario Kart fan, it was inevitable that it would eventually be my first Switch 2 game. But to date, I've played Mario Kart World only in occasional online multiplayer matches with friends, not by myself, which means I've not fully explored it. Given that lack of exposure, I find the free roam mechanic rather pointless, and I've yet to fully understand how the courses tie together.
Abandoned (6 / +2)Rising HellA vertical-scrolling 2D roguelite platformer (whew), this game has such small graphics that I could rarely tell what I was doing. It was a cheap purchase that I bounced off in mere minutes.Yars RechargedYars is one of the best Atari 2600 games of all time, but the sequel is essentially a bullet hell shooter that doesn't come close to capturing that magic.Chained EchoesKnowing that I grew up on 16-bit turn-based RPGs, many friends recommended Chained Echoes to me. It started off promising, and I expected some additional complexity in the opening few hours… but the game never stopped layering new mechanics, until it became overwhelming. I wrote a reddit post about the challenges I faced, but any reassurances I received were not enough to get me back into a game that had become more tedious than enjoyable.Backpack HeroThe new Virtual Game Cards feature allowed a friend to lend me this inventory management game, which I quickly learned is a genre I find to be more of a chore than anything.Dave the DiverSimilar to Moonlighter, Dave the Diver alternates action sequences with retail management. And similar to Moonlighter, I find the latter to be tiresome.Stray Gods: The Roleplaying MusicalThe titular word "roleplaying" led me to believe this was an RPG, when it is in fact a visual novel. I might've enjoyed it more had I gone in with the correct expectations, but instead, I got bored.
Unplayed (34 / +4)Finding ParadiseI enjoyed To The Moon, and I conducted a developer interview for its sequel, A Bird Story. I'm eager to play this cozy narrative game from the same studio.A Good Snowman is Hard to BuildI first played this game when it came out for the Mac over a decade ago; I figured I'd revisit it on Switch.Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot CampI couldn't get into the Game Boy Advance original, though I blame that on the GBA's small screen, as I loved Desert Commander on NES, which is practically the same thing. I picked up a new copy for cheap at a game con in Fort Collins, Colorado.Life Is Strange: Double ExposureI loved the first Life Is Strange game, and I followed all its comic books — yet I've played few of the sequels. This is now the third game in the series in my backlog.DownwellGiven that I abandoned Rising Hell, I don't know that I'll enjoy this vertical shooter more. But it comes highly reviewed!LunarkA Flashback-style game from WayForward? Yes, please.Castlevania Dominus CollectionI never had a DS, so this collection of three new-to-me Castlevania games was a no-brainer.Star Trek Prodigy: SupernovaI'm a big fan of this TV series, especially the second season. While the game has only average reviews and looks intended for co-op play, I couldn't say no when it was on sale for 96% off.Long Gone DaysI backed this military game on Indiegogo in 2016, but not at a level that got me a copy of the final product. Now I get to see what I helped fund!Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver 1&2 RemasteredI have fond memories of playing the first Soul Reaver on Dreamcast when I was in college. I hear the gameplay hasn't aged well, but nostalgia required I give it a shot.Monster Boy and the Cursed KingdomThis game is loosely related to Adventure Island, a classic NES game I still play every time I see it in an arcade. I'm curious to see how the series has evolved.A Boy and His Blob Retro CollectionThis is one of the few games that's easily identifiable as being from David Crane, the creator of Pitfall! I'm more likely to play the Wii remake that's also available for Switch, but it was cheap enough to ensure I had the entire series.Dragon Quest III HD-2DI already have the original game on NES and Game Boy, but when the remake of this classic role-playing game went on sale, I figured I'd buy it yet again.Read Only Memories: NEURODIVERI didn't finish the original ROM, but I heard that the studio, MidBoss, was disbanding, so I grabbed the sequel while I could. (Apparently I was misinformed, as MidBoss is still around.)Arcade SpiritsI finished this delightful visual novel on the Mac, but it was written for an older version of the OS; I bought the Switch version to ensure I'd continue to have access to it.Arcade Spirits: The New ChallengersSee above. Also, I interviewed this game's narrative designer!John Wick HexI've seen only the first movie in this series starring Keanu Reeves, but I enjoyed it. When it was announced the dev studio had lost the rights to the franchise and would be discontinuing Hex, I grabbed it while I could.THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD: RemakeLight-gun games are great fun, though they rarely translate well from the arcade to the home. Still, for $2, I figured it was worth a shot. (Get it?)Wilmot Works It OutI don't even know what this game is — but Wilmot's Warehouse was wonderful, so I bought this game based on the name alone.Nine SolsA "taopunk" Metroidvania with excellent Metacritic scores? Sign me up.NINJA GAIDEN: RageboundI never played the modern reboots of this classic series, but the latest version looks more like the NES originals from Tecmo that I grew up with.World of Goo 2The original game came out the same time that the Wii introduced innovative pointer controls. It took look for the sequel to come out, but I understand the Switch version has a similar control scheme to the original; could that magic be recaptured?Flashback 25th AnniversaryI briefly played this game back in the day on the Super Nintendo, the same platform where I played Out Of This World, its spiritual predecessor. It's the same kind of puzzle-action-platformer as Prince of Persia or Planet of Lana, other games I gravitate toward.Mega Man 11I borrowed this game from the library back in 2019, and I just couldn't grok the "Double Gear System"; the franchise is hard enough without me failing to understand the tools at my disposal! Nonetheless, I recently bought the Legacy compilations, and picking up Mega Man 11 completed my collection.Framed CollectionI interviewed the developers of Framed — sort of a puzzle version on the Sega Genesis classic Comix Zone. I no longer have the iPad mini I bought to play games like these, but the Switch is a reasonable alternative.SEGA AGES Out RunI used to boot Shenmue on the original Xbox just to walk to the town's virtual arcade and play Out Run. While playing it in an actual arcade is still best, I'll take a quick hit on Switch.Sword & Bones 2The first Sword & Bones game was a fun, though generic and barely memorable, action-platformer. The sequel might be good for a few hours of fun, too.Minit Fun RacerMinit was a fun, Zelda-like adventure, but this expansion of the franchise looks more like the old NES game T&C Surf Designs.Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration Expanded EditionI'm generally not a fan of emulation; I think the experience of the software is lost when it's translated to different hardware. But this collection is more than just the original Atari games, as Digital Eclipse Blasphemous 2The first game remains in my backlog; for the day I eventually play and finish it, I'll now be ready for the sequel.Bubble Bobble 4 FriendsBack when couch co-op was the standard, not the exception, Bubble Bobble was a reliable standby. I'm hoping the same will prove true for the Switch rendition.Tomb RaiderFor some reason, I never got to play this reboot of Lara Croft on Xbox 360. Although the Switch 2 version lacks the polish of the remastered versions on other consoles, it will still be the best version I'll have ever played.Suikoden I+IIThis is another RPG franchise I missed during the PSX days. The vast cast of playable characters reminds me of what I didn't like about Chrono Cross — but I'll give it a chance. (Unfortunately, there is no upgrade path from the Switch 1 version to the Switch 2, so I'll play the last-gen version, which was on sale.)Metroid Prime 4: BeyondAfter a decade of waiting, Samus finally returns! Since I'd just finished Metroid Prime Remastered, I'm waiting a bit before rolling back into her world.
Not bought yet (4 / +3)The Rogue Prince of PersiaI'm a fan of Jordan Mechner, creator of Prince of Persia — and this latest iteration of Prince of Persia was developed by some of the same talent behind Dead Cells, one of my favorite roguelikes. I would've already picked up, except Ubisoft games have a history of being deeply discounted very soon after release, which makes waiting to buy The Rogue Prince of Persia an appealing option.Terminator 2DAlthough this 2D action-platformer promises only about ninety minutes of gameplay, it'll be worth it to play a new incarnation of one of my favorite movies of all time.ViewfinderGorogoa was one of my favorite puzzle games of 2018, and Viewfinder looks very similar in concept.Hollow Knight: SilksongI didn't swoon over the original Hollow Knight — I thought it was a fun Metroidvania worth finishing, but many games, including Ori, fit that description. I may pick up the sequel someday.
Unreleased (7 / +7)The Gecko GodsSix One Indie showcased this platformer in September, and Game Informer gave it a good write-up.RecurThe same Game Informer coverage included Recur, a Braid-like time-bending puzzle game featuring a mailman protagonist.Fallen FatesYet another game featured by Game Informer. I decided not to back this top-down action-RPG on Kickstarter, since it won't be out until 2028 at the earliest.Rue ValleyDisco Elysium remains in my backlog, but if I like it, then Rue Valley seems a natural progression, per Game Informer.Indiana Jones and the Great CircleHere's a game I never thought would come to Switch! Might be fun to play after Tomb Raider.007 First LightThis is not the GoldenEye that I grew up with, but it does seem the kind of mainstream game that I often overlook in favor of indies. Maybe it's time to see what I've been missing.DispatchI like the Invincible animated series' art style, as well as the mix of action and humor — ways in which it appears to have influenced or inspired the visual novel Dispatch.The post My gaming memories of 2025 first appeared on Gamebits.
After I waited in line for two hours this April, my preordered Nintendo Switch 2 finally became available on June 5, 2025, at GameStop in Englewood, Colorado.
The only problem: on that date, I was in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic in Europe.
My life as a digital nomad means I'm rarely in one place long enough to collect a product reserved months earlier. So a friend in Colorado picked up my Switch 2 on launch day and shipped it to my next domestic destination in Massachusetts. I arrived there on June 26 — and a week of travel later, I finally had time to unbox the console on July 4 in Brooklyn, New York, followed by a local data transfer from my Switch 1.
For the first time in 19 years, I didn't get my unboxing video posted on the day of the console's release — though the impact was, I suspect, minimal. I launched my YouTube channel with the unboxing of the Wii U in 2012; by the time the Switch launched five years later in 2017, my channel had already peaked. Still, I enjoyed performing day-one unboxings of Nintendo's latest video game console. While I couldn't continue that tradition this year, it was still fun to perform a month-one unboxing of the Switch 2.
For better or worse, the Switch 2 is an upgrade that requires continuous investment: beyond the console seen in this video, I also want to get a Pro 2 controller, a microSD Express card, a screen protector, a handheld grip and carrying case, and dragon skins. Watch my channel for more of those peripherals!
The post Nintendo Switch 2 unboxing & system transfer first appeared on Gamebits.
When I emailed the subscribers of my quarterly print magazine, Juiced.GS, announcing that the March 2025 issue had been mailed, one of them wrote back with a non sequitur: would I want to be a guest on his gaming podcast?
Retro Game Club has been playing, reviewing, and discussing retro games since February 2019. Each episode looks at one game in-depth while also covering the latest news and updates from retrogaming. Previously co-hosted, the show is now the sole production of Rob Shelby.
The game that was picked for my episode was Shadow of the Colossus, which remains in my backlog; I didn't have much to contribute to that discussion. The episode instead became a mini-profile of my history in gaming, from competing in the Nintendo World Championships, to working at Blockbuster and GameStop, to launching the Gamebits newspaper column and then YouTube channel.
It turned out this wasn't my first "appearance" on Retro Game Club — last year in episode 170, they cited my annual Computerworld feature when discussing the passing of Lode Runner creator Doug E. Smith.
The game I picked for the next episode's hosts to play was the Apple II CRPG The Magic Candle. That episode is now out, and I'm looking forward to hearing what they thought of it!
Thanks for having me on the show, Rob!
The post Retro Game Club podcast appearance first appeared on Gamebits.
For the second consecutive year, I was on stage at PAX East talking about retro games. This time, I was reprising my Portland Retro Gaming Expo panel "The Apple II Origins of Today's Games". The PAX East edition featured the talented Vince Weaver, a demake artist known as "deater". He'd been invited to join last year's panel, "Demakes Decoded", so it was great to finally collaborate with him!
The rest of PAX East was a whirlwind, as seen in these photos!
PAX East 2025I don't quite remember the gimmick of what I was looking at… but apparently, this was a really hard driving game?What wickedness is Dr. Robotnik up to now??Scooby-Doo door gags prohibitedCozy gaming roomLittle Neo*GeoMidna & Link explore the Twilight Kingdom.Aenne SchumannCampDune sandwormVince and I hosted a surprisingly popular panel about Apple II games!Talking into the mouse like Scotty didThere's a Pikachu in that Pikachu! ?“I’m forever blowing bubbles … “ ?BioShop Infinite — a barbershop quartet that sings video game music?! I'm in heaven.Just Pyramid Head out for his daily stroll.Benny the four-month-oldThe video of this moment made my annual 1SE compilation. It was quite dramatic.Watching people navigate Adventure at the Atari booth was not what I ever expected to see at a modern video game convention in 2025.Orphan dice need a home!The post PAX East 2025 photos first appeared on Gamebits.
This week at PAX East 2025, I'll be hosting my 13th panel this Friday — and it's by far the most niche of the talks I've given at PAX:
The Apple II Origins of Today's Games
The Apple II is known for its impact on the workplace (VisiCalc) and education (Oregon Trail) — but it was also an iconic games machine that launched and inspired franchises that continue to these days. From the early stealth action of Castle Wolfenstein to the strategic depth of Ultima and the revolutionary platforming of Prince of Persia, our panel will delve into how these classic titles laid the groundwork for today's blockbuster games.
Featuring:
- Ken Gagne (he/him/his) [Editor, Juiced.GS]
- Vince Weaver (he/him/his) (Demaker, deater.net]
This panel is an updated version of my panel from Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2024. If you can't make it to PAX this week, you can catch the audio and video of the panel's PRGE edition — or stay tuned for recordings from PAX!
The post Apple II games at PAX East 2025 first appeared on Gamebits.
Ever since I was old enough to drive and earn my own money, I've been preordering Nintendo's latest game consoles. The Nintendo 64, GameCube, Wii, Wii U, and Switch all wasted no time between their commercial launch and their delivery into my hands, thanks to retail stores like GameStop, Toys R Us, and even KB Toy Works. I intended the Switch 2 to be no exception.
But now I'm a digital nomad, which makes local retailers less reliable. When Switch 2 preorders opened last Thursday, April 24, I was in Denver, Colorado. When the console releases on Thursday, June 5, I'll be in Prague, Czech Republic. There'd be no way for me to collect it and shoot an unboxing video on release day.
But preordering In Prague wasn't a viable option, either: with current exchange rates, the console without Mario Kart World Tour is US$570. And I'd still need to check luggage (yet another fee) to get the console and its original packaging back to the States.
Seemingly, the only option remaining was to order it online and have it shipped to Massachusetts, where I'd collect it upon my return from Prague on June 26. That was my first option — but it proved to not be the best one.
Website woesI'd already decided not to patronize Amazon, Target, or Walmart. After checking the Goods Unite Us app for GameStop and Best Buy, I decided my preference was for the former.
But out of curiosity, I stayed up until 10 PM MDT last Wednesday, when Best Buy was supposed to begin accepting preorders, just to see if I'd have any luck. Online orders didn't actually open until 10:30 PM, at which point I was placed into a virtual queue. A half-hour later, I hadn't made any apparent progress through the line, so I gave up and went to bed.
At 9 AM the next morning, I started refreshing GameStop's site, hoping to place a preorder. But the site continuously crashed with a variety of HTTP errors: 502, 503, and 521. On the rare occasions the page did load, the Switch 2 was displayed alongside a gray "CURRENTLY AVAILABLE" button.
But on one load, that button was red! I clicked it — and it faded. Clicked it again, and it faded some more. Clicked it a third time — and I was redirected to my cart, complete with a Switch 2 in it!
But when I tried to check out, the site crashed again. When my cart finally came back up, it still showed the Switch 2 — but now listed as "Out of Stock". And the Apple Pay button, though active, would not successfully accept my payment.
After nearly an hour of futile efforts, and with all domestic online stores now sold out, I closed my laptop.
It was time to revert to a time-honored tradition.
GameStopI drove 12 minutes south to my nearest GameStop, arriving there at 11 AM, an hour before they opened. I was dismayed but unsurprised to see a lengthy line had already formed.
As I made my way to the back, two gregarious masked adults approached me, asking "Hi! Here for the Switch 2?" I confirmed I was and asked what my odds were. "Oh, they're great! Do you want the console with or without Mario Kart?" Just the console, please. "Awesome! This store will have 44 Kart bundles and 20 of just the console. You're 26th in line, but only the second person to want just the console!" They wrote my number and console preference on a sticky note before clarifying, "We don't work here — we just want to help!"
Assured of my place in line, I jogged back to my car to get my camping chair, laptop, and water bottle. Thank goodness for a day and age when we can wait in line and be at work.
At one point, the store manager came out and distributed barcode stickers to everyone in line. Wondering how long I'd be waiting in line, I asked him if both registers would be open. "Yeah, but I'm the only one here," he admitted.
I was shocked. How could GameStop plan so poorly as to have only one employee working today? I later learned they hadn't, and that his co-worker had called in sick. I nonetheless volunteered: "I worked at a GameStop 24 years ago. Want me to sub in?" I knew accepting the offer would get him fired, but I empathized with the plight of the overworked retail employee.
