Old Sites

• Rumic World

A veritable shrine to Rumiko Takahashi, run by slavishly devoted twin brothers Dylan & Harley Acres since *1996*. It's ***STILL*** being updated as of 2023(!!!) If you like Rumiko Takahashi's work a lot (and I do), it's a genuinely useful and interesting fan resource. Inside, you'll find plot synopses, character bios, articles, and much more!

It's through this site that I learned Rumiko Takahashi was knighted by the French government, and that the twins that run the site are apparently both chairpersons at two separate colleges. Isn't the internet crazy?

• Anime Densetsu [NSFW]

A pretty ancient small scale forum/gallery thing, ostensibly about anime, mostly full of retro hentai. 18+ only!

• PC-98 Images [NSFW]

An archival site that hosts mirrors for PC-98 games (and is still actively updated, as of 2023!). I like it for the screenshots and the brief, wry reviews at the bottom of each game's page. Since it seems like 99% of the PC-98's game library was hentai, clicking on pretty much any game is bound to bring up NSFW screenshots. 18+ only!

• Usagichan Company Search and Rescue

A fascinating (and historically invaluable) library of first-hand coverage of various anime conventions, complete with photos. Its earliest coverage goes all the way back to 1998!

• Ricki's Trigun Planet

An anime fansite for Trigun, established 2003. I'm a big fan of Trigun so a site like this is obviously gonna be my thing, but I think the genuine nature of the site is really charming and makes it worth visiting for anyone, if only for its authentic weeb fanpage feel.

(UPDATE: As of January of 2023, the site has been partially resurrected since becoming inactive in 2015. It looks like Ricki updated it to talk about Trigun Stampede; I'm thankful a site as charming as this can get a second lease on life, even if it's only a blip of activity!)

• Slayers Universe

A Slayers fansite from 1997 with a shockingly appealing site layout, which is a pleasant surprise for something so old -- maybe it was worse when it launched, but the earliest archive.org cache is from February 29th, 2000 (leap day, what are the odds of that), so...

Anyway, the site has boatloads of information collated from Slayers media, from lore to production details. There's a potent aura of Web 1.0 fandom, and the earnest enjoyment for the franchise on display here makes me pretty jealous that this whole "independently hosted community resource site" thing has more or less gone the way of the dodo, and I will likely never partake in something so genuine. Then again, there's a rambling article about how the site got too big for the site admin, and he was harangued for getting some plot information wrong, so maybe it wasn't all sunshine and roses, but still...

• Compile.co.jp

The whole site is hysterically corny-looking. For a company that published Disc Station and made a lot of their games for computers, it sure looks... Angelfire-y. Carbuncle says "web design is my prison. guu"

I love Madou Monogatari/Puyo and this site is a goldmine of webcore graphics from both series. This may be an incredibly niche recommendation, but if you like crusty websites (I'm guessing you do, you're on NeoCities after all) and Compile-era Puyo, this is prime pickins' for assets to steal for your own page. Oh, and there's really interesting contemporary information about Compile's projects circa right before the company crashed and burned, but I'm not paying attention to that. I'm trying to download a microscopic gif image of Schezo.

• The IRTC Archive

The Internet Raytracing Competition, or IRTC, was a 3D graphics contest run between 1996 and 2006 as attested to by the landing page. According to this random article I found, it was a pretty big deal in its time (presumably among 3D graphics enthusiasts and no one else) mainly using POV-Ray, a raytracing tool that looks like a vaporwave holdover's wet dream (aka me). The art produced by the IRTC in the years it was running is nothing short of inspirational (again, if you're a vaporwave holdover who likes primitive 3D graphics) and I'm so grateful that every entry has been neatly and tidily preserved on one convenient gallery site. The IRTC archive is my favorite place to go hunting for desktop wallpapers, and I find myself idly browsing its historic halls often, fantasizing about having the talent and expertise these entrants had.

• Sogna Digital Museum[NSFW]

A fansite dedicated to the VERY niche subject of Sogna, a game development company in Japan that made eroge games mostly for various PC platforms, with brief dalliances with smash hit consoles like the FM Towns Marty. Since Sogna is most remembered for the "Viper" series (a collection of low-gameplay, impressive animation hentai games), that's mostly what the site focuses on.

