It’s FunFactor Fuuuuuuuuuesday! It’s @funfactorpod.com’s first shake at @gameinformer.com, a mag Ty and I had little experience with. And then...Carnage Heart. It was Ty's bizarre obsession, I’d never heard of it, and it was (and is) one of the most unusual, tough-to-talk-about games of all time.

Experimental post: The Inevitable March of Time From the moment of this post, Super Mario Bros. is now closer to World War II than it is to the present day.

Time is a circle.

Been looking at the next podcasts to RSS up. Yeah, tons of people want everything from 1UP, but it'd be a missed opportunity if I didn't interleave the popular with the delightfully obscure.

Some day Nintendo fans will understand that Nintendo treats its universes as piles of beloved music and iconography to be remixed and recontextualized into fun new games and not an interconnected linear narrative linked by causality But it is not this day

"If you claim difficulty is sacred, remember that its earliest form was capitalist exploitation wrapped in machismo. There's no artistry here, just economics." Another banger article from Alli, and something I've discussed from time to time, too, with regard to clue books and hint lines.

believe it or not, there was a time on the internet where it did not feel like you were constantly getting clonked on the head with hammers. there were problems, sure. but the concussion symptoms were way, way lower, on average.

One neat thing with PSM is that they showed some of the design process and highlighted the artist responsible for the cover. In an era of game mag covers dominated by renders, PSM's illustrated covers definitely stand out.

I recently became fascinated with the Dove Foundation, a non-profit that, once upon a time ~25 years ago, reviewed video games based on their suitability for Christian families Here is, as far as I can tell, a complete list of all 77 games that received the Dove Seal of Approval

Podcasting is now twenty years old. And that means shows that ran for years are now just a bunch of URLs that resolve to nothing. Sometimes, someone uploads a full set of mp3s to archive.org, and that’s great! But you can’t easily listen the same way as your other podcasts. What if you could? 🧵

I keep this Kongregate image around as a reminder of how easily huge chunks of the video game scene can vanish without a trace. Similarly, ゲームアツマール (kinda like Japan's Newgrounds, but based on RPG Maker) died in 2023 without a single note on Western media... how many die without us even knowing?

I really liked it when my electronics tried to do the one thing they were made for, well, instead of being an attack vector for ads/data scraping.

At long last, the DVD version of the infamous bus commercial for Pokémon Red and Blue is online in high-quality! www.resetera.com/threads/13...

NEW VIDEO - i played the 2nd best metroidvania released on the 4th september 2025 www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAud...

Instead of saying something released for PC, I like to say it came out on The Computer

i think one of my favorite pointless things i've learned about recently is that they changed the signs that say "BIRDLAND" in arcade super hang-on to say "BIRD BIRD" in the megadrive port instead

It brings me genuine joy that, in an era where "gaming discourse" is generally just "dogpile on the thing we're collectively angry about today," the response to my TG16 video/series has been purely positive. Just tons of people saying, "Hey, thanks for noticing this weird little system that I love."

From Software development office in 1998 during the PlayStation/PSX era. From left: Armored Core producer Yasuyoshi Karasawa, Echo Night producer Toshifumi Nabeshima, Shadow Tower producer Shinichiro Nishida and CG team leader Mitsuo Tosaka. Here's what they've worked on since then via MobyGames.

Bad news: I've figured out how to reconstitute box art from the source files

Soviet computer prototype, SPHINX. Designed by Dmitry Azrikan. 1987.

We've passed 4000 magazines in our digital library! Every issue is cataloged and text-searchable, so it's easier than ever to do historical research with game magazines archive.gamehistory.org/folder/9a193... Here's a few recent highlights... 🧵

i have had cause to save this image of John Madden a la Apple II to my phone and I am now deciding to make it everyone's problem

Forums and self hosted game servers were better

I'm starting to get texts about this now so I guess I need to say something: There is a fundraiser going around about a "preservation disaster" raising money right now that I highly advise you to stay very far away from. A particular British tabloid is running with it unquestioningly. Thread:

📖 Bytes of Game Ads 📺 One of the first computer game ads I can remember seeing in a magazine, one that added even more mystique to Populous in the years before I could actually play it.

On this hallowed launch anniversary of UFO 50, we have some big news to share for those who missed our epic live finale last night! (VOD here, with an extra :30 of warmup: www.twitch.tv/videos/25690... - to be trimmed and posted as audio soon...) In order of escalating coolness, news in thread:

This port also has the best ending of all gaming.

It's nothing short of amazing that Chris can turn around an hour-long multi-segment audio show every week at a consistently great level. I haven't word-of-mouthed this show nearly enough, but it's an essential listen for anyone interested in the culture of games.

I reposted a bunch of games I typed up from books and magazines today. This one is special though. It is literally 11 lines of BASIC code and it is addictively fun. It was created by 田垣勝久. The people who create these are amazing and I feel honored to be able to bring their games to life for others.

Seems inevitable that at some point somebody will successfully sue for libel over these inventions.

My 16-bit video chronologies are now fully represented (at least until we hit 1991) with the arrival of Turbo Works, a series that will operate under a single unifying premise: "This system was so good, and it sure got totally tripped up by every imaginable setback in the U.S." youtu.be/4s9SVjnsyn8

I am still in awe that Paradox tried to run their usual DLC policy (which works great for modular grand strategy games, but not so much narrative action games) on a niche series that has been in stasis for over twenty years. Good that they backed down.

thinking about this screenshot from Columbo that makes it look like a 90s point-and-click adventure game

on the occasion of Super Mario's 40th I want to bring up one of my favorite head-scratchers: the NA release of the "20th Anniversary" Game Boy Micro where nowhere does it say the anniversary of *what* because NOA used to avoid explaining what a famicom was

Who the hell would use shit like ChatGPT when Dear Daria on the 2002 Sony Clié PEG-NX80V exists

today in Gaming: rogue developer jams garbage data into RAM exclusively to kill emulators and emulators only

If your placeholder assets aren't clearly placeholders, you'll forget to replace them Back in ~1999, the art director for some dollhouse game made a temporary diamond-shaped model for their character UI. By the time he realized they hadn't replaced it, it was too late and it shipped as-is. Oops!

I think we could put “Jewish immigrants starting jukebox/coin-op companies primarily for US military forces in Japan” close to the very bottom of the structure here

This passed almost entirely without notice, but the 1978 arcade game Block Fever was preserved for the first time and added to MAME. This was Nintendo's second arcade video game, and as far as I can tell the only Nintendo game that had not previously been preserved www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaWr...

Trying to use Bluesky’s muted words feature to make it slightly less of a festival of anxiety

Absolutely insane how far our computer game John Hurt rendering technology advanced in a decade.

I like when you register for a website and then it takes you to a login page instead of just signing you in. That’s right, good point, I might not have wanted to log in right now. Maybe I signed up today so I could log in sometime, some other day.

Been working on this for a while now, and happy to finally share it with folks. Introducing: SiIvaGuessr! A new daily browser game where you can test your niche knowledge of High-Quality Rips. A new curated puzzle will be available each day! siivaguessr.meme

Skin of my teeth, but I did it [checks cherry requirement] …oh.

One last bump for this article before the end of the week. The only thing better than a good old game is a weird, rough, and underplayed old game: kimimithegameeatingshemonster.com/2025/09/10/g...

mortal monday, tv ad, still (september 13, 1993) 'acclaim/arena releases four new versions of mortal kombat for the leading home systems: super nes, genesis, game boy and game gear.' archive.org/details/Vide...

seeing so many people fly through these openings who are big stars now is kind of... inspiring? like if you keep at it it might work out? I mean it didn't for me, but y'know, in general