Once the doors opened at noon, the line progressed slowly, at about 3–5 minutes per customer, with only three customers let into the store at a time. There wasn't too much camaraderie while we waited: although everyone was there for the same reason, we mostly kept to ourselves.
I finally got inside at 1:15 PM, the second person in a group of three. I watched the person ahead of me to know what questions the manager would ask. When it was my turn, I preempted the spiels: "Just the console, no warranty, $50 minimum deposit, and I have GameStop Pro and Apple Pay." (Though I was tempted to instead say, "Just this Funko Pop figure, please.")
After everyone else got their Switches preordered, they quietly left the store without a look back at the line they'd spent hours in. Not me: I stood outside, pumped my fists into the air, and cheered, expressing the enthusiasm we all must've been feeling about the first new Nintendo console in eight years.
And now, we waitAs for the geography of my preorder, a friend in Denver has offered to collect and ship the Switch to me — or to keep it, if I ended up getting one directly from the manufacturer.
In either case, I'll still need to wait until June 26 to actually get my hands on the Switch 2, which means no day one unboxing, like I did for the original Switch. In the end, it doesn't matter: one way or the other, I'm guaranteed a Switch 2 this summer.
GameStop wasn't the only line I stood in this week: just a few days earlier, I earned a $100 gift card for waiting at Cracker Barrel. While that was a unique, one-off event, waiting for a new Nintendo is something I've done before and hope to continue doing for generations to come.
The post Preordering the Switch 2 first appeared on Gamebits.
As a child of the 80s, I amassed a decent collection of video game cartridges, including 155 NES games and 69 SNES games. But as a digital nomad, I don't have an easy means to access this library: they games are all sitting in the basement where I grew up with them, waiting to be played on an ancient CRT — not the most mobile setup for someone who practically lives out of their Prius.
When I visited Stone Age Gamer last year, I bought an EverDrive X6, a Super Nintendo cartridge that accepts microSD cards with SNES ROMs. My primary motivation was to play the English fan translation of the Super Famicom version of Dragon Quest II, the only NES game in the Dragon Quest series I'd never finished. (This was before Square Enix announced a 2D-HD remake.) It was important to me that I be able to play the game on original hardware, not in an emulator for macOS or on a tiny handheld like an Arcos or RetroPie; while those options were certainly more convenient for my lifestyle, they were too divorced from the experience the original developers intended.
As a secondary goal, I intended to copy all my existing NES and SNES games onto an SD card so I could play them on the EverDrive, enabling me to access the games I already own on actual hardware, but in a more portable format.
The EverDrive was a sufficiently hefty investment for one day, so I left Stone Age Gamer lacking a critical piece of hardware: a console to play it on. The store stocked used Super Nintendos and replicas aplenty, but I figured that was a problem for another day.
Six months later, an email from Stone Age Gamer informed me I'd won their monthly drawing. My prize was an EverDrive for the Game Boy Advance — or a $70 store credit. I opted for the latter, and after poring over their sizable inventory, I selected the missing piece to my EverDrive puzzle: Old Skool's Classiq II HD, a console that plays NES and SNES games and which supports HDMI output in either 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios.
UnboxingThe Classiq II comes with a USB power adapter, composite and HDMI cables, and both NES- and SNES-style controllers — all the hardware you need to start playing immediately, be it on a CRT or an HDTV. It's compatible with original Nintendo accessories, too, which means I can use my old controllers for an even more authentic experiences. And although the console has four controller ports (two each for NES and SNES), all games can be played using the SNES controllers.
Since I don't travel with Nintendo cartridges, I had to acquire some to test on the Classiq II. I bought some Super Famicom games at Vincon and borrowed some NES games from my friend Alon and some SNES games from my friend T.J. All of them worked great. The litmus tests were with Star Fox, which relies on the FX chip for additional graphics processing; and the EverDrive, which I used to play the homebrew game New Super Mario Land. Both worked great!
Although the Classiq II HD's SNES slot accepts Super Famicom games, Famicom games require an adapter — and the adapter I bought would not fit into the console's NES slot, unfortunately. I did have some American NES games, but I found if I inserted them too tightly, they wouldn't load; a gentle touch was called for.
You can see the unboxing as well as the software tests in my unboxing video:
I read on Tumblr that the Classiq II will play SNES games more accurately than NES games; and that the NES EverDrive won't work at all. I didn't have the opportunity to reach the same conclusions, but I'm confident the Classiq II will suit my needs.
TrifectaTo complete this suite of functionality, I need to buy one more thing — something that Stone Age Gamer doesn't sell: an Open Source Cartridge Reader. This ROM dumper will let me copy cartridge games to my Mac and then to the EverDrive for play on the Classiq II. Other gamers have suggested it'd be cheaper and easier for me to download the equivalent ROMs from the Internet. But I trust and prefer the provenance of my own games, knowing I'm playing legal backups of those exact cartridges and not a variant or hack.
Thank you to Stone Age Gamer for the Classiq II HD! It was just what I wanted and needed.
The post Unboxing the Classiq II HD first appeared on Gamebits.
My experience with video game retail is largely limited to cookie-cutter chains, whether it's a specialty store like GameStop or a big-box store like Best Buy, where purchases are entirely transactional and no relationship is established. It's all about getting the game out of the store and into the home as quickly as possible.
But indie stores aren't like that. And my travels recently brought me to the best of them all.
A few years ago, my news feed alerted me to a novelty Switch game case modeled after a Blockbuster VHS case. As a former Blockbuster employee who's still friends with many of my co-workers, I was quick to buy a few to hand out as gifts.
I'd never purchased from this particular online retailer before, but what distinguished them from any other digital storefronts was that they also had a physical location. Since I'm constantly traversing the country, I made a mental note to visit Salem, Ohio, the next time I was passing by.
That's how I came to find myself at Stone Age Gamer one day last June.
Stone Age GamerWalking up the sidewalk of this small town of less than 12,000 people, I knew when I'd found my destination.
Embrace all hope, ye who enter hereOne of the first things I noticed was a working arcade of pinball machines, console demo kiosks, and more. I quickly turned around and went back to my car to get the coin tube of quarters I keep there for just such an emergency.
After getting my coin-op fix, I perused the store's merchandise. This wasn't the endless Funko merch I see at every GameStop; it was more offbeat, more expensive, more artistic, and more beautiful — items I could see myself actually adorning a game room with, if I had such a space.
But since I'm a nomad and don't have a permanent home, I wasn't there for swag. I was there for functional hardware and software I couldn't find anywhere else.
Video game consoles & cartridgesStone Age Gamer had tons of used consoles — but in shapes and sizes I'd never seen. They had Nintendo 64 consoles in a variety of colors and shells. They had a Nintendo GameCube keyboard that I never knew existed. And tons of reproduction consoles, offering modern alternatives for playing classic cartridges. It was like walking through a living museum, where every artifact is meant to be touched and enjoyed.
Nintendo consoles abounded in all shapes and sizes.I didn't know this peripheral existed. For Phantasy Star Online, I presume?And, unlike their online store's inventory, they stocked tons of used games. Many of them were loose (i.e. not complete in box) — but for a small markup, some of those games were presented and protected in fancy clamshells. Not realizing I already had StarTropics II: Zoda's Revenge for NES, I picked up another copy, this one in deluxe packaging.
But what I really loved was chatting with the staff, who seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of their entire inventory. When I mentioned that I'd long ago misplaced my NEO-GEO memory card that allowed me to record high scores on arcade games, they tempted me with a replacement. Or when I lamented that my Virtual Boy was on the fritz, they recognized the problem and offered the appropriate replacement parts as well as installation and repair service.
And when I got to the real reason I was there — to buy an EverDrive flash cart for my Super Nintendo — they knowledgeably explained the pros and cons of each of the three models. Once I selected one to purchase, The manager said he had to step into the back to "make one". While I don't know what that entails, it implied that he knew exactly how this product works, and it wasn't just something he'd ordered or imported to flip.
Everything I bought that day were extremely niche items that one might reasonably procure from eBay. But to find them in a retail store staffed by friendly and insightful employees who genuinely know and care about their products and their customers — that's not something that scales to a chain. I've worked at GameStop, and I liked what I did, what I sold, and who I worked with — but it was no Stone Age Gamer.
Altogether, I spent nearly two hours at the store, poring (and perhaps drooling) over Stone Age Gamer's unique wares. Given their limited store hours (the retail location is open only three days a week, and other days by appointment only), I suspect most of their sales stem from their online business; with a blog, podcast, and extensive social media presence, they invest a lot of time and energy into building their community. But if my experience is any indication, that community and experience extends offline as well.
Worth every pennyStone Age Gamer isn't the only game in town — or at least in the country: a few weeks later, I stopped by Media Exchange of Elkhart, Indiana, and picked up some additional rare items. That store even has a "wish list" where you can note which games you're looking for, and they'll notify you if and when they become available — a dangerous proposition for one's wallet!
But I've yet to find a retail outlet as comprehensive as Stone Age Gamer: an exhaustive and unique inventory, online and offline sales, an informed and enthusiastic staff, and a reasonable trip from a major city. The worst (and most expensive) part of the day was the flat tire I got on the drive back to Pittsburgh. But I'd left Salem on such a high note, nothing could diminish the positive experience of a visit to Stone Age Gamer and the rarities I'd left with.
The post A visit to Stone Age Gamer first appeared on Gamebits.
Over the last few decades, games have become living products, with frequent patches and DLC. If the online services that make these updates available ever go offline, games will become locked in whatever state they exist on your device — if they exist at all. This inevitable fate is nothing new; reporter Kyle Orland detailed it at length for Ars Technica almost a decade ago.
As a Switch gamer, there's not much I can do to help preserve the games I play. So I instead ensure what I have on my system is always at the latest version, precluding a future where a patch was released but never downloaded before it was taken offline.
There's just one problem: the Switch's "Auto-Update Software" setting doesn't work the way Nintendo says it does.
Navigate to the System section, then set the Auto-Update Software option to On. Updates to installed software will be downloaded automatically while the Nintendo Switch system is connected to the Internet.
"How to Update Software on Nintendo Switch"
Even with this setting enabled, there are only two circumstances under which software will be automatically updated:
- When you launch a game and an update is available; or
- The game is one of the last twelve you've played, earning it a place on your home screen. (Thanks for this tip, reddit!)
But there are far more than twelve games in my backlog. What happens if I want to play something I bought five years ago? Not only do I want it to boot right away without waiting for patches, but I want those patches to still be available, whether I'm offline or Nintendo is.
I thought the only alternative was to periodically request a manual update for each game in my library.
Fortunately, the good folks at Perfectly Nintendo have a far more elegant solution. Their website has an entire category dedicated to daily software updates and changelogs. Better yet, the category has an RSS feed: without even giving Perfectly Nintendo your email address, you can subscribe to receive that category's headlines, scanning them for the games you own. Once you spot a match, just boot up your Switch and update that game.
Subscribing to the RSS feed requires an RSS reader. I recommend Feedly, whose free plan supports up to 100 feeds sorted into three folders, which has always suited my needs. (There are plenty of other RSS readers out there, too; WIRED has some solid recommendations.)
Now you'll always have your games primed and ready to play, no matter where you are or what the future may hold!
The post Keeping Switch games updated first appeared on Gamebits.
The Nintendo Joy Con includes a button for taking screenshots or videos of gameplay — perfect for capturing unforgettable moments, hilarious antics, and epic wins. These files are then stored on the console's internal memory or on an optional microSD card in JPEG or MP4 format.
I use the SD card option, and every few months, when the card gets full, I pop it out of the Switch and dump the files onto my Mac. From there, I can create website galleries, social media thumbnails, or YouTube and TikTok clips.
The only downside: Nintendo sorts the files into folders by year/month/day, and the filenames are inscrutable, such as 2017122820483800-F1C11A22FAEE3B82F21B330E1B786A39.jpg. All this tells me is when I took the screenshot, which is not as useful to me as knowing what games they're from. At best, this default organizational structure mean I have to open each file to identify, move, or rename it; at worst, if it's a screenshot from something I downloaded and then quickly deleted, I may have no memory of what the game was!
Nonetheless, there is some logic to those filenames. The first half (everything before the hyphen) is a timestamp; and the second half (everything between the hyphen and the period) is an identifier unique to the game. In the above example, F1C11A22FAEE3B82F21B330E1B786A39 means it's from Breath of the Wild!
Renan Greca, co-edtor of the Brazilian gaming website Neo Fusion, has developed a handy utility that relies on these identifiers for automatically sorting all the files by game title. His "Nintendo Switch Screenshot Organizer" doesn't change their filenames, but it does copy them into folders with more intuitive names, like "Super Mario Odyssey" or "Life Is Strange".
BeforeAfterThe program runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux (instructions for each are different), but there is a caveat: it has to be updated for each new game. At the time of this writing, the utility recognizes 551 different Switch games! If it encounters a game not on that list, it will sort what files it can and produce a report for the rest, like this:
Names not found for the following game IDs:38236DD6F3CF1F60A8998C836EE22216Found in: ./Album/2024/06/06/2024060622180800-38236DD6F3CF1F60A8998C836EE22216.jpg
If that happens to you and you're not tech-savvy, just copy and paste that report into this GitHub repository (free registration required). Include the name of the game, if possible; if not, attach the screenshot in question. Renan has given me access to update the official game list, and I'll make sure the next version includes your games!
The post Organize your Switch screenshots by game first appeared on Gamebits.
Even though I have a few thousand comics in long boxes in my basement — an artifact of a particularly voracious period from 1996 to 2001 — I've never attended a convention that was primarily about comic books.
But while looking for local activities during a one-month layover in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I saw a poster for 3 Rivers Comicon. It was a one-day event with tickets under $20, which seemed like a good way to spend a Saturday.
I was right! Although comics were the focus, with many wheelers and dealers both buying and selling rare books, there were also plenty of local purveyors of illustrations, crafts, and accessories — and, of course, cosplay. It was fun to see so many creative artists rendering their art across such diverse media.
Video games were also in full force. From one game retail booth, I went home with a cartridge of Little Nemo the Dream Master for NES, which I rented as a kid and was surprised to realize was not already in my collection. The addition was $15 well spent.
More memorably, the co-host of the Arcade Bookshop podcast was staffing a booth. Though I hadn't heard of this show, I'm a big fan of story-driven games, from Gone Home to Life Is Strange, and I'm on the cusp of attending next week's NarraScope, a convention dedicated to narrative in gaming — so Bryce's pitch for his show was right up my alley:
In Arcade Bookshop, listen to Bryce Johle and Caleb James blab about the stories in video games and books. As writers and gamers, the co-hosts want to emphasize the importance of stories told in all forms, as well as the artists behind them. Play and read along every other Monday!
Bryce was at 3 Rivers Comic Con interviewing con-goers about their favorite games and books. I was the first person who volunteered to be recorded; my response to his question, in which I opine about Firewatch and the value of stories, can be found at 12:09 into episode Arcade Cafe #15, seen in the video embedded above and heard on Podbean or Pocket Casts.
Although the show's hosts had not played Firewatch before, they compared it to Oxenfree, a 2D supernatural thriller that's very different in tone, art style, and interface from Firewatch. But they're not wrong when they say the gameplay in both essentially boils down to dialogue choices, which perhaps is why I've recorded Let's Plays of both Firewatch and Oxenfree. (Oxenfree's sequel, released 11 months ago today, remains in my Switch backlog.)
If you like podcasts about stories, I also recommend The Moth. Ten years ago this year, I appeared on The Moth stage, telling the story of how I accidentally launched a YouTube channel that now has 82,000 subscribers and 17 million views.
My thanks to Bryce and Arcade Bookshop for giving me something fun to remember 3 Rivers Comic Con by!
The post Arcade Bookshop at 3 Rivers Comic Con first appeared on Gamebits.
I love gaming magazines. I grew up reading Nintendo Power and GamePro and occasionally picked up copies of EGM or Edge, poring over their pages to learn more about upcoming games, read interviews with developers, and feel a part of a community. As an adult, I became an editor at the same company that published GamePro; to this day, I apply those same editorial skills when publishing my own quarterly magazine, Juiced.GS.
With so much longform journalism having moved online, where it's inundated by ads and easy to overlook, I find myself still preferring print magazines. They're harder to come by these days, but one I've consistently been an ardent reader of for decades is Game Informer. Although owned by GameStop (another former employer of mine), I've never gotten the sense that the magazine serves to shill the failing retailer's products. I've enjoyed not only the reviews, but also the timeless in-depth features and retrospectives. So did plenty of other gamers: by 2013, Game Informer was the United States' most-circulated magazine behind only AARP, putting it well ahead of such familiar names as Reader's Digest, Good Housekeeping, and National Geographic.
Game Informer has made its share of mistakes over the years, including laying off many of its long-time staff. While this shift made room and opportunity for new voices to start their careers, I now sometimes find myself struggling with articles that can't find their thesis, or whose grasp of the comma is uncertain. However, even these foibles were outweighed by the delight of having gaming news delivered to my doorstep every month.