I only recently discovered Sogna and the Viper series when I blindly purchased a hentai DVD at Anime Boston in April (it was my first time at a con that was fine with nudity, I was in it for the novelty). It was called Viper GTS, and I thought the girls on the cover were pretty cute, so I picked it up not knowing anything about it. When I get home, me and my partner plumrou watched it to see if it would be funny (it was, its pretty low budget and the dub is hysterical), and I looked it up afterwards -- turns out, its an adaptation of a PC-98 game of the same name, though they *really* downgraded the character designs in the hentai. It feels so cool that I inadvertly collected something connected to my interest in PC-98 games by pure chance, and despite it being hentai, it's a special part of my media collection now.

Anyway, I'm a fan of these Viper games now -- the pixel art is stunning and it's no wonder they managed to be successful enough to get a hentai adaptation with the animation quality already present in the PC games. This site appears to have been VERY popular when it launched in 2008, if archive.org is anything to go by (seriously, almost every day in July, 2008 is preserved). Within its pages, one can find anything and everything you'd ever want to know about Sogna.

• Chrono Trigger IRC RPG

A wiki(?) for an online Chrono Trigger roleplay hosted over the EsperNet IRC Network, hosted every Saturday at 2PM, PST... seemingly last updated in August of 1997. Sorry if you were interested.

(Crazy that this rp ended(?) only 2 years after Chrono Trigger came out, you don't really imagine the SNES and the internet overlapping much)

A lot of images and some links appear to be broken, and pages often load slowly or incorrectly throw up 404s, but I believe that's oocities and not the site itself.

The site includes logs of each session, capping out at session 15, though it appears from session 11 onwards, the logs were hosted on a different site and thus not preserved -- whether or not our brave heroes ventured beyond the fifteenth session or if everyone got into a fight and ended the game is anyone's guess. Also of note is a page with character bios for every member of the RP, stirring deep nostalgia and embarassment in me, a veteran of cringe internet roleplay.

Finding a website like this is like finding buried treasure -- thorough documentation of how multiple people talked and roleplayed in an IRC channel from almost three decades ago is an amazing find.

(CTRPG cast ranked by how easily I could beat them up:
#1: Derek Eccles (he could subdue, say, a blue imp)
#2: Jazz (when he finds out his whole past has been a lie, there will be hell to pay!)
#3: Mariah Nu (she has a fetish for inventing(?))
#4: Akira (he was originally in it for money, but now for revenge)
#5: Ashe (the store is now in medina)
#6: Keli Levine (when you get to know her, she actually very interesting to talk to)
#7: Leeta DeArmond (average magical defense for all elements except for Ice. she's got a weakness against Ice)
#8: Krysta Somo (some bore mutant children who added to the then-tiny gene pool of the mystics)
#9: George Desormeaux (protects someone for a fight, cecil-style)
#10: Star Azure (update: it seems that star has gone completely loco)
#11: Valeria (the vines began pummeling valeria's step-father and mother)
#12: Lieutenant Lynn Calhan (it is also important to note that there were genes other than human genes used)
#13: Kane (he wears no clothing except for an impskin loincloth)


• PEZJester's World

"Jolly" Jim the Court PEZJester has created a space online where he can discuss his greatest passion in this world: collecting PEZ dispensers (only the old ones that don't have feet, whatever that means). In all seriousness, Jim's unabashed love for what he collects is pretty charming. There isn't much else to say, I just included this site for being off-beat and strange. Definitely the most Hypnospace-y site in this link dump.

• Ranma ½ Info Site

A Ranma ½ fansite last updated in early February of 1997, which makes it older than dirt. Brad Rancourt, the site admin, clearly has gone balls to the wall with custom graphics, which I can't imagine was easy to do in those days. As previously established, I like Rumiko Takahashi's work, and this is another one of those fan pages with a lot of enthusiasm and detail for all the series minutia, which I really respect.

• Wayne's Word

Wayne P. Armstrong is a former college professor and hardcore botanist/biologist who seems to be very serious about the free dissemination of information in a time pre-Wikipedia, as the madman has been updating his site with educational content since *1994*. It STILL sometimes get updated now, in 2023, which is absolutely insane. I don't think there's much of a need for a site that doesn't have information on literally everything like Wikipedia these days, but if you're interested in plants and animals and Wayne himself, check this site out!

