Super Mario Bros SMS Title Screen

Last month, Mario Bros. added another tally mark to its growing list of modern ports to classic systems. Developer LackofTrack released a near-perfect conversion of the classic platformer to the Sega Master System. The Master System was the contemporary competitor to the NES in the 8-bit console space. No one would have imagined that Nintendo’s cash cow would ever appear on a direct competitor’s system, yet here we are, 41 years later.

The game was created as an entry in SMSPower’s 2026 coding contest, with the v1.0 release happening at the end of August. To be clear, this isn’t a reskinning of an existing platformer like Sonic the Hedgehog or Psycho Fox. SMB for the Master System is a true port of the original, using the same code disassembly used for the Commodore 64 version.

While having a superb port of the original game would have been amazing, LackofTrack went even further with this version. It also includes an enhanced version of the game. This version uses graphics based on the Super NES port for Super Mario All-Stars, taking advantage of the Master System’s expanded color palette.

Super Mario Bros SMS Enhanced Version

Along with the graphics, the soundtrack also evolved from the original. Using the Yamaha YM2413 synthesizer found in the Japanese Master System, and often added as a modification to consoles in other regions, the background music has been redone with arrangements of the music from the All-Stars version of the game.

It’s pretty amazing to not only be playing this classic game on the Master System, but also to be playing a game that, while being on hardware on par with Nintendo’s system, looks like a next-generation version. The enhanced version’s graphics are bright and colorful, with character sprites that are considerably more detailed than the NES originals. The additional background enhancements, including animated elements that didn’t exist in the original, really help flesh out the experience. And while the iconic sound effects are the same for both versions, the enhanced FM soundtrack really completes the package, making it feel like a true 16-bit experience.

From a gameplay standpoint, this is Super Mario Bros. in every sense of the title. All of the required elements are here: jumping on enemy heads, question mark blocks, pipes that can lead to other levels, and castles where you eventually find out your princess is in another castle. It is about as accurate as you can get, given that it was developed using a version of the original source code.

Super Mario Bros SMS Original Version

While it is a great port, it isn’t without its flaws, however minor they may be. Both the NES and SMS were often plagued with sprite flicker when too many characters appeared on the same horizontal plane of the screen at once. While both versions suffer from this malady, the Master System port can occasionally experience additional slowdown with too many characters on screen. The framerate drop is usually brief and generally doesn’t disrupt the game flow.

Quite often, sound on the Master System can seem more shrill than the NES, and this game is no exception. While the sound effects and original soundtrack are near-perfect recreations of the originals, you can tell the timbre is on the high side. It never got to the point of grating on my nerves, but I could tell. Turning on the FM soundtrack really helps to balance this out.

If you are a fan of Super Mario Bros., you owe it to yourself to check this out. Even if you don’t own a Master System, or were ever even a fan of the console, fire up an emulator and give it a go. The fact that this was sourced from homebrew developers is a testament to the dedication fans of these systems have, even decades after they were originally released.

Source: https://www.smspower.org/Homebrew/SuperMarioBrosSmsPort-SMS

The post Mario Comes to the Sega Master System appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

WALTER DAY’S GAMING SUPERSTARS: VOLUME TWO On Sale!

Paperback NOW Available!

The post Walter Day’s Gaming Superstars: Volume Two – by Todd Friedman appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Though clearly a fan of GoldenEye 007 herself, Alyse Knorr has a surprisingly functional depiction of the Bond Team at Rare in the late nineties. Her Boss Fight book, centered as it is around the working environment of the developers, provides a compelling argument that GoldenEye 007 may well have been the last major game completely built from scratch, a function of the Nintendo 64 classic predating Unity and modern animation rigging. It’s also one of many reasons why GoldenEye 007, the game, came out a full two years after the movie was released theatrically 1995, which you’d certainly think would put a damper on the game’s relevance but that’s obviously not the case.

The story of GoldenEye 007 is, fittingly, a very British one. Martin Hollis is the man responsible for getting the game greenlit. This is a non-intuitive story in a lot of ways. Nintendo wanted a GoldenEye game, but the Stamper brothers at Rare weren’t all that interested. Martin Hollis, a rookie in the game development industry without enough sense to realize that licensed video games had a bad reputation, heard about the offer, and somehow convinced the Stamper brothers that he could put a team together to make a genuinely great game. Everyone on the Bond Team was a rookie, the sort of people who built video games in their garage and most of them just really loved James Bond as a concept.

The book’s description of the Bond team often reminded me of this quote from an old game review I read back in the day: “Goldeneye 007 for Nintendo 64 remains the best James Bond game ever made because while you play it, you feel like James Bond.” While we tend to think of licensed games as bad, the reason why they’re bad is because they almost always operate under fairly onerous restrictions in regard to characterization and time crunch. It’s easy to see, from Knorr’s descriptions of the Bond Team, how these turned into advantages. Rookie programmers with no real development experience nonetheless have a pretty good idea what James Bond is.