Game Informer's biggest mistake was made not by its editorial team, but by its publisher: a year or two ago, they eliminated the option to subscribe to the magazine by mail, which used to cost only $20/year. In an attempt to lure potential customers into GameStop, individual issues became available only in-store or online (where the cost of $7/issue was elevated by shipping and handling fees).
I ended up subscribing to GameStop Pro membership program for $25/year; it didn't include the magazine, but come with a $5 monthly coupon I could put toward buying each issue. But this minimal increase in cost also had a disproportionate increase in time and energy: finding a store that had the latest issue in stock and making the trek to pick one up was an exercise in frustration, especially when dealing with store managers who would cancel my orders before I could pick them up but then didn't know how to refund them. Nonetheless, I assumed I was alone in dealing with these travails, or that the change was an intentional step by GameStop toward the inevitable shuttering of the print edition.
So I was shocked and delighted last month when Game Informer posted one of the biggest mea culpas I've ever witnessed: a return to offering a print subscription.
I believe there's something special about a real physical magazine in your hands, filled with beautiful layouts arranged and planned each month to celebrate what we all love in the gaming hobby. We're betting big that many of you still feel that same way, even as you also enjoy all the other ways you connect to our content.
In recent months, it's sometimes been difficult to know how to get Game Informer in your mailbox, and for that, we apologize. Requests for an easy, no-frills way to get a print magazine subscription are (by far) the number one request we hear from you, and that's what we're delivering today.
Please consider supporting Game Informer with a subscription, and help us ensure there’s a place to discover this work for another 30 years into the future.
Matt Miller, "Announcing The New Game Informer Magazine Subscription"
The new price of $19.91/year for ten issues is an amazingly good price for the amount of content — about 84 pages per issue, or 840 pages per year. (That's only 2.3¢ per page!) Gaming journalism, like all journalism, is essential (yet also doesn't pay its staff much). Subscribing to Game Informer is an affordable and rewarding way to get your offline gaming fix while supporting an institution and its staff. I immediately signed up for a two-year subscription for $34.99 (a savings of 12%, or $4.83); whether you're a long-time reader or a curious newcomer to Game Informer, I encourage you to do the same.
After you're done reading each issue, what next? If you don't collect magazines, you may find it hard to keep your issues out of the recycling bin: most libraries don't accept donations of periodicals. Even the Video Game History Foundation won't take them — though they do have an alternative suggestion: "See if any of your local universities have a video game program and if they’d like to house them." (I have a prior arrangement to donate mine to The MADE, a non-profit video game museum in the San Francisco Bay Area.)
Of course, if there are other gamers in your life (perhaps the next generation?), a second-hand copy of a magazine can be worth its weight it gold, as it was for me when I was younger. It all starts with your subscription to receiving first-hand copies!
The post Game Informer magazine subscriptions available again first appeared on Gamebits.
Over holiday break 2021, I finally customized my Switch with skins I'd purchased months earlier.
I went with the Ruth Thompson Red Dragon from SkinIt, whose deluxe bundle encompassed my Switch, dock, Joy Cons, and Pro Controller. It took a bit of work to apply the decals without leaving any bubbles behind, but I was pleased with the end result.
FrontBackThe only cosmetic downside was that the design on the Joy Cons align only when they're in the plastic grip; when they're connected to the Switch itself, the images don't flow. But that's an issue only when I'm playing in handheld mode, which is rare, as I prefer to play docked with the Pro Controller.
Drift & repairAlmost everything in the above photos was purchased on March 3, 2017 — the day of the Nintendo Switch's release. And everything from that launch day continued to work flawlessly for seven years, until my left Joy Con's joystick started to drift.
Joy Con drift is a known issue — practically our generation's Red Ring of Death, except less fatal. Multiple lawsuits have been brought against Nintendo on the matter, and since 2019, Nintendo has offered free repairs, even for Joy Cons that are out of warranty.
By 2024, it was time for me to request my first Joy Con repair. The form Nintendo had me fill out was easy, producing a free UPS mailing label for me to print.
My only concern was in what cosmetic state the Joy Con would be returned. It still had the SkinIt decal on it; should I expect it back in the same shape? I was reminded of an Xbox 360 user who sent his console in for repair from the RROD. The case had autographs from dozens of video game industry luminaries; when it came back from Microsoft, it had been wiped clean. Would the same happen to my Joy Con?
Fortunately, even my worst-case scenario was not all that bad: unlike a custom Xbox 360 shell, I could replace a Joy Con decal for just $10. That left me less concerned and more intellectually curious of possible incomes, of which I ranked four in decreasing probability:
- 60%: The decal gets removed and the Joy Con repaired
- 20%: I receive a replacement Joy Con with no decal
- 15%: The Joy Con gets repaired and returned with the decal
- 05%: The Joy Con is returned unrepaired, the decal having voided the warranty
Here's the timeline through which I had to wait to see how the scenario played out:
- March 06: Submitted repair request
- March 11: Mailed Joy Con from Massachusetts to United Radio of Syracuse, New York
- March 13: Joy Con received in Syracuse
- March 18: Repair initiated
- March 20: Repaired Joy Con shipped back to Massachusetts
- March 22: Joy Con received
Upon receipt, I opened the box — and this is what I found:
It's true! Despite the house odds of only 15%, Nintendo repaired my Joy Con and returned it with the skin still fully intact — and drift no longer an issue.
Kudos to both SkinIt and Nintendo for excellent products and customer service. I'm a satisfied client!
The post Joy Con skins & drift repair first appeared on Gamebits.
This past Sunday, for the first time since before the pandemic, I had the opportunity to share a panel with attendees of PAX East!
Demakes Decoded: From HD to 8-Bit
In an age of HD remasters, demakes buck the trend by reimagining a modern game for a more primitive console. Ever wanted to play Silent Hill 2 on the NES, Disco Elysium on Game Boy, or Portal on N64? Now you can! But how much of a game's core gameplay is dependent on technology? What features are important to preserve, and how do you adapt the rest? Is it really the same game — and do the original copyright owners think so? We'll chat with four demake devs about their projects, inspirations, and challenges, exploring how they balance modern innovation, technical constraints, and retro nostalgia.
Featuring:
- Ken Gagne (he/him/his) [Editor, Juiced.GS]
- James Lambert (he/him/his) [Developer, Portal 64]
- Jasper Byrne (he/him/his) [Designer, Superflat Games]
- Colin Brannan (he/him/his) [Developer, Disco Elysium: Game Boy Edition]
- Animal Planet (they/them) [Developer, PicoWars]
The audio from this panel is presented as a bonus episode of the otherwise defunct IndieSider podcast. Stream it below or from Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pandora, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, or RadioPublic, and click past the jump for a written transcript.
TranscriptKen Gagne: Welcome to the last day of PAX East 2024. Thank you for waking up before the crack of noon to join us for Demakes Decoded: From HD to 8-Bit. My name is Ken Gagne, pronouns he/him. Very excited to be sharing with you a panel of amazing developers today. A little bit of introduction and information before we get started. First, I want to start with a blank slide, land acknowledgment saying that we are residing on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Massachusetts people whose name was appropriated by this Commonwealth. We pay respect to the Massachusetts elders post and present. We acknowledge the truth of violence perpetuated in the name of this country and make a commitment to uncovering the truth.
So this panel is about Demakes Decoded: From HD to 8-bit. And first, how many people here have no idea what a demake is? We got one person, two, three, four, five. Excellent. So for those five people, let's establish what a demake is. A demake is not Resident Evil 4. That would be a remake. We've had some amazing, wonderful, very enjoyable and highly received and acclaimed remakes in the last few years. Resident Evil 4, Super Mario RPG, that weird game by Square that nobody thought would ever come back. And of course, Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. So those are all remakes.
A remake is re-imagining an older game for a newer system. It's not just applying a new coat of graphics like The Last Of Us. It's such a technological leap that they are actually almost going back to the drawing board and making a new game inspired by the original game. A demake, what we're talking about today, is just the opposite. It's re-imagining a newer game for an older system going backwards in time. And we have four developers here today who I'm about to introduce.
So first, who remembers Portal? Yeah. Portal came out in 2007, 17 years ago, for Windows and Xbox 360. 11 years before that the Nintendo 64 came out, and James here has ported it, has ported Portal to the N64. And this is what it looks like.
James, say hello!
James Lambert: Hi, I'm James Lambert. Yeah, and I ported Portal to the N64. And I guess I just repeat what he said. It took me about two years to get to this point. And then the YouTube channel, if you want to check it out, you can see kind of the progress in the videos. And unfortunately you can't get the ROM for me right now because Valve told me to take it down. But I'm sure if you searched online, you would be able to find it somewhere, but not just from me.
Ken Gagne: Yeah, it's like the Streisand Effect. The more you remove it, the more visible it becomes.
James Lambert: Of course, yeah.
Ken Gagne: Where are you coming in from for the panel?
James Lambert: Yeah, I'm from Utah. That's it.
Ken Gagne: Well, thank you for coming all this way.
James Lambert: And nobody else is.
Ken Gagne: Another game that is actually going in both directions right now, a remake is coming for Silent Hill 2, which was originally released for the PlayStation 2 in September of 2001, where, speaking of James, James Sunderland is trying to find his dead wife, who he mysteriously received a letter from. And even more mysteriously, the game has been ported to the 8-bit Nintendo called Soundless Mountain 2. And the master of that thesaurus would be Jasper Byrne here. Hello, Jasper.
Jasper Byrne: Hi there. Yeah, I made this one in 2008, so it's quite a long time ago now. But it was originally for a competition for demakes run by The Independent Game Source, or TIGSource. It was a forum where a lot of indies used to post back in those days. And to my surprise, actually won the competition. And so that actually ended up getting it noticed a little bit by, I guess, journalists and stuff. And ended up leading onto me doing another game like Lone Survivor, which was sort of using what I'd learned from this if you like. So another 2D survival horror game basically. So yeah, it only goes up to the apartment section, but I did always want to finish it.
Ken Gagne: But all these demakes are fully playable. These aren't just tech demos, which is pretty awesome. You can actually just download them and play them. The next panelist we have is somebody who was inspired by Disco Elysium, which is a noir-style game that came out for Windows originally in October 15th 2019. And it just seems a natural candidate of course, to port to the original Game Boy. So we have Disco Elysium: The Game Boy Edition by Colin Brannan.
Colin Brannan: Hello everybody. Yeah, it was like a pandemic project for me four years ago really. I was just trying to figure out something to work on in my spare time. I hadn't done anything creative in a few months. And there's a really neat tool out there called GB Studio, which I totally recommend to anyone for making Game Boy games like this. And so this is actually completely without code. I'm an artist, not a programmer or an engineer. So yeah, there's some really cool stuff you can do with such a small tool and then they even let you export an actual ROM. So people have been playing it on actual Game Boy hardware as well, which is super cool to see for me.
Ken Gagne: Wow. Is this your first project like this?
Colin Brannan: I've done other small game stuff before, but this is the first thing that really got any traction or had anyone talking about it. Yeah, my first demake, yes.
Ken Gagne: Awesome. That's really cool.
And last but not least, another game that's also been remade, Advance Wars, originally came out for the Game Boy Advance on the same day as Silent Hill 2, September 10th, 2001, remade for the Switch in 2023, and re-remade, this is the original up there, or rather the Switch version. This is a tactical game of sorts. And it was remade by Animal Planet at the end there for the PICO-8, which is what exactly?
Animal Planet: So it's a fantasy console, as in it takes the idea of older consoles and makes it run on modern hardware. It's all fake. No, but it introduces fictional constraints. Is there anything else to that video or is it just the-
Ken Gagne: Sorry.
Animal Planet: There we go. There's the game. Yeah, so the PICO-8 takes ideas of making games for older consoles. You've got constraints, but all these constraints in this example are kind of artificial. It's got an artificial palette, token limit, things like that. It creates interesting constraints for making the game. And originally I've been kind of making this game for over a decade since I started programming because I was enamored with how artificial intelligence works for games like StarCraft and the old Advance Wars games. And I wanted to get into that and see how that really works. So it was an off-and-on project for very long, and I restarted it many times. And eventually I was like, "I'm making it so."
Ken Gagne: Awesome. Thank you.
And then that brings us back to me. I am not a developer or an artist. I am an editor of a magazine called Juiced.GS. It's currently in its 29th year of publication. It's print only, not a PDF. And it's a magazine all about the Apple II computer. Who remembers the Apple II? Yeah, you probably remember it because you grew up playing Oregon Trail in school, or maybe other games like Wizardry. Wizardry, the Apple II version of Wizardry is actually on the show floor at the Atari booth. It's amazing. I'm not kidding. You can go play it.
And the Apple II originally came out in 1977, and it has been the home to many amazing demakes in the last few years, like The Secret of Monkey Island, Out of This World, also known as Another World, Myst. And these are all playable by the way, Kerbal Space Program, and Portal. And those were all actually made by the same demake artist. And he recently submitted Portal to an online competition. And when you fill out the form, they asked, "What is the name of your game?" And so he said, "My game is called Don't Tell Valve."
And we did a cover story a few years ago all about demakes for the Apple II. I have some copies here I'll be giving out later if you want to read that. And so these are our panelists and we're here today to talk about the demakes that have been created, that we've outlined. And I want to start with an open question to any panelist who would like to answer, and that question is but why? Why demakes? Why? Anybody, why?
Colin Brannan: I think with, Animal Planet, you mentioned constraints earlier with your response, and I think that's what it was for me is that when you're working with a modern engine like a Unity or an Unreal, you can do anything really. When you're working with older hardware, you have those constraints and that makes your project scope much smaller and you have to really get more creative and make more interesting choices. And also, your project, you can't go forever on something. You're like, "Okay, I can only do so much." And it helps you keep your own … Your projects finish. There's only so much you can do with them, which was important for me at least.
James Lambert: And along with that, with working within the constraints, I agree with everything with there, but also it's kind of fun to try to push, at least in the N64 case, push the limits a little beyond what you think could have been done, see what those limits actually are. And that, I really enjoy working within those constraints and trying to push beyond what you thought was possible.
Jasper Byrne: Yeah, I guess I'd just add to that, they also … Because I think some of those things apply to just making a game for an older system, but maybe also that it is trying to figure out how an existing game could work in a different visual presentation or something like that. So how do you solve the problems that were in 3D in 2D or whatever it is, or through a very limited palette or whatever it is. Maybe that's an aspect of it that interested me, I would say.
Ken Gagne: And one of the nice things about these platforms that have constraints is nowadays if you want to go to … When I was a kid, you could grow up and go into computers. But nowadays, you're going into graphics or networking or AI or all these other disciplines because computers are so big. You can't grok the entire computer. With an older machine, you can be the designer, and the level creator, and the programmer, and the sound designer, and you can do everything as just one person like we used to do 40 years ago. So it's nice. Show me somebody who did a one-man game or one-person game for PlayStation 5. That's not as likely as it was for the PICO-8 or the Apple II. How do you choose … I'm sorry, go ahead.
Jasper Byrne: No, I was just going to maybe also say it's also interesting to look at the way mechanics have evolved and game design has evolved, and apply those things to an older system and see what it would be like if you like, sort of thing.
Colin Brannan: Yeah, that was a big thing for me as well. Because I work in UI and I really want to see UI has developed so much over the past decade, especially since the RPG-ification of everything. And it's so complicated now and you have so few inputs on an old Game Boy. And I was like, "Well, how do I take these systems and mechanics from a modern RPG and try and crunch them down into this little machine?" You got six buttons total plus start and select. How can that work?
Ken Gagne: Yeah. And Colin, I actually want to hear from you about the next question, which is how do you choose which platform to demake on to? Because you took a PS4 game. You could have easily remade it for PS2 or PS1 or N64. What made you look at Disco Elysium like, "Oh, that's going to be an awesome 8-bit black and white game."
Colin Brannan: Well, it was the other way. Because I found the tool I used, GB Studio, first. And then I was thinking about this seems cool, I want to make a UI heavy game for the Game Boy. And so I had the platform first and I started thinking about games I've been playing recently that I really enjoyed and that had maybe interesting systems or really contemporary ideas for characters and leveling up and stuff. And I was like, "Okay, well, let's take that and apply it to that platform." So it was actually the other way around for me.
Ken Gagne: I see. Okay. And I also want to hear from you, James, because you chose the N64 for Portal, which of the demakes on here, is the most technologically recent platform. But I want to point out that the N64 came out in September of 1996, which is closer in time to the moon landing than it is to today. So yes, it's a newer system, but not by much. So why the N64?
James Lambert: Actually a lot of the same reason. I had started working on N64 homebrew games because it's a console I grew up on and it makes me feel old hearing that moon landing thing.
Ken Gagne: Mission accomplished.
James Lambert: It's the console I grew up on. And so it kind of inspired me to learn to make games in the first place. And so when I recently discovered, recently being before the pandemic, discovered people are figuring out how to make games for the N64, I learned the tooling, did a few game jams, and then I was just kind of tinkering with the variety of different ideas I had. And I thought, "I wonder if it'd be possible to do the Portal effect, where you can render through a portal and go through it." So I thought, "Let's just try it." And I got it working and I'm like, "How far can I take this?" And just kind of took off with it.
