Category: Video Games

Mari Lwyd’s Pantri Panic Launched

Today sees my game – Mari Lwyd’s Pantri Panic – launched, as part of the Pico-8 Advent Calendar Jam 2025.

I’ve done a lot of travelling this year and on planes I saw a lot of folks playing versions of a “place blocks to make lines” mobile phone game. I found a copy that I like (Romeow & Julicat – which has been on the Evercade) so thought I’d turn it into a game, themed around the great Welsh export – Mari Lwyd. I added elements to both Welsh Christmasses and some video games I like, so I feel like this is one of the favourite games I’ve built so far.

You can play it below.

Hope you like it! If you do, I’d really like the following:-

You can download the game for free on Itch.io for Raspberry Pi and the source code for you to build in Pico-8. If you donate £2 or more you get the Windows, Linux and Apple Mac executables. I have also a Ko-Fi page which I am using as a generic “support my endeavours in various things” page. You can make a one-off donation or memberships.

Or you can just play online. Let me know your high scores, my best is 72625.

Lazy Zombie Nation

I follow the Welsh national football team. My first computer was the Commodore 64.

I was today years old to realise that the music for the Commodore 64 game “Lazy Jones” music is the sample used by Zombie Nation’s “Kernkraft 400“.

Kernkraft 400 became Wales’ anthem after a match away at Belgium in the mid-2010s when the DJ played it at half time. I think the favourable conditions for Wales and the 48 hours of Leffe Blonde meant it was swiftly added to Y Wal Goch’s playlist, so much so that it was played in bars as I travelled around France in Euro 2016, usually the ones filled with the Welsh. We were no trouble, like.

You would have thought I’d have become aware of it, given my love of retro games. But no, I was told today. Thanks Matt!

50 before I’m 50 – Go to The Cave

A few weeks ago (after completing the Stroud Parkrun which was incredibly hilly), I – along with a few folks from The Retro Asylum Discord – visited The Cave, a retro museum linked to the YouTube channel of The Retro Collective.

As annoyingly it’s been a few weeks since I attended, so I’m going to leave the images doing the talking, but if you’re ever in the area and you like nerdy stuff like I do it’s well worth paying a visit. The items in the cave and connected Arcade Archive are beautifully maintained – I am struggling to think of a Street Fighter II machine that was so looked after and presented, it worked perfectly.

Whilst I could wax lyrical about the day and the event (it was good seeing folks again also), I would rather pictures tell the story. I will say my favourite little gimmick was the WH Smith esque area where you could scan the games to play them on a Mister. That was effortlessly cool.

Another one from the list!

The excellent looking WH Smith esque store
The fabulous NEO GEO Pocket. My brother had one of these, no idea where it went. The joystick is wonderfully clicky
A lovely tribute to one of my favourite games ever, Doom
An absolute pristine Unreal Tournament box. Literally immaculate
Great Giana Sisters. Super rare as it’s a bugger to get hold of. It’s a C64 take on Super Mario Brothers and Nintendo got Litigious.
Beautiful pins. I want the Lemmings ones. Already looked on eBay. No chance
A complete collection of Codemasters games. I’ve a fair few of these (28 in my collection). Notice the Championship Wrestling game with “Hulk Hogan” on the front
The Nintendo Kiosk. Is a multisystem that was used to advertise the NES in Japan (I believe). The 3 monitors synced up so I was playing “1 bullet, 1 screen” on Duck Hunt
I wanted this so much as a child. The Cartoon Classics Commodore Amiga…
I had this when I was a child. Shudder to think how long I played it for.
At least one person out there paid for WinZip!
The Tower of Power. I did add a Game Genie to it too…didn’t work.
The Acorn Archimedes was a great machine, used to pray for rain so we would boot these up and play Chuck Rock, Manchester United Europe or Lemmings on them.
Serious software
So the machine on the left is a joint IBM PC and Megadrive. The machine on the right I think is a machine that was in cars. Not sure of the legality of that but there you go.

If you ever get the chance to go, you should. The Cave is brilliant and would love to go back again one day!

