I can’t imagine AI being able to code something efficiently enough to run on a C64!

I try to stay in touch with the Atari 2600 homebrew community, and this was the conventional thinking there, too. But between increases in LLM’s sampling of appropriate code and various automated tools, some people have started making games for the console with AI and very little knowledge of their own.

Are the games good? Not particularly. Are they as well-coded as a moderately talented human could achieve? Not even close. But they are functional. If AI can do that, I’m sorry to say that it should almost certainly be able to make a C64 “game” of some description.

Laughs in external USB 3.5" floppy drive

Yes, when I first realized that being published in Japan by D3 Publisher was a common denominator between these weird and wonderful budget games that I found, I became very interested in them. My friends actually went to TGS one year and got everything they could from the D3 booth for me.

However, since I’ve moved to Japan, I’ve continued researching and collecting vintage games, and I’ve found that while the majority of Simple Series games were published by D3 Publisher, especially the PS2 games, there are also some titles that were officially published by other companies. I guess it all leads back to D3 somehow, though. Also, D3 Publisher was still independent in the years these games came out.

My favorites include (Almost all PS2):

• The Zombie vs Ambulance (aka Zombie Virus). Drive an ambulance around a zombie-infested city, rescuing survivors and upgrading your vehicle.
• The OneeChanbara series. Slay blood-gushing zombies as an inexplicably bikini-clad, cowboy-hat-wearing swordswoman with light adventure/Metroidvania elements. The earlier ones are better IMO; as time went on they focused more and more creepily on the sexy female characters which were initially mostly a gag, especially after the movie (Yes, a movie!) came out.
• RC de Go! (PS1) Race in a remote-control car league.
• The Sniper 2 (direct sequel to a PS1 game I own but haven’t played). Play a sniper blackmailed into doing missions for a crime syndicate while you try to find a way out.
• The Ninkyo (aka Yakuza Fury). It’s pretty fair to call this a very barebones Yakuza (Ryu ga Gotoku) knock-off, but it has its charms.
• The Nihon Tokushubutai (aka Special Forces). A strange hybrid of FPS and realtime strategy in which you control a SWAT team in various scenarios.
• The Helicopter (aka Radio Helicopter). Fly a radio helicopter around your neighborhood while completing arbitrary but fun challenges. There’s another game that was marketed as “Radio Helicopter 2” in PAL territories, but it seems to be completely unrelated and not even a Simple Series game. I have it and didn’t find it nearly as fun as the original.

There are more that look very interesting but I haven’t played them yet, so I don’t feel I can recommend them. And there are also some real dogs, naturally, although I should say that even the ones I’ve listed can be something of an acquired taste. The Earth Defence Force series started as Simple Series games too, although I haven’t played any of them

While I was writing this I remembered a few more of my favorite budget games that weren’t Simple Series games:

• Sanvein (aka Starfighter Sanvein) on PS1. I’m not normally one for overhead shooters but I was really taken with this one. There’s an interesting light strategy element to it.
• TheDog Island on PS2 and Wii. Inspired by a line of stationery and decorative items, it’s a collect-'em-up with light Metroidvania elements aimed at younger players, but quite fun and addictive.
• The Puppy/Kitty and the Magic Hat (aka Petz Dogz/Catz 2) on PS2 and Wii. A spiritual sequel to TheDog Island, they’re actually two games which appear to be identical except that one is populated by dogs and the other by cats (I have the cat version).
• Choro-Q High Grade 2 (aka Road Trip Adventure). Choro-Q is a line of kids’ toy cars that older Westerners may remember as Penny Racers. Naturally there is a whole slew of tie-in kids’ games in Japan, from the Famicom onward, but for me this particular game is a standout. There’s racing, sure, and it kind of sucks, yes, but the meat of the game is exploring a massive open world, solving mysteries, and figuring out how to get to various places and which special vehicle parts you’ll need. It includes a “soccer” minigame which feels like a possible inspiration for Rocket League, but in a game that came out many years earlier.

The original book of “Ready Player One” had a secret ARG, not unlike the one the main characters in the book take on. But as far as anyone can tell, no-one found it or even thought to look for it. Ten months after publication, the author Ernest Cline finally made an announcement about it.

The “trailhead” (starting clue/puzzle) was hidden in an almost identical way to the one in the story, and there was an empty leaderboard on his website just the same, too, but somehow no-one picked up on any of it. It must have been driving him and the publishers mad.

Quite a few of the various Simple series’ games on PS1 and PS2. Some of them were translated and released in Europe and the USA, but many more weren’t. Not too many lost gems there, though. Most of the games that stayed in Japan aren’t anything special.

The series started out as basic implementations of card and board games to be sold for a low price, then moved into fairly generic video games in established genres, but eventually the various developers started making somewhat original, low-budget games, and some of them are pretty good, especially considering their budgets.

I’m not sure how the games are connected as a series, although they definitely are, because they’re numbered in order of release on the original covers. But they’re made by many different developers, and even in Japan there seems to have been at least two publishers releasing them.

TIL that cheap fanny packs can apparently now be called “cross-body packs” in a vain effort to make us forget how uncool they are.

Honestly, I think it would’ve been better if they’d leaned into it as a retro 80s/90s thing and just called it a fanny pack. It’s already hideous, anyway.

Edit for clarification: There are things that I would happily and unironically call a “cross-body pack”. But IMO the picture on that website is of a fanny pack.

Not advice on what to do exactly, but why do you say “long box”? I know many PAL and NTSC-U Saturn games came in special, long boxes, but I can’t recall ever seeing a Japanese Saturn game in anything other than quite standard CD jewel cases (special edition carboard outer boxes aside). Particularly Kaze no Regret, which is a fairly common game here (a regular jewel case copy still usually goes for under 1,000 yen, even with obi and other ephemera).

If you want to, it should be possible to pop the broken cover out of the hinge piece and replace it with the cover from almost any standard double-width CD jewel case. There are several videos on YouTube showing how to do this. Once you put in the paper insert, no-one would ever be able to tell.