Ken Gagne: Amazing. And similarly, how do you choose the game? Like Animal Planet, you did Advance Wars, which every time I play Advance Wars I'm like, "Oh, they remade Desert Commander from the 8-bit Nintendo." Thank you, thank you. So the mechanics of Advance Wars seem like relatively mathematically simple, and I'm saying that as not a developer. Is that something that influenced your decision of demake that game?
Animal Planet: I would say that that was a benefit of demaking that game because fans fortunately have Wiki'd all the aspects of combat, so I didn't have to spend weeks balancing that game. I just plugged in the numbers and there you go.
Colin Brannan: Advance Wars, it is prescriptive, right? Like you know the same action or action will always have the same outcome. Like the AI always reacts the same way, right?
Animal Planet: Yeah, there's a little bit of randomness, especially in combat. And in this game, there is no randomness in the PicoWars. So there's no randomness. I fudged it a little bit, changed things a little bit, made it simpler mathematically. But ultimately, yeah. It wasn't a reason to get into it, but it was helpful.
Ken Gagne: And so when you're demaking these games, there has to be some sort of a sacrifice because it's not going to be the same game when you're done. So for example, Silent Hill 2, it's this psychological horror game that has a pervasive sense of the unnatural. It's not just an LJN licensed platformer for the 8-bit Nintendo like Back To The Future or something. So Jasper, when you were taking Silent Hill 2, was that an integral aspect of Silent Hill 2 that you had to capture when making it into an 8-bit Nintendo game?
Jasper Byrne: I suppose I compromised it a little bit because technically it's not actually a Nintendo ROM. It is a PC piece of software, Soundless Mountain. So I use that to my advantage to kind of add things that couldn't be done necessarily like transparent fog, which obviously you couldn't do on an NES. And the sound, I didn't go with pure chip tunes. I went with sort of more distorted real sounds, almost as if they were coming out of a Street Fighter II cabinet, the way they were crunchy and 8-bit, that kind of thing.
So it was more trying to add a bit more realism there in the audio, I suppose, to make up for lack of detail in the visuals or something. But yeah, in effect, I cheated really with it because I didn't stick to the exact. I think it would've been difficult to do it purest on the NES because I think part of what makes this work or made people like it was the audio, which is quite similar to actually Silent Hill 2, but just a little bit dirtier sort of thing.
Ken Gagne: Interesting.
Jasper Byrne: So I think with this game, maybe it's kind of a different case to probably the others on the panel, because it's not actually for an old system. My choice of why to make it for the NES was because I hadn't grown up with the NES and it was always exotic to me. And I used to see a lot of pixel artists draw stuff in the NES palette and I found it really attractive. But I sort of knew nothing about it, so I kind of wanted to make what I imagined an NES game would be like, if you like, having not really grown up with it.
Ken Gagne: Yeah, because survival horror was really a term coined in the PS1 era when Silent Hill and Resident Evil came out. But it could be retroactively applied to some older games like Haunted House for the Atari 2600 and I think was it called Dear Home?
Jasper Byrne: Sweet Home.
Ken Gagne: Sweet Home, thank you, for the 8-bit Nintendo. So this whole genre didn't really exist predominantly in that era, and it's fascinating to see what it-
Jasper Byrne: Yeah, that fascinated me about it actually.
Ken Gagne: Now what about Disco Elysium, Colin? So I confess, I haven't played that game. I know it was at one point banned in Australia.
Colin Brannan: I hadn't heard about that.
Ken Gagne: Yeah, apparently just the rampant drug use.
Colin Brannan: Yeah, there's a lot. Yeah, yeah.
Ken Gagne: Yeah. So when you looked at Disco Elysium, what was it you said, "I need to keep this but I can ditch this."
Colin Brannan: Okay, so there's a character in Disco Elysium named Kuno, which anyone knows. Kuno is not in my game. Kuno is a 13-year-old, who's the worst person you've ever met, just shouting slurs all the time and stuff. And I said, "You know what? I've already tried to contract my scope a bit. I'm sorry to all the Kuno fans out there, but I don't want to deal with this." And then I got a bunch of messages when I put it out and people were like, "Where's Kuno? Why isn't Kuno here?" And I was like, "Sorry, I just didn't want to deal with it."
But there's other stuff. The drug use is kind of fun and that also. I was interested in the stats, how they work and the drug use in the game is all about adjusting your stats. So it's like, okay, so I have to put some of that in. It was just making clever little cuts in different places.
And also another big one was there's a lot of text in Disco Elysium. And when you're playing real Disco Elysium, you've got maybe a third of the screen is one big text scroll. On the Game Boy version, I have two lines, sometimes three max of 18 characters, not 18 words, 18 characters. So a big thing I didn't realize when I started is I actually had to rewrite a good portion of the script of the game so that would fit in nice little chunks that were easily parsable without having to skip through too many different text boxes.
Ken Gagne: I'm sorry, remind me, is this the entire game you ported into?
Colin Brannan: No, it's the first, I don't know how long, it depends on how you play a game. But playing this takes maybe about 40 minutes or so. Which is longer, I planned for 15 minutes and then you start working, you start putting little things in there. And then luckily, because it's on the Game Boy, I'm a little bit contracted to what I can do, it's like you start putting stuff in and go, "Oh god, I've made a 40-minute thing here." But yeah, it's the first. It's up to the point where you solve a couple of the mysteries a little bit earlier if you get lucky with some of the rolls.
Ken Gagne: Are there any ways in which you think your version of this game is better than the original?
Colin Brannan: No, not really. I am pulling so much from them. It's entirely derivative I think in a lot of ways, which is fine. I don't think that's a judge against me, but I'm taking what they're doing, going, "This is really cool. What if it looked like this instead?" I don't think better is really a scale that does much work for talking about comparing the two.
Ken Gagne: Okay, that's fair. What about you, James? With Portal 64, obviously the portal mechanic is core to the game and we saw that demoed in the video and some of the graphic fidelity might be a little more pixelated. What other changes did you have to accept?
James Lambert: Yeah, so with that one, the fidelity had to be dropped. There's not as much detail in many of the levels. I don't have the nice baked ambient inclusion textures on the walls. But I did try to use Portal, the original Portal, as close of a template as I could have managed for like, "Okay, when do I need to add details to certain places?" I think this footage is a little old that you're seeing here, but like the little light indicators that indicate which buttons are connected to which parts of the puzzle, I ended up adding that later.
But I tried to get the important pieces in first. Obviously the portal gun, that's important to be able to render portals through. But then as I got that and then I said, "Okay, now I have the core done, let's just start adding details as I can and just keep iterating on that." And trying to push that as far as I could. I'm trying to think what the biggest thing that I didn't get to that I was hoping I could. I know being able to render multiple Portals deep in recursions, so you see through a portal, through a portal, through a portal. Well, in an early demo I could go quite deep, but it was because there's very little rendering. But later on, I kind of had to stick with just two layers deep and I couldn't use some of the tricks they used for pushing that further.
Colin Brannan: So I have a quick question about that. So the portals are still really impressive when I see them in game. It's just really cool tech. Did you use the same tricks they use in actual Portal or did you have to come up with your own ways to make it work on the N64?
James Lambert: I don't know how much I matched with what they did. I had a cater to what N64 could do. So I think it is a little different. I kind of use tricks with partitioning the Z-buffer. And I don't know how much detail I go into here. So I think I had to use some tricks that are a little bit different there. But I guess one way to think about the portal rendering, everybody knows that N64 can do split screen. So it's just split screen rendering, but within the same area, if you think about it that way. That's kind of the way to think about it.
Ken Gagne: That's amazing. I had no idea. One of the other key elements of Portal, the original, is GLaDOS. And a lot of that comes across in the amazing voice acting. How were you able to preserve that, if at all?
James Lambert: Yeah, so just with that, I just took the game bundle. Portal has what they call VPK files. All of the data for the game is in it. So I just made it so when you were building the ROM for Portal, you said this is where I have that installed on my system. And I was able to extract the sound files, lower the sound quality, compress it to the N64's audio format, and then bundle it in it directly. So I didn't have to include any of their assets in my project in order for it to build. It just grabbed it from theirs and changed the quality down to include it.
Ken Gagne: Let me see here. So when you're porting a game to an older system, a lot of older games we grew up with were awesome partly because we didn't know any better. And then we've had a lot of quality of life improvements. Like try playing the original Final Fantasy and stocking up on 99 potions. It takes a long time. Or trying to figure out which sword is better, this one or that one. And you have to equip them to find out and maybe go into battle and see how much damage they do. So we've had a lot of just the general user interface of games has improved. The way you navigate through the world has improved.
When you go back in time and demake these games, how do you avoid those paper cuts that existed back then? Or do you embrace them and just say, "This is what it would like if this game existed back then. Yeah, it would suck. Thank goodness it didn't." Jasper.
Jasper Byrne: I think in the case of Silent Hill 2, I couldn't honestly find much that had dated. I think it really stands up very well even today. So I just went as hard as I could on trying to recreate every aspect, like how the menu looks, the noise when you use the menu, up and down. All of those little details, I just tried to steal verbatim. It depends on the game I suppose, but for me, I think that one really has held up well.
In going to 2D, it gets rid of the question of tank controls and things like that that you'd have in a survival horror back then. Actually Silent Hill 2, I think it had, well, it does have the more modern type of controls anyway, which was kind of different from Resident Evil at that time, I suppose. At least up until, well, the prior one had been Resident Evil 3, I guess. But even the original Silent Hill I think has a camera, the modern controller movement, not the tank controls, if you like.
So in that sense, it hadn't really dated. Had it been a 3D game and doing a PS1, well, I guess you'd have to do a PS0 demake of Resident Evil 1 or whatever and it was in 3D. In that hypothetical situation, I guess you might update it to not have tank controls or something like that. But then-
Ken Gagne: You just inspired my PAX East 2025 panel, In Defense of Tank Controls.
Jasper Byrne: I love them.
Colin Brannan: I have to say, the tank control sickos are out there.
Jasper Byrne: I'm just saying, yeah, a demake artist might choose to do that. But I personally love it.
Ken Gagne: Same, same. Thank you. Did you see that somebody, I guess this is kind of a demake, they modified the original Super Mario Kart for the Super Nintendo to have tank controls? It's fixed camera angles, and as you go around the course, the angle changes to different static points. Another demake, somebody ported Tears of the Kingdom's Ultrahand to Ocarina of Time. All right, just a brief aside there. Sorry.
So Animal Planet, what about when you were porting Advance Wars? Are there some modern quality of life improvements to game design and UI that you were able to bring back to PicoWars?
Animal Planet: Yeah, I think a lot of it was really nice user interface that the Advance Wars game had. They took a strategy game where you're controlling tens of units at least and they put it on a handheld console that had just gotten color, so there's a lot of UI aspects to that. I guess I really had fun … It's a weird thing, but it was a real challenge to make the arrow. So when you select a unit, you are now commanding it where to walk. And getting that arrow to look nice and to be connected in this limited system where I couldn't really. Well, when it's a 16 by 16 grid for every little character, I don't know, it made it difficult to make it even at every point. Play it, see it. It loops around pretty nicely I think. That would be the user interface aspect that I enjoyed working on.
And I don't know if I made it any cleaner though. Like Jasper was saying, they had some good people in that game. It was more about simplifying what they already have and making it clean and fun and in a new style. And I think the PICO-8 fantasy console also really shined in that regard. It made everything look really fruity, just very colorful and vibrant and almost tropical. PicoWars feels like Advance Wars on a tropical island.
Ken Gagne: As a magazine editor, I was taught that an article isn't done when you have nothing left to add, the article is done when you have nothing left to remove. So when you say you simplified Advance Wars, did you take away some things that weren't really needed in the original and just get rid of the cruft?
Animal Planet: Yeah, there's a lot removed. It would've been really not possible to include as much as is in that game because, well, speaking of the constraints of the PICO-8, you only have a certain amount of code you can put for every single cartridge they call them. And there are really hacky ways, there's my game again, there are really hacky ways to make it so that you can have multiple cartridges, but all the state of the game is erased every time you switch a cartridge. So I had to write serialization code, so store it in memory and then reload it. And of course, this would all be unnecessary if it was written in Godot or something or Unity, like a modern game engine.
So things that had to be stripped. There are no naval units, there are no air units. Commander superpowers are unfortunately just really couldn't be fit in if the artificial intelligence is there too. But commanders do have their own quirks and stuff, like there is a long-range specialist. And coming up with a few new special abilities for commanders that aren't in the original game was a lot of fun. So there's some new stuff there for sure.
Ken Gagne: I think it's especially bold that you chose to demake a Nintendo game because they are quite litigious. There have been a lot of Zelda and Metroid games that have been taken down over the years. And I'm curious, I'll save you for last, are the developers of the original games aware of your creations? Some people actually seek out the original creators' opinions because they're like, "This is an homage to what you've done. You've inspired me and I want you to know that." And sometimes the response to that is not great. So have any of you, save you for last, gotten responses from the original developers or are you aware that they're aware of it?
Colin Brannan: So I was really fortunate actually. They sought me out. I don't know where they saw it, but I think it was when I posted the first build of it to a GB Studio Discord to get some hints on stuff from people, about a week later, someone from ZA/UM, the studio that makes Disco Elysium, their marketing team sent me an email and was like, "Hey, we're putting together a second anniversary press release in three months and we want to put a bunch of fan work into it." And they said, "We really like your project. We approve it." Yeah, sorry to everyone else. It was very strange.
But now I've got their stamp of approval, which means everything needs to be a little bit more by the book. And also I was like, "Oh, a lot more people are going to see this now." So I am not a musician. I had no music in the project at that time, and I had to reach out to someone and go, "Hey, I need some sound in this that's not just the worst bleeps and bloops you've ever heard. Can you go in and remake the soundtrack?" But the soundtrack is licensed music from another band. So then we had to go to the marketing and the marketing was like, "Yeah, we need to check with the band that they're okay with us putting this thing out." And it became a whole different kind of headache. But everyone was okay with it as long as we weren't making any money in the end.
Ken Gagne: So when you say you have their seal of approval, are they tweeting about your game or otherwise acknowledging it publicly?
Colin Brannan: They did. Yeah, they've tweeted a couple of times and stuff, and I think it was originally an email to news outlets and stuff. I remember when they first sent it out, they must've done a marketing release or something with a bunch of different fan projects for the two-year anniversary, and I think some poor IGN intern, it must've been a slow day and they needed to make 30 minutes of content because they uploaded the first 30 minutes of Disco Elysium Game Boy onto IGN's main YouTube account. I was like, "Y'all know, this is just a fan thing? This isn't real. You played basically the whole game." But okay, sure.
Ken Gagne: That is amazing. There is a particular game on the show floor this weekend that looks very much like a Konami game. And I was in line to play it, and the two people in line ahead of me were talking and one person said, "How is this not a copyright violation?" And the other person said, "Probably because Konami doesn't care about their IP anymore." So Jasper.
Jasper Byrne: I literally saw that advertised outside the front, that game that you're talking about. And it was literally on the poster outside. And at distance, I thought it was a Konami game. And then I saw it closer and I was like, "Okay." It really is very close, isn't it?
Ken Gagne: Is Konami aware of Soundless Mountain 2? Because you made this game 16 years ago, right?
Jasper Byrne: I did send it through their official channel and never heard back. But I also sent it to Masahiro Ito who did the art. And he said, "That looks really interesting and I'm going to play it." And I never heard back from him. So I don't know quite honestly whether he checked it out or not, but I liked the idea that he did.
Ken Gagne: It's fascinating that you took the initiative of reaching out to Konami. That's kind of like playing a game. Let's poke the bear and see if it wakes up and if it doesn't run away.
Jasper Byrne: Well, I guess because it was entered into the bootleg demakes competition, and so we had to change the name to make it look like it was a knockoff cart that was just skating around copyright anyway. So all the characters have changed name. He's Jake, he's not James.
Ken Gagne: Completely different.
Jasper Byrne: Every line of dialogue is slightly changed, all these sort of things. There's not one line of dialogue that's taken verbatim. All the character names have changed. It's called Soundless Mountain, obviously, that sort of thing. So I just try to be very careful about that and not do anything that could be … So I guess it counts as parody, does it? I don't know, honestly.
Ken Gagne: And parody is legally protected free speech.
Jasper Byrne: Right. Yeah, so technically I think I might have a leg to stand on should they ever try and care about their IP anymore.
Ken Gagne: Maybe you could claim that this is what they're remaking this year when it comes out for PS5.
Jasper Byrne: Yeah, they might come after me now, I don't know.
Ken Gagne: We're jumping all the way from the 8-Bit Nintendo to the PS5.
Jasper Byrne: Maybe I should try sending it to Ito-San again and see if he has played it.
Ken Gagne: I think they should buy this off, put it in as an Easter egg. So James Sunderland is walking around Silent Hill, he finds a dilapidated arcade console. He starts playing it and it's Soundless Mountain 2.
