Dank Zine - Issue 82
Issue 82 goes deep. Like, Soviet-era computer lab, eight-floppy-disk, reverse-engineer-the-whole-game deep. This issue is anchored by a major interview with the person who dragged one of the MSX's greatest RPGs into English, and it doesn't stop there: emulation history, new fan translations, a cursed kids' CD-ROM, and a horror RPG that crawled out of the internet on Halloween like a haunted VHS tape someone left on your porch.
Sad Cat Comix
Sad Cat is three spreadsheets into Princess Maker. It is year six. Daughter excels at sin and may become a corrupt noble. This is somehow Sad Cat's fault. Sad Cat is playing Princess Maker correctly, which means everything is going terribly.
Feature Interview: Max Iwamoto on Illusion City
Illusion City is an eight-disk MSX2 RPG that people talked about for decades without actually playing. Dense scripts, broken code, a reputation for being brilliant and completely out of reach. Max Iwamoto is the reverse engineer who rebuilt it from the inside out. He talks about Soviet-era university MSX clubs where hacking was a necessity, not a hobby. He talks about fixing 100+ bugs, including a Petrify exploit that lets you one-shot the final boss, designing custom pixel fonts to squeeze into tiny battle menus, and disassembling chunks of the game directly from compiled code. He also talks about what fan translation actually is ("advanced localization"), why he learned to say no, and what's coming next with Burai. Really good interview.
Zophar's Tales: My First ZSNES Experience
A first-person account from the person who ran Zophar's Domain, written about the night in October 1997 when ZSNES 0.150 dropped and changed everything. IRC friendships, beta testing builds, dial-up multiplayer, and what it felt like to be inside the golden age of emulation while it was happening. Also: zsKnight is Canadian and pronounces it "ZED-ESS-EN-EE-ESS." Nobody knew this.
Drink Break Beats Review
Marupanda's Game Boy-flavoured album Drink Break Beats. Music built for short attention spans, trimmed with kitchen scissors, engineered around limitation as a design rule. Arcade break room energy. Functional, in the way coffee is functional.
Weird New Hacks and Translations
Four new patches worth your time. Jewel BEM Hunter Lime is PC-98 anime monster-hunting chaos, finally in English. Titanic Mystery: Ao no Senritsu is a 1987 Famicom Disk System oddity where you pick a diver for reasons the game refuses to explain, now translated. Emerald Dragon is a Super CD-ROM2 RPG with a dragon protagonist who has to solve everyone's problems. Fortress of Necros is a PC Engine RPG spun out of a Japanese toy line with eight classes and gloriously odd mechanics.
This Game Exists: Shelley Duvall's It's a Bird's Life
A 1993 Windows and 3DO CD-ROM where Shelley Duvall narrates a story about her real parrots migrating from Los Angeles to the Amazon after a house fire. You click through sixty illustrated pages. There are no fail states. The 3DO version exists because the 3DO needed multimedia content, and someone had a finished disc. This is not a game. It is a pure, uncut artifact from the moment when CD-ROM storage exploded, and nobody yet knew what to put on it. Existence Level: 7/10.
Please Play This Instead: SplatterWorld
Namco's unreleased 1992 NES horror RPG surfaced on 4chan on Halloween 2025. A nearly finished ROM, timestamped January 1993, with a battery save and a debug menu included. Rick from Splatterhouse recruits a guitarist with claws, a sentient mudpile, and the ghosts of defeated enemies to stop the King of Terror. One of the first bosses is a possessed vending machine. 9 skulls out of 10.
3DO-roscopes by MisterRadon
Your horoscope assigned a 3DO game. Whether you are a Primal Rage Sagittarius or a Dragon Lore Capricorn, the stars have opinions, and MisterRadon has art.
Dank Art
Art from AnnK, Goemonsama, Chuboh, and Maru, featuring Riot City, Waku Waku 7, Success Joe, Marble Madness II, Over the Garden Wall, Bubsy, Peanuts, and more from the streams of LordBBH, HungryGoriya, Macaw45, and friends.