Over the next few weeks I will be writing some more short stories for a contest. I will likely have some things to jot down here about writing. So right now I am going to do something a little different. I’m going to tell you about the best joke I have ever seen.

I have an absolutely enormous collection of old games. Literally thousands of them. While I do play a lot of newer games, I also dip into this collection on a near daily basis. It would be easy to write this off as nostalgia, but I don’t think that old games are better than newer ones, or that game development peaked sometime back when I was younger. It’s more that I think a good game is a good game, no matter when it was made. And sometimes a game that isn’t very good might have some aspect to it that is worth investigating. I play with old games, because I play games. All of them.

I solved some development problems today. That isn’t really noteworthy. Making any part of a game is solving an unending torrent of problems. Nothing more, nothing less. Making games, like any sort of creative work, never really has any procedural aspect. A point where you are going through the motions. You solve one problem, then another, then another. Maybe you make a new problem when you solved that third one, so you add that to the list and solve it as well.

It ain’t perfect. It’s not even that much fun. But it works.

Best Games - Wave Race 64 Some games just feel right. There isn’t really much to Wave Race 64, when you get right down to it. The big, beautiful, 3D sequel to a simple Gameboy jet ski racing title. There aren’t really that many tracks. There are only a few riders and they aren’t very different from one another. There are stunt and time trial modes. You can play split screen multiplayer. On paper, a pretty uninspiring package for a racing game.

There is a few pieces of text in Street Fighter III : Third Strike that I find fascinating. They aren’t important to the game. They are mostly semi-nonsensical pump up quotes. One bit of text might have a typo in it. None of that is why I find it fascinating. It’s the technique that I love.

I wrote about the Calgary Arcade Jam last week. Well that got me inspired. I’ve been working on an arcade style game for a while. That meant I have had to create a whole lot of systems and processes to make 3D meshes look and move like 2D sprites.

https://itch.io/jam/arcade-jam-2026-cgda/entries Yesterday I got the chance to participate in a game jam. This time I wasn’t jamming, I was judging. I played all the games and talked with all the teams. It was sort of fun to see a game jam from this angle.

For a while I had most of the control issues with my game worked out. You could run around and the screen would scroll at least as smoothly as a 1990s era arcade machine or console. I had introduced most of the same constraints, so I was met with the same results. The simulation of the game could move with sub-pixel precision but the graphics could only move in full pixel increments. That meant that some movements would look smooth, but moving in some directions, particularly diagonals would sometimes lead to a stepping or jitter.

I hit a strange milestone recently. This is both the most stories I have had out on submission and the longest I have had multiple stories out on submission. Let’s be completely honest, most, if not all, of them will be rejected. Now that’s not a defeatist attitude, that’s just the way this game goes. Most stories get rejected. Sometimes several times.

Turning an entirely 3D, triangle based, game into a 2D, pixel art, game takes a lot of fakery. Up until now, a lot of that fakery leaned on a few scripts and processes that were largely CPU based.

Best Games - Return of the Obra Dinn It’s the sort of premise that could only come from an indie developer. At a larger development studio or publisher, Lucas Pope and Obra Dinn never make it past the first pitch meeting.

Work continues slowly on my game. I have reworked a lot of my Blender to Godot flow. I have simplified some of my shader setup so that my CRT effect lives completely independent of any graphics it’s modifying. I have added menus, proper pausing, and a save/load functionality, though most of that hasn’t gelled to anything close to final.

For my birthday I decided to gift myself not having to post something this week. Shit. I just did, didn’t I.

Best Games - Punch-Out!! Punch-Out!! only exists because of a mistake. By 1984 Nintendo had already released three Donkey Kong titles and one Mario Bros. game. I don’t know if you heard, but the Donkey Kong and Mario games did quite well. Well, most of them did. I don’t believe Stanley from Donkey Kong 3 is really a household name. I wonder how that one sold.