How one developer got rollback netcode working in 1997

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I saw an interview with one of the developers of ZSNES – one of the first truly great emulators. One of the key points, highlighted by PC Gamer and Time Extension was this great quote – how a developer achieved rollback netcode in 1997.

“30 times a second, I do a secret save state. The emulator plays ahead, maybe 30 milliseconds, and whenever it gets a packet saying the controller has changed, it rewinds to that frame and replays the emulation until the current point with that new input buffer.”

zsKnight – Zophar’s Domain Interview

Rollback netcode, even nearly 30 years later, is still a sticking point for many online games. It’s fine for first person shooters where you don’t need millisecond accuracy, but for things like fighting games like Street Fighter, it’s crucial. Really the only first enjoyable experience on fighting games online for me was Super Street Fighter II Turbo: HD Remix which was released in 2008, and even now the first thing many fighting game enthusiasts talk about was how it’s like to play online.

The fact that the problem was solved in 1997 before it is even a thing is so joyful.

I did manage to play ZSNES online in Business Studies class back in the day. Usually we were playing Bomberman or Mario Kart. Never got it working over dialup, but for a free version over a decent network, it is probably better than a lot of rollback netcode today.

You can watch the full (2 hour) interview below.

A Full Circle Reaction

One of the highlights of my year is Play Expo – a weekend away in Blackpool that has a bunch of retro and modern video games. It’s pretty much the same every year: arcade machines as you walk in, trading hall to the left, pinball machines to the right, home consoles towards the back along with the main stage. Play Expo has a familiarity to it, which makes it a must attend every year for me. If only to see the same faces every year.

The traders hall is often a place I go for a wander. Not straight away, as it’s hectic, but towards the middle afternoon on Saturday it dies down a bit and you get to check out the trading hall, have a bit of a chat and just generally have a better buying experience. You feel less pressured as you check through the boxes on the floor (which – as somebody who has dropped 3 stone in the past year – is a lot more easier experience on the knees).

One such place is The Gaming Newsagent – a long time attendee that started as SegaMags, but branched out into all such other magazines. It was in one of these boxes and a bit of time for exploring I found this magazine. St Format issue 70, from May 1995. An immediate buy. When I said immediate, I meant immediate. I never bothered looking through the rest.

So what was so special? This small PD Game on the cover disk, Chain Reaction. A simple addictive game I played so much and stuck with me for a while. Here whas what was written about it.

CHAIN REACTION BY: Stephen Taylor and Colin Whitehead MACHINES: All STs FALCON-COMPATIBLE: No MEMORY REQUIRED: 512K RESOLUTION: Low UNCOMPRESSED SIZE: 152K Getting started You must dearchive Chain Reaction to the root directory of a blank disk (it isn't hard-drive compatible). The MENU program does this automatically for you. About the program Chain Reaction is a thoroughly absorbing strategy game, which sees up to six players (human, ST or both) competing to ensure their atoms are the last left on the playing board. You take it in turns to place atoms on a grid, but each cell, depending on whether it is a corner, side or middle cell, can hold only a certain number of atoms before reaching critical and exploding outwards. In this explosion, the affected atoms explode one atom into each adjacent cell. If your opponents' atoms are in that cell, they become your atoms (they change colour) and if that cell now becomes critical it also explodes outwards. This results in some catastrophic chain reactions that can wipe other players from the board completely. And it's shareware Chain Reaction features colourful graphics and neat little sound samples to give it real atmosphere. Full instructions on how to set up the game are contained in the REACTION.DOC file, where you'll also find a justifiable plea to register the program for £5. If you want more games of this quality on your Atari, you'd do well to respond. (Caption next to the screenshot of the game grid:) Chain Reaction offers multi-player action that'll knock your socks off (before blowing you off the board).
Chain Reaction from ST Format Issue 70 (image taken from Atari Mania)

If you followed me online for a while, you’d know that this sounds a lot like a game I made. Gone Fission! was inspired by Chain Reaction (and a thousand other PD games, I’ve got an article in my drafts where I talk about all different versions of the game and everything cool that has happened post launch. This is another of those things to add to that post, in a fun coincidence.

Anyway, weird kind of full circle on a side project that dominated this year.