Jasper Byrne: I'm not going to lie, that would be my dream.
Ken Gagne: If you could play Outrun in Shenmue, why not play Soundless Mountain 2 in Silent Hill 2?
Colin Brannan: There's that bit in Metal Gear Solid 4 where Snake has a dream and he's back in Metal Gear Solid 1.
Jasper Byrne: Or Day of the Tentacle where you can play Maniac Mansion on a computer in Day of the Tentacle. I love that.
Ken Gagne: There's a Call of Duty game where you can play Zork. And Pitfall for the Super Nintendo had Pitfall for the Atari 2600. Come on, the opportunity is there, the precedent is there. You could be rolling in it. Come on.
All right. So James, I understand that you took your game, that is inspired by a game by Valve, and you uploaded it to Steam, which is run by Valve. How'd that work out for you?
James Lambert: Well, it didn't actually make it to Steam. It was just a GitHub. I did do it where I just distributed a patch where you didn't download the ROM for me, you had to go grab a file from your Steam installation to generate the patch. Turns out that is actually against the terms of service of Steam. But anyway.
So in terms of getting permission, so sometime in December, somebody from Valve reached out to me. He had worked on the original Portal and he was just telling me they thought Portal was pretty cool. And by the way, the portal paradox where if you drop a piston over a cube and you ask the question is does it shoot out or does it just stop and then fall, the guy who wrote the original physics for Portal says that it shoots out. So just if there's any question there.
But anyway, so I got in contact with them. He loved it. The legal team less so. So had some back and forth with them and it took a while to get this figured out. So clearly there are people at Valve who wanted to see this project continue. But ultimately, because I was using libultra, which is Nintendo's proprietary library for the N64, they're like, "We don't want to touch that." So they had a can of it.
And I think even outside of that, I asked if I could use an open source one like libdragon, and they weren't really on board because I could lose control over the distribution of a ROM. Because I wasn't distributing on Steam. And I know a lot of people were taking my ROM and just putting it on their phone emulator so they could play Portal on their phone. And I feel like Valve kind of saw that and thought, "We don't want to lose control over and not be able to monitor the distribution of this game." So I think for those reasons, they wanted the project to end.
Jasper Byrne: I think if anything, there's an element of it sounds to me like your game was actually too accurate and too close to the original game.
James Lambert: Possibly.
Ken Gagne: So it sounds like Valve didn't want to touch the Nintendo library you were using. But as long as you're distributing it on your own, can they really tell you to stop making Portal 64?
James Lambert: I'm no lawyer, so-
Ken Gagne: None of us are. None of us are.
James Lambert: I figured I'd rather just avoid the liability. I don't know, maybe I could lawyer up and figure out what I could do legally and see where I can actually finish this within a legal sense, but I don't know if I want to take that leap.
Ken Gagne: So in all seriousness, where do you go from here? Because you literally worked on this game on and off for years and if somebody just put a kibosh to it, I wouldn't just move on to the next project. I would go into a deep funk and be like, "What's the point of anything?" So where do you go from here?
James Lambert: Yeah. Well, I was using that project as an opportunity to grow my YouTube channel. And I also was learning a lot about developing for the console. I was building out physics engines and other assets, and so I'm just taking a lot of the learning and some of the code and porting over to a new game project that I've started on. So it's still pretty early because I'm now using libdragon so I had to rebuild a lot of the core engine that I was using. But I just started on a new project and I'm hoping that I can use some of the momentum from that to carry over into a new project.
Ken Gagne: And will this also be a demake or be an original IP?
James Lambert: This is an original IP because I don't want to get slapped again.
Ken Gagne: Sure. So this has been a professional development opportunity for you. What about for the rest of you? Why do you do demakes? Like Colin, you said that this was just a pandemic project for you. So is it just for fun and by day you're a marine biologist or something?
Colin Brannan: Well, no. So at the time I was working on it, it was a hobby thing and then also a portfolio piece. But I wasn't a game developer, I was a mechanic actually. And then later, not immediately after, but a little bit later, I actually did get a game development job afterwards. And I was like, "Oh yeah, because it's a cool part of my portfolio." And it was when I got hired, it was one of the most recent things I did. So I'm sure the people who hired me saw it. But then before coming here, I was talking to my boss about it and he's like, "Oh, have you done those before?" I was like, "You hired me." But yeah, it was another thing.
And it was also anytime I've worked, tried to start up a project … And personally for me, scope creep is just so real. So it was a good way to try and keep things in check and have a small project that I could easily finish and put out there.
Ken Gagne: Cool. What about you, Jasper? I know that this game, as we said, was made 16 years ago and you've made a lot of other games since then.
Jasper Byrne: Yeah. Why do I make remakes? Well, as I said, it was for the competition, so it wasn't something I'd ever really considered up until that point. To be honest, I'd never even heard the word used until, Derek, you ran that competition for The Independent Game Source. Yeah, he'd obviously thought about it quite deeply before even coming up with that idea. But I don't know what there was around at that time, 2008. I can't really think of any. It is possible that, Derek, you invented it in some ways or invented the concept. But I remember him saying that it was based on the idea of you'd find these clone cartridges and consoles in China or whatever that would have a version of something that was nearly Street Fighter, but not. And so that's why it was called the sort of bootleg demake thing.
So that interested me. It was just a sort of a funny concept in a way. Trying to imagine what one of these games where it was a kind of knocked-together clone of Street Fighter II or whatever would be like, maybe for a lesser system as well. Because I think that was true of it. So games would come out on later systems and then they would make it for the NES or whatever, like Street Fighter II for the NES or something like that. So that part of it interested me. It was funny in a way just to kind of picture what they'd be like because I hadn't actually played them.
Ken Gagne: Yeah. What about you, Animal Planet? Why are you doing this? Well, we started off with that, so what I'm asking is what are you getting out of it now?
Animal Planet: Well, now that it's over, it's nice to see people play it. Advance Wars diehard fans that are just seeking anything on the internet that can keep filling that hole in their heart for Advance Wars. But what got me into it originally was it's such a passion project. And the first question you were asking was what makes a good game a candidate for a demake. And I think any game, any kind of passion project is for it to be a passion project. And it was just something that I was thinking about when I was sleeping. I was thinking about when I was eating, waking, outside, running, whatever. So I think I'm actually missing that in my current project, which is why I haven't been able to work on it. I can't get a storyline down for it. With Advance Wars, it was like I love this game.
And I made a new story. There's a prequel for it. So it was so exciting to get back into the war and do that. With this game, it's like what happens? Really only what's driving me is I'm having fun making the art, I'm having fun exploring the game engine and doing algorithms. But there's something not gluing it together. And I think that there's a passion part missing. So I think it's really important to have that, find something that really makes your heart beat. Even if it's, it's a demake, ideally I'd be working on my own IP and my own story and be like, "This is me." But I think that that's where my heart was, and I think a lot of it creates a lot of value for people and a lot of people really enjoy that.
Ken Gagne: Awesome. It's kind of like fanfiction from a software development perspective.
Jasper Byrne: Yeah, it seems to me like everybody's coming from a place of loving these games, particular games that we've demade, a great deal. It's just almost like paying homage to the games that really inspire us. I guess
Ken Gagne: Before I go to questions for the audience, I want to point out that there's a huge demake community. This is a small sample of the demakes that are out there. Are there any demakes that inspire any of you or that you give a shout-out to that aren't your own?
Colin Brannan: Bloodborne PSX is incredible.
Animal Planet: Same.
Ken Gagne: Yeah, Bloodborne for the PlayStation 1. So that is a thing. Yeah, anybody else?
Jasper Byrne: Yeah, I'm sure all of us love that one. It is quite incredible what she achieved with that game. Because she recreated the entire game.
Colin Brannan: Yeah, it was like, "Wait, it keeps going." It keeps going.
Jasper Byrne: Boss fights and everything, and it's quite an incredible project. Really inspiring actually. Yeah, I don't know about too many others. I had obviously heard of a couple of the others on the panel.
But I guess thinking another aspect I suppose is the game, growing up with a home computer systems like the Sinclair Spectrum, we always had terrible arcade conversions that were much worse than the NES games and things like that. So in a sense, I kind of grew up with demakes, if you like, of arcade games. Because they were terrible. Again, like Street Fighter II on the Spectrum, which does exist.
Ken Gagne: You're not being fair to the work you have done because there's a difference between a demake and a crappy port.
Jasper Byrne: Right. Yeah, hopefully. Hopefully.
Ken Gagne: I want to switch to questions and see if this microphone is going to work for me because now this is the opportunity for you to not line up. You can stay in the comfort of your seats and raise a hand if you have a question. And I see, all right, let's start right here. I saw your hand go up first. And by the way, a question is a short declarative statement that ends with a question mark.
Audience member: So James, you in particular mentioned having to use Nintendo related code and stuff like that. For the rest of you, did you have to research your target systems like development software or anything like that?
Colin Brannan: Sorry, I keep saying them, GB Studio is great. Check it out. It's awesome. Their guidelines and everything are all, it's like, "Hey, here's what you can do. You can only have X amount of sprites in one scene or X amount of characters." And they're always very low numbers. So it was part of the software that I was using was giving me those restrictions and whatnot.
Ken Gagne: Cool.
Jasper Byrne: Yeah for me, it wasn't anything beyond just the palette and the color palette really. How many colors does the NES have and what are they? That was all I really looked into technically. I didn't try and follow the sound specifications or anything like that.
Ken Gagne: What we need is an N64 studio app. Just drag and drop. Boom, done. Here, have a copy of my magazine. And on the back there's Steam code for a random game. Any other questions? Let's go back here. Hi there.
Audience member: Do you think there's any overlap between I guess the motivation for the stuff that comes out of the demo scene and demakes?
Colin Brannan: Demo scene being the music video tech that people make, right? Or the video game demo scene?
Audience member: No, the basically music video tech.
Colin Brannan: Yeah, okay.
Audience member: Obsolete systems. Video on a 2600 or whatever.
Colin Brannan: I think a lot of us we're all coming, like we were saying about coming from a place of fandom of an original project, where demo scene seems much more interested in the tech engineering aspect of it. I'm not super involved in that though. I don't know.
James Lambert: Me personally, I can't really speak to that. I don't have that overlap, I guess.
Animal Planet: I think other than sharing the same target as in older consoles, restricted consoles and spaces, I don't see a ton of overlap.
Ken Gagne: Yeah, there is some overlap. The person who did the Apple II demakes I mentioned has also entered the demo scene. And right here in Boston, there used to be an event called Demo Party that you could go to every year and people just show off these amazing self-running demos. It's like 16kb and it runs for two minutes of audio video on PC and it's ridiculous. Yeah, and there are also some great, don't stand in front of a speaker, some great Atari demos. Let's hear from you.
Audience member: Hi. You mentioned Street Fighter II on the NES. How can you tell the difference today between demakes made today and demakes that were made on the black market in China and Russia, like Somari the Adventurer or Super Mario World on the NES, those games that you would often find on multicarts or Soulja Boy consoles, kind of stuff that YouTuber Rerez talked about?
Jasper Byrne: Well, obviously the motivation is the main difference because those people that were bootlegging those cartridges, they were just trying to somehow trick you into buying what you thought was a better game. Whereas I guess people like us who are doing this sort of thing are trying to do probably the best job that we can within the limitations if you like.
Colin Brannan: I also don't want to be totally dismissive of it though because some of them at times you play those and they're like, "This is actually all right." And now I'm thinking what if someone remade the most bootleg thing you could find? Get a team together, spend a lot of time at it.
Jasper Byrne: Bootleg remakes. Yeah, that would be good.
Ken Gagne: So what, like Cheetahmen 64 or something? Sure. Let's go right here.
Audience member: So has there been any game or console that you've been very passionate about wanting to demake onto, but it wasn't really feasible, the challenge just being too great? You've mentioned the difficulties with porting to your specific consoles already, so I was just curious.
James Lambert: Yeah, actually, I really like the idea of trying to get an open-world sized game running on the N64. But then I consider, okay, but then I have to make an open-world amount of content. And that's really the bottleneck. I'd love to try the tech, but unfortunately one person just can't generate a lot of content. And you're much better off I think targeting something that you can make a small slice of that feels complete rather than trying to go really broad.
Colin Brannan: I think it's a Sid Meier quote or something about wanting to make a game that took entirely inside one apartment block or something. This idea of making a very open-world, but at a very tiny scale and just doing a lot of work still, but packing it all into the tiniest amount of physical digital space rather than a big expansive field or whatnot.
Ken Gagne: Cool. Let's see, I saw a hand from you sir, with the New York, is that a Yankees hat in Boston?
Audience member: I'm sorry. I'm from Canada.
Ken Gagne: What part of Canada?
Audience member: Calgary.
Ken Gagne: That's not Toronto.
Colin Brannan: No, sorry. Don't give him it. No, no.
Audience member: So I wanted to ask, obviously this stuff comes from a love of these games. You wouldn't make this stuff otherwise. But is there anything about it that it's a little bit like seeing how the sausage gets made? Is there anything that's you go back to these games and you kind of see through them a little bit. Does it ruin anything for you or is it just a positive thing overall?
Animal Planet: For me, no. It was such an incredible positive experience and being able to see the just tunnel vision-esque incredible amount of work that people have done to break down Advance Wars and have all the facts about the characters, but also just the battle statistics and all of that. That's kind of why I got into creating this, to see how that really worked. And it was very fulfilling. No magic lost there.
James Lambert: No, same. I think I kind of noticed the little details they added the game and why they did things. You're like, "Oh, that makes sense." They're little subtle things that they've added that you just wouldn't notice without diving deep into it.
Jasper Byrne: It made me just love it even more. And I spent a lot of time just analyzing the pauses, how long fade-outs would take, how long you would spend traversing each room, and just looking at all of these timings and things. I feel like I learned so much about editing and timing and kind of pacing of a game just through just analyzing the videos. And luckily with Silent Hill 2, there were a bunch of documentaries as well that were made at the time that were really good that came out with the Director's Cut. So just rewatching all that stuff just made me even more inspired and love it even more, quite honestly.
Colin Brannan: It's like the thing I was attracted to was mechanics and systems. So I was already really thinking about how they were working. And then if you really like the music in a game, you can do a cover of it. If you really like the characters, you can do fan art. And it's like I really love these mechanics and systems and it's fan art of mechanics and gameplay in a lot of ways.
Ken Gagne: If you like a game soundtrack, go to OCRemix.org. They have a lot of great remixes of games. If you like reading about the games you're playing and you want a more of an academic breakdown, go to Boss Fight Books, many of which are quite good, especially Silent Hill 2 and Metal Gear Solid. Let's go right over here because you know what Desert Commander is.
Audience member: Yes, unfortunately I've been playing games that long. Actually, my question was for Jasper. I wanted to ask why Silent Hill 2? There's a lot of horror games out for PlayStation 1. Could have done Resident Evil, you could have done Fatal Frame, you could have done Galerians, you could have done Countdown Vampires.
Jasper Byrne: That's a good shout.
Audience member: Probably would've been better. But yeah, why Silent Hill 2?
Jasper Byrne: I love Galerians. Yeah, I love Fatal Frame as well. It's because I guess I personally just have a large interest film and it was very influenced by film, obviously, and outside of the game world. So I liked a lot of the source material I think that they used to kind of research that game, like the movie Jacob's Ladder or whatever. And so it just connected with me very strongly on that cinematic level. And I guess my dad was a screenwriter and we used to watch movies together, two a day or something. So it was really just that love of film that I felt within that game. It's probably one reason I also love Kojima's games or whatever.
Ken Gagne: Awesome. Thank you. I think that is the end of our questions, unfortunately, although we'll be hanging out outside the hall at the end. In the last minute, I just want to go down the line. We do have our social media accounts up there, but I want to give you the opportunity to verbally plug your title, where people can find it. All your games are available online for free. Well, they were.
James Lambert: Allegedly.
Ken Gagne: So just going down the line here, where can people find you?
James Lambert: Yeah, I just have a YouTube channel, James Lambert. That's all.
Jasper Byrne: Yeah, I have a Twitter, Jasperbyrne. It's up there. And also Instagram is Jaspersonic because I make music as well, and it's more the music side I put on there, Insta and TikTok and what have you. So JasperSonic or Jasperbyrne on Twitter.
Colin Brannan: Don't find me. It's fine. You don't have to. You can send me an email or go to csbrannon.itch.io to check out Disco Elysium for Game Boy. But I'm okay. Come say hi.
Animal Planet: You can find PicoWars on itch.io/picowars or my Twitter, X thingy is listed there, Lambdanaut. I don't post there too often, but yeah, some game dev stuff goes up there.
Ken Gagne: Awesome. Thank you all so much for coming to Demakes Decoded. Enjoy the rest of PAX.
The post Demakes Decoded at PAX East 2024 first appeared on Gamebits.
In 1990, I competed in the Nintendo World Championships, which was simultaneously a competition and a marketing campaign for Nintendo. Similar to E3 and PAX, the event was an opportunity for gamers to get their hands on the latest and upcoming games, with demo stations showcasing Final Fantasy, Super C, Solstice, Batman, and more.
