Games Archive

Top supplier of great articles Nicole Branagan is at it again. We’re back into the strip mahjong games today, here going back to 1991. Video System is a company that’s probably best known in retro-gaming circles for Aero Fighters/Sonic Wings, but mahjong games (usually branded Idol Mahjong) were one of their bigger moneymakers. And there’s something interesting going on here– Idol Mahjong Final Romance 2-R-4 Special re-releases the final three games in the series, which all also got contemporary console releases, but the first game in the series has never been seen outside of its original arcade launch. Why? ↫ Nicole Branagan Look, you’re not going to get something like this from anyone else.

Two years ago, I was Porting my JavaScript Game Engine to C for No Reason. I have since found a reason: making a new N64 game! The result is Xibalba 64 – a Wolfenstein 3D-like FPS. Modretro agreed to publish the game as a physical launch title for their M64 (a modern N64 clone), complete with cartridge, packaging and manual! ↫ Dominic Szablewski The article details the development process, from setting up the correct tooling to actually getting the game to play on a real Nintendo 64, and everything in between – including optimising the game to get it to run at a steady 60fps. The biggest issue is that the Nintendo 64 is quite a complex and quirky console, and in order to develop for it, you needed access to Nintendo’s officially sanctioned platform library, libultra. These days, though, there’s an open source alternative, libdragon, enabling homebrew development. It’s awesome that, thanks to the hard work of volunteers, people can still develop top-notch games for something like the Nintendo 64. If we had left it up to Nintendo, we’d be seeing nothing of the sort today.

The Nintendo Entertainment System. Is it the platonic ideal of an 8-bit video game system? Well, only because it’s so prominent and successful– it’s actually kind of an oddball in its expandability and design. But there’s something else about it. The picture is a bit… wobbly. Well, over composite video anyway. Let’s dig in and learn a little big more about the nitty-gritty of composite video. ↫ Nicole Branagan As usual, the information density in this article by Branagan is kind of remarkable, especially when you consider it never overwhelms you. Such a great read.

Valve officially made the Steam Machine available (sort of but not really) today, and if you were hoping for the president of the Yacht Collectors’ Club to have found a loophole through the RAM and storage crisis, I’ll be the bearer of bad news: the base Steam Machine model with 512GB of storage and no controller costs $1049 or €1039. It’s clear that this price is significantly higher than Valve had originally anticipated, as the company dedicates the first part of its press announcement to this sticker shock. Steam Machine, like our other hardware products, is made up of many components that we source from manufacturers around the world. The price at which we sell our hardware is a direct result of the cost of these components. We felt like we had a good understanding of how those costs might change over time when we first started sourcing them for Steam Machine back in 2023. That understanding was born from the many years of data we all have about the evolution of PC hardware prices – primarily, that it tends to get cheaper over time as new technology arrives. Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components. There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we’re sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price of the components as we’ve secured them over the past 6 months. Price wasn’t the only thing impacted by all of this: availability was as well. There were periods where we found we couldn’t source some of our components at all, at any price. More than anything else, this has impacted the number of units we’ve been able to produce for launch. ↫ Valve press announcement As Valve mentions, availability is also going to be an issue, and thus they’ve had to settle on a complex reservation and lottery system. Between now and 25 June, you can sign up for a model, after which the entire pool of reservations will be randomised to determine a waitlist order. As machines become available, they will simply go down the list from first to last as determined by that randomisation. In other words, you can’t just go out and buy one right away. At this price and for the hardware the Steam Machine contains – an AMD Zen 4 CPU with 6c/12t up to 4.8 Ghz, a custom RDNA3 GPU, and 16GB of DDR5 RAM and 8GB of DDR6 video RAM – you’re probably better off sticking with what you already have. Until the “AI” bubble pops and prices come down again, that is. Thanks, “AI” techbros. Everybody despises you.

My goal was to build a complete, shippable first-person shooter using techniques that were common in the early 90s, while allowing myself the luxury of using a modern compiler and a platform abstraction layer. ↫ Marko Stanic It looks amazing already, and it isn’t even done. Stanic goes into great detail explaining how he created the various assets for the game, and it’s a joy to read through his creative process and problem-solving routines. The game’s called Catlantean 3D, and is expected to ship somewhere early 2027.

A beautiful TUI might not be particularly accessible, and there’s effectively zero consistency between how different TUI applications look, feel, and behave, but damn if an amazing TUI isn’t a work of art. Case in point: El Poblador. This is a TUI version of Settles of Catan, written in Go. That’s it. That’s the post.

