The Set Side B Archives Vol 3: Corridors of the Blobber Dungeon
Author: John Harris
Date: 2024-11-05T07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Videogames

The Set Side B Archives, Volume 3

CORRIDORS OF THE BLOBBER DUNGEON
by John Harris

2024

Also by John Harris:

Exploring Roguelike Games (CRC Press)

The Black Book of Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Figure Fight

8-Bit Obituaries

21 Unexpected Games To Love For The Atari VCS

Somebody Set Up Us The ROM Part 1

Somebody Set Up Us The ROM Part 2

We Love Mystery Dungeon

This is version 1.0 of the text (small file size version)

To explain the title: A "blobber" is an old-school, first-person perspective CRPG where the player's party explores grid-based dungeons. Wizardry, the first true blobber, is the subject of several articles in this book.

Introduction

This is the third collection of posts from our blog Set Side B, of game writings and finds weird and rare, from the corners of the internet.

As I write this, no lie, it's November 4th, 2024, and everyone who actually has a sense of what's going on in the world is on pins and needles, dreading the possibility of bad electoral news the following day. It could be that it turns out everything is okay, or at least less than utterly awful, tomorrow. Or it could turn out that the election will be so close that we won't actually know the answer for some time, and this feeling of intense uncertainty will persist for a while, dooming us all to days, maybe even weeks, of sleepless nights. So I'm actually kind of grateful for having something to take my mind off of that.

Set Side B is as yet modest of stature, but I'm quite proud out our little piece of the World Wide Web. The internet has always had a huge problem with discoverability, and while many solutions have been attempted, from web directories to search engines to linkblogs to social media to AI bots, no good solution has ever been found. SSB is our own little attempt, not to fix it, but to paper over the hole. Reading our site, you might be able to fool yourself into thinking that, relating to gaming matters, that the problem doesn't exist. We look forward to allowing you to ignore this basic, essential flaw in the World Wide Web for years to come.

It is true that Set Side B is a web-first kind of publication, but I think these EPUB compilations still fill an important purpose. Anyone who's paid attention over the three decades we've lived with the internet should have noticed that websites disappear all the time, and often from reasons beyond the control of the site's owner. If, frog forbid, Set Side B were to vanish tomorrow, these compilations would serve as a record, not just of the contents of the site, but of links to most of the things we've found.

There are many things from the web's early days that have disappeared that I wish I could find again. One example: there used to be a "Alderaan Chamber of Commerce Homepage," which was a fake 404 page not found error, and explained that, if this page weren't available, it was probably due to a ludicrously unlikely event, like the whole planet being destroyed by some kind of superweapon. It also listed their planet motto: "We are peaceful. We have no weapons."

The Alderaan Home Page is just one example of the millions of sites that just don't exist any more, all traces of their existence gone except their memories in the minds of the people who once visited them. One day, those memories too will be gone. But as long as even one copy of this ebook remains, then a record that Set Side B existed will survive, and through this introduction, so will the fact that there was once an Alderaan Home Page. In the internet era, it's all that most sites can hope for.

In this collection, you'll find:

- Quite a lot about foundational CRPG Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, and the classic, yet shamefully obscure, arcade puzzle game Rampart

- The word from a number of interesting retrocomputing sources

- A bevy of found wonderful and weird games to investigate and play

- A collection of romhacks to enjoy, or at least read about

- A wide variety of gaming culture finds from the halls of Youtube

- Quite a bit else.

A lot of the content here takes the form of links to Youtube videos. I am not happy with this state of affairs, but it is what it is. A combination of Youtube financial incentives for content creators and Google's continued deterioration as a means of finding things online has made their video platform a primary destination for game-related content online. What would have ben embedded video on the blog have been replaced with linked still thumbnails here.

You might also notice a certain imprecision with the categories. I have tried to split the many articles in this book into reasonable thematic divisions, but a lot of items bridge categories, and so I cannot promise that you'll, say find something on Glitches in the Internals section. At the last second I tried moving some items around so they'd make more sense, but I'm not sure that this effort has done any good.

Thank you for reading this, and Set Side B. It might not seem like much, but I care deeply about it. So let's flip the disk and get started!

Original Writing

Games Writing Premiering on Set Side B

Science Facts From No Man’s Sky

- Hi-tech devices can easily be constructed right in your pants pocket, and out of common materials.

The secrets of space travel are contained within this plant.

- You can make a warp fuel out of a Venus Fly Trap (Oxygen) and a really strong tree (Concentrated Carbon).

- Venus Fly Traps are particularly dangerous, as their jaws are so powerful that they can harm beings sitting a good 50 feet out of their reach.

- “Oxygen,” the element, is different than “oxygen,” the stuff you breathe under water.

- Data is fungible: it doesn’t matter so much what it is, but that you have it. “Navigation data” works to bring your ship to you irrespective of where you got it or where you are, even if it’s the length of the galaxy away.

- Planets are littered with junk and buildings that are useful to you personally. Drop pods are scattered among the wastes of a billion worlds, each broken in precisely the same way, each able, when fixed, to expand the capacity of the space suit of any visitor. When it is done, it’ll continue to sit there in place, repaired but useless, until the end of time, a mute monument to the fact that, at some point, a traveler needed their pocket expanded.

- If a mission calls for culling a herd of creatures that are getting out hand, it doesn’t matter which creatures get culled, or which planet it happens on, or it could indeed be anywhere. They’ll be satisfied if you slaughter tiny helpless beasties, T-rexes, or any combination.

- “Low atmosphere” means exactly the same thing as “low gravity.” They are synonyms.

- The surface of a planet may be too hot, too cold, too toxic or too radioactive, but caves on it are room-temperature and cozy.

- Don’t believe what Kerbal Space Program told you. Orbits are a fiction invented to tell people to keep them out of astrophysicists’ business.

Also, this isn’t a questionable science fact or anything, but the rarer planet types were designed by Dr. Seuss:

On ZANZALOR you can find all sorts of thing
from long buried data to pieces of string
all of their houses are shaped like a ring
from which natives dangle and swing like a swing!

note: string cannot be found there, you can’t swing, and the planet’s not called ZANZALOR. I had to fit the meter, It’s a gag don’t write me.

Review: World of Goo 2

Usually it’s Josh Bycer who does these reviews of new games, but for a change I’m doing one this time! And in text no less! It’s World of Goo 2, which is available for purchase now on the Epic Store, Switch and the makers’ own website.

The people from Tomorrow Corporation got in touch out of the blue, because then-Gamasutra helped spread the word about the original game long ago. Now-Game-Developer currently has a temporary hold on freelance Q&A work, but Kyle Gray was gracious enough to give me a press key anyway, and I figured a review here would be the least I could do. It’s true, it was a free key, but on the other hand I’ve always been a big fan of the original World of Goo. I’ve finished it at least twice, on PC and on Wii.

Does this make me biased? What does biased even mean? The principals of 2DBOY and Tomorrow Corporation have always been shining stars of indie gaming, and I’ve played nearly everything they’ve made since, including the DS title Henry Hatsworth and the Puzzling Adventure, directed by Kyle Gray. Was there a chance that this could have been a negative review? Not really, but then, if it was going to be negative, I probably wouldn’t be writing it. All I can do is assure you: we’re not in this for press keys.

–

There are games that feel like they’ve been with us always, and so it seems for the original World of Goo. It was published in 2008, but I’m so used to games being older than I expect that I half expected it to date from 2006, or earlier.

2DBOY’s World of Goo came out at the beginning of the indie gaming revolution, and one was of the biggest success stories of that heady time. It was one of the first non-Nintendo downloadable titles for the Wii, where it was a huge hit and helped to establish that console, and Nintendo’s consoles generally, as a hospitable, profitable home for small independently-made games.

Conduits

In the 16 years since, the game industry has changed drastically, although really it always has been. Indie titles have proliferated, to the degree that it has become difficult for a game to make itself seen amidst a flood of competitors. Some of the principals of 2DBOY split off into another company, Tomorrow Corporation, which produced the quasi-spinoff Little Inferno, a couple of brilliant visual programming games, Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans, and they published the comedy-adventure game The Captain. Except for The Captain, all of these Tomorrow-made titles, and World of Goo too, share a distinctive and unique visual style and soundscape, which are kind of like if Tim Burton and Danny Elfman decided to make video games.

But World of Goo was the game that started it all. It’s a clever physics game where players build constructions out of “Goo Balls” in order to erect towers, bridge gaps, and generally bring the remaining balls on the level to an exit pipe. Drag one goo ball near another to make a bond between them, which behaves like a thin, stiff spring. By joining them together, balls and bonds, you can make all kinds of physics constructions. More species of goo balls are introduced in later levels: goo balloons, reusable goo, goo that can bond to three other goo balls at once, goo that can only bond singly, goo that sticks to walls and more.

A Shooter

The aim of most levels is to reach that pipe somewhere in the level. If you can get a goo construction close enough to it, it activates, drawing goo balls into it. To win a level, you have to collect a minimum number of balls; getting more means getting a better score. Usually goo balls that have been used to build things can’t then be sucked down the pipe, so the more goo you use to reach it, the less you can save and the lower your score. Each level has an optional “OCD,” or “Obsessive Completion Distinction” target, that is reached is marked on the hub screen by a flag. Some levels it’s earned by saving a target number of goo balls, some by using under a certain number of moves (goo connections), and with some it’s just a time limit. All of this applies to its sequel, World of Goo 2, as well, just with more kinds of goo and with more puzzle elements. The OCD goals now have one of each type for each level, which are tracked separately.

World of Goo’s gameplay is not completely original. A variety of small games and web toys featuring physics systems of WoG’s type have existed at least as far back as the year 2000, going back to Soda’s defunct, yet fondly remembered Java toy Soda Constructor. World of Goo itself began life as a freeware toy called Tower of Goo, that emerged from its creators’ work at Carnegie University and the Experimental Gameplay Project. (Warning: link is ancient, although still works.)

–

World of Goo went far beyond those earlier versions of the idea, and World of Goo 2 goes beyond even that. The games stay fresh through by constantly introducing new wrinkles on the concept, and new kinds of goo balls with different properties, and it’s always a joy to get a new element to play with. The first game had 48 levels, and WoG2 has 61, but they go by in a flash, and the game never overstays its welcome. If anything they feel much too short, like there are gameplay possibilities left unexplored. I guess it’s true that you should always leave them wanting more.

Liquid Goo

World of Goo had a bizarre story involving the creation and machinations of an ominous company, called World of Goo Corporation, that may have been inspired by 2DBOY’s founders’ experiences working for Electronic Arts. It’s really less of a story as a collection of short stories, told in five chapters, with the highlight being a bizarre and self-referential Chapter 4 where the game’s concepts are flipped upside down.

World of Goo 2 also has a bizarre story that’s like a collection of short stories, about World of Goo Corporation’s ominous successor, World of Goo Organization. It all culminates in Chapter 4, where the game’s concepts aren’t so much flipped upside down but entirely stretched out of shape. I don’t want to spoil it, but Chapter 4 is amazing.

So yes, World of Goo 2 largely follows the same lines as the predecessor. It’s not just in story. It follows up on some of those possibilities hinted at during World of Goo, but it also adds many more new concepts, so by the end, which I reached in an obsessed 9 1/2 hours of play, I felt like there were at least as many gameplay loose ends as at the end of the first World of Goo.

A basin

All the old species of goo ball return, but now there’s new friends to learn about. There’s now liquids! And jelly creatures that you can split apart and grind up in satisfying ways! Goo conduits and launchers, and shooters and engines, and even more beyond that. The physics engine has received a substantial upgrade. Goo balls now leave damp blotches on the terrain they rest upon. The Time Bug undo feature can go back a bit further. You can drag the view around with the mouse, zoom in and out with the mouse wheel, and the goo balls are a bit better about getting out of your way when you’re trying to click on something important.

The only way that it’s really deficient, I’d say, is that it lacks the open-ended “Tower of Goo” mode of the original, where players could use their collected goo balls from the other levels in a high score challenge. Maybe in an update? World of Goo 2 has enough ideas in it that they could, if they chose, make a World of Goo 3. But what then? Could they keep riding this train for 100,000 years? Maybe not, but if they can keep up this level of ingenuity, then easily for another sequel.

World of Goo 2 has an engaging art style, so here, have some of the many hundreds of screenshots I took. There aren’t any big spoilers in them, but they do illustrate some of the later goos and gimmicks.

A Jelly Creature

Growth Goo (no giggling!)

Lava, and goo bonds that deform to terrain

Albino Goo (now heatproof)

Cheese(?)

I had an amazing amount of fun with World of Goo 2. I binged it and finished it in 9 1/2 hours. You might finish it a bit faster, since I took something of the scenic route, but I also still remember many tricks from the first game, which I had completely OCD’d on Wii, and didn’t get stuck anywhere. It gets started a bit faster than World of Goo did. If you haven’t played it, you might want to go through it first. Luckily World of Goo has never gone out of print, and is available for nearly all desktop and mobile platforms, in addition to Nintendo consoles. You can’t get the Wii or Wii-U versions any more, but it can be obtained readily for the Switch.

It’s true, I’m on Tomorrow Corporation’s side. They’re good people and deserve to do well, but I’d be obsessing over World of Goo 2 even if I’d never heard of them before. It’s a real jewel, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

Coleco’s Tarzan for the Atari VCS/2600 Found After 40 Years

The lost Atari 2600 version of Coleco’s Tarzan game, from the VGHF article

As reported in a post at the excellent Video Game History Foundation, a copy of the unreleased Atari port of the Colecovision Tarzan game has been found, bought from a former Coleco employee. It used an unusual bankswitching scheme, but has been hacked to use a more common system, and both versions of the ROM are available from the Internet Archive. Both are 16K, very large for an Atari game, but microscopic by the standards of data today.

The Colecovision version of Tarzan was a late release, and had unusually good animation for its time, and repetitive, yet atmospheric, music. Here’s a Youtube link of the first loop of that version of the game (5 1/2 minutes):

I tried a little of the 2600 version, and I couldn’t make out how to get further than a few screens in. That single button control scheme is a real hassle! Here that is (four minutes 1/2). Dig that opening theme song! Don’t dig that gameplay music, though. It didn’t sound as bad when I played it, I think it was an issue with the recording.Here's a Peertube link to my attempt.

The article has a run that gets further into it (7 minutes):

Apple’s Untaken Path

EDIT: I got the name of the chip wrong, as xot pointed out in a comment. I knew the right now but I always get it mixed up. Corrections have been made, here is xot’s comment:

“The 65C02 is a low-power CMOS variant of the venerable 8-bit 6502 with minimal extra abilities. The 6502 successor used in the Apple IIGS is the 16-bit 65C816. It was designed by Western Design Center in collaboration with Apple, Inc. The story that Steve Jobs held back the IIGS in favor of the Mac is popular because it perpetuates Jobs’ mythic status of being a petty, conniving villain … but it isn’t true. The Apple IIGS was created atop a heap of questionable design decisions. No one decision doomed it but its CPU absolutely held it back. The very boring truth is that WDC could not reliably supply ‘816 processors at the speeds they promised (up to 14 MHz). The IIGS is limited to 2.8 MHz because Apple needed a stable product, which unfortunately was way slower than it should have been.”

Some of this slightly contradicts what was said in the video, but not that far. Whether Steve Jobs was petty and conniving or not I will leave to the ages, at least for now.

It had Apple’s first color point-and-click interface, and it ran on a 65C816.

It was the Apple IIGS. It was released two years after the original Macintosh, three after the Lisa, and it worked surprisingly well. It came with 256KB of memory stock but could be gotten with a whole megabyte, and could be expanded to up with 8 MB–in 1986! It supported hard drives and devices could be attached to it via the Apple Desktop Bus. It ran at less than 3MhZ, but its processor was capable of going much faster, with the rumor being that it was a decision of Steve Jobs to limit its processor so it wouldn’t steal the Macintosh’s thunder. (Jobs had been forced out of the company by the time the GS was released, but these decisions are not so easily reversed?)

What’s more the Apple IIGS was made to compete with the Amiga, and so it had considerable audio-visual advantages over the black-and-white Macintosh. 4096 colors and a sound chip designed by the people who had created the SID. And while it had a mode that made it compatible with Apple II software, it used an OS that looked and worked a whole lot like a Macintosh. It was surprisingly capable as a gaming machine; it took a long time, but in 1997 an Apple IIGS version of Wolfenstein 3D was made, although running at a pretty low frame rate:

The 65C816, a 16-bit version of the classic 6502, was used in a number of platforms but ultimately didn’t have the reach of its predecessor. But if Apple had thrown more weight behind the GS, we could well be living in a world where 6502 variants still saw use outside of embedded and hobbyist systems, instead of the Intel and ARM chips that dominate the market today.

I’m thinking along these lines because Vintage Geek made a video about the GS’s virtues, and it’s interesting to speculate about. It really was a kind of wonder machine, and the last gasp of the Apple II line. Here it is (15 minutes):

The IIGS: Apple of Macintosh? (YouTube, Vintage Geek, 15 minutes)

Home Computer Graphic Character Sets Compared

8-bit microcomputer graphics were, compared to the graphics cards and chips we mostly use today, pretty limited. While machines like the Commodore 64 and Atari 800 allowed for a fully programmable display, not all devices of the age provided for that.

One solution was what I am told is now called semigraphics, which means using generic characters that are pre-defined by the system in combination with each other, piecing together larger images from symbolic building blocks.

ASCII Art, that fading art form created to make imagines on terminal displays, is a form of semigraphic. The IBM PC character set supported semigraphics mostly through its famous Code Page 437, which provided a variety of line-drawing characters , but looking at it it’s evident that it wasn’t intended for general graphic use.

Different platforms from the time varied widely in their support for graphic characters. Let’s take a quick look at what the options were.

Apple

The base Apple II had a very limited character set:

Images in this post taken from Wikipedia. Note: this image displays the blink attribute as greyed out

The Apple II’s character offers little opportunity for graphic use. Of course the Apple II is a miracle through and through for being designed almost entirely by one person, Steve Wozniak, and that includes its character set. Note that it doesn’t neglect reverse video, and even has hardware support for flashing characters. Still though, not much you can do with it other than repurpose punctuation and letters.

PETSCII

The PET and successors, by contrast have an excellent character set for makeshift graphics. The image above is of the Commodore 64 version, but the same graphics are used on old PETs, the VIC-20, the Commodore 128, and even the TED-based machines, the Plus-4 and Commodore 16.

While they’re not reflected in the above image, the whole character set can be reversed too. These machines reverse characters by, simply, duplicating the whole set in ROM as negative images.

PETSCII contains:

- Four playing card suit glyphs

- A decent set of line-drawing characters, with all intersections both sharp-edged and curved corners

- Diagonal slopes, diagonal lines and crossed diagonals

- Horizontal and vertical lines at different places in the character cells

- Frame corners, which combined with the lines can make decent rectangles

- Horizontal and vertical bars at several different widths

- Half-tone checkerboards and half-character checkerboards (on PET systems these have a single-pixel grain, but on later machines the checkerboard squares are 2×2 blocks)

- 4×4 blocks in enough combinations that, combined with their reverse versions, can be used to approximate a 80×50 pixel display with plain characters

- Symbols for English pound and Pi

PETSCII is one of the most versatile character sets from the time, and you can do a ton with it with some thought and ingenuity. There used to be a Twitter account (in the days before the Muskening) that posted images of robots made out of PETSCII characters. And because the character set is included in ROM, one doesn’t have to create their own character graphics, using up 8K of system RAM to hold them, to have rudimentary graphics. (In fact, the original PET didn’t even support redefining the character set, so PETSCII was all you got.)

ATASCII

Did Atari consciously follow the naming of PETSCII, with their own self-branded ATASCII? Both are riffing off of ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. So I guess PETSCII, going by Commodore’s own claimed meaning for PET, means “Personal Electronic Transactor Standard Code for Information Interchange,” which is pretty terrible. But the ATA in ATASCII makes even less sense, since ATA obviously is just the first three letters in Atari.

While it has nowhere near the sheer number of graphic characters that PETSCII has, it had a decent number, including line drawing, slopes and diagonal lines and playing card suits. Of particular note is that the Clubs symbol has the same hole in its middle that it does in PETSCII.

TRS-80

Wikipedia doesn’t offer a screenshot chart of all the symbols of the TRS-80 set, but it does an HTML Table display, which the above is excerpted from. The only graphic characters it has are these off 2×3 cells, which are like the 2×2 blocks in the Commodore set but with an extra row. This gives its screen slightly finer resolution.

The TRS-80 had fairly basic graphics, it seems: those characters appear to have been it as far as graphics goes. The page I saw that described its capabilities even had a name for those blocks: squots. I think that’s a perfectly fine name for these kinds of boxes, whether it’s on a TRS-80, Commodore 64 or other machine.

Sinclair ZX-81

The ZX-81 had a very limited character set. While it has checkerboard and 4×4 block characters, their inclusion comes at the cost of an apostrophe, an at-sign, and even an exclamation point.

The following Spectrum removed the checkerboards, but added the exclamation point and apostrophe, as well as a lowercase alphabet. Still no @ though.

DOS Code Page 437

This is the one that most of you probably already know. It has its own version of squots, but they’re incomplete: it doesn’t have quarter-box or squot-grained checkerboard characters, though it does have three forms of half-tone, a rather extra assortment of double-lined box characters, playing card suit glyphs, and a number of unusual characters up above that will be very familiar to anyone who played PC Rogue.

DOS Code Page 437 was in many ways the end of the venerable tradition of character set graphics. Neither the Atari ST nor Amiga had much use for general purpose character graphics, instead choosing to use their sets’ spare capacity for international characters, a noble offering, but less useful for graphic use.

It is worth noting some of the characters in the ST’s set, though:

Some miscellaneous glyphs like arrows, an X mark and checkbox, a bell and musical note, the Atari logo in two characters, a bunch of digital readout numbers, and four characters that seem to form a face. Here, I’ll piece it together for you:

Who might this handsome person be? It’s a little hard to make out at this scale, but it’s intended to be a pixel-art representation of “Bob” Dobbs, icon and symbol of the Church of the Subgenius!

It’s not a good set of squots, but it’s not bad.

A 30+ Year Old RPG System for the Commodore 64

It’s been months now since I announced my plans to release some project involving LOADSTAR, a 17-year computer magazine on disk, either here or on itch.io, or both. I’m still working on them.

In the meantime, I present this, a packaged-up release of Dungeon on itch.io, a complete old-school RPG gaming system for the Commodore 64, as it was released on the disk magazine LOADSTAR back in 1990.

Written by David Caruso II, Dungeon is a way of creating adventures for others to play, and a system of creating, maintaining and playing characters in those adventures. It was kind of a throwback even in 1990 (the SNES was released that year), but it definitely has charm, and an old-school kind of appeal.

You start out on the Guild screen, where you create a character from one of five fantasy races, then venture out on adventures stored on floppy disks, which in this release are provided as C64 1541 disk images. Fight monsters to earn experience points, find the object of the quest and then return to the Guild by the exit to have the chance to advance in experience level. If your character dies they’ll be revived, but only up to two times! If something happens and you don’t make it back, but don’t die either, your character will be marked as “GONE,” meaning they’re stuck in limbo until they make it back to the Guild on their own!

Your character advances in level between adventures, but they don’t get to keep any items they found on their journey. If they advance in level however, they get to permanently improve two of their stats. Getting to the maximum score of 25 grants them a special ability, but it’s really hard to get there!

This presentation of Dungeon is being made with the permission of Fender Tucker, owner and former Managing Editor of LOADSTAR. It isn’t free, but for $5 you get the Dungeon system and five pre-made adventures for it, culled from the 240+ issues of LOADSTAR. I include a stock copy of the open-source Commodore 64 emulator VICE, configured for playing Dungeon. (If $5 is too much for you, rumor has it Loadstar issues can be found online elsewhere. Dungeon was first published on issue #74.)

If you want to know more about it, I have constructed this 40-page PDF of documentation on Dungeon, from the disks of LOADSTAR in 1990, along with the instructions for the adventures and further notes on playing it from me. Here: (file size: 2.6 MB).

The document refers to an itch.io release, that’s what I’m currently working on. (It's now available, it's $5.) Late in the document there are some spoilers for a particularly difficult adventure using the system.

Dungeon was created by someone named David Caruso II. Neither I nor long-time LOADSTAR managing editor Fender Tucker knows what became of him. I have what is almost certainly an old address for him. It’s been 33 years, and I suspect that Dungeon itself is a couple of years older than that, so it’s possible that Caruso has passed away by now. If he hasn’t, though, I’d like to talk with him. I think (hope?) he’d appreciate that people are still thinking about his creation even now.

C64 Dungeon Play and Lost World Demonstration

Another personal project post! I have done more work in making David Caruso II’s obscure Commodore 64 CRPG Dungeon, published in the issues of the disk magazine LOADSTAR more than once, presentable to current-day audiences. Although it certainly has its limits, there are some aspect to it that are unique, even forward-thinking. We posted about Dungeon here before. To remind everyone, we sell Dungeon on my (rodneylives’) itch.io page for $5, with the blessing of rights-holder and LOADSTAR owner Fender Tucker.

There are a few bugs in Dungeon, now basically impossible to fix, that I’m trying to track down and document, and I’m also working on improving the documentation, as well as provide some useful goodies with the system, like a disk of monsters, equipment and magic items. That’s useful because Dungeon has a special feature where it’ll take the monsters and items on a “Data Disk,” and scatter them around a dungeon map of its own creation. It calls these randomized adventures “Lost Worlds.”

Lost Worlds operate as a kind of quasi-roguelike. The Dungeon software creates a random map and places random items around it, but once created it becomes a Dungeon adventure that any created character can explore as many times as they like. While it doesn’t have roguelike tactical combat gameplay or random item identification, it does have a form of permadeath. Characters only get three lives to advance their level as far as they can go.

Lost Worlds are interesting places to explore, but there are some bugs in them. It is possible, in fact pretty easy, to get stuck in a part of the dungeon from which one can’t escape. Sometimes a one-way door leads into an area that can’t be escaped, and sometimes a passage-blocking trap will strand the player’s character in a dead-end. And once in a while a Lost World is downright unfinishable, its goal item disconnected from the parts of the dungeon the player can even reach.

While there are spells (Passwall and Teleport) that can release a trapped character, if they aren’t available the character is not completely lost. If you turn off the C64 (or close the emulator), then return to the Guild screen, the character will be marked as GONE. Over time, measured in loads of the Guild menu, the character will eventually find their way back on their own. It takes quite a while for this to happen though: I counted 15 loads, saving the game each time, before a GONE character returned.

This video (23 minutes) is is something I recorded myself as a demonstration of both Dungeon’s gameplay, and its Lost World adventure generation. It uses a set of 30 low-level monsters and items based on the stats of the old Basic edition of D&D, and a set of magic items I created for usefulness and to show off Dungeon’s spell set.

So, why would someone want to play this game, when there’s so many other newer CRPGs out there to play?

- The idea of rolling up a character and taking them through scenarios made by other people, to try to get their level up as high as they can get before they die three times, is great. My hope, perhaps misplaced, is this release will inspire other people to make dungeons for others to play, and I look forward to seeing them myself.

- The magic system of Dungeon, while it doesn’t allow for characters to learn spells themselves, is unique in that most of the spells are utility spells! There are spells for passing through walls, for teleporting anywhere on the map, for revealing terrain, for seeing in darkness, for giving oneself a damage shield, for locating the goal item, for disarming traps, and more. There is only one direct damage attack spell! Spells are more like tools than something you use to pound through the enemies.

- The dungeon model allows for dark areas, traps that block exits, two-way and one-way teleporters, secret doors, one-way doors, and decorating dungeon maps with PETSCII graphics. The simplicity of the dungeons, all of them fitting on one screen, works in Dungeon’s favor. No dungeon can be too large since they must all fit within the bounds of the map grid.

There are unique design considerations for making Lost Worlds too. Even though the computer creates the maps unaided, since it populates them from the monsters, items and traps that are on the Data Disk, the difficulty of the resulting dungeon is affected. The various doodads are distributed without apparent heed for what they are; I wonder if the generator actually cares for their identities or if it just checks how many of each type are on the disk, so as not to exceed that number.

If there are more easy monsters, more powerful items, and more weak traps on the disk then the dungeon will be easier due to their corresponding numbers being greater, and vice versa. It occurs to me that one of the flaws in the dungeon generation I mentioned could be alleviated, by not giving it one of the wall creating traps that could trap a player in a dead-end, but that also makes the dungeon a bit less interesting, so I’ve left it in the mix I use.

I recognize that, if I let myself, this might become a Dungeon blog. Rest assured, I’m not going to take it that far. But I really hope that some people give Dungeon a chance. While sure it has its inspirations (one person on Mastodon said it reminds them of Phantasie, a somewhat less obscure early CRPG), I think it’s pretty unique, and deserves for more people to have a look at it. I’m particularly pleased how well the sample monsters and items I made work in the Lost World framework, and I’m trying to think of ways that it might be improved. More on this later… but, not immediately, I think.

NYT’s Connections Puzzles

The New York Times, long a hold-out against comic strips, nevertheless makes a concession to play and whimsy in the form of their Games page. A lot has been made about their purchase of Wordle (and their recent crackdown on imitators, boo), and it should not be construed that we appreciate that.

But we find that one of the more positive aspects of their gaming products lately has been their Connections puzzle, which right now is not even a year old. (I don’t know if you’ll need a subscription to get through to that link. Paywalls suck, but are a necessary suckage.)

Today’s puzzle. It’s here today, it’ll be here tomorrow.

Each puzzle is a 4×4 grid of words. Rarely it may contain phrases; on April 1st, it had emoji, but it’s usually pretty good about staying in its lingual lane. The positions of the words in the puzzle are not relevant to solving it, but they’re sometimes placed with an eye to theme, or in such a way to suggest connections that don’t actually exist, in order to obfuscate the solution a bit. Usually, they hardly need to bother; the puzzle is usually fairly difficult.

Each puzzle contains exactly four categories of four terms, no more and no less. The categories and words in the puzzle are always chosen to punish imprecise and vague associations.

A solver (I won’t presume that that solver will necessarily be you at this stage) will want to find four words that have the same relationship with their category. One will never have a subordinate relationship with another word in its category, exclamation point! I emphasize this because you’ll often find a puzzle has a word that seems to have a superior-inferior relationship with another word, but this is a trap! Categories are egalitarian! Down with hierarchy!

Words are also chosen so that sometimes you’ll only find three words in a prospective category, which is a sign that you’re on the wrong track. Sometimes you’ll find five, which could mean you’re on the wrong track, or that one of the words is slightly outside the category. Sometimes your only real clue is because another category relies on one of those words to complete it, instead: categories never overlap, so if a word is in one category it isn’t in another.

Because the categories are exclusive like this, if you find one category, all the other categories become a bit easier to figure out. There are always four, and they’re ranked, by the puzzle setter, in color by trickiness, from least to most crafty: yellow, green, blue and purple. If it helps you remember (let’s drop the pretense that you are not involved in this), those are in spectrum-order. Even so, often you’ll find you’ve gotten the blue or even purple category early.

You only get four failures, and the nature of the puzzle is that sometimes you’ll make a mistake or two. There is no penalty for running out of mistakes other than getting told the answers, which by that point is occasion to curse the perfidy of the puzzle maker. (“Brit-pop bands? How was I supposed to get that?”)

By way of aid, I can tell you that categories tend to follow certain themes. Sometimes they’re literal; sometimes ridiculously so. My (least) favorite example of this was CONDO – LOO – HAW – HERO. Go ahead. Guess what the hell those have to do with each other. You’ll hate it. (Answer at end of post.) But because, once you’ve gotten three categories, all that remains must be the fourth, you have some leeway, which is good for when you have a category like that one.

Another very common category is the phrase that’s completed by all the words in the category, or titles that are all completed by those words. If you’re stuck (yeah I’ve given in to just using second-person by this point), it’s often because there’s a category of this type.

Being well read is always useful for this kind of puzzle, but rarely is it necessary. Like the Crossword, a basic facility with language will be of inestimable aid. None of the connections will be too obscure; nor, likely, will you have to deal with absurd words like inestimable.

Unlike the Crossword, the New York Times doesn’t maintain a public archive of Connections puzzles for you to try, but multiple other sites do, at least until the NYT gets as litigiously jealous of them as they became of Wordle clones. Here is one. There is an official Companion blog that offers hints. Other sites, including Rock Paper Shotgun (really?), offer their own daily hints.

Here are some example categories, all taken from recent puzzles. What do these words have in common? I’ve hidden the answer with an abbr tag, on desktop devices you can hover the mouse over the words to reveal the category.

Star – Feather – Flower – Mushroom

Brain – Courage – Heart – Home

Jack – Love – Squat – Zip

Getting harder now:

Cradle – Eye – Meow – Pajamas

Dogs – Brown – Unchained – Fiction

Clown – King – Colonel – Mermaid

Bowl – Buzz – Crew – Pixie

Cigarette – Pencil – Ticket – Toe

And finally, that example I gave earlier:

Condo – Loo – Haw – Hero

How To Play Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On

Yeah, it’s another Youtube video, but there’s an important difference this time: I made it myself. It’s seven minutes long.

I’m new at this kind of editing, and I spent a lot of effort trying to give viewers enough time to read all the text, but I failed somewhat in that regard. I suggest pausing the video if you need to catch up. It’s about the recently released Switch version of Pocket Card Jockey, a horse racing and breeding simulation that search-and-replaced all the fiddly HORSE RIDING parts with CARD GAME: a form of Solitaire called Golf, a.k.a. One Foundation.

Yeah, I’m new at this kind of editing. It was good practice though!

Game Freak has mostly had its legacy taken up by The House that Pikachu built, Pokèmon. Pokè this and Pokè that. But they had a history before they made their absurdly popular critter catching/fighting RPG, beginning as an obscure  Japanese fanzine from 1983, and they sometimes publish a game that has nothing to do with their monstrous progeny. The best known of these is probably the Gameboy Advance game Drill Dozer, but lately they’ve sallied forth into mobile gaming with a title called, in English, Pocket Card Jockey. It got a 3DS port beloved of the few that tried it, and now an update of that is on the Switch ($15). It seems a bit easier now, but it’s still wonderful.

I’ve seen Pocket Card Jockey described as not complicated, and rarely do I see a take that I disagree with more. Pocket Card Jockey is very complicated, each horse has almost a dozen characteristics to be cognizant of, each race is full of tension, and success in G-I (the hardest type) of races usually comes through executing a good strategy. I’ve also seen people say that it must have been easy to make, and I disagree with that assumption too: I think it must have been terribly difficult to construct, and most of that difficulty was in design and playtesting. Games like this don’t just happen, not if they’re any good, and Pocket Card Jockey is good.

Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On has an extensive tutorial, with three whole practice races, but there’s still a lot to learn. That’s why I made this video, to try to infect you with some of my own 100-level enthusiasm for it. I know of few games that work better in practice. You should give it a try.

Cosmic Collapse Level After Sun

A few days we linked to Cosmic Collapse, a Pico-8 Suika Game clone that, I claim, is better than the original, or its many many other clones. Its graphics are less cloying, its music is much better, its physics are livelier which adds a greater element of skill, and it has missiles awarded at different score levels that can be used to destroy individual planets.

Cosmic Collapse’s bin is slightly smaller than Suika Game’s, and to compensate a bit for that its “winning” “planet,” The Sun, is only the 10th item in the game, unlike Suika Game’s Watermelon, which is the 11th of its orbular objects. Nether game really ends at that point, it’s the kind of game that continues until you lose, but it serves as a thematic success point.

But as it turns out, as revealed by a comment by creator Johan Peltz on its itch.io page, Cosmic Collapse has two levels beyond sun. The first is a rather striking animated Black Hole object! After a lot of playing I finally managed to get to it. Here is a screenshot:

Pretty neat! The comment from the game’s creator mentions that there is a level past it, but that they don’t think it’s possible to reach. I don’t think it is either: to get to the Black Hole you have to have two Suns, and to get to that you have to have one Sun plus one Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Earth, Mars, Mercury and Pluto. (I think it’s Pluto. What would it be if it wasn’t Pluto? Ceres?)

So, to get to the last object, you’d have to have a Black Hole plus a Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Earth, Mars, Mercury and assumed-Pluto, which probably won’t all fit in one bin. My guess is it’s a guest appearance by some galaxy or something. Maybe someone can look at the game’s resources and find out what.

In addition to playing to get to Sun/Black Hole/Whatever Follows, it’s also possible to play Cosmic Collapse for score. The best way I’ve found to do that is to use missiles to destroy the largest objects when it becomes evident that you can’t do anything more with them. My highest score is nearly 15K. Indefinite play doesn’t seem quite possible, as missile awards come less frequently at higher scores, but it’s still fun to see how high one can get. (That’s not meant as a drug-inspired euphemism. Or a Donkey Kong-inspired one, either.)

Addendum: After writing this, I managed to get to Black Hole again, and got video of what it looks like in motion, which is pretty cool:

Sublime Games: Stephen’s Sausage Roll

Stephen’s Sausage Roll (homepage, Steam $30, Humble $30 – Increpare gets the most money if you buy it here, plus you get a Steam key)

This is the beginning of a series of reviews of sublime games. The sublime is, as described on Wikipedia, the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation. That’s a lot to live up to for a videogaem!

I’m using that term to describe games that feel like they stretch out your brain just by playing them. Usually this doesn’t mean by difficulty, although Stephen’s Sausage Roll has plenty of that, but by there being some special aspect of it. I think what I mean by that will become more evident as this series continues, but Stephen’s Sausage Roll is rather foundational. Both Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) and Arvi Teikari (Baba Is You) have claimed it as inspirational. Sublime things tend to inspire people a lot.

It’s easy to miss the quality of Stephen’s Sausage Roll if you play it casually, because it’s not a game that really lends itself to casual play. SSR doesn’t ease you into its puzzles, right from the very start the game demands thorough knowledge of the consequences of its movement scheme, knowledge that can only come from failing at its puzzles many times. Stephen’s movement is reminiscent of the porter from Sokoban, but he’s got this dang fork sticking out of him, and every movement must take it into account. Steven can only move forward and backward without turning to the side, which rotates the fork around him.

Understanding how to move that fork around is essential to shoving around the sausages in each level. To solve a level, all of its two-tile-long sausages must be moved over grills exactly once in four locations: once on each tile of one side, and once on each tile of the other. Leaving a sausage on a space doesn’t overcook it, but you can’t move it so a cooked spot touches a grill again. One move for each sausage on each tile of each side! Burning a sausage, or dumping one in the water, immediately fails the level.

This playthrough of one early level demonstrates how it works:

This description is not all of Stephen’s Sausage Roll’s tricks, not by a metric mile, but it’ll stump most players for a good while. It starts out hard and gets harder.

There are no tutorials, not even instructions other than an early sign that tells to use the arrow keys to move, Z to Undo, and R to Restart a puzzle. (These hotkeys have become a bit traditional, and work in other games.) You can’t even read the sign until you realize you have to swing your fork around and walk alongside it. Stephen does have other moves, I have come to learn from reading pages about the game, but it’s impossible to activate them in early levels.

When I read writing about puzzle games, the writer often talks about how smart the game made them feel, sometimes in a paragraph that also mentions dopamine hits, like they were Skinner boxes that give players treats. I dislike game criticism that tries to reduce them to pop neurochemistry. Besides, these days dopamine is not in short supply. It’s available on every Steam corner, plus you could get it just as well from food, an interesting novel, a movie, or pornography for that matter. Difficult puzzle games make you work for it, and where is the fun in that?

The fact is, puzzle games are not interesting for being a dopamine administration mechanism. They are about improvement, about learning to overcome challenges on your own. Once you learn how to do Sokoban puzzles they lose their appeal, because solving puzzles isn’t as much fun as learning to solve them.

Stephen’s Sausage Roll does not make the player feel smart. It makes them feel perfectly stupid at first, but by the end of it they may feel smart. They may, because by completing it they may have become a little smarter. The improving aspects of playing video games is not often mentioned these days, but it is one of the main reasons that I enjoy them. Thinking through a difficult puzzle can help one learn to think a little better, and because of that these sausages are no mere empty calories.

But the difficulty, and the novel take on Sokoban rules, aren’t the only reasons I’m writing about this in a series about sublime games. Each of the game’s little puzzles is a small portion of a larger world. When you enter a level, most of the world sinks beneath the sea, leaving you with a tiny portion of it remaining. When you properly cook all of that level’s sausages, the world returns, but pink walls, where the sausages were, will be gone, allowing you progress. This means the very terrain of the overworld is made of the puzzles you’re solving, which is an unexpected elegance in a game about cooking sausages. And mirroring that fact, there is a deeper meaning to the sausages you’re cooking and eliminating from the world, one that is revealed slowly, as you solve each excruciating puzzle.

SSR is a game that makes a mockery of the very concept of review scores, as most sublime games do. The graphics are purposely done in a PS1 style, intentionally ugly by current standards, and the sounds are simple steps, swishes, and the occasional “ugh” that may have come from the game or the player. And it’s gameplay, while great, shows that play can be about subtracting, taking away all extraneous elements, rather than adding unnecessary new things. In what world does taking away things add points to a review score?

Stephen’s Sausage Roll is not an extremely popular game. While it inspired big hits like The Witness and Baba Is You, and is rated Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam, it hasn’t sold as well. But it hangs on, quietly enlightening new generations of players and designers. It may inspire you too, if you were to let it.

The 10th-Key NES Pac-Man Scatter Bug

I already shown it off on Mastodon, but I’m so pleased with getting this bug on video that I’m re-reporting it here! First, though, some background.

Still the definitive resource on the design internals of Pac-Man.

I’ve been looking into the various home computer ports of Pac-Man lately. One of the better ones is the one for Famicom/NES, probably because it was made in-house at Namco, which I presume because while it’s by no means perfect, it has ghost AI that much more closely matches Jamey Pittman’s definitive Pac-Man Dossier than the others. This is a bit more important than the other ports because, due to the relative familiarity (that is to say, inexpensiveness) of NES emulation at this point, Famicom Pac-Man is often put in compilations, especially in dedicated consoles, instead of the arcade game. In point of fact, the Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1 that’s available for various consoles uses the Famicom versions of all its games, not the arcade, and Pac-Man is one of the included games. To tell the difference: if the score, fruit tally and lives are to the right of the screen, instead of above and beneath it, and Pac-Man looks a little too big to fit in a maze passage, then what you have is an inferior home conversion.

How is it different? Well:

- The sound of Pac-Man eating dots is much worse, for starters, it never fails to bother me.

- More substantively, the ghosts have slightly different constants in their chase routines: it’s slightly harder to fake out the Pink ghost (Speedy/Pinky), and the Orange ghost (Pokey/Clyde) gives up the chase a little more reluctantly.

- The timing for scatter periods, relative the speeds of the ghosts, is a little off. Scatter periods are usually slightly longer.

- The speed of the game as difficulty increases is also a little off. In the arcade, the First Apple board (Level 5) marks a noticeable increase in Pac-Man’s speed, but it seems to happen around the Second Orange (Level 4) on Famicom. Yes, that’s how much of arcade Pac-Man and its port that I’ve played-it could be subjective, but maybe it’s not.

- The bug that affects Pink’s and Blue’s (Bashful/Inky) AI when Pac-Man’s facing up doesn’t exist here.

- When ghosts enter Scatter mode, they don’t reverse direction. This makes the game easier (one less sudden reverse to throw you off) and harder (no obvious indication that the ghosts are scattering, and one less thing to throw them off from immediate pursuit).

- As the game advances in difficulty, in the arcade, on the 4th Key board (level 17), the ghosts won’t turn blue and vulnerable when you eat an Energizer, and instead will just reverse direction. And from the 6th Key (level 19) on, the ghosts will never turn blue again! NES Pac-Man instead gives them a very tiny bit of blue time, about a half-second’s worth. It never reaches a state where the ghosts become completely invulnerable.

And at last, the bug which I have confirmed. On the 10th Key board (Level 22), and every level thereafter, the ghosts will start out in an unusually long Scatter period. Their usual habit is to emerge from the box in the center of the screen and move to a corner of the screen, and circle there for a few seconds. Pink goes to the upper-left, Red (Shadow/Blinky) to the upper-right, Orange to the lower-left, and Blue to the lower-right. This period is called a “Scatter Mode” in the Pac-Man Dossier.

In most levels, presuming you don’t lose a life, the ghosts will enter Scatter Mode at exactly set three times: from the start, about 25-or-so seconds in, and about 30 or so seconds after that. These periods are usually five seconds long. There are some minor details I won’t get into-you can read the Dossier for those. These periods are lifesavers for intermediate Pac-Man players playing without patterns, as they are the only really safe ways to access the bottom passages of the board without getting trapped or wasting an Energizer.

Each Scatter Mode is only supposed to last five-to-seven seconds, but on Level 22 and after, all of the Scatter Modes last around 20 seconds. Here is the bug in action, demonstrated in Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1:

Why would this board be different from the others? In the arcade, the 9th Key (Level 21) is the maximum difficulty the game reaches. Any pattern that works on the 9th Key level will work for the rest of the game, all the way up to the kill screen on Level 256. It seems that, on the Famicom/NES version, after that level the game may not have data for the level to follow? But I haven’t looked at its code to know for sure. Maybe I should make that a future project.

The Original Neverwinter Nights

I feel sometimes like the kid from The Sixth Sense. That reference probably dates me to an extent, it’s from 1999 which feels like practically yesterday. It’s pretty recent as my references go: I know who Kojak was, and remember M*A*S*H.

I feel like that kid because when I look over the internet, sometimes I see ghosts. The shades of dead games. When something disappears from the web, it’s really gone, there is no corpse and its server leaves practically no trace of its existence. But sometimes signs can be found, like archived client uploads, broken hyperlinks, site snapshots on the Internet Archive, or still-active fansites.

One of those ghosts that flickers into my hazy vision sometimes is the original Neverwinter Nights. Not the Bioware game by that name, which really has very little to do with it. The first Neverwinter Nights was a SSI-produced MMORPG on America On-Line, that lasted from 1991 to 1997, a contemporary of Island of Kesmai, and of WorldsAway,which I’ve brought up here before.

NWN might have been a MMORPG, but it was also a MS-DOS game, and it ran on a modified version of SSI’s Gold Box engine, and (I presume) used the 2nd Edition D&D ruleset. That may have been what doomed it in the long run, for the license expired, and AOL, TSR and SSI couldn’t reach an agreement that would allow the game to continue. It is worthy of note that of those three companies, two don’t exist now, and the remaining one is nowadays nearly a ghost itself. I’m not going to say it happened because they couldn’t reach an agreement on continuing NWN, in fact it probably wasn’t, but it’s a little comforting to think it might have contributed. Two things that are equally disposable, it seems, are old MMORPGs and the hide-bound corporations that ran them.

There is a fansite devoted to the AOL Neverwinter Nights, apparently continuous in existence from the days the game was live. It hosts a fan recreation called Neverwinter Nights Offline, which is not an exact recreation of the original but recreates a large portion. Of course, without other human players inhabiting the game’s world, it’s nowhere near the same. It runs in DOS, so Dosbox might be of some use to you.

There is also ForgottenWorld (no relation to Capcom’s arcade game), a fan-made recreation of Neverwinter Nights. The note on the fansite dates to 2004, but ForgottenWorld still survives, and even has a Discord. I haven’t tried it myself yet, nor the offline version of NWN linked above. That’s because I see ghosts like these all the time, and I cannot devote the time or energy to any of them that they truly deserve. But maybe, you can.