Likewise, since GoldenEye 007 was being developed for the Nintendo 64, hardware that the Bond Team didn’t get to see until long into development, hardware which itself was delayed to 1996, there were ample excuses for the Bond Team to take their time and get it right. Although I should note that “take their time” might not be the best phrasing here, given that they were working punishing eighty hour weeks. Likewise, it’s not like Nintendo was insensitive to the delays. There was an entire extended period where the game was straight up canceled and the Stamper brothers avoided telling the Bond Team because they were confident that they could talk Nintendo out of this fairly extreme step, given time.

Factors like this led to the Bond Team having remarkably good morale, to the point they even managed to shove the game’s legendary multiplayer mode in last minute. GoldenEye 007 is a game of unusual influences, with the likes of Super Mario 64 and Super Bomberman having a more direct thoroughline than Doom. What made GoldenEye 007 such a big deal was that no one had any concept of even attempting a four-player split screen shooter. Never minding the technical challenges, why would anyone want to play a game that way when the standard of games like Quake was having a nice monitor all to yourself while shooting other players over a LAN connection?

Part of the recursive charm of Xibalba 64 to me was how it envisions the Doomclone aesthetic existing alongside the deathmatch polish of Goldeneye 007. It’s a fun contrast because Doomclones as a genre were largely killed off by Goldeneye 007. Although ironically enough, despite its influence, the GoldenEye 007 style itself didn’t last too long, being supplanted by Halo in the short term and Xbox Live in the long-term getting rid of the split-screen entirely. Part of the problem was the Bond license itself, which paradoxically became so valuable thanks to GoldenEye 007 that none of those original programmers could feasibly work on it again.

Not that they really wanted to. As rookies, they needed the guiding principle of James Bond, but as experienced programmers responsible for the biggest gaming hit of the late nineties, having to draw within the lines of that mythos was just too restricting. In all these regards, GoldenEye 007 is an artifact of its era, and its story in this Boss Fight book, one of those legends that’s unlikely to recur.

The post A review of GoldenEye 007 from Boss Fight Books appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Roguecraft GB Title Screen

For the uninitiated, the basic formula for a Rogue game, or “roguelike”, is pretty simple. You are presented with a procedurally generated dungeon. As you make your way through each level, slowly descending deeper into the dungeon, you will come across items to pick up, potions to use, and monsters to defeat. The original Rogue game has been ported to many systems since its 1980 release for Unix terminals.

Roguecraft is a variation on the Rogue formula, originally released on the Commodore Amiga. The lineage of this particular version begins with the Commodore 64 game Rogue4k, developed by Ricki Sickenger of Badger Punch Games. The “4k” stood for the fact that the entire game fit into just 4 kilobytes of RAM. The game was then expanded into Rogue64 with custom graphics and additional features.

Both Rogue4k and Rogue64 were presented in the standard top-down perspective of most Rogue games. When the decision was made to bring the game to the Amiga, one of the major changes was to swap out the top-down graphics for a three-quarter isometric view, similar to games like Head Over Heels and the original Fallout games. The graphics were given a full 16-bit overhaul, with more colors, more animation, and more variety.

Roguecraft GB Above Ground

Not long after the initial Amiga release, a new version of the game, dubbed Roguecraft DX, was released for Blaze’s Evercade retro console ecosystem. It quickly became one of their most popular single-game cartridge releases. This expanded version of the game was back-ported to the Amiga and brought to the Mega65, with a Windows version and even a ZX Speccy version planned.

Amongst those versions was a new release for the Game Boy Color. Instead of attempting a straight port of the game to the system’s tiny screen, it was rewritten to exploit the console’s limitations. Given the portable’s reduced screen resolution, it would have been extremely limiting to attempt to replicate the original’s isometric view, which would have forced the graphics to be incredibly small to fit an entire dungeon room on the screen. Instead, the view was switched back to an overhead perspective, similar to the original Commodore 64 game, but retaining much of the color and detail of the Amiga version.

The game itself is pretty straightforward. You start out above ground for the first level of the game (a change that was made for the DX version of the game). Each screen can be exited in one or more of the four cardinal directions, advancing you to the next screen in the level. Each screen has the potential to contain treasure, potions, the key to exit the level, and any number of different monsters. Starting off, you will face chickens and green tentacled monsters. As you descend through the levels of the dungeon, you will face different, stronger creatures to defeat. You’ll need to tread carefully, because if you run out of health, you’re dead. No extra lives. No continues.