Among the stations were multiple units of a small handheld: the Game Boy, released just a few months prior and packaged with Tetris. I'd gotten mine for Christmas and had monopolized it, which wasn't hard to do, since no one else in my family had much interest in Nintendo. But my father, who was my chaperone for the Nintendo World Championships, was bored while watching me compete. He used to play Centipede on our Atari 5200, so he took the opportunity to try Nintendo's latest gaming machine and its Russian puzzle game.
From that day forward, we shared my Game Boy.
Apple TV+Tetris became a worldwide phenomenon: "the Tetris effect" is not just the latest iteration of the franchise, but also the tendency of players to see visual artifacts, mentally placing blocks into their environment to make everything neat and tidy, long after the game has finished. Tetris has been ported, cloned, and parodied such that it's hard to imagine anyone not being familiar with the title and its mechanics.
Multiple movies have been made about Tetris, including the 2011 documentary Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters; one of its writers is now working on an upcoming Tetris documentary, Best of Five, a Kickstarter I backed in 2020.
These two films focus on the gameplay and fan base of Tetris, creating a gap. Tetris's origin has been recounted in the 2016 graphic novel Tetris: The Games People Play and the 2016 non-fiction book The Tetris Effect: The Game that Hypnotized the World, but that story had not been told on the silver screen — until 2023, when Apple released Tetris, a dramatization of the game's origin, written by Noah Pink (marking his film screenwriting debut) and directed by Jon S. Baird.
The primary protagonists of Tetris are Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton), Bullet-Proof Software's founder, CEO, developer, and publisher who's trying to secure the rights to sell Tetris in the United States and Japan; and Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov), the Russian government employee who created the game in his native Moscow. If Rogers can score this game license on behalf Nintendo and get the foreign puzzle game packaged with the Game Boy, he'll secure a future for him and his family while getting Pajitnov the fame Rogers feels he deserves.
Credit: Nik on UnsplashAs a kid who grew up playing Tetris, I remember boasting to my parents, "The Nintendo is so popular, even Russia is making games for it!" As I've since learned from poring over many books of video game lore, and as this movie underscores, nothing could've been further from the truth. Stymieing Rogers' efforts to collaborate with Pajitnov is the Iron Curtain: the year is 1989, and Soviet Russia, though faltering, is still a force to be reckoned with. Rogers arrives in Moscow to find his motives questioned, his life threatened, competitors underfoot, and cultural and linguistic barriers obscuring who, if anybody, actually owns the Tetris license.
Action!Despite the movie's title, the star of Tetris is not the game or its creator, but Rogers. Egerton brings such infectious optimism and sincerity to the role that it's easy to root for this underdog as he goes up against both Communism and his better-funded competitors. When other publishers offer multi-million deals for Tetris, it's just a drop in the bucket for their empires; when Rogers counters with a lowball offer, he's putting everything he owns — his business, his reputation, his very home — on the line. And when he attempts to befriend Pajitnov, it's not to get the inside track, but out of a genuine admiration for a fellow software developer — one who's made a game that Rogers himself has become addicted to. As one character describes Rogers: "He's dumb. But he is honest." Which is more than most of us can hope to be.
Balancing that is the cynical Pajitnov, who has lived since birth in the same apartment — the very place he watched his father be dragged from by the Communist Party, never to be seen again. Other than his wife and two sons, Pajitnov trusts almost no one — with good reason, given his background… yet he spends his spare time writing computer games. There is a spark of hope and joy in him that Soviet Russia desperately wants to extinguish. Pajitnov wants to believe in the same things Rogers does, but he's afraid to. Soviet Russian-born Efremov captures all of that and more in his performance.
Then, the last thing Pajitnov expected happens: the two game developers, American and Russian, become friends. As one review said: "[The scene that cements Rogers and Pajitnov's relationship] has more reverence for gaming as both an artistic medium and a way to bring people together in it than the combined runtimes of almost every other game adaptation ever made." Just as my dad and I bonded over Tetris, so too did its creator and its eventual publisher. Tetris starts practically needing a flowchart to keep track of who owns which rights to the Tetris game, but it really takes off when the two heroes bridge their political upbringings and find their chemistry.
Credit: AppleAlthough Tetris is a male-dominated film (as much of the games industry has been and, sadly, continues to be), Sofia Lebedeva turns in a surprisingly diverse and nuanced performance as translator Sasha, who is based on a real person. In smaller parts is Rogers' family: Ayane Nagabuchi plays his wife Akemi, and Kanon Narumi his daughter Maya. Due to Akemi and Maya discussing an upcoming school performance, the film passes the Bechdel test. It's not much, but it's something.
TruthinessThis biopic seamlessly blends fact and fiction. If there can be said to be antagonists in this film, then there are three: the late Robert Maxwell and his son Kevin, actual historical figures who controlled a British media empire until the early 1990s; and Valentin Trifonov, a KGB agent who urges his comrades to deny Communist Russia's decline while simultaneously seeking personal gain from the Maxwells' capitalistic overtures. Although there was an actual Russian politician named Valentin Trifonov, he died in 1938; the movie's Cold War character is an unrelated fabrication.
Credit: Henk RogersSome dramatizations are understandable; as one website put it, "Basically, how do you liven up what were essentially boardroom discussions?" But even when the movie veers from the truth, it still has an important stamp of approval. Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov's IMDb credits include producer on two titles with the same name: Tetris, the 1984 computer game; and Tetris, the 2023 movie.
Yet an exhaustive fact check confirms that, other than Trifonov's presence and a climactic car chase scene, the movie is surprisingly accurate. The high-stakes negotiations, the clandestine meetings, and the most important characters (including Nintendo of Japan's third president Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo of America founding president Minoru Arakawa, Nintendo chairman Howard Lincoln, and Mikhail Gorbachev himself) are in the movie much as they were in real life, and the film ends with a recap of what happened to many of these true characters in later years.
Putting the pieces togetherTetris is a movie I was excited about from the moment it was announced. It's a story I mostly already knew, and not one that I realized needed to be told. But it's a fun film with two talented stars, a cast of colorful characters, a clever soundtrack (including a Russian variation on the Bonnie Tyler classic "Holding Out for a Hero"), subdued yet slick pixelated interstitials, and the occasional moment of Argo-level tension. Like an actual game of Tetris when you're in the zone, everything just fits.
The post Putting together the Tetris movie first appeared on Gamebits.
At the end of yet another epic year of gaming, as I do every year, I like to look back at all the games I've bought, played, finished, and abandoned as a reminder of the surprises, delights, and disappointments I encountered. This sixth annual end-of-year recap recounts all my journeys through the video game landscape.
This was my first year using You Need A Budget (YNAB), an app that helped me be more conscious about my spending habits. This coincided with my Switch backlog breaking a hundred — a timely reminder that I need to spend more time with the games I own, and that I'm not saving money by indulging in sales of games I'll never play.
As a result, this year I bought only 37 games — only half as many as last year, and the least I've bought since the pandemic. As a result of buying fewer but higher quality games, my average cost per game also went up — from $9.52 last year to $14.97 this year. But the total software expense of $391.10 was the lowest of any year since 2016.
I record my game purchases in both YNAB and Excel, and my progress through the games is tracked in Trello. Games that have not moved from 2022 — such as It Takes Two, which was "Unfinished" a year ago and which a friend and I are still occasionally poking — are not listed. Games gotten for free from No Gravity Games' holiday specials are also not included. All games are for the Nintendo Switch unless otherwise noted. A change in a category's tally from last year is represented parenthetically in the section header.
Finished (12 / +1)Super Arcade RacingI loved playing the NES game Micro Machines as a kid, and this top-down racer came closest to matching that appeal.FirewatchI wasn't sure whether to put Firewatch on the list, as it was my fourth playthrough and my second on the Switch. But I was spending a week in Yellowstone National Park, and it seemed timely to take a break from Tears of the Kingdom to revisit one of my favorite games of all time.VenbaI dug the cooking mechanic, art style, and story of this game about an Indian couple that moves to Canada to give their son a better life. So I was shocked when it was over almost as quickly as it began! I'm baffled why they would craft such a lovely cooking system only to use it so seldomly.Legend of Zelda, The: Tears of the KingdomMy year was defined by a return to Hyrule, as it was for most Zelda fans. Tears of the Kingdom was released during a three-month break from work, so I went to a midnight release of Tears of the Kingdom and immediately dove (literally) into it. In a way, I regret the timing: Tears of the Kingdom was so all-consuming, I could've used those three months to play a dozen other games instead of just this one. I also felt Tears of the Kingdom had a little too much content: I spent nearly a hundred hours pursuing side quests before tackling even the second dungeon. I was too often pulled in too many directions with a laundry list of chores, with the infinite possibilities of Ultrahand adding to the sense of overwhelm. I still enjoyed Tears of the Kingdom, but at times, it felt more like an obligation than a welcome return.ElecHeadElecHead is a puzzle-platformer in the style of Celeste or Mega Man with plenty of hidden items and side quests. A few of the puzzles demanded help from online guides, but for the most part, I was tickled to explore and solve this world.Before Your EyesI backed this game on Kickstarter back when it was known as Close Your. Since it's primarily a VR game, I didn't think I'd ever get to play it — but then I found it on display in the LEVEL UP: Pixels, Play & Progress exhibition at the Atlanta Museum of Design. No one else was around, so I occupied this installation for as long as it took to play the game beginning to end. It was a beautiful, sad story that progressed through the years each time you blinked. I'd never played anything exactly like this, though if pressed, I'd say it was almost like What Remains of Edith Finch, except less horrible and surreal. The museum's exhibit closes today, but if you have your own VR rig, I recommend trying this one.Super Mario WonderI picked up the latest 2D Mario game en route to the airport and finished it across a few transatlantic flights. The Wonder Effects were a colorful way to mix up the traditional Mario formula — but with a few exceptions, I didn't find the game particularly challenging. There are a few hidden areas I've yet to discover, but I got 100% in enough worlds that I didn't feel compelled to continue exploring.Thomas Was AloneIt took me three previous false starts over the course of a decade before I finally played this game through to the end. Switching between the various playable characters wasn't as tedious as I once found it, and the narrator was an enjoyable companion throughout this brief puzzle-platformer.Ocean's HeartThis game received glowing reviews for being a 2D Zelda-like, so with A Link to the Past as one of my all-time favorites, I eagerly dove into Ocean's Heart. What a surprising disappointment! The game was buggy, the boss battles were anticlimactic (they had no build-ups and no matters, and most could be finished with just four sword swings), and the writing was lackluster (the game ends with an absent father figure saying, "I guess I have nothing left to teach you. Want to go home?" and the heroine responding, "Yeah"). Did I miss something?TRON: IdentityTRON is my favorite of Disney's franchises, and opportunities to explore the Grid are few and fare between. Unfortunately, this visual novel didn't scratch that itch, and my first playthrough left me confused about what I'd just witnesses. And the defragmentation mini-game was inscrutable — thank goodness it was also optional.The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe EditionTen years after the original's release, I finally explored this modern classic. I understood that avoiding spoilers was key to enjoying The Stanley Parable; as a result, it took me awhile to understand what the hell I was experiencing. Once I figured it out, I had a great time. (It's actually quite a bit like The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, a gamebook that was adapted into one of my favorite Switch games.) It's hard to say whether or not I actually "finished" The Stanley Parable, though. (IYKYK)Wilmot's WarehouseLaura Kate Dale was brought into my workplace as a guest speaker on neurodivergence and gender diversity. She mentioned that people with autism often enjoy repetitive tasks, so I asked her what game she could recommend that would scratch that itch. She enthusiastically recommended Wilmot's Warehouse, which I've found to be a wonderful (if stressful!) memory game about devising unique but logical organizational schemes.Unfinished (6 / -1)Oregon Trail, TheI'm of the "Oregon Trail generation" that grew up playing the original game on the Apple II. I was intrigued when a modern, more historically accurate and sensitive edition came out for Apple Arcade a few years ago, so when it was finally ported to the Switch, I grabbed it. A friend and I started a journey together but didn't get far before moving on. I may come back to it.Ink & Paper: DoodleCutThere have been few successful home adaptations of one of my favorite Taito arcade games, Qix. Ink & Paper: DoodleCut comes closest, and its a cappella soundtrack is delightful.The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Expansion PassI recorded over a hundred Let's Play videos of the base BotW game, after which I was so worn out that I never even looked at the DLC. I finally started it this year, but it amounted to little more than a series of obscure fetch quests. I thought playing BotW would prime me for the sequel, but I ended up shelving the DLC (again).BlancI love cooperative video games — and who doesn't love baby animals? Blanc is the perfect marriage of the two, and despite some occasional camera issues, my friend and I enjoyed collaborating to help this kit and fawn through a cold winter. Blanc is currently on sale for the first time ever, and my friend bought a copy, which means we can move our couch co-op online, increasing the odds we'll finish this game in 2024.Horizon Chase TurboI love Sega's OutRun, a spiritual predecessor to Horizon Chase Turbo. But this game's courses require more memorization than I expected in order to pick up the various tokens scattered throughout. I often find myself going back and replaying old courses instead of moving forward, like I'd prefer.Blossom Tales: The Sleeping KingThe sequel to this game has been on sale often enough that I felt I should finally play the original — especially since I interviewed its developer for my podcast way back in 2014! But, although I enjoy Zelda-likes, this game was too much in that vein so soon after I'd played through the disappointing Ocean's Heart. I needed a genre cleanser, so I almost immediately booted this game down, with the promise to come back when I'm ready for more Zelda action (unless I end up playing the Zelda: Oracle games that were recently released for Switch's Game Boy emulator).Evergreen (3 / +2)Puyo Puyo Tetris 2I had only the free demo version of the original game, so when the sequel went on sale, it seemed worth adding to my portfolio of party games.F-Zero 99I'm not much for playing online multiplayer games against strangers.FlipullI bought this game on sale for a quick, cheap hit of nostalgia: I grew up playing an unofficial Apple IIGS port of this Taito arcade puzzle game under the name Plotting.Abandoned (4 / +1)WandersongThe number of hours I felt I played this game is many more than my Switch reports I actually did. The story is clever with some surprising twists, but the gameplay and mechanics are too simplistic, and I sometimes found myself lost in the 2D world without a map for reference.A Little to the LeftI think a lot about organization as part of my day job, so I thought this game would appeal to that side of me. But the inscrutable and finite answers were frustrating; I wanted more freedom to come up with my own solutions. Fortunately, I later discovered Wilmot's Warehouse (see above), which gave me what I needed.AriseA wordless adventure about someone at the end of his life, reflecting on his past mistakes. I enjoyed Old Man's Journey, so why not this? Because its 3D platforming is generic and uninspired.Arkanoid Eternal BattleArkanoid is one of those Taito arcade games I always save a quarter for. I'm baffled at how badly they botched this modern sequel; it looks and plays terribly on the Switch. I never got around to trying its online multiplayer.Unplayed (16 / -19)BIT.TRIP CollectionI played all the BIT.TRIP games when they were originally released for the Wii, but their sale price was too good to not own again on Switch.Metroid Prime RemasteredThe release date of this game came and went with me neglecting to preorder it, and I was shocked to find it was sold out everywhere. Then it dawned on me: I'd missed the North American release date — but I happened to be in Hungary, where the release date was a week later! I was able to preorder the EU version during this liminal period. This makes the third time I've bought Metroid Prime; my Wii U trilogy edition is still in the shrinkwrap.Final Fantasy I-VI Pixel Remaster CollectionI bought this (expensive!) physical cart as a birthday gift for a friend… only to find out he'd already bought the digital edition. I kept it for myself, figuring it might be a good opportunity to play Final Fantasy II, III, and V for the first time.The Room TwoA silent, Lovecraftian puzzle game, the original of which I enjoyed on iPad.TimespinnerI backed the Kickstarter for this 2D Metroidvania, which earned me the PS4 version. Now I have it on Switch, too!Golf StoryI'd been eying this acclaimed sports RPG for awhile, and the combination of a coupon and a sale allowed me to net it for free. It's not high on my list to play, but I'm glad to have the option.Once Upon a JesterThe thespian in me couldn't help but pick up this silly-looking game about musical theater.Alignment ParadoxOne of the few non-Switch games on this list, this indie title was developed by one of my co-workers for Adventure Jam 2023. Obviously I'll buy a game if it's both up my alley and going to support a friend.Oxenfree IIThe original Oxenfree is the only Mac game I've ever recorded a complete Let's Play of. Although its spiritual successor, Afterparty, fell flat with me, I'll definitely give the actual sequel my time.The Making of KaratekaKarateka is originally a game for the Apple II, the computer platform I grew up with and which I now publish both a quarterly print magazine and news website about. I couldn't review the interactive documentary, The Making of Karateka, for either of those outlets, as I invested in its publisher, Digital Eclipse, through Republic.co. But I interviewed its editorial director, Chris Kohler, for the magazine, which got me a free review copy.This Way Madness LiesZeboyd Games was co-founded by Robert Boyd, with whom I used to be a sysop (or moderator) on the Video Gaming Central forum of CompuServe. I always keep an eye out for his stuff, and while my tolerance for prolonged RPGs is limited, this seven-hour investment seemed a good way to see what an old friend has been up to.Organ TailI really enjoyed this zombie spoof of the original Oregon Trail, having played it many times back when I owned an iPad mini. It's hard to believe how long ago that was — I interviewed its developer about his next game for my podcast nine years ago already.Life Is Strange 2The first Life Is Strange is one of my all-time favorite games; I fell in love with the characters and read the entire run of their comic-book series. I already have True Colors in my backlog, but I regretted that I never got to play my PS4 copy of LIS2 before I put that console into storage. Now I have it again!Vengeful Guardian: MoonriderI find the older I get, the more I enjoy 2D platformers like I used to play on the NES. The title is somewhat generic, and in hindsight, I probably paid too much for it (about $12), especially given that I have other 2D platformers in my backlog. But what's one more?FAR: Lone SailsA three-hour narrative game with an 88 Metacritic score on sale for $2? Sure!Chained EchoesMy friends T.J. and Bethany gave me strong and unsolicited recommendations for this RPG. It's one of two games I allowed myself to pick up in the holiday sale, the other being Wilmot's Warehouse.Not bought yet (10 / +3)A Highland SongStudio Ghibli's stories are hit or miss with me, but the art style is undeniably beautiful. A Highland Song is reminiscent of that, with great voice acting. I don't fully grok what the story or gameplay are about, but I'm interested enough to find out.BelowWhen Capybara Games (creators of Super Time Force) delayed this game in 2016, I lost track of it; I didn't realize until this year that it was eventually released in 2018 for Windows, PS4, and Xbox One.Planet of LanaA beautiful 2D puzzle-platformer with a much more colorful palette than Limbo or INSIDE. Alas, it's not (yet?) available for Switch.Gravity CircuitWhen I posted Gravity Circuit's sale to reddit, commenters responded by calling this Mega Man-like game one of their top retro games of all time. If I didn't have so many retro platformers in my backlog, I would've grabbed this one in a heartbeat, but while the sale price of $16.49 is fair, it's higher than my average, which gave me pauseLunarkI read about this game in Game Informer #354. Although the look is a little too heavily pixelated for my tastes, I like the Flashback/Prince of Persia-style action, and developer WayForward has a strong track record.SomervillePreviously an Xbox exclusive, this Limbo-like game came out for PS4/5 in 2023. I can either unearth my PlayStation, or I can take this precedent as reason to hope for further ports, including to the Switch.Sea of StarsBased on critics' glowing reviews, friends' recommendations, and the Game Informer cover story, I desperately want this Secret of Mana-like RPG — but I rarely spend more than $30 for a digital-only title. I passed on the holiday sale in favor of waiting for a limited physical edition in 2024. Whatever the format I just hope Sea of Stars maintains its quality from beginning to end, unlike the developers' previous title, The Messenger, which had a very strong first half before dropping off.Strayed LightsHere's a slick-looking 3D action game that I saw but did not play at PAX East. Any game with a soundtrack by Austin Wintory warrants a place on this list.Super Time ForceThe PlayStation version of this game is already eight years old — but I recently remembered it as something I played on my Xbox 360 and never finished, so I've added it here as a reminder to buy it again.Trinity FusionI got my hands on this 2D side-scrolling cybernetic action-platformer at PAX East 2023 and liked what I saw. It's out now for PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam — but not Switch.Unreleased (6 / +5)Hyper Light BreakerHyper Light Drifter is in my backlog, so I assume I'll like another game set in the same universe.Moonlight PulseI spoke with the devs at PAX East about this 2D Metroidvania set in and on a giant turtle. When I asked, "Is it turtles all the way down?", the dev just blinked and said, "No, there's only one turtle."No Longer HumanMy PAX East 2023 notes describe this as a "seizure-inducing action game", and its official website says it's being released in… 2022.Prince of Persia: The Lost CrownThe last Prince of Persia game I played was for the Apple II; I never kept up with the Sands of Time series or other assorted reboots. The 2024 installment one looks fun, though, and the recent release of Making of Karateka (a game from the same creator, Jordan Mechner) has me in the mood to check it out.The Lost WildAfter reading Game Informer's preview, I have this game in mind as a cross between Firewatch, Alien Isolation, and Dino Crisis. It's such an unexpected combination that I just have to see how it turns out.UnleavingThis game's hand-painted landscape drew me to its PAX East 2023 booth; I'd like to try my hand at this artistic game when it comes out in Q1 2023, assuming it makes its way to Switch.The post My gaming memories of 2023 first appeared on Gamebits.