On Neverwinter Nights Offline, there is a series of Youtube videos where aulddragon plays it for four hours. The first video in the sequence follows. Check out that Gold Box combat style!

Fansite: The Original Neverwinter Nights 1991-1997
Let’s Briefly Play “Neverwinter Nights AOL” (Youtube playlist, about 4 hours)

On The Red Obelisk

In 1987, programmers Robert Germino and David Todeshini wrote a weird and obscure Commodore 64 game called The Red Obelisk. It barely made a dent in the market, which is kind of a shame. It’s nearly entirely unique, which is a difficult thing to say of any game 36 years after its publication.

Part of why it’s not remembered much today might be how unique it is. It’s mostly a game about alchemy, but not as much in an Opus Magnum kind of way. You’re given an object, kind of like a gemstone, found in an asteroid belt. You shock it with electricity, zap it with lasers, and shoot sound waves at it. All of this is depicted in an illustrated laboratory, with surprisingly atmospheric graphics and sounds. Doing these things may increase its value. You can sell it at any point to earn energy proportionate to its value, which you need to run your ship and guard against hazards, and points. Your real goal though is to create a Red Obelisk

An earlier work of theirs was Sentinel, of which there’s even less information online.

I played a bit of The Red Obelisk and uploaded a recording to Youtube. I don’t do too well. Here is that video (7 minutes):

Both The Sentinel and The Red Obelisk, and another game I think they made called Phaserdome, were included on a disk called Master Blaster put out by Keypunch Software. Keypunch wasn’t a great organization; there are tales of them taking freeware games, scrubbing them of information by which their creators might be identified, and then selling that on a disk. It was before the widespread adoption of the Internet, the World Wide Web was still three years away, so it was easier to get away with that sort thing than it is now.

Later on The Red Obelisk got picked up for an issue of Loadstar, and the veracity of its editors I vouch for completely. I haven’t yet checked their products for the other games. Sentinel is also on Loadstar. The documentation I retyped below suggests they have another game on Loadstar as well. Both The Red Obelisk and Sentinel are on the Internet Archive, but you can get legal and paid-for copies for $15 of the first 199 issues (Loadstar was amazingly long-lived) via LOADSTAR COMPLEAT, still sold by its long-time Managing Editor, my friend Fender Tucker. The Red Obelisk is on LS64 issue 58.

The game is fully described in its instructions, below, so I’ll just give you some of my own impressions. It’s interesting! It has to have something to it for it to have persisted in my memory for so long. I think the game is implemented in BASIC with some machine code routines to handle the real-time portions. This is a perfectly valid way to implement a game; I did it often myself back then. It’s pretty much the only way to get the smoothly-moving asteroids and slick sound effects the game has.

What I remember the most is the Object Mode, where you zap various objects on your workbench in the hopes of creating a hugely valuable Red Obelisk. Everything you do costs energy, and running out destroys your ship, so efficiency is a must. In order to succeed you must take notes as to how each object behaves. Basic directions are given in the instructions: get the Tolerance below 100 with electricity, and the Temperature above 500 with lasers. Is that all there is to these tools? It has been too long for me to remember, but I do remember finding a string of Red Obelisks at one point, so there must be some process to it. Experiment to see what you can find.

The other thing I remember is the noise that your ship makes when you collect an object. All of the sounds in The Red Obelisk are effective, but that noise found a home in my brain when I played it decades ago, and it has never left. I think it probably never will.

What follows are the instructions to the game as included on Loadstar 58, as written by Fender himself, with section headings and minor formatting added by me.

THE RED OBELISK
by Robert Germino and David Todeschini

One of the safest bests of the 21st Century is that treasures will be found in space in the form of small meteors. They may be gray and drab-looking on the outside but inside will be jewels and precious gems, just waiting for the mining engineers to extract them. But it won’t be easy.

If you are a veteran of the universe of STURGRAT (on LOADSTAR #54) you will have an idea of the complexity of 21st Century space mining.

Setting

In THE RED OBELISK you are in control of a mining company. You must gather some object from space and by using the powers of your factory, you can ‘sell’ them for the maximum profit. Your goal, as is any capitalist’s, is to garner as many shekels as you can.

Let me describe your ship first. It is a Sturgrat space mining/laboratory and short-range fighting vessel. It operates in three modes, the Object Mode, the Mining Mode and the Attack Mode. You begin in the Object Mode (which is the inside of your laboratory) where you get a readout of all the capabilities of the Sturgrat.

Object Mode

The most important thing to keep your eyes on is the POWR rating in the lower right of the screen. If this gets too low, you will lose your ship, and, as is shown right above the POWR display, you only have two, not counting the one you begin with.

But your power is running down so you can’t tarry too long making decisions. And believe me, there are a lot of them to make.

You begin with an object on the conversion table. Its type is shown on the left. The idea is to process this object and then convert it into SCORE and POWR. You have to get the tolerance down and the temperature up.

These two values are shown on the left, TOLR and TEMP. You hold down the E key (for the electrodes) for a short period of time and notice that when you let up the TOLR has gone down. Get it down below 100. Press L (for the lasers) the same way to get the TEMP above 500. Since your POWR is going down all of the time, it pays to do these two things quickly and efficiently. They MUST be done for each object.

In the bottom left hand corner is the value of the object (VALU). As a true capitalist, you will want this figure as high as possible before you convert it into cash (SCORE).

You can increase the value of the object by bombarding it with Ultrasonics. Press U and then push the joystick forward and listen to the pitch of the sound. Press the fire button and the VALU will increase by a certain amount. If you want to increase the VALU faster, push forward on the stick, the pitch will increase and so will the amount the VALU increases when you press the fire button.

You can get too greedy with VALU. If you’ve increased it too high, the object will be destroyed and will disappear from the screen.

A good Sturgrat miner will write down the TYPE of object and try to discern the maximum VALU an object of that type can attain WITHOUT destroying itself at conversion. Write this figure down, too.

If you convert at too low a VALU, you will only get the VALU, but if you convert it at just below the ‘peak’ VALU of an object, it’ll be transformed into the incredibly valuable RED OBELISK, which, in more ways than one, is the name of the game. It’s up to you to determine each object’s ‘peak’ value.

You cannot do much more in the Ultrasonics mode. Press U to toggle out of it (if you are in it) and then you are ready for conversion. You do this by pressing RETURN. You’ll either (a) convert it for the present VALU, (b) create a RED OBELISK (which pays off handsomely) or (c) find yourself looking at a dreaded FALSE OBELISK. If you see one of these, you have to act quickly and destroy it by firing Caps at it (the F key) or by bombarding it with Ultrasonics. If a FALSE OBELISK is left to itself it will destroy your current ship and its cargo.

Mining Mode

Which brings up the question: Where do objects come from?

You have to space-mine them. Press the SPACE bar to go from the Object Mode to the Mining Mode. You’ll see your Sturgrat drifting through a meteor field. Use the joystick to maneuver around the meteors trying to capture the small, shining object that is floating slowly across the screen. The object must be captured DIRECTLY in the Sturgrat’s scoop. Even a small bit off-line will cause your ship damage.

You have a tractor beam which you can enable with the fire button. It will draw the gleaming object up the screen where the action is less hectic.

As a matter of fact, the top of the screen is a safe place where you can scoop up hydrogen molecules with your tractor beam and slowly boost your POWR if you are running low.

You can gather up to nine objects at a time or you can gather just one and head back to convert it. To go back to the Object Mode, press RETURN.

Attack Mode

You begin your stint as space-miner with 3 ships and 3 Caps, but as your POWR gets higher (above 1500 megajoules) your Sturgrat becomes more attractive to marauding space-hijackers. When you least expect it you will be attacked.

The message says that you have lost the object on the conversion table and that the marauder wants to know if you surrender or not. If you surrender, you won’t lose your ship but you’ll have to continue with what you have. If you answer N to the surrender prompt you go to the Attack Mode.

This is the arcade portion of your mission. Move the joystick so that the cross-hairs are on the middle of the attacking ship and press the fire button to fire. Keep an eye on your POWR level. If you are in danger of losing your ship you can weaken or destroy the marauder with a Giga-Gem by pressing the G key.

Giga-Gems can destroy any cargo that the attacker may have, so you should use them only as a last resort. When you have bludgeoned the attacker into submission he’ll ask if he can trade his cargo for his life. If you feel in a benevolent mood (or in a greedy one) you’ll probably do better accepting his offer and letting him limp off into space.

If you choose to destroy the enemy, you may be able to salvage some of his Caps. If you let him live you may get CRGO (objects), Krystals or Giga-Gems. Base your decision on what you need most.

The Krystals (KRYS) cam be converted in the Object Mode by pressing K. A Krystal is mainly a bonus score you get for defeating a marauder and being kind enough to let him slither off alive.

That’s about it. It will take a little practice with the controls of your Sturgrat but soon you will be grabbing objects and converting them like crazy hoping to find a level for each TYPE of object that will give you a RED OBELISK. As your POWR rating goes up you will have to fight off space-raiders more. Try to get the highest score so that you can head back to Earth a rich man.

As for the trip back to Earth, that’s another game, but one I’m sure Bobby and David will be creating soon. Sturgrat rules! Long may it run.

DISK FILES THIS PROGRAM USES: RED BOOT, RED BOOT 2, RED OBELISK, SPR1, T.RED BOOT

**** End of Text ****

Something About Youtube Ads

This is only incidentally about video games, but games are frequently advertised on Youtube.

You might have noticed a particular Youtube ad that, for whatever reason, you might want to make a record of. Or you want to watch it again to get details; maybe you want to save a local copy with youtube-dl or yt-dlp for some purposes, maybe to remix. Or maybe for some reason even vote on it, or leave a comment on it.

A secret fact about Youtube ads is that they’re all secretly just normal Youtube videos that have been registered with the ad system to put them into rotation. Every video you see on Youtube has its own 11-character ID, and ads are among them. If you know an ad’s ID, you can load it like any other video by putting it after the string:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=

in the URL.

How can you get an ad’s ID? When it’s playing, pause it (one of the few things you can do in the player when an ad is being shown), then right-click the video and select Stats For Nerds.

That will get you various bits of troubleshooting information about the video currently being played:

Where it says Video ID/ sCPN, that code after it, that’s the ad’s ID! That’s the code you paste at the end of the URL line to get to the video’s landing page. You can select it right out of the info box with the mouse and copy it to the clipboard with CTRL-C:

Notice, the ad video itself is unlisted. It isn’t always, but it’s rare for an ad to appear in Youtube’s discover interface anyway. Also, this video doesn’t have voting disabled. It’s off the bottom of the screen here, but its comments are even open. An amusing aspect of this is, before I got to watch this ad as a normal video, Youtube served me a different ad immediately before it.

Because of this, if you find a silly, ridiculous or awful ad, you can find its page on Youtube and watch it again, tell others about it, sometimes even leave comments that probably no one will ever read.

For example. Here’s an infamous video that made the rounds some months ago. “Give this man seven seven draws!” (The caption says 777 draws.)

“Is that not enough? Give him some legendary Heroes at well!” I’m confused as to what a “draw” is, or why I’d want 777 of them, but a random lady in a business suit told it to me so it must be important!

It’s been labeled as unlisted and comments are turned off, but they didn’t bother to mark the video as non-embeddable. The ad campaign is over I think, but the video is still on Youtube, where it could possibly stay until the sun grows dim. The page says it’s currently been seen 3.6M times but it has no vote score, so it seems that getting served as an ad increases its view count.

This video, with the descriptive name “MLV109 EN 1920×1080 PC,” promoting the game “Grand Mafia” showcases the adventures of a poor Level 1 Crook, who’s constantly being turned down in his sudden marriage proposals to Hot Babes and Ex-Girlfriends because his level is low compared to the high level types that he’s surrounded by.

Hero Wars has been a heavily advertised game for months, sometimes with pretty gross ads. Badly animated blue hero guy is constantly injured by all the monsters and gods in his dumb generic fantasy world because he never went to school and learned about the important math concept of greater than. Because of that, his girlfriend got turned into a toilet and smashed to pieces. Stay in school, kids!

(Note: in the time since this post went up, the Hero Wars video has been removed from Youtube, so unfortunately this fine example of animation is lost to us.)

F-Zero 99 User Names, Good and Bad

I’m trying to ease up on Youtube links, which I’ve come to realize take up a lot of the content of this blog by weight. I probably won’t be too successful at this, as it’s become a lot harder to find interesting written content on the internet, though it was never really easy.

I’ve been playing a lot of F-Zero 99 lately. I’ve been working on posts introducing the game, which is really great I think, but that kind of content (ugh the C word) takes time to write and check.

So in the meantime, enjoy/cringe at this collection of fun, and bad, handles spotted in the game. Of course, such a determination of quality is inherently subjective. But I think you’ll find that its lack is easier to adjudicate.

- Ganondoof,

- ◆El Guapo◆ (I like to think it’s a Cat Town reference)

- Hootcifer (Owl House)
- Valnar (Grandia II)
- Ghost Cake
- POWBlock
- GimmieFife
- ManChild30 (ah, honesty)
- Snautilus
- Gaudimann
- SmileyBone (a Bone fan I see)
- adorabunny
- Mamasaurus

- GIANTROBOT (there’s something to be said for pure enthusiasm)

- Damitbobby

- SnickerRoo

- AAAAAAAAAH (I counted the As to make sure I wrote it right)

- MissHeart (speaking for all the fem names in this list, takes a lot of guts to express girlishness in this environment even if there’s no voice chat)

- Moi
- Cheesemage
- Flarky (it’s fun to say!)
- Chibi-Nini
- LordFeh
- Espurrator
- GudNameGuy
- Goooose
- PixieVolt
- Malo (taking time off from his shop)
- Need4Sneed
- Boisterous
- Apostrophe
- fax-kun

- koppa (I hope this was intended as a Shiren reference)

- HALLOWEEN! (I assume they only play one day a year)

- Frizbeee
- Bubbline
- Orcustra
- Lonk (a fellow GDQ viewer)
- PeterMeh

- lovemykids (I assume this is a pure statement of affection and not a demand)

- TheKraggle (Lego Movie references are welcome)

- DadMode7

- SisterDoom

“Waddle DIO always comes first!”

Obnoxious names, much less in number thankfully:

- Hugh Jass

- BON9ERMan

- Gotenks (what is this, 2002?)

- Jeb Bush (what is this, 2016?)

- Wet Shart (I am opposed to this word and all that it stands for)

- MAGA KING (Please go jump in a hole until your brain develops, if it ever will)

F-Zero 99 is not a fitting stage for such lusers. Get out of here with that sub-Sephiroth378 crap.

Don’t be like MAGA KING. If you’re going to be ignorant, at least have the decency to be quiet about it–also, less importantly, maybe try not sucking at F-Zero 99 so bad lol.

Note: while Nintendo continues to gamely update their blocklists to prevent newly-discovered ways to express slurs, they aren’t perfect, and I’ve seen a couple of outright offensive names. Those don’t even get the dignity of being present in my list of bad handles.

Getting Started in DE’s Remake of Wizardry I

Wizardry hates you

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, a.k.a. Wizardry I, is a classic and venerable CRPG from the early days of computer gaming. It’s thought to be the very first computer RPG where you played as a party of more than one character. Even the early PLATO RPGs didn’t have a single player control a whole group like that.

Wizardry took D&D as its inspiration in ways that now even D&D itself doesn’t know. Its Armor Class value counts down like it did in olden times. And death is meant to stick, and be costly to recover from. Dead characters can fail to be revived, which turns them to ash and costs even more to fix. And that can fail too, and the character is just gone.

Pit traps in the dungeon have no counter, most of them have no hint they’re waiting there, their damage scales with the dungeon level so they’re nearly always a danger, and frequently kill your mage characters. Yet, they are not the worst the game has to offer, especially when you get to the second game, which contains what may be the single cruelest trap ever put into a computer game, and I am not exaggerating.

Then there’s the mazes themselves. They’re tricky, and although there are many quality-of-life improvements in the new game, including an automap, the game purposely doesn’t protect you from its map-foiling tricks. If you get teleported or spun around, the game’s automap won’t notice, and it’ll mess up your map! This is by design, because playing Wizardry with an infallible map is a hugely different experience. You’re supposed to get confused.

So you see, Wizardry hates you.

Wizardry doesn’t hate you that much

These stories are frightening, enough that I imagine they’ve scared some players away from the game. But despite (and in a way, because of) them, Wizardry is still a lot of fun to play. For the first seven experience levels characters grow gratifyingly quickly, and the play, due to its challenge and its consequences, is rarely boring. The original game underwent a year of playtesting before it was released to the Apple II-owning public, and the balance bourne of that time and work shines through. Wizardry is still a fun game to play, and while many of Digital Eclipse’s changes to adopt the game to current tastes are appreciated, I’m not convinced they’re all positive ones. It is what it is though, and I want to emphasize, what that is, is still fun.

Make backup saves of your game

Still though, one change that I can only regard as positive is that it’s really easy to make a backup copy of your save file. This isn’t just anyone telling you this! It’s me! I wrote a roguelike column for years for GameSetWatch insisting that permadeath was okay and that players shouldn’t back up save files to avoid it! But roguelikes are designed to be replayed many times, and anyway are usually pretty short so your time investment can’t become too large. Wizardry is not a long game, but it isn’t short either.

While Wizardry’s mazes don’t change, the game can throw all kinds of enemy parties against you, and even advanced parties once in a while get screwed over by the RNG. It is a rite of passage to rescue a deceased group one or two members at time from the dungeon, but it gets old after the first time or two. I don’t suggest winding back time every time a character dies, I think that’s going too far. But it will save you if, say, a character fails their revive from ash roll, or your party wipes beneath a set encounter space.

Backing up your save on the Apple II meant backing up you Scenario Disk, was a time-consuming option. Here, Digital Eclipse outright encourages you to make a copy of your save. The option is right there on the file menu, and I encourage you to use it too.

Use Old-School Creation and Advancement Rules

Under Old-School Options, you should use the original game’s character creation and stat advancement rules. I played through most of the game with the updated rules under the impression that they would take the edge off the difficulty, not knowing that these two actually make the game harder.

Character creation gives each character lineage (formerly called race, a term that’s become more loaded since 1981) set stats, and a number of points to distribute between them. The new system gives all characters a flat 12 points to spend. Under the old system character creation system, most characters got between 7 and 10 points to distribute, but 10% of the time would get ten extra points, and there’s a slim chance to get even more. Players could reroll endlessly to get bonus points in the range of 17 to 20, which was a huge boost! 10% of the time really isn’t that uncommon, and stats matter quite a lot in Wizardry, so it wasn’t hard to give all your characters a substantial boost right out of the gate, enough to start with a Samurai.

Of the other option, “Point Buy” on gaining a level, the new rule gives characters 1 to 3 points in stats of the player’s choosing upon reaching a new experience level. The old rule gives each stat a chance to advance, based on the character’s Age/Vim, with a chance that it could go down as well. The possibility of losing a point should be considered, but often characters gain four or five points upon level gain. It’s more a matter of taste, but I’ve had good experiences with it, at least at low levels.

Of the other option, “Point Buy” on gaining a level, the new rule gives characters 1 to 3 points in stats of the player’s choosing upon reaching a new experience level. Each has about equal chance, so it averages out to two points, which is really low generally, and even lower if you aspire to creating a Lord (a range of stats from 12 to 15) or a Ninja (all 17 or above).

Fortunately, you don’t have to stick with one option or the other, but can switch between them when you want. If you have a character who’s closing in on Lordship or Ninjahood, but just needs a couple of more points in a specific stat to obtain it, you can switch to the new style just before claiming that character’s next experience level, and even switch back afterward.

Creating characters

The game offers you to start you out with a group of pre-made characters of an appropriate mix and starting out at Level 2. I wholeheartedly suggest that you don’t use them.

Wizardry is not a game about helping an Overlord get an amulet back from a wizard. The quest is largely bunk; while Werdna is definitely not on your side, there’s is nothing in the game to suggest that Trebor is in the right either. No, Wizardry is a game about watching your characters grow through adventures, and overcome hardships, and possibly succeed in a great challenge. You really want to make your own characters for this.

While Level 1 characters are very fragile, and somewhat disposable, they’re yours. Under the new rules reviving Level 1 characters is free, and it doesn’t take them many fights to advance to Level 2, where they’re sturdier, and at Level 3 your group even starts learning good spells. Make your whole group and stick it out, you’ll have more fun.

Even once your group starts exploring the dungeon and gets a few levels under their belt, the game will continue to offer you new, randomly-generated extras, with levels approaching those of your highest-level character, in the Tavern. These can be useful as a B-team, to supplement your group if you want to play around with different party compositions, and to help rescue your own characters if they wipe in the dungeon. The original game didn’t have them, and they’re expensive to hire, but they can come in handy.

Party composition

In many classic party-based CRPGs in the Wizardry style, the ideal party is pretty obvious: a fighter, a thief, a cleric and a mage. Wizardry doesn’t buck that trend entirely, the game seems designed around three fighters, a thief, a priest and a mage, but there are interesting tactical possibilities that can be explored with non-standard party composition, and since the game lets you have up to 20 characters on your roster in total and switch them in and out of your main group at any time in town, you can even try them out without restarting your whole game.

Here are some ideas:

- The basics: Figher x 3, Thief, Priest, Mage makes it harder for the monsters to break through that crunchy front line to get to the tasty low-HP classes behind them.

- Go thiefless: I go over this below, in the section of Chests and Traps. In short, you have to forego a lot of treasure, but having an extra priest or mage lets your group rule in other ways.

- Any number of Samurai instead of Fighters: it isn’t hard to make a Samurai in initial character creation, and that’s actually the recommended way to play one, since when a character changes classes their stats in play, they are all lowered tremendously. Samurai start out with more HP than Fighters, but earn slightly less with each level. But in return, they start learning Mage spells at level 4, giving you a few extra uses of DUMAPIC, and eventually MAHALITO, which can make a big difference against some enemy groups.

- Having a Bishop instead of a Priest. I don’t suggest this one so much unless the Bishop is an extra character, because getting to higher tier spells as soon as possible is hugely important and Bishops, although they learn both spell types, get them more slowly. They do have the Identify ability though, which saves you a lot of gold at the Trading Post, and makes selling spare equipment found in the dungeon a reliable source of extra funds.

The most important stat for each class is the obvious one: Strength for Fighter types, Agility for Thieves, Piety for Priests and Intelligence for Mages. But after that, for front liners it’s Vitality, and for spellcasters it’s Agility.

However, Vitality increases HP and helps the front line hold together for longer, since when the back rank falls into it they tend to get eaten quickly. But every class is helped by Vitality, it increases the chance of revival success, and it’s not a bad idea to add some to your Mages for when dragon breath or an enemy MAHALITO gets through.

Agility affects when a character acts in combat, and it’s important that those huge group-size damage spells happen early in the first round before the enemy has the chance to act. The best fight is the one that ends before the monsters get a single turn.

About VIM, a.k.a. AGE

Wizardry has a check on resting too much. Whenever a character stays at the Inn, they lose a tiny bit of VIM. It’s not enough to show on-screen, we’re talking about a small fraction of a point. In the original game it was called AGE, and started around 18 and counted up. You can switch to that name in the Old-School Rules. Each Inn stay is a week of time, although strangely it only counts for the characters who actually stay at the Inn. So long as you try to make the most of your expeditions into the dungeon your characters won’t age much, but the higher their age grows, the greater the chance (if you’re playing by Old-School stat level gain rules) that stats will go down. And if characters get very old, into their 50s, they could just die, period.

The higher a character’s VIM/lower their AGE, the less of a chance they’ll lose stats when playing with random stat gains, but it’s really subtle unless you class change multiple times.

When characters are revived from death, they age by a random amount that could be up to a year. When characters chance classes, they age considerably, by several years! So it’s best not to change classes lightly.

It’s said, of an early release of Apple II Wizardry, that if you quit the game while in the dungeon, and you resume their adventures by restarting them as an “Out” Party, that the game would age them by ten years. I’ve only heard of this by rumor, and it seems to indicate that this was changed in later releases. I tell you this just to say, even the original designers thought better of that one.

There’s a lot more to say about playing Wizardry! Watch out for more soon, I still have to get some of my notes organized. We’ll talk about how the game actually plays, and give a plan for tackling the dungeon overall.

EDIT: I repeated myself at one point, so I fixed some wording there. Also some minor fixes elsewhere. I notice that the theme is covering some of the text with my screenshots. I’m not sure why it’s doing that. We’re looking into it.

Getting Started in Digital Eclipse’s Remake of Wizardry, Part 2: The First Level

It occurs to me that it might be a good idea to explain what playing Wizardry is like. There was once a time when this basically was what a CRPG was. JRPGs obscured that greatly and became the new default, but before Final Fantasy took over the world, there was a whole pile of what we might now call Wizardry-likes: The Bard’s Tale series, Dragon Wars, Might & Magic, Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder among them.

All of these party-based CRPGs have a lineup, a list of characters that are generally considered to be in order. Dungeon Master arranges them in more of a 2×2 grid, but there’s still a front line and a rear. Key in all of these games is that the front line is where you should put your melee fighters, who are in substantially more danger and need more HP and equipment protection (often directly using the D&D term Armor Class). The rear is where the characters who can’t take a licking go: the thief and your mages. Clerics/Priests generally can go in either area. By tradition they they can still still use most armor, but the problem is they’re usually the party healer, so being in the front line also means they’re more likely to get taken out by Paralysis or Petrification, leaving the rest of the group in the lurch.

It’s vitally important that the front line holds. Characters who get knocked out will get automatically shuffled to the back of the group, putting the squishies in range of the monsters’ unkind claws and teeth. It might be possible to hurriedly cast some AC-increasing spells, but it’s usually just as fast to cast strong attack magic and end the fight, then cure the downed fighters in camp. If you can’t do that… well, then it’s best to find your way back to town by the most expeditious route.

What route might that be? Well that’s why you’ve hopefully been working on a map! You might have played labyrinth games before, or think you can rely on a spatial sense build from playing first-person shooters, but those are not going to suffice here, you need a map. The Digital Eclipse remake of Wizardry maintains one for you, but as previously said it can be “tricked” by two particular types of maze phenomena: spinners and teleporters. Spinners change your facing randomly but leave you in place; suitably, they’re almost always placed in four-way intersections, so it’s not obvious which why you’re now going, or even if you’re going back the way you came. Teleporters usually leave your facing the same, but now in a different location.

Once you’re in the dungeon, then what?

I said last time that you should make your own characters, but that will also leave them at experience level 1, which is really weak. Until you reach level 2, every expedition into the dungeon should contain a single encounter. The starting quadrant of the first level has just three rooms. Enter one of them, fight or run from the inhabitants, then run to the stairs. If you used any spells or took any damage, have the affected characters stay at the Inn. It takes a lot of stays to lose even one point of Vim, so it’s nearly free.

If you’re playing with the original Inn, then stays will be more expensive unless you stay at the Stables, which gets you your spells back and nothing else. But that’s okay, because you can then dip into the maze and have your priest cast DIOS on your injured. You can repeat that cycle as many times as you like, and it won’t even age your characters. It almost feels like cheating, but you want to push every advantage you have as far as it will go.

Get used to training up level 1 characters, you’ll be doing it several times. You’ll want a B-team of characters to rescue your main group if need be, a Bishop of moderate level to identify found equipment without paying Boltac’s insane prices, maybe a separate Evil/Good team if you want to try out a Ninja/Lord, and maybe characters to replace failed resurrections from ash. The only time you’ll have to train up a character unaided, though, is the first time.

It is true, one of the modernizations in the Digital Eclipse remake is the ability to outright hire characters of levels approaching your highest experience level reached, but it’s not free, and could end up being really pricey. If you’re broke, then you can’t hire anyone over level 1, and if you have no characters you won’t be able to earn more money. Also, you should know that there’s a limit of 20 characters you can have among all those you have at one time. I don’t know what happens if all of your characters are dead and in the maze at once. Seems like they should have accounted for that possibility, though.

How to handle those first fights

Use every advantage you have! Mages begin with the sleep spell KATINO, and while it’s almost useless later in the game it’s the key to surviving the first floor, that and the priest’s Dispel Undead ability.

There aren’t many monsters that can appear randomly on the first level:

Bubbly Slimes: the weakest monsters in the entire dungeon. They never flee and are immune to sleep spells, but are almost never a danger.

Kobolds: easy to beat unless they outnumber you. KATINO, the sleep spell, works quite well.

Orcs: Like kobolds but a little beefier. Both kobolds and orcs are very prone to running away if you’re even slightly above their level. Use KATINO.

Level 1 Rogues: Also weak and prone to fleeing, and vulnerable to KATINO.

Undead Kobolds: one of the very few (possibly the only) monster in the game with a description of “Skeleton.” For first-level groups kobold skeletons are pretty dangerous, all the numbers of kobolds but without their tendency to run away or vulnerability to sleep. You might be tempted to fight them hand-to-hand for the experience points, but this is just the kind of thinking that gets first-level parties slaughtered. You have a priest; they should be trying to dispel them every turn. (If you don’t have a priest then go right back to town and make one!)

Bushwackers: the horrors of the first floor, they do around a d8 of damage, making them deadly. If a group of first level characters encounters a group of Bushwackers without any KATINOs available it’s best to try to run. Bushwackers can be a problem even for 2nd level parties, but against higher level groups they’re just as prone to fleeing as their lower level compatriots.

Zombies: about one time in five, a group of Bushwackers will be generated with an assisting team of Zombies. This is by far the most dangerous encounter possible on the first floor, pretty much impossible for a first-level group to defeat without a lot of luck on their side. I’d have the priest try to dispel the Zombies, and use your mage(s) to cast KATINO on the Bushwackers. If you can get all the Bushwackers asleep, maybe use any remaining extra spell slots on HALITO on the zombies, but there is no really good way to survive this. Fortunately Bushwackers+Zombies is a rare combination, I’ve only seen it happen once on the first floor.

There is one more monster that can appear on the first floor….

Murphy’s Ghost

A beloved monster among Wizardry fans, and something of a legend in the annals of CRPGs, is Murphy’s Ghost. It’s a special encounter that can occur in one specific room on the first level of the dungeon. It’s in a region behind a secret door, so you might not find it until you learn the light spell MILWA, or possibly its longer-lasting version LOMILWA.

In the original, stepping onto its encounter spot was enough to make Murphy’s Ghost appear. Now you have to search to fight them. In both cases though the fight is easily repeatable.

On the first floor, Murphy’s Ghost can appear in groups of up to two. The fight isn’t that difficult, and even against low level characters it can’t do more than 4 hit points of damage every round. The main problem is that Murphy’s Ghost has a very low (that is, very good) Armor Class, at -3, and has many hit points. No attack magic works on the ghost, but spells that worsen its AC, or improve your characters’, work well. It takes around 40-50 melee attacks, on average, to fell a Murphy’s Ghost. One ghost earns 4,450 experience points, which split six ways it still over 700 XP apiece, and a pair of them can be enough to gain a whole level’s worth of experience at once. It is possible, rarely, to earn more experience from other groups on the first level, but Murphy’s Ghost has the advantage of only getting one attack per round, and of appearing every time its room is entered/it’s searched for, even if you just fought it a couple of moves before.

Murphy’s Ghost is slightly less useful in the Digital Eclipse version because the new unskippable battle animations take up a lot of extra time. It was always the combination of easy repetition, battle speed and relatively low difficulty that made fighting Murphy’s host appealing. After your group gets a couple of extra levels on their bones the first floor starts looking a lot less treacherous anyway.

@Play: Glorious Adventure in the Mystery Dungeon

It’s the shortest @Play column ever! The following is a video link:

What is happening here? This is the newest Mystery Dungeon game, Shiren the Wander: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island. It’s actually a great deal of fun, a sharply-designed entry in the long-running classic roguelike series.

This isn’t “roguelike” like half the games on Steam. This is a true roguelike, even if it doesn’t have ASCII graphics: a turn-based RPG with substantial randomized elements, that demands that you live (or not) by your tactics, strategy and wits. I don’t begrudge others appropriation of the term, but it does mean I have to now use the qualifier classic when I want to discuss the old style. Really, it’s better to call games not in the original style roguelite.

The dungeon depicted is Heart of Serpentcoil Island, the traditional end megadungeon that most Mystery Dungeon games have. After finishing the “main” dungeon, and playing a lot of extra bonus dungeons that each show off a specific element of the game’s engine, there’s the megadungeon: a 99-level gauntlet of terror where you enter at level 1. None of the items you’ve collected throughout the rest of the game will help you here. You must start from scratch with just a riceball. You don’t even have a weapon or a shield to begin with: everything you have, you must find along the way.

The game doesn’t pull many punches in this dungeon, as you can see. At experience level 1, every space in a room (other than the entrances: that’s a secret tip for you!) could contain a game-ending trap. The only consolation is that they’re really quite rare! I was exceptionally unlucky in this run.

Additionally, the uses of many of the items, the scrolls, grasses, pots, bracelets and incense found in the dungeon, are unknown: their effects must be discovered, through means both blatant and subtle, for yourself. Some of them will be essential to your survival, let alone success; others, like the Ill-fated Seed, you really want to avoid using.

It’s a ludicrous test of knowledge and skill, and a fitting capstone to the game. If the experience shown in the video seems like it might put you off, at least it shows conclusively that the game isn’t taking it easy on you. If you win, and it can be won, it’s a great accomplishment. I’m still working on this one myself; I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Worst Possible Day to Play Nethack

As we’re reminded by abadidea on Mastodon, that day is today, October 13, 2023.

Nethack uses the system time-of-day clock to affect the game in modest ways. It figures out the phase of the moon, and if it’s a full moon the player’s “base luck,” the number at which it starts and tends to trend towards, is +1. Luck affects the game in many minor ways, most notably affecting the to-hit chances of striking monsters. Full moons also affect werecreatures and the chances to tame dogs, but those effects are highly situational.

Playing on a new moon has one effect, but it’s a big one. If you’re fighting a cockatrice and you hear its hissing, and are not carrying a lizard corpse, then you always begin turning to stone, instead of there only being a one-in-ten chance. This is what is called a “delayed instantiate”: you don’t die immediately, but if you don’t take immediate action it’ll happen in the next few turns. That’s the next few turns from the game’s perspective: various events may conspire to prevent you from getting that action at all. (The Nethack Wiki’s page on petrification is instructive.)

If you do get the turn, one of the things you can do is eat a lizard corpse, or that of another acidic monster. (Eating dead monsters raw is something you just end up doing often in Nethack.) If those aren’t at hand, what usually works is prayer, provided that you haven’t prayed too recently, your patron god is not angry with you and you’re not in Gehennom. Ordinarily, if you haven’t been playing badly, your god isn’t mad at you. If you’re in Gehennom you’re in the late game anyway, and probably have had ample opportunity to obtain one of the several ways of halting impending calcification.

Prayer is nearly a universal panacea, if it’s available. But there is one other thing that can block prayer: if your luck is negative. Even if it’s by just one point, prayer will never work.

That’s where the only other date effect in Nethack comes into play: on Friday the 13th, your luck defaults to -1, the opposite of the full moon effect. So, unless you’ve increased your luck by one of a number of means, prayer will never work on Friday the 13th. And today is both a new moon night and Friday the 13th. Other uses for prayer won’t work either: if you’re weak from hunger? Too bad. Low on hit points? Sorry. Punished with a ball and chain? Not going to work. Wearing cursed levitation boots? LOL.

Days that both have a new moon and are a Friday the 13th are rare. The last one was in July of 2018, before that November of 2015, and the one before that was in 1999. So, um, if you’ve been thinking about trying out this weird old roguelike game you’ve heard about, you might want to wait a bit. Until tomorrow, anyway.

@Play: Which Is Better, Ring Mail or Splint Mail?

Gary Gygax was a weird person. I won’t get into his life or history, or the casual misogyny of AD&D character creation, or the Random Harlot Table. But he did know a lot about medieval weaponry and armor, and to some degree this obsessive interest seeped out and infected a whole generation of nerds.

How useful is this armor in protecting someone? Five. It is five useful. (Image from National Museum in Krakow)

I know which is generally better: leather armor, studded leather armor, ring mail, chain mail, splint mail, plate mail or plate armor. I know that, although in life each is different, battles are random, and there’s countless factors that might determine who would win in a fight, the order in which I have given them is roughly how effective they are, because it’s the order that Armor Class increases, sorry decreases, in classic Dungeons & Dragons.

While the list of armors is presented, in practically every Player’s Handbook, with their effects on protection right there in order, unless you’re steeped in the material, it is not obvious, just from reading the names of the items, which is supposed to be better than another.

Splint Mail was rare in Europe during the medieval period. It’s also really hard to Google Image Search for without ending up with pictures taken from D&D material!(Image from Wikipedia)

This is a considerable roadblock, and one I struggled with for a while, when I first tried to learn to play Rogue, because that game expects you to know how effective each piece of armor is. You start out with Ring Mail +1. You find a suit of Splint Mail. Should you switch? People who play nearly any classic roguelike are going to run against this eventually. Even now, some games just expect you to know the relative strengths of each.

If you decide to take the chance and try it on, to Rogue’s (and Nethack’s) credit, it tells you immediately how effective the armor is on the status line, and you can compare its value to your past item. To Rogue’s (and Nethack’s) detriment though, if the new armor is cursed, you’re stuck with it, until you can lift the curse (to a new player, unlikely) or die (very likely). And then, unless you’ve been taking notes, you’ll still probably forget the relationship between the two items, meaning you’ll have to guess their relative value again later, and deal with the same risk.

Classic D&D tended to give short shrift to the intricacies of real-life armor use, simplifying a complex topic beyond perhaps what was appropriate. AD&D attempted to remedy that by going overboard, giving each armor ratings according to its bulkiness, how much of the wearer’s body it covered, how much it weighed and how it restricted movement. Gygax’s tendency towards simulation is responsible for some of the most interesting parts of the game, but it didn’t help him here I think.

Most classic roguelikes, at least, use the “bag of Armor Class” approach to armor, which is probably for the best. Nethack probably goes to far in the Gygaxian direction. If you find Plate Mail in Nethack, you’re almost entirely better off just leaving it on the ground, even despite armor’s huge value, because it’s simply too heavy. Even if you can carry it without dipping into Burdened status, or, heaven help you, Stressed, its mass and bulk lowers the number of other items you can carry before you reach Stressed, and carrying many other items is of great importance. This is the secret reason that the various colors of Dragon Scale Mail are so powerful in Nethack: it’s not that they have the highest best AC in the game (though they do), it’s that they’re also really light! Even if you don’t get the color you want, it takes concern about the weight of armor completely off your list of worries.

The use of armor underwent revision throughout D&D’s development. (This page lists the changes in detail.) For reference, the relative quality of D&D, and thus roguelike, armor goes like this.

Name | New-Style Ascending Armor Class | Old-Style Descending Armor Class
Leather Armor | 2 | 8
Studded Leather & Ring Mail | 3 | 7
Scale Mail | 4 | 6
Chain Mail | 5 | 5
Splint Mail & Banded Mail | 6 | 4
Plate Mail | 7 | 3
Plate Armor | 8 | 2

Why the difference in values? Up until the 3rd edition of D&D, Armor Class started at 10 and counted down as it improved. 3E updated a lot of the game’s math, and changed the combat formula so that AC was a bonus to the defender’s chance to be missed instead of a penalty to the attacker’s chance to strike. Because of that, now it starts at 10 and counts up. The changeover was a whole to-do, I assure you, but now two editions later we barely look back. But in that day others were confused by the system too, and even Rogue used an ascending armor score. Nethack, to this very day, uses original D&D’s decreasing armor class system.

If you compare those values to those used in 5th Edition, you’ll notice that even the new-style numbers don’t match up completely. As I said, while the relative strengths have remained consistent, if not constant, the numbers continue to change slightly between versions.

That concludes this introductory level class. You’re dismissed! If you’re looking into the relative effects of different polearms… that’s the graduate-level seminar, down the hall.

Shiren 6: What Happens When You Finish The Final Dungeon

I’ve been playing a lot of Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island lately. Partly in preparation to add a chapter on it to my Mystery Dungeon book, partly because I like Mystery Dungeon games. I streamed my playthrough of finishing the main dungeon (on my first attempt!) here.

Here is the title screen (which is a spoiler for after finishing the main dungeon, although that is really only a short way into the game):

After you finish every other task in the game, including finishing the final 99 Floor “megadungeon” where most items are unidentified, the title screen changes to add a nice rainbow:

I forgot to get a picture with the title in place. I can’t go back and get it now because of what followed….

There is one more thing to do at that point though. That is to play through the megadungeon again, but finding 12 “Celestial Stones” that severely restrict your inventory by the end.

Well, I’m not sure if they really counted on anyone doing that? There doesn’t seem to be much reward for it. It doesn’t go remarked upon by anyone in the game. But it does change one thing: the title screen. Here it is:

I like the red “IN SPACE” stamp! Sadly, all the graphics in the actual game still show an island floating in the atmosphere, and not in orbit. I wonder if they plan on doing something with this in an update? That seems like a lot of extra work for the benefit of not a lot of people.

Looking through my screenshots, I found this illustration that can be unlocked for behind the main menu, showing Shiren stumbling upon a Monster House:

Game Finds

Interesting games, of a wide variety of types, found while exploring the web.

Gamefinds: The Silly Knight Prologue

Both Frogfall from the day before yesterday and this one were recent itch.io highlight honorees, and both are interesting enough to feature here too, although they’re very different kinds of games, and for very different reasons.

The Silly Knight is a classic-style point-and-click graphic adventure game. Click on things to interact with them. Some things can be picked up and put in your inventory. Half of the fun is clicking on things and seeing what your character has to say about them.

The Silly Knight is claimed to be a prologue. It has a simple puzzle, and some voice lines, and then things take a turn for the surreal. Then, the game claims it’s over, but actually you can go back in and “play” it “again,” and things will be slightly different, and again, and again. Even with all of that, it’s still extremely short, but what do you want for free?

The Silly Knight Prologue has a playthrough video on Youtube, embedded below. It’s 6 1/2 minutes long and spoils the whole story (what of it there is), and the game is free anyway. It doesn’t reveal all the jokes though. Presumably, if the full game gets made, the story will pick up from here, although who the heck even knows how that would be possible….

The Silly Knight Prologue (by Alexander Preymak, on itch.io, for Windows and Mac, $0)

Gamefinds: Frogfall

It’s not FrogFind, which is an web search engine with a retro-computing theme run by the person behind Action Retro.

No, this one’s a charming and free action game from itch.io. It’s a lot like a platformer, but not quite completely one, because you never land on any platforms. Once you leave the ground, it’s up to you to guide your tiny friend to eat every fly on the level before they touch the ground again. Each fly gives the frog a burst of height, like they’re bouncing off of them. It’s satisfying to collect every fly on one pass, bouncing off of each one like a little amphibious pinball.

There’s some leeway you’re granted. They frog can hit ceilings without danger; they won’t collide but will just fall from there. Sometimes you can hit walls, although sometimes they’ll result in failure. Retrying is instantaneous though.

As you progress, the game introduces new elements. “Empty” flies only appear and become snackable once all the other flies have been nom’d. Flies with a dot on them must be eaten twice; they become edible again after any other fly has been eaten. Skate rails (the itty bitty froggy can shred, it seems) give the frog a place to grind safely for a while, and can be used sometimes to get around barriers or return to heights to get more flies. There’s bouncing spots the frog can hop endless on too.

There’s 48 levels in the game, three of them tutorial levels and then nine levels in each of five worlds. After they’ve all been cleared and the frog has enough food for winter, you begin to unlock harder “B-side” levels, which introduce new tricks.

The aesthetic is laid-back, and the music is quiet contemplative, somewhat in contrast with the frog’s acrobatic feats. So help a frog out! Winter is coming!

Frogfall (by Kultisti, for Windows, on itch.io, $0)

Here’s video of a playthrough of the main game. Note that, while it does show the ending, it doesn’t show any of the B-side levels.

This late-appearing board is aptly named: “that level”

Hempuli is still at it

Hempuli is the brilliant creator of the rule-breaking-and-making puzzle game Baba Is You. That is not the subject of this post, but I couldn’t recommend it more highly. No, the post’s subject is a series of things they've made since.

They’re all: (free|wonderful|insane|playable in browser|available on itch.io). There’s twenty-three of them, and they’re all ludicrous ruminations on the idea of Sokoban. We’ve posted about Hempuli’s improbable series of Sokolikes before, but they keep making them, and so now there’s 23.

The basic rules are: there are blocks, and you can push them. If all the Xs on the level have blocks on them at the same time, the flag activates, but it stays active only while every X is occupied. If the flag is active, you can step on it to complete the puzzle.

But there are also buttons. If all the buttons of a given color have boxes (or players) on them at the same time, then certain gates in the puzzle open. Some puzzles have water. Don’t step in that. Boxes will usually float on top of water though.

In (nearly) all the puzzles, the arrow keys move your little Sokoperson, the R key resets the current puzzle, and the Z key reverses your last move. Keep pressing Z to keep going back, until you reach the puzzle’s start state.

Those are the basic rules, but don’t be surprised if they’re upturned in some of these games. Hempuli is diabolical, and sometimes the basics don’t apply, or are turned on their head in unexpected ways.

From Mountris. The character is about to make a surprising mistake.

In Mountris, some of the blocks you push are Tetris shapes, that move as a single unit. Think carefully about the implications of that.

Upon seeing this early puzzle in Permaban, my mouth said, unprompted, “What fresh hell is this?”

One interesting thing about these games generally is how they often break one of the central rules of Sokoban, that you can’t push two or more blocks at a time. In many of Hempuli’s variants you can, but in some of them you can only do it in certain circumstances.

Hell, continued: From the aptly-named (?!) Nabogorf. Notice, this one has a different Undo key. Why do you suppose that is?

As I review these games in order, I’m struck by how they keep getting stranger. Evidently the process of making Baba Is You disconnected some important limiter in Hempuli’s brain, and so now they’ve become a portal, spewing forth constant matter from the Elemental Plane of Puzzles. Weep for them… but also, enjoy the results of that, both now and almost certainly in the future.

From Mayban: Oh, there’s color now. What does that mean? What’s about to happen? Why am I shaking in my seat?

Automount turns the game on its head. But they all do, so that statement is meaningless. This one turns it extra on its head. With cherries on top.

Game Finds: Mobile Suit Baba

Hempuli, the creator of the indie hit Baba Is You, certainly has been busy! He made a number of solitaire games, some with Baba characters; then a number of board games. Now he’s returned to the Baba Is Youniverse, with another charming game that uses some of the ideas and rules of Baba Is You, with a helping of Into The Breach mixed in! The result is Mobile Suit Baba:

Ha ha! You said it Baba!

The scenario goes something like this. Baba and his friends now pilot a number of giant mech robots that look like them. An invasion of Skulls threatens their laid-back society of agrarian animal creatures with fruit theft. Baba and company leap into action to protect their food stockpiles. This is communicated with dialogue from the various characters, which is all adorable.

A simple puzzle, that relies on Baba’s ability to throw other characters over blocking terrain.

Each character has slightly different abilities and movement ranges. The mind-bending, rule-changing aspect of the original game is back: levels have noun and property objects in them, as well as the keyword IS. A noun IS property sequence arranged in order from top-to-bottom or left-to-right makes that sentence instantly true, for better or worse. It’s back, but it is a bit diminished in importance. A couple of levels don’t even have words this time, which in Baba Is You would result in a completely broken level.