Roguecraft GB Dungeon

Fortunately, you have a number of tools at your disposal during your journey. Three different colored potions will appear randomly throughout the game. The green potions will always refill your health and heal any poison you may have encountered. The red and blue potions are assigned random effects at the beginning of the game that persist for the remainder of the play session. The effects range from showing all of the rooms on the map (accessed by holding down the B button) to temporarily increasing your character’s strength or turning all of the monsters in the room into chickens. You will also encounter red and blue crystals that will increase your maximum health and strength, respectively. These will appear after killing a certain number of creatures. Hearts will refill your health and heal any poisoning. And the final pickup is the key that unlocks the level’s exit. Keep in mind, you will need a free inventory slot to hold the key once you find it.

The original Roguecraft contained a ten-level dungeon leading to a final encounter with the boss creature. In DX, that number was increased to 15 levels plus the introductory above-ground level and final boss. For the Game Boy version, the number of levels was decreased to 10, including the initial ground level, plus the final boss. The first run I successfully completed took me nearly an hour. Given that each dungeon is procedurally generated, there is quite a lot of gameplay to be had here.

Roguecraft GB Final Level

Additionally, there are three different characters to choose from at the beginning of the game. The Warrior is the default character and the easiest of the three. They start with the most health but have no additional abilities. The Rogue is the next hardest. They start with less health, but have the ability to teleport, and after teleporting, they receive a backstab ability that will kill most creatures with a single hit. The Wizard is the hardest character to play. They start out with very little health, but are the only character that has a ranged attack. This can allow you to clear a room without ever coming into contact with a monster. Thus, the different characters serve as difficulty levels for the game, providing additional challenges to complete it. There are even three separate achievements for completing a run with each of the different characters.

I have absolutely adored this game ever since playing the original Amiga version a number of years ago. I have effectively purchased the game 5 times: after buying the original, I bought the Evercade version, the DX on the Amiga, the Mega65, and now this version. And I have every intention of purchasing the Windows version when it releases next month. It is just fun. The gameplay is simple and straightforward; it is easy to pick up for a gaming session, but the challenge is real. While the graphics aren’t quite as impressive as the 16-bit versions, they are very good in comparison to other Game Boy Color games. And the fact that Badger Punch and Thalamus are supporting a system that was discontinued 23 years ago is just amazing.

If you’re looking for a good dungeon crawl, or just want something to make your aging Game Boy Color feel new again, definitely check Roguecraft GB out. One caveat, though: you will need a flash cart to play this game on your original hardware, as it is currently digital-only. While they did take pre-orders for physical copies of the game earlier this year, it is not clear whether any will be available for sale once they are released.

The post Review – Roguecraft GB for the Game Boy Color appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

AUGUST 11, 2026 — Following the runaway success of last year’s Commodore 64 Ultimate, Commodore International has announced it is bringing the TAC-2 joystick, also known as the “Totally Accurate Controller,” back into production more than 40 years after its debut. Pre-orders begin today at commodore.net.

Originally released in 1983 by Suncom Technologies (whose “We Help Make Computers Friendly” motto complemented Commodore’s own “Welcome to the World of Friendly Computing” quite well), the TAC-2 was renowned for its durable, microswitch-free design alongside its arcade-accurate ball-top handle and gloriously clicky dual fire buttons, and remains highly in demand to this day. Due to its scarcity, re-sales of a fully-functional TAC-2 can fetch upwards of $100 or more. To make the TAC-2 more accessible while furthering Commodore’s mission to preserve home computing history, and building the company on its two strong “retro” and “futurism” pillars, the company is officially bringing this controller king back to the front lines and into its ecosystem. Today Commodore has begun production on a faithful new recreation of the TAC-2, that will retail for half the price of a well-preserved original.

“While the Commodore 64 Ultimate was designed to support all classic C64 peripherals, getting your hands on vintage hardware like the TAC-2 is sometimes easier said than done,” said Commodore’s CEO, President, and Chief Joystick Waggler, Peri Fractic. “The TAC-2 was always a personal favorite of mine, from its sleek silvery design, to its almost indestructible nature, and we’ve taken every effort to ensure the Commodore TAC-2 is a faithful re-release of the original’s tactile history, that looks, feels, and plays just like you remember.”

Like the original, the Commodore TAC-2 joystick movement is controlled using an internal ball-and-contact mechanism. Unlike the original, Commodore has replaced the shaft – previously made from a TR418 tire valve and an attached brass ball – with a single form, solid steel, chrome-plated shaft assembly, to overcome the main – if rare – cause of failure in the original: stress fractures between the separate components that could occur after repeated use. Still, the TAC-2 was famously “tested to 3 million moves without failure”, and Commodore’s new steel shaft is engineered to be even stronger than the original TAC-2’s.