Modern kernel anti-cheat systems are, without exaggeration, among the most sophisticated pieces of software running on consumer Windows machines. They operate at the highest privilege level available to software, they intercept kernel callbacks that were designed for legitimate security products, they scan memory structures that most programmers never touch in their entire careers, and they do all of this transparently while a game is running. If you have ever wondered how BattlEye actually catches a cheat, or why Vanguard insists on loading before Windows boots, or what it means for a PCIe DMA device to bypass every single one of these protections, this post is for you. ↫ Adrián Díaza I hate that we need proprietary rootkits just to play competitive multiplayer games – we can chalk this up to a few sad people ruining the experience for everyone else, as so often happens. I have a dedicated parts bin Windows box just to play League of Legends (my one vice alright, nobody’s perfect) so I don’t really care if it has a proprietary rootkit running in the background as there’s not a single bit of valuable data on that machine, but for most people, that’s not realistic. Virtually every League of Legends player hands over control of their entire computer to a proprietary rootkit developed and deployed by a company from China, whereas players of other popular online multiplayer games must install rootkits from companies from the United States. If anyone inside the governments of these countries ever wants to implement a backdoor in dozens (hundreds?) of millions of Windows machines, this is the way to go. It’s an absolutely bizarre situation.

The new version brings a ton of new enhancements and fixes to all 3 supported platforms, with Steam running not only on Arm64, but also on RiSC-V and on Loongarch! And this is the Linux version of Steam, not the Windows one (but the Windows one works too if you really prefer that one). While Box32 (used to run Steam) is still experimental and unstable, stability did improve. Still, expect some crashes when downloading things with steam. And it’s not all, Battle.net is also getting stable, and some games are working too. Not all unfortunately, and your success might depend on your geographical region, as program versions might differ. At least, you can try it on ARM64 & Loongarch. It’s still to be tested on RiSC-V. ↫ Box64 0.4.0 release announcement These are some major improvements to Box64, and impressive ones at that.

Valve announced a few new devices yesterday. There’s a new Steam console, which is essentially just a tiny PC with SteamOS installed – think of it as a Steam Deck without a display. Second, Valve finally released a new Steam Controller to go with the Steam console, which has taken them long enough. Lastly, there’s a brand new Steam VR headset, the Steam Frame. Other websites with actual access to these new devices will do a better job of covering them than I ever could, but I do want to highlight something crucially important about the Steam Frame: it contains a Snapdragon ARM processor, but can still run Steam and all of its games. How does this work? Well, after developing Proton to allow Windows games to run on Linux, Valve “introduced” FEX, which will allow you to run x86 Windows games on ARM Linux. I put the quotation marks there because FEX was an existing project Valve invested heavily into in recent times, and it’s now at the point where Valve seems confident enough it will be capable of running enough x86 games on ARM Linux. As such, the Steam Frame runs full SteamOS with KDE Plasma, you can run x86 Steam games, and as an additional bonus, you can install Android APKs as well. I’ve yet to even try VR, because I’m not particularly interested in buying into any locked-down platform. The Steam Frame may be the first VR device I’ll buy – depending on price, of course – and the Steam console definitely looks like a great addition to the living room, too. My wife and I have little to no interesting in buying an Xbox or PS5, but having easy, no-hassle access to our massive Steam libraries on our TV will be awesome.

Gaming isn’t something we talk about very often here on OSNews, but I think this piece of news is actually a rare piece of good, welcome news from this industry. Mojang, the Microsoft-owned company behind Minecraft, has announced it’s going to stop obfuscating the code behind the Java edition of Minecraft. A refresher: the Java edition of Minecraft is the original version of the game, which exists alongside the Bedrock Edition, which is written in C++. Both variants are kept more or less in sync with each other. The Java edition has historically been far more moddable, and comes with far fewer restrictions than the Bedrock Edition, which Microsoft maintains far tighter control over. Still, the modding scene around the Java Edition sprung up in spite of Mojang and Microsoft, not because of them, but over the years the modding scene has been embraced more and more by these two companies. The final step in this embrace comes today as Mojang will no longer obfuscate the code behind th Java Edition. Minecraft: Java Edition has been obfuscated since its release. This obfuscation meant that people couldn’t see our source code. Instead, everything was scrambled – and those who wanted to mod Java Edition had to try and piece together what every class and function in the code did.  But we encourage people to get creative both in Minecraft and with Minecraft – so in 2019 we tried to make this tedious process a little easier by releasing “obfuscation mappings”. These mappings were essentially a long list that allowed people to match the obfuscated terms to un-obfuscated terms. This alleviated the issue a little, as modders didn’t need to puzzle out what everything did, or what it should be called anymore. But why stop there? ↫ Minecraft website This is excellent news for the game, the wider modding community, and players. Minecraft is still a massively popular game, and making modding easier is very welcome, as for a lot of people, mods are what make Minecraft actually interesting. It’s also rare to see a massive force in gaming making a positive step like this, so they deserve the few kudos.