Nintendo has delivered its annual Switch stats report. Like most gamers, I found my year was defined by The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Its release coincided with a three-month sabbatical from work, which afforded me so many hours to explore this iteration of Hyrule. In a way, I almost regret the timing: being off from work for that long, I could've played dozens of other games in my backlog. Instead, the completionist in me found it almost a chore to pursue every side quest I was assigned in Zelda, such that I'd sunk a hundred hours in before I finished even the second dungeon.
In preparation for this game's release, I revisited Breath of the Wild, whose DLC I'd purchased but never played. I found it an underwhelming series of fetch quests, and I didn't end up finishing most of its shrines.
The two Zeldas, sandwiched by the delightful, if unchallenging, Super Mario Wonder, were the three games in which I invested the most hours this year. Here's the full rundown.
And, because this information was present in Nintendo's interactive slideshow but not in a manner easily captured visually, here's a table charting my gameplay habits over the year:
| Month | Total Hours | Total Games | Days Played | Top Game | Hours | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Jan | 4 | 10 | 5 | Nintendo Entertainment System | 1 | | Feb | 10 | 6 | 10 | Super Arcade Racing | 5 | | Mar | 14 | 10 | 15 | The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild | 9 | | Apr | 3 | 3 | 5 | Wandersong | 2 | | May | 38 | 4 | 15 | The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom | 31 | | June | 66 | 5 | 25 | The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom | 59 | | July | 63 | 4 | 22 | The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom | 59 | | Aug | 39 | 10 | 18 | The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom | 29 | | Sep | 1 | 1 | 1 | Nintendo Entertainment System | 1 | | Oct | 15 | 8 | 10 | Super Mario Bros. Wonder | 8 | | Nov | 14 | 4 | 16 | Super Mario Bros. Wonder | 5 |
(I have no recollection of investing much time in the Nintendo Entertainment System emulator; I might've booted it up only long enough to complete the missions necessary to earn some Platinum Points.)
What's not captured in any of this data is the flurry of activity with which I ended the year, playing such great games as Wilmot's Warehouse and The Stanley Parable. I'll have more to say about those in my next post, in which I recap every game I played this year.
The post My Nintendo Switch stats for 2023 first appeared on Gamebits.
This time last year, I was fulfilling a mission: play every classic game at Funspot, the world's largest arcade.
It's done.
It took 28 consecutive daily visits, but I have now played every functional, single-player, retro game housed at the @Arcade_Museum.
"And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer." ? pic.twitter.com/EPfT4NWP8M
— Ken Gagne (@gamebits) April 16, 2022
I belatedly wrote a blog post detailing my journey, which caught the attention of WMUR, the news station out of Manchester, New Hampshire. They wanted to feature my accomplishment on Chronicle — so as soon as my three-month sabbatical from work began, I headed back to Lake Winnipesaukee to sling another round of tokens. The resulting piece aired on Tuesday, April 18, 2023.
It was a lot of fun to work with Sean McDonald and Paul Falco from WMUR, as well as to finally meet both Gary Vincent, with whom I've previously only emailed, and David Lawton, whose late father I'd met twice on the arcade floor. The Lawton family has created countless memories for me as a child, and they continue to offer Funspot as a place for new memories to be made. I'm grateful that my nomadic lifestyle allowed me not only to play every Funspot game, but to bring some well-deserved publicity to this historic and important site.
Funspot's American Classic Arcade Museum is open Monday–Friday, 12 PM–10 PM; and Saturday & Sunday, 10 AM–10 PM. A non-profit, the ACAM accepts monetary donations via PayPal.
The post Chronicle's profile of a digital nomad at Funspot first appeared on Gamebits.
As I look back on the past year of gaming, I realize that find my gaming isn't defined by what was released in any given year. As primarily a Switch gamer who often waits for games on sale, there are no big hardware or software releases that define a calendar year for me; instead, it's just a matter of which games I've made time to play.
My four software highlights in 2022 were all games that didn't come out this year. Spiritfarer took me and a friend on a journey; Hollow Knight is a tough-as-nails Metroidvania; Twelve Minutes is a disturbing time loop of a game; and Ring Fit Adventure has been my constant companion throughout the pandemic.
But there are many more games I played this year, and even more that I bought. This year, I became an even more frequent poster (and consumer) of deals on the subreddit r/NintendoSwitchDeals. Combined with Deku Deals' email alerts, I bought more games for less money this year: 53 games (nine more than last year) for $504.34 total ($55.87 less than last year), or $9.52 each ($3.21 less than last year). My YouTube channel's revenue covered all these expenses.
If I really wanted to be frugal, I'd limit myself to buying games I actually had time to play or finish. This year, I finished only eleven games, most of which weren't even released or purchased in 2022.
But I still feel okay investing in this hobby, because I'm supporting creators who make the games I want to see in the world. The only way an indie studio will get to make their second games is if we buy their first ones.
However, while I've always tracked my gaming habits across a variety of tools (mostly Excel and Trello), I've recently added You Need a Budget to the mix. The goal of YNAB isn't just to see where your money goes, but to be more conscious and intentional about those decisions. I'm curious what this will mean for my backlog's rate of growth in 2023.
I've also resumed uploading YouTube videos, for the first time in 17 months. While the day of generating thousands of views is long gone, I still enjoy producing this content and sharing my games, and it continues to produce residual income.
As is my annual tradition, here is my summary of every game I played, bought, or wanted to buy this year, as tracked on my Trello board. The parenthetical numbers represent the total for that category, followed by the change from last year. Games don't reappear on this list from previous years unless they've changed category. I've also chosen to omit any games I got for free, those being the twelve games I downloaded from No Gravity Games' "12 Games of Christmas" promotion — all games I would not have bought otherwise.
This list counts only Switch and Steam titles, but I would be remiss to overlook the dozens of hours and hundreds of games I played this spring at Funspot, home of the American Classic Arcade Museum. More than anything else in this list, I'll remember that month as a defining time in my year.
Finished (11 / +1)SpiritfarerA friend and I started this game in 2022, but since it doesn't support online multiplayer, we had to wait until we were in the same place before finally finishing it. Although some of the exploration and resource management aspects of the game got a bit tedious, it was a bittersweet story that we didn't want to see end.Swords & BonesThis game appealed to the Ghost 'n Goblins fan in me, though its short levels and lack of replayability made it quite forgettable.Twelve MinutesI was excited when this Xbox title made its way to the Switch, and despite the confined nature and lack of creative solutions, I enjoyed the trial and error of this time loop puzzle. However, its story was at times unsettling: it let you kill your wife either on accident (which I did) or on purpose (which I did not), neither of which advanced the story; however, it did require that I drug my wife and murder an unarmed, restrained man. Honestly, one of my favorite memories of this game may be reviewing it as a guest on the N-Focus podcast.Trash QuestThis short, tight Metroidvania with no narrative and a Game Boy-like palette was entertaining for the night or two it took me to finish it. A few bosses were so tough that I needed to pick up some tips from YouTube videos.Hollow KnightTrash Quest was a palate cleanser that prepared me for Hollow Knight, a seminal modern Metroidvania. It quickly became my most-played game of 2022, with 38 hours spread across 17 days. I loved the art and the story, and the customization and combinations the charms allowed for nearly infinite strategy. I could've used a bit more hand-holding in figuring out where to go and what to next, though — there were times I was utterly lost. And despite jumping through all the hoops to get the "good" ending, all I managed to achieve was access to the "true" final boss, who was hard as nails (pun intended); after all that work, I ended up settling for the "bad" ending, sigh.Wide Ocean Big JacketI picked up this indie game for less than $2. It was more of an interactive story than a game. The dialogue was sharp and felt authentic, but the art style was nearly rudimentary made it hard to feel immersed.Ring Fit AdventureFinally! After 2.5 years, 31 hours, and 8,000 calories, I finished the exercise game I picked up at the beginning of the pandemic. I hoped it would give me a reason to continue exercising, but the post-game content is weak, so my Ring is likely destined for storage.Arcade Spirits: The New ChallengersI don't always play visual novels, but when I do, they're Arcade Spirits. Both games are set in a parallel world where arcades still reign supreme. I was slightly more engaged by the plot of the first game, but both offered fun choices, diverse characters, and witty dialogue. Aenne Schumann, one of the game's two narrative designers, was the penultimate guest on my Polygamer podcast, coinciding with this sequel's release.A Memoir BlueReminiscent of Florence, another wordless, narrative-driven, female-led indie game that can be beaten in under an hour, A Memoir Blue is a mother-daughter story, which we don't often see in games. For that reason alone, it was worth a play.Kathy Rain: Director's CutI grew up on point-and-click adventures like Space Quest and Maniac Mansion. I thought it would be fun to revisit the genre, and I already had a head start from having played a bit of Kathy Rain six years ago, when I interviewed Clifftop Games' founder Joel Staaf Hästö for the IndieSider podcast. I liked how the story started, but became far more surreal than I expected. And the puzzles vacillated between very easy (with the game giving me tips before I even had a chance to try solving it on my own) and so obscure that I needed the help of GameFAQs. Overall, an uneven experience.UnpackingI've been waiting to play this chill, puzzle game about unpacking into new homes over the course of a lifetime, and I finally found time to start unpacking on Christmas night. I like the gameplay and the subtlety of the narrative, though sometimes the art leaves me unclear on what an object is or where it belongs, as demonstrated in my Let's Play.Unfinished (6/ -2)Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age – Definitive EditionI absolutely devoured Dragon Quest VIII on the PlayStation 2, devoting nearly a hundred hours to its completion. I was hesitant to start playing Dragon Quest XI, because I wasn't sure I could afford to lose myself like that again. Turns out I needn't have worried: the first few hours introduced a hackneyed plot, a lackluster battle system, and confusing options (like when and how to switch to 16-bit mode or enable/disable various optional challenges). I couldn't get into this game at all, but I'm hoping to give it a second chance.Tile FlipA silly little puzzle game, probably ported directly from Steel AssaultA run-and-gun platformer that combines elements of Contra and Bionic Commando. My Let's Play of this game was the first upload to my YouTube channel in 17 months. Alas, I have not yet finished Steel Assault, despite making it to the final boss, who is incredibly difficult!It Takes TwoA Way Out was a phenomenal PlayStation 4 game that was playable in co-op mode only. It Takes Two is a more family-friendly take from the same developer, and after playing two hours of the free demo, I was convinced to buy the full game.ZumatchFirst there was Ballistic on the original PlayStation; then there was Zuma's Revenge on Xbox 360. I was looking for more of the same in Zumatch, but this puzzle game introduces various power-ups that unnecessarily complicate the gameplay.Elevator Action -Returns- S-TributeI will always play Elevator Action whenever I see it in an arcade, so after forty years, I was ecstatic to finally play the sequel, which never made its way from Japan to American arcades. Unfortunately, the sequel is less Elevator Action and more Rolling Thunder. I like Rolling Thunder, but it's not what I wanted from this game. I recorded a Let's Play of the first three of the game's six levels; maybe I'll go back and finish it, or even play the original game that's included.Evergreen (1 / -2)Big Brain AcademyThe Wii version supported the Wiimote, which made it easy to point and click to solve various puzzles. With the Switch, I have to choose between playing on a big screen or using a touch interface, which is a compromise the Wii didn't force. Still, it's a fun puzzle game, and I like competing against the ghosts of my two friends who also play Big Brain Academy.Abandoned (3 / -1)Hammer KidThis platformer's short levels were similar to Swords & Bones' (see above), except without any real gimmick or flair. I kept waiting for it to get more complex, but it never did.Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 PlusI was into this game for awhile, but additional levels are locked, requiring superior achievement in earlier levels. The threshold of this requirement was low to start, but when I realized the final level required nearly perfect scores in all prior levels, I abandoned the goal as unattainable.Ys OriginI'd only ever played Ys III on Super NES, so I thought seeing where the series began would be fun. Sadly, this game is more like a cross between a shmup and the dreadful NES game Deadly Towers; I was utterly bored by it.Unplayed (35 / +9)Bloodstained: Ritual of the NightI think it was Christmas 2018 that I recorded my Let's Play of the original Bloodstained game, which was an excellent tribute to Castlevania III, which I've also Let's Played. I'm a sucker for these games!CrossCodeI like to think of myself as someone who loves RPGs, even if the last Final Fantasy game I finished was last millennium. Still, CrossCode came so highly recommended by Andrew Brown of the N-Focus podcast, I had to pick it up.GODS RemasteredThe last time I played this game was in a competition at Blockbuster Video. I don't remember it being a fantastic game, but for 99¢, I was willing to pick it up for the nostalgia value alone. DexThis 2D action-RPG seems to have settings and themes similar to Shadowrun, one of my favorite Super Nintendo games. It feels like it'd be better on Steam than on Switch, but at 90% off (only $2), I was willing to take a chance.INSIDEI finished Limbo and Inside on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 4, respectively; the latter even has a Let's Play series on my YouTube channel, though I alternated with someone else so played only half the levels myself. The two games were on sale for $2 each, so I thought I might replay them, this time in their entirety.XCOM 2 CollectionVandal Hearts was one of the games that sold me on getting the original PlayStation. The only tactical RPG I've enjoyed since then is Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, which I'm told is a light version of XCOM, prompting me to pick up a physical copy on sale.A Plague Tale: InnocenceWhen a co-worker suggested I could access my PlayStation 4 from afar using PS4 Remote Play, I opted to test it with a used copy of A Plague Tale from eBay. The remote experience is not everything I hoped it could be, so I've yet to play this game.Republique: Anniversary EditionRepublique was an early Kickstarter success, having met its crowdfunding goal of $500,000 over a decade ago.Goblin SwordThis looks like a pretty standard platformer with some very light RPG elements — perhaps reminiscent of Faxanadu. Worth taking a chance on for $2.Horizon Chase TurboThe Apple TV version of this game was fun; until Sega releases OutRun 3, Horizon Chase Turbo will do.HuntdownA miss old-school Contra games. Huntdown promises to continue that legacy in the over-the-top style of RoboCop.Little Nightmares IIA prequel to the original Little Nightmares, which I never played, this horror adventure game has generally favorable reviews.Ocean's HeartIt's been only two years since I played the Switch remake of Link's Awakening, and I'm already hankering for some old-school Zelda. Ocean's Heart should fit that bill.The Artful EscapeI've heard The Artful Escape described as more of an experience than a game. I like games as art — as long as it's more coherent than Kentucky Route Zero.InfernaxGosh, I just keep buying Metroidvania games! This one looks more 8-bit than most of the ones I buy, so at least I have some variety in my portfolio.Guacamelee! 