Well the con summer 2026 is over for me so let's get some thoughts out on everything in one go. Confuzzled 2026 (photo by Stormfloof) Confuzzled is the old reliable. I've been attending the convention almost annually since 2009 (only missing a couple of years in between) and the con has been in its current venue for a good 14 years now, and outside a few minor tweaks along the years as its grown to accommodate bigger crowds, it has largely remained the same for its duration in the current…
Recently I was sharing stories with a local acquaintance, and she asked to see a photo of my scooter.“Whaaaa!” she exclaimed, as I found one on my phone.“You’re a bā jiā jiǔ! [Pause…] Do you know bā jiā jiǔ?”Indeed, I do know bā jiā jiǔ. But I was surprised she said that. Because bā jiā jiǔ is Taiwanese slang for “gangster”…8+9In Mandarin Chinese:Eight is pronounced bāPlus is pronounced jiāNine is pronounced jiǔSo bā jiā jiǔ literally means “8+9”. But how does it also mean “gangster”?The term…
The first recording today is Pokemon: Battle Frontier – Strategy Tomorrow – Comedy Tonight. Ash and friends meet Audrey, and her Chatot, who repeats everything people say. She shows them how they’re going to do Pokemon stand-up comedy. Naturally, Team Rocket try to steal it. They get blasted off quite quickly. Audrey’s problem is that every time she tries to travel to where she’s going to perform, Chatot flies off, and doesn’t return for a long time. It does it again, and they follow. They find…
My new game is an endless race in the sky inspired by 90’s 3D racing games like sky roads, marble madness, and sonic 3d. This was for a competition where the size was limited to only 1024 bytes of JavaScript, a very small amount of space! My vision was to create a dreamlike experience with […]
Cat + Gamerby Wataru NadataniGenres: Manga Pages: 186 Series: Cat + Gamer #1 Rating: Synopsis: Riko, a twenty-nine-year-old office worker with an obsession for video games, finds her quiet life upended when she takes in a stray cat in this adorable manga series! Her coworkers can’t quite figure her out—she never talks about her personal life, she never works overtime, and she never joins them for happy hour. Is she antisocial? Nope, she’s rushing home to play video games! One day, a stray cat…
Voyage of the Marigold, my StarTrek-esque game of commanding a starship on a dangerous mission, is now available on Itch.io. There are no updates to the game itself, and the...
Say one thing for Carl Chudyk, he’s always swinging for the fences. His latest, Chess Joker, is full of wonderful ideas. At its most basic: what if we took the game-altering jokers from Balatro, say half a thousand of them, and transformed Chess, that ancient game of strategy and discipline, into a cast-iron bathtub filled with jelly beans and marmalade and one or two razor blades just for fun. At its best, Chess Joker lives up to that promise. The problem is that it isn’t often at its best.…
Long awaited by absolutely no one Project Diva Mega Mix review
I'm finally ready to check out the last of the four action figures I picked up from Fresh Monkey Fiction & Big Bad Workshop's The Order of the Crimson Moon line: Wolfsbane! Who is Wolfsbane? He's a mercenary who supplies weapons and provides knowledge on arcane magic to the Order of the Crimson Moon. He's a cool arms dealer sporting black leather with red highlights, metal hands, and wrist mounted weaponry. Oh, and he comes with an alternate robotic head. Hey, wait a minute... this guy sounds…
Although I’ve bought some digital titles on PC (via Steam, GoG and other stores) and a few titles on a very old PS Vita, starting with my PlayStation 4 Pro, I decided to only purchase games on physical discs. Same with my Switch and PlayStation 5. Last year I purchased Hogwarts Legacy for the PS5 and was horrified, after playing the introduction, that an Internet connection was required to download the actual game. It was clearly written on the box. I had missed it, and now I could no longer…
ICE TERROR MR. FREEZE BATMAN & ROBIN (KENNER) When the first Batman movie came out in 1989, they just had the one villain, but by Returns, they’d decided they needed to up the stakes with two, which was kept for Forever. By the time of Batman & Robin, it was apparently just not frantic enough, so they upped it to three villains, all of them classically unrelated. In a movie featuring Bane, a tall, imposing, muscular villain with a notable accent, Arnold Schwarzenegger was cast as Mr Freeze,…
Classic investigation boards appears in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (Headfirst Productions/Bethesda Softworks, 2006). ▲ Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (Headfirst Productions/Bethesda Softworks, 2006) ▲ Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (Headfirst Productions/Bethesda Softworks, 2006) ▲ Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (Headfirst Productions/Bethesda Softworks, 2006)
A mysterious maze Developer: MIA Publisher: MIA Release Year: 1983 Available On: MSX Genre: Maze Game Man, this is one mysterious game if I do say so myself! It was only released for the MSX in Japan, there’s barely any information about it on the internet, and it sure hasn’t been re-released at any point either. Heck, not only is it missing a fleshed out RetroAchievements page and set, it didn’t even have a single person who claimed it as “played” on Backloggd until I came around! It’s a good…
Donny has an exclusive interview with Carl Critchlow to unveil his latest work for The Hobbit's Witch-king, Bringer of Ruin The post Witch-king, Bringer of Ruin by Carl Critchlow appeared first on Hipsters of the Coast.