As in the original, the difficulty rises fast, although this one is easier than it looks.

In the original, the most important property is YOU, because it assigns agency to one or more of the characters in a level; without [something] IS YOU, you can’t affect the game world. Here though, that dire need to make sure someone IS YOU at all times is gone. Now, all of your characters are considered to be controllable. But you still have to manipulate rules sometimes, to affect the properties of the terrain.

Once you have some other characters unlocked, you can sometimes choose who you want to bring into a level.

Also, you usually have more than one character to control, in a turn-based sequence. And your characters have different movement ranges and abilities. And you have a strict time limit (although it can be made less onerous in the settings). It all feels, like its inspiration, Into The Breach, but derandomized, and turned into a puzzle game. There’s no real combat; instead you manipulate your enemies so their objectives are not met.

This Youtube trailer gets the mood across nicely.

Choose your teammates carefully!

It’s all extremely charming and worth a look. While its sale price will be a paltry $4, for a few days Hempuli is giving it away for free on itch.io! Even at full price it’s worth it.

Mobile Suit Baba (itch.io, $4)

Hempuli’s itch.io Collection

I recently made a Metafilter post with the title Exploring the BABA IS YOUNIVERSE. Having used that pun here already I can’t well put it up again, but the links in the article are good ones, so I figured I’d present them here too, with a few extras. All of these, plus more, are on Hempuli’s (Arvi Teikari’s) itch.io page. Everything here is free and for Windows, unless otherwise noted.

Once in Space 2022

- First, some that I’ve already linked on this blog already: Mobile Suit Baba (previously, $4, and mentioned previously), Cavern Sweeper (previously, Web) and Baba Is You XTREME (previously). And of course there’s Baba Is You ($15) itself.

- A recent trilogy of Sokoban-like games, each with a unique gimmick: Covemount, That’s a Warp and Pultimush, and the earlier IT’S A BLOCK-PUSHING GAME (all for Web)

- Baba Files Taxes is a very silly game, but Baba’s world is an appealingly silly one anyway, and there is a little gameplay there in trying to duplicate Baba’s signature as closely as possible.

- The Plumber Thing ($2) is a horror puzzle/platformer.

- It’s-a Me is a purer platformer, starring the confusingly-named Me from the Baba games. It seems pretty standard at first, until you discover what the run and jump buttons were assigned to. I hope you’re careful with your fingers….

- Keke in the Caves of Peril is also a Baba-Youniverse game, that evidently takes more than a little inspiration from Boulder Dash.

Stumblehill

- The “gravity-changing platformer” Once In Space 2022, which gets pretty tricky pretty quickly.

- Stumblehill is a platformer, with striking graphics, where the controls are purposely a little harder to master than your basic example of the form.

Baba Friend

- Baba Friend is a little desktop buddy/toy who wanders around your computer’s screen while you do other things. It’s much like the classic computer amusement Neko!

- Rude Chess is another Sokoban variant: some of the pieces you have to move are chess pieces, which shift according to their movement rules when pushed. The rude part applies because, if a piece has a choice of squares to move to, it always tries to pick one that doesn’t lead towards a destination square!

Rude Chess

There’s more too, that I only fail to list here because of time-related reasons, including some physical games and a screensaver. Go on and explore their itch page, it’s brilliant!

Hempuli’s itch.io software (mostly free, most for Windows)

Homebrew Atari 7800 Arcade Ports

Last year user PacManPlus made available free downloads of some of their Atari 7800 remakes of arcade games. For people who aren’t in the scene this might be of limited interest, but these games were formerly sold commercially on AtariAge’s website and not generally available for free. Atari 7800 emulation is, of course, easily available in RetroArch, but this page on the EmuGen Wiki lists some standalone emulators.

One of the included games is a game that is very rarely ported, Baby Pac-Man, because it contains a significant pinball component. The pinball physics in the remake are uncommonly good! The Youtube account The Atari Network reviewed it with gameplay video so you can see for yourself:

Baby Pac-Man isn’t the only game in the collection, but its especially notable for that emulated pinball sim.

The remakes were originally sold commercially on cartridges, but they were recently delisted and removed from sale, so PacManPlus was kind enough to make them available for anyone to download and play. I for one appreciate his kind generosity!

PacManPlus’ Atari 7800 Arcade Ports (atariage.com)

Gamefinds: Nip For Speed

From itch.io’s Youtube account, this barely qualifies as a game, but it’s funny. Surreal. Absurd. Bizarre. But mostly funny. It’s Nip For Speed, and it’s from knackelibang.

You’re riding in a car with an orange cat behind the wheel. Not a cartoony cat, a realistic cat, or at least its low-poly model is kind of realistic. It doesn’t act, or talk, much like a real cat though. There’s also a dog involved.

Content warning: the cat does meet its end, but in a much more cartoony way than the cat’s model. It probably shouldn’t have been behind the wheel anyway.

Here is a Youtube video of a complete "playthrough" of Nip For Speed.

Nip For Speed (itch.io, Web and Windows, $0)

Gamefinds: POOM

Found by Varyag on kitsunes.club, this may be the ultimate version of the phenomenon of Pico-8 remakes of arcade games. It's not a remake of a classic arcade game but of id Software’s DOOM itself. And it has a great name: POOM. It’s made by freds72 on itch.io, and it’s free to download and play. Its levels are not ports of the original room, unless my memory is faulty, but smaller versions, but the general sense is still there. It even has a good remix of the first level music.

It’s a really good name

Game Finds: Cosmic Collapse

A fair amount has been said about Suika Game, an inexpensive and addictive Switch game that has players dropping fruit into a physics-enabled bin. Two fruit of the same type that touch immediately merge into a larger fruit, and the goal is to join them together like this until you create a mighty Watermelon. You can keep going at that point, although with one of those majestic spheres in the bin it won’t be much longer before one or more fruits extends up out of the bin, which brings the game to an end.

The history of this unexpected Flappy Bird-like phenomenon is laid out in an article in the Japan Times. Until recently the game was exclusive to the Japanese eShop, although that needn’t actually be a barrier. People from any territory can create eShop accounts for any other, and play all their purchases on the same Switch, but now I notice that Suika Game is even on the U.S. shop. And of course, as often happens when a simple and elegant game blows up out of nowhere, a horde of imitators has arisen, which a quick Googling will reveal. I count six free web versions just on a quick perusal of the search results.

But what might actually be better than Suika Game is the Pico-8 recreation of it, Cosmic Collapse.

Cosmic Collapse is more expensive than Suika Game, but that just means it’s $5 instead of $3. Instead of happy fruit, you merge together planets. They go up in size from Pluto (an honorary planet), through Mercury, Mars, Venus, Earth, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and then Sol herself. If you’re wondering, all planets are presented without rings. If joining two suns causes anything to happen I don’t know. (In the comments on the itch.io project, the developer says that there are objects beyond the Sun.)

Cosmic Collapse could be played just like the original, but it adds some extra features. Scoring is modified by a simple combo system: successive planets merged due to one drop have their points multiplied, encouraging the planning of sequences. And, at certain score awards, you’re granted a missile that can be used to destroy any one object in the bin. Used judiciously, it can allow your game lengths, and scores, to greatly increase. My highest so far is nearly 15,000.

The biggest advantages it has over Suika Game is in the polish and the physics. The many web clones tend to play like they were hacked together in an afternoon, but even the original is clearly a low-effort production, right down to its generic, non-looping music. The celestial orbs in Cosmic Collapse bounce around in a lively manner after merging in ways that take some practice to master, and even the smaller planets have their uses. The tiniest of space rocks, dropped at the right spot, can be just what you need to knock two other planets apart from each other, or separate one from the wall of the bin. You see? Pluto’s good for something after all!

Both Suika Game and Cosmic Collapse suffer from a certain unfairness. You don’t get to control the order in which fruit or planets get dropped into the bin. It’s been observed that even a lot of skill and practice can only get you so far if the orb-selection dice don’t roll favorably for you. The best advice I can offer, in the early game, is to try to sort the circles in size from one side of the bin to the other, which at least will make it easier to find a good place to drop things. Also in Cosmic Collapse, keeping the surface of the bin as low as you can helps a lot, since the propulsive force of the spheres, especially the smallest ones, is increased the further it falls, and that can be a marvelous prod to shaking up a static bin.

Cosmic Collapse (itch.io and Steam, $5)

Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

A long time ago, there was a radio series called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was about a man named Arthur Dent, who with the aid of his friend Ford Prefect managed to escape from the Earth when it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, after which he went to have increasingly weird and ridiculous adventures.

At the center of the story was an electronic book named, like the radio series itself, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was like an iPhone and Wikipedia combined into one device, only Douglas Adams somehow thought of them in 1978, which was the same year Space Invaders was being manufactured. It was written by a brilliantly funny man named Douglas Adams. Adams also wrote some scripts for Doctor Who, and some other books, including The Meaning of Liff, Last Chance to See and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

Before he wrote those other books though, he wrote some more about the Hitchhiker’s Guide. He wrote a TV series based on the radio series. There was also a vinyl recording, which was simply called an album then because CDs hadn’t been invented yet. Each of these versions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has substantial differences from all the others. Then Douglas Adams met Steve Meretzky, and the two of them did a computer game version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, itself with major differences from the other versions.

They made the game for a company called Infocom. Infocom was one of the first great successes in computer gaming. They wrote what they called interactive fiction, but could more generally be called text adventures. They presented the world of the game as text on a screen, like you were reading a book, and you expressed what you wanted the protagonist character to do by typing commands. Sort of like those things some inaccurately call AIs, and are more properly called Large Language Models, or LLMs, except a person actually wrote everything that can happen, and there’s a point to them.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was the second best-selling game that Infocom ever did, after Zork. It sold over a million copies, a gigantic success at the time, and still pretty good today. So everyone was keen to do a second Hitchhiker’s Guide game. The game even says, at the end, that an incredible adventure was about to happen, but you’d have to buy the next game to find out what it was.

Time passed….

Infocom tried to get Douglas Adams to create a sequel. He did co-write Bureaucracy with the staff of Infocom, a lesser game with some brilliant ideas in it. Later he wrote Starship Titanic for a different company, which was fairly well-received. Douglas Adams was, as said, a brilliant person, but his was a whimsical and capricious intelligence, fixating on things that seized its fancy, but that made it difficult to focus on mundanities.

Infocom’s games sold steadily fewer copies as time passed. Eventually, they were bought by Activision, and functionally shut down. They made some Zork games themselves, but eventually Activision forgot that Zork or Infocom even existed.

Some more time passed….

Douglas Adams wrote some more Hitchhiker’s books. At the time there were already two, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and Life, The Universe and Everything. He soon followed it up with So Long And Thanks For All the Fish, and then Mostly Harmless.

He never did write that sequel to the computer Hitchhiker’s game. Then, sadly, Douglas Adams, who in Last Chance to See wrote movingly about animals on the edge of extinction, went extinct himself, dying on May 11, 2001.

Time continued to pass. Disney, the least-suited company for such a thing, made a big movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It wasn’t too bad, all told, but it wasn’t Disney-level popular, probably because it didn’t have space magicians or superheroes in it.

Lots of people, not the least of which his old friends at Infocom, were saddened that Adams never followed up with that second Guide game.

Then in 2023, a person with the nom de net of Max Fox wrote their own version of what a sequel to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy might have been. It’s called Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

It adheres to older trends in adventure gaming: you die sometimes just from trying things out. Puzzle solutions can be a bit cryptic. But it also has a simulation of Infocom’s “Invisiclues” built in, where you can pick the area you’re in and problem you’re having from lists and get a series of more specific hints for getting past your problem area, which is still a pretty good way to provide play help without giving away the whole puzzle like a walkthrough might.

No, it isn’t the sequel that Douglas Adams would have written. But that thing will never be. It’s possible that someday a different sequel will be written that matches Douglas Adams’s voice a little better. But in the meantime, we have one idea of what it could have been like.

It doesn’t make it a happier galaxy to live in. But it does make it marginally less sad, and that’s the best we can hope for.

(Note: following images have spoilers for the very early phase of the game. If you want to play this game, you’ll need a program that can play Z-machine files. I suggest Windows Frotz.)

The beginning, after the ending

An unsettling landscape

Five points, and a sudden demise

Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

(ifdb, Z-machine, $0)

Game Finds: Pacman’s Sky

It’s one of those games that was made to fulfill the promise of a pun in the title, but turns out to be fairly interesting in its own right.

That’s not to say it’s perfect. Randomness plays way too much of a role in your success, although that could also be said of No Man’s Sky, honestly.

Pac-Man is stranded on a maze-like planet. The maze wraps around vertically and horizontally, but there are no helpful tunnels here to slow down the ghost pursuit, for the screen is always centered on Paccy. There is an escape rocket in the monster house, and the way inside opens up when you’ve eaten a sufficient number of dots. I wouldn’t bug out immediately though; as you eat dots, and also ghosts made vulnerable by the consumption of randomly-placed Energizers, you fill up a fuel meter in the upper-right corner of the screen. You want it to be as full as possible, especially in this first maze, while the game is still fairly easy.

For you see, when you enter the rocket, you blast off into a 2D universe of other planets, and you need fuel to travel between them. (A bit of advice: the rocket’s thrust is always to the right! Press up-arrow to go forward, and up and down to steer.) Use the map in the lower-right to pick the next planet to crash onto, and explore a new maze. You don’t want to run out of fuel! Although you have a total of four Pac-Lives, if you run out of fuel in space, you lose regardless!

You’ll soon find that most planets are much larger than your starting world, and the game sends in a number of ghosts proportionate to its size! You could end up fleeing from nearly two-dozen ghosts! Fortunately, there are new colors of ghosts in the mix, and none of them are as avid a pursuer as the classic hues, although their meanderings will often block escape routes.

Your goal is to collect Cherries, which are sporadically scattered throughout the planets. You want to eat at least 10, then launch with a full fuel tank, and then press the Space Bar to warp out of the universe, and the game.

As I mentioned up top, randomness plays a huge role in your success. Cherries are placed completely randomly: you might find Cherries in the starting maze, or you might find a planet with four Cherries on it and all you have to do is find them, but many planets will be Cherry-less. The best strategy is to scout each planet you visit for Cherries as quickly as possible, snarf up the ones you find while refilling your fuel tank with dots, then quickly evacuate and move on to the next planet.

Some tips:

- If you return to a planet you’ve already been on, it’ll be in the state that you left it. This usually makes it harder to refill your tank since there’s fewer dots, so get what you can and launch again.

- To help you avoid revisiting planets, I suggest targeting particular planet colors first.

- Energizers are placed randomly, and like Cherries, some planets don’t have any.

- Ghost vulnerability times are roughly on a par with those of the first maze of the original game, but with so much more terrain to travel through it’s usually difficult to make a clean sweep of all the ghosts, even when there’s only the normal four.

- The class ghosts have largely the same personalities as in the arcade games: Red chases you directly, Pink looks in the direction you’re facing and tries to get in front of you, Blue seeks to be on the other side of you from one of the Red ghosts, and Orange sometimes loses interest in attacking you when you get close.

- The new colors have ghosts that try to lurk behind you, ghosts that try to travel in straight lines regardless of what else is happening, ghosts that just bumble around, and even ghosts that just try to get away from everyone else, Pac or ghost.

- Like arcade Pac-Man, the ghosts periodically enter “Scatter Mode,” and give up the chase for a few precious seconds. Unlike the arcade game, the ghosts don’t reverse direction when either entering or leaving Scatter Mode. Your only clue to the behavior change is them turning away, or turning back towards you. That makes them a little less predictable.

- Beware! Once in a while you’ll find a ghost that, instead of the usual blue eyes, has an Among Us visor. These ghosts will be one of the other colors, and the same personality as that color, but when you eat an Energizer, not only do they not become vulnerable, they also speed up greatly! If it’s one of the more vicious colors (Red or Pink), this makes eating an Energizer extremely dangerous!

- Ghosts become dangerous again the moment they reform from their eyes in the home. If you’re venturing in to get to the rocket, and a pair of eyes rushes in behind you, you can easily lose a Pac without having much control over it. This happened to me several times, it’s worth being wary of.

If you want to play in the universe of this victorious game, you can enter this seed at the title screen. It had one planet with four Cherries!

Pacman’s Sky (itch.io, $0)

Game Finds: Ghost Hunter

Another game jam entry, Róger Goulart’s Ghost Hunter is a short and silly game about a young lady who loves ghosts, maybe a bit more than she should.

Here are some opening screens:

Take a moment to enjoy this screen.

They may have a point.

And a new unholy quest begins.

Most of it is a kind of guessing game. Each of three cemeteries has tombstones arranged around it. You go to each one and dig it up with your Shovel of Resurrection. If it’s a friendly ghost, then it emerges and you get one credit towards your quota. If it’s a cursed tomb however, an angry ghost comes out and chases you for a bit. If it catches you, you take a point of damage.

How do you tell the difference? Well, usually you can’t. But there are these orange tombstones placed around each level, and when you dig one of those up you get a random powerup for a short time. (Usually: once in a while you’ll find an angry ghost in one instead, but that’s rare.) One of the powerups shows you whether a tomb has a friendly or angry spirit in store. Other powerups slow angry ghosts, disguise you so they don’t chase you, refill your health or make you walk fast for a short time.

Level 2 has periodically appearing sludge ghosts that must be destroyed by digging up waterspouts to block them. Level 3 has annoying bat enemies that must be avoided, and a higher quota than the other levels.

My tips:

- When you stop digging up a grave in the middle of the process, the digging you did before isn’t forgotten. You can sneak in a little extra digging when running from angry ghosts this way.

- You tend to lose a whole letter grade at the end of a level from taking damage, so be safe.

- The best powerup is the one that reveals the cursed graves. When you get one, I suggest just wandering around for a bit, looking for the mean ghosts, and remembering where they are so you can dig up friends in piece.

Spoilers for the ending are after the download link!

Ghost Hunter (itch.io, $0, web and Windows)

A shame, but they asked for it. Also, what happened to their faces? They’re scarier than the ghosts!

And isn’t that all that matters?

Little Runmo: The Game

Last year for Sundry Sunday we linked to Gooseworx’s video game-inspired cartoon Little Runmo. In summary: a platforming character discovers that the peril-filled world he’s tasked with traversing is part of a system designed to support the life of a grotesque ruler. They turn it off, but other circumstances happen, and in the end things don’t go too well. Here’s the video, again (16 minutes).

A little green person off on a dangerous journey.

Little Runmo was made four years ago and has amassed 30 million views. Much more recently, a month ago Gooseworx made a pilot for a show to be called The Amazing Digital Circus, which in that short time has gotten an incredible 147 million views. Presumably it’ll get a series, but who really can tell these days? We have one major media company that thinks it’s worthwhile to make complete expensive productions then purposely kill them before release for a tax writeoff, but these are not the pages to discuss that. (Update: The Amazing Digital Circus is in the middle of its first season now, with two more episodes since that one!)

Pointy things: the bane of all runny jumpy people

Over on itch.io JuhoSprite has made a platformer game inspired by Little Runmo, constructed in Godot and (it seems) with Gooseworx’s permission. Here is the trailer (2 1/2 minutes):

You might think it’d be a simple recreation, in game form, of the original, but it’s got its own things going on! Its platforming is pretty sharp. In addition to basic running and jumping, pressing an action button in the air gives Runmo a forward dive that gives a slight bit of extra height and some forward distance. On the ground while ducking, this move turns into a forward dash that can get through low ceiling passages.

Even with all the thematic deconstruction happening in Little Runmo, we never find out why Runmo has to traverse dangerous worlds. Presumably the evil king supported by their deaths has set up some social pressure to convince his people to traverse spiky obstacle courses. Maybe the local rulers are in cahoots with him. BTW, it’s fun to say “cahoots.” Cahoots!

The game is divided into levels, but they aren’t clearly announced, and to a limited extent you can explore the areas as you wish, in a different order than as presented in the cartoon. The game world isn’t exactly as the cartoon presents it either, with the areas much larger, and containing a decent number of secrets to find! It’s usually worth it to poke around out of the way places if you can figure out how to get to them.

There’s a section with Mario-style timed alternating blocks, although here, if you’re inside a block when it appears, you just die.

The game starts out fairly chill, but gets pretty difficult. It doesn’t seem like an unfair level of difficulty, although it may take you a few plays to build up the skills to conquer it. Here is some advice to playing it:

- If you haven’t seen the cartoon, you should know that the above ground area is only a small part of the game. The wide pit, the first one with the alternative spike wall over it, is the entrance to the rest of the game. Pikit’s message hints that that’s the way to go (press up to listen to it).

- Unlike as seen in the original cartoon, you have to use the midair dive move to get past the pit, it’s too wide to cross with wall jumps alone.

- Get used to hugging walls on the way down, to slow your descent. This can be used to scout out pits for secrets, to see if the scrolling continues.

- If you press towards most walls but keep jumping, you can climb them easily. Get used to doing this all the time.

- If a ceiling has a one block overhang, you can get around it with a jump off the wall and a dive back towards it.

- Watch the cartoon, and think about ways to explore regions that the animated Runmo doesn’t go to.

- There is at least one place where there are extra lives hidden off the top of the screen.

- While running out of lives doesn’t erase your metaprogress, it just sends you back to level 1, the game does not save its state when you exit it. If you quit out and reload, you’ll be at the very beginning.

The Meatball Man is one of the funniest parts of the cartoon. It is possible to complete his room, but it’s optional in any case.

If you don’t care to see the game yourself, this 100% completion speedrun shows off the locations, although of course it doesn’t waste time talking to Pikit or exploring unnecessary places. There don’t seem to be any unnarrated longplays around yet, so, best to sharpen those skills if you want to experience it all.

Little Runmo: The Game (itch.io, $0, Windows & Linux)

Here is a secret room. What is this place? A possible reference to The Amazing Digital Circus?

Underlevel

It’s a quick and fun free game on itch.io! It was made for a game jam in 48 hours, with an updated build released a while after. It’s only been out for three months but it’s already become pretty popular, with its fun graphics and gameplay and appropriately frenetic music. It’s a good thing to mess around with for Spooky Month.

You’re the skeleton lord in charge of a five-level dungeon, but a knight has invaded your domain and means to destroy you! Rally your lollygagging skeleton minions, to both lead them to the safety of the downstairs and destroy as many of the gem-laden pots on each level as you can, before the knight gets to them first and smashes them to raise its experience level! If you can’t play it (that Windows thing, argh), here’s a playthrough on Youtube . (9 1/2 minutes)

You start each floor with one skeleton near the upstairs. The knight will arrive in just a few seconds, so use the mouse pointer to get it the hell away and guide it to other skeletons, who are just bumbling around having skeleton thoughts, and alert them! The skeletons with the yellow eyes are active, and will try to reach your pointer.

You’ll quickly discover that skeletons aren’t very smart (no brain, you see), and will often get caught up on walls. If the knight is close behind, you might have to abandon some. The skellies also stumble sometimes, like undead Pikmin. If you can get them to the downstairs, all of the active skeletons that touch it will leave the level and join your horde at the bottom of the dungeon, all but one. The last active skeleton cannot leave the level until all the other skeletons have evacuated and all the loot is gone.

Two things increase the knight’s level: killing skeletons and getting the gems out of smashed jars. If you can get a skeleton to run into a jar first, it’ll break and the gems inside will probably disappear before the knight can get to them! But if the knight is nearby it might grab the gems before they vanish!

The HUD has a lot of information that can help you out. The red arrow on the left side points the way to the downstairs. The left side also tells you how many loot jars and skeletons (“enemies”) are left on the level; both numbers must reach zero, either because of your actions or the knight’s, to move to the next floor. The lower-right corner has a “Knight Cam” that shows you what the knight is up to. It doesn’t tell you its location in the dungeon, but it can still be helpful in figuring out what it’s doing.

Clicking the mouse button will cause all of the active skeletons to jump, dodging any attacks the knight might make until they land again. (Be careful not to click outside the window!) The knight can attack on the move, and smashing a skeleton to bits doesn’t even slow it down. You can’t attack the Knight until the end of the dungeon, so don’t try to gang up on it. The knight also snatches up gems just by being near them, for it has one of those auto-pickup features. It sucks.

Fortunately, the knight isn’t any smarter than the skeletons, and it tends to go after the target that’s closest to it. You can even see its AI: its target path is shown onscreen as a thin line. It changes color, from white to yellow to orange, as it gets closer to whatever it wants to destroy.

If you’re having a bad game and want to start over, you can press F2 to do so. There is no “Are you sure?” prompt and it happens instantly, so be careful with that key.

The knight isn’t done until every skeleton is gone and every loot jar is smashed. It always pathfinds to the closest thing to break, so you can keep it distracted by leaving a jar in an out-of-the-way place for it to waste time running to.

You can see the knight’s level at the bottom of the screen, with a red bar indicating how close it is to gaining an experience level. Every skeleton you escape with is 10 HP off the knight at the end. If you can get to the end with the knight at level 9 or less you have a good chance of winning.

Underlevel (itch.io for Windows, $0)

Time-Limited Pumpkin Carving Game

Every year, the creator of A Short Hike turns on the servers for a pumpkin-carving game. It all gets taken down about a week after Halloween, so enjoy it while/when/if you can!

The carving interface is easy to use, although it does result in a glitch that has to be undone sometimes. Keep trying though!

There’s over 2,000 pumpkins to be seen so far, with the ability to favorite ones you like and award the best ones badges!

There’s more than just pumpkins to see, you can go on a hayride, explore a maze and find interesting spots too!

Nice Elder Sign!

The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival (itch.io for Windows, Mac and Linux, free but $2 gets you a cosmetic extra, goes offline after Halloween season)

Game Finds: Feydome

There’s hundreds of new games released every day, and there’s no way to can even find out what they all are, let alone try all of them. So there’s an inescapable element of randomness to what meets my eyes, and thus to what I bring to you. It’s useless to ask, “Why did you link to that silly little trifle when Important Game by Known Developer goes without remark?” Our finds are always going to be kind of idiosyncratic.

So it is with this one, Feydome, a slight but fun game made in two weeks for a game jam. It’s a laid-back 3D exploratory experience where you’re a barely-garbed, at first, fairy, searching an eerie abandoned village for clothes to wear. Movement is by WASD, with the Q and E, or else the left and right arrows, rotating the camera. Yes, it’s an exploratory dress-up game!

At the start your fairy is weak and can barely fly at all. You find glowing orbs that each grant a tiny bit more wing stamina, but never enough that you can fly indefinitely. Each orb very slightly extends the amount of flight time, by around one or two frames. So you’re always tied to the ground, but there are a lot of orbs to find, and that extra time adds up.

The fairy can glide if you hold the fly button down, even when out of energy, and if you keep tapping the space bar you can glide much further, which is a huge help. It helps to devote one hand to this, while using the other to move forward.

While you can rotate the camera, you can’t adjust the angle vertically, so you can’t look above or below, and there is no mouselook. The developer says that an expanded version is being made, maybe these control oversights will be addressed in that.

The pieces of clothing, 29 in all, are in weird chattering spheres that are stuck all over to the walls, floors and ceilings. When collected, a sphere stops chattering, which is of great help in tracking down the last few. Clothes go into your Customize Menu. You start out with just a Tied Fiber top and Leaf Panties bottom, but each item you find helps to make your wee friend more presentable in polite society (if there were any in this game).

There are no enemies, and no moving objects besides the fairy. While it’s difficult to get around at first, it’s surprising how even an extra half second of flight time expands their horizons. Mind you, there is no reward for finding all of the clothing. There is no ending; the journey is entirely the point with Feydome. You’re left alone in the abandoned world, you and your wardrobe, until you exit the game. There’s no save function either, but the game’s so short that it can be finished in one sitting anyway. Maybe 40 minutes in all, if you focus on finding everything.

But it’s fun to explore! It’s a satisfying gameplay loop, finding orbs, using the extended flight time to find yet more orbs, and punctuating the process with occasional new clothes. I’m sure this kind of gameplay has been done before, but this is a neat example of it, and it doesn’t cost anything to try.

Feydome (itch.io, $0)

Mappy on Pico8

What pushes a game past the notability barrier, that makes it interesting enough for me to post it here? Classic arcade game remakes are always a good sign. Items for the Pico8 fantasy console are also a strong positive factor. These two elements combined well make it a must-post.

Especially when the game is Mappy. A great game from Pac-Man-era Namco, simple rules, but while surprisingly difficult, a little strategy can get you a long way in. True mastery is possible, but requires a lot of effort.

This Pico8 version is a good remake, although quite a bit harder. Guide Mappy of the Micro Police through each mansion, stealing back the ill-gotten gains of the kitty-cat gang. Unlike many real policepeople, Mappy is an entirely non-violent actor, and never arrests anyone; he just takes back their loot. And for their part, while the Mewkies and Goro (“Boss the Big Bit”) do knock Mappy out if they catch him, later media seems to indicate that neither side bears any real antipathy for the other. They’re just doing their jobs.

The thing that makes Mappy unique is its trampolines. While on a trampoline you cannot be hurt by the cats, but three bounces on the same one without stopping causes it to break. When you get off the trampoline it’s easy to get caught unless you use the doors as a defensive tool. Pressing the button (X in this Pico8 version) opens the closest door in front of you-you don’t even have to be near it. It swings out in the direction of its doorknob, and knocks out any cat near it on that side for a few seconds, allowing you to pass by. The light-colored doors also house the powerful Microwave, not here a cooking tool but a multicolored beam that launches out and sweeps cats it hits out of the level for a few needed seconds.

This remake of Mappy restores the Japanese name for Goro, “Nyamco,” a pun on the arcade company’s name with a cat angle: “Nyan” is Japanese onomatopoeia for “meow.” You’ll find that while supposed-boss Nyamco is as aimless as he ever was, wandering each level mostly randomly and hiding behind loot, the Mewkies are tenacious chasers, and will quickly corner you if you don’t have a good plan. Even with its higher difficulty it’s a lovely port, and it’s free to play too!

Mappy for Pico8 (itch.io, $0)

Candy Box

I always thought this shopkeeper guy resembled Tom Baker as Doctor Who. Maybe it was intentional.

Candy Box is pretty ancient now, over ten years old. Here is the Metafilter post where we discussed it, which reads like the rantings of crazy people but is also full of spoilers. It was an early entry in the genre of incremental games, sometimes called “clickers,” like Cookie Clicker and Clicker Heroes, and may well have inspired some of them. It’s still online (at a new home), and its still just as playable as it always was, its extremely ASCII presentation now even more appealing now than it was back in 2013.

While it may have helped kicked off the genre, I feel it’s important to point out that there’s actually a lot more going on here than Number Go Up. You go on quests! You have equipment! You have an alternate currency to track, lollipops, with different production characteristics!

Candy Box is a game that’s best experienced going in cold, but since its gleeful hugeness is less of a hilarious shock now that countless other games have done it too, it might help a bit to give you some starting advice. Eating candy isn’t useless: it increases your maximum HP.

Every time you reach what you think is the pinnacle of ridiculousness, some new aspect is introduced. By the end you’ll be mixing up candy potions, using a a candy alchemy system much more detailed than most AAA game’s crafting systems, using only two ingredients.

There’s a sequel too, but let’s save that for tomorrow….

ALL HAIL THE FROG

Candy Box’s New Home (github.io)

Candy Box 2

As foretold yesterday, today’s post is on the sequel to Candy Box, Candy Box 2.

The Map, where you travel to various locations. There’s a few secret areas to find here….

Those colored boxes are magic spells

It’s a much more developed game, with rather a lot of depth to it, but it’s still ultimately an incremental-style game in form, even if its not as direct about it as most of that benighted genre tend to be. There’s many more places to go and items to find than the first game, and a lot more secrets. If you don’t use the wiki, you’ll probably get stuck and have to search around for a few days until you find (or save up) the means to continue.

This monkey has an item you really want, if you can figure out a way to defeat him

While figuring out all the various ways to overcome the game’s puzzles is fun, I find the most interesting thing about Candy Box 2 to be its engine, which is surprisingly flexible for a game presented entirely with text characters, which is kind of like a deluxe Javascript version of the venerable Unix library curses. There’s windowing, a Z-order so objects can pass in front of others, and colors are used for magic effects, and some areas even have special effects, like scrolling around, zooming in on the action, or being able to swim up and down.

The highlight in this one is the puzzle the Cyclops at the lighthouse can eventually be persuaded to let you try, which as far as I can tell is of a completely novel type, and could be the subject of its own entire game. Good luck with that, by the way.

Like the first game, there was a preposterous Metafilter thread about Candy Box 2, and it’s even more full of spoilers, and equally as bizarre if taken out of context. Please enjoy responsibly.

Candy Box 2’s New Home (github.io)

itch.io: Folder Dungeon

Folder Dungeon, on itch.io, is a short and not-too-difficult game where an adventuring cursor has to dig through the folder structure of a hard drive to find an important file. Each window is a room of the dungeon; entering a Door folder takes you to another room down. You can go back the way you came using the back arrow icon at the bottom of the window.

In addition to doors, rooms can contain items, which can be picked up by clicking on them. Gold is among the items, the value of the coin indicated by a number. Some items cost money; if they do, they’ll have a coin and a number on the item. Some items, notably Health Potions and Ice Cream, take affect immediately; they never enter your inventory, but work immediately on your stats whether you needed it or not.

And, some of the things in rooms are monsters. If you do something other than attack a monster by clicking on it, then every monster in the room has a percentage chance to attack you; if you attack a monster, then it always counter-attacks if it survived the attack, but other monsters in the room don’t get the chance to attack.

Somewhere in each folder structure is an Exit icon. When you find it, you can only enter it once all the monsters in its room have been defeated. You don’t have to defeat all the monsters in a room to leave it, but it does give the monsters in the room a chance to attack you.

The most interesting play mechanic is, every action you take generates “heat.” You can only take so much heat. If heat reaches your maximum capacity, you take one damage per action until you leave the level (which resets heat to 0) or you lower your heat by collecting an Ice Cream.

Note, as you can see in the above screenshot, there’s a display bug in the current version that cuts off the left and right sides of the screen. Or is it a bug? It didn’t actually prevent me from playing? Maybe it’s an aesthetic choice? Anyway, I managed to finish the game on my first attempt, but it was close.

Folder Dungeon (by Ravernt, itch.io, $0)

Decker

The history of computers is filled with great transformative ideas that never took off, or sometimes, were even actively sabotaged.

One of those ideas was Hypercard, a “multimedia authoring system” for Mac OS Classic. One way to describe it is like an individual website, contained within a file on your computer, that you could click around and explore. Unlike websites, instead of learning a special language to create documents in it, it has its own creation system that allowed users to wield the Macintosh’s powerful UI to make things.

Hypercard was an early version of several different things. Of course its concept of linking between different “cards” of information was influential to the design of the World Wide Web. Its method of placing controls onto cards and attaching code to them is reminiscent of RAD development environments like Delphi and Visual Basic. And its multimedia capabilities allowed for the creation of full games, the most prominent example of which, of course, is Cyan’s Myst. Hypercard also could be seen as the inspiration, with varying degrees of directness, of a swath of creations ranging from TWINE to alienmelon’s Electric Zine Maker.

But wait! Don’t we live in something rich people call the “free market?” Aren’t superior products supposed to make their creators (and, of course, investors) billions of dollars? Why aren’t we all making Hypercard stacks now, on our Macintosh System 29 computers? Of course: it’s because good things are not necessarily profitable, that corporate politics matter much more than the intrinsic worth of a technology, marketing is grotesquely powerful yet also somehow overvalued, and finally, the World Wide Web came out and essentially did it one better.

Yet Hypercard still has its fans even today. Decker (not Docker), the subject of this post, is a kind of homage to Hypercard made for current OSes. It looks, on purpose, like it’s a program for early versions of Classic Mac OS, with 1-bit graphics and copious use of dithering. Yet despite that it’s still reasonably powerful. So, rediscover the promise of computing circa the late 80s, with Decker.

Decker (itch.io, $0, for Windows, Mac and Linux)

Sudo Sweep

It’s not a command to delete temp files as root on a Unix-styled system! It’s a fun and free little game over at itch.io!

The board on the left is a Sudoku-like game; the board on the right is Minesweeper. The two boards match: the numbers on the Sudoku board are the number of mines in the matching area of the Minesweeper game. You use each to help you solve the other!

It’s not perfect, mind you. There’s currently no way to mark a square that definitely has a mine in it, just the question marks you see in the right-hand board above. There are still cases, familiar to players of standard Minesweeper, where you end up having to guess. And don’t click the “change size” button if you care about the current game: it doesn’t make the boards larger, it starts a new game with bigger Minesweeper and Sudoku boards!

Still though, I have to give creator Rianna Suen props for a cool idea! I found this through the “map obelisk” area during Roguelike Celebration, which is a pretty cool place to find things beloved of clever people!

Sudo Sweep (itch.io, free, playable by web)

Websites

A variety of websites, new, old and ancient, themed around electronic entertainment.

The Flicky Blog

It’s a whole blog devoted to Sega’s arcade hit, and inspiration for some of the animals that Sonic rescues: Flicky! It doesn’t post frequently, but it doesn’t have to!

Flicky is a wonderful little game, if you’ve never played it. It’s sort of like Mappy meets City Connection. You guide a bluebird through a horizontally-scrolling level to rescue baby chicks from cats. Weirdly, the cats can’t actually hurt the chicks, but they can hurt you.

The standout post on the blog is a discussion of Flicky’s place in Sega’s history, which mentions that the game was created by Youji Ishii, who would go on to create Fantasy Zone! There really should be more games like Flicky and Fantasy Zone, I think. And I’m right!

www.flicky1984.com (Blog)

The Mr. Saturn Text Generator

ꔠ⋲ɣ-ơ! 𝕂ηơ⍵ ɣơ⊔ ⍭ꔠ⋲ꭱ⋲ β⋲ ᨓꭱ. یƌ⍭⊔ꭱη ⍭⋲ⵋ⍭ 𝙶⋲η⋲ꭱƌ⍭ơꭱ ơη ⋲ƌꭱ⍭ꔠ ⟟η⍭⋲ꭱη⋲⍭ βơ⟟η𝙶? ⟟⍭ ηơ⍭ β⋲ φ⋲ꭱⴥ⋲ᘓ⍭ β⊔⍭ ⟟⍭ ơⴥ ی⊔ⴥⴥ⟟ᘓ⟟⋲η⍭ ⍵ƌᘓ𝕂⟟η⋲یی ⍭ơ ᨓƌ𝕂⋲ ⟟ᨓφꭱ⋲یی⟟ơη ơη ⴥꭱ⟟⋲ηɗ ƌηɗ ᨓơηی⍭⋲ꭱ ƌℓ⟟𝕂⋲! ɗƌ𝕂ơ⍭ƌ!

(Did you know there is a website that will convert whatever you enter into an approximation of the text from Mr. Saturn from Earthbound and Mother 3? It doesn’t look exactly like it does in the games, but it is certainly reminiscent of it. Dakota! Dakota?)

It turns out there is a TrueType Mr. Saturn font as well, as presented in this Reddit post. Note that this link should not be construed to mean that I in any way approve of Reddit, or of how much internet content that it’s concentrated under its fetid profit-seeking embrace. That’s where this is, so that’s where I linked. It is a vectorized version of a pixel font recreation of Saturn-speak, which is available here. Message over boing!

Earthbound Battle Backgrounds Website

This interesting, and even slightly useful, website combines the various layers that the cult classic SNES JRPG Earthbound uses to construct its funky battle backgrounds. There are more combinations here than actually appear in the game. There is a GIF-making function, but it seems to be broken for the moment. You can still make them full-screen and save screenshots, that’s what I did, though unfortunately doing it that way means they aren’t animated.

Here are a few still examples.

Earthbound Battle Backgrounds

The Blog at perfectpacman.com

The URL makes it seem like it’s going to be entirely devoted to that specific classic arcade game, but lately it’s concerned itself with two other topics, both pretty interesting. Here’s a link to the site, for ease of access.

Most of the posts by weight recently have concerned the lawsuit by Billy Mitchell to force Twin Galaxies to retain his scores in Donkey Kong, which as the evidence mounts up against him, much of it recounted on the blog, became increasingly unlikely to prevail. According to the blog, there are several major discrepancies in the footage he provided of his scores, that made it evident that they were produced in MAME, which for various reasons disqualifies them for the category he was aiming for. That evidence is recounted on this subpage, but among the most telling is that Donkey Kong’s software draws its levels in a way that interacts with the CRT redraw to produce, on arcade hardware, a couple of frames where the boards are incompletely drawn in a distinctive way, that is not evident in Mitchell’s tapes.

Comparison from perfectpacman.com showing the screen drawn in a way distinctive to MAME, but not to the arcade hardware.

By this point Mitchell’s name seems to be mud in classic gaming circles, so presumably coverage of this topic is nearing its end on their blog. That’s probably for the best, as their other major beat is covering gaming challenges that Twin Galaxies offers bounties on, like escaping Midgar in FFVII without using Materia, or getting as many Gold Skulltulas as a player can in Ocarina of Time without taking damage. That’s the kind of gaming geekery we can get behind!

GifCities

GeoCities has been gone for fifteen years now, about as long as it was alive, and it’s still sorely missed. It was shut down by Yahoo, which seems to exist purely to kill good things during downturns. (See also: Yahoo Directory.) It’s just a “brand” now; the company formerly known as that changed its name to “Altaba,” and then itself died.

GeoCities was a place where anyone could make a static website, for free (although with frames and ads). This isn’t the place to recount the full story, but at the time it had kind of a reputation. Since anyone could make a site there, and having a site was a big thing in those heady early World Wide Web days, a lot of people did make them. It was their first site in a lot of cases; in many cases, it was their only site. And before social media and Google’s decay, you could even reasonably expect to find GeoCities sites, if they were good.

So a lot of web newbies made sites, and they perpetrated all kinds of design atrocities in the process. Back then we rolled our eyes and held our noses, but now that time is remembered with fondness.

There are multiple places where you can go back and explore old GeoCities sites, although with varying degrees of stability. Try checking Restorativland or Oocities. Or the Internet Archive’s GeoCities collection.

One of the most egregious of the many sins made by GeoCities users was the overuse of animated GIFs. GIFs themselves are their own throwback to the early era, and actually predate the World Wide Web. The image format was created at Compuserve in 1987, while the first web browser was released on Christmas Day, 1990. Now Compuserve is long gone, although their website, amazingly, is still up, offering an early 2000’s style web portal experience, and while it’s likely no one human is curating its links, some one, or thing, is still updating its copyright date.

I seem to be discursing a lot today, but I am actually closing in on today’s true subject, just with a flight plan best described as a wide, lazy spiral. Here we go. GIFs, that relic of ancient Compuserve, once the subject of an infamous software patent owned by even older pre-web tech company Unisys that threatened to strike the format from the internet, is the only thing of Compuserve that really thrives today.

There are other animation file formats. There’s MP4 and its progeny, of course. Google has a version of webp that has animation, but people don’t trust Google so much anymore. GIFs are also limited: it’s an indexed graphics format that maxes out at 256 colors. But there are many ways to make them, all the major browsers support them, many social media sites support them, and they doesn’t have Google’s sterile, chlorine-like stink about them, so they survive. Improbably, awesomely, people still make, use and view GIFs today.

Google Meetup(?)’s message input bar with GIF button

Discord’s message input bar with GIF button

Google Meetup, or whatever the hell they call it now, has an interface for searching for GIFs to use, and Discord does too. There’s a site, the slightly-incorrectly named GIPHY, that hosts them and lets you search for them. Arguably GIFs are more popular than ever. But the acknowledged Golden (well, maybe Tarnished Bronze) Age of GIFs was the Geocitiene Era.

Well, now the Internet Archive has an amusingly-styled site, GifCities, where you can search through an archives of the GeoCities site collection.

Comic Sans! A spinning rendered dollar sign! Party like it’s 200X!

Most of the Old Web, by weight, is lost now, so let’s cherish what remains.

Bobbins’ Olde Tomb of Videogames

A new website about retro games! Both new to this blog, but also new in general, its first digest dated to October of last year! Bobbins’ Olde Tomb of Videogames covers much of the same kinds of things that we do on our Retro beat in a weekly digest format. The site is laid out like an email newsletter archive, but to subscribe link is way down the archive page, so if you want to subscribe to that particular type of content emission, that is where you can breathe it in. Aaaah!

So if you enjoy those kinds of posts here you might want to look into them, there! Their main focus seems to be Eurogaming, but items in the most recent issue also include a link to an interview with Kenta Cho and a Pico-8 remake of Amidar! It is worth brief yet intensive investigation, much like that of a dog finding a sudden biscuit. That’s a good thing, BTW.

Oldweb: Remembering ionpool.net

It used to be that the internet was full of thousands of tiny sites. Many of them might only have gotten a few visits a year, if that, but they were there, quietly and earnestly providing a resource for people who might be looking for it.

One of these sites was ionpool.net, which used to host a listing of classic gaming information. Here it is from its last archived version on the Wayback Machine from December 29, 2020. There’s a lot of links there, and the nature of the Wayback is, unless I check every one of those links, I can’t be sure if any of them will work. The few I’ve tried do, which is something at least.

ionpool.net in 2013, this is just the beginning of the list

There’s a lot of interesting documents there, presented in the classic List Of Tiny Links format. There’s far more there than I can summarize in a simple throwaway daily blog post like this one, but I particular point out to KLAX In Three Lessons, a series of Usenet posts written by Lyle Rains of Atari Games himself. In fact, those posts are so interesting that I might call them out in a later post….

Back to ionpool.net. The thing that saddens me is that the site still exists, but instead of providing the information that it helpfully offered back in 2013, now it’s just a black page with a graphic reading “END OF LINE.” This:

I can understand that even the slight resources necessary to preserve a website can, over time, become onerous. But I’d think it would be an equivalent cost to host an image like that, instead of leaving the old content up indefinitely. It was largely text files anyway.

Ah well. There is still the Wayback Machine, after all, slow and incomplete as it might be and difficult to sort through like it is. I can’t help but think that we should have more alternatives, though. The Internet Archive is not forever either.

Brainscraps.net

I think, when you find a blog that’s been around since 2009, and is still being updated somewhat in 2024, that itself is worthy of celebration, and that is the case with brainscraps.net. It’s maintained by May Kasahara, a member of the venerable community weblog Metafilter (where I can also be found posting and commenting as JHarris).

Blogs come and go. Bloggers come and go too; sometimes they lose interest, but sometimes they pass away, such might be the case with oneswellfoop, a.k.a. Craig Wittier. There was a recent Talk post there about the many members who have passed away.

This is not a Metafilter focused blog. I mention all this to say that people’s blogs, and being around to blog, that’s precious, people’s writing is important, it’s a part of them, and I’m happy whenever I encounter it, whether the blog gets 10 readers or a million of them. But it’s nice when people go by there and read them, and I hope that you’ll be inspired to read Brainscripts, and other blogs, and if you don’t already, that you’ll learn to cherish that they exist. They won’t always, their bloggers won’t exist always either. Neither will I, and neither will you. So let’s all enjoy what time we have here left!

But let’s not be too maudlin. May Kasahara also has an itch.io page, with a variety of fun projects on it, like Mary Sue’s Character Casino, and Daisy Doom, and Senpai Simulator, and Legend of Cascadia! I am more than happy to spread the word.