The Commodore TAC-2 is available for pre-order in five colorways: BASIC Beige, C= White, Knight Black, and Starlight Edition will all be available for $49.99, with a limited Founders Edition featuring a gold PVD coated ball and matching premium PVD buttons, available for ‘Commodore’ $64 dollars. Additionally, BASIC Beige, Starlight Edition, and Founders Edition, will feature a fixed color LED under fire buttons to light up the fun, while Knight Black and C= White will retain the classic look of the originals.

The BASIC Beige is designed to match the Commodore 64 Ultimate ‘breadbin’ style, C= White matches the C64C ‘slimline’ computer, with the Starlight Edition matching the translucent stylings of its own namesake Commodore 64 Ultimate edition.

Fellow joystick wagglers can pre-order theirs today at commodore.net.

The post Totally Accurate Controller Makes a Totally Accurate Comeback with the Commodore TAC-2 appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Technically speaking the box sold by Homebrew Factory just says Yap, but the original game by CeL does have the full subtitle, which is also a lot easier to search for. Bit of a weird name for a hero. I do like his character design though. He’s like something halfway between a farmer and a mechanic, wielding a slingshot that looks like a weapon for a kid half his age, but hey, if it’s the only weapon you have that can burst magic bubbles, it’s what you’re stuck with. More than the slingshot Yap’s real power is his defense mechanic. But more on that in a moment.

Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles is a Pang clone. The game might be better known as Buster Bros. depending on what territory you live in. You might more easily remember Pang as that game where you play the guy that shoots up a harpoon to blow up bubbles, dividing the bigger bubbles into smaller bubbles. Not to give Pang too much credit, since Bubble Buster for the ZX Spectrum had an identical concept. Nor am I trying to give Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles a hard time for being a variation on this kind of arcade game, which surprisingly enough, was never actually popular enough to get a Game Boy port, despite the gameplay being perfectly suited for a mobile platform.

Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles differs from previous iterations of the genre by making use of limited scrolling and colors. The limited scrolling has the effect of making you feel like you’re on the run. Yap’s magical slingshot is quite slow, at least before getting any power-ups, so if you miss your first shot, it might take awhile before you get another chance. And as you wait, you have to dodge the other bubbles. This is where the colors come in. You have to destroy all of one color before you move on to the next one. Consequently, you might be dodging for quite some time trying to get the last tiny bubble of one color before you can move on to the other ones, which only bounce around slightly upon being hit.

These minor changes actually do quite a bit to distinguish Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles from the existing Pang formula, resulting in the bubbles feeling genuinely menacing despite their entirely predictable trajectories. The game includes a defense mechanic (just press B right before getting hit by a bubble) that doesn’t even the scales quite as much as you’d expect since it requires fairly precise timing. Of the sixty stages across six environments, the last one is the most difficult mainly because the use of fire mechanic makes it harder to escape the bubbles, which until that point, was the best way to play the game.

The levels being devoid of any features aside from the bubbles themselves is a welcome simplification of gameplay. I also liked how it affected the worldbuilding, to the limited extent there even is any worldbuilding. The world of Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles feels almost post-apocalyptic (because of the bubbles presumably destroying everything), with Yap and his magic slingshot being a fairly inexplicable last hope. The bubbles are surprisingly effective antagonists, almost mocking with their geometric precision, such that the showdown with the wizard who created all these bubbles at the very end is a letdown by comparison.

While I enjoyed Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles, I should note that the cartridge I received from Broke Studio had a pretty glaring flaw. The save battery didn’t work. Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles doesn’t strictly speaking need a save battery, as it’s perfectly possible to beat the game in a single sitting, but it definitely benefits a lot from being able to put the game down and take a break after a particularly frustrating loss. CeL hints that this game has a Konami Code but I couldn’t get it to work for the sake of rigging a stage select, which is all the game really needed. I should also note that it’s possible the game itself had faulty save functionality rather than the battery, but I can’t really test that without another cartridge.

The post A review of Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

After three years of research and development, and multiple prototypes tested at the Long Island and Portland Retro Gaming Expos in 2025, the Time Breaker LightGunTM officially launched on March 1st, 2026. We didn’t just make it work; we made it better. By fine-tuning the recoil system, we cut latency
by more than half compared to our initial public demos—from 32 milliseconds to 11 milliseconds. The result is a professional-grade, cordless peripheral that feels right in your hand and works the way it should on real hardware and modern screens. Recognized with the GRS Quality