The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot…. A recent Retronauts episode looked back upon the history of Buckner and Garcia’s 45-year-old video game novelty song Pac-Man Fever. Host Drew Mackie also runs Thrilling Tales of Old Video…
The setup for Dungeon Module B4: The Lost City is as follows:The player characters are traveling with a desert caravan when a sandstorm separates them and causes them to become lost. They wander the desert for days. Their mounts die, and they drink all of their water and eat all of their food. They stumble upon a ruined city with a pyramid at its center. An open door leads inside. With no provisions and nowhere else to go, the party has no choice but to enter.This is a pretty good setup for a…
Dirty Work is a party game from Thailand. This is a simultaneous action selection game, and it is very much about guessing your opponents’ intentions. You are all miners mining gold, contributing to a stash of gold, one nugget at a time. Sooner or later someone will be tempted to steal from the stash. However such thieves can be caught by miners who decide to play guard. So these are the
In the days when the Masters had passed and the Long Quiet had fallen upon all the Caverns of the Galchutt, still within the deepest clefts of the earth there labored the truest of their servitors. Within the depths of Eurl-kallat Dath – the Cavern of Dripping Darkness – the Shepherd of Malignancy tended the vile works which had been left to his care. This slim volume – bound in a white volume sheened with a silver-grey which is slick and greasy to the touch – tells the legend of the “youngest…
I read Joel's post today about how he keeps track of his gaming. I love reading about how other people go about time tracking, and his methods are completely different to mine. It inspired me to think about how I use and visualise the data that I collect every day. I use it for my week notes, it gets loaded in Exist and correlations are drawn. I never really 'look' at it though. So I created a calendar for 2026! The game shown on the each date is the most played game for that day, with a…
This post was first promised in early 2024[0]Pongwars on the C64, @Two9A, Feb 22nd 2024, but it got so long, I added a table of contents. That might be a first... Introduction Before we get started Digression: Building a C64 disk image The game loop: Movement calculations Digression the second: Representing negative numbers After movement comes positioning An element of chance The playing field Keeping score Digression the third: Binary long division Rendering the score Future considerations…
My first Colorforms kit showed up when I was four or five years old, and I fell for it completely. The pieces were reusable, and the sets were affordable, which mattered a lot in a house where new toys could be kind of rare. This was years before computers and electronics filled every room, so a bag of sticky vinyl shapes felt like something close to magic to me. Of course at the time I never thought much about where they came from, and I decided to dive into their history.Colorforms began as a…
Continuing with the Star Wars-ish theme as we move into July and Dave Stone’s Season of Scenery 2026, I’ve got a whole bunch of printed computer consoles painted in a “Star Wars Imperial” style. I was inspired to print and paint these by watching through Chris Peach aka “Peachy”‘s series of YouTube videos showing the start of a Star Wars-Themed Five Parsecs from Home campaign, titled “The Rambolorian” and seeing some of the terrain he was using. Sablebadger, aka Brander Roullett has a fair few…
G’day, Ive been calling this ww2 project of mine bolt action ‘48 because its mostly based on warlord games minis. Plus my setting was 1948, as in the war had continued on and not ended in ‘45, buuuut as I’m using homebrew rules I’m thinking a name change is in order. Any suggestions? The other day I finished 3 Sherman tanks in preparation for game 2 of the campaign I’m running with Big Waz. I really enjoy painting tanks. Fury Carrie IT They complete my allied armoured column for the game. Fury…
Thanks to Csaba Virág, we’ve learned of two more pieces of Commodore Plus/4 software that have thankfully been preserved. Dino Daddy is an English language learning program where players translate words, whilst Matek Robi is an educational mathematics title. Both programs were provided by Imre Lóránth and digitally preserved by László Bozsó. Interestingly, the software was written by the same author behind the commercially released Rabló Rulett, though it isn’t currently known if either…
I've been on a little bit of a cyberpunk kick lately. I go through phases with media. When I enjoy something, I tend to disappear down the rabbit hole for a while searching for similar things in that space. After recently enjoying Black Rain (1989), restarting Cyberpunk 2077 and then re-watching Blade Runner 2049 for what must be the fifth time, I remembered there was a modern release of the classic 1997 Blade Runner PC game. Definitely all cyberpunk (or in Black Rain's case,…
An iconic spear-throwing device likely wasn’t used by prehistoric hunters until around 10,000 years ago A much favored idea refuted?
The Kejap Food Game is not available for sale. You can get this as a free gift if you visit Kejap Food (a Malaysian fast food chain) and buy MYR 30 or more of food. While stocks last, of course. This is a simple, real-time game that is played in five minutes. It is a cooperative game. You work together to serve as many customers as you can within the time limit. Before a game starts,
From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 91-92: After losing sight of the Resolution among the Antarctic icebergs, Captain Furneaux had sailed the Adventure to Tasmania, a large island about 150 miles south of Australia which the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had sighted and visited in 1642. The French had landed there in 1772, but the Adventure was the first British ship to anchor. For a few days they…
This is a review and preview of two incremental games, Progress Racer RPG and Maktala. Played with a retail key and demo build, respectively.
This comic was originally funded by members of my Patreon, to whom I am endlessly grateful. If you like it and want to see more, why not become a member yourself? The post Greebo Chapter 6: Showdown, Part 1 appeared first on Other Strangeness — merritt k.