Oldweb: Flying Omelette Lives

Considering its longevity, I can almost forgive the broken image links in the right sidebar.

A brief but happy statement: the website Flying Omelette, dating back to 1998, is not only still online, but its most recent update was this past November, and it saw frequent updates throughout 2023. Rock on, levitating eggfood!

There’s a lot of things to find on the site, including collections of MP3, nine hosted shrines and a number of guides. Please show it some love, because you can be sure that Google won’t.

Flying Omelette (flyingomelette.com)

Cam’s Pac-Man Fun Page

From the linked page. Piranha is one of a whole category of Pac-Man bootlegs that try to obscure their origin.

I’m considering writing more on the subject of the male-gendered Pac, which I assume is a mere matter of social custom among the Pac-People since they have no genitalia or clothing. Pac-Man bootlegs, in particular, are bizarre and wonderful, even if they often aren’t very fun to play.

But Cam has a nice page devoted to Pac mutants. And these old Geocities-style pages need much more love these days, so for now I’ll link to them. Have a look!

A little remarked-upon aspect of these Pac-likes is how their character name is strictly determined by how many letters long it is, so that they can fit on this screen in the same amount of space that PAC-MAN did.

Doom Text Generator

Please enjoy this Doom Text Graphic Generator in the meantime.

It goes well with this text generator we linked to a couple of years ago:

Doom Text Generator – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Logo Generator

Advance Wars By Web

Advance Wars By Web is a long-standing website allowing for Advance Wars games to take place between players online. It’s old enough that it came out before Advance Wars Dual Strike, the first DS Advance Wars game, and has survived long enough to see the release of Dual Strike, Advance Wars Days of Ruin, and now Advance Wars 1+2: Reboot Camp.

The first Advance Wars game had a legendary awkward launch date: September 10, 2001. I don’t know if world events following it had any influence on its popularity, but Advance Wars had the advantage of being a long-running series, going back to the Famicom, that had never been given a chance in Western territories. (One reason? Super Famicom Wars had a notorious character named Hister, with a mustache that made its inspiration unmistakable.)

The first two Advance Wars titles, taking their name, like previous versions, from its release platform the Gameboy Advance, were unexpectedly popular. The gaming groups I was in in college played an incredible amount of Advance Wars 2. We maxed out the game’s timer at 999 hours! I have no doubt that, if our group hadn’t broken up from people graduating and leaving, we’d still be playing it today.

Both of these games are preserved in proper fashion by Wayforward’s Switch remake of Advance Wars and its immediate sequel. Of the two games after it, Dual Strike leans a bit too hard on CO powers (already a creeping problem in AW2), and Days of Ruin implemented a lot of gameplay adjustments and fixed but, alas, lost the weird sense of fun from the semi-cartoony characters and setting of the first two games.

The Gameboy Advance Advance Wars games did not have internet-enabled multiplayer. The DS versions had better options, but they’re unavailable now, at least without some technical effort, due to the shutdown of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.

Advance Wars By Web both allows a game much like AW2 to be played over the internet, and it does so with features that make it feel like a play-by-mail game, with the site handling the state involved with turn-based multiplayer. It does this at the of having any form of single-player: all of its battles are against other human players. So it’s not an excellent way to learn to play Advance Wars games interactively, as with the official games, which easy you into the game a bit at a time. But as for learning how to play this online version, there’s a number of useful videos available on their Tutorials Page. I especially like their video on overcoming first turn advantage, which they do by spotting the second player one Infantry unit. It’s not a perfect solution, but one that works out fairly well in play. And the video on designing balanced multiplayer maps, which offers a lot of practical advice that can be carried over into designing maps for the original games. And there’s a huge library of over 3,800 games to view, if you want to see how the community plays.

I don’t know if Reboot Camp is helping to sustain the avid fandom that the first Advance Wars games did, but I’ve enjoyed it a lot. If you enjoy it too, you can go from Reboot Camp right into playing against people online on AWBW. I can’t offer much more about it than that, for Advance Wars is a deceptively deep game and I have to make a post here, on the average, every day, but it’s been offering online play between humans for nearly twenty years now! That has to count for something.

Advance Wars By Web (awbw.amarriner.com)

Retrocomputing

Machines that manipulate electrons in order to do cognitive work--inefficiently.

Glory Be to Frog in Heaven, it’s Fan-Made Character-Mode Gradius

Why would someone make something like this? I’m glad they did though. It’s fifteen minutes long, made for a pair of Japanese Sharp-produces home computers. Note that the proper name for this is not ASCII-art, as it makes heavy use of Japanese characters. Also note that enemy shots don’t ever seem to contact the player’s ship despite appearing to contact it in multiple places, so I don’t know how accurate the conversion is. Also also: no music, and only the occasional beep for sound. And, after the second level, it loops through some basic terrain forever with no enemies, with no Moai Stage, so you can stop watching after the second Big Core blows up.

(The Japanese description to the video notes that there’s no hit detection and no enemies after Stage 2.)

MZ-80 MZ-700 Gradius (Youtube, 15 minutes)

Mission: Impossible for CP/M

Set Side B’s mission statement is to cover three categories of gaming: retro, which let’s be honest is most of what we do; indie, often the province of blogmate Josh Bycer; and niche, which is usually what all the Nintendo stuff gets filed under.

Well, you don’t get much more niche than the category of CP/M gaming. CP/M, or “Control Program for Microcomputers,” is an ancient OS for 8-bit Z80 computers that recently turned 50. Half a century old! While CP/M was very popular in its era and had a lot of software made for it, much of it is obscure and hard to find now, and in histories of home computing tends to get largely overshadowed by Apple and Commodore. It’s a huge vanished scene, but it can be thought of as the DOS before DOS: the OS that would become PC-DOS, then later MS-DOS, was made as a recreation of CP/M’s API for the 8086 family of processors.

If you think MS-DOS software looks primitive then CP/M will appear to you like the freaking Stone Age. MS-DOS had early adapters like CGA and EGA for graphics, but CP/M had none of those. The point of CP/M was that it ran on a plethora of systems, from manufacturers like Kaypro and Osbourne. Many big microcomputers from the age, like the Commodore 64, TRS-80 and Atari 8-bit line, had add-on cartridges with Z80 processors in them so they could take advantage of the huge CP/M software library. Since the point of CP/M, as would be for MS-DOS later, then Windows after that, was cross-compatibility, it had to run on all those systems. But it didn’t have the IBM PC’s standardized graphics hardware, so little, if any, CP/M software took advantage of special graphics functionality. It’s all terminal gaming.

A beneficiary of the limited prospects for games on the CP/M was Infocom, which released a number of their early titles, including the Zork trilogy, on CP/M, which wouldn’t be held back by the lack of graphics. But other games were made. Many of these titles were reviewed by the ultra-niche blog TechTinkering, which has a Youtube channel, which uploaded video of a lot of CP/M software, including Mission: Impossible.

Mission: Impossible, by Richard Altman, is one of the category of terminal games, which are often played by printing information on the game state to the screen, then asking the player to enter options from a numbered list. In addition to only rarely having real-time play, because there are no visual or aural components to engage the senses, a lot of the weight has to be borne by the gameplay, which often means it’s pretty difficult. It’s of the class of games that can be found in David Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games books, games like Star Trek, Lemonade Stand and Hammurabi.

Mission: Impossible is a fairly complex game that I don’t yet fully understand. Here, watch TechTinkering’s 19-minute video on it.

Mission: Impossible (TechTinkering)

A Complete Playthrough of the Original Zork Games

Three videos of a Youtuber called SwimYBO going through all three of Infocom’s classic Zork games. Zork was originally made for the PDP-10 by a number of students at MIT as a larger and funnier version of Colossal Cave, and was made all as one game. When remade for a variety of home microcomputers at the time, it was written in a special language, ZIL, for a virtual machine called the Z Machine. So, the game writers wrote their games once for ZIL, which had a Z Machine written for each of the target platforms. This explains how they were able to relatively easily port for every platform under the sun, back when there were over a dozen, and also why most of their games looked like they were the output of a simple terminal emulator.

Infocom was bought by Activision, used as a brand for a number of weird titles like an NES game, and eventually the Zork name would be applied to a pair of Windows graphic adventures. The property currently lies dormant in the hands of an uncaring megacorp, along with many other old computer game settings, characters and properties from over the proliferating decades of time since Pong.

Anyway. SwimYBO’s playthroughs go through the entire game and reveal all the puzzles and solutions, but they do leave some of the descriptions and game lore unrevealed for a player who might come to them later.

Zork I (“The Great Underground Empire,” 29 minutes):

Zork II (“The Wizard of Frobozz,” 30 minutes):

And Zork III (“The Dungeon Master,” 34 minutes):

100 Commodore Plus/4 Games

I’ve brought up the Commodore Plus/4 before, an odd system that seems poorly suited as a follow-up to the massively successful Commodore 64. It was the host system for Pac-Pac, a Pac-Man-like game made in recent years for the Plus/4, a system that’s, compared to the C64, really doesn’t seem meant for games. The video that’s our subject today is just a collection of quick views, I mean just a few seconds each, of 100 Plus/4 games, for the reason that there being even one seems like a challenge. Here is the video (17 minutes). Why? I’ll save that for after the embed.

The Commodore 64 had its strengths and weaknesses. It had hardware sprites, but only 8 of them, each with at most three colors, and even for that you had to trade off half their horizontal resolution. It had smooth scrolling, but it required the processor to move every byte of the screen itself, a feat that was actually impossible on unaided hardware within one frame’s time. (Well, there was a way to do it, discovered fairly recently, but it’s bizarrely dangerous. I’ll describe that some other time.) It had a very good sound chip for its time, but it only had three voices. It had 64K of RAM, but some of it was very difficult to access, and a quirk of the system’s design mean that some of it couldn’t ever be used by the graphics chip. And it had a floppy drive true, but in the rush to release it it ended up with a terrible flaw, making the 1541 floppy drive the slowest disk drive of all the 8-bit micros, giving rise to a whole category of fastload software.

The Commodore 64’s greatest strength was its very low price. Founder Jack Tramiel upended the calculator market with a very low cost calculator, and pulled he same trick on microcomputers with the C64, which sold for just $200 for much of its life. The Plus/4 sold for more than that for the scant year it was offered, abandoning its predecessor’s main advantage. To make up for it, it had a word processor, database and spreadsheet included in ROM. The Plus/4 was intended as a business machine, which is a shame, because businesses could afford PC clones. The C64 was properly seen as a games machine. A C64 without its game-friend features was not going to make it.

The Plus/4 had much worse sound support, no scrolling support, and worst of all, no hardware sprites. No sprites means moving objects have to be done either with tile graphics (wasteful in terms of tiles) or a bitmapped screen (slow). It did have a couple of advantages though. It had support for many more colors, up to 121 of them, and its processor, another version of the 6502, was clocked quite a bit faster.

Still, regarding games on the Plus/4, as the adage goes, it’s amazing that the dog talks at all. Every game in the video, old and new, should be regarded as something of a triumph.

The MAD Magazine Type-In Program

One of the essences of comedy and humor is a shared context between participants. When a joke is made both the teller and the hearer must know what’s being spoken of, and how the elements fit together in relation to each other, if the funny ha-ha is to occur.

Which is why I find the creation of The MAD Computer Program interesting. Published on issue 258 in BASIC for four of the microcomputer platforms of the time, Atari 8-bit, Apple II, Commodore 64 and IBM PC, it was obviously MAD’s bid to maintain technically relevant to that brief moment in computing history. Setting aside whether it’s actually funny or not (it’s not), it means that MAD’s editors must have decided that home computers were common enough that they could waste some of their precious print pages on catering to their owners. Anyone without one of those computers would find them to be four pages of wasted content.

The four programs have a lead-in that reads in a set of data (using READ commands to get vector coordinates from DATA statements, of course). The lead-in part is different for each platform, but the lines with the DATA statements are the same, and so are only printed once in the magazine. That’s also the least interesting part of the ordeal of entering type-in programs: tables of raw data, numbers without context, sequences of values that will put your monkey brain to sleep, yet will surely cause your code to fail catastrophically if entered incorrectly. There’s 140 lines of them to enter here, plus some more if you’re using a C64. As my eyes brush over them, childhood trauma from entering type-ins from computer magazines cause them to water involuntarily. I miss the age of magazine-supplied type-in programs, but not that part of it.

What do you get when you spend a grueling half-hour typing in two pages of numbers written by a group who describes themselves as a gang of idiots? Something genuine useful like Compute’s Speedscript word processor? A unique and interesting two-player game like Basketball Sam & Ed or Laser Chess? The author of the text of the piece is coy about what the result will be, but encourages readers to send a printout to the MAD offices. I wonder how many did? Probably not too many; a thread on the AtariAge forums implies that there’s an error in the listing that causes the program to crash about two-thirds the way into its run. One participant remembers that MAD published a correction a few issues later, but if they actually did I can’t say.

If someone does get it to work, what then? If you’re familiar with MAD you might can already guess what the result, a picture drawn in hi-res on your screen, will be, but to save you the effort of setting up an emulator and entering over a thousand numbers one at a time, here’s a Youtube video of the program in action:

The preview gives it away. WHAT, ME WORRY? It’s a pretty good representation!

The video links to the blog post on Meatfigher.net that I learned about the program from. Meatfighter’s a pretty cool little blog and it’s worth rummaging through their archives! atariprojects.org offers an emulator disk image with the program already entered for you. dougx.net offers a version of the program written in Javascript that renders its output in your browser window. Without the (relatively) low resolution of the ancient computers that ran the original programs I feel the result loses something, but at least you don’t have to type it in yourself.

The MAD Computer Program (meatfighter.net)
Video of output from the MAD Computer Program (Youtube, 1 1/2 minutes)

Mattel’s Handheld Dungeons & Dragons LCD Game

This little pocket-sized unit was released in 1981, three years after the VCS/2600, but as the Gameboy proved years after, pocket-sized gaming can get away with less complex hardware than consoles. They called this their D&D “Computer Fantasy Game.”

Mattel made pretty good use of the D&D license. They also released the “Computer Labyrinth Game,” which was a mixture of physical and electronic components. This version is wholly electronic, and has the same kind of feel as a Game & Watch title. It has the old-style of LCD components, black shapes that are faintly visible at all times, but can be made much darker to “display” images.

This 13-minute unboxing and demonstration video is by Youtuber Nerd Mimic. If their gameplay description sounds a bit familiar, it seems that this game is mostly a handheld port of the older (yes, even from that time) computer game Hunt The Wumpus, which is played on what the math people call a graph of nodes. The idea is to use clues given by the game to deduce the location of a monster and to kill it by firing an arrow at it from an adjacent space. Stumbling into the space of the monster or a bottomless pit is lethal, and there are bats wandering around that can drop you into a random space. It’s a classic of early gaming, and a pretty good choice for a pocket-sized version.

Mattel made two console D&D games for the Intellivision, both of them interesting and thought of well today: Cloudy Mountain and Treasure of Tarmin. None of these games made use of the true AD&D ruleset, as it would have been called at the time. They’re original game designs with a vague sort of fantasy theme, but they’re still interesting to play.

Hare Basic for the Commodore 64

Our friend Robin at 8-Bit Show And Tell lets us know of this cool and free Commodore 64 BASIC 2.0 extension, of a sort, called Hare Basic. It’s a successor to an earlier version called Bunny Basic. Here’s the video, 48 minutes long. My comments on it follow below, which you can read either after having watched the video, or before, depending on of you have most of an hour to spare right now. Downloads of both a programming manual and Hare Basic itself are available here.

Commodore BASIC is, in many ways, the worst of all worlds. It’s a slow interpreted language, a variant of infamous Microsoft BASIC, and it has almost no machine-specific features, but it comes with the machine, and it’s burned into ROM. You can swap it out for extra RAM if you have a replacement OS or are running something in pure machine code.

I could go on for a long time about the problems with Commodore BASIC 2.0, a language I’m quite familiar with having spent much of my teens programming in it. Sometimes it feels like it was designed especially to run slowly. One example: it supports floating point math, which ordinarily would be a good thing, right? Use integer math for performance, and just use floats when you need decimals, right? But no: internally, Commodore BASIC converts integer variables into floats when doing any math with them, and converts them back to store as integers when it’s done. Wilberforce Trafalgar Franklin?! Why?! It does these unnecessary extra steps to do all arithmetic as floating point even when it doesn’t need do, and doesn’t offer a way to do performant integer math at all! Need I remind you that Microsoft BASIC is based upon software written by Bill Gates himself? I suspect that I don’t!

Hare Basic is a highly optimized subset of Commodore BASIC that can be switched on and off as needed. It has to be coded in a special way which might throw beginners for a loop: Hare Basic can’t abide whitespace, for example, only allows for variables of one letter in length, has no support for modifying strings, and contrary to Commodore BASIC can only do integer math. There’s lots of other differences too, and if you want to play around with it it’s essential that you study the manual.

But once you get used to it, it runs blazingly fast, sometimes as much as 10 times faster! And the best part is you don’t have to use it for everything. You can start out with a standard Commodore BASIC program, then enter into Hare Basic mode with a USR function call. You could write your whole program in Hare if you’re up for it, or just loops, or other places where performance is necessary.

Of course, this is ultimately an enhancement for a programming language that runs on a home computer made in 1984. It’s not what one might consider of universal interest. But it might be of interest to the kinds of people who read this site. It’s interesting to me, at least. Maybe I should dust off VICE and see what I can do with it? I haven’t coded on a ’64 in nearly three decades, maybe I should get back into that….

Commodore Free Magazine

Keeping aligned with the C64 angle, Today’s find is COMMODORE FREE Magazine, a long-running Commodore 64 magazine in PDF format that’s been going since late 2006. It recently published its 98th issue, meaning, #100 should be bursting forth before too long! Until then issue 98 features include a history of Commodore’s 8-bit line, a comparison of versions of Commando for their favorite machines, reviews of a Commodore port of Sonic the Hedgehog and the classic title The Sentinel, and a long piece of personal non-fiction by Leonard Roach.

At 15 years running, that starts to put it in striking distance of LOADSTAR’s run! May it keep on keepin’ on.

COMMODORE FREE Issue 98 – Homepage

Old Vintage Computing Research: The Web-@nywhere Watch

Back in January, the wonderful blog Old Vintage Computing Research, which covers all kinds of old machines and devices, presented this bizarre “smart” watch from the early days of the World Wide Web. It didn’t connect to the internet itself; it sat in a cradle and had up to 93K (who could need more?) of precious plain-text data sent to it from a Windows 9X or 2000 machine, that you could then read “on the go,” “on the road,” “in transit,” “while sitting on a subway car sadly isolated from a web browser,” etc. This essential device would have cost you $85 at the time.

Image from the linked blog post.

Imagine trying to read 20 print pages’ worth of internet text on that tiny display! For more, please click through for the device’s history and loving paens to its gross unusability.

I couldn’t let this promotional image from the device’s long-dead website go without comment though, offering “Free download from WEB”:

Image from the blog, originally from the device’s website. This bikini-wearing computer graphics lady likes her Web-@nywhere so much she got a dorky tattoo of its logo. It’ll either take an expensive operation or a simple retexturing to remove that! No one tell her she’s wearing the watch upside-down.

Old Vintage Computing Research: The Web-@nywhere Watch

Randy Glover, Creator of Jumpman

Here is a talk by the creator of the brilliant 8-bit platforming game Jumpman (who isn’t Mario). That’s all the lead-in I have time to provide right now. And if you get the chance to try Jumpman, do it. There’s a version on Steam! (Note, the C64 version is preferable to the DOS version.)

The Man Behind Jumpman: Retro Gaming Revealed (Youtube, 58 minutes)

An Ad From Compute Magazine #001

This is an ad, on the first page of the first issue of Compute Magazine, for “the pet program” from “softside software,” names all in lowercase. I have no idea if any copies of these programs remains in existence in our universe, but two places to look would be zimmers.net’s FTP archive and the Silicon PET Archive, and even in this era of the internet there are a fair number of PET software archives remaining.

Softside was far from the only company to put out its hopeful shingle through the pages of early computer magazines. At the time, magazine publishing worked with a lead time of several months. It is possible that Softside Software had gone under even by the time this ad saw print, but then again maybe not. A forum thread on AtariAge mentions several BASIC games sold by a “SoftSide,” apparently an Atari 8-bit magazine-on-disk, but they were based in New Hampshire, and the Softside of the ad was in New York.

Notes on the programs proffered:

1. Graphics Pac 2: I’m not sure what they mean, as the reference I’ve found claims the PET didn’t have a bitmapped display, but there were several models, and further add-on cards that added bitmapped displays, an 80-column mode, and even (gasp) color. A simple “Microsette” itself would not be enough. We are near the end of the PET’s reign as Commdore’s core product though.

2. Assembler 2001: It is easy to laugh this off nowadays when assemblers are mostly free software (and thank frog for that), but this was before that, and before the internet. $16 is a great price for an assembler from that time.

3. Bike. Apparently it was a Hammurabi/Lemonade Stand style game, where you made business decisions through simple menus and entering figures. Maybe someday someone will write such a game about running Commodore. You might scoff at the warning that “Bike is dangerously addictive,” but standards were lower then. It was 1979; Wizardry wouldn’t be published until 1981. “Worth a million in fun, we’ll offer Bike at $9.95.” I admire their chutzpah.

4. Pinball. “Dynamic usage of the PET’s graphics features” would have meant using its hardcoded, unchangeable ROM graphics character set, with no sprites. “With sound!” That would mean its simple piezoelectric speaker. Don’t expect Raul Julia’s voice, or even Gorgar’s, to talk to you from the machine.

5. Super Doodle. Certainly of no relation to Omni Software’s popular Commodore paint program. Super Doodle lets you use any number of colors so long as they’re black or green, and a resolution of 40×25 characters. “Why waste any more paper.” Well probably because loading your notes off of tape would take too long.

6. Driving Ace. Offers two games for $9.95. The description doesn’t give a good sense of what they were like, but there are essentially only three kinds of racing game: scrolling in one direction (Monaco GP style), one screen or scrolling all around (Sprint style), and 3D (Pole Position through to Ridge Racer to F-Zero). I presume one of these is like Sprint and the other is like Monaco GP; I don’t think the PET was capable of even a slight approximation of 3D, but then, Pole Position’s hardware shouldn’t have been capable of what it could do either.

The ad is from Compute Magazine, most often stylized as COMPUTE! with an exclamation point, grew out of The PET Gazette in 1979. That former publication centered around the computing devices from Commodore International’s subsidiary, Commodore Business Machines. CBM had been around for over two decades up to that point as a maker of typewriters, adding machines and calculators, but in a maverick move by its co-founder and president Jack Tramiel, they bought MOS Technologies, which had just startled the nascent computing world by creating an ultra low cost microprocessor, the 6502. Tramiel had learned from a bit of a bastard move by Texas Instruments, who used their ownership of much of their supply chain to release a line of calculators that sold for less than Commodore’s production costs. Now, Tramiel owned the company that produced the chip that would soon launch the personal computing revolution, and could make other chips too, and Commodore was set to soon pull off Texas Instruments’ trick on the home computer industry with the VIC-20 and Commodore 64.

But until then they made other computers. They made the KIM-1 “single board computer,” and the PET 2001 and other machines with the PET branding. The PET Gazette’s audience was originally those machines, but burgeoning success convinced them to publish a more generalized 6502-focused magazine, and that magazine was Compute.

I have more to come on Compute, which in many ways was the archetypal type-in program magazine. It was far from the only one; other magazines offering type-in software at the time, names now even more obscure than Compute’s, were Creative Computing, Family Computing, and Commodore’s own publications Commodore Magazine and Power Play. Compute would for a while languish somewhat in the shadow of its own sister publication, borrowing part of its name from its predecessor, Compute’s Gazette, which focused on Commodore’s computers, the VIC-20, the Commodore 64, and later the Commodore 128.

The PET Gazette was founded by Small System Services Inc., and was published out of a shop, the Corner Computer Store, in Greensboro, North Carolina. Presumably that changed as the subscription rolls increased. Eventually Compute would be sold to ABC Publishing, a subsidiary of the broadcast network, and it would continue happily for several years. When its fortunes began to wane it was sold, first to Penthouse Publishing (really!), where its logo was redone to resemble that of its own publication Omni, then later to Ziff-Davis, who only wanted its subscriber list anyway; I don’t think they ever published an issue. As it became clearer that the future would be MS-DOS and Mac, its focus shifted, but they kept up their small systems focus for surprisingly long. I don’t think the Penthouse era provided any coverage that wasn’t DOS, Windows or Mac, but it would take time to check. Corrections later, if necessary.

Inform 7

Still December, still in low-impact posting mode. I figured I’d tell you all about interactive fiction authoring system Inform 7, which still feels new in my mind despite coming out 17 years ago.

I say “Inform 7” to distinguish it from previous versions, which were a very different system. Inform 6 was a cryptic C-style programming language; Inform 7 source code reads like English. Radically so:

A bit of Zork implemented in Inform 7.

I’ve long wanted to learn Inform 7 and create something interesting with it, but every time I do I run into a thick wall of error messages. I feel it’s important to emphasize, from my own experiences trying to code with Inform 7, that this apparent ease-of-use is completely fake. It reads like English, and does what it appears to say. But in fact it’s written in extremely fiddly and precise English. It’s still all programming language, with a precise syntax, it’s just a syntax that makes it readable to both humans and the computer. In this way, it’s like Ultra COBOL.

And yet, reading it is useful to understanding it in an intuitive sense that’s untrue of many programming languages. It eschews the usage of punctuation for random coder things, in the abhorrent C style. Yeah, I said it, I’ve wrestled with C syntax more than once, I even generally understand it, but I really don’t like it.

Inform 7 used to have a great website, at inform7.com, where it could both be obtained and had great examples. That site is gone now, replaced with a GitHub page that is also pretty great, but since it, like all GitHub sites, is relying on the largess of Microsoft, and subject to the eventual enshittification that inevitably affects all corporate-owned hosting, it feels like less than the original. Ah well.

That site contains the Inform 7 documentation, which has a wealth of examples for learning how to use it. Alex Proudfoot runs another GitHub site, Inform 7 Examples, which contains that after which it is named.

This post risks defeating the entire purpose of making low-effort content during a busy time of year, suffice to say this is an unusually-deep rabbit hole of which much more deserves to be said. Later.

The Current Inform 7 Website (GitHub)

Demoscene: La Linea

Demos aren’t necessarily out to wow you by pushing a computer’s hardware to its absolute limits. Sometimes one will just present something that was obviously (to people who understand the platform) challenging to do, but is fun for its own sake.

La Linea is a series of short films made for television created by Italian animator Osvaldo Cavandoli. They may be familiar to 80s kids who watched a show called The Great Space Coaster, as they were in regular rotation as segments on that show. They feature an expressive and excitable character, known as “Mr. Linea,” who speaks gibberish and has a variety of adventures, despite the fact that he and his world are represented (with some cheating) as contortions of a single horizontal line. The character often speaks to the off-screen animator, asking for various items, devices and, occasionally, other characters to interact with. Every cartoon ends with the main character falling off or through the line in some way. Some of them are collected on Youtube. Here is an example (2 1/2 minutes):

In 2002, the demogroup Breeze made a tribute to Cavandoli’s work in the form of a full-length La Linea cartoon running on a Commodore 64. It doesn’t have the distinctive music or the gibberish, and there’s no photorealistic hand that reaches in to draw parts of the scene, but the style is otherwise faithful to the original. It is a remake of La Linea #10. Please, enjoy (3 1/2 minutes)!

Demoscene: Batman Rises

Found from Z303’s aptly named Tumblr The Demo Scene, Batman Rises was created by the aptly-named Batman Group, who might be just a little too obsessed with Warner Bros’ multimedia megaproperty. This demo was created for the Amiga 500 with 1 MB of RAM in 2022. That people are still making demos for the classic Amiga platform today is pretty awesome, whether they focus on Batman, Spider-man or some other be-spandexed corporate-owned trademarked character.

Here is video of the demo in action (8 1/2 minutes):

They also made a blog post describing the narrative of the demo. You may find it interesting. It still seems pretty fluffy to me (I mean it has a scene of zooming down a technological tunnel for no reason I could discern), but I’ll admit it’s pretty awesome to see something like this running on 36-year-old hardware! If you have interest in obtaining the demo yourself, to run in physical hardware or an emulator, both it and instructions for running are here.

Grey: A FPS on a Commodore 64

Grey is what the subject line says: a FPS, running at an acceptable framerate, on a Commodore 64, without a Raspberry Pi or other hardware to help it out. Here is its thread on Lemon64. Have a look (24 minutes):

How is it possible? Well, it’s not running 60fps for one. Updating the whole screen in one frame on a C64 is hugely challenging, but fortunately FPSes can look satisfactory running at slower framerates. It’s not Quake-level graphics, or even Doom, it’s more like Wolfenstein 3D in ability, and it’s confirmed that it uses that style of raycasting. And on top of all of that, it doesn’t use hi-res resolution, which would be really slow on an unmodified C64. It seems to use character tiles to fake a kind of low-res display. But when you’re trying to get a game running on a 1 MHz machine with 64K of RAM, tricks and shortcuts are not only necessary, but rather laudable. What a hack!

This is a work-in-progress, with a demo of the game available in a recent Pateron-available issue of Zzap 64. No source code is available yet. Let’s hope for continued development!

Reviewers

Other people, in other places, talking about games.

Jeremy Parish Covers NES Friday the 13th

Few games for the NES have been better treated by hindsight than Friday the 13th. At the time it was regarded as a terrible game with difficult play and nearly impossible to win.

But even then there were things about it that indicated that there might be a little more going on then than was first apparent. Publisher LJN was known for making terrible games, but they outsourced their work to different companies that often weren’t actually that bad, just given weird properties for video games (The Karate Kid? Jaws? T&C Surf Designs??) and approaching them with experimental gameplay. And for their part, all of LJN’s games are technically sound, and manage to hit their 60fps frame rate targets, which is much more than you can say for many other NES games, including some from big manufacturers like Capcom, like Ghosts & Goblins and 1942, both implemented by Micronics, or Strider, which as we’ve noted before is a mess.

The critical reappraisal for Friday the 13th began with TripleZeroFilms made a well-produced 76-page PDF strategy guide for it, that exalted its good qualities. There is a Metafilter thread, from user Pope Guilty, on it that may also be of interest.

It has come time, as we all knew it must, for Jeremy Parish to collide with Jason’s axe, and as befits the game’s redemption, his video is divided in half, first about its reception at the time, then later now that it’s appreciated a little better. Just don’t turn it off after the 8 minute mark, there’s still more than half of it to go!

The masked axe-slinger: Friday the 13th, NES Works 113 (Youtube, 18 minutes)

Jeremy Parish Covers SMS Shinobi

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but Youtube is largely a wasteland when it comes to game opinion, criticism and history media. Generally, if it has to do with games, you have to sift through a whole lot of crap to get to the good stuff.

The gold standards in this wretched field are Dr Sparkle’s Chrontendo and spinoff series, which seek to review every NES and Famicom game in a decade-plus quest, and Jeremy Parish’s NES Works and its own spinoffs. Our post’s topic today has to do with one of those spinoffs, SMS Works, which has at last come to one of the Sega Master System’s defining titles: Shinobi.

One of the best things about Jeremy’s videos is the context they bring. They try hard to mention other games that came out around the same time, and how ideas would be bandied about between the different developers, repeated and refined. His videos are the only source I know of that would realize, that could realize, that Shinobi was heavily influenced by Namco’s spies-vs-tokusatsu-creeps arcade game Rolling Thunder.

So then, at 15 minutes long, here is that video.

SMS Works: Shinobi (Youtube, 15 minutes)

Chrontendo 63!

Dr. Sparkle has come through once again with the 63rd edition of Chrontendo! It’s the third we’ve linked to from Set Side B (even if, for a while, we incorrectly labeled the previous one as #68, oops).

The games covered by this one are:

Knight Move (Japan only): A puzzle game involving landing a chess knight trying to land on a target square. Apparently this got a later release on PC by Spectrum Holobyte. Wikipedia tells us that the “A. Pazhitonov” listed as the creator on the Famicom version’s title screen is Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris. I cannot speak to that fact’s veracity, but it seems plausible enough. Pajitnov later would be hired by Microsoft to make puzzle games for them around the Windows XP era.

Lamentable US cover art of The Mafat Conspiracy (image from MobyGames)

The Mafat Conspiracy: the sequel to Golgo 13! The US release does its Japanese manga source material a great disservice by not having the grim face of protagonist Duke Togo visible anywhere on the front of the box, instead using extremely generic cover art. In play, it’s very similar to a slightly more competent version of the original, just with a different scenario.

Disney Adventures in the Magic Kingdom: Another of those Capcom Disney games, a glorified minigame collection, and probably the worst of the bunch! We’re a mile away from Ducktales here. As if to confirm the player’s low expectations, trivia questions are part of the game.

Solstice: Isometric platformer of the style well-known around that time in the UK, a very difficult yet respectable exploration game, and probably the best game in this episode. I prefer its SNES sequel Equinox, programmed by the Pickford Brothers, which has a highly distinctive look.

The vibe of Solstice’s print ad is like “we’re gonna make a porno”

The Last Starfighter: This is secretly a renamed port of the Commodore 64 classic Uridium! A little of the bloom is off the rose here, if only because high speed scrolling of the kind you see here is so common on the NES, yet so difficult to accomplish on the Commie. The C64’s distinctive look was heavily influenced by that system’s limitations: it takes some serious programming effort to get the C64 to be able to scroll significant screen data in a frame, enough so that, to do it, you basically have to leave color memory unchanged, since it can’t be relocated like tile definitions can. The NES can do scrolling much more easily than the Commodore 64, and had been doing very colorful fast-scrolling games like the Super Mario series for years, yet the game kept the same nearly-monochrome look as the C64 game. That’s why Uridium got such acclaim in the UK, because scrolling games like it were unknown on the system at the time, while the NES had support for it in the hardware, so it didn’t have nearly the same impact.

Captain Skyhawk: The main things I remember about this, a game which I’ve played and beaten, is it was made by Rare, and that Dave Barry once wrote a column about how much his kid dearly wanted a copy of this game. Dr. Sparkle is pretty hard on this one too, and I think for good reason. This is clearly a game intended to be in the River Raid style, but with elevation. It could have been done as a quasi-flight sim, with targets you have to duck beneath or fly over, but in its design the elevation barely matters, and instead it’s a lot more like a standard vertical shooter. The enemies don’t even cast shadows! Helicopters or ground vehicles alike can be shot if if they were on the same plane. It would have done better if it had either gone all-in on the elevation, maybe tying it to the player’s speed, and having fewer yet smarter enemies that also had elevation; either that, or taking out the elevation completely and making it into a 2D shooter more like Zanac or Raiden. Rare at that time understood the NES hardware better than most developers, and was more than capable technically of going with either approach. But they didn’t.

Then after you have Afterburner-style dogfighting levels, then the point where most players threw down the controller in disgust, when they’re asked to align and dock with a rotating space station. It all resembles a tech demo at Rare that Milton Bradley decided to try to make a few bucks off of selling as a game.

Mechanized Attack: It’s another military-themed SNK action game, like Ikari Warriors, Guerilla War, Iron Tank or P.O.W. This one’s a light gun shooter. The game is most notable for having a debug mode, accessible by a code, with pixelated female nudity. This connects with reports of sexism in the Japanese game industry at the time (link found on Kid Fenris’ blog). The full salacious details of the cheat are up at The Cutting Room Floor.

Horrifying Palamedes box art (image from Wikipedia)

Hatris: Another game designed by Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov, it’s also nowhere near as iconic as Tetris was, but as time has shown us, very little else is. I get the play mixed up with that of Nintendo’s Yoshi puzzle game, perhaps for good reason. Turns out there was an arcade version of this!

Palamedes: Another Tetris-ish generative piece-laying puzzle game, this one with a dice theme. And there was an arcade version of this too!

Hiryu No Ken III: 5 Nin No Ryuu Senshi: Only released in Japan. Dr. Sparkle is quick to let us know right off this isn’t the “Fist of the North Star” Ken, but the Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll Ken. These games are a bit more simulationist (in a sense) in their depiction of martial arts than most beat ’em ups.

SD Hero Soukessen: Taose! Aku No Gundan: Also Japan-only, second in a long series of “super deformed” (basically meaning big headed, small bodied humanoid figures depicted in a cutesy kind of way) robot fighting games. The robots (and tokusatsu characters) are licensed from a variety of media, making this a massive crossover media series that could be seen as an inspiration for the hulking monstrosity that Super Smash Bros. has become. Properties that I recognized from the video are Kamen Raider, Gundam and Ultraman. This one has a fan translation patch.

Chrontendo 63 (Youtube, 1 hour 18 minutes)

Chrontendo 64

Dr. Sparkle is back with the 64th installment (Youtube, 55 minutes) of his quest to review every NES and Famicom game. He’s pretty far in! In about ten episodes, he figures he’ll reach the launch of the Super Famicom, which won’t be the end of his journey but will probably mean he’s in the home stretch.

In the meantime, ten games from 1990 are in this episode. They are:

Puss ‘n’ Boots: Pero’s Great Adventure – Technically a retread of a previously-covered Japanese game, this version has substantial differences so Dr. Sparkle decided to cover its U.S. version separately. A very easy game until the last stage where it jumps in difficulty, and then the final boss is absurdly hard. Dr. S expresses confusion why a game made to be so easy that it’s obviously intended for young children would become nearly impossible right at the last second. Personally, I suspect it was done because NES game publishers were terrified of the game rental market.

Wit’s: A Japan-only release, this is basically a de-luxe version of Snake, where your enemies have special abilities that you have to account for. Surprisingly, it’s an arcade port!

Captain Tsubasa Vol. II: Super Striker: A weird RPG take on Soccer, published by Tecmo and based on a manga and anime series. Instead of controlling a player or players completely in real time, the action pauses frequently and asks you what to do. The main screen is mostly animations down on the soccer field. It’s a unique take on soccer, but it’s not the only one: this is the second game to play like this on the Famicom. The Captain Tsubasa game series continues even today: the most recent releases, Dr. Sparkle tells us, are on PS4 and Nintendo Switch, although I don’t know if they take the menu-based RPG approach.

Jyuouki: This is simply a licensed Famicom port of Sega’s Altered Beast, and a pretty bad one at that.

Mahjong G-Men: Nichibutsu Mahjong III: Yet another Mahjong game, although with some interesting features, if you’re into Mahjong. That’s not Mahjong Solitaire, a.k.a. Shanghai, the Activision (and formerly PLATO) computer game where you remove tiles in matching pairs from a tableaux, but the Chinese Rummy-like game using tiles instead of cards. It also has a weird Tetris-like subgame involving Mahjong tiles.

The Pennant League: Home Run Nighter ’90: Yet another Famicom baseball game.

Dr. Mario: The classic Nintendo puzzle game! I always thought it was a bit inferior to Tetris, but then most games are, and that didn’t stop me from playing a ton of it long ago.

Pictionary: Based on the board game, and coming from infamous American NES publisher LJN. Dr. Sparkle is a bit harsh on developer Software Creations, but I think this effort looks pretty well-made to me. It’s not a classic, and it’s actually not really so much Pictionary as a kind of variation on the theme, where players play mini-games to reveal parts of a drawing and then try to guess what the drawing is of. It looks much like one of Rare’s many game show and board game adaptations and creations, and in fact if it weren’t for the Software Creations credit I’d have assumed that Rare made it.

Bigfoot: From Acclaim and developed by Beam Software. It’s fairly well polished for a Beam Software title, but has some weird ideas to it, including a weird control scheme for the events that involves tapping left and right on the control pad. I think the idea has a bit of merit, but that it was probably the wrong place to use it. A Bigfoot game would mostly be bought or given to kids, who would be the absolute last demographic you should expect to master a non-standard control scheme. I’m not one of those people who thinks making a game that goes about its play differently than most other games is always a terrible idea (see: most of what I’ve ever written about roguelikes), and I can kind of see why they did it, trying to make a race game that’s more than just holding to the right. It probably could have used a bit more iteration though.

Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll: A game from Rare that they actually put a lot of effort into, and it shows. And some people really like it, it’s definitely got a cult following. Dr. S isn’t part of it, due to the difficulty of getting used to SRnR’s isometric style. I think what happened was, they had these routines laying around that they used in implementing NES Marble Madness, and decided to do another game that controlled in that kind of way. I think the game was poorly suited to a digital control pad; if it were controlled with an analog stick, or at least a digital control where diagonal movement is easier, I think it’s possible that some people who hate Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll might be able to enjoy it better.

Anyway, here is the whole episode, start to finish:

Events

Things that happened in the past year, and what we said about them.

Tombstones: Romhacking.net Calls It Quits, Game Informer Shuts Down

First:

It’s a grievous blow to the game editing community, but Nightcrawler, the maintainer of the 19-year-old hack repository and community site romhacking.net, is shutting its doors. The reasons why are the top news item on the site, probably the last new news item that will ever be posted there.

romhacking.net as it looked August 2, 2024, R.I.P.

They mention several reasons, but say a collection of users who had offered to take up the site for disingenuous reasons. The details were not mentioned, but they mentioned by way of comparison what happened to emulator author Near, creator of higan, and that can be easily taken as a bad sign.

However, Gideon Zhi on Bluesky offers a different take, that suggests comparison to Near is greatly inappropriate, and that Nightcrawler was severely burnt out and refused offers to help. I don’t know which is more accurate, but the details are offered suggest there may be something to his version of events. Gideon Zhi isn’t one, I think, to cover something like that up. Ah well, drama.

Maintaining a hugely popular website for 19 years is a huge drain on your time, energy and finances. It’s possible that ultimately Nightcrawler needed, or even just wanted, to retire, and that’s okay.

I’ve made frequent use of romhacking.net over the years, both in researching two romhack ebooks and the Romhack Thursday feature on this site. While what the maintainer of romhacking.net says in their news post, that there isn’t as much of a need of a centralized site for collecting and presenting romhacks as there was back in 2005, I still found their site extremely useful, and I think it served a vital role. I will greatly miss it, but I understand their wishing to move on. They took the step of uploading the whole site contents to the Internet Archive, which is a forward-thinking move that I applaud.

Will they ever return to updating the site? Anything is possible, but I expect not. Will another site arise to take its place? Who knows, there’s definitely demand for it. I wish Nightcrawler well in any event, and thank them for their service.

–

Second:

Kotaku reports that Game Informer, the oldest game magazine still in print in the US (dating back to 1991) is shutting down. It was originally a production of the classic game retailer FuncoLand, who would advertise, in turn, in classic 90s gaming magazines, and the publication changed ownership to GameStop when they bought FuncoLand out in 2000.

Game Informer’s site, as it looked August 2, 2024, R.I.P.

Since then, GameStop has kept the magazine going as a house publication, at times distributing issues for free to customers. It seems the announcement was sudden, with management sending out a tweet about the publication’s closure while staff was being notified of the ending of their positions.

There are older game magazines in Japan, of course, and US game magazines lately have had things pretty tough with competition from the internet. It’s surprising that they’ve managed to keep going for this long.

The 30th Anniversary Edition of the Game of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I’m trying to include these timelines whenever I make a post about something that’s gone on for a bit

Okay, this is mostly from memory, so here goes. And it’s impossible to talk
about this subject without launching into a discursive and random mode of writing that may be funny but often comes off as annoying if one doesn’t have the writing skill of a Footlights alum who was friends with the Pythons (Monty) and once script-edited for classic Doctor Who. I apologize for that, but understand that reading the book version in large part warped my writing style for decades. I think I’ve gotten better since then, but I doubt it.

So in the beginning Douglas Adams created a hilarious sci-fi comedy radio show called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Then there was an album, then a TV show, then most improbably, a text adventure game from Infocom back at their height. One might think, surely a movie is next, right? And you’d be correct (2005), but because Hollywood is a twisty maze of executives all alike, only after 13 years after the last book had passed (1992), along with the life of Douglas Adams (2001), and somehow from the Disney company (still around).

Brushed aluminum styling!

The history of the whole thing is involved, and I already covered much of it in a previous post. This post is just to point out the updated, 30th Anniversary edition of the web version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the BBC’s website. It replaced the 20th Anniversary edition. If they keep to the pattern, there should soon be a 40th Anniversary edition, but there’s been no sight of one yet.

Web version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide text adventure game on the BBC’s website (bbc.co.uk)

Previously on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The fan-made sequel, Milliways

5th Anniversary Video by The Makers of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Producer Koji “IGA” Igarashi and director Shutaro Iida posted a video last night (7 1/2 minutes) to their Youtube channel looking back on the game’s creation, starting from its Kickstarter announcement and their many stretch goals, and the game’s planning and development.

Wheeler Dealers Has Been Preserved

The news comes to us by way of Apple cracker 4am’s Mastodon account. Wheeler Dealers was a cassette release, a format not as well understood as the Apple II floppy disk formats, but it’s playable on its Internet Archive page.

Its title screen gives it a copyright date of 1978, making it only slightly younger than the Atari VCS/2600. Wheeler Dealers was the first published game by M.U.L.E. creator Dani Bunten. Designed for four players, it came with a special controller to allow four players to participate in auctions on an equal footing. If played in an emulator, they often have settings to allow the buttons to be remapped to joystick directions, and from there to specific keyboard buttons.

It’s a stock trading game, written in BASIC, and much less polished than M.U.L.E. would be. It barely has graphics and has no single-player mode. I find it hard to control in the IA’s web-based Apple emulator. Basic stock trading games seem really simple these days. I think Wheeler Dealers (or “Wheeler Dealer$,” according to the title screen) is mostly interesting these days has a herald for M.U.L.E., which I find holds up really well to current-day tastes. Dani’s real-time auction mechanism would be honed to a fine edge in M.U.L.E., which to this day is probably still the best multiplayer auction mechanism in any game.

Dani Bunten left us long ago now, back in 1998, but her absence is still keenly felt. One of her last projects was a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive port update of M.U.L.E., which was infamously scuttled when publisher Electronic Arts insisted, as a condition of publishing, a mechanism by which players could directly attack other players with weapons. It is far from the only terrible action that EA would be responsible for, but it’s certainly one of the worst.

Episode 3 of BS Shiren the Wanderer Recovered

The Mystery Dungeon series of Japanese roguelikes, which includes the Shiren the Wanderer games, has a fair number of obscure entries. There’s “The Rainbow Labyrinth,” a mobile entry that toyed with adding F2P features and never made it out of beta. There’s a few other mobile remakes of early titles that can’t be obtained or played now due to their platforms being discontinued. And back on Super Famicom, one of the very first Mystery Dungeon games, a spinoff and modification of Furai no Shiren, was released for Nintendo’s Satellaview add-on.

Most Satellaview titles are extremely obscure now, with their only remaining remnants that aren’t languishing in a vault somewhere inside Nintendo (if they even exist there) being saved data files on aging flash memory cartridges in the possession of diehard Nintendo players and collectors in Japan. Satellaview was treated as a way of distributing disposable software, games and other programs that were tied to a specific date or time, so there are a good number of lost items for it, and many will probably never be recovered.

Entropy and bitrot are huge problems with computer software of all types, and it’s shocking how little most companies, even Nintendo themselves sometimes, seem to think about recording essential parts of their past. So any successful reclaiming of old data from the land of howling hungry ghosts is good.