2I bought the first game on Wii U; never played it. Bought it again on Switch last year; still haven't played it. But if and when I do, I'll now be ready for the sequel!Boyfriend DungeonI've heard mixed reviews of this title, such as how it's incomplete and not everything the publisher promised. But it was also nominated in the Games for Impact category of The Games Award 2021, so it must be doing something right.CartoThe game Refactor promised a game where you would piece together your environment as you explored it. That game still hasn't come out, even eight years after its Kickstarter, during which time it appears Carto has fulfilled a similar need.Death's DoorAn old friend emailed me last December: "If you get the chance check out this indie game for the Switch. I mean how often do you get to play as a crow who works as a grim reaper?" Sold.UnsightedThis title is billed as a Metroidvania, but I don't recall having ever played a game in that genre that used a top-down perspective like Zelda's. Should be an interesting mix.Endling: Extinction Is ForeverEndling is one of the few physical games I bought this year, and its tale of the wanton environmental destruction wrought by humanity aligns with my value system.EvergateEvergate looks like the platforming of Ori and the Blind Forest with the themes of Spiritfarer — what's not to love?1979 Revolution: Black FridayIt's not often enough that games are used to teach about real-life situations, people, and history. I hope this game will help fill a gap in my knowledge about the Iranian Revolution.A Boy and His BlobI have fond memories of the original NES version of this game by David Crane of Pitfall! fame. I played the remake on Wii but never finished it, as I got caught up in trying to find all the treasures to 100% each level. I bet I can shed myself of that compulsion and actually finish the game this time.Dicey DungeonsI'm not keen on the second half of the description "roguelike deck-builder" — but I was willing to take a chance when the game went on sale for under $2. Mummy Demastered, TheI had no interest in seeing the 2017 Tom Cruise film on which this game is based, but maybe it will be a fun enough Metroidvania to distinguish it from what was, by all accounts, an awful movie.Dungeon and PuzzlesThis tile-based puzzle game seems like it would be more at home on a tablet device than the Switch. But I got more play out of Warlock's Tower on Switch than on iOS, so Dungeon and Puzzles will be a fun console title, too.Magnificent Trufflepigs, TheA friend described this game as having "an air of mystery and sinister doings that won't actually exist". Sounds like Firewatch to me!Nonograms ProphecyI bought Nonograms Prophecy without even realizing it was a picross game (which I'd never heard referred to as "nonograms" before). I just figured $2 was a low barrier for entry to the aforementioned No Gravity Games holiday giveaways. Thirteen games for $2? Sure, why not? Even if this one isn't a gem, surely one of the others is.Portal Companion CollectionI already completed both Portal games on Xbox 360, but if I can find the right player two, I'd happily go through the second game again.A Winding PathHave I ever played a hand-drawn adventure game before? Well, I will!ElecHeadThis cute puzzle-platformer reminds me of the early Mega Man games. It was on my wishlist from the day Nintendo debuted it in a Direct to the day it went on sale.Master SpyYet another game I reviewed on the InsideSider podcast, way back in 2015.Grapple DogWhen I posted this sale to reddit, I was met with strong encouragement to buy Grapple Dog. "For the love of everything that's good BUY IT, one of the best indie games of this year hands down," one user strongly urged. "Cute visuals and fun writing, nice physics, and there's a lot of evolution of ideas and concepts. Also, a good amount of collectibles to grab!" wrote another. "Correctly priced. Great value. Fun to pick up and play whenever you feel like it. Honestly this is what the Switch was made for," chimed in a third. Sounds good to me.Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of HopeI finished the first game, which sets me up to enjoy the sequel. But do I need to finish the original game's DLC first? Regardless, I'm not likely to play this game anytime soon, and I know it'll likely be cheaper by the time I am — but the Cosmic Edition from Best Buy was on sale and came with a download code of the first game, which I was able to give to a friend as an early Christmas gift.Not bought yet (7 / +2)Horizon Forbidden WestAloy's debut outing was my favorite game of 2018. I would be first in line to continue her post-post-apocalyptic adventures, except as a digital nomad, I have easy access to neither a PlayStation 4 nor a PS5.TunicI wanted to play this game after hearing Jason Scott devote an entire episode of podcast to it. It wasn't originally available for Nintendo Switch, although it seemed a perfect fit for the platform. Now that it's been ported, I'm just waiting for a sale.The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe EditionThe Stanley Parable is one of those Windows games I've been hearing about since its 2013 release but have not yet had spoiled for me. It wasn't until 2022 that it became available for consoles; I look forward to finally being able to play it.TimespinnerI back this Metroidvania's Kickstarter, but the key I received was for PlayStation, predating its Switch release. Now I'll need to buy it (again) for the console I actually have available.No Place for BraveryOne reason I have this list is to remember games that piqued my interest but may nonetheless quickly be forgotten. I don't remember how I first heard of No Place for Bravery, and I had to rewatch the trailer for this top-down action-RPG as I wrote this list. It reminds me of Mark of Kri, a PlayStation 2 game I was ambivalent about — but there must be a reason I put No Place for Bravery on my list, so I'll keep an eye on it!Alan Wake RemasteredI briefly played a friend's Xbox 360 copy of the original Alan Wake over a decade ago, and it scratched the same itch as Silent Hill. Now it's finally on a Nintendo console, but it's apparently a buggy mess, resulting in a very low Metacritic score. A sale wouldn't be enough to convince me to play this version; it needs some decent patches first. I'm not optimistic.A Little to the LeftI'm neat! And this game requires things to be neat!Unreleased (1 / -2)MiegakureI should've put this game on the list ages ago, as this four-dimensional puzzler been in development since 2009. I think I may even have played it at IndieCade East one year. After all this time, it still has no release date.The post My gaming memories of 2022 first appeared on Gamebits.
Nintendo has launched their annual recap of your gaming habits — except this year's are less informative than usual. Here are mine.
Absent from this year's metrics is total number of hours played. The total number of games is present, but in an obscured fashion (mine was 43). In place of those two prominent summaries, we get… games we played on the day they came out. Mine are a free demo of Nintendo Switch Sports and a indie puzzle game called Tile Flip that I picked up for a dollar and played exactly once. Not exactly representative of my year in games. And the "3+ years of play" seems borked, as Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered released on 13 Nov 2020 — just two years and a month ago. Hardly "more than three years"!
The above cards list only my top three games; here is a list of my top seven:
- Hollow Knight: 17 days, 38 hours
- Spiritfarer: 8 days, 21 hours
- Mario Kart 8 Deluxe: 17 days, 17 hours
- RingFit Adventure: 29 days, 16 hours
- Kathy Rain: 4 days, 10 hours
- Twelve Minutes: 4 days, 7 hours
- Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered: 8 days, 6 hours
I don't have a great record of completing games, but it tracks that the ones I spent the most time with are the ones I finished: Hollow Knight, Spiritfarer, RingFit Adventure, Kathy Rain, and Twelve Minutes. I started RingFit in 2020 and Spiritfarer in 2021, so it was especially satisfying to finally close those books.
My upcoming year-end recap will list every game I played in more detail, so stay tuned!
The post My Nintendo Switch stats for 2022 first appeared on Gamebits.
My grade school's milk cartons had coupons: buy $5 of tokens at the Funspot arcade in Laconia, New Hampshire, get another $5 free. Laconia happened to be where my family and I were going on vacation that summer, so, emulating my mother, I became a coupon-clipper.
That vacation on Lake Winnipesaukee flew by, and despite my best efforts to play every game at Funspot, we still had leftover coupons — all of which would be expiring soon. I, being ever the thrifty youngster, pled with my mom to make an investment: "Let's use the coupons now, so we'll have all those free tokens when we come back next summer!"
"Oh, Ken!" my pessimistic parent replied. "You don't know what could happen between now and then. Funspot could burn to the ground!"
Despite my mother instilling in me a belief that, at any given moment, everything I hold dear could go up in flames, leaving me to sift through the ashes of my broken dreams — Funspot remains to this day.
Four decades later, we're both still here!Not only does the building still stand, but the late Bob Lawton, who founded Funspot in 1952, had the prescience to retain the same arcade games I grew up playing there in the 1980s. In 2006, years after my family had outgrown spending summer vacations together, I returned to Funspot as an adult and found it largely unchanged from my youth, with those aging machines now part of Funspot's non-profit wing, the American Classic Arcade Museum.
The late, great Bob Lawton (center)Vowing that it would not be decades again before I returned, I made Funspot into one of my many annual traditions, going there every winter with my friend Andy and every spring with my podcast co-host Sabriel, for years until I began nomading.
High scoresEarly in my nomading, as I began visiting arcades nationwide, I was inspired by Sabriel, who'd begun logging her arcade high scores. I started my own spreadsheet and prepopulated the list with every classic game at Funspot. Although I'd played most of those games before, I hadn't kept a record of my scores, resulting in most of my spreadsheet being empty. That blank canvas nagged at me — so I set out to rectify it.
I'd devoted the entire spring of 2022 to visiting my family's old vacation destinations, which I kicked off with five weeks in Laconia. My mission: play each of Funspot's classic, functional, single-player games at least once. My goal wasn't to beat my own or anyone else's high scores, but simply to play each game and make note of my accomplishment.
As a non-profit, the ACAM isn't able to keep all games operational.But I was concerned this project would be less a nerdvana and more a joyless experience. Would imposing the structure of a spreadsheet make Funspot less a diversion and more a chore? And without someone with whom to take turns at the joystick or go head-to-head, would a solo expedition be any fun?
As it turned out, lacking a second player was no concern at all. Although I sorely missed having someone to share Rampage and Marble Madness with, I also delighted in playing whatever games I wanted, whenever I wanted, for however long I wanted. I'd been enjoying the freedom and flexibility of traveling solo for years; Funspot was no different.
Gyruss is still as funny as it was when I was 12.As for making a project of my gaming, it was Sabriel, my muse, who allayed my fears. She pointed out that, without a goal in mind, regular trips to Funspot might become a pointless waste of time — a diversion from more productive pursuits. But giving myself a plan of attack also imbued me with a sense of purpose and the ambition to see it through.
As I later discovered, there was an added benefit: left to my own devices, I'd likely find myself repeatedly playing TRON, BurgerTime, Arkanoid, and little else. But playing everything meant going outside my usual repertoire, discovering gems I'd never played before (such as Kicker) or forcing myself to revisit games I'd normally avoid (like Chiller).
Playing Star Trek on April 5 — First Contact DayVisiting Funspot quickly became part of my daily routine: after work and before dinner, I'd make the ten-minute drive to the world's largest video game arcade and play for 20–60 minutes. Sometimes I'd wander the aisles, playing whichever games struck me; other times, I'd choose a theme, such as playing every racing game or every Sega title; eventually, I became even more methodical, seeking out specific games that had eluded me. But always, I allowed myself the luxury of playing games that I'd already filled in on my spreadsheet. I was in no rush to complete my goal; unlike previous trips to Funspot, which were limited to summer vacations, weekend getaways, and day trips, this time I had more than a month to enjoy myself at my own pace. It was a lovely, meandering path that balanced leisure and structure.
A row of all Taito, all the timeSometimes I shared the arcade with a children's birthday party; other times, I was the only person on the floor. I might be at the arcade when it opened on a Saturday and when it closed on a Sunday, with new games appearing and old games being moved throughout the weekend. A few friends from Massachusetts even made day trips to join me in my endeavor, providing an excuse to try Funspot's indoor mini-golf or take a break for an ice cream buffet at the nearby Kellerhaus. But always, the arcade and its games drew me back, just as it first had four decades earlier.
The price of victoryIt took me four full weeks to complete my spreadsheet and fulfill my childhood dream of playing every game at Funspot.
It's done.
It took 28 consecutive daily visits, but I have now played every functional, single-player, retro game housed at the @Arcade_Museum.
"And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer." ? pic.twitter.com/EPfT4NWP8M
— Ken Gagne (@gamebits) April 16, 2022
Or so I thought, as the next day, undeterred from my daily visits, I noticed a game I'd overlooked and which wasn't on my spreadsheet: Bandido, a 1979 arcade game by Nintendo. It proved a fitting bookend, as it was on a family vacation to Laconia in 1986, at a Papa Gino's just five miles from Funspot, that I first discovered Nintendo via their arcade version of Super Mario Bros.
Now I'd discovered not only another Nintendo game that was new to me, but so many other games I'd never played before. The cost for all these experience was minimal: $20 breaks down to 80 quarters, but at Funspot, $20 buys 125 tokens, which brings each token's value down to 16¢ — and, with the exception of pinball, every of their games is still just one token. A single $20 bill bought me at least a week of visits to the arcade, and $80 got me more than a month, making for one of the most affordable and diverse experiences I've had as a nomad… and I didn't even need milk carton coupons to make it happen.
Funspot tokens are so cheap, they literally give them away — free with every large pizza!What I'll remember most about my spring in Laconia isn't the tactile memory of playing so many different games, but the lesson of making time for self-care. So often after work, I find myself diving into hobbies and side gigs that involve commitments to others: publishing a print magazine, co-hosting a podcast, delivering online workshops. Every project advances a cause, whether it's historical preservation or social justice or my financial situation — each important, but each requiring work.
By contrast, my daily sojourn to Funspot was a commitment to myself, and I relished the cause it advanced, which was arbitrary and selfish. There's no excuse for being selfish in a way that harms or neglects others; yet often we're made to feel guilty even for being the kind of selfish that harms no one yet benefits ourselves. As a result, our own self-care often goes neglected.
But every day this spring, I had an excuse to leave work on time, disconnect from the Internet, and focus on being present at Funspot. My podcasts, my magazines, and my workshops would all still be there when I got home an hour later. In the meantime, I got to explore dozens of virtual worlds, rediscovering a piece of myself in each — one token at a time.
The post A daily journey through Funspot first appeared on Gamebits.
The games I bought, played, finished, and will best remember.
The post My gaming memories of 2021 first appeared on Gamebits.
Nintendo is now offering players their annual Switch stats, offering insights into favorite games, modes of play, and hours invested. Whereas my metrics last year were wholly representative of life in a pandemic, this year, with vaccines and a booster, I was able to spend less of it in isolation, resulting in a dip in […]
The post My Nintendo Switch stats for 2021 first appeared on Gamebits.
The games I bought, played, finished, and will best remember.
The post My gaming memories of 2020 first appeared on Gamebits.
This year marked my first year as a digital nomad, which deprived me of any consoles that require a television. And the pandemic deprived me of many other activities, such as dancing and storytelling events. I knew these factors would combine to result in more Switch time — but I didn't realize just how much […]
The post My Nintendo Switch stats for 2020 first appeared on Gamebits.
Revisiting a classic NES RPG
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Three objects in particular were almost painful to give away due to their value and rarity.
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How do parents make time for games — and for themselves?
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The games I bought, played, finished, and will best remember.
The post My gaming memories of 2019 first appeared on Gamebits.
Home of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games
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Wow -- I played a lot of Nintendo Switch games in 2019! Here are my statistics, including hours played and points earned, as well as how you can get your stats.
The post My Nintendo Switch stats for 2019 first appeared on Gamebits.