Standard from retro gaming influencer Glen’s Retro Show, the Time Breaker LightGunTMdelivers authentic arcade action directly to your modern living room setup.Built for the PlayerThe Time Breaker LightGunTM is a plug-and-play lightgun designed for wirelessly playing classic PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 shooters on modern displays. Every detail was crafted for the
dedicated gamer:

http://intecgaming.us.com/

● Complete Cordless Freedom: Powered by a high-speed 2.4G wireless solution to
eliminate tangled wires and allow holster-ready movement.
● Weighted for Authenticity: A balanced, ergonomic feel that mimics classic arcade
booth controllers with comfortable grips.
● Iconic Colorways: Available in Classic Light Blue or GunCon Gray (accented with
orange safety muzzles).
● Tactical Features: Features built-in mechanical recoil with a dedicated ON/OFF toggle
switch, alongside Single-Fire and Auto-Fire modes.
● Modern Display Compatibility: Supports HDTVs, 4K displays, CRT screens, and
projectors in both 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios (4:3 recommended for optimal experience).
● Two-Player Support: Fully supports 2-player co-op action using two guns paired to a
single infrared sensor setup.
● Dual TV / Esports: Full support for two PS2 consoles connected via i.LINK across two
separate screens/TVs for full-frame 2-player arcade action.
● Premium Unboxing: Every unit arrives in a custom-designed box complete with a
physical instruction manual and a signature thank-you card.
Plug & Play — Instant Compatibility with 30 Classic Games

http://intecgaming.us.com/

https://intec-game.com/?shpxid=1fc007b4-873e-4aae-8210-99d8001ae479

The Time Breaker LightGunTM natively supports GunCon and GunCon 2 protocol titles out of the
box across original PS1, PS2, and backwards-compatible PS3 hardware:
PlayStation 1 (PSX) Compatible Games:
1. Time Crisis
2. Time Crisis: Project Titan
3. Point Blank 1
4. Point Blank 2
5. Point Blank 3
6. Ghoul Panic
7. Elemental Gearbolt
8. Moorhuhn series
9. Extreme Ghostbusters: Ultimate Invasion
10. Gunfighter
11. Judge Dredd
12. Rescue Shot
13. The Gun Shooting 1
14. The Gun Shooting 2
15. Mighty Hits Special
16. Maximum Force
PlayStation 2 (PS2) Compatible Games:
1. Time Crisis 1 (via Gunvari Collection)
2. Time Crisis 2
3. Time Crisis 3
4. Endgame
5. Gunfighter
6. Resident Evil Survivor
7. Resident Evil Survivor 2
8. Cocoto Funfair
9. Dino Stalker
10. Death Crimson OX
11. Gunvari Collection + Time Crisis
12. Virtua Cop
13. Ninja Assault
14. Vampire Night

Available Package Configurations
1. Single LightGun Accessory Kit
● Time Breaker LightGunTM (GunCon Gray or Light Blue)
● PSX Wireless Receiver x1
● PS2 Wireless Receiver x1

● Infrared Sensor Receiver x1
● Infrared Sensor Stand x1
● PS2 USB Extension Cable (for 2-Player setups) x1
● 1.8m Type-C USB Charging Cable x1
● Screw Rod x1 & Hexagon Wrench x1
2. Single LightGun + HDMI Converter Kit
● Includes everything in the Single LightGun Accessory Kit, plus:
● RGB-to-HDMI Video Output Conversion Box x1 (Improves image clarity and enables
easy connection to modern TVs)
● HDMI Cable x1
● Secondary 1.8m Type-C Power Cable x1

http://intecgaming.us.com/

What Retro Gamers Are Saying
“A light gun that works on real hardware. No software, no extra add-ons, just a sensor bar,
some assembly, and it’s ready. I will never use an emulator again for hard-to-emulate games…
thank you very much.”
“THE SOLUTION FOR MY LIGHT GUN ITCH! They are damn near perfect! I was trying to
figure out how to set up a CRT TV… no need anymore! Now planning to buy another TV for
some Time Crisis 2 and 3 iLink play!”
“The guns themselves are good quality and feel just like the Time Crisis arcade booth guns…
As close to the original experience as you can get!”
Looking Ahead to the Future of Intec Gaming
Intec Gaming® is dedicated to preserving the lightgun genre. Expanding the Time Breaker
technology across other classic console ecosystems remains our primary focus, with the
upcoming NES Time Breaker LightGunTM anticipated for release in Q4 of 2026.
We don’t just sell nostalgia. We solve the technical challenges that keep you from your favorite
games.

The post Intec Gaming® Bridging the Gap: The 3-Year Journey to the Time Breaker LightGunTM appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Project, which he calls “a tribute to the foundational and beloved 8bit classic Temple of Apshai (1979).”

Old School Gamer Magazine: How did this project begin?

Van: I guess it began in spirit with the original Temple of Apshai by Automated Solutions in 1979, that I loved as a kid on the Apple ][+ and later C64. That credit goes to the great Jim W. Connelly of game dev legend. Hope to meet him someday, so I can thank him personally.