Image from Satellablog

That’s why I’m remarking here that Satellablog, dedicated to recovering and making playable as much old Satellaview software as they can, has managed to obtain a copy of Episode 3, of the Satellaview version of Shiren the Wanderer, “Save Surara” or “Save Surala” depending on the tastes of the person romanizing the title. That means episodes 2, 3 and 4 have been found, leaving only the first episode.

Save Surara was a Soundlink title, like the releases of BS Legend of Zelda. That means they were intended to be played at the same time as a special audio broadcast, and contained events that were time-synced with that broadcast. Without the broadcast (which are usually lost now), Soundlink games can’t be entirely played as originally intended, but it’s still better than nothing.

Here is video of Episode 3 in action. It’s about 49 minutes long. It’ll have to be modified to get it into a state where people who aren’t into romhacking will be able to play it themselves:

With three episodes recovered, there’s still hope that someone in Japan saved a copy of Episode 1 on a forgotten flashcart resting in a closet somewhere. Frog bless all of you awesome hardware hoarders over there!

Nintendo to Shut Down 3DS and WiiU Online Play in April

It’s been making the rounds, but I feel it’s worth echoing. When the DS and Wii online servers shut down, it was forced because Nintendo’s partner who maintained the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection Servers decided they didn’t want to do that any more. This is Nintendo’s own decision here.

Screenshot from Nintendo Observer

The big game affected here is the first Splatoon, which still has, for now, free online play with the purchase of the game. Also affected will be Mario Kart 7 and Animal Crossing New Leaf for 3DS.

There will be some who will shrug over this, saying Nintendo shouldn’t be expected to run these services indefinitely. Sometimes they will shrug quite loudly. I am not one of them. I think online servers should be kept going for much longer than most companies run them. I think this should be considered part of the contract they entered into when they sold the game. It is true that 3DS and WiiU games had free online server access, that Nintendo’s multiplayer subscription service began with the Switch. But I still think the way I do, and I also think it’s foolish to think that, just because it’s a paid service, that Switch servers will be kept running for any longer than the 3DS and WiiU servers were.

My concern is an issue of software preservation. These kinds of games and services are in danger of being outright lost in their current form, like many MMORPGs, and iOS and Android games for previous versions of those OSes. I feel very strongly that this software should be remembered and made available for future generations. It’s true that there are efforts to reverse engineer these kinds of services, but there is no guarantee that they will be completely accurate, or even successful at all, especially if they rely on secret algorithms and information housed on the official servers.

Ah well. Get in those free splatmatches while you can. Their days are numbered.

(The shutdown occurred as announced.)

MobyGames Offering “Pro” Membership

It’s a bit upsetting to see that MobyGames is going a bit more for-profit, and now offers a trail Pro membership account. Usually this kind of move means fewer features and a degraded experience for those not sending in their dimes. The trial rate is $5 a month, which seems both high ($60 a year?) and low (how much revenue will this bring in given the small number of people with a paying need for MobyGames information?).

MobyGames has long been a useful resource for game research and images, but was recently bought by Atari, which is not the same as the old Atari, although as time passes that distinction becomes slowly less relevant? The company calling itself Activision has slightly more continuity with the Activision that was founded by ex-Atari developers to sell VCS/2600 games, but very little of it remains I’m sure, and they passed through a phase where they had renamed themselves Mediagenic, which worked out badly. The CEO that pulled Activision out of their nosedive, as it turns out, is Bobby Kotlick. There’s a name that’s been in the news lately and on which I will not comment at this time!

So, it seems inescapable that Atari is behind this move by MobyGames, to try to get the site to pay for itself. I honestly don’t think there’s much of a market for these features unless they make the site downright painful to use for free users, and how many people are willing to pay for full MobyGames access? When people (myself included!) contributed to MobyGames all those years, did they know they were merely building up Value for later Purchase? Will this turn into yet another Gracenote situation? Does anyone now remember what Gracenote did?

Well, this is speculation on my part. Nothing necessarily means MobyGames will soon be ruined. But it is a pattern that’s happened many times before, so let us keep our eyes open. At the very least, it seems like a ripe opportunity for someone to create a new game cataloging site. Me? No no, it can’t be me, I’m sorry, my brain is too full of things, and I have this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side….

Nintendo Direct 2/21/24 Quick Takes

Here is the whole video in case you missed it:

Here is the list, with personal hype level expressed in stars, none to five:

00:30 – Grounded. Your characters are “shrunken at the hands of an evil corporation.” First, corporations don’t have hands, their employees do. Second, it’s interesting to see how corporations have joined mad scientists, sorcerers and alien emperors as “the evil.” Anyway, this looks mostly like Generic Action-Adventure Game. “Work your way through the campaign to uncover the mysteries of the back yard.” Like, where they buried the water pipe? Good luck with that. Two stars.

01:37 – ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the mist. Big contrast to the previous trailer. It’s a “return to the Ender Lily’s world,” just assuming you know what that is. From the trailer I assume the “Ender Lily” must be a really bad flower, because everything is dark and grim, but especially dark. “This once flourishing country sits atop a wealth of buried magic,” yet somehow it looks like Blade Runner. Points for using the word homunculi (16 points if you have the tiles for it) and not inventing another bullshit video game word like “the Aeinsward,” or “the Valarath” or some crap like that. Your character is told early on that “your eyes says[sic] that you long for death.” Sometimes the winning move is not to play. I feel bad about talking down the work of so many hard-working developers, but I don’t think it’s possible to make a game less appealing to me, personally. One star.

03:04 – Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure. “Role-puzzling” is not a thing. Looks like it might be okay, but I’m rating my enthusiasm as generated by the trailers, and they give me flashbacks to the PULL word in Baba Is You, so: Two stars.

03:45 – Unicorn Overlord. Oh, I want to play the fantasy title game too! Gargoyle Emperor! Chimera General! Minotaur President! Looks to me like a Vanillaware joint. Checking: I was right. Reading the transcript, I’m struck by the word unleash, one of those overused videogame words. It literally means to let go, but because it sounds good it gets used for all kinds of things. But really, if it ain’t a dog, it doesn’t fit. Vanillaware’s cool though, so I’ve talked myself into looking forward to it. Three stars.

04:23 – Monster Hunter Stories. “Monster Hunter” brings to mind fighting dragons and behemoths. “Stories” suggests Scenes From A Marriage. Combined, I’m imaging getting hitched to Smaug. (This is probably the backstory to the classic anime Dragon Half, come to think of it.) Anyway, it’s Monster Hunter. You hunt monsters. It’s a remake of a 3DS game, discarding the (mostly) realistic look of other Monster Hunter games for cartoony human characters. I have a previous Monster Hunter on my shelf but I’ve never played it, so I can only rate this One star.

05:00 – Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed. I remember when Epic Mickey games filled the discount bins at Walmart, but I always liked the idea, and the internet-viral concept art that inspired them, and they were “directed” by Warren Spector. One thing that always confused me about Epic Mickey, of which the trailer reminds me, is the opening positions Mickey as an innocent interloper, but the content of the Epic Mickey games clearly indicate that these worlds are about him, as a character. He’s not a plucky underdog, he’s the center of the Disney-pocalypse. And yet, that’s interesting. Three stars.

06:07 – Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance. The title logo makes it look like it’s called Shin Megami Tensei V: Engeance. This being a remake, I’m just glad they didn’t call it something like Revengeance, hah wouldn’t that be stupid. I don’t remember at this point whether a mainline Shin Megami Tensei game has ever appeared in English before. Maybe on the Playstation or Playstation 2? Sounds about right. (Checking: it was recent! 2021! Huh.) I think it defies belief that this isn’t yet another Persona game. Two stars.

07:41 – STAR WARS: Battlefront Classic Collection. Okay I was wrong, it’s not possible for me to be less interested in this. It’s exciting to some people or else they wouldn’t have made this, but I’m writing this, and I say, One star.

08:24 – SOUTH PARK: SNOW DAY! When your franchise stars a character who was once grounded by his mother for “trying to exterminate the Jews,” I submit that there is something deeply wrong with it. No stars.

There’s so many games here that I’m going to skip around a bit from here on.

10:23 – Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble. It’s an article of faith now that there have been no good Monkey Ball games since Super Monkey Ball Deluxe, and the recent Banana Mania, which was primarily content recycled from the old games. I just picked up Banana Mania a couple of days ago and was reminded why I like the Gamecube-era titles so much, so what the hell, Three stars.

11:40 – World of Goo 2. World of Goo was beloved of many people, myself included, and I’ve also liked everything Tomorrow Corporation has done, so I’m really looking forward to this, even if World of Goo is a very hard act to follow. Five stars.

14:03 – Another Crab’s Treasure.That’s a great title. The trailer, itself, actually calls this game a soulslike, which I guess is just the word we use now when a game is meant to be hard. The game does fix my main issue with Souls games, their relentless dourness. It’s whimsical and charming! Three stars.

15:32 – Penny’s Big Breakaway. From some of the people who made Sonic Mania, which itself makes it worthy of examination. A 3D platformer in 2024 that isn’t Mario, who’d have thought it possible. Three stars.

16:13 – Suika Game Multi-Player Mode Expansion Pack. I’ve been a bit outspoken that I don’t really like this version of the concept, preferring Cosmic Collapse on itch.io. Paid DLC that lets you play against others does nothing to improve the concept for me. One star.

16:57 – Pepper Grinder. It looks a bit interesting, but it feels a bit like a cheat that the tunnels you dig close up behind you. Two stars.

17:26 – Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! Originally a F2P mobile game by Game Freak as one of their occasional non-Pokemon titles, like Drill Dozer and Part-Time UFO, which always seem to be terrific. They released a 3DS port that was one of those games that critics (including myself) couldn’t stop gushing over. I’m so hyped for this that I’ve already bought it, as of this writing it’s on my Switch back at home waiting for me to get back and play it. Five stars.

18:16 – Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley. A Moomintroll game! One where you play as his enigmatic, vaguely Link-like friend Snufkin! I’m in! Sadly its trailer is really brief. Four stars.

19:26 – Rare Games Added to Nintendo Switch Online. Five games are added: RC Pro-Am (NES), a classic; Snake Rattle & Roll (NES), challenging and a bit underrated; Killer Instinct (N64), which I never cared for but some people will like; Battletoads in Battlemaniacs (SNES), likewise; and Blast Corps (N64), which is very underrated, a launch game that helped define its system. All of these games except Battletoads in Battlemaniacs were previously collected in Rare Replay for Xbox One, but there is a feeling of coming home here. Overall: Four stars.

These releases are notable all because of Hiroshi Yamauchi’s decision not to buy Rare from the Stamper brothers at the dawning of the Gamecube era, which lost Nintendo Rare’s then-formidable reputation and coding prowess. Nintendo sold its 49% stake to Rare, and Microsoft bought controlling interest. The Gamecube took a substantial hit to its library, and Rare has never been the same. Despite a few distinctive hits (Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, Viva Pinata and Sea of Thieves) I think Microsoft has never really used them well. For a time they were basically devoted to making Kinect games! (Checking: in fact, Rare’s Kinect Sports was at that time their best-selling game since Microsoft acquired them! Shame that its being tied to an abandoned peripheral means it has had practically no lasting legacy.) I would suppose the return of these titles to a Nintendo system is part of the deal that enabled Goldeneye 007 to come to both Xbox and Switch, but that is only speculation.

RC Pro-Am and Snake Rattle & Roll, are extra notable for their copyright notice by Rare Coin-It, a Miami-based subsidiary of Rare, that seemed to be devoted to games that had arcade pretensions. I don’t know that, but a lot of their games released with that copyright have strange arcade affectations: attract modes, high score lists, and arcade structure. In particular: Slalom (which did get an arcade release, as Vs. Slalom for Nintendo’s Unisystem arcade platform), Wizards & Warriors, RC Pro-Am and Cobra Triangle. But these weren’t the only games that bore the Rare Coin-It copyright. I really don’t know why; maybe they were assigned games that Rare thought might have potential as arcade games.

Back to the Switch Online collection, this move gives me hope that the Wizards & Warriors games, especially the first, and its sequel Ironsword, will make it there someday.

Project To Completely Finish Super Mario Maker 1 Enters Home Stretch

Super Mario Maker. Not the one for Switch, with the Master Sword power up and Superball Flower and the like. The one for WiiU, with all the Amiibo characters and that formerly had the website listing all the levels, that Nintendo took down because it is a company of good and bad, and for them software preservation is among the worst.

Super Mario Maker survives, for now, but its online services will be shut down in April, removing the vast swath of levels that players made for the software, because Nintendo can’t be assèd to preserve it. That sucks epically, gigantically, humongously, Brobdingnagianly. But it’s Nintendo. They always do what they want, heedless of the opinion of others, and as I said, that’s both good and bad.

Remember Super Mario Maker? Most players used it to construct hyper-lethal deathtraps, literal abattoirs of Marios. (Tip: don’t Google image search the word “abattoir.”) Sure, I tried constructing reasonable levels of fair situations, but saying that online is like claiming I don’t watch television: it sounds pretentious. In practice everyone made at least one Smiling Hellscape, and yes I did make at least a couple.

But on the other hand there is speedrun culture, who attempts to overcome any challenge in a game no matter how ridiculous. In order to upload your level to the SMM servers, you have to complete it. That means it must be completable, even if it’s ludicrously unfair. In addition to the usual kaizo gauntlets, some players created levels that rely on prior knowledge to finish, and tackling one of those if you don’t have that information can be Promethean exercise in trial and error, emphasis on the trial.

That brings us to the Discord server of Team 0% (invite link). There mission: to show every level created for Super Mario Maker some love, and by love I mean, at least one completion, before the servers go dark for bad in a month’s time. SMM helps out by offering to give players uncompleted levels. And so they play on, no challenge to great, no gimmick too obscure. Recently they finished every level made in the year 2019. And they’re down to their last 1,000 levels overall!

One month to go. 1,000 levels to finish. Can they do it? They finished 1,000 levels back in the first week of their project, so it’s definitely possible. We’re watching them on their epic quest, and wish them luck. The good kind!

(What happened was, every level, except those that used hacks, was finished except for one. There was a furious effort to complete the level before the deadline, until the person who uploaded it revealed they had used hacks to bypass its clear check, and it would require ludicrous precision to finish it honestly, so the maintainers of the project just announced it was done. But then someone actually managed to finish it fairly anyway. Kind of a letdown of an ending.)

The End of Blaseball Blexplained

It has now been over seven months since the end of Blaseball, that shining star of lockdown that burned brightly but ended suddenly. Stories will be told of its brief reign, and memories zealously hoarded. I’m amazed that no one else has definitively moved in to take its place with their own take on splorts, it seems to be an opportunity waiting to be filled, but until such time as it happens, the concept, along with the game itself, continues to Rest in Violence.

The planets orbiting Blaseball’s many suns continue to orbit, their surfaces unwarmed but still hosting faint signs of life. The Blaseball Wiki remains online, explaining the absurdly twisty intricacies of a game that no longer exists, and The Society for Internet Blaseball Research still hosts statistics and information related to that dearly missed pretend pastime.

One of those planets is Blaseball Blexplained, a Youtube series that doggedly and diligently presented season recaps of Blaseball’s many crazy seasons. Since Blaseball’s ending, they’ve slowly continued their recaps, and have now finally finished their last Expansion Era summary, of the Hellmouth Sunbeams. It is around 16 minutes long. It present the final recantation of the nearly un-understandable events that marked the final seasons as did all the others, throwing out references to Black Holes, Feedback and Fax Machines, counting on you to know what the hell all those things mean. You do, don’t you? ‘Course you do.

So, one last broadcast from Blaseball Explained, favorite fake sport summary channel, now broadcasting exclusively to the Hall of Flame.

Farewell, Blaseball. In your memory, I proclaim: hail Namerifeht.

The Monitor, friendly guardian of the Hall of Flame and concessions operations
(Image from blaseball.com)

P.S. The Society for Internet Blaseball Research (SIBR) has a page of information on how the fates of Blaseball, early on, intersected with that of the Pacific Salmon Treaty of 1985, and of a mysterious face named by fans Salmon Steve. Here is that page.

Godot 4.2 Released

Events often resist efforts to package them up and stamp a Convenient Narrative on them, but it’s really tempting to me to say the history of the internet in this era is that of many people rejecting the hegemony of large corporations and doing things for themselves.

Social media has seen the rejection of Twitter, for reasons I really don’t want to hash out again here, and while some ran directly to Threads or Bluesky, a good number realized it was eventually just going to happen all over again, and that helped to increase the update of open source, federated work-alike Mastodon.

Another piece of this narrative vase that we might be able to fit into place, with creative thinking and a whole lot of glue, is the downfall of Unity and how it helped the effort to create the free open source gamedev replacement Godot. And lo, after a fairly recent release of 4.0, yesterday they already released 4.2. The changelog is here. Here is GDQuest’s rundown of the changes (22 minutes), and here are Lukky’s five favorite new features (3m), which are:

- FSR 2.0 support (upscaling higher resolution output from lower resolution rendering)

- Color-coding of folders in the file hierarchy within Godot’s UI

- The ability to “bake 2D nav-meshes”

- When resizing 3D objects, the UI no longer resizes symmetrically around the object’s origin by default, but instead only the side you’re changing is modified

- And, within the code editor, you can now create special comments to define a code region, which can be independently collapsed to reduce clutter, and expanded when you need access to its contents. And the Ctrl-K Comment Out feature works better now.

To get back to talking about software philosophy…. There are unique problems with using fully open tools to create games. Console manufacturer devtools are still locked in a mode where the maker hands you proprietary libraries, which they are unwilling to make freely available because of their economic desire to preserve trade secrets and control their platform. Most developers get around this by going through a third party, who has independently created a system of working between the open development framework and the publisher’s libraries, and then licenses it to a studio so they can get their project working on consumer hardware.

Godot is subject to this limitation, with 4.2 being no exception. But there is a sense, with it, that it’s the brightest hope for free and open game development going right now. They don’t ask for any license fees, they don’t try to count how many installs you have and they don’t track user behavior. But because they don’t try to claw in income through direct means, fair or foul, they must survive off of contributions. If you find Godot useful to your work, please consider using their donation link and signing up for an entirely voluntary plan.

Escapist Collapse and Aftermath

Just saw on Metafilter that The Escapist has fired Nick Calandra, who helped revive the site after they threw their lot in on the side of Gamergate during that whole fiasco. In summary, it took a huge amount of effort and good will on their part to recover, and that they did was largely because of Calandra, and long-time Escapist video maker Ben Croshaw, a.k.a. Yahtzee, the maker of the 16-year-running Zero Punctuation. Croshaw has left the site too, which is difficult for him because The Escapist owns the rights to ZP. I think he’ll probably bounce back from it, ZP is nothing without Croshaw, seeing as how it’s inextricably tied up with his voice, editing, art style and sense of humor, all of that is a lot more recognizable than the name “Zero Punctuation,” and it’s all him, but it does mean having to start from scratch without a link from the old site, just hoping that his fanbase can locate him again.

(On Metafilter, people are mentioning that Croshaw was one of the voices both-sides-ing Gamergate, which is something I had not been aware of when I linked to him here in the past. I do think people are allowed to change, although I haven’t seen him say anything about it since. Mind you, his general style isn’t hugely appealing to me, so I probably still won’t be linking to him that much in the future.)

The word is that Calandra is taking Croshaw and possibly other people and may end up “doing a Defector,” start an independent site with the evicted/departing talent. Getting creators out from under the thumb of having to give up control in order to chase startup money is good, generally, and I wish them well on that.

“Aftermath” in the title doesn’t refer to the aftermath of the collapse of The Escapist, but to a separate thing that some people from Kotaku have started, for similar reasons to the Defector. In fact even more so, since Kotaku is owned by the people who own Deadspin. Luke Plunkett, who I’ve linked to before, is among them.

However, I am still concerned. There’s almost always something to be concerned about in this internet age, after all. My biggest worry about a proliferation of gaming sites is that many of them are going to go with hard paywalls. This is understandable, people gotta eat after all, but there are only so many dollars out there for these places to chase, and proportionately very few of them are in my pocket. I know that I feel strong qualms about linking to articles that most of my readers won’t be able to read.

Update: the name of the new venture is Second Wind. They have a Patreon, a Youtube channel and a Twitch channel.

Second Wind and Fully Ramblomatic

So the dust has settled a bit, and now Nick Calendra, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw and a number of other people from The Escapist’s video production department have left that company and started Second Wind, fully creator-owned. And Yahtzee has made his first episode of the replacement for the 16-year-old Zero Punctuation, using the name of his blog, Fully Ramblomatic. The episode covers Alan Wake II, and it’s exactly what you’d expect it to be: profane, insightful and full of obscure references, like using the head of H.P. Lovecraft as part of the “lake of mysterious occult wank” that Alan Wake has leapt into.

It’s all still Ben Yahtzee, which isn’t entirely to my tastes, but other than a couple of missteps through the years he’s generally been a good egg, or so I’ve been given to understand. I’m on board with things that increases the viability of creator-controlled media, so I wish them well.

Nintendo vs. Smash Bros. Tournaments

Oh Nintendo. As people following this blog can easily see, we have more than a little fondness for the output resulting from the playing card and igo board maker’s lucrative side venture into video games. Everyone wants to make them like Nintendo, but no one else actually does, or seems to be able to, or can even pin down what that would mean.

Super Smash Bros. Melee, the game potentially most harmed by Nintendo’s policies (image from MobyGames)

Maybe it’s because, despite being one of the biggest companies in the world, it still feels like a small company, in some ways? Or that they don’t seem as beholden to the bleeding knife of capitalism as other companies are? (This is illusory, of course.) Maybe it’s their adherence to Japanese corporate traditions, or the influence of Shigeru Miyamoto, or their toymaker’s vibe?

But there is a dark side to them as well: they can be incredibly controlling regarding their IPs. Years ago they reached out to a fan

They have what they would call a staunch anti-piracy stance, which you’d expect of most software companies sure, but what that ends up meaning, due to the fact that 99% of their software is made for closed systems like consoles and mobile (we haven’t forgotten about the Animal Crossing PC clock!), they have absolutely no modding support.

This has resulted in a zero-tolerance policy regarding infractions concerning the competitive Smash Bros. scene. Project M is a popular fan-made hack of Super Smash Bros. Melee that it feels like even mentioning will cause Nintendo to affix a red letter to your organization.

aMSa, the Yoshi-main Melee player who was the focus of AsumSaus’ excellent documentary (image from AsumSaus’ video)

Kotaku has reported that there is currently another round of fan backlash over Nintendo’s guidelines over the use of Smash Bros. games in community tournaments. There is good reason: the rules read like they were written by people ignorant of the extent of competitive Smash play.

Nintendo is also demanding tournament prices not rise above $5,000, and is disallowing sponsorships. While it’s true that Nintendo is justifiably a bit cautious about the edginess surrounding esports tournaments, which resulted in sexual misconduct allegations back in 2020, there is definitely a middle ground between preventing situations like that and hamstringing a burgeoning esport, and Nintendo should pursue it, or risk destroying this entire scene.

As I said, I am not a lawyer. Someone who is, is Moonie, who used his incredibly ZeFrank-sounding voice to made a Youtube video breaking down Nintendo’s new guidelines. He doesn’t seem as worried about them as others (the thumbnail to his video is a giant DON’T PANIC). Here is his 18-minute dive into the guidelines, but a major point is that they primarily affect unaffiliated community tournaments, which as a class are distinct from majors, which would have an explicit agreement with Nintendo that would make the limitations in these guidelines not apply. In order words, while some of the furor is justified (other companies like Capcom aren’t as limiting of community events), a lot of it is the result of failed Nintendo messaging. Nintendo does have a lot of trouble communicating things like this that won’t get everyone’s roar up.

But even with that proviso, it’s still not great? Nintendo is still claiming that fan modifications are entirely forbidden, even among community tournaments.

What do I think? Nintendo could fix all of this by changing their EULA by explicitly recognizing and allowing for fan work, but in a way that asserts the primacy of their IP. Again, IANAL, but if they put their own lawyers to work to try to forge a system whereby fans could continue to build off of their work, they might be able to do it in such a way that they don’t risk damaging their properties. Other companies have done it, notably Sega, who blessed fangame creators in a way that generated their megahit Sonic Mania. What is causing Nintendo’s overreaction here, in my onion*, is their institutional distaste for even acknowledging that people are hacking their systems and modifying their games in the first place.

* typo made on purpose

I must acknowledge, there would be a whole flowchart of knock-on effects if Nintendo were to acknowledge and accept fan modifications, and probably not all of them would be to Nintendo’s benefit. Particularly, just to modify their software requires breaking their system security, which doesn’t necessarily imply piracy but does mean opening up the system sandbox and maybe revealing system secrets like keys. Sega doesn’t make consoles any more, so it’s not an issue they have to worry about now.

But what is obvious is that they’ve frequently attacked a vibrant community, and making a lot of enemies out of players. There has to be a good solution to this.

Super Smash Bros. Fans Freak Out About New Nintendo Rules (Kotaku)

A Lawyer Analyzes Nintendo’s Tournament Guidelines (Moon Channel on Youtube, 18 minutes)

General Topics

Less obscure topics in gaming....

Sunsoft Hebereke Cartoons

Hebereke is that NES game, released in European territories as Ufouria, with the cute, yet somewhat bizarre, characters. It recently got a Switch release (“Enjoy edition”), and kind of a sequel.

Sunsoft has released some animations of Hebe and his friends on their Youtube channel. Each is very short, and entirely in Japanese, but most of them don’t have words anyway, and they’re all of a style of humor that I don’t think they make a huge amount of sense even in their native language.

They’re all collected in this playlist, but a couple of selections should help you understand what you’re in for. All of these are about one minute long.

Hebe buys a toy gun:

Hebe and Sukezaemon race on what I’m going to call jet-powered “vehicles”:

And, trouble with bird poop:

Legends of Wario

There’s this image going around, referred to in this video as a “greentext” image, in that way that people who are very online will just throw out there and expect that everyone knows what they’re talking about when other people (like myself) who are at least as online don’t know because they weren’t online in the same way. It seems that a “greentext” image is that way because it’s a quote in an old 4chan thread. Bleh.

But anyway. Said image is a list of obscure, but apparently canonical, facts about everyone’s favorite money-grubbing antiplumber, Wario. Narrator Mish Koz goes through each fact and tries to determine from whence it came. Many of them are sourced from an old Nintendo website. They’re entertaining at least, for 17 minutes. Here is the video:

The facts are:

- He has a bee allergy
- He likes wrestling & country music
- His favorite foods
- He can bench press 200 kg

- Dr Crygor uses him as a guinea pig for his experiments

- He goes treasure hunting with Mona

- He gave 9-Volt a GBA

- The reason for his immortality is he doesn’t feel like dying

- Things Wario hates: smart things, jerks that are stingy with their money, chocolate with peanuts, marron glacés, peppers and jigsaw puzzles

- Wario’s spending habits: he spends most of it on food

- He ate 100 Poison Mushrooms and red and white spots appeared over his body

- He washes his clothes every 10 days

- The source of his powers: garlic

- He has a farming background, although no one seems to actually know the source for this fact

Investigating the Wario Greentext (Youtube, 17 minutes)

Wii Shop Theme Played on a 1-Bit Speaker

Not a lot to say about this one that isn’t in the title. Maybe the fact that it’s two minutes long.

Wii Eshop theme on motherboard error code piezoelectric speaker (Youtube, 2 minutes)

Possibly the First US Commercial For a Nintendo Product

Generally it’s considered that arcade Donkey Kong was the product that put Nintendo on the video game map, but Nintendo’s Game & Watch line actually predates it by a year. They licensed it to Mego, the company that made those highly collectable large-scale action figures of pop culture characters, and Micronauts.

The Video Game History Foundation found Mego’s commercial for “TOSS UP,” what they called Ball, and branded under their name for Game & Watch products, “Time Out,” and put it–guess where? Yeah it’s on Youtube again (46 seconds):

Shmuplations Translates An Interview With An Arcade Donkey Kong Programmer

The name of Ikegami Tsushinki Co. is a bit better known nowadays. For a long while Nintendo was content to just let the world believe they were entirely responsible for their early blockbuster arcade hit Donkey Kong, but eventually word got out that all of its program, and large portions of its design, were the work of a number of uncredited employees of that company. While Nintendo owns the trademarks over the game, the copyright of the arcade game’s code appears to be owned by Ikegami Tsushinki, or perhaps held in joint between them and Nintendo.

One of Shireru Miyamoto’s original notes for the design of Donkey Kong, at that time envisioned as a Popeye game.

Which is it precisely? Look, when you write a daily blog you don’t have time to hunt up Japanese legal records. What is important though is that this is why Nintendo doesn’t have the rights to just rerelease arcade Donkey Kong willy-nilly. To date, they have used it once since the classic arcade era: an inclusion in the N64 Rare title Donkey Kong 64. Mind, there has been an Arcade Archives release from Hamster; I presume they got the rights from both Nintendo and Ikegami Tsushinki. It’s for this reason that Nintendo almost always presents NES Donkey Kong in compilations, which is similar but differs from the arcade game in many important ways.

Hirohisa Komanome was one of the people at that company that worked in concert with Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, and several other employees of Ikegami Tsushinki, to complete the design and implement Donkey Kong from Miyamoto’s notes, finishing it in only around three months. Donkey Kong came out in July of 1981, meaning it was probably began around the beginning of the year. The quickness of their work would prove to be essential: remember, the American arcade industry collapsed in 1983, when many promising games would be abandoned or released to greatly diminished profits. If Donkey Kong had been released a little later, it may not have become such a fondly remembered hit.

Kate Willaert commissioned the translation by Alex at Shumplations of an article written by Hirohisa Komanome that was published in 1997 in the Japanese publication bit. It’s up on their site here. Given that Nintendo tends to be very tight-lipped when letting their employees talk to the press, it’s probably good for us that Donkey Kong was implemented by an outside company, or else this account of the game’s creation may never have seen print, or our eyes.

Donkey Kong: A Record of a Struggle translated into English (shmuplations.com)

Inty Sports and the IBL

The end of Blaseball continues to leave a large squid-shaped hole in what I’m going to, for the sake of argument, call our hearts, but there are alternatives out there. One such alternative is Inty Sports, and the IBL: the Intellivision Baseball League.

Forget about hacking Tecmo Bowl or the like to include modern stats, this goes all the way back to arguably the first complete home console baseball simulation, back on the first console that made decent sports adaptations a reality.

Since 2014, each year, over the course of around three-and-a-half months, a league of ten teams with names based on Intellivision properties battle it out for the title of IBL Champions. I don’t know if human players back the teams or if they’re all computer-played, but it seems probable that it’s the latter. Intellivision’s Baseball (originally marketed with the Major League Baseball license) is a decent adaptation, although there are some rule changes as described on its Wikipedia page: no fly balls are simulated, home runs are declared based on “how and where” the ball is hit, and if a run is scored before the third out on a play, it counts.

Intellivision Baseball is from an era before consoles tracked stats, named players, or even offered selectable teams, so any strengths and weaknesses on a given team are merely the result of statistical variance. If you can allow yourself to forget about that detail, though, you might allow yourself to be amused, for a period of time ranging from minutes to multiple years.

Each game progresses rapidly, and is over in a brisk 9 to 11 minutes, which is much better than real-life baseball. Inty Sports has a website with the records of past seasons, and a page of greatest moments. Their 2024 season wrapped up just a few weeks ago, and can be viewed on their Youtube channel. Here is the final game of the 2024 season, Spartans vs Bombers (11 minutes):

AsumSaus on Smash Melee

I’d been wondering why I hadn’t seen AsumSaus, that Smash Bros. person, post anything lately. So I search his account and it turns out yeah, he’s been posting, Youtube just didn’t deign to show them to me. He just put something up that’s 27 minutes on on Smash Melee.

Baseball Bits on Barry Bonds

Here’s a really different post on something that only borrows the aesthetics from video games, but does so in an entertaining way. It’s the Youtube series Baseball Bits on the channel Foolish Baseball, which makes explainers about a lot of different topics related to baseball. Not video baseball; real, Major League Baseball. As such I normally wouldn’t be too interested, but they do a good job of their explanations, and it’s not difficult to follow along.

As an example, here is their recent 19-minute piece on controversial baseball superstar and incredible hulk Barry Bonds, that distills the essence of his long career into four plate appearances.

If this is of absolutely no interest to you, believe me, I understand. I don’t intend to turn this into a real-life sports blog any time soon. But I thought the use of 16-bit video game aesthetics to talk about something that has nothing direct to do with video games is interesting. It’s possible that this pixel-art kind of vibe has staying power, and people will still be referring to it, making it, enjoying it decades to come. Hey I can dream, right?

If you want to find out more about this “Barry Bonds” person, it’s even further afield, but Jon Bois at Secret Base did a great demonstration of the fear he projected upon the sport of baseball in his own video asking: what if Barry Bonds played baseball without a bat? (13 minutes)

Dan Olson Discusses James Rolfe

Dan Olson is the brilliant documentarian behind Folding Ideas. He’s covered a range of interesting topics ranging from Decentraland, gamer culture, NFTs, financial scammers and Minecraft.

James Rolfe plays the Angry Video Game Nerd, that long-running game commentary and comedy series, and to some degree he is the nerd, even though the character doesn’t reflect his own views or personality. Although he plays a character, playing it has become his career. He does other videos too, but it’s what he’s known for, it’s his mark upon the world, and so it’s how he’ll be remembered.

Rolfe is the head of a little empire called Cinemassacre. Rolfe was really popular at one point, but over time his subject became less relevant. Time is unkind. By the time the mechanisms became available to effectively monetize what he does, his fandom had diminished, although he keeps plugging away, and it sustains him. Cinemassacre partnered with an outfit, Screenwave, to help him monetize it, which involves making five videos a week. It’s provided him with an income to support a family. That’s the same trade-off most of us make, only he gets to do something he likes doing.

Dan Olson did a video on James Rolfe (1h 17m). Here, I’ll embed it:

It makes the case that James Rolfe was a victim of his own success. The Nerd character was extremely popular for a while. If you have three things you do, and one of them turns out a popular as the Nerd was, you’re naturally going to focus on that, and the others must suffer.

Dan Olson’s video is not against James Rolfe, but it’s also not in favor of him. It presents him as a hack, a jobber, a person who, when he finally has the chance to do something with his own ideas, they end up half-baked, iterations over things he made as a teenager. These things are probably true, but they’re also better than what most of the rest of us get.

I have never really been a fan of the Nerd. I think that the relentless negativity has fed into a culture that tears things down. But there is effort in how they’re made. There is a weird skill in coming up with so many distinct ways to insult things. I don’t agree with all his videos, which don’t leave much room to consider things noble attempts or failed experiments. But they’re just games, after all.

James Rolfe isn’t a bad person, far from it. Even so, Olson’s video tells us that Rolfe has an anti-fandom, a band of people who just hate him and what he does for no reason, for the crime of having a family and doing what he needs to survive. What an awful thing to exist. To think that there’s a category of person so petty. But also, this kind of pettiness is a great invisible sea. It is one of the worst of the early Internet's many legacies, and it’s largely the result of most people having no real, I’m not going to say life, but I will say stakes in life. When people’s lives are devoid of real meaning, they find what little meaning they can, and sad to say, there’s a lot of people who, to put it in Balatro terms, the best card they’ve been given is a five of clubs, and the rest of their deck is mostly twos and threes. (Can you tell what I’ve just came from doing?)

I’m rambling a bit, and part of that is due to the fact that Olson’s video rambles too. Dan Olson became obsessed with James Rolfe and his legacy, due in part to the similarity between their lives, and it feels like the video was released partly to exorcise James Rolfe from Olson’s mind.

I hope that Olson has successfully evicted the nerd from his brain attic. And I hope that Rolfe continues to be successful, even if I won’t watch his videos. It’s a hard life for all of us, far too hard to spend it tearing others down.

Twinbeard Completes Bowser’s Fury One Shine At A Time

Twinbeard is a pretty active gamedev and Youtuber. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because he made Frog Fractions and Frog Fractions II. Yes! Him.

Lately he’s been playing Mario games on the installment plan: one significant unit of the game per video. One level at a time, or one star, or shine, or whatever luminous MacGuffin the plumber is lusting after at the moment.

He just wrapped up Bowser’s Fury in 105 videos: 100 shines, plus some extra things like boss fights. Some of the videos go by really quickly; some do not.

If this sounds familiar, before we linked to Twinbeard playing through Super Mario Galaxy in a similar manner. Now that he’s finished helping Bowser though his emotional issues, he’s off on another game, this time with a different angle. He’s playing through a romhack of Super Mario World, but with each level remade from memory of various different people. It might also be worth looking into!

Twinbeard Plays Bowser’s Fury (Youtube playlist, 105 videos)

How Many Super Mario Games Are There NOW?

For the best results, read the title with a whiny stress on the word NOW, like you’re a kid asking “Are we THERE yet?”

Let me see, off the top of my head. It’s Super Mario, so the original Mario Bros. or anything before it are out. I assume these are “mainline” games, meaning tentpoles for their platform. Okay, let’s go:

Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2 (Japan), Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA), Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario Land, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, Super Mario World, Super Mario Bros. 4: Yoshi’s Island, Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Galaxy, Super Mario Galaxy 2, New Super Mario Bros., New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Super Mario 3D Land, Super Mario 3D World, Super Mario Odyssey, Super Mario Wonder. That’s 18, but I’m sure I missed one or two. Super Mario Maker & 2 are more like side games; All Night Nippon Super Mario Bros. is basically a romhack, if it’s not a platformer in some way it’s not really a Super Mario game so Paint and sports and karts don’t kount. Bowser’s Fury is like a parallel universe, and the later Yoshi and Wario games made themselves distinct from the original series. Mario Clash for Virtual Boy doesn’t have Super in the title, and it feels more akin to Mario Bros. anyway.

jan Misali (talk to them about their name’s capitalization) did a video covering the matter in an extreme amount of detail. It’s two hours and eight minutes long! Can you hang in there that long? I just finished the video about the Star Wars hotel and I’m frankly exhausted. Tell me how this one ends.

JRPG Junkie’s Review of Skies of Arcadia

It’s not completely positive, as they point out the game’s high encounter rate and the slowness of battle, but gosh there’s a lot of awesome things in Skies of Arcadia that don’t seem to have ever been revisited in other games.

The main overworld is one in which you have an airship and fly around a world that has floating islands but no real ground. Sure, that’s been done by other people, and more than once, and fairly recently too, but SoA brought some really interesting nuance to it that gave players good reason to explore, like interesting optional subquests. You could find mysterious locations out in the world and sell them to the Explorer’s Guild for extra money, but only if you’re quick enough to stay ahead of rival ships also looking for them. There was also an alternate form of combat, ship-to-ship (and sometimes ship-to-huge-monster) battles, that played out very differently from the JRPG norm. All the extra things to do gave the game this weird veneer of simulationism, which I always find interesting, even if it was largely an illusion.

Skies of Arcadia was originally a Dreamcast release, one of only two substantive JRPGs made for that system (the other was Grandia II), and fell victim to the Dreamcast’s short life and subsequent exit from console manufacturing by Sega. It did get a remake for the Gamecube, but that was the last we’ve seen of Skies of Arcadia, other than character cameos in Sonic racing games.

JRPG Junkie: Back to the Backlog – Skies of Arcadia

Pixel Memories Dioramas

Clivefrog77 makes these nice gaming dioramas, often based on European Commodore 64 games, and sells them on eBay. He has a page on Google Photos. I’m not sure if all of those are his, but a lot seem to be.

Rags to Riches

International Karate +

Great Giana Sisters

Dan Dare

Bad Dudes vs Dragon Ninja

U Can Beat Video Games Covers Final Fantasy IV

I’ve posted about the great Youtube walkthrough channel U Can Beat Video Games several times in the past, so I try not to report on every video they do. And lately, as they’ve been tackling bigger projects that take a lot more time to finish, there haven’t been as many to post about.

But now they’ve completed their four-part series, each at three-plus hours, on one of the most iconic JRPGs from the era, Final Fantasy IV, which of course got released in Western markets as Final Fantasy II. It goes over everything in the game, every secret, every step of the story, a lot of cool tricks and strategies, and more.

I understand some people use this as background for doing other things, or as their adult replacement for Saturday morning cartoons (look them up). In any case, it makes for a lot of viewing, so block off a fair amount of time for this.

Here are the direct links and embeds:

Part 1: Beginning to Cecil’s promotion to Paladin (3h44m)

Part 2: To Dr. Lugae in the Tower of Bab-Il (4h8m)

Part 3: The Underworld and up to the Bahamut optional fight on the Moon (4h17m)

And finally:

Part 4: The remainder of the game, and the ending (3h38m)

If you think this is huge, it’s only going to get huge-r when they reach Final Fantasy VI (er, III)!

U Can Beat Video Games Video Directory

We’ve linked the Youtube channel of U Can Beat Video Games repeatedly in the past, most recently for their sprawling guide to Final Fantasy II(IV). Yet they keep making new videos. Just a few days ago they did a video on all of of Book I of Ys for the TurboGrafx 16/PC Engine, with one on Book II promised soon. And since they post (usually) weekly, if I did a post here every time they released a video, it’d become one-seventh of our posts!

Here is the video on Ys Book I, it’s 2 hours and 2 minutes:

And here is a directory of every game video U Can Beat Video Games has put up to date. I haven’t inlined the videos because there’s over a hundred!

NINTENDO

SUPER MARIO

- Super Mario Bros. (NES, 1h10m)

- Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA version, NES, 1h8m)

- Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES, 3h23m)

- Super Mario Land (Gameboy, 54m)

- Super Mario World (SNES)
Part 1 (2h10m) – Part 2 (2h8m)

- Super Mario Kart (SNES, 1h11m)

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA

- The Legend of Zelda (NES, 1h31m)

- The Legend of Zelda, Second Quest (NES, 2h4m)

- Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (NES, 1h8m)

- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES)
Part 1 (1h56m) – Part 2 (2h46m)

- The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening Gameboy/Gameboy Color)
Part 1 (2h31m) – Part 2 (2h36m)

METROID

- Metroid (NES, 1h19m)
- Metroid II (Gameboy, 2h5m)
- Super Metroid (SNES, 3h37m)

STARTROPICS

- StarTropics (NES, 1h36m)

- Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II (NES, 2h4m)

OTHER

- Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! (NES, 43m)
- Kid Icarus (NES, 1h25m)
- Duck Hunt (NES, 28m)
- Kirby’s Dream Land (Gameboy, 1h)

RPGS

FINAL FANTASY

- Final Fantasy (NES)
Part 1 (2h59m) – Part 2 (3h38m)

- Final Fantasy Adventure (Gameboy)
Part 1 (1h37m) – Part 2 (2h57m)

- Final Fantasy IV (II in its original US release) (SNES)
Part 1 (3h44m) – Part 2 (4h8m) – Part 3 (4h17m) – Part 4 (3h36m)

DRAGON QUEST

- Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest (NES, 2h55m)

- Dragon Warrior II/Dragon Quest II
Part 1 (1h50m) – Part 2 (3h45m)

- Dragon Warrior III/Dragon Quest III (NES)
Part 1 (3h59m) – Part 2 (4h23m) – Part 3 (3h35m)

NIHON FALCOM

- Ys Book 1 (TG16/PC Engine CD, 2h2m)

- Faxanadu (NES, 1h36m):

- Legacy of the Wizard (NES, 1h22m):

OTHER RPGs & RELATED GAMES

- Shadowrun (SNES, 3h41m):

- Willow (NES, 2h26m):

- The Guardian Legend (NES, 2h34m):

- The Battle of Olympus (NES, 1h33m):

- Crystalis (NES, 2h20m):

- Gauntlet (NES, 1h52m):

- Actraiser (SNES, 2h37m):

- The Magic of Scheherazade (NES, 3h18m):

BEAT-EM-UPs (“belt scrollers”)

TECHNOS

- River City Ransom (NES, 55m)
- Double Dragon (NES, 26m)
- Double Dragon II: The Revenge (NES, 35m)
- Double Dragon III: The Sacred Stones (39m)

OTHER

- Streets of Rage (Genesis/Mega Drive, 1h15m)

- Final Fight (SNES, 1h5m)

KONAMI

GRADIUS

- Gradius (NES, 31m)

- Life Force (NES, 46m)

CASTLEVANIA

- Castlevania (NES, 35m)

- Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (NES, 1h17m)

- Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse (NES, 2h22m)

- Super Castlevania IV (SNES, 1h47m)

CONTRA

- Contra/Probotector (NES, 32m)
- Super C (NES, 30m)
- Contra Force (NES, 50m)

METAL GEAR

- Metal Gear (NES, 1h18m)

- Metal Gear: Snake’s Revenge (NES, 2h2m)

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES, 44m):

- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game (NES, 1h3m)

- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project (NES, 1h21m)

- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time (SNES, 1h)

OTHER

- Bucky O’Hare (NES, 1h6m)
- The Lone Ranger (NES, 1h57m)
- The Adventures of Bayou Billy (NES, 56m)
- Jackal (NES, 44m)
- The Goonies II (NES, 48m)

CAPCOM

MEGA MAN (a.k.a. RockMan)

- Mega Man (NES, 43m)
- Mega Man II (NES, 59m)
- Mega Man III (NES, 1h19m)
- Mega Man IV (NES, 1h19m)
- Mega Man V (NES, 1h37m)

GHOSTS ‘N GOBLINS (a.k.a. Makaimura)

- Ghosts ‘N Goblins (NES, 30m)
- Ghouls ‘N Ghosts (Genesis/Mega Drive, 45m)
- Gargoyle’s Quest (Gameboy, 1h18m)

DISNEY

- Darkwing Duck (NES, 54m)
- Rescue Rangers (NES, 41m)
- Ducktales (NES, 44m)

- Disney’s Adventures in the Magic Kingdom (NES, 23m)

OTHER

- Bionic Commando (NES, 1h3m)
- Strider (NES, 1h2m)
- Little Nemo: The Dream Master (NES, 47m)

TECMO

NINJA GAIDEN

- Ninja Gaiden (NES, 58m)

- Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos (NES, 1h9m)

- Ninja Gaiden III (NES, 1h3m)

OTHER

- Rygar (NES, 46m)

SUNSOFT

- Blaster Master (NES, 1h26m)
- Batman (NES, 32m)
- Journey to Silius (NES, 32m)
- Fester’s Quest (NES, 1h1m)

RARE

WIZARDS & WARRIORS

- Wizards & Warriors (NES, 52m)

- IronSword: Wizards & Warriors II (NES, 57m)

BATTLETOADS

- Battletoads (NES, 1h)

- Battletoads & Double Dragon (NES, 50m)

OTHER

- Marble Madness (NES, 25m)
- Cobra Triangle (NES, 33m)
- Snake Rattle & Roll (NES, 41m)

LJN

- Friday the 13th (NES, 38m)

- A Nightmare on Elm Street (NES, 48m)

STAR WARS

- Star Wars (NES, 44m)

- Super Star Wars (SNES, 1h8m)

- Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (SNES, 1h49m)

- Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (SNES, 1h44m)

ICOM ADVENTURES

- Shadowgate (NES, 1h33m)
- Deja Vu (NES, 1h27m)
- The Uninvited (NES, 1h43m)
- Beyond Shadowgate (TG16 2h49m)

- EXTRA: The Untold Stories of Shadowgate (15m)

THE SIMPSONS

- The Simpsons: Bart vs The Space Mutants (NES, 50m)

- The Simpsons: Bart vs The World (NES, 54m)

Uncategorized

- Maniac Mansion (NES, 1h44m)
- Snow Bros. (NES, 52m)
- Aladdin (Genesis/Mega Drive, 1h5m)
- Dragon Spirit (NES, 1h1m)
- Home Alone (NES, 27m)
- Joe & Mac (SNES, 54m)
- Nightshade (NES, 1h15m)
- Shinobi (Genesis/Mega Drive, 55m)
- G.I. Joe (NES, 1h3m)
- Jurassic Park (SNES, 1h43m)
- Hudson’s Adventure Island (NES, 1h27m)
- Solstice (NES, 39m)
- Monster Party (NES, 39m)
- Clash at Demonhead (NES, 1h25m)
- A Boy and His Blob (NES, 44m)

- Sonic the Hedgehog (Genesis/Mega Drive, 1h20m)

and…

EXTRA: Top Ten NES Missed Secrets (17m)

The History of Kid Pix

I feel like I should adopt some standard way to inform people which items are links to other sites (with minor commentary attached) and which are significant longform items of our own creation.