Media

• The Cutting Room Floor

My favorite website. It's a wiki that catalogs unused content within video games. I frequently browse this site when I'm bored.

• Tonc - GBA Modding by 'cearn'

A massive manual on the Game Boy Advance's hardware and how to homebrew your own games. The guy that wrote this thing is a MASSIVE nerd. I really really want to learn to do this one day. (But why is it called Tonc???)

• danooct1's YouTube Channel

My favorite YouTube channel. A chill guy demonstrates the payloads of computer viruses, in addition to their history (when there IS history) and how they spread in their day. It may mostly be the flashy, entertaining side of malware analysis, but I think it serves a valuable purpose as an educational tool.

• La Investigación YN

A NeoCities page documenting the search and archival for earlier versions of Yume Nikki. The site updates very infrequently (basically whenever a breakthrough occurs), so it's not something you'd need to check regularly. Still, the story of where these pieces of lost media were hiding all this time is pretty interesting if you haven't heard it!

• The Game Boy Abyss

Someone who, at time of writing, is trying to play and review every single GBA game released in English. It's written in a loose, conversational style and it's a concept only a nutcase would attempt. Really, really cool page! Best of luck to its creator; more people need to appreciate the torture you're willingly putting yourself through.

• The Obscuritory

A review site that covers esoteric software and forgotten games. This one might be more well known than I realize, but I still really enjoy and hope other people will too.

• Gaming Alexandria

A games media archival site, containing things like videos and magazine scans, as well as some unused game content a la TCRF.net. I bought my copy of Super Nazo Puyo: Rulue no Roux and the Super Famicom version of Puyo Puyo from this place!

• Gaming Hell

My favorite game reviewer! This site is, along with TCRF, one of my favorite haunts when I don't have anything better to do. It's more or less completely responsible for me wanting to do reviews too, and thus I added the DaikoChannel page. Sometimes the humor is a little mean (to an unfunny degree), but since Ant Cooke is a brit, I assume that just makes me look like I don't understand comedy. Coverage of arcade games and niche weeb games seem to be a specialty.

• Apple Rankings

A site reviewing every kind of apple, with a hysterical, riotously funny tone of writing.

Resources

• Dr. Sloth's Neopets Image Emporium

A searchable image database containing nearly every graphic and site asset hosted on Neopets.

• Vetusware

A colossal repository of abandonware downloads, from games to operating systems.

• Soundfonts

A download page for a handful of miscellaneous .sf2 files, if music-making's your thing.

• Kaoanis

A shitload of kaoani gifs that make the page load really slow. Useful for your NeoCities page, maybe.

• Dither Me This

An in-browser image editor that I use for this very site! It dithers images you put into it. Really handy for making images look nice and crusty for Aesthetique purposes, or for simple color reduction.

• Bonnibel's Graphic Collection

A NeoCities page that hosts a collection of random graphics pulled from the internet that you could use for your site.

• sakuga.video

An automated player of random clips of sakuga animation, sourced from sakugabooru.com. This one's straddling the line of "resource" and "interactive", but I guess it's a resource if you think of it like a collection of animation references, presented in a convenient way. I don't know where else to put it, but it's cool.

Interactive

• wizMUD

A free-to-play MUD that's more like a virtual chatroom than a game, as it pointedly does not include things typical to online MMOs, such as grinding. The game has been in defunct limbo on and off since its launch in 2017, but the servers remain online. It's amazingly cool to see this kind of thing independently hosted in the modern day, even if it's a little lonely to explore an inactive virtual world.

• Living Worlds

Technically not Living Worlds (as far as I know?), which is an app featuring beautiful pixel art created in the 90s by Mark Ferrari as part of a "planner program" called Seize the Day. This website allows you to examine the palette of each background included in Living Worlds and view the scenery at different times, all animated through color cycling.

• JS Kid Pix

An in-browser version of the 1989 version of Kid Pix.

• NeoCities Sokoban

A super cool and addicting version of Sokoban that runs in-browser from a NeoCities page.