Fast-forwarding to today, Webshai began a few months ago as a Claude AI experiment in design-driven development. Im a life-long old-school career programmer, but the sudden and recent AI revolution has made code-writing skills obsolete. I’ve been “vibe-coding” as the kids call it now, on another much larger project when I needed a break.

Ive always wanted to pay homage to the classics that inspired me, so I wrote every note and observation about old Apshai that I could think of, into a design doc to see how well Claude could execute purely on a detailed vision. It was an experiment in new alternative workflows.

Old School Gamer Magazine: What makes it special?

Van: Originally I intended to make no enhancements, just a functional clone written from scratch for the web. But web accessibility is the first point-in-favor, I suppose. The most fundamental change. Just browse and go – no signup, no download, no friction.

Also, it’s genuinely roguelike – people abuse that term today, to the point that they clearly don’t know (or dont care) what it even means. But Webshai is the real deal (largely because Im also in love with Nethack, the direct descendant of the original Rogue). Instead of the original 4 static levels of Apshai (or 12, if you include the also-great Upper Reaches and Curse of Ra sequels), Webshai has a procedural level generator.  I defined 7 tiers with their own visual themes, tile sets, and monsters, 4 levels per tier, for 28 levels total.  Each level larger with more rooms than the level before it.

And even that was an arbitrary cap. With more art, I could offer 100 levels. 1,000 levels. I will, if I get enough players to justify more development.

And these are generated for each user, uniquely. No two users will see the same dungeon.

And yet yours wont change, so you can still memorize YOUR levels (NetHack is a cold-hearted bitch on that issue – new game? WHOLE new dungeon again!) same as we did when playing the original.

Otherwise, it’s primarily a nostalgia play.

Lastly, all my games are web-based. I love the ease of accessibility and delivery for the players – just browse and go. No bloated 50 gazillion derpabyte download to install.

And no risk of malware in those binaries – a problem occurring with increasing frequency, particularly in the low-budget indie market.

Don’t get me wrong, I have an embarrassingly large and venerable library of purchased games on Steam. Steam is, generally speaking, fabulous. But I wont even download indie games from Steam until the binary has been vetted by others.  And I *do not* install binaries from Itch. No hate, I applaud what they’re trying to do, but I do not trust their content creators.

And I don’t build Windows binaries. I bear an admittedly pathological hatred for Microsoft in general, and Windows in particular, both as a user and a developer. The Web is my rejection of all-things Microsoft, and of Apple as well. They work overtime to control us, limit our options, and force us into their walled gardens. The web is freedom.

Old School Gamer Magazine: Who’s the core audience?

Van: Well so far, nobody. Figure in an era of global virality, if you cant earn a following via simple word-of-mouth popularity, you’re doing something wrong. You either stand out, or you die.  Blending in,is not an option.

So thus far, I have no players. But I only dropped the open beta of Webshai maybe a week ago. Now Im looking for my first players.

Old School Gamer Magazine: Who are you trying to reach?

Van: The only crowd that I expect will really care – us 40-something/50-something old timers. To the kids these days, the old games just look primitive. Which is fair – they ARE primitive. But if you grew up on Apshai, you were left wanting more. At least I was.

Old School Gamer Magazine: Why does the preservation and homage of this era of games mean something to you?

Van: Two reasons, I think:

1 I was there, I lived it, these are the relics of my formative years, and represent some of the best times. Many a survivor of the torments of childhood, emerges from that battlefield with a guiding light. Something that led them through the darkness. For me, gaming was an HUGE part of that.

2 Those were the frontier days. The developers from that era, didn’t have game engines. They didn’t even have utility libraries. Often they didn’t even have pixels! And there were definitely no standards, no patterns. We didn’t even use the WASD UI pattern for steering yet! So what they made, was raw. It was feral. It was almost random.

And it was ground-breaking. Those early devs went out into the frontier, the wild, and they built.. whatever, whatever they could with whatever they had! And they built a whole new world and a new industry, and invited us to follow, to join them in something they called “home computer gaming” – when us users were still barely learning what a “home computer” even meant!

Old School Gamer Magazine: Why is this all important to you?

Van: That’s a surprisingly important and heavy question. Why do we game? Of what value is it? Sometimes I wonder if what I do – I was an off-and-on big-studio game dev for 35 years – is even meaningful, or just a waste of time. With all that’s wrong in the world, what do I contribute? Video games? That’s it?!

I don’t farm to grow food. I don’t build homes. I don’t heal the sick. All I do is provide entertainment.

Then I remember that 2nd grader, just 8 years old, introduced for the first time to Temple of Apshai, and I remember how a world of magic and fantasy and adventure and wonder opened up before me like an endless landscape.