Suffice to say this is the former category. I didn’t write this history of Kid Pix: Craig Hickman wrote it, back around 2013. And he also created the original version of that program too. And it was terrific. Here is the link.

Kid Pix in its original format

What was Kid Pix? It was a paint program for early Macintosh models that was very well-received, and is very fondly remembered. It had a powerful UI but was still, nevertheless, aimed at kids. Think of it as a more fun version of MacPaint. I refuse to stay in my lane regarding entertaining uses of computers, but perhaps of more interest to what I’d think are our usual readers, it had a similar concept to the art module of Mario Paint, but came out at least a couple of years earlier.

I especially like how he described the original Macintosh UI as having “a consistent and enlightened vision behind it,” which I’m not sure can be said of Macs today, or really of the products of any major software company. That’s just my opinion, mind you.

Did you know there is a Javascript re-implementation of an older version of Kid Pix? Here!

Kid Pix – The Early Years (red-green-blue.com)

Monopoly Mario Illustrations in the Style of Rich Uncle Pennybags

There is no one who hates a thing more than someone who formerly loved it. As a kid I rather enjoyed Monopoly, until I came to realize its many flaws (as I like to say, it’s over long before it ends). This means I know a lot about the game, even though I find it pretty annoying to play.

One of the things about Monopoly I know is that its artwork has changed a fair bit over the years. The board mostly looks the same, but the characters are different. The character that Hasbro now calls by the generic “Mr. Monopoly,” and used to be called Rich Uncle Pennybags, was not the original mascot for the game, which was a character with a big 50s ad art-styled head. I don’t have pictures of it, just vague memories from seeing it back during the Monopoly anniversary that happened decades ago now. Google is of no help. The search continues.

Another thing that I know about Monopoly, as the rest of the developed world by now, is that Hasbro was, for a while, extremely active in pimping out the Monopoly property for making custom versions. There are several hundred of then, probably thousands by now, and they keep making more.

There have been multiple Nintendo Monopoly boards. Mario obscurities site Supper Mario Broth found one, and in one of the few examples of something I’ve found interesting about one of those damn Monopoly variants, there are drawings of Mario and Luigi on the cards done in the style of Rich Uncle Pennybags!

Most of them are pretty sad attempts to wallpaper over Monopoly game elements with a Mario pattern. In the game, houses are “power-ups,” and a hotel is an “invincibility.” But the artwork shows much more care in melding the two properties than do the rules!

Mario Parties require you pay at the door. They’re probably BYOB too.

4D Golf Releases on Steam

4D Golf, from CodeParade, responsible for the similarly mind-bending Hyperbolica, is amazing because it doesn’t cheat. It provides a genuine 4D-world in which to play the game of golf in. Not in the sense that time is a fourth dimension; time passes in this four-dimensional world too. It basically asks, what if our normal world were four-dimensional. And had a mini-putt course in it. So, here is the release trailer on Youtube:

The trailer has an especially intriguing aspect to it because it promises a big feature that hasn’t been revealed publicly yet outside the release of the game. To find out what it is one will just have to buy and play the game to find out… or read the comments, where a couple of people have spoiled it. It’s possibly best that they did though, because it suggests that 4D Golf is even more amazing than it seems at first.

4D Golf (Steam, $20)

Completing Arcade Dragon’s Lair

Dragon’s Lair was the original laserdisc arcade game, and a big hit at the time. It immediately caused a large part of the ailing arcade sector to swing around to doing laserdisc games, a trend that will seem very familiar to people who have been following NFTs, overwhelming the market and ultimately further contributing to the downfall of the golden era of U.S. arcades instead of saving it. Dragon’s Lair, and its sequel Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp and spinoff Space Ace, were by many accounts among the best of the era, with excellent cel-drawn animation provided by the studio of former Disney animator Don Bluth.

Now that I have properly introduced the concept to those who might not have known, I can now introduce this video (14 minutes), put together by the Youtube channel Broken Arcade, which demonstrates how to complete Dragon’s Lair. It’s not a perfect playthrough, but it is done on one credit, and while it plays the player explains what movements he’s doing on the joystick and button, along with notes on timing and tips for getting each scene right. The directions and button presses needed to finish each scene (which are presented randomly in the game) are also listed in the description to the video.

Even if you’ve never heard of Dragon’s Lair before, it’s worth it to watch the lush animation! Here it is embedded:

The Digital Antiquarian on the Rise of Age of Empires

In the early days of Microsoft they really looked down on gaming, fueled by an antipathy towards entertainment by many higher-ups in the company. The Digital Antiquarian recounts the story of the game that got Microsoft started on computer gaming, ultimately leading to the rise of Xbox, and from there, Halo. It’s a longer piece, and mostly text, but the DA knows their stuff. Myself, I’ve never played Age of Empires! Maybe I should try it….

Cover art from the article.

Age of Empires (or, How Microsoft Got in on Games)

From Supper Mario Broth: Luigi Concept Art & Mario Strikers Banners

From the “Small Findings” sub-blog of Mario obscurities site Supper Mario Broth comes this collection of concept art for Luigi, from last year’s Super Mario Bros. Movie. Here is the original post.

Here’s another image, from the main Supper Mario Broth site. Several spinoff Mario titles have promotional images for fake Mario universe companies used as background art elements. Most of the time these are used in the Mario Kart games. There were a few made for the original Mario Strikers, that went unused in the final game. This one appears to be for some kind of Bowser Support Hotline. Original post.

Nerdly Pleasures on R.O.B.

Another image from Nerdly Pleasures, the Japanese box for “Robot,” their name for R.O.B.

We linked the blog Nerdly Pleasures back on Sunday when we used their image of R.O.B.’s gyro setup. The post it came from though is deep enough that I figured it’s worth its own spotlight!

The lengthy and detailed post came from 2015, and in addition to positioning R.O.B. in time and Nintendo’s history, also provides some technical information, such as the sequence of flashes that games use to communicate with the robot toy to make it perform various actions.

Nerdly Pleasures seems like a fine blog, and it’s still going with a post on King’s Quest IV that went up on the 17th, and I look forward to pointing out more of their work in the future.

What about R.O.B.? – The NES’s First Mascot (Nerdly Pleasures)

The Dreamcast Junkyard on Shenmue-likes

The Dreamcast Junkyard is an underrated blog, and when it’s not telling us about good old Dreamcast games, it’s telling us about games that are like good old Dreamcast games. While Shenmue never got past the second game, despite plans for an epic multi-game story, its spirit lives on in a multitude of other games, from various studios. The specific ingredients of a Shenmue-like, I would say, are a real-time lifesim with a large variety of sidequests. But that technically applies to farming games like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, which are not quite the same thing.

Six are listed in this article, and they are the Yakuza series (of course), the Persona series, Bully, Mizzurna Falls, Lake, and The Good Life; I’ll leave it to the post to explain the whys of each. The Good Life, specifically was entirely off my radar, but it sounds like it might be worth looking into!

6 Games That Scratch the Shenmue Itch (Dreamcast Junkyard)

The Many Revivals of Toontown Online
planet clue on Youtube posted a roundup of the many recreations of Disney’s defunct MMORPG Toontown Online, which range from strict remakes to expanded projects that add a considerable number of features to the original.

Fan-made MMORPG recreations and revivals, sadly, never manage to gain even a small fraction of the users of the originals. This is for several reasons, particularly the lack of ad budget, and a desire to stay partially under the radar, necessary to avoid legal reprisals from the original publisher–which, I remind you, in this case is Disney, the 2,000 lb. gorilla-mouse of lawsuits.

These F2P MMOs are a large part of many people’s childhoods though, and it’s inevitable that there be community interest in reviving them, if just to be able to visit old virtual stomping grounds once again. The people that I shed a tear for are those who played old Compuserve and AOL-era MMOs like Island of Kesmai (which exists in two fan-run forms, LOKFreedom and Lands of Kes) and, particularly, the original AOL-based Neverwinter Nights. But more on that tomorrow….

I think it’s possible that Disney will come to realize how many people have fond memories of Toontown Online, and also Club Penguin (which also has a fan revival), and bring them back after some time. They are not insensible to bringing in yet another revenue stream, and they’ve been open to revivals of other old video game properties of theirs like Ducktales Remastered. If that happens though, will they then launch their legal-nuclear missiles at the many fan remakes of Toontown Online? It remains to be seen.

The Death, and Many Many Rebirths of Toontown Online (20 minutes)

NES and Commodore 64 Games Compared

Greg’s Game Room on Youtube looked at 28 games with both NES and Commodore 64 versions. It’s not by any means all of them, but a good selection. Usually its the NES version that’s better, but there are some surprising upsets, especially if the game originated on a microcomputer platform.

The Commodore games that won out are Ballblazer, Castelian, Die Hard (but the C64 version’s really different), Ghostbusters, Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins, Q*Bert and (surprisingly) Smash T.V. Decent C64 games that nevertheless lost are Blades of Steel, Commando, Donkey Kong, Mighty Bomb Jack and Super Mario Bros. (rated were both the similar Great Giana Sisters and the recent fanmade version of SMB that uses advanced scrolling tricks). Gyruss, Mario Bros. and Pac-Man were rated at a tie.

Nintendo vs Commodore 64, 28 Games Compared (Youtube, 46 minutes)

What is a Game Dad?

I refer you to the question in the title. It’s not GamerDad, or The Game Dad Blog, or Board Gamer Dad, or Video Gaming Dad, or the Youtube channel GameDad. It’s a GameDad, as opposed to a GameBoy.

A Game Dad is a frankly awesome idea! It’s any portable, pocket-sized game-playing device that has a focus on emulation. I myself would say it needs physical controls, not a touchscreen, to control well, but that’s not part of the “official” spec given by Dan over at gamedad.club. It looks like site owner Dan agrees with me to an extent.

Game Dad is not a brand name. No company yet calls their device a Game Dad, it’s more an adjective that you can apply to things. Two special cases: A Steam Deck is not a Game Dad because it’s not pocket-sized. A smartphone is not a Game Dad because it’s not dedicated to playing games. Game Dads shouldn’t be something you do work on, or will pester you while you play. Game Dads don’t host apps. Game Dads don’t try to feel you algorithmic bullshit. Most Game Dads, when you turn them off, they don’t go to sleep. They turn off.

The picture here, from the site’s header, might help to fix the idea in your head. Notice that unlike a Gameboy it has four buttons and dual analog sticks, but it otherwise looks a lot like a Gameboy.

Lots of companies make Game Dads, or Game Dad-adjacent devices, and you should be able to get a pretty good one for around $70. That will typically get you something capable of playing up to PS1-era games. N64 games are a little more challenging since its processor was weirder. But as the site says, the best Game Dad is the one that plays the games you want to play. Dan’s site is full of advice and opinions, and all of them are good. The one he has personally is an Anbernic RG353V/RG353VS. Both run Linux, but the V version also has an Android partition and a touchscreen, two features that Dan considers inessential to Gamular Dadiness, and lowers the price by $20 to about $78, but the more expensive one also has more RAM and built-in storage, if those things matter.

Please ignore that the page says that it “let you fondle admiringly,” the device is not emotionally needy.

At this moment a lot of the interest in retro gaming circles is in FPGA devices like the Analogue Pocket, which will be more expensive than this. This isn’t a device for complete cycle-accurate recreations, it’s for inexpensive, pretty-nice emulation for good-enough gaming fun.

By the way, Dan is on Mastodon as @ifixcoinops@retro.social. Yes, I’m still using Mastodon. You should too! I’m on Bluesky because I feel like I have to be, but I’m on Mastodon because I want to be.

gamedad.club

Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games, on Princess Peach Showtime

The article notes how few games in Nintendo’s many series star Peach. There’s really only been one headline game for her before, 2006’s Super Princess Peach, which was really easy. Showtime isn’t bad, but the article notes it’s more like a collection of minigames than a cohesive whole. I mean yes, it does feel a bit like nitpicking, but Peach has been playable in a good number of platformers before, going back all the way to Super Mario Bros 2., but never in the starring role. (She’s arguably the best character in Mario 2, too.)

Please excuse the “Demo Available,” this image came from Nintendo’s site.

The article notes how much Peach’s sidekick resembles Lisa Simpson, and is that ever apt.

Hardcore Gaming 101 Covers Snake’s Revenge

Hardcore Gaming 101 is one of the most important game history sites on the internet, and site creator Kurt Kalata writes on a wide variety of games for consoles and computers alike. Recently they’ve been on a Metal Gear kick, and that means covering the black sheep of the series, Snake’s Revenge.

Snake’s Revenge is the forgotten Metal Gear game, an NES sequel made without Hideo Kojima input, to the NES port of Metal Gear that he also had nothing to do with. It has a reputation for being terrible, but that’s really unmerited. As Kurt Kalata notes, while it has its flaws, is ignored by later Metal Gear games, and it has a story based on the manual scenario for Metal Gear written by Konami’s crazy American writing staff*, it’s technically proficient and has good music.

Yep, it’s the Metal Gear with side-view segments.

You can, and should read it for yourself, here.

* The American manual for NES Life Force says that the evil planet-eating monster Zelos was the proud progeny of “Ma and Pa Deltoid.” In the description of Dracula’s Heart in the manual for Castlevania II, it warns: “Careful! The heart attacks.” These were by no means isolated occurrences from Konami’s US staff.

Retro365: Apple Galaxian, Star Craft and the Beginnings of Brøderbund

Pretty dry today, a tale on the blog Retro365 about the creation of Apple Galaxian, early action gaming hit for the Apple II, and how it helped establish classic computer publisher Brøderbund, who’d licensed it from the Japanese company Star Craft. It was sold in Ziploc bags, and was an immediate hit.

Here’s what Apple Galaxian looked like in action:

Brøderbund would go on to release many more wonderful programs for home computers, eventually publishing Lode Runner and Myst. Star Craft was still in operation in Japan until 1995. Anyway, please follow the link, it’ll help make up for me having to enter the crossed-o in Brøderbund’s name so many times!

Apple Galaxian: The Vital Japanese Connection (Retro365)

Basement Brothers Xanatalks About Xanadu

Falcom is possibly the greatest Japanese game publisher that’s barely known in the US. Recently Ys sequels have changed this a bit, but their earlier titles are still a hole in the knowledge of even some Western RPG fanatics. At least, I never had much of a chance to learn about them, other than through Hardcore Gaming 101’s as-usual excellent descriptions of the Dragon Slayer series.

Xanadu is a Dragon Slayer game. It’s actually Dragon Slayer II, but it plays nothing like the original. Dragon Slayer IV: Drasle Family, is one of the very few Dragon Slayer titles to get a release over the geographic and cultural divide, as Legacy of the Wizard on NES. It doesn’t play like the other games either. It was a tradition to make every Dragon Slayer game play very unlike the others. The way I see it, the series was as much about coming up with a new system to explore and master as it was about having new scenarios and locations.

Xanadu is also a ridiculously obtuse game, which is in keeping with the original. Lots of the Dragon Slayer line expected you to do obtuse things, things not explained to you, to proceed. I’ve played through Legacy of the Wizard, and can verify that it was hard, but compared to Xanadu it seems like a model of straightforward play. In Xanadu, right near the start, there is a place where you fall down a hole, walk left five steps, then double-back right to scroll a secret shop onto the screen, the only place in the entire game where you can buy and sell magic items. Its inventory system doesn’t use words, it’s just a sequence of numbers, indicating quantities, and you’re just supposed to know the order of the items they represent.

Xanadu, like some other prominent RPGs, is secretly about resource management. Each monster you find on the world map screens (which are side-view!) can only be defeated and looted a limited number of times. If you run them out, and are left without the items needed to finish the game, you’re just stuck. You can also get stuck in some areas if you just move the wrong direction. You can save and load the game, but doing so carries costs in gold pieces! The only way to escape this temporal-economic trap is to make a backup of your game disk, and restore your copy from it. I like this idea, I’ve always found the grind-until-you-win nature of many present-day RPGs a bit unappealing. I kind of wish more games now would take inspiration from some of these early efforts, where each game could have a radically different play style, and require the player apply some real strategy to win, but maybe without being quite so user-hostile.

Youtube channel Basement Brothers made a nice retrospective of Xanadu, and managed to complete the whole game, although by following a video walkthrough. It’s an essential window into a whole universe of RPGs we were denied at the time.

Xanadu (PC-88 Paradise) Falcom’s original classic, and Japan’s must-have 8-bit action RPG of 1985 (Youtube, 39 minutes)

Super Play Magazine’s Top 100 SNES Games

Lists of the best games for various platforms has been a fixture on the internet since it was opened up to the general public. Every big gaming site, those still with us and those gone (R.I.P. Joystiq) feel the urge to make them periodically. After all, they combine several popular article themes: they’re listicles, they’re about video games, and they make definite-seeming yet inherently subjective statements about things that geeks have over-strong opinions about. They’re the ideal hit-getters for pop culture sites really, whether they focus on games or not.

Even in print, these lists weren’t rare things. Super Play Magazine, from the UK, did such a list in April of 1996, which was reproduced in HTML text by the site RVGFanatic in 2010.

Why would such a list interest us now? Well, most of these lists have a strongly US-focused vibe, and the UK had a somewhat different scene than we (me being American) did. So there are a number of very interesting games on the list that generally don’t appear in other places, including a few Japanese ones. And they included SNES Rampart, so I’m automatically kindly disposed to it.

Of particular note, besides Rampart: three Parodius entries, two Micro Machines games, Pop’n Twinbee, Cool Spot, Samurai Spirits, Hebereke’s Popoitto, Spike McFang, SNES Side Pocket, Xandra’s Big Adventure, Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt, NFL Quarterback, World League Basketball (made by HAL!), The Chaos Engine, Street Racer, Super Smash T.V., Lemmings II: The Tribes (but not Sunsoft’s excellent SNES port of original Lemmings?!), Sensible Soccer, R-Type III, U.N. Squadron, SNES Civilization, Out To Lunch (I hadn’t even heard of this before!), Mickey’s Magical Quest, Cannon Fodder, Plok (the Pickford Bros. rule) and Equinox (also Pickford-made, and also highly underrated).

Super Play Magazine’s Top 100 SNES Video Games (RVGFanantic)

Wolf Link’s Tears of the Kingdom Minimalist Playthrough

I’ve been waiting a while to post this one. Right now SGDQ 2024 is acclimating everyone to games being played very quickly, but this post is about a game being played over a long, long period, so by comparison, it should feel even looooonger. Longer than you’d expect maybe from the run being called minimalist.

Wolf Link has, for ten months, been trying to play The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in a minimalist fashion. By their definition, minimalist means getting a 100% map completion. That doesn’t seem too obvious, does it? But 100% map, which is the closest the game has to declaring you’ve finished 100% of the game. There is no 100% game completion counter. Filling out all of the map is as close as it gets.

That’s still a whole lot of things. It means unlocking all the towers, getting all the Korok seeds, and doing absolute everything need to get everything to appear on the map. What Wolf Link means by minimalist is going as little as possible beyond that, regarding to changes in world and game state.

For example. There’s a sword on the ground. You pick up the sword, and it makes the little item-discovered jingle for finding a type of item the first time, and putting its name up in a little description box. That’s not okay, because now Link knows about that kind of item, so go back to your last save.

Discovering a few types of items like this is unavoidable. Anything that has to be discovered in order to fill out all of the map, well, that can’t be helped, right? But what actually has to be done to get to that point? Are there sneaky ways around collecting essential items? And there are a lot of items that, the first time they’re collected, mark themselves on the run in an indelible way. Most items, in fact. Getting items out of chests that don’t respawn is also outlawed if there’s any way to get to 100% without it. Completing shines is also forbidden after the first four, so the whole game is played with four hearts and one stamina wheel, or later, possibly, three hearts and a little over one stamina wheel.

In Tears of the Kingdom, however, there’s still lots of things you can do. All of the powers you pick up in the first shrines, as it turns out, are essential to getting 100%, so all of those abilities are open. Meaning, especially, you get Ultrahand and the ability to glue things together. Getting Zonai items in capsules isn’t allowed, but using those that are found around Hyrule in the field is. The precise rules are laid out on the Rules tab of the document here.

Another interesting thing, it turns out, that you can do, that turns out to be essential in this challenge, is [spoilers]: unlocking Mineru, the Sage of the Spirit Temple that players aren’t even told about until finishing the other four temples, can be done first. She can be the first sage you get! And the useful thing about that is that Zonai devices can be attached to her, then she can be ridden to use those devices at will. Unlocking her early though by the rules of the Minimalist Run requires doing the Thunderhead Isles in the Sky without clearing the thunderstorm, which is no mean trick.

Over ten months the series has gotten up to 34 videos, and there’s quite a ways to go. The journey already is a long one, but here it is as it stands:

How Super Mario 64 Was Beaten Without The A Button

In 24 minutes, Bismuth on Youtube explains how Super Mario 64 was beaten without a single A button press, on actual hardware by someone who’s nom de net is Marbler. The run was performed over five days. Video of the feat isn’t up yet, but should appear on Marbler’s channel when uploaded and encoded. Here is the video embed:

I have some commentary on this. First, if you’ve been following PannenKoek all this time like I have you know they’ve done many videos over the internals of SM64, many with the end goal of getting the A Button Challenge as low as it can go. The answer is, he doesn’t get all the stars, and it’s been a long iterative process of routing, and figuring out how to do formerly TAS-only techniques on with a controller. After a long period of improvement, finally, the dam broke.

What does this mean for PannenKoek? I think their most interesting videos lately have been those that are more about Mario 64’s internals, like that terrific explainer about invisible walls. And completing every star without A button presses is still a ways off. I think they’ll be fine.

How Super Mario 64 was beaten without the A button (Youtube, 24 minutes)

Playing Fortnite As A Pacifist & As A Friend

In many kinds of games, one of the most difficult playstyles to pull off successfully is the pacifist: a character who either (according to its community) doesn’t harm, or doesn’t kill, any other character in the game. Lots of games have some form of violence as their primary verb, so eschewing all of that is choosing to make (your own) life harder.

A game in which pacifism is particularly difficult, yet possible, is Nethack. It’s a “tracked conduct” in that game, meaning, when your game ends, you’re informed as to if you played that way. There’s a page on the Nethack wiki all about it. Back on GameSetWatch I related a story, from a Usenet post, where a player won as a pacifist. Since then, many people have ascended (Nethack’s term for winning) as a pacifist. It’s hard, possibly the hardest single conduct, but there’s still lots of ways to take care of opponents without killing them, including let your pet do it. Nethack gives players ludicrously many possible actions, and there’s almost always a way.

There is another conduct, “never hit with a wielded weapon,” but it’s not necessarily much harder, since you can kill things with it, you just have to use other tools, or your fist. Monks, who fight best with martial arts, find that the best way to play anyway.

This is all a digression, because it’s hard to shut me up about Nethack, but it also serves as a segue. How about Fortnite? It’s a game where 100 people are dumped into a space and the only way to win is to be the last survivor. By definition, you can only win at it if everyone else dies, so they have to have an accident. Not a mafia-style “accident,” but a genuine one.

As it turns out, Fortnite even has an achievement for it, although its reward is laughably small. And it’s not so much that it’s hard, but relies heavily on chance. The video that follows then expands the subject a bit: it is possible to befriend another player, whose main objective is to kill you?

Searching for Humanity in Fortnite (Youtube, 30 minutes)

Esoterica

...and, MORE obscure topics in gaming. (I understand the differentiation between this and the previous section is slight at best.)

A Japanese Youtuber Plays Rogue

I only have the barest understanding of Japanese, and the auto-translation on this video is pretty bad (see below), but I still found this Japanese Youtuber’s experience with the Steam release of Epyx Rogue to be interesting (27 minutes):

They keep using terms from Chunsoft’s Mystery Dungeon games, especially Torneko no Daibouken from the Super Famicom, but seem to have a good sense of how those items connect to and were inspired by Rogue.

Your armor weakens, oh my! “All the F words in the world were about to come out.”

They also die a lot. Because Rogue doesn’t want you to win. It was made for a community of players who would play it over and over, and were competing on shared scoreboards on university machines, and indefinite play makes for a poor measure of player skill. Standing and trading blows with every monster is a bad strategy in Rogue in the long run. Instead, it helps to run from strong enemies, to build up more hit points so as to defeat them, and sometimes in order to escape them to the next floor. Rogue’s monsters grow in strength as you descend fairly quickly, and the player is usually not far ahead of them in the power curve. Then around the time Trolls show up they’re roughly an even match, and they keep getting tougher. The point where the monsters become stronger than the player is different every game, and depends a lot on which items the player has found and has identified, but it always comes eventually. They eventually get pretty far, dying on their fifth attempt to a Griffin on Level 18.

Some text from the automatic translation:
“Water supply texture: Say goodbye to the smell of raw oysters.”
“The Dora doll’s twisty honey positive is getting warmer.”
“I miss the days when I used to go Hee Hee in Centauros.”
“Let’s quickly wash and throw away the rotten plastic bottles we drank from.”

The CRPG Addict Reaches Nethack 3.1

He’s been at this since the days of GameSetWatch’s run of @Play, but the CRPG Addict has finally reached Nethack 3.1, the game where Nethack reaches most of its final form. It’s true that it has gained features since then (especially weapon skills and splitting apart race and role from each other), but it was the version that introduced the current-day structure of the dungeon, added the many role-specific Quests, made the Wizard’s Tower a three level stronghold instead of just a little place in the mazes of Gehennom, put in the Bell, Book and Candle subquest, handed the Amulet of Yendor to the High Priest of Moloch, and put in the Elemental Planes and the current form of the Astral Plane.

Here are all his Nethack 3.1 posts to date:

Game 504: Nethack [3.1 series] (1993) – Beginning adventures

Nethack [3.1]: Blessed and Cursed – Discovering exercise, death by battery drain

Nethack [3.1]: Rust and Ruin – Beginning of very good game

Nethack [3.1]: Quest for Glory – Middle dungeon levels, Rogue level, Quest branch

Nethack [3.1]: Wish List – Exploring the lower regions of the main dungeon

Nethack [3.1]: Beyond This Place Of Wrath And Tears: from the Castle to Fort Ludios to entering Gehennom to killing Baalzebub

Nethack [3.1]: Nothing Lasts Forever – from killing the Wizard for the first time to getting the Amulet up to escaping the main dungeon for the Elemental Planes

The Marquee and Instruction Card For Vs. Super Mario Bros.

Vs. Super Mario Bros. was the arcade version of Super Mario Bros., which made it to US arcades a few months after the NES release. It’s a much harder game than the home version, with levels brought in from the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2, and operator adjustments that can make it even more difficult.

A little remarked-upon aspect of the game is that it came about before the drawn character design of Mario and his enemies had been solidified, at least in the US, so the official arcade release of SMB had a weird marquee, with an image design that was never drawn upon by later releases:

Image scavenged from gameongrafix.com

It’s somewhat reminiscent of the flier they distributed to promote the game when it was going to be titled Mario’s Adventure:

And even more interesting, it had this title card. Behold, an official Mario looking meaner than he ever had before or has since!

Can’t sleep. Mario will kill me.

Sega’s Amazing Island for Gamecube

I remember seeing this game for sale back then. It looked, on store shelves, a whole lot like a Pokemon clone. It’s not like we had any lack for them at the time.

Reading the back of the case made it clear something else was going on. Amazing Island was actually an early form of creativity game, like Drawn to Life, or Spore for that matter. Instead of collecting pre-made monsters, you made your own! Starting from one of a number of skeleton types, you used the Gamecube controller to draw shapes around it, that the game would then animate to bring your creation to life. Not a bad concept!

Worse was the execution, what you’d actually do with your creatures after they were made. Ideally the game would somehow use the contours and colors you attached to your newborn monstrosity to give it statistics, and then you could command it into full-animated battle against other monsters. Instead, you were given a variety of minigames to use your monster in, which didn’t have the same appeal. Rather than having Pokemon-style moves, they played a number of variations on volleyball, or racing, or some such.

Youtuber Camobot put the game through its paces in a 14-minute review. Here it is:

I think the video has its faults, but it mostly serves its purpose of presenting a noble experiment that never got a rerelease, and might earn a cult following today if it were. I wonder especially, if the Dreamcast hadn’t failed, if Amazing Island might have seen release on it, or on its successor if one had happened. It didn’t seem to sell too well on the Gamecube, and it probably would have done even worse on the PS2 or Xbox.

The failure of games like Amazing Island at market is why most games are largely similar by-the-numbers products nowadays, that don’t take risks but are made to ensure a modest yet predictable profit. This is why, when you see a game that you might like that looks like it might really try something different, you should take the plunge, if you are able, and check it out. Until developers are better incentivized for taking chances making novel and unique games, they’ll have to stick to churning out the bland gruel that still moves copies, and no one really likes that, not the players, and not even the devs.

Farming Simulator eSports

The life of a farmer is a difficult one. Most people don’t know how difficult it is to succeed in agriculture. It’s not enough to harvest fields of wheat and to bale hay. The first bale of hay collected in a barn, as it turns out, sets a multiplier! And any grain collected in the silo, and any hay harvested in the upper floor of a barn (but only the upper floor), is not only affected by that multiplier, but reduces the multiplier of rival farmers. I presume all of this is due to subsidy laws.

These are the idiosyncratic rules of Farming Simulator eSport, a popular (in some circles) gaming competition, it seems, in Germany. Teams are sponsored by agricultural equipment manufacturers, and there’s a pick/ban system in place for tractor selection. Pro gamers compete to get bales into their barns (preferably by that magic window into the upper floor!) before their opponent does, and can raise and lower a bridge on the rival farm, in an effort to mess them up, all while real farmers share pints of lager and look on in confusion.

People Make Games looked into this scene and explains it over half an hour, here:

Inside the Peculiar World of Farming Simulator eSports (Youtube, 32 minutes)

Food Fight Frenzy

I am frankly amazed that this is happening, that the company now calling itself Atari seems to be on a streak of good, or at least interesting, decisions, but in addition to releasing Atari 50 and buying Digital Eclipse, they’re making updated versions of classic Atari (and Stern) arcade games, and an upcoming release of theirs is a personal favorite of mine: Food Fight!

It isn’t even their only recent sequel to it they’ve made; another would be the also-upcoming FPS Food Fight: Culinary Combat for the (current) VCS. But that seems to be an inspired-by game with cartoony 3D graphics; this looks much closer to the arcade original, and made by people with a deep love for it.

I don’t know what’s inspired their warming up this particular old property, but Food Fight was a fine game that was sabotaged mostly by the classic US arcade crash. Charley Chuck is a kid out to eat a giant ice cream cone before it melts, but out to stop him are four chefs. Scattered through each level though are piles of food that can be thrown, by either Charley or the chefs.

Like the cone that’s Charley’s goal, the original Food Fight drips with character. There are so many clever touches, especially for a game from 1983. Charley’s large eyes look in the direction he moves; the analog joystick registers many more directions than the standard digital 8-way joysticks in common use at the time. The named chefs have different personalities, along similar lines as Pac-Man’s ghosts. Each kind of food has different properties when thrown. Charley smiles when things are going well, and bears a more neutral expression when they aren’t. Charley can bring along one piece of food from a previous level. If a particularly clever move is pulled off, the game will call for an instant replay. The level select screen lists a flavor for each ice cream cone, with higher levels having dual flavors.

This is how Food Fight played in arcades (7 minutes):

The new game supports up to four players around a cocktail table form factor, in a last-kid-standing scenario. Instead of just flinging food at the chefs, the other players are also viable targets.

The original Food Fight was one of the last arcade projects of early independent game developer GCC, who designed games for other companies to publish. They also made Ms. Pac-Man and Quantum, and they also designed the Atari 7800 console and many of the arcade ports that were made for it.

Here’s is Arcade Heroes’ post on Food Fight Frenzy. Arcade Heroes also did a nine minute video talking about the game’s creation, and the changing climate at Atari that resulted in its creation being greenlit, and that shows off the gameplay, which looks very faithful to the original!

People who want to hear quite a bit more about this upcoming release can watch/listen to episode 140 of the Youtube/podcast series Indie Arcade Wave (36 minutes).

Popular Science(?!): Getting Classic WordArt Back In MS Word

There’s many kinds of entertainment you can get from computers. Nominally we’re about games here, but what is a game? There are games implemented in Microsoft Excel. You can have fun at a command line. And you can enjoy making WordArt in Microsoft Word.

Thing about that. WordArt exists in “modern” Word, but it’s not the version that existed in earlier Windows versions. (I can’t bring myself to use the word modern without qualification for Office since they introduced that damn Ribbon and no I won’t let that die.) How to get to it? I don’t know, because Ribbon, but if you search for it in Word’s feature search interface it’ll pop it up for you, not show you where it is in Word’s UI, but just provide it, so if you want to use it again in future you’ll have to search for it again.

Current-day, bad WordArt

Yes, I I recognize this is already turning into a diatribe. But it goes to back up my point that Word is deep into its dotage, and the degradation of WordArt is just another symptom of that.

But as it turns out, the code for classic WordArt is still in Office, it calls out to us despite all the efforts of current-day Office’s hellish UI, and how fitting is it that that other relic of happier times, Popular Science, should be the publication to tell us how to reach out to it.

Classic, good WordArt

Justin Pot is the one who shows us the way there, and let me say, if you think my own writing style is comically florid, you have to see how they described the process.

Pot’s piece is good, but does slightly imply that the main interest of old WordArt is kitsch. That is a factor sure, but the old style of WordArt is intrinsically more powerful than the watered-down version. You can just do a lot more with it! Just look at that example! It is just a tool; what matters is what use you put into it, and I feel like Microsoft tamed the feature’s power mostly because it speaks of fun, and that is something they have made a conscious effort of stomping completely out of MS Office, the same reason they haven’t included easter eggs in “serious software for well over a decade now.

Anyway, to get the old WordArt back, you have to save your document in “Compatibility Mode,” which in this case means in the format of Microsoft Word from 97-03, as a .doc file. I wonder what other aspects of old Word remain in the software? Could it be that the classic menu bar is still in there somewhere? Oh be still my rapidly-beating heart!

HG 101 Forum Thread on Obscure Arcade Secrets

Today’s find somehow doesn’t involve a Youtube video! On the forums for Hardcore Gaming 101 there’s a thread, inspired by the lengths players must go through to reach the true ending of Bubble Bobble, about arcade games with super obscure secrets. I don’t even think I know what they’re talking about with the Rainbow Islands secret, involving playing through the game seven times doing a minor thing different each time. It sounds like a bit of a money sink to me, but this was the era of Tower of Druaga after all. The thread is here.

If you don’t know about the absurd secrets in Bubble Bobble, the best guide I know of to those is still the Bubble Bubble Info Pages, last changed in 1998 but still on the web after all these years!

Kimimi the Game-Eating She Monster: Brandish

I still have to figure out some consistent way to differentiate things we’re linking to, in titles, from our own content. It’s making me uncomfortable how things we link to on other sites are generally not distinguishable from things we make ourselves. The site: title construction is the best I’ve come up with for that, although I also use it for our own subseries, like Sundry Sunday. Please, except this rambly prologue as an introduction!

Kimimi the Game-Eating She Monster writes lots of interesting stuff, and we’ve linked to her several times before. In fact I have a whole Firefox window devoted to pieces she’s made. This one is about the Super Famicom (and others) game Brandish, one of Nihon Falcom’s many interesting RPG experiments.

Brandish is played in a dungeon where each level is a map, and monsters appear on it, and you attack them in real-time, without going to a separate screen. That is to say, combat isn’t “modal.” When switches change the state of the dungeon, you see their results happen immediately. Areas blocked to you are shown as just plain wall until you reveal them.

These things all make Brandish seem almost like (here’s that word again) a roguelike. But Brandish’s dungeon isn’t random, but set; the game isn’t a generalized system like roguelikes often are, but has set scenario. That makes it seem like a lot of other early RPGs. And one weird thing about it that’ll definitely require some adjustment is, Brandish is programmed so that your character always faces up; if you rotate to face a direction, the dungeon rotates around you. But the game doesn’t use the Super Nintendo’s “Mode 7” rotation feature: the dungeon turns immediately, which is disorientating until you get used to it, and even, it’s still a little disorientating. Brandish probably works that way because it was originally a Japanese PC game, and to implement Mode 7 rotation would mean having to rework some graphics to reflect the different perspectives.

Here’s a Youtube video of a playthrough. Skip past the intro, and what I’m talking about should become clear:

And now you’re ready for Kimimi’s own piece on Brandish. She likes it! And I agree, it’s a very interesting system. Brandish was popular enough to get multiple sequels. If you want to learn more about the series generally, Kurt Kalata’s Hardcore Gaming 101 has a good introduction to them.

Kimimi the Game-Eating She Monster Covers Brandish

Nicole Express: Nintendo’s First Consoles

Long long before the Switch, Wii-U, Wii, 2DS, 3DS, Gameboy Advance, Gamecube, SNES, Super Famicom, Gameboy, NES or Famicom, there were Nintendo’s Color TV Game 6 and 15.

Nintendo’s second console – the Color TV Game 6, released a week earlier, was the first
(Image from Nicole Express)

These were what are now called dedicated game consoles, that can only play games that are built into it. It used to be that these were the only kinds of consoles there were. They’ve made something of a comeback recently, for this is essentially what units like the NES Mini and Atari Flashback are.

Nicole Express has the details. Some interesting facts from her post:

- The Color TV Game 6 and Color TV Game 15 use the same system-on-a-chip design. As sometimes happened back then, the 6 is electrically capable of playing all the games the 15 can, but doesn’t make the 15’s extra game’s selectable.

- The paddles don’t use potentiometers, like nearly every other paddle controller does. They’re switches, meaning no analog control. When your paddle moves up or down, it’s always at a constant speed, making the included Pong-style games play much than on practically every other system.

- All of Nintendo’s game consoles have used a three letter designation. The Switch’s is HAC. The Wii was RVL (Revolution), the DS was NTR (Nitro), the Gamecube was DOL (Dolphin) and the Famicom was HVC. This system may have originated way back here with the Color TV Game: it’s code was CTG.

First is the Worst: Nintendo’s Color TV Game 6 & 15 (Nicole Express)

/dev/scream

Computer entertainment is a wide field, and it’s easy to forget that it’s not all jut vidja gmaes. Por ejemplo.

On Linux machines, there is a system “device” called /dev/zero. If you pipe its contents into something else, like a file, it provides an endless stream of zero bits.

Someone, going off of that idea, created another virtual device called /dev/one. It produces an endless sequence of 1 bits. Usually this takes the form of 255 bytes, which are binary 11111111.

/dev/zero is more useful than /dev/one, since zero bits also make zero bytes. Usually, if you’re using /dev/zero, you don’t actually care much about the data you get anyway. /dev/one is mostly for the entertainment of a weird sort of Linux user, presumably one that makes jokes about vi and Emacs.

Well to that kind of person, /dev/scream should be 20% more entertaining still. (A 20% increase should rightfully, I think, be called a dash.) It produces an endless randomized sequence of two characters, capital and lowercase A, and capital and lowercase H. So:

“AHAhaHaAAHHahaaAhAhHAHaAhAAHHhah”

The fact that it could be interpreted as either a sequence of screaming, or a sequence of laughing, could be taken as either a bug or a feature.

/dev/scream (GitHub)

Hidden Dialogue in Earthbound

It might not seem like it, but in the 8- and 16-bit era, text in a game was rather expensive.

The expressive power of an English sentence is great, but in a way, that of an equal number of bytes of assembly is greater, due to it living and working in the machine, and not just in the head of the player. A page of text is about 700 words; at an average of five characters each, uncompressed that’s 3,500 bytes, or 3.5 kilobytes. By contrast,the whole OS of the Commodore 64, Kernel and BASIC ROMs combined, is 8K.

Most JRPGs are thought to have lots of text, but really they have less than you might think. Square used a few tricks to make a little text seem like more than it really was: like the use of larger fonts, and using graphics to put on little skits to illustrate scenes instead of just displaying them as plain old words. And of course there’s compression. A good compression scheme, while troublesome for fan translators, can still cut down the size of text by half.

But Earthbound is a unique game in many ways, and one of them is the amount of text it has. Creator Shigesato Itoi is a copywriter and essayist, and he wrote a ton of words for Mother 2, Earthbound’s Japanese version. Translator Marcus Lindblom gave it a localization that many regard as one of the greatest of all, that manages to get across much of the wit and charm of the original.

It was a huge task. The text dump on GameFAQs, compiled by someone going by the name “BlueberryButtface,” is 391 kilobytes; the size of the game’s ROM is a bit over 3 megabytes. A direct comparison isn’t really helpful because the dump on the page is uncompressed, but it’s still useful to get a sense of scale.

A lot of this text, as it turns out, is hidden. Not in the sense of being locked off from the player, unused in the game. The text is findable in the game, but much of it is obscure, available only at a specific part of the game, or easy to miss. And, this being Earthbound, much of the text is pretty funny!

On Youtube (again), Cybershell has put together a 28-minute video that uncovers much of this hard-to find text. I already knew about much of it, because I’m weird like that, but it’s nice to have someone present a guide to what’s there and how to find it. A lot of it is the text of the Hint Guy, who, as in the style of Nintendo’s games at the time, will give you a pointer to whatever you have to do next in the story if you pay him a fee. All the hotels in the game have newspaper text appropriate to the point of the story you’re in, even the one way back in Onett, the starting town. Items have interesting descriptions if you think to ask for them. And of course, after you win the game, you can go back in and talk to the NPCs on the way back home, and frog help me, Shigesato Itoi wrote, and Marcus Lindblom translated, congratulatory text for nearly everyone in the game. And there’s more, even than that.

Here’s the video. It’s a fun use of half an hour, if you have any interest in Earthbound.

Rare and Obscure Dialogue in Earthbound (Youtube, 28 minutes)

Space Harrier Version Comparison

I’ve been visiting the Space Harrier series lately, mostly Planet Harriers, the 2000 arcade sequel that somehow escaped getting a Dreamcast port.

Google picked up on that (ugh) and pointed me to a 55 minute video comparison of home versions. I don’t think any of you will want to watch the whole thing, but I’ll embed it as a place to start from:

Space Harrier ports are interesting because of how impossible it was for home versions of the time to simulate it. It was a technical marvel in arcades, at a time when generally arcade hardware tended to be miles better than any ports. So, few of these versions have even a slight hope of matching up.

But that makes them interesting! Every one of them had to make a compromise between Space Harriers many different facets, and try to get as much of the arcade’s feeling through despite severe hardware limitations. The arcade beats most of them for quality, of course, with few exceptions.

Frank Herbert’s Book on Computers

Frank Herbert, of course, is the person who created and wrote the first Dune books. You remember Dune, don’t you? Paul Atreides, Muad’Dib, Bene Gesserit, Baron Harkonen, etc? Notably, in the backstory to his sci-fi epic masterpiece, there was a time called the Butlerian Jihad, where all computers and robots were destroyed and it was declared taboo to create a machine to do the thinking of a human being. These days, doesn’t seem like such a bad idea!

Well he was a bit of a tech enthusiast at the time, and he wrote a book about computers, possibly to try to not get too full of themselves, entitled “Without Me You’re Nothing: The Essential Guide to Home Computers.” The computers in question are Apple IIs and Atari 8-bits, so it may seem kind of quaint today. Also, the link is on the Internet Archive, and it’s one of those funky books that you have to “check out,” for about an hour, because every viewed copy is backed up by a physical edition they have in holding. You know, because publishers suck!

Still, for periods of an hour at a time, it is a portal into a simpler time, where computers typically had 64 kilobytes of memory or less. Will they inspire you to destroy all thinking machines and train a cadre of people to do complex math in their heads? I’m going to guess no, even though Apple products are one of the subjects of the book. In order to be inspired really loathe computers, I think you have to have at least a 300-baud modem.

Without me you’re nothing: the essential guide to home computers, by Frank Herbert (archive.org, 307 pages[!], readable for periods of one hour at a time)

Note: the above was written before a certain infamous court case that curtails the Internet Archive's ability to offer books for virtual loan, because surely their offering it to check out interferes with the Herbert estate's ability to profit off of a 40-year-old computer book focusing on 8-bit microcomputers. And I can't currently check if the book can be seen, because substantial parts of the Internet Archive are still offline due to recent actions by hackers. So, the usability of the above link may have diminished.

GDQ Animations on GitHub

It turns out that the various animations that Games Done Quick uses are all in a repository on GitHub, where you can download them and run them yourself, and even make contributions if that is something you feel up for. The require Node.js, and a little command line use and tinkering to get started (it turns out you’re supposed to run npm install from within the repository folder, not from outside of it as implied by the instructions).

The repository can be obtained here. I got it working, and here are some of the displays running from my own machine. And don’t forget that SGDQ 2024 is still going!

GDQ Animation Repository (github.com)

Doing Weird Things To A Sega 32X

The Youtuber: MattKC Bytes
What he did: Unexpected things to Sega’s aborted Genesis/Mega Drive add-on.
The address: here.
The length: about seven minutes.

The explanation: Did you ever play around with a 32X? Evidently not a lot of people did. It was straaaange. Unexpectedly powerful! A bit misjudged! Hosted a port of DOOM! Had a port of Virtua Racing that compares favorably with the Saturn version! Had that crazy hard-to-play Knuckles game that gave us Vector the Crocodile!

Have you ever hooked one up though? Its hardware is odd. It’s like a completely separate console to itself. The Mega Drive wasn’t made to support add-on processors and chips like that, so Sega used a clever solution: the 32X has its own video output, and also a video input. You plug the Genesis’ output into the 32X, and then the 32X into your TV. The 32X mixes the Genesis’ signal into its own, as if it were chromakeyed. Since the 32X cartridge supplies the program running on the Genesis as well as itself and they can talk to each other, the two processors and graphics chips should be able to sync perfectly, if awkwardly.

But: because the Genesis’ video signal emerges from that console through this external wire before reentering the 32X, it’s possible to do things to it while in transit. The Genesis supplies video timing information that the 32X relies on, so you can’t get a signal from the add-on without the Genesis’ AV plugged into it, but the Genesis does produce a viewable video signal that you can see on its own.

All the details are in the video, which has been embedded below for your convenience and amusement.

Excellent Breakdown of Wii Music Capabilities

By that title, I don’t mean the capabilities of the Wii title called Wii Music*. The video below, from Dublincalif, is about the properties of the Wii’s sound system itself. It’s 24 minutes, but pretty interesting for all that, and it’s presented really well. It’s a model explainer video, and a great first effort in that style from its maker!

