Well then! It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. I think I said this in the last one because I am currently not doing them on a regular basis, but this is probably missing a ton of stuff and some of these are a little bit older. Although maybe these shorter roundups are better? I’ll probably also have things from the last two weeks popping up in the next roundup. Sorry about that. Second, fuck terfs. Just the worst people.

The links!

Jolt Country is doing great review of older games, like this one on Adventure Construction Set.

A new blog appears! Read schledorn talk about the classic game Descent

Have a graph of all the Myst cards

Renga in Blue covers the obscure Interact computer made in Michigan through the text adventure games The Troll Hole Adventure and The Mysterious Mansion Adventure

Another new blog! This one is by the creator of Narrat and she put together a list of interesting game resources

A remaster of BioMenace has been announced! This post goes into the background on how that happened

Not a blog post but Benj Edwards wrote about the game dev Bill Williams, who made some of the most fascinating Amiga games. Although this article is focused on his non-Amiga game Salmon Run.

Seed of Worlds does better ttrpg blog roundups than I ever could

Ah jeez, I think I’m coming down with a cold. Or I feel like crap because I haven’t slept well over the past few days (my own dumbass fault). So I guess we’ll see tomorrow how I’m doing. It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these and it’s going to probably be missing a lot of stuff from the last week or two because things were a mess for a moment. But I like doing these because I get very excited about the internet existing outside a handful of social media websites and Discord.

Video Games

I never even heard of this Virtua Fighter game for the Game Gear.

Misty talks about an extremely Canadian trucking game.

There’s a new video game newsletter by Christian Donlan, Florence Smith Nicholls and Keith Stuart.

Have a primer for developing for the Playdate.

I’m sad about Myst developers Cyan being hit with layoffs. Andrew Plotkin talks about the developer’s history and how it’s definitely not the worst shape they’ve been in.

Music

I’m a huge fan of good radio stations so I appreciate this post from Yaffle recommending some to listen to.

Technology

Adam writes about bookmarklets

Here’s a guide to getting started in open source

Michigan

I love this history of the name of a hill in southeast Michigan.

The director of the Ann Arbor District Library writes about what the IMLS does.

Not a whole lot to say this week. Blogs are good and this week is very retro games and tech focused. Maybe you’ll find something new to add to your RSS feed reader.

Video Games

I don’t think I’ve mentioned Wes Fenlon’s Read Only Memo newsletter but it’s good stuff. Primarily focused on emulation, this week is about Nintendo once again going after emulators.

RetroStreamers.com reviews the new Amiga roguelike Roguecraft. I also just like the streams these folks do.

Leaded Solder makes a new game for the Famicom using Nintendo Family Basic.

Ephemeral Enigmas reviews the wild PS2 game TVDJ.

I didn’t know there was a blog about the Hugo IF standard library but here we are. This post is about Hugo file limits.

As everyone knows, I will take any excuse to post about Myst Online. The community recently had a contest to build to fan Ages in the game and here are the results.

I will also take any excuse to post about Golfshrine Online, a site dedicated to golf video games. I hate the real sport of golf but enjoy the video games. The most recent post is about getting Links: Flying to Phoenix – the Japanese PC release of Links LS 1999.

Nadia Nova, creator of adult games like Slime Feet, made a tutorial for getting started making VNs.

RoJo Aventuras is a great adventure games blog in Spanish and I appreciate this review of the newest chapter in the Stellar Mess series.

Not a blog but for whatever reason I get excited whenever a game dev posts a recipe (cmon, consider it) and liked this bluesky post of John Romero’s enchilada sauce recipe.

Technology

I never thought about how you could have a bot follow RSS feeds in Discord and post in a channel when a new post came up.

Computer Chronicles Revisited is back! The blog is a review of the classic technology show from the 80’s and 90’s.

Will Smith praises Fastmail and I have to agree. There’s probably a longer post in me about why moving from Gmail to Fastmail is great even though you have to pay for it, but I don’t think it costs that much, Fastmail has a lot of nice features Gmail doesn’t, the client is indeed fast, and also just not seeing ads in your email client is nice too.

I follow multiple personal blogs where people like to talk about their bikes and I just think that’s a lot of fun. So here’s one where someone talks about converting their bike to a cargo EBike.

Comics

I didn’t know David Petersen, creator of Mouse Guard, had a blog but now I do. So have some Mouse Guard cover art.

Photography

Have some nice photography from The Works of Egan and Renkon.

That’s it for this week. Have a nice Sunday!

I’m annoyed! Inoreader has introduced an AI Summary tool to their RSS feed reader! Why would anyone want that? People who follow blogs are reading nerds. Anyway, you should still add this blog and others to your RSS feed reader of choice, but now I’m looking for one that can synch what I’ve read but isn’t Feedly and Inoreader. If you have any recommendations, drop them in the comments

Chuck Jordan is spending a month only using his blog to post and taking a short break from Bluesky/Mastodon/etc. This sounds really nice and I’m strongly considering doing it for April. I encourage you all to join me. Not for any sort of moral reason, I just don’t want to miss out on good posts on social media.

This blog post on affirmations is how I learned about the IndieWeb Carnival, which seems to be a group that gives prompts on a blog post each month.

Video Games

Renga In Blue writes about a computer shop that had a game publishing business as a spin-off and their game The Colonel’s House.

Wraithkal continues doing very nice #ScreenshotSaturday posts for folks on Mastodon

Macintosh shareware developer John Calhoun writes about the shareware dev that inspired him, Duane Blehm. The developer passed away before John could even send him money for his shareware in the 80s so this post has John trying to learn what he can about Duane’s life from the materials that still exist.

Adrian Hon wrote a eulogy for Urban Dead, a MMO that ran for 20 years but is shutting down now because of new laws in the UK. While I haven’t played the game in many years, I’m always sad to see a MMO shutdown, especially when it was running just fine before the new laws came into effect.

WildWeasel of The Golf Shrine now has a blog. I liked this post about Daikatana and how it’s not too bad once you install the patches and get past the first few levels.

Rob writes a very short post about how if smaller, more focused games are the solution to the games industry’s problems.

Did you know The CRPG Addict is still plugging away at playing every crpg in order? They just played the German rpg Die Prüfung (1993).

Not a blog post but Damiano Gerli has a great thread on semi-obscure Spanish games.

Writing

Thom Cote has a short story on Neocities about worm tunnels.

The Lunar Flaneur has a post about dreaming about an anthology in their sleep and then putting it together.

Did you know that some of the folks from 90s pc game developer Dreamforge Intertainment started a sci-fi magazine a few years ago called Dreamforge? They just redid their site and you can read all the stories and poetry here.

TTRPGs

Seed of Worlds is doing better ttrpg blog roundups than I could ever do.

Music

My friend Erik just played music at monthly Enter the Void show in Minnesota. Check out the post for more info and neat noisy music.

Photography

Have some nice pictures of the Frederik Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I’ve been to Grand Rapids many times but still haven’t been here yet.

Dev Logs

Lunar Division talks about developing Amberspire.

localthunk posts Balatro’s dev timeline.

Megan Carnes writes about creating music for every tarot card.

An explanation of how Eldritch 2’s save files work compared to the first game.

Farfama talks about TO:RI Development. The game looks beautiful!

Technology

The Works of Egan explains why you should start a blog. Obviously I will endorse that.

Chuck Jordan endorses the Reeder app for RSS feeds on Apple devices.

A day late and I still need to do an indie game roundup (I might just skip last week and put it all into this Friday’s post?) but here’s some more posts I enjoyed reading this week.

I really think other folks do the whole roundup things a lot better and it’s how I discover a lot of new blogs and other neat things, so here are some by videodante, Emily Price, The Works of Egan, Sweetfish, katey, and Aura. You should do one too!

Video Games

Steam Next Fest ends today, so this would have been more useful if I made this roundup yesterday, but maybe you’ll still find some games to add to your wishlist in these Next Fest roundups by startmenu, Indie Hell Zone, Adventure Game Hotspot, and Buried Treasure.

Emily Price reviews Misericorde Volume 2: White Wool and Snow for Unwinnable, which means I have just added the first game to my wishlist.

Not a blog post and you probably already saw it elsewhere, but EA has uploaded the full source code for Command & Conquer, C&C Red Alert, C&C Renegade, and C&C Generals + Zero Hour to Github. Hopefully it’s the beginning of a trend.

It sounds like a previously unreleased C64 game, the Scramble-like Magnum Force, has been found.

The dev of Balatro now has a blog!

Speaking of Balatro, damien has modded Balatro on the PC to have touch controls.

Not a blog post but I really liked this interview that the Space Quest Historian and Richard Cobbett did with Aaron Conners and writing the Tex Murphy games AND novelizations, which I’ve heard are sometimes better than the games.

Florence Smith Nicholls talks about the wild combination of karaoke, games crit, and games preservation in You don’t see me at the club? Well I don’t see you in the 2006 MMO Wurm Online. Since I talk about Myst Online to the point of me sounding like I’m shitposting (I’m not), I fully endorse this.

Someone wrote about the world-building in Riven: The Sequel to Myst, so of course I have to include it.

And then finally, because I’m never not on my Myst Online bullshit, did you know that the game is still online, available for free, and folks have monthly meetings in them? Here are the meeting notes for last Saturday’s All Guilds Meeting, where they discussed things like making new Myst Online content, the Mysterium convention, and upcoming events like making a dutch baby.

TTRPGs

We got a new ttrpg newsletter! This one is Carouse, Carouse! and written by a collective of folks.

Clayton talks about designing a community.

Technology

Probably preaching to the choir a bit with this one but I liked reading about Why Personal Sites Matter More Than Ever.

Will Smith from Tested talks about the end of support for Windows 10 and what you can do with your old computer if it can’t do the update to 11.

Other Bits

I can’t stop thinking about this Grape-Nuts ad

A new issue of ALOCASIA is here! It’s a free journal of queer plant-based writing.

If there’s something we can all agree on, it’s that 2025 is The Year of the Blog. V Buckenham is saying it and Robert Yang is saying it, so here is another roundup of blog links. If you find anything you enjoy, be sure to subscribe to their sites with your RSS feed reader so you can catch further updates.

Video Games

Voting on the MAGS adventure game jams is now open. Even if you don’t have an interest in voting, Wraithkal’s link is a nice little roundup of point-and-click adventure games made in jams that you may have missed.

Aysha U. Farah has a new buttondown newsletter and writes Alan Wake 2 Knows Writers are Weird Little Freaks.

Jolt Country writes about the shareware classic Abuse.

There was a new Ink console announced that sounds like a disaster to me but smarter people like Andrew Plotkin and V Buckenham have already posted about it.

Atari Archive goes into the history of the Superman game from 1979.

Rob asks Who Gets To Sonic Meme?, a reference to the meme featuring Sonic saying they want shorter games with worse graphics made by people paid more to work less.

RetroStreamers reviews one of my favorite modern ZX Spectrum games Last Train to Tranz-Central.

TTRPGs

Jeff Stormer from the ttrpg podcast Party of One has thoughts about Actual Play as nonfiction.

Music

Nat Clayton writes about her favorite music of 2024.

Dev Logs

.plan updates are back and on erysdren’s blog.

Harris Powell-Smith talks about how they write their Choice of Games interactive fiction.

Tech

Will Smith (not the actor) declares email bankruptcy and endorses fastmail (I love fastmail too).

Izzy keeps making updates to the blogging tool Bimbo.

I haven’t used it yet but Rewild, a tool for hosting a site from your own computer, sounds interesting.

Poetry

A new issue of Beestung is out! It’s a poetry magazine for non-binary writers and I think it’s fucking great.

Not Blog Posts But

I liked reading about the early history of MMORPGs in Brazil.

A retro gamer YouTuber uploaded a Wolfenstein 3D video but it’s mostly about how Elon Musk is a Nazi.

This week is almost going to be more of a blog roundup slush pile because I’m behind on my rss feed reader and wanted to get something out there so it doesn’t become a gigantic post when I finally get caught up. So enjoy some blog posts that maybe be older than a week. I think that’s fine.

All the cool kids are doing roundups of things they like these days! Here are some by Yaffle, tallywinkle, and Aura. Join them!

I said in the last blog roundup that I get really excited about game devs posting recipes, so here’s one by Julia Minamata for her mom’s thumbprint cookies. There’s also lots of updates about her great point-and-click adventure The Crimson Diamond.

Not a blog post but my kids loved this WebGL fluid simulation. It works great on mobile too!

Creeping for Scale Models has a place where people can anonymously send confessions about their hobbies.

It’s an older post from a year ago, but I really like this one about how web3 propaganda wants you to think the internet was only a place where people read websites those first 10 years.

Video Games

Good Old Days reviews the Perry Mason text adventure.

Indie Games+ reviews Core Trials, a bullet hell that uses your phone or computer’s camera.

Renga in Blue plays the 1982 interactive fiction game Arkenstone.

People are still making Mario Maker levels!

Not a blog post but Kritiqal continues to have great interviews with indie game devs on their podcast. This time it’s two members of the indie game studio, Mortally Moonstruck Games, developers of Mushroom Musume.

Robert Yang presents The Sportslike Manifesto, arguing for new ways of making sports games.

Laura Michet has a post about making money as an independent game dev.

Atari Archive goes into the 1979 Atari game Miniature Golf. I don’t think I’ve actually mentioned this site on here before but I’m a big fan of Atari Archive’s videos and Kevin’s book of the same name.

Adam Le Doux of Bitsy fame has made the classic game Snake as a bookmarklet.

TTRPGs

Elf-wise has a post on how to play B/X compatible adventures for smaller groups of D&D 4th Edition players.

Cameron Kunzelman talks about Cyberpunk 2020’s Lifepath Generator.

Dev Logs

Ron Gilbert (Monkey Island, Putt-Putt) announces his newest game Death by Scrolling.

Robin talks about Building The Roottrees are Dead.

I’ve been enjoying the weekly updates on Eldritch 2.

Cutestpatoot talks about the process of making Seven Kisses, a card based RPG/card game.

Harris Powell-Smith announces their next interactive fiction game The Earth Has Teeth.

Not Blog Posts

It’s a bit older but I really liked Alice Bell’s article Can a Steam profile be a real memorial for a lost life? Getting older means you have more digital artifacts in your life from people that are no longer with us and I have a lot of feelings about that.

The Museum of Screens has a little essay made in Downpour about why you should try the game making tool Downpour.

I actually thought about doing one final roundup but then someone said they liked these so I’m being pulled back in. I might do them on a regular basis but have smaller posts so it feels less like a job and more like I’m just posting again, which is why I like having a blog.

As usual, if you enjoy these then add the site to your RSS feed reader. Social media networks come and go but RSS will never die! I use Inoreader and that is easy and free to use, and syncs across all your devices. If it ever gets bought by a billionaire I can just export all my feeds to something else. If you have a blog, do your own roundups. Search engines suck now from all the AI slop and people do look at these roundups if you want to help people discover interesting writing.

Here are this week’s links

Florence Smith Nicholls has a great post about archaeology in games.

Aura wrote a guide to submitting your games to MobyGames. Consider doing this if you aren’t already. I’ll admit to being vain enough that I like seeing my name pop up under more titles. But I think it’s also good for games preservation to have all these little indie games documented. I think there’s a bigger post in me about why I think you should do this over IGDB, which is used for Twitch and Backloggd, but it mostly comes down to: If you’re concerned that people are going to review bomb your experimental, queer indie game, no one uses the rating functionality anymore on MobyGames. Everyone that still looks at MobyGames is old now, which includes myself, and no longer has the energy to care. Still seems to be a thing on Backloggd though, which is a site that can fall into the ocean.

Misty De Méo wrote an article for Indie Tsushin way back in December that I don’t think I ever mentioned. This one is about 1994 Mac stray dog survival game Rodem the Wild.

Misty also wrote a post cd-rom preservation on The Future is Now.

Interactive fiction author Robb Sherwin has been doing a lot of fun game reviews on their blog. The most recent is NHL ’96.

Jay Tholen of Hypnospace Outlaw fame wrote about making games in the early 2000’s.

Dungeonsweeper has been one of my favorite games lately and Josh Grams has a fun post breaking down the thought process that goes into playing a round of the game.

Issue 2 of the Spooky Tomb Of Videogames is here. Highly recommended if you like my indie game roundups, because I basically copied the original form of those and did a worse job. If you want to know how much talking about small indie games matters, I originally found out about the game 3D Don’t Die Mr. Robot from Rob. Fell in love with the game and started talking about how great it was, which then led to my friend Ben picking up the game, getting really into it, and talking about it on his adventure games podcast Quest Quest (where else would you talk about an arcade game?). It’s like a little chain reaction, much like the ones you set off in 3D Don’t Die Mr. Robot.

After Yochai was basically harassed off Bluesky for pointless ttrpg discourse, he made a post about how it’s time to bring back forums. I think everyone who knows me is not surprised at all that I endorse this post. But like I said earlier, social media networks come and go and can get bought by shitty billionaires, and I think forums are a tiny bit safer. Or at least, having a lot of little sites is probably better for a healthy internet than 3 big websites, and I don’t trust Bluesky at all, sorry.

Amiga Boing Boing is ending its blog by the end of the year and is looking for a new person to run it. Are you an Amiga nerd with lots of time? Maybe you should consider taking over.

Chuck Jordan posted a recipe for vegetarian chili that looks very nice. I like when game developers post recipes because then I can say I’m a fan of their work on Curse of Monkey Island, Sam & Max season 3, and vegetarian chili recipe. I don’t think I have any recipes on me that I made up but if you do, consider sharing it.

Well, that does it for this week. I suppose that wasn’t so bad. I guess don’t have to do a big organized thing every week like Critical Distance does. Unless people started giving me as much money as their patreon pulls in. Man, that would be nice.

Yeah idk, I’d rather write this than watch the news today. This one will be long since it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these but it should be more reasonable in the future. As usual, my hope for these is that you find new stuff to add to your RSS feed reader (I use Inoreader) and that you consider doing your own blog roundups if you have a site and encourage other to use RSS, since social media and Google Search are disasters now.

Video Games

Bobbins’ Olde Tomb of Videogames is back! Please subscribe to this one. Rob regularly highlights great indie games that I’ve never heard of.

A lot of folks were doing GOTY stuff, including Gamers with Glasses, The Indie TTRPG Newsletter, Ars Technica, Indie Game Reading Club, Ephemeral Enigmas, Chris Schilling (it mentions Domino Club!), and this thread by Wurm Fud.

Andrew Plotkin made a version of Zork that displays the game’s code and annotations as you play.

Here’s a post on how to play the weird official Half-Life arcade game Half-Life 2 Survivor on your Steam Deck.

Into the Spine had a post where each writer, all 102, recommended a game. It features a recommendation by Emily Price for one of the games in the anthology I helped with!

I can’t remember if I mentioned Press Play Gaming nominating my anthology for best anthology, but I’m bringing it up again baby!

Swanchime writes about their issues with the indie dev scene.

Farfama writes about making games for an audience of 1.

Tabletop RPGs

Kieron Gillen and Jim Rossignol have launched a site for their ttrpg blog posts called Old Men Running the World.

Seedling Games talks about What Is a Zine?

Have a D10 table of Dead Adventurers

Playful Void publishes The Zungeon Manifesto

Florence Smith Nicholls talks about LARPs and prompt engineering for people, not AI.

Dev Logs

Dave Snider, of Giant Bomb fame, has announced a new tabletop rpg project that you can follow on his site and newsletter

Exodrifter talks about finances as an indie game developer.

Em Reed talks about their future plans and favorite things in 2024.

Eric’s Edge talks about making a game in Hypercard

Technology

Greg Pak talks about why you should make a personal website and how to get started.

Benj Edwards talks about his hopes for computers going forward such as users moving away from DRM and subscriptions and a push to make computers more personal again.

Wyx talks about how to put your music on Neocities

Joe Siegler talks about what matters the most, the weird Doctor Who blu-rays in the United States.

Other

Molly White recommends volunteering at your library and recommends some sci-fi books.

Not Blog Posts But:

Someone actually talks about how adventure games have been doing well for quite a while now.

PC Gamer continues to highlight 5 lesser known games every week.