And I remember, we aren’t just animals. We need more than food and shelter and our health. We need entertainment. And specifically, entertainment that challenges. That invites us to explore. 

Interactive entertainment is the next level, beyond books and movies (both of which I still cherish). Interactive entertainment let’s us be the hero, instead of some Hollywood actor having all the fun. It’s the ultimate storytelling, because we get to *tell OUR story*. Not have someone else’s story told to us, whilst we imagine ourselves as the protagonist.

And Ive done this – trying to design games, build games, and empower people to tell THEIR stories – since I was a little kid. Even before computer gaming, when tabletop D&D was all the rage.

Old School Gamer Magazine: Anything else you’d like to add?

Van: Credit where credit is due:

Half the sound FX in Webshai, were done working with Claude AI tuning programmable oscillators by ear to recreate the classic C64 sound.  The other half, was my sound artist/musician girlfriend Elisa Berlin of Noise Complaint (and who has a boss cameo in level 4 of the Catacombs tier).

The sprites were all generated on PixelLab.ai – I can’t draw a decent circle to save my life.

Tile art, all procedurally generated by Claude.

Likewise, the code was written entirely by Claude AI. I only take credit for the design and architecture of that code. Ive been developing for the web for the last 25 years, with 15 of those in Javascript.  This would have taken me AT LEAST 6 months to build by hand, but with AI it took just 6 weeks. Though admittedly it became a very back-and-forth process after the initial generative pass. Anyone who thinks using AI for game dev is equivalent to pushing some magickal do-it-all-for-me button, should try that sometime.

The post Old School Gamer Magazine Exclusive: Inside new C64 Temple of Webshai Project appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

By Charlotte Reber’s own admission, Dragon Age II is a somewhat counterintuitive choice for a Boss Fight book. After all, Dragon Age: Origins is the main famous, well-regarded game of the series, a fantasy epic role-playing game in the Bioware house style that takes place in an original fantasy setting. Reber’s book, while mostly a depiction of the Dragon Age II writers’ room, is framed in the context of Reber explaining why it is that this game, specifically, struck a chord with her, motivating her to grab a copy years later despite her being a part of the mushy majority that vaguely liked Dragon Age: Origins but never actually finished it.

Dragon Age II, both the book and the game it’s about, functions as a sort of roundabout story about a story in this way. Why Dragon Age II specifically has this odd character focus is largely due to corporate drama. Electronic Arts bought Bioware in 2007, started paying more attention to the acquisition in 2009 as its long-term MMORPG plans started to take shape, and just sort of arbitrarily demanded that Bioware release a new Dragon Age game by March of 2011 because they noticed that Bioware didn’t have anything else scheduled for that specific year. Reber namedrops The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask as a similar kind of spiritual successor and even just going from the rushed timeline, there are definite parallels to that Boss Fight book too.

The relatively unambitious replication of the prequel’s game engine features in both too, but the main aspect of Dragon Age II that intrigues Reber is the scaled down plot, which doesn’t feel any less dramatic despite having far less intense world-ending stakes. In Reber’s argument, it’s precisely because Dragon Age II has these lesser stakes that it’s much easier to identify with the characters. The whole game is framed around character interactions, specifically, the dwarven hustler Varric who narrates the full story to an inquisitor, a metatextual thread that begs a lot of questions about the narrative’s general accuracy, even if it never quite gets to the absurdity of the opening sequence.

Reber attributes the depth of the story to the character conflicts because, well, because that’s the main thing the writers had to work with. While the book never really discusses what was going on from the programming side, it’s a clear, ever-present concern from the writers how they can’t really script anything all that ambitious from a gameplay perspective because the technical team just didn’t have the time to expand on the game’s engine in an especially impressive way. Even the conceit of the game mostly taking place in a single town, with a lot of refused locations outside that town, is only just barely justified by the writers coming up with a three-act structure, allowing the passage of time to let the town feel different despite mostly just looking at the same.

The Dragon Age II Boss Fight book is oddly open about the game’s shortcomings, certainly more than any other Boss Fight book I’ve read to date. The game’s reception, far from being a triumph, instead becomes an almost anticlimactic disappointment, with fans trashing the title. What makes this ambiguous tone especially weird is that Reber dedicates a lot of energy to emphasizing that this was an early example of bigotry in gaming, tying that practice to Gamergate years later. Yet there’s no real sense of perspective about how much gamers were criticizing the game, rather than the story specifically, or how representative any of the more bigoted responses really were. It all comes off as a very stupid Internet argument, and for whatever it’s worth, Reber does discuss the topic so little it’s not clear she thinks there’s really that much to be said about it either.

In the end, Dragon Age II is one of the more flawed Boss Fight books I’ve read, on account of the fact that I’m still not entirely sure what the game is really about, from a story perspective. Reber discusses the storybuilding from a fairly mechanical perspective, as might be expected from a person who is described on the back of the book as a writer of fiction, but doesn’t integrate those mechanics into the game’s actual content as well as Tremblay’s recent tome on Life Is Strange. At least part of this is a problem with the script of Dragon Age II, which as Reber notes, can’t really be interpreted on its own as if it were a screenplay because there are too many potential variations between major plot points.

In short, both in book and game form, Dragon Age II is a series of difficult challenges not quite convincingly surmounted, even if the high points are strong enough that they’re easier to remember than the weaknesses. Indeed, the oddities and the contrasts engendered by these issues make up a lot of the charm. It’s always worth remembering that distinctive games with personality tend to weather historical perspective better than technically better generic ones.

The post A review of Dragon Age II from Boss Fight Books appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

If you’ve never heard of the original Xibalba, that’s not too surprising. The 2014 browser game from Phobos Lab is a weird little artifact of its era, a chonky retro styled Doom clone premised around the Mayan underworld. The blocky aesthetic exists alongside Oculus Rift functionality, allowing players to immerse themselves in the weirdly blended aesthetic of New World iconography, nineties era first person shooters, and the spooky ambient music of Andreas Lösch. ModRetro’s decision to bankroll a Nintendo 64 version of this game adds another level of eerie recursion to the whole concept, creating a demake that feels like a delightful, disturbing trip from a parallel universe.

It certainly helps that Dominic Zablewsky seems like a genuinely sweet and enthusiastic guy. As he tells it in the game’s instruction manual, Xibalba was mostly just a demo for his JavaScript game engine, and not even a “real” game in and of itself. Building it up to something worthy of the fifty-dollar asking price required, among other things, that Zablewsky rewrite the entire game in the C programming language. This is the kind of ambitious task a programmer takes on only if they have genuine passion and curiosity, and Zablewsky’s enthusiasm bleeds through every one of Xibalba 64’s seventeen levels.

What really sells this title as something special is how despite the sheer sense of scale of this world, we ultimately know surprisingly little about it. The story as outlined in the instruction manual is vague and cryptic. So is the opening crawl that prefaces each level, eerie, ominous poetry about the nameless protagonist’s descent into this world, culminating with an equally strange encounter with a god and a ray of light.

We never really do find out what exactly was going on, causing the entire text to read like a nightmarish fever dream. Even Zablewsky’s flawed English goes a long way to maximizing the vibe. It’s not always entirely clear what certain technical instructions mean, for example, but in a game this simple, there are only so many ways to interpret them. Who’s telling us these instructions anyway? The shamans? The tree monsters? The robots? A disembodied voice somewhere? Not knowing just makes it that much creepier.

Even getting lost is just an excuse to take in some of the details, trying to figure out what exactly is going on with this worldbuilding. One of the few technical flaws I noticed in this game was a lack of a map. Although I realized upon further consideration this was a deliberate choice to maintain the immersion, and it works wonders. Especially with the lights out, I consistently felt as if I was wandering through a deeply unsettling place. That I was using a small collection of high-powered weapons to blow up every other living or mechanical thing I found down there just contributed to that sense of unease.

The actual gameplay of Xibalba 64 is nothing new, not just compared to Xibalba but relative to Doom clones in general. In some ways it’s beneath the capabilities of the M64. There’s no vertical shooting for example. Again, though, the simplicity of the overall game design is what makes it much easier to focus on the smaller details. This isn’t a game about shooting monsters, even if it’s difficult to finish any given maze without killing everything in the level. It’s a game about being tested, or judged, by who or what, it’s hard to say.

This as much as anything else nails the retro gaming experience. Why do we play games at all, really? Why play Nintendo 64 games instead of titles on new, shinier consoles? It’s not just the nostalgia factor, it’s about that spiritual connection with other fans. Zablewsky nails that vibe long before the end credits, expressing immense appreciation to the Nintendo 64 homebrew community for all their help in getting him to figure out how to make this game work. Whether as the disembodied prologues or just the guy who uses the end credits to write in little hearts directed to his fiancé, Zablewsky is a real person, and Xibalba 64 is his genuine labor of love.

Not to suggest that the main value of Xibalba 64 is its connection to Zablewsky. There’s a lot of replay value in here, from extra difficulty settings to loads of secrets and cheat codes. This isn’t even getting into the multiplayer options, from a co-op mode in the main campaign to a four-player bug hunt or, for that real nineties magic, a deathmatch to the last person standing, with enough options to change up gameplay to keep it spicy without being overwhelming. This is the kind of game you can play at parties. Nerdy parties, perhaps, but Xibalba 64 is the kind of game that makes you proud to be a nerd. It just feels really considerate, right down to the bevy of customization options.

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