You might think that all the music on the Wii is just streamed, either from audio tracks or files, but it isn’t. The Wii has fairly little NAND storage, and music is a major consumer of storage space, so a lot of its music is sequenced, essentially MIDI files played with sample banks, with optional effects added. The video is a great overview of its features and capabilities.

* Of random interest: Wii Music’s data is amazingly small! Of that 4.7GB DVD it resides on, it uses less than 10 MB!

The Wii’s Music Is A Bit Complicated (Youtube, 24 minutes)

Bringle’s Obscure Changes in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

I wish that these videos weren’t always videos. A lot of this information would be delivered just as effectively in text, but these days a lot of game researchers have abandoned good old text for flashy video, or otherwise locked-off Discord servers that don’t add to our common body of knowledge. I’ve complained about this before, and I am liable to keep complaining about it. Because I’m right about this, and yet it doesn’t change. Get to fixing this, world!

The video (21 minutes) has a lot of interesting changes though. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has sustained a huge amount of fan interest over the years, due to its story being actually really good for a Mario game, it’s terrific sense of humor, and its deep gameplay. It’s generally agreed to be the highlight of the whole Paper Mario series, building on the ideas of the first game.

This is a good opportunity to muse upon what the gameplay merits of TYD are. I identify these:

- The combat system, which keeps most of your moves useful in different ways by giving them special properties that make intuitive sense. Jumps can’t hit spiked enemies or enemies on the ceiling, while hammer attacks only hit the first enemy in line and can’t hit enemies in the air. There are exceptions to these rules, but they’re more costly. Follower attacks also have their own limitations along these lines.

- The action commands, and Guard and Superguard functions. Paper Mario wasn’t the first JRPG to add a timed minigame to combat (that may have been Super Mario RPG), but the design here is very good. Most moves have an action command minigame where good performance increases the move’s power. Guard reduces the damage taken from attacks by pressing a button in a brief time window, while Superguard negates damage if a different button is pressed in a briefer time window. The button you press changes both the difficulty and the reward. Both aren’t easy to perform consistently, as many enemy attacks have tricky timing, but the Superguard bonus is great enough that it’s really tempting to use it. All three of these functions largely replace the general randomness and variance in JRPG combat, making it a lot more skill-based. (Finding ways for players to demonstrate skill in RPG-style games is a long-standing design challenge. I should write something about that here in the future!)

- And then there’s the joy of exploration, and the many secrets in the game world that reward it. Paper Mario had a bunch of them, but TYD really goes overboard. I can’t name a game with as much cool stuff thrown into its game world for players to just happen upon. The old line used in many Nintendo game manuals is to “try everything,” but how much of everything should the player really try? TYD is one of the few games that feels like it lives up to the true breadth of that word. There is a character in the game whose purpose is to give the player hints at finding obscure secrets. The Trouble Center offers further rewards and fleshes out the game world by giving Mario and friends the opportunity to perform helpful tasks for people. There’s so many things to do!

Super Paper Mario also had a lot of tricks, but it had a worse story (IMO), and it completely abandoned the classic Paper Mario battle system. Later Paper Mario games went in a completely different direction with unique battle systems for each. It was Thousand Year Door that got the most right in a single game.

So, um. The video! Yes, watch it, it’s interesting.

Obscure Changes in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (Youtube, 21 minutes)

Vivian in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is Trans

She is! She always has been!

Image from abadidea on Mastodon, who got it from Nintendo Life

I had heard this fact but wasn’t sure if it was actual lore or fan-canon, a character who had been adopted by the community as trans. But as it turns out she always had been in the original Japanese, and in some localizations. Nintendo of America censored that aspect of the character for the US audience.

It’s funny. Those of us in the US who “consume media” that’s been localized for international audiences sometimes hear of those countries where one aspect or other has been papered over, like making Steven Universe’s Ruby a boy so her and Sapphire’s relationship would play better in countries with more homophobic cultures. Show creator Rebecca Sugar pushed against those localization decisions by, when the characters got married, making sure Ruby was the one in the wedding dress. It’s a decision that may have shortened the show’s run (the last season feels rushed), which reflects poorly on producer and airer Cartoon Network.

We in the US can tut at this, and look down upon those “less enlightened” places. Well, here’s a case where it was done for us, to us. And it’s been remedied in the new release, not a change, but the removal of a change. Vivian isn’t a bit character either, she’s an important part of the story.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is the highlight of the Paper Mario series, its gameplay is terrific, and it’s story is hilarious and surprising, much better than a Mario game has any right having. It has many fans, and I’m sure most of them didn’t know either. When they play through this and find out about Vivian, I think it’s going to spark a number of conversations. It may also spark a few realizations.

Moviecart

After a long day in the data mines, it’s certainly nice to come home, walk over to the movie shelf, select a movie to watch, then put it into my movie player of choice: an Atari 2600. A demonstration (40 seconds):

Moviecart’s actually been around, judging by the date on that video demonstration, for at least three years now, but is currently accepting preorders for $25. The video only uses half the screen, and has glitches and distracting horizontal and vertical lines running through it, but at they say, it’s amazing that the dog talks at all. Or in this case, that the dog can display roughly arbitrary video and sound, two things the Atari usually finds it impossible to pull off.

How is it done? With custom hardware, certainly, but even granting that there’s only so much that can be done with the VCS/2600’s display chip, the restrictive funnel through which the cart’s video must be squeezed.

After that, getting all that data to the screen is done through presenting it to the VCS/2600’s address space at the absolute limit of the system’s ability to use it. The real work is done by a processor on the Moviecart’s board, which handles reading a specially-encoded video file on a Micro SD card and doing all of the work in getting it ready for the screen, so the VCS’s 6507 processor has to do as little as possible itself.

Moviecart, from lodefmode (github)

PannenKoek’s Epic 3 3/4-Hour Explanation Of Mysterious Mario 64 Invisible Walls

You may remember PannenKoek as that person who has been trying to figure out how to complete Super Mario 64 in as few A button presses as possible, an odd, but no less noble, quest. They’ve been at it for quite a long time now, 13 years, but they’re still going. They have two loaded Youtube channels containing the pixelated fruits of their labors, PannenKoek2012 and UncommentatedPannen. Whenever you see a random Youtube video that uses the File Select music from Super Mario 64 as background music, they’re paying homage to PannenKoek, god of the game explainers.

While explaining aspects of Mario 64, that foundational, primordial 3D platformer, sometimes they ably explain complex and niche topics in computer science along the way. We’ve covered their videos before, more than once probably, and marveled at how by explaining some unexpected behavior in Nintendo’s N64 launch title, they have managed to make something important about how computers do things comprehensible. In three videos, they explained how Mario 64 handles terrain well enough that one feels (somewhat misguidedly) that they could implement their own 3D platformer. They made a bizarrely interesting video about how characters blink their eyes that shows various ways that games implement timers and randomness. They have a whole video on pseudorandom number generation, and another on floats, that computer number representation system that has deeply weird implications.

Their most recent video is a three hour, 45 minute epic that explains why sometimes, when Mario jumps, he seems to strike something invisible in his way. It’s a consequence of several unusual decisions Nintendo made in constructing the physics of Mario’s world, which includes the fact that level edge walls in Mario 64 aren’t implemented as geometry, but as a consequence of the lack of geometry: if there is no floor over a space, then the game rules it as Out Of Bounds. It won’t let Mario enter this completely invisible unspace under normal conditions, and will instantly kill him if he somehow enters into it. It is like antimatter. And that’s not even getting into how ceilings operate.

Here, then, it is. It is a lot, and I wouldn’t blame you if you can’t get through it all, but for a certain intersection of game obsession and brain chemistry, it is engrossing, and that’s before they even get to the periodic table of invisible walls:

Could You Realistically Survive in Super Mario 64?

It’s a fun idea, to determine if you, as a physical human being person, with all your physical human being person needs, could survive in the world of Super Mario 64, were you somehow to be transported there permanently.

The video embedded and linked below, from a Youtuber named Pretzel, is the projected beginning of a series about whether you could survive in different game worlds. Games are abstractions, and play life in them often leaves out details like drinking, eating, or (let’s face it) pooping. By ignoring that and trying to look at them as if they were actual places you are, by definition, engaging in pedantry, ignoring the essential nature of these places. But it’s fun to think about somewhat. At least we know this world has cake!

Could You SURVIVE in Super Mario 64? (Youtube, 14 minutes)

Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door Obscurities

It’s been some time since we had one of these obsessive quirk videos. I’d been feeling a bit self-conscious about using them a lot I suppose, plus none of them struck my brain the right way. Well, here’s one that’s pretty good, from Youtuber Bringles (21 minutes):

I won’t like this will be mostly interesting to people who are familiar with the game, but I should explain a few things in case you aren’t but still want to watch.

A “superguard” is a special mechanic in TYD. After the concept was pioneered with Super Mario RPG, the first Paper Mario also included a timed reaction move, often a button press, you can do in response to enemy attacks to reduce damage. But singe the first two Paper Mario games purposely keep their battle numbers pretty low, with most attacks doing single digit damage, sometimes even just one or two points, any reduction to that ends up being significant.

Those moves are called guards. Thousand Year Door goes a step further, with superguards. If your reactive button press happens within a three frame window of the attack’s impact, your character will often take no damage. That’s really strong, which is why both the frame window is so slight and way some enemies play cagey timing games with their attacks to try to trick you into guarding early or late.

One of the things the video reveals is that, in Western releases of the game, nearly every non-item attack in the game can be superguarded. The Japanese version, which was released first, has a lot more attacks that can’t be superguarded, making this a mechanic that was un-nerfed.

Another interesting mechanic revealed by the game is how a lottery in the game works. Players draw a ticket and try to match a four-digit number. You might expect that to work randomly, but it’s much less random than you’d think. Instead it decides how many real-world game days (using the Gamecube’s real-time clock) it’ll be before each of the four tiers of prices will be won. The number of days is random, but only by a bit: it’ll still be a while before the wins happen, but within a limited range. The highest prize won’t be won until at least 335 days since the game was started. There is no chance of winning it before then! That might sound unfair, but since it’d be a 1-in-10,000 chance of winning it fairly, it’s more bending the odds in the player’s favor. Although honestly, who would even be playing the same game of PM:TYD nearly a year after beginning it?

One more thing you should know is that TYD has this stageplay aesthetic in its battle sequences, which take place on a wooden stage in front of an audience of Mario characters. Some enemies play around with the stage (like hanging from the ceiling), but the audience also can play a role in the fights. The video reveals that two particular kinds of audience members don’t trigger randomly as one might expect, but react to certain failures of the player’s behalf during combat. X-Nauts throw rocks if an attack hits but does zero damage (like if the target is invulnerable or guarding), and Hammer Bros. throw hammers at you if Mario misses with a Hammer attack, in something like a display of hammerer pride.

It’s an interesting video all in all, concerning a game that’s much deeper than it may seem at first.

Obscure Mechanics in Thousand Year Door (Youtube, 21 minutes)

How Speedrunners Get N64 Control Sticks

The Nintendo 64 broke ground for Nintendo in many ways, but arguably the worst part of that was the controller.

I’m not one of the people who complains about not understanding the controller or how to hold it. That part’s pretty easy to understand: you hold it one way, with the central prong in your left hand and the right handle in your right, for games that use the control stick like Super Mario 64; you hold it with one handle in each hand for games that instead use the Control Pad. It makes sense that Nintendo still wanted to feature the Pad prominently since it was one of the defining characteristics of the NES and SNES era.

The Control Pad is durable and easy to use, even if it does result in bruised thumbs when pressed with force, as can happen in challenging games. What’s not so durable is the N64’s signature control device: the Analog Stick. A special design that didn’t see much update after the Nintendo 64, because of the “white dust of death,” a mysterious fine powder that emerges from the inner workings of the stick after heavy use. Along with the powder always came degraded control performance: the stick would lose some of its tight feel, wobbling when shaken, and would no longer recognize the full extend of its range. All official N64 control sticks would succumb to the dreaded dust with time.

During the console’s life the source of the powder wasn’t common knowledge. It turns out it’s the result of the control stick grinding against its housing and actually rubbing itself in a fine dust. The looseness came from the powder getting into the tight confines of the stick’s mechanism, and from the pivot chamber getting looser as it was ground away by the joystick.

Some games were notorious for decreasing a controller’s working life. The Mario Party series was infamous for demanding rapid spins of the control stick, that could produce the dreaded dust and wobble after surprisingly few games. But with use, it seemed that all the official joysticks would succumb to it eventually. Third-party sticks, such as the then-ubiquitious MadCatz sticks, didn’t suffer from the problem, but their control sticks weren’t as sensitive, and required a smidge more force to push. For demanding play, the official sticks are a must.

This has resulted in a big problem. Since all the Nintendo-made N64 sticks degrade eventually with use, and Nintendo isn’t making them any more, speedrunners playing on original hardware have few options for playing games the way they were intended by their designers. Some jealously hoard pristine sticks, which have become expensive, while others work to make replacements.

Retromeister on Youtube has made a 24-minute video explaining the problem, and the lengths to which runners have resorted to keep themselves playing. And this, following, is that very thing:

Super Mario Sunshine’s Substitution Cipher

Are you surprised by that title? It isn’t obvious that there even is one, but Youtuber 2CPhoenix makes a strong case that there is, that’s (mostly) consistent across the game’s signage! Here’s their video on it (9 1/2 minutes):

These kinds of ciphers aren’t to common in games, but they’re not unheard-of either. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker uses one for the Hylian language, which it even translates for you if you play through the game a second time, and there’s at least one other such language that’s used in Breath of the Wild for Shiekah artifacts. And of course, working out a cipher that’s used in many locations is a major late-game puzzle in Fez.

The “language” of what are possibly the Noki in Sunshine Mario Sunshine is one of those things where, like Bubble Bobble’s Bubble Alphabet, the letters are actually heavily stylized versions of our familiar Latin alphabet, meaning, if you kind of take your brain off the hook slightly and just try to read the glyphs like they were words, you can get a bit of a sense of what they’re saying. Or at least I can. A little.

It’s enough to make one want to take a second look at the fakey-letters in some other Nintendo games, such as the Splatoon and Pokemon series….

Technology Connections Examines Pinball Machines

Back in October, and again last month, the popular Youtube channel Technology Connections, which in the past has explicated the workings of the popcorn button on microwave ovens, an 80s home TV censorship device, and the marvels of heat pumps, among many other topics. The channel is great, a primary example of how to do Youtube explainer videos right. But, we’re mostly about games here, and they don’t often cover those. Until he recently did some videos on old pinball machines!

October 2023: How the 70s-era “Aztec” Pinball Machine Works (50 minutes)

December 2023: The Step-by-step Logic of Old Pinball Machines (43 minutes)

Mario Paint Data Overflow Error

There is a subtle flaw in SNES art creation tool Mario Paint. It has 32K of Save RAM, which is not technically enough to save an entire project, normal and animation canvases included. The program uses data compression to get everything to fit, and the compression is good enough that most of the time everything can be squeezed in, but such is the nature of data compression that it is not guaranteed to work on all possible data.

What happens when Mario Paint can’t fit everything into its save file? This:

A comment on the video gives purpose to the numbers the robot displays as it counts down. 100-25 is compressing the image; 25-12 is erasing the save RAM, and 12-0 is copying the data into save RAM.

TrueType Unicode versions of the Amiga System Fonts

Strictly speaking they’re not from a game, but the Amiga was regarded as a gaming computer, so you may be interested in these modern-OS compatible versions of the Amiga system font Topaz, with extra characters done in the style of the originals! They’re made by “Screwtapello” on Mastodon!

Amiga Topaz Unicode Nerd Font (gitlab.com)

Space Harrier Theme on Japanese Master System Hardware

Fact 1: the Japanese version of the Master System had an add on that provided FM synthesis sound synthesis, and greatly improved its music. Many US-released games have support for the add-on, but it was never released over here so that feature remained unused.

Fact 2: A later revision of the hardware in Japan (there called the Master System) had the FM chip built in. This version could even mix together the system’s default sound with the FM chip. And, if you turned the system on without a game inserted, it played a special version of the Space Harrier theme, programmed to take advantage of both chips.

This is that:

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops Repairs a Baby Pac-Man

Over on Mastodon, Dan Fixes Coin-Ops has been documenting an epic quest: the repair of a Baby Pac-Man machine.

It’s one of the non-Namco Pac-Man spinoffs that Bally/Midway released in the wake of the original’s extremely high popularity. I’d like to remind readers that while Namco has been the sole beneficiary of Pac-Man’s heights lately, the original game, at first called Puck-Man in Japan, was not popular there. The spin-offs, console ports, handheld games, trading cards, stickers, clothing, cartoon show, Christmas special, breakfast cereal and unnumbered other items, that was all Bally/Midway’s doing. Toru Iwatani created and designed it, his team made it into a game and cabinet, Namco released it in Japan to middling success, and from there Bally/Midway got behind it and turned it into one of the most gigantic video game hits there’s ever been, a machine that at one point had one hundred thousand units.

Now, I’m not going to deny that their effort led to some erasure of knowledge of Namco’s existence at the time. All those Pac-Man machines and spin-offs mentioned “Bally Midway Mfg. Co.,” with nary a mention of Namco. But it’s undeniable now that erasure is happening in the other direction: a search over the History page on official Pac-Man website has no mention of Bally at all, even though the page acknowledges that the game was “a major hit in the United States.”

Some of that success leaked back to Japan and fueled some Namco-made sequels: Super Pac-Man, Pac N Pal, Pac-Land, Pac-Mania, Pac-Man Arrangement and eventually Pac-Man Battle Royale and Pac-Man Championship Edition, and more recently things like World’s Largest Pac-Man and Pac-Man Battle Royale Chompionship.

Bally/Midway made their own sequels. One of those, Ms. Pac-Man (created by GCC), came to eclipse the original in popularity, but in addition to their licensing of Super Pac-Man and Pac N Pal they made Jr. Pac-Man (also from GCC), as well as Professor Pac-Man and this game here. The one Dan Fixes Coin-Ops repaired. Baby Pac-Man.

Baby Pac-Man is a game that only could be made by Bally, because it’s a video game/pinball hybrid.

Bally, together with the company that would buy them, Williams, is arguably the greatest pinball maker there’s ever been. Up until around 2000 (a heartbreaking year) they made wonderful machines like The Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Attack From Mars, Star Trek: The Next Generation and quite a few others. In 1982 though pinball was in a slump while video games had reign over arcades. The decision to make a game that connected one of the greatest arcade games of all with pinball must have seemed obvious. (It wasn’t their only attempt to capitalize on their golden license with a pinball table, witness Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man, which I’m informed was released eight months before Baby Pac-Man.)

The combination of an arcade video game and pinball makes for a unique experience. It also makes for a game which breaks down even more often than your standard arcade game, as the thread notes: there’s three computers in the thing, and it’s subject to all the typical arcade game problems, all the typical pinball problems, and special problems with the portions of the machine that connect the two halves together.

The thread begins memorably:

In case y’all were tired of hearing about popular Fediverse people making bad decisions, just thought I’d let y’all know I bought a 1980’s hybrid pinball/videogame tonight

Like this isn’t for a client, I’m not working on it to earn. This game COST money. This is my game now, I paid for it and it lives in my house. I’m not gonna get to give anybody a bill.

This is such a perversion of the natural order of things. I’ll probably route it one day, but for now this is an arcade machine that I SPEND money on!

It’s taken me a little while to get it into the house and have a chat with the mate who sold it to me and let the littleun have a go and put her to bed and fix a couple things and have a go myself so I’ve not been catching up on my notifications, I saw some questions so I’ll do a little thread on it over the next couple of days

I cannot stress enough that you should not buy one of these things

Folk who like 80’s pinball want stuff like this or Haunted House and you shouldn’t buy a Haunted House either

These are games for pinball techs or people with money to hire pinball techs or very close friends of pinball techs

Except Baby Pac-Man needs you to be friends with an arcade tech too.

He finally got it working after three months of work, and what a journey it is. He did it for love of the game: while Baby Pac-Man is dissed in some circles it’s a genuinely interesting game. But to like it, you have to abandon the relatively lenient expectations of classic arcade video games. Pinball is inherently unfair, and that unfairness oozes out and coats even the video portion of Baby Pac: the ghosts don’t waste time in coming after you, and you start with no Energizers: you have to earn them in the pinball portion, which for the most part you can only visit once per life/board. You can return to the video portion temporarily though by locking the ball in a scoop.

Here is the full thread (to date) in Masto Reader, which is a Mastodon version of Threadreader. It takes maybe half a minute to collect the posts and present them though, so to read the whole saga you’ll have to be a little patient.

An interesting video about Baby Pac-Man (although with some bad sound) District 82 Pinball’s here (12 minutes), which covers the tech and gameplay:

And Joe’s Classic Video Games’ demonstration (25 minutes):

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops: Baby Pac-Man Repair

District 82 Pinball’s Baby Pac-Man play and tech tips (Youtube, 12 minutes)

Joe’s Classic Video Games on Baby Pac-Man (Youtube, 25 minutes)

Pac-Store Animations with “Pac-Marie”

If it’s generally entertaining, I try to save game-related animations and cartoons for Sundays, but this is probably interesting more for how it illustrates how the Pac-Man property is changing. Yes, it’s another excuse to rant a bit about how Pac-Man’s lore is changing under Namco’s direction, like in the Baby Pac-Man post!

I recognize that Bally/Midway’s taking the lead on Pac-Man promotion and lore amounted to a bit of cultural chauvinism. In the early 80s, U.S. licensors of Japanese arcade games would outright put their own copyright notices on games. When I was a kid and Pac-Man fever was running at 104 degrees (Fahrenheit), I knew that Bally/Midway was a thing that existed, but nothing at all about Namco. They filled that widespread ignorance of the game’s origins with their own lore, starting with Ms. Pac-Man, and it’s surprising that now, long after their deal was dissolved and Midway games division consumer games division shut down, that their lore survived for so long.

Tengen’s first release of Pac-Man for NES, with Hanna-Barbera cartoon character designs. Image scavenged from an Ebay listing.

A lot of that has to do with the enduring popularity of Ms. Pac-Man. Other Bally contributions like Jr. Pac-Man haven’t proven nearly so enduring. Another part of the U.S. Pac-Man lore, that has ended up exerting a strong, almost unhealthy, influence over their property has been the Hanna-Barbera cartoon show, yes the one almost no one remembers except for its weird Christmas special, from 1982. That thing got two seasons, alongside likewise forgotten (and less durable) properties Richie Rich and The Little Rascals. H-B’s version of the characters continues to pop up randomly in different places, like the cover art for the original version of Tengen’s release of Pac-Man for NES.

The Hanna-Barbera cartoon was a strong influence over the art design and music of Pac-Land, which means among other things that that weird cartoon is now echoed in Smash Bros. Ultimate. Shh! No one tell Warner Bros!

Okay, time to spiral on down to the point of this post. A “pop-up store,” it seems, is a “retail concept” that involves setting up a small store for a limited period of time, often with a strong theme or a focus on a single brand. Kind of like a micro-sized version of Spirit Halloween.

Namco experimented with a Pac-Man-themed pop-up store in Japan in 2016. They called it “Pac-Store,” and they came up with its own idiosyncratic take on the Pac-Man lore for it, and made a series of short web cartoons to promote it. They’re still on Youtube, but they’re collected into one video by The Pac-Man Archive. That’s what is embedded below. Even though it’s mostly in Japanese you should watch a few minutes of it, if just to see how Namco has retconned the history of the hungry yellow sphere.

Like gag me with a spoon, it’s Pac-Marie! I love the Pac-gloves on this style of character.

From Ghostly Adventures: Pac-Man and friends who I don’t even care enough about to learn their names. UGH. That’s a lot of detail spent on the idea of Pac-shoes. Image from Gamespot.

Pac-Man has two assistants, but they’re not Ms. Pac-Man or Baby or Jr. They don’t even have “Pac-Mom,” Namco’s more-recent recreation of Ms. Pac that isn’t burdened by AtGames’ licensing with Ms. Pac-Man creator GCC. Instead, Pac is backed by “Pac-Marie” and “Pac-Little.” Keep in mind that the horrible “Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures” TV show was released around 2013, and its characters got unfortunately crammed into at least one iteration of Pac-Man Museum (the one I have on Steam). It’s interesting that they didn’t use those for Pac-Store. Maybe Namco was already coming to realize that Ghostly Adventures was destined for purgatory.

I actually don’t hate Pac-Marie, she’s got a fun design, and it’s not like Pac-People have much to distinguish them anyway. She’s still a hell of a lot more appealing than anything from Ghostly Adventures.

Pac-Store – All Animated Shorts (Youtube 8 1/2 minutes)

Don’t make her angry. You wouldn’t like her when she’s angry.

Names For Bootleg Pac-Man Ghosts

From a bootleg made by “SegaSA / Sonic.” Appears to have no relation to the Sega we know, or its spiny progeny. One of the few bootlegs that gives Pac-Man himself a nickname.

From a bootleg made to work on Moon Alien hardware. These are the “alternate” official names for the ghosts. Are they direct translations of the Japanese ghost names? Those are remarkably ugly ghost colors: hence, this remark.

These boring names are from “JPM bootleg,” I assume that is its maker.

From NewPuc2, Set 2. The best bootleg names I’ve seen so far, by a wide margin, even if they have nothing to do with their colors or personalities. I can almost forgive the misspellings.

A Forum Post About the Dithering in Return of the Obra Dinn

Dithering is a method (actually, several methods) of simulating more shades or colors than the hardware is capable of, by producing an array of dots that generally match the colors. One of the qualities of the classic, original Macintosh platform, which used a black-and-white monitor, was the way that it used dithering to give the impression of grayscale shading.

Nowadays most display devices are capable of, in Mac terminology, “millions of colors.” Macs are far from the only devices to have used dithering, but it’s a quality particularly distinctive to them.

There is an excellent article, here, written for developers but clear enough that many non-coders can understand it, that explains how its done, and demonstrates many styles of dithering. Interested readers may also enjoy this article, also on dithering. These pieces, all by themselves, are enough reason to make this post, but they’re not really the things that I want to draw attention to today.

The indie hit Return of the Obra Dinn, from five years ago, is notable because it’s a 3D game, but it uses black-and-white dithering, applied in real time, to do its shading as an aesthetic choice, and the effect is striking. Not just for the dithering, but because the dithering is stable; its dots don’t jump around in a randomish manner, but tends to look like an applied texture, even though it’s generated by an algorithm. You can see for yourself in this trailer:

The cool thing is (and I think it’s linked from one of the articles I presented above), the creator of Return of the Obra Dinn, Lucas Pope, wrote about dithering in a post on TIGsource while the game was in development, and he explains the experiments he ran to get the shading to work and be stable. I recommend graphics programmers to it without hesitation, and others might find it interesting to. I know I do! Have a look!

One of Lucas Pope’s dithering experiments (Note: this ebook version of the image doesn't include the animation)

Forum post describing dither experiments done for Return of the Obra Dinn (TIGsource)

Figuring Out Kakariko Village’s Unemployment Rate

MiyaTRT figured it out. Karariko’s Unemployment Rate. In both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

You might disagree with their methodology. Like in BotW he declares that Paya is unemployed even though she is obviously training to become village leader after Impa retires. But it’s still an entertaining video, and probably will tell you some things about Chicken Town’s NPCs that you didn’t know before, like that in BotW one of the townsfolk stamps on one of their neighbors crops at night!

Kakariko Village Has A 6.03% Unemployment Rate (Youtube, 7 minutes)

Identifying Luck in Mario Party 8

ZoomZike’s back with another epic-length exhaustive examination of the hidden mechanics and math behind a Mario Party title, this time the Wii game Mario Party 8. At three hours and 34 minutes it’s not as long as the nearly five-and-a-half hour video on Mario Party 7, but it’s not any less detailed.

I can’t think of any more detailed descriptions of the hidden mechanics of such a complex game as these. The time and effort it takes to make them suggests mania on the part of the creator, but I’m still glad they do! It’s fascinating the care that these apparently-chaotic games were made with, and how their secrets were discovered by attentive players. I suggest not watching it all in one sitting, but in segments over several days. If you care about the subject at all, that is. But as should be evident, I do care, and I think you might as well if you’re interested in game design and give it a chance.

Identifying Luck in Mario Party 8 (Youtube, 3h 34m)

Pixelfont

Pixelfont is a neat web tool that will take an image you provide, laid out in the proper format (which you have some control over, like character width and height) and will turn it into a pixel TrueType font for you to use! The gamedev applications of this should be obvious.

This isn’t the first free online font-building tool of this nature. The classic in the field is Fontstruct, which can also produce pixels that aren’t square, and can even extend outside of their cells, but also shows ads (although unobtrusive ones) and doesn’t let you import an image. Still, both are rather of use, or at least are fun to play with!

Pixelfont – Fontstruct

SpriteCell’s JRPG Magazine Review Archive

This is quite a collection to look through! While it was originally posted in 2021, it was updated with some new reviews just this past Sunday. They’re sorted alphabetically by game. They go at least as far back as NES Dragon Warrior, but some of them are really recent, especially with the addition of games reviewed by WalMart’s free pass-out magazine GameCenter. Their definition of JRPG kind of goes far afield, with some metroidvania-style Castlevanias, two Advance Wars games and a good number of half-related things.

Here are a small selection of included magazine scans….

GamePro’s review of the TurboGrafx port of Cadash, which unlike the Genesis/MegaDrive’s version has all four characters from the arcade game. The review’s written by “The Pizza Boys,” and has slangy writing and goofy little cartoon faces over the review scores, because it’s in a magazine written for teenage boys from 1991. Notice, the whole review is seven paragraphs, with four section headings, and four “PROTIP” inserts that don’t offer useful advice:

The review of Dragon Warrior from Game Player’s. I love it when magazines from this era publish the address of Nintendo of America. This review doesn’t really tell you much about the game though:

I had forgotten about this phase in Nintendo Power’s history. Check out their dissing the inventory of Earthbound, Nintendo’s own product! (I disagree, BTW, Earthbound is designed around its inventory limits, and they’re an essential part of the game!)

VideoGames & Computer Entertainment has always had a place in my heart, and Clayton Walnum is one of my favorite reviewers. In its heyday it had a no-nonsense approach to their reviews that appealed to me. It was the exact opposite of Electronic Gaming Monthly, a magazine that, honestly, I never much liked because of their loud editorial style and tendency to bloat their magazine up with advertisements:

Who doesn’t love Grandia? This review reminds us that we almost didn’t get an English version of it!

Little King Story is, no lie, one of the most overlooked Wii games of all time:

“VideoGames: The Ultimate Video Game Magazine” had a redundant title, but some fun layouts. Here’s their two page review of SNES Ogre Battle:

Sega Visions’ review of Phantasy Star II, a very grindy game without much story really, but with some really great twists:

EGM’s review of the remake of Shining Force for GBA:

GamePro’s review of Suikoden II didn’t age real well:

Vay, here mostly to show off the anime character portraits:

Zelda II in a late review from The Nintendo Official Magazine, with Dr. Mario riding along:

The JRPG Review Archive (spritecell.com)

The Complete Script of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

Not only is it everything in the game, including unused dialogue, but it’s not a text file on Pastebin, GameFAQs or Github, but on its own website, at dialoguetree.net! This means, when its domain expires, it’ll be gone from the web. Maybe the Internet Archive can rescue it….

If you’re not familiar with it, Thousand-Year Door is widely regarded as the best of the Paper Mario games. Not only does it update the game system of the original Paper Mario with all kinds of new ideas, but it has a fairly brilliant story given its having to work with Mario lore, and it has hilarious writing and memorable characters. Super Paper Mario, that followed it, has its charms, but a somewhat lesser story. And after SPM, it seems Nintendo decided that they weren’t fond of the branching-off of Mario lore that the Paper Mario games was doing, so games after that didn’t have as much of their own continuity.

This is the game where Mario joins a pro wrestling federation as “The Great Gonzales,” where he solves a murder mystery on a train (with a particular NPC who is slightly menacing somehow!), and has one of the best uses of Luigi from among all the Mario games: while you’re on your journey to rescue Peach, it turns out that Luigi is on his own weird adventure, in the “Waffle Kingdom,” that you only find out about from talking with him. Luigi his own crazy partners that accompany him, who have their own opinions about his adventure. Here is the page on dialoguetree.net that lists that part of the script–needless to say, it is spoilers, and if you plan on playing TYD you probably should experience it there first.

Dialogue Tree, Home of Game Scripts (although so far only Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door)

New Super Mario Bros. Wii’s Exception Handler Code

Codes are largely a forgotten element of video gaming. They started out as debug features that didn’t get removed before release, then they became easter eggs to reveal to favored players, ways to dispense unlockables, ways to provide extra difficulty balancing, and even publicity tools, before the age of DLC gave developers a way to profit off of bonus features. Why have players enter up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right when you could just sell them play advantages outright. I’m simplifying the situation a bit, sure, but I’m not simplifying by much.

Codes still exist, once in a while, but it seems like they’ve gone back to being development aids. One of them crept into New Super Mario Bros. Wii, but only becomes usable if the game crashes. The code is: Home, Minus, Plus, Minus, Plus, 1, 2, 1, 2, A. It brings up a scrollable register dump and stack trace, and other assorted information. It doesn’t let you continue playing. For players, it’s just a curiosity, but it’s a thing that is interesting.

This video shows it off:

New Super Mario Bros. Wii Exception Handler (Youtube, two minutes)

JRPG Junkie Describes Lost Sega Arcade RPGs

Another JRPG post! That’s two in a row, and it’s about some quite interesting games, including a lost Shining Force game. The website JRPG Junkie tells us about some Sega arcade games that fit the mold that sound like they would have been interesting to have tried.

Quest of D (image from JRPG Junkie)

Quest of D was a dungeon crawler where the player’s inventory was collected as physical trading cards, that were scanned into the game in order to use them. Shining Force Cross was similar in concept but without the cards; it lasted until 2016. And finally there was Soul Reverse, introduced in 2018.

The world of Japanese arcade games from around this time is largely a big dark area to me, and right around the time when the US arcade industry started its death spiral. It was also a time when server connectivity and online updates came into vogue, meaning when the servers went down, many of them ceased to be playable. It’s really sad that this has become essentially a lost age of gaming, at least to people outside of Japan. We probably couldn’t play them then, and we certainly can’t now.

Dungeons & Deckbuilding: Sega’s Lost Arcade RPGs (JRPG Junkie)

Glitches

When games go wrong.

Looygi Bros. Tests Glitches in Nintendo World Championships

Looygi Bros. obsessively plays various games and finds quirks, glitches and interesting facts about them. Their newest video tries out a bunch of known glitches in NES games and sees if they work in the new Nintendo World Championships speedrunning game. The result: in many, but not all, cases, Nintendo has put in code traps to make sure the games are operating as intended, and if they are set off, like if Mario goes through a wall or Link wraps around the screen, the emulator software declares Strategy Unavailable and resets the run. They tested 11 glitches in a ten-minute video, embedded here:

To summarize them:

1. Minus World: the trap occurs when Mario tries to slide through the wall at the end of World 1-2.

2. In Donkey Kong, it’s possible to climb down the first ladder, wrap around the screen, and end up on the girder right below the goal. They caught this one.

3. Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA) Fast Carpet: with two carpets spawned, you can travel extra fast. This one didn’t get caught, but the set-up time to use it makes its use in the challenge prohibitive.

4. Wrapping the screen in The Legend of Zelda. This is one of my least favorite glitches honestly. Nintendo caught it, you can’t glitch around the screen horizontally nor get Link into the top-of-screen status area. (I also dislike the term “HUD” for these areas. Dammit Jim, it’s a video game not a jet fighter.)

5. The “door jump” glitch in Metroid. This lets you use a door to get Samus inside the blocks that make up the edges of the screen, from there you can, depending on the situation, either wrap around the screen vertically or explore “secret worlds” created by interpreting random cartridge data as terrain. This one’s trapped.

6. Super Mario 2 double jump. I didn’t know about this one! In some circumstances when you’re near an enemy, characters can jump in mid air. This one is both not trapped, and actually useful in the challenge!

7. Super Mario 3 Fortress skip. In similar circumstances to passing through the wall in Super Mario Bros. to get to the Minus World, you can pass through a wall midway through the fortress to skip an area and go straight to the boss. This one’s trapped, probably checking for the same kind of situation as the Minus World trick.

8. Super Mario Bros. wall jump. Not trapped, and conceivably useful in the World 8-4 completion challenge to get into the elevated pipe.

9. Kid Icarus fortress 1 shortcut. There’s a way to glitch through a wall early in the route through the fortress that takes you almost to the end. This one is trapped, but it’s triggered, not when you get through the wall, but when you go through the room’s exit. It probably makes sure you go through all the essential rooms in order.

10. Super Mario Bros. 2 cave skip. It’s a way to glitch through a wall so you don’t have to wait for a bomb to explode. It’s tricky but possible, you end up taking damage to get through it though.

11. Super Mario Bros. 2 item attachment. A complex trick that lets you get items into areas where they aren’t intended to go. Technically this is untrapped and usable. In conjunction with the cave skip trick, it’s possible to kill Birdo with a Shy Guy, potentially with one throw instead of having to wait for three eggs to throw back at her. Looygi Bros was unable to get the whole trick to work in the World Championships software, but offers the possibility of it working to whoever can chain together all the necessary techniques.

I find it interesting that the tricks were disabled through traps instead of fixing their games, they seem to have enough technical know-how to know how the glitches work to check for them in the emulation layer, but maybe fixing them was deemed against the spirit of the game, or they didn’t want to risk changing the game’s essential behavior?

More NES Glitches Tested in Nintendo World Championships

We already linked to what turns out to be Part 1, back on Monday. This is Looygi Bros’ part two, nine minutes long:

Here’s our post on Part 1, and here’s a link to its video.

Looygi Bros. tends to make a series of videos on topics, so there will probably be a Part 3, and more. Instead of linking them all individually, I may wait for a bit and collect them all into one post, or maybe even add them to this post retroactively.

Here are the glitches in Part 2 listed out and explicated:

1. Super Mario Bros, jump over the flagpole in World 1-1: Requires time-consuming setup, and useless for saving time, as the result is Mario can’t finish the level, but it does work.

2. More invisible ladders in Donkey Kong’s Ramps level: There are more invisible ladders than the one demonstrated in Part 1, and these aren’t caught by traps! The current World Record recorded by the servers uses it, in fact, making it an essential strategy for anyone trying to beat it.

3. Kirby Credits Warp: One of the levels in the game has a massive trick, where Kirby can get inside a wall, and if they have the Stone ability (possible to get with Mix), can crash the game, and if the Start button is pressed on the same frame as Stone activating, the NES cart jumps straight to the credits! The crash however takes the NWC software back to the selection menu, and the Start button is disabled, so this one’s impossible to do.

4. Legend of Zelda moving through blocks: A frequently-used trick in speedruns, it’s not caught by the NWC software but there’s no place where it’s useful for saving time.

5. Super Mario Bros. 4-2 Wrong Warp: This is an alternate way to get to the 8-7-6 Warp Zone without having to reveal the hidden blocks, then hit and climb the vine, by going down the coin pipe shortly after without scrolling the screen far enough to change the secret area destination. Seems to be impossible to make work in NWC, as the game rewinds when the vine block is scrolled off-screen.

6. Super Mario Bros. 8-4 Wrong Warp: Done under similar conditions to the 4-2 wrong warp, this one is caught by the emulator and rewinds the trial.

7. Surviving Timeout in Metroid’s Escape Sequence: If Samus uses the final elevator with the right timing at the end of the escape, the explosion happens, but she survives to complete her mission anyway. It’s possible in NWC, but results in the longest-possible time to complete the trial, so it’s only useful to show off.

8. Super Mario Bros. 8-2 Bullet Bill Flagpole Animation Skip: If Mario bounces off of a low-flying Bullet Bill right at the end of 8-2, it’s possible to trigger the flagpole, but leave Mario before the block on which the pole rests. This results in him walking into it endlessly, but it triggers the level completion sequence, and means he doesn’t have to raise the flag or walk to the castle. It’s really only a slight time save, but it does work in the NWC version of the game.

Wherefore MISSINGNO?

It’s another highly technical game glitch explanation, although from a source we don’t often follow here: even though it has to do with explaining glitch Pokemon from the first generation of that series, it was the ending presentation of RustCon 2020 given by Siân Griffin, despite having little to do with Rust, other than showing the possible results of not having strong memory safety in your programming language.

It’s 39 minutes long, and it might prove difficult to get through for some, but it’s good and interesting information:

I will give you an overview:

When the original Pokemon games generate a random encounter with wild Pokemon in the overworld, they refer to one of two lists in RAM memory, copied there from ROM. One list is for “grass” Pokemon, that are generated when walking through tall grass, and one is for “water” Pokemon, that are generated when in riding a Pokemon using Surf over water tiles. The lists are copied when entering a new region, with a differing enemy generation table.

Due to an oversight in the tile checking code, a different subtile is checked when generating a Pokemon from each list. This means it’s possible, on some shores, to generate a Pokemon from the grass list when actually on the water. If one of the lists has a Pokemon generation rate of 0% for its type, then its list doesn’t actually get copied. Some regions that are largely aquatic aren’t intended to ever generate grass Pokemon, and so have a 0% grass encounter rate, and so never copy a grass Pokemon encounter table. The Pokemon generated come from whatever was in memory before, which may be all zeros, or may be whatever used the memory in that area previously. Pokemon has little RAM to work with, so the Pokemon generation table memory has other things that use that memory, and one of those is data for the trainers you trade Pokemon with.

If you use Fly to fast travel to Cinnabar Island, you can reach a region where the grass encounter table won’t have been initialized, but you can still cause grass encounters to happen by Surfing on the shoreline. The contents of that table can be manipulated by doing something else that uses that memory beforehand. As a result, you can cause an encounter with an undefined Pokemon, which has the name MISSINGNO and has various glitch attributes.

Because the Pokemon has faulty definitions for some of its attributes, like appearance and cry, it’s possible to crash the game or wreck your save data from playing around with MISSINGNO. But if you run from it, this damage can be minimized. And when it tries to mark that you’ve seen MISSINGNO in the bit array that records which Pokemon you’ve seen, it overshoot that table and actually sets a bit in the memory that follows it, which usefully, is your inventory. Generate the right version of MISSINGNO and run from battle, and you may suddenly find yourself with over a hundred of an item in a specific slot in your inventory. If you put the Rare Candy there before, you now can give your Pokemon over a hundred experience levels, or you could create stat-gain items this way, or lots of Master Balls.

Glitches such as these seems like they’re rare, but really, there’s lots of games that have them. It’s one of the perils of coding your game in assembly, really.

Noneuclidean Doom

Found by cortex over on Metafilter was this 2022 talk where someone noticed that the value of the constant pi in the source code of Doom was slightly incorrect. It’s a very tiny difference, and the results aren’t really visible in the game. So Luke Gotszling got the idea to compile the game with different values, and to see what the results are. They gave a talk about it! It’s 19 minutes long, and may be interesting if you’re of that frame of mind.

Non-Euclidian Doom: what happens to a game when pi is not 3.14159…. (Youtube, 19 minutes)

Wherefore Pac-Man’s Split Screen?

I did a search of the blog to make sure I haven’t posted this before. I’m really an obsessive tagger, and it didn’t show up under the tag pacman, so I think it hasn’t been seen here before. Let’s fix that now!

It’s a video from Retro Game Mechanics Explained from six years ago, and it’s 11 1/2 minutes:

Here’s a terse summary of the explanation, that leaves out a lot. Like a lot of 8-bit games (the arcade version uses a Z80 processor), Pac-Man stores the score in one byte, making the maximum it can count to 255. Since it doesn’t use signed arithmetic, it doesn’t use the high bit to signify a minus sign and so flip to negative at 128.

As an optimization, Pac-Man’s code uses the depiction of the maze in the video memory, itself, in the movement of both Pac-Man and the ghosts. If a spot has a maze wall tile, then Pac-Man can’t go there, and the ghosts won’t consider that direction when moving.

At the start of every level, the game performs some setup tasks. It draws the maze anew, including dots, Energizers and walls. One of these tasks is to update the fruit display in the bottom-right corner. It was a common design idiom at some arcade manufacturers, especially at Namco, at the time to depict the level number with icons in some way. Galaga shows rank insignia in the corner; Mappy has small and large balloons and mansions.

Pac-Man’s code shows the bonus fruit for each level, up to seven of them. If you finish more than seven levels, only the most recent seven are shown. If you get far enough eventually this will be just a line of Keys, the final “fruit.”

The code draws them from right to left. There’s three cases (the video goes into much more detail), but generally it starts from the fruit of six minus the current round number, draws it, counts up once and moves left two tiles, draws that one, and so on.

An interesting fact about Pac-Man’s graphics hardware is that the screen doesn’t map as you might expect to the screen! A lot of arcade games have weird screen mappings. Most consumer programmable hardware will map characters horizontally first vertically second, like a typewriter*.

In Pac-Man, the bottom area of the screen comes first in memory, starting at memory location hex $4000 (16384 decimal), and it doesn’t go forward like an English typewriter, but is mapped right to left. The first row of 32 tiles comes at $4000, and the second row is $4020. Then the playfield area is mapped completely differently, in vertical rows going down starting from the top-right of its region, then the next vertical row is the one to the left of that, and so forth to the left edge of the playfield. Then comes the score area at the top of the screen, which are two final rows mapped the same way as the bottom area, right to left.

From the video, this chart shows how Pac-Man’s screen memory is mapped.

When Pac-Man’s score counter overflows, it breaks the check for the limit for only drawing seven fruit, and causes it to draw 256 fruit. This is why the tops of keys are drawn beneath the upper-halves of the fruit at the bottom of the split screen. It also breaks the tile lookup for the fruit.

As it continues writing its mis-sourced fruit tiles in memory, it goes back in memory each time to draw the next fruit, and after the fruit section of the display it keeps going to the left, into the area where Pac-Man’s lives are displayed, then it keeps going and overwrites half of the maze tiles. Then Pac-Man’s lives (and any empty spaces that indicate the lack of lives) are plotted, overwriting fruit after the first ones drawn and obscuring some of the memory corruption.

Since the game’s actors use that data to decide where to move, and where dots and Energizers are placed, it means they can move outside the bounds of the maze, and that there won’t be enough dots for Pac-Man to eat to complete the level. That’s what makes it a kill screen: if Pac-Man loses a life, a few dots will get placed in the maze as the fruit are redrawn, but it’s not enough to bring the dot-eaten count to 244, which triggers the level clear function.

If the fruit-drawing loop didn’t stop at 256 (another artifact of using 8-bit math for the loop), it’d go on to clobber the rest of the maze, the score area at the top of the screen, then color memory (which has already been clobbered by the palette-drawing portion of the loop). Then, going by a memory map of the arcade hardware, it’d hit the game logic RAM storage, which would probably crash the game, triggering the watchdog and resetting the machine.

The visual effect of the split screen is certainly distinctive, enough that since Bandai-Namco has capitalized on its appearance at least once, in the mobile (and Steam and consoles) game Pac-Man 256. I’ve played Pac-Man 256: it’s okay, but, eh. It’s really too F2P unlocky.