This post is a combination of looks at several oddities among my pile of NES and Famicom cartridges. Why, for example, do I have a copy of Gyromite when I don’t have a R.O.B.? Did I miss something interesting in my MMC blog post? And while it is the Japanese release of Kid Niki: Radical Ninja, is my Kaiketsu Yanchamaru being a little too radical? Who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong? Some of these questions will be answered! ↫ Nicole Branagan at Nicole Express A well-written post with tons of weird NES nerdery. Branagan delivers, every time.

People notice speed more than they realize. Whether they’re ordering food online, watching a video, or checking out of an e-commerce store, that near-instant response gives a quiet kind of reassurance. It tells them, without saying a word, that the system behind the screen is working properly. When everything moves smoothly, people tend to believe the platform knows what it’s doing. Speed becomes less about impatience and more about reliability; it’s how a website or app earns a user’s confidence without ever asking for it outright. When things slow down, even slightly, the feeling changes. A spinning wheel or delayed confirmation sends a small jolt of uncertainty through the user’s mind. It’s subtle, but it’s enough. People start wondering if the system is secure or if something’s gone wrong in the background. Most companies understand this reaction now, which is why they spend so much time and money making sure their sites load quickly and transactions go through smoothly. Fast performance doesn’t just please customers; it convinces them they can trust the process. Online casinos show this relationship between speed and trust especially well. Players want games that run without lag, deposits that clear quickly, and withdrawals that arrive when promised. The platforms that do this consistently don’t just look professional. They build lasting reputations. That’s one reason many players pick trusted sites with the best payouts, where the speed of payments matches the fairness of the games themselves. These casinos often have their systems tested by independent reviewers to confirm both payout accuracy and security, showing that real credibility comes from proof, not promises. There’s also something psychological about how we respond to quick actions. When things happen instantly, it gives people a sense of control. A fast confirmation email or immediate transaction approval makes them feel safe, like the system is responsive and alive. Think about how quickly we lose patience when a message doesn’t send right away. That hesitation we feel isn’t really about time. It’s about trust. Slow responses leave room for worry, and in the digital space, worry spreads faster than anything else. The speed of a platform often mirrors how transparent it feels. A site that runs smoothly gives off the impression that its systems are well managed. Even users who know little about technology pick up on that. Industries that handle sensitive data (finance, entertainment, healthcare) depend heavily on this perception. When transactions lag or screens freeze, people begin to question what’s happening underneath. So speed becomes more than a technical achievement; it’s an emotional one that reassures users everything is in working order. Fast payments are one of the clearest examples of this idea. Digital wallets and cryptocurrency platforms, for instance, have won users over because transfers happen almost in real time. That pace builds comfort. People like knowing their money moves when they move. The influence of speed stretches far beyond finance. Social networks depend on it to keep people connected. When messages appear instantly and feeds refresh without effort, users feel present and engaged. But when those same tools slow down, even slightly, people lose interest or suspect something’s broken. We’ve grown accustomed to instant feedback, and that expectation has quietly become the baseline for trust online. Still, being fast isn’t enough by itself. A website that rushes through interactions but delivers half-finished results won’t hold anyone’s confidence for long. Reliability takes consistency, not just quickness. The companies that succeed online tend to combine performance with honesty. They respond quickly, yes, but they also follow through, fix problems, and keep communication open. Those qualities, together, make speed meaningful.  If there’s one lesson that stands out, it’s that quick service reflects genuine respect for people’s time. Every second saved tells the user that their experience matters. From confirming a payment to collecting winnings, that seamless, responsive flow builds a kind of trust no marketing campaign can replace. This efficiency becomes the quiet proof of reliability in a world where attention is short and expectations are high.

Blocky Planet is a tech demo I created in the Unity game engine that attempts to map Minecraft’s cubic voxels onto a spherical planet. The planet is procedurally generated and fully destructible, allowing players to place or remove more than 20 different block types. While much of the implementation relies on common techniques you’d expect from your average Kirkland brand Minecraft clone, the spherical structure introduces a number of unique design considerations. This post will focus on these more novel challenges. ↫ Bowerbyte What a great read. Turning a ‘flat earth’ game like Minecraft into something taking place on a spherical world seems impossible at first, but it seems Bowerbyte managed to do it. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to play a Minecraft-like game on an actual sphere, this is it.

I have a slight problem wherein every time I start up a game of NetHack, I completely lose touch with my surroundings for hours on end. Thankfully The DevTeam Thinks Of Everything and there’s a solution that allows communication with the outside world without breaking immersion: the mail daemon! If compiled with -DMAIL and OPTIONS=mail is set in your runtime configuration (the default on Linux), NetHack will periodically check a user specified mbox file (MAIL) for new mail, and upon receiving an email a mail daemon will spawn in and deliver a scroll of mail to the player. Upon reading this scroll a mail program (MAILREADER) will be executed, which hopefully allows you to read your mail. ↫ George Huebner I love everything about this.