* Yes, I just used a typewriter’s operation as a metaphor for something a computer does. It didn’t feel acceptable to use another computer thing as the comparison, since ultimately the reason they do it that way is because typewriters did it that way too. I guess the fact that it’s English reading order would be better to use, but I’m really overthinking it at this point.

Ocarina of Time-r Bug

Here is a very short video from Seedy, only a minute long, explaining an interesting bug in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

OoT handles fiery environments without the Red Tunic, and being held underwater by wearing Iron Boots without the Blue Tunic, in an unusual away. You might expect them to return Link to the last safe place he had been, like when falling into a void, or else maybe kill him instantly, or at least cause periodic damage. Instead, for whatever reason, the designers chose a unique way to implement the danger Link is in.

While in hot places or stuck underwater without the proper tunic, the game starts a timer, with time relative to the amount of health that Link has. If Link leaves the area or puts on the right tunic before time runs out, the timer goes away and Link takes no damage regardless of how much time was left on it. However, if the timer expires before Link reaches safety, he just dies instantly, “getting a game over” in the clumsy parlance of video games. You’d think it’d be better just to inflict some damage on Link every few seconds, but that’s not how they chose to do it.

Link gets eight seconds on the clock for every full heart he has. Fractions of a heart grant proportional time. While the game only displays health in quarter-hearts, Ocarina of Time actually tracks hearts in 16ths (each full heart is effectively 16 hit points), and each 8th of a heart grants Link one second on the timer.

So, what happens if Link has exactly 1/16th of a heart? The display rounds up, so it looks like Link has a quarter of a heart left, but he’s considerably closer to kicking the bucket than that. He has less health than what’s needed to get a one-second timer. How does the game cope with that?

It does it by just not starting a timer at all! If Link is almost dead, paradoxically, he becomes immune to fire and drowning timers. He’s still in great danger, for any attack on him in this state will kill him immediately, but it makes tunic-less challenge runs a bit more interesting.

Break Timers With Low Health (Youtube, 1 minute)

RGME: Glitching Mario World by Stomping Wigglers

More Youtube videos coming up! In this hellish age of the World Wide Web, where discovering things with Google Search is harder than ever, at least Youtube has a decent discoverability system (when it works, which is not always). Discovering things has long been really difficult on the internet, what we’re witnessing is just a regression to an earlier state where things appear and disappear unseen all the time, like particles and antiparticles annihilating each other. It’s still a huge problem, we just forgot, for a while, that there’s still no good solution. Um, what was I talking about again?

Retro Game Mechanics Explained (RGME: See? The acronym in the title means something!) recently explained a glitch in Super Mario World, a game that is becoming infamous for its many glitches. Some of those glitches are oversights, but some are the result of features planned in development, and even partially implemented, but then for whatever reason were abandoned.

Most of the enemies in the game, if you stomp on them over and over without touching the ground, give you more and more points and eventually extra lives. But there are indications that, at some point during the game’s development, it wasn’t going to stop there. There is support in Super Mario World for further rewards beyond “1UPs”: 2UP, 3UP, 5UP, and from there, for some unknown reason, coins.

The code in the game supports going into those ranges, but for all the enemies in the game, only one has the support enabled, probably accidentally: Wigglers. If you consecutively stop Wigglers, which is only possible in one or two levels, the cap on the awards for stomping on them is lifted, and the lookups from the table on which the rewards are stores continue, off the end of the table, into miscellaneous ROM space, awarding undefined rewards, and quickly awarding many hundreds of thousands of points.

The full details are in their video, here (20 minutes):

I have a particular fondness for this glitch because I encountered it myself once, long ago, on actual hardware!

Behind the Code: Why Does Nintendo’s Tetris Crash At Extremely High Levels?

Displaced Gamers’ excellent Being The Code series on Youtube looks into what causes Nintendo’s NES Tetris to crash at really really high levels, over level 150. In the process, it goes through how that game displays and adds scores together. Have a look (22 minutes)!

The “No Fire” Trick in Galaga

Arcade Galaga has an interesting bug that’s been known of for a long time, that can be taken advantage of to cause the enemies to stop firing. The inner workings of the bug are explained on its page on the website Computer Archeology, but here it is in brief: on the first level, if you leave the bugs at the far left or right sides of the formation alive and wait long enough, 10 to 15 minutes, just surviving their attacks, then eventually the enemies will stop firing all together, and will never fire again for the rest of the game.

Why does this happen? Galaga reserves eight hardware sprites for the shots of the enemy bugs. Galaga’s graphics hardware has no way to disable the displaying of a sprite, so if something isn’t supposed to be visible it’s kept off screen, at horizontal coordinate zero. A shot sprite at that coordinate is never updated, and never moves. This is in addition to the game’s internal records of which shots are in use. When a bug wants to fire a shot, the game looks at which shots are available, and if one isn’t in use, it puts it at the proper place, and sets its velocity (X and Y deltas). From then until it leaves the screen, it’ll be updated every frame. When it is detected as having gone off-screen, it’ll be marked as out of play, and its X coordinate will be set to 0. Shots at X=0 are never updated.

The problem is, it’s possible for bugs to fire shots while they are at X position 0. This happens most commonly when bugs at the far left and right extremes of the board attack. The shot is marked as in-use, but it’ll never be updated, and so it’ll never be cleaned up and set back to be available for firing. When all eight possible shots are in this limbo, the bugs can’t fire any more. The machine resets the shots at the end of a game, so the problem won’t affect subsequent plays.

Ben Golden Diamond performed the trick in a Youtube video, and he manages to get it to happen in around seven minutes. He doesn’t explain the precise criteria for doing the trick, but his description will still work, it just has unnecessary steps. It will work on any level, but it’s easiest to do on the first. In the video, sometimes the bugs fire wraparound shots from off-screen. That’s a good indication that the bugs are sometimes firing from the 0 coordinate.

Keep in mind, performing the trick on purpose will disqualify a score for world records. The scoreboard on a local Galaga machine probably won’t care, though.

Internals

Information on the inner workings of game software.

What’s So Random About Ms. Pac-Man

I’m not going to say that famously Ms. Pac-Man is a more random game than Pac-Man, because who really knows things like that who isn’t a hardcore gamenerd. But among hardcore game nerds, it’s common knowledge. (If you didn’t know, A. congrats on your coolness, and B. sorry to now destroy your coolness.) Here a video about how randomness works in that game, from Retro Game Mechanics Explained (21 minutes):

Pac-Man is a game that is vulnerable to patterns: if you do exactly the same thing each time on the same level, the same results will occur. There is one pseudo-random element in Pac-Man though: when vulnerable ghosts reach an intersection, the code picks an arbitrary address from a range of memory addresses, then uses that value to pick a direction to decide which route to take. Two implications of this: vulnerable ghosts are most likely to head left at intersections and least likely to go up, and if any byte in that range changes the behavior of the game slightly changes too, even if it’s not an executable byte. Patterns still work in Pac-Man, despite this pseudo-random function, because the seed is reset at the start of every level, so if you do exactly the same thing, vulnerable ghosts will still have the same information fed to their movement routines.

Ms. Pac-Man has other sources of randomness: the ghosts, in Scatter mode, use a different source of pseudo-randomness to decide where to go, one that isn’t so easy to manipulate; and which fruit appears and which of four predefined routes (three for one of the mazes) it’ll take through the board.

Ms. Pac-Man doesn’t have its ghosts scatter periodically through the level like they do in Pac-Man. They only scatter at the start of the board. It’s not much randomness, but it’s enough to upset rote pattern creation, since each ghost has the opportunity to make several decisions of which path to take during that period. The way the randomness is handled is interest itself. The ghosts pick one of the corners of the board, much like they would in original Pac-Man, but randomly, when making their choice of target to home in on.

So there! Now you can amaze your friends, if it were 40 years ago and your friends were then able to be impressed by your knowledge of Ms. Pac-Man! You’re retroactively welcome!

Random Elements of Ms. Pac-Man (Retro Game Mechanics Explained on YouTube, 21 minutes)

Behind the Code: Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

For some reason there’s been a lot of Youtube videos lately that fit our eclectic purview, so here’s a code-heavy dive into infamous NES disasterpiece Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

It’s 19 minutes long, and is even geekier than is usual for us, going into a disassembly of the game’s machine code in its quest to make the game marginally less awful.

As long as we’re on the topic, here’s Jeremy Parish’s NES Works episode on Dr. J & Hyde, which is also 19 minutes, and also covers the somewhat better (but not hugely so) game Amagon:

While we’re on the subject, did you know that Jekyll & Hyde has a secret ending? Both endings are shown here (4 minutes):

The “bad” ending is the normal one, and shorter, but is arguably a happier conclusion to the story. To get it, all you have to do is get to the end of Stage 6 with Jekyll. That’s all.

To get the other ending, get to Stage 6 with Jekyll, then turn into Hyde and get to the end of his version of the stage. Usually, if Hyde gets as far into his level as Jekyll has gotten into his, he’s struck by lightning and dies. But in this level he’ll be allowed to reach the end of his version of the level for some reason, where there’s a boss! Beat it, and when you return to Jekyll’s world the enemies will be gone, and he’ll be free to finish the level without harassment. However, ending events will be different….

More From Displaced Gamers on Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde

We presented Displaced Gamers’/Behind the Code’s video on the jankiness of kusoge disgrace Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde back on Saturday. They did another video on that game, that delves into why the game’s frame rate is so inconsistent. In summary, its engine throttles its framerate in a terrible way, using long delay loops. It’s a pretty awful idea! It’s 19 1/2 minutes long. The video claims it’s even geekier than their first video on the game, but I think it’s actually slightly less technical, at least it doesn’t fill the screen with as much 6502 assembly code.

Another fact about J&H: the Japanese version had two full levels that were cut from the U.S. version, which replaced them with replays of other levels. It made a bad game even worse!

Now, because of Behind The Code, you know more about the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde game than many much better NES titles. Congratulations!

Behind the Code on Why is Contra Force Slow?

Displaced Gamers’ Behind the Code series is one of the best explainers of the quirks of NES games on Youtube. It’s not afraid to dive into the assembly code itself if need be, but its videos can often be understood by people without deep technical backgrounds.

Here is their video on the coding problems with Konami’s Contra Force (24 minutes):

Watch the video for the full spiel, but here’s a summary.

Once upon a time, in the waning days of the Famicom, Konami planned to release a game called Arc Hound in Japan. It was going to be another of their trademark run-and-gun shooters, along the lines of Contra. It even received coverage in enthusiast magazines in Japan, and it probably would have used one of Konami’s bespoke mapper chips like the VRC6 that the Japanese version of Castlevania III used.

Arc Hound was likely far into development when the decision was made to not release it in the Japanese market. Producing a game cartridge requires a substantial investment in parts and marketing, of course, and they must have judged that they couldn’t make enough of a profit off of it in their home territory: the Super Famicom was already out, as well as Contra III on that platform. But the NES still had a little bit of life left in it in the US, so they decided to give the game a shot over here, as a title in the Contra series

A big problem there was Nintendo’s policies towards manufacturing NES games. Nintendo demanded the right to build all the licensed software for the NES, and further restricted most (although not all) publishers to using Nintendo’s own family of mappers. Konami had been forced to revise their games to use Nintendo’s mappers in other games: Castlevania III famously used a different mapper in Japan, one that offered greatly expanded sound capabilities that worked through the Famicom’s sound channel pass-through, but was incompatible with the NES.

Extra sound channels are nice, but the primary use for most mapper chips is bank switching, swapping different sections of a cartridge’s data into the Famicom/NES’s 6502-workalike’s 64K address space, and also potentially making different sections of the game’s graphics data visible to the PPU graphics chip.

Behind the Code’s examination of the game program reveals that a large portion of the time of each frame is spent in setting up bank switches. Whether it was coded poorly, or just that Konami didn’t want to pay to include a mapper with more a more efficient bank switching mechanism, the game wastes a lot of time just pulling in different banks of data to be visible to the NES’s hardware. So it is that Contra Force could have run a lot better, but Konami either didn’t want to expend the coding effort, or pay for the the mapping hardware, to allow it to do so.

Presumably, somewhere in Konami’s archives, there is a version of Arc Hound that uses a VRC chip to handle mapping, and that runs much more smoothly. Maybe someday it’ll come to light, although I wouldn’t lay any bets on it. More likely perhaps is that someone will hack up the code and make such a version themselves. Who knows?

Displaced Gamers on Mega Man 3 Glitches

A bit of scanline flickering is a fairly common problem on the NES. Even Super Mario Bros. 3 had it, and that game was made by Nintendo themselves.

Game graphics in the 8- and 16-bit ages often came down to tricky hardware manipulation. The art of doing raster effects, changing the registers in the video hardware so as to divide the screen into different sections, ultimately comes down to timing. On the Atari VCS/2600, nearly all the graphics had to be done that way, but it was still a useful technique for over a decade after that.

A lot depends on the specifics of the video chip, a custom-built piece of silicon developed for the express purpose of taking graphics defined in memory and folding it, like electronic origami, into a shape that the TV would perceive as a broadcast signal. At that time, while it might still have been possible with clever coding, CPUs weren’t nearly fast enough to do that job themselves and still produce acceptable graphic quality and run game logic. (If you want to see what it would be like, I refer readers interested in doing it the very hard way to the amazing Freespin demo, which runs on a 1541 disk drive, and no video hardware at all.)

Older NES games used a supported bit of hackery called the “Sprite 0 Hit,” a signal the PPU would send at the moment the first of the system’s 64 sprites began to be drawn. By watching for it, games could do rudimentary raster effects on a system not designed for them. The issue there was processor time: the Sprite 0 Hit feature wasn’t hooked up to an interrupt line, so the program had to continually watch for it, checking a memory location repetitively over and over until it changed. Some games spent large portions of their runtime in a tight loop checking for the Sprite 0 Hit. Since, from the program’s perspective, the signal might come at any time, the loop needed to be tight, meaning the game couldn’t spend that time doing other work or else it might be delayed in responding to the extremely time-sensitive signal.

The MMC3 mapper had a special function though that could time out when a programmable scanline was reached, and send the processor an interrupt request at that time, greatly freeing up the processor for doing other things with that time. But not all programmers understood the best way to use it, which is why Mega Man 3 has some scanline glitching in a couple of very visible places, in the pause window and on the level select screen.

Displaced Gamers’ Behind the Code series, which we’ve linked to multiple times in the past, has done an exposé looking into how Mega Man III’s glitches happen (28 minutes), and even wrote some code that erases all trace of them. As usual for Behind the Code, the explanation is fairly technical, especially of the fix, but the first half of it is fairly comprehensible. No one says you have to watch the whole thing. Or, indeed, any of it, but I always enjoy them!

Retro Game Mechanics Explains Mario 3’s Minigames

Let’s get the video embed out of the way first. Pow!

Super Mario Bros. 3 has two significant minigames (outside of two-player mode), and the inner workings of both are explained in this video.

In most worlds there are “Space Panels,” which provide a slot machine minigame for extra lives. If you’ve ever tried them, you might have noticed that it’s extremely difficult to win anything at it. Well, the video explains why that is: there’s a significant random element to stopping the wheels. In particular, the last wheel has so much randomness in when it actually stops that it’s actually completely random what it’ll stop on! So much for timing!

I have a theory (which I explain in a comment on that video) that the slot machine game was made so random because of the quality of the reward (it’s possible to earn up to five extra lives at it), and because they had played around with life-granting minigames before. Doki Doki Panic, which got reskinned for overseas markets at Super Mario Bros. 2, has a slot machine game, “Bonus Chance,” that appears after every level. With good timing and practice Bonus Chance can be mastered, earning up to five extra lives for every coin plucked in the level. I have managed to abuse that game to earn so many extra lives that the game ran out of numbers for the tens’ digit of the life counter, sending it into letters of the alphabet. There’s certainly no danger of that in Super Mario Bros. 3.

The second minigame has the player match cards from a grid of 24. Each pair of cards found earns a modest prize, from as little as 10 coins up to a single extra life. Most of the awards are powerups for the player’s inventory. The player gets two tries, but if they don’t clear the board it’ll carry over to the next time they play. Attempts at the card matching board appear every 80,000 points the player earns, making it the only Super Mario game to actually reward scoring lots of points.

The card matching game is one of the most interesting minigames in all of the Mario series. There’s only eight layouts for the cards, the second and fifth cards of the middle row are frequently both the 1UP card, and the last three cards on the bottom row are always Mushroom, Flower and Star, in that order. This means the minigame can be mastered, and even if you don’t memorize all eight layouts to deduce where the prizes are, knowing the three cards that never change usually means it won’t take more than two or three attempts to clear the board, netting lots of powerups.

Retro Game Mechanics Explained looks into why the card matching game works the way it does, and discovered some interesting things. There’s actually code in the game to do a much more thorough randomization of the cards, but it goes unutilized. The full details are in the video, but in summary:

- The board always begins in the same state,

- the last three cards on the bottom row are left unchanged, probably on purpose,

- the first way the other cards are scrambled shifts them one space in sequence, and is only done one or three times, three times in total,

- and the other method of scrambling them, which involves swapping around three specific cards, is done exactly once between each shift.

The only variation in the steps is from the choice of whether to shift once or thrice, each of those three times. Thus, there are only 2^3 possible layouts, that is, 8. There is a loop in there to potentially vary the number of times the cards are swapped (the second way to scramble the cards), but the way it’s written the loop is never used, and the cards are swapped only once each time.

All of the layouts for Maro 3’s card matching minigame, from the Nintendo Power guide. “The key is concentration” alludes to the traditional card game “Concentration,” which is played in a similar manner.

What I also find interesting is, this isn’t the only Nintendo to use a minigame that involves mixing up hidden prizes. Kid Icarus’ Treasure Rooms also have a limited number of layouts, which vary for each of the game’s three worlds. The player can open pots in the room to collect minor items, but if they open the wrong pot early, before opening all the others, they find the God of Poverty, and lose everything they’ve found. If they can save that pot for last, though, the final pot will instead contain a pretty good prize, which can even be a Credit Card item that cannot be obtained otherwise.

The way they’re designed, both Mario 3’s card-matching game and Kid Icarus’s Treasure Rooms have tells, specific spots that can be revealed to identify which of the limited number of boards that version of the game is using, and that the player can use to get all the prizes. Also, there are Nintendo-published guides that reveal all the layouts, in Nintendo Power for Kid Icarus (recounted on this charmingly old-school webpage), and the Nintendo Power guide for Super Mario Bros. 3 (on page 10), so Nintendo had to have been aware of the limited nature of the board layouts, and may have actually intended them to be defeated with a good strategy.

SMB3 Roulette & Card Matching Games Explained (Youtube, 20 minutes)

Banjo-Kazooie Decompiled

Kaze Emanuar on Youtube passes along the info that Rare’s terrific N64 platformer, Banjo-Kazooie, has been decompiled (7 minutes):

What does that mean? It’s that they’ve created source code (up on GitLab) that, when put through the same C compiler that originally generated Banjo-Kazooie’s object code, produces an exact binary image of the game. They can now rebuild Banjo-Kazooie. They don’t know the original variable names or any comments that were in the code, so it doesn’t mean that the code is perfectly understandable, but it is a major breakthrough in using the game engine for other things, including game improvements, mods, repurposings, and even compiling it for other platforms.

One result of this is that we now have a complete list of the codes that can be entered into the infamous Sandcastle Room, which are obfuscated in the original binary. The Sandcastle Room is a board of letters on the ground in the second level that can be used to spell things out, and if the proper text is entered it can unlock things in the game, or even enable the items in the abandoned “STOP N SWOP” feature that had been planned to allow players to transfer data between cartridges. If you decide to take a look yourself, the codes are listed out in the file named code_3E30.c.

NESHacker’s Guide to the NES Hardware

More and more I find I should do a blog search to make sure that I haven’t posted something before, and my search for this video didn’t find it. It did find our link to the Copetti Site’s discussion of various console architectures, and a separate link specifically to their explication of the SNES’ construction, but not this particular video from NESHacker, so it’s fair game. Post! (zoop)

It’s only about nine minutes long so you can guess that it doesn’t go into deep detail. Essentially the NES is split into two parts, the CPU and its memory, and the PPU graphics chip and its own memory. A lot of classic consoles and microcomputers had to take special measures to support their display, which often ended up being the most complex part of the unit. Think about it: you have what amounts to a deluxe broadcast character generator right there in a box on your desk, shelf or floor, with lots of extra bells and whistles besides. (In fact, home computers were often used to generate current events channels for local cable companies, and an Amiga was essentially the basis for the old Prevue Guide channel.) It’s like a tiny special-purpose, single-receiver TV station just for your own use.

Graphics hardware is extremely timing sensitive. It has to generate the signal for your TV to display according to standardized picture generation requirements, so special requirements are often necessary. In the Commodore 64, for instance, the VIC-II graphics chip has the power to actually put the 6510 CPU to sleep, so it can have unrestricted access to the computer’s memory, without fear of bus conflicts, when it’s needed. This reduces the overall speed of the processor by a bit, and it’s why C64s turn off the screen when loading programs from cassette tape, in order to keep the CPU timing consistent relative to the data being streamed in off the tape.

The NES gets around this by giving the PPU RAM and address bus for its own exclusive use, and to put stuff in it the CPU has to use the PPU as an intermediary. And what’s more the NES exposes both the CPU and PPU’s address busses through the cartridge connector (which is why it’s got so many pins), allowing carts to supply dedicated ROM and RAM to both chips.

Even though it’s just a high-level overview, I found it a worthwhile use of those nine minutes, and you may very well enjoy it too.

NES Hardware Explained (from NESHacker, on Youtube, 9 minutes)

Computing Pi on a NES

Today’s link is to a madperson who explains how to compute digits of pi on a NES’s 6502 to an arbitrary length. As you do. Along the way it explains how to multiply and divide in binary on a processor without hardware support. It’s around nine minutes long, but if you want a machine to get to the end of pi it’ll probably take a tad bit longer.

We link to such a variety of things here. Sometimes we post light videos where someone has Kirby do funny things. Sometimes we show explainers that explain how to do arithmetic on old processors. I presume that you’ll take from these what you want, and leave the rest to the crazy people, by definition the people who are not you. I understand.

.NET on NES

At Microsoft Build 2024, Jon Peppers described his experience converting .NET bytecode so it can run on the NES’s 6502-like. It’s 43 minutes:

Running .NET on the NES (Youtube, 43 minutes)

Youtube Series: Inside the Famicom

It’s only two episodes in, but this series from the Youtube channel What’s Ken Making is already really interesting, with episodes averaging at around 16 minutes each. The first part is titled “The Design of a Legend,” which doesn’t really grab me much, but the second is about the main processor, “The 6502 CPU,” which Ken admits near the start isn’t exactly accurate. The Famicom/NES’s processor isn’t precisely a MOS 6502; it’s a Ricoh 2A03 in NTSC territories, and a 2A07 in others. The 2A03 is licensed from MOS, but lacks the original’s Binary-Coded Decimal mode, and includes the Famicom/NES’s sound hardware on-die.

Episode 1 (15 minutes):

Episode 2 (17 minutes):

That removed BCD feature. Why? The video notes that the circuits are right there within the chip, but have been disabled by having five necessary traces severed. The video notes that the 6502’s BCD functionality was actually patented by MOS, and asks, was the feature disabled because of patent issues? Was Ricoh trying to avoid paying royalties?

Reverse Engineering the 6502

This is a 52-minute talk from 2010, from the 27th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, Germany (the talk is in English), presented by Michael Steil of Visual 6502, which successfully reverse engineered the venerable 6502 microprocessor, a chip used, in one capacity or another, in one form, or another, in all the Apple, Commodore and Atari microcomputers, the BBC Micro, the Atari 5200, in a modified from the Atari 2600 the NES, and countless arcade games, as well as in other places.

The talk is intended for a technical audience… literally. When the speaker asks who in the audience has coded in assembly before, practically everyone raises their hands. It’s recognized that we at Set Side B veer wildly between the most surface-level populist material and in-depth treatments for those with gigantic capacities for technical discussion and the attention span of a Galapagos Giant Tortoise. We like to think this is charming, and will listen eagerly if you tell us that you agree.

Anyway, here is that talk. I already mentioned that it’s 53 minutes. If that’s too long, there’s a speed-up function on Youtube. If that’s too technical, well, I don’t know how to help there. Maybe a read through pagetable.com’s documentation on the 6502. Oops! I’ve made it worse, haven’t I. Well, if you like, you might console yourself that the 6502 is really a simple processor to learn to code in. I’ve done it myself! There’s no memory management, there’s only three general-purpose registers, the stack is fixed in place, and all opcodes are one byte. It’s so simple that an extremely motivated child could learn it. Guess how I know?

27c3: Reverse Engineering the MOS 6502 CPU (Youtube, 53 minutes)

Here’s a description of the talk from the conference web site.

Sharopolis Looks Into NES Technical Feats

Youtuber Sharopolis has a 20-minute video up examining several specific NES games and how some unexpected tricks were pulled off in each: Rescue: The Embassy Mission, Crash and the Boys Street Challenge, Castlevania III and Jurassic Park. I love learning about how developers overcame hardware limitations, and if you’re reading this, I’d wager there’s a good chance you do too!

A Guided Tour of the NES

This tab has been open on my browser for literally months, so I’m finally excising it from the bar….

A while back the site HackADay did a teardown of the NES, going through how to take it apart and reassemble it, and going through some of the elements of its assembly. It doesn’t go into a lot of detail, but that lets it be fairly short, at only nine minutes.

NES Hardware Explained (HackADay post, Youtube video)

On Super Mario World’s Score Display

Awesome Mario trivia blog Supper Mario Broth noted on Mastodon that Super Mario World is extremely inefficient in displaying Mario’s score.

There is more information on SWMspeedruns.com, but in brief, SMW stores the player’s score as a 24-bit value as hexadecimal digits, and converts that value to decimal when it’s time to display it. There is no good way to do that that doesn’t involve figuring out the entire arithmetic, but Super Mario World does it particularly slowly: it starts with a copy of the score, then sees if it’s over 1,000,000. If it is, it increases the millions digit of the displayed score by 1, subtracts a million from the work value, then repeats. When it runs out of millions it repeats with the hundred-thousands, and repeats until it finishes with the tens. At least it doesn’t try it with the 1s, seeing as how nothing in the game awards single points!

In a worse-case scenario, with a score of 9,999,990, the code goes through this whole process every frame, consuming up to 8% of the time available for game logic.

What could the game have done to accomplish this better? It could have found out how many of each digit there was once instead of looping and incrementing. It could only figure out the score when the value changes. Or it could save the value as the digits themselves in decimal, just increment them by the right values when its needed, and then copy that figure to the screen. That’s largely what 8-bit games would do.

Even worse, if Luigi is the active character, the game does this twice: it figures out and prints Mario’s score, then it does it again for Luigi’s score, placing it onscreen in the same place.

While printing the score is just one thing the game does each frame, the effect is great enough that complex scores can lag the game, enough that speedrunners take the score into account to avoid it.

This adds to the evidence that Super Mario World development was rushed. It’s already known that a lot of the code in SMW is buggy, allowing for some truly heroic exploits like programming a text editor in SRAM purely by manipulating objects in an early level.

Mega Man’s Score System

Looks like we’re on another Youtube binge, ayup ayup. This time it’s another hopeful video constructor asking us to consider the oddity of the score system in the original Mega Man (a.k.a. Rockman).

When you post as many Youtube videos as I do, it’s easy to form opinions about their style. That of “TheRetroDude,” as he styles himself, is interesting, it’s still hyper-edited in the way that so many Youtubers loathsomely adopt, but it’s not nearly as distracting as those. He keeps the volume down, as well as the number of swoopy objects tearing around the screen like a toddler newly introduced to Toblerone.

He has good points about how extraneous the game’s scoring system is too, although his misgivings could be laid against many other games. In Super Mario Bros, score is mostly a spacer before toppled turtles start giving extra lives. I think that score isn’t a bad addition to a game as long as it’s implemented thoughtfully, yet for too long it hasn’t been. Even in the NES days it was included to give players a short term goal to aim for, when they didn’t really need it.

What would a good scoring system look like, one that rewarded skill? Well–

- Losing a life would reset score to that at the last passed checkpoint, eliminating point pressing from lives.

- Extra lives at game end would be worth a bonus each.

- Game timers are worth a small, yet substantial, award at level end, to prioritize fast play over slow.

- Awards should be given for score, most typically extra lives, but others are possible too.

- Replaying levels, and other means of “minting points,” earning arbitrary scores, should be ruthlessly eliminated. If the player can replay levels indefinitely then think about if your game really needs a score, and if it does, don’t allow players to earn more points from replaying them without costing them the points from that last pass.

Two games that come to mind that do scores well are:

- ZANAC on the NES, being a scrolling shooter without checkpointing score is generally fair, although it is possible to warp backwards does break the no-replay rule, and

- Star Fox 64, which only adds a level’s score to the player’s total at its end. SF64 is a game obviously designed around score attacks.

Where was I? Oh! Here is that video about Mega Man’s scoring system.

Mega Man 1’s Really Weird Score System (Youtube, 9 minutes)

Figuring Out Yars’ Revenge Code From Its Graphics

What is Set Side B about? We talk about old arcade and NES games, Nintendo things, weird gaming-related videos, ancient MMORPGs, and other weird and idiosyncratic things largely as they inspire us, much as how beta particles and gamma rays inspire random atoms as they pass through them, causing mutations and cancers along the way. (Alpha particles are too bulky to pass through, but that’s really just highly energetic ionized helium anyway!)

One foundational aspect of what we choose to highlight, though, are the extremely technical things, and wow, in that regard today’s link delivers. The brilliant Youtube channel Retro Game Mechanics Explained, which appears here semi-frequently, did a video on the Atari VCS/2600 game Yars’ Revenge that has to be seen to be believed, if not always quite understood.

It’s been random floating game knowledge for a while that the “Neutral Zone” area in Yars’, a flashing and coruscating band of lights that serves as something of a safe zone for the player’s bug, was the direct result of reading the game’s own code out of memory translated and displayed on screen. After all, machine language opcodes are just data, and the VCS has such a hugely limited address space that any reuse of that data is helpful.

RGME went through the graphics displayed on-screen and tried to see how much of the game’s code could be pieced together using it. The answer was, a fair bit, but not all. The process is really the most interesting part about it. Here it is:

Of particular note, the top comment on the video (because it got pinned there by RGME) is from Yars’ Revenge creator Howard Scott Warshaw himself!

In passing, let me just comment for a moment on what a weird phenomenon Yars’ Revenge is? It’s the best-selling original (non-port or license) piece of software for the old Atari. It’s such a weird artifact. It’s not a traditional style of game design. It’s got atmosphere, and strangely evocative sound. And it has that odd easter egg that can just outright end your game if you’re not careful. It really feels like an object of its time, that couldn’t have both come about and be as popular as it was in any other age. It didn’t inspire many imitators. But, it did come about, and it was popular, and I’m glad that’s true.

I watch this video and I wonder that it seems targeted so directly at me personally, that I wonder if anyone else might enjoy it at all. But then I look at its view count and see it’s approaching 200 thousand in around two weeks, so someone else out there must like it too. So: please watch the video, if you care about bits and bytes, opcodes and operands, and Exclusive-Ors. Or want to learn about those things. If neither is true for you, I’m sure there’ll be something more to your tastes next post.

Reverse Engineering Game Code from the Neutral Zone in Yar’s Revenge (Youtube, 41 minutes)

Details of Mario Kart 64’s Catchup AI

It’s information I’d much rather see in text, and I find the video a bit annoying from a construction standpoint (the speaker has a bad case of Youtube Voice), but it’s really interesting information regardless. This video from Abyssoft contains a deep explanation of MK64’s opponent driving algorithm, and explains that the game selects two rivals for your character on each cup, and that opposing drivers pick one of three paths through the course, and can clip right through walls if needed to continue driving around the circuit.

Explaining the Ways in Which Mario Kart 64 CPUs Cheat (Youtube, 12 minutes)

Romhacks

Bit twiddling for fun (but not profit, that would be illegal).

Phred’s Cool Punch-Out!!

It’s a little risky to post this, because it’s a joke video game page on Tripod from 2001 that still somehow persists on the internet in 2024. I have to imagine that Phred is in his mid-to-late 40s by now. There’s several long pages here from that site, and there’s always the chance that a racist or neo-nazi joke, from an age when kids thought lightly of such things, could be lurking somewhere in there. Please understand it as a product of its time. It’s an amateurish site, but it has a lot of energy behind it.

I think it’s still worth looking at as a reminder of that age of the internet, which had many bad things about it, but also a lot of good things. I don’t know which this is. It contains a number of pretty dumb graphics hacks for Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out and/or its successor released after Nintendo’s licensing deal with Tyson ran out. Those hacks can be found here, although the background (the words “Master Phred” in fancy letters) makes the descriptions and download links really hard to read. (Try highlighting the text.) If you follow a few links, you can find actual NES Punch-Out rom downloads, which it’s even more amazing to find on a website in 2024.

Among the hacked characters are a robot, Doc Louis and Zelda, sure

The characters page includes, among other hacked characters like Rick and Nick Bruiser from the SNES Punch-Out, a character named after the Wii Punch-Out opponent Disco Kid, which indicates this page has to have been updated since 2009. There’s a links page where every outgoing link, other than GameFAQs, is broken, and a secrets page where most of the secrets are fake.

Well there it is, Phred’s Cool Punch-Out. You’ve survived 23 years. May you live a hundred more.

Phred’s Cool Punch-Out!! (tripod.com)

Romhack Thursday: DKAFE

We’ve not done Romhack Thursday for a while. As the winds of the ‘net, and my attention, blow around randomly, sometimes there’s more things that seem worthy of posting than others. This one definitely fits the bill though.

We’ve posted about 10yard’s intriguing Donkey Kong hacks Galakong and Vector Kong before. I don’t think they’re actually hacks in the classic sense of the term, modifications of a game’s software intended to run on its original hardware, or at least an emulation or simulation of it. Galakong might, and Vector Kong definitely does, rely on Lua support in MAME to produce, respectively, a version of Donkey Kong where Mario teams up with the ship from Galaga, and another version of Donkey Kong limited to the Girders stage, a.k.a. Ramps, but with sharp colorful line-drawn artwork akin to that produced by Atari’s later Vectorscan monitors.

10yard let us know that they have produced a front-end to a variety of Donkey Kong romhacks, 90 in total. It runs on Windows an Raspberry Pi, although if it runs on the latter I suppose it must also be possible to get it to work on Linux? Maybe?

It’s not just a front end though. It presents all of its mods through an interface that itself plays like Donkey Kong! You move Mario around the levels of the classic arcade game (they’re connected vertically), and each is littered with arcade machines. You can play them with coins collected them as DK rolls them through the boards, and also earned by getting good scores in each game. Collecting more coins not only gives you more chances to play, but it unlocks further games in the collection.

You download the package from the Github page linked above. You must also provide the MAME-compatible romsets for Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Donkey Kong 3. (It might work without without all of them, but fewer games will be available.) Of course, it’s up to you to rip, or otherwise provide, those files. If you provide them, it’ll handle all the patching for you automatically. It even includes its own custom version of MAME to play them.

Both Galakong and Vector Kong are among the hacks provided, but there’s so much more to see and play besides those, including Halloween, Christmas and Doctor Who themes hacks. There’s really too many to mention here, and I’ve only started unlocking games myself. I’ll leave you with the closing link, and some screenshots of the hacks included that I’ve managed to unlock so far.

DKAFE (by 10yard, for Windows and Raspberry Pi, on Github)

Most of the hacks include a screen like this one, that tells you what scores you must reach in order to earn coins. 3rd place usually isn’t terribly difficult to reach. For many games, a 1st place score will be reached around the time of the Conveyors board in Level 3.

This is the game selection mode. Coins you earn are rolled down the ramps from the top of the screen; you have to collect them in order for them to count!

Before starting each hack, you’re presented with a text description of the game and how it plays, and who made it.

Here’s Galakong, which has been linked from this site before. The game is slightly easier, objectively speaking, than standard Donkey Kong, but it’s easy to get your attention split between the ship and Mario and make mistakes because of it.

Pac-kong replaces the roaming fireballs with the ghosts from Pac-Man. They move mostly randomly, like the fireballs, did, but they’re much faster. You can become invincible by collecting an Energizer, which turns Mario into Pac-Man temporarily. Pac-kong’s one of the harder hacks present.

Donkey Kong Anniversary Edition changes the boards slightly, and replaces the bonus items with presents and balloons. In case you didn’t know: you can collect items off the edges of girders by jumping at them: if you hit the edge of the screen during your jump, Mario will be bounced back to around the place he leapt from, and will (usually) be unharmed!

Donkey Kong Wizardry changes the Girders level substantially. They add new pits to leap over, changes to the way the ramps tilt, and adds other surprises. You get an advantage though: if you press the Player 2 Start Button (the 2 key), it’ll freeze the fireballs for several seconds.

Donkey Kong Lava Panic adds a tide of deadly fluid constantly rising up from the bottom of the screen. It becomes important to get the lower rivets on the Rivets board before they become submerged!

The Halloween and Christmas-themed hacks change the Girder stage greatly. When barrels (or whatever analogue that hack uses for them) fall off of a gap in the middle of the screen, they may randomly decide to go either direction, adding even more uncertainty to Mario’s progress. Be careful!

Garfield+

I posted links to this elsewhere to so-so-reception, but darn it the idea is amusing enough to me: take an old 3D game that got really poor reviews, hack it to make it better (not to mention playable on current Windows), and post the hack online.

The game involved is a Garfield game for PS2 and PC that I hadn’t even heard of before. The person who did this objectively silly thing is a Youtuber, and they uploaded a 20 minute video on the game and their modifications. You can even download their modification to play yourself.

No one was clamoring that they do this. They themselves admit the game isn’t really that great. But they love it, for irrational reasons, and that’s fine by me. It’s not really terrible, they surmise that the egregiously poor reviews (0/10!) were part of the Internet Pile-On Effect, where the reviewer finds something it’s okay to hate, and proceeds to do so as much as they can. In this case, the game’s greatest sin is being a licensed game, and those are always the absolute worst, aren’t they?

Anyway, here’s their video in an embed. Again, it’s 20 minutes long, so it might not fit into your schedule. That’s okay.

Romhack Thursday: BS F-Zero Tracks Revived

The site of friend-of-the-blog Matthew Green has a wonderful post that describes a new hack that puts the long-lost tracks from two Satellaview versions of F-Zero into the main game, making them playable in a romhack. The creators of the hack, called BS F-Zero Deluxe, went to great lengths to recover them, partly by using tracks recovered from old Satellaview Flash carts, and some by actually recreating them painstakingly from a VCS recording of the tracks being played.

The post has a long discussion with the hack’s main programmer that goes into great detail concerning the origins of the tracks and how they were recovered, and other context surrounding the broadcast versions of the game. I won’t restate all of that here; it’s well worth reading it over on Press The Buttons.

This version of the hack leaves the title screen unchanged. Maybe it’ll get its own title logo later?

The great thing about the tracks is they follow the progression of the original game. The original had a number of tracks that would be iterated over, with changes, as the player went through the leagues of the game, and the new tracks continue that pattern, with Big Blue II, Silence II, and Mute City IV, as well as new track sequences Forest I, II and III, Sand Storm I and II, and Metal Fort I and II.

The ten added tracks have been collected into two new BS Leagues to test classic F-Zero players:

BS-1 League

Forest I

FOREST I: One of only two tracks with no pit area for recovering energy! The Forest tracks are fairly simple tracks, but have large areas with slip zones.

Big Blue II

BIG BLUE II: Many changes from Big Blue in F-Zero, including a branch with a hard jump on the left, and an easy jump on the right. If you take the hard jump and it doesn’t look like you’ll make it, you can fairly easily steer in the air back onto the easy jump route.

Sand Storm I

SAND STORM I: Somewhat like an easier version of Fire Field, and with the Fire Field music to boot. Watch out for the narrow hazard zone with land mines down the middle! It’s hard for me to tell exactly, but it seems like this track uses Death Wind’s gimmick, where you’re constantly being pushed around as you drive.

Forest II

FOREST II: In addition to being the other track with no pit zone, a large part of the track is composed of one long slip zone.

Silence II

SILENCE II: The many 90-degree turns of the original Silence have been simplified, but in their place are two sections with land mines that are worse than any of their use in the original F-Zero. There’s also a highly dangerous section where all the walls of the track have been replaced with jump pads, giving unskilled drivers ample opportunity to launch themselves into oblivion.

BS-2 League

Mute City IV

MUTE CITY IV: The original three Mute City tracks began each of the original game’s leagues, and were mostly the same except for a significant changed area in the middle of the track. In Mute City II it was a difficult branch, and Mute City III added a narrow section and some landmines. Mute City IV does the same thing, except its new area is a huge series of jumps over open space! When you see the big arrows made of jump pads pointing the way back on to the track you had better follow them! It’s easy to die here even if you know what you’re doing, since at high speed you’ll probably have to aim for the narrow parts of the arrow.

Forest III

FOREST III: The only Forest track with a recharge area. It’s still not a complex track, but there are a couple of slippery areas with mines to avoid.

Sand Storm II
I had enough of an issue getting through this that my only screenshot is of finally finishing it. Note how much energy I have left-none!

SAND STORM II: The most difficult track of the new set, with lots of tight turns and an area with the magnets that pull you to the side, in addition to the strong winds.

Metal Fort I

METAL FORT I: Not so hard a track, except for the place where you have a jump onto a narrow section with magnet hazards on the sides. Make sure you’re lined up right, or BOOM.

Metal Fort II

METAL FORT II: For the last of the new tracks, it’s not really that challenging. There are two jumps on the side of the track, with boost pads just before them. For the first jump, if you miss the boost pad you probably won’t have enough speed to make it to the end of the jump unless you steer back onto the track, but if you hit the boost you should be okay. The second pad, you’ll probably have to steer back onto the track regardless, you simply don’t have enough speed to keep going straight even if you hit the boost.

BS F-Zero Deluxe also includes four more vehicles, with notably different properties from the classic four familiar to everyone who played the original (and F-Zero 99 for that matter). They’re presented alongside the first four, and can even be driven on F-Zero’s 15 tracks.

The new cars

When I start thinking about Nintendo’s Japanese consoles in context with these kinds of events, I start to realize that Nintendo’s long been doing special events to connect with its fans, it wasn’t something that started in the Switch era. On the Famicom they released special Disk System releases in conjunction with contests; on the Super Famicom there was the Satellaview; and on N64 there was the 64DD. I don’t know of something similar they did on the Gamecube, but the Wii and Wii-U were internet capable and had special software like the Everybody Votes channel to try to engage players. On the portable side of their lineup, there was the e-Reader, special Pokemon events, the DS Kiosks and software experiments like Dusty Diamond and the Nintendo Badge Arcade, and the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection before they shut it down. I’m sure there’s a lot of things I’m forgetting too.

It’s a shame that Nintendo tends to regard all of these things as trash, never to be revisited except maybe in the occasional trophy or sticker in Smash Bros. The people who all of this would matter to aren’t getting younger; it seems like a huge missed opportunity for them.

Note: It's been observed that Nintendo's online battle royale take on SNES F-Zero, called F-Zero 99, has some extra tracks in it now that are remakes of some of the Satellaview tracks!

desreveR 46 oiraM repuS

Form a hack by Starxxon. That's all the description you get this time.

(Super Mario 64 Reversed, Youtube, 1 1/2 minutes)

Romhack Thursday: Doom on a Commodore 64, kinda-sorta

Look at that title and marvel a bit. Doom on a C64! What an idea. How could it even be possible? What an age we live in. It is a time of wonders. Children are our future.

Of course there’s more to it than that. There is a whole class of “retro” game that amounts to implementing the actual game on separate hardware, and using the supposed host platform as a glorified display and input device. That’s what’s going on in this case. Doom is really being run on a Raspberry Pi in a plug-in cartridge on a processor that’s underpowered by modern standards but far outpaces that of even Doom’s base configuration, and is thousands of times more powerful than the Commodore 64 to which it pipes its output.

But there’s still some technical interest in the means. The device that runs it is a “RAD Expansion Unit,” a DIY device that emulates a C64 RAM expansion, and apparently can even take over from the 6510 CPU and drive the system’s hardware directly. It works by writing to the VIC-II video and SID sound chips itself.

There was still a lot of coding work required to make this possible. A C64 has somewhat decent sound hardware, but the VIC-II chip has severe limitations on what it can display. The Raspberry Pi has to take the game’s display and port it, in real-time, to a graphics chip that can only display up to four colors (out of only 16) in each character cell, and that’s by sacrificing half of its horizontal resolution. Doing that on the fly itself is a noteworthy hack.

Could it be possible to run DOOM on a C64 without such assistance? At native resolution, ha ha ha: no. The memory limitations are too grievous, so at the very least you’ll need a RAM expansion.

I’ve mused at times on whether it might be possible if one uses the character screen as a kind of super-low-resolution graphics mode, each 8×8 character block representing either a 2×2 pixel grid (so, a resolution of 80×50) or a single pixel (40×25). Even at such a resolution 60 fps is probably out of the question, for it takes a lot of cycles to change every tile every frame, but maybe at 30 or 20? 15, 12, 10? (60 is divisible by a lot of numbers.) I will leave that question to people who are more current with C64 assembly coding.

Here is a demonstration video:

Doom on C64 – A playable tech demo for the RAD Expansion Unit for Commodore 64/128 (Youtube, 19 minutes) – Github repository

Zork I and Planetfall With The Edge Taken Off

Infocom text adventures in the classic style have this interesting thing they do where you explore interesting locations and solve puzzles in the rooms, but there’s also some miscellaneous things you have to do to keep yourself alive. Resource management.

Later Infocom games tended to go much easier on this kind of puzzle, but they were, then and now, a source of frustration to players, and that kind of difficulty termed friction by some, isn’t currently in fashion and can be excluding to new players.

Zork I in particular had two such elements: the need to keep a light source going in the underground at all times or else stumble around in the dark and soon get eaten by grues, and its carrying limit, which forced players to ascend to the White House frequently to deposit their treasures in the Trophy Case.

Similarly Planetfall, that game what has Floyd the robot in it, requires your character keep themself fed to stay alive, which is something of a distraction from the game’s mysteries. It also removes some ways the player can block themselves from winning, and removes some of the ways to die, in the name of fairness.

There are a couple of Github projects that took the publicly-released source code and removed these portions of the game. All of the rooms are still there, but the lamp has so much energy that it probably won’t run out, the player can carry much more and won’t fumble with the items they’re carrying unless they carry a huge amount, probably more items than there is in the game.

Just to let you know, I’m not yet aware of any such project to make the Babel Fish puzzle in the game of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy less infuriating.

Zork I Modernized and Planetfall Modernized (github)

zandravandra’s List Of Mega Man Romhacks

It’s too light to make it an official Romhack Thursday post, but it is Thursday, so…. or rather, it was, yesterday, when this was slated to go originally, except Fully Ramblomatic premiered and I figured I should strike while that iron was hot. This iron, after all, is more malleable at lower temperatures.

Alex Zandra on Mastodon, @zandra@mastodon.social, who is @zandravandra on Cohost, put together a list of her favorite Mega Man romhacks that looks pretty interesting.

The games are (in order through the series): Mega Man Speed Bomber, Rollchan No Constancy, Rollchan At The Tokyo Olympics, Mega Man 4 Voyage, Mega Man 5 Double Jumper, and Rockman 6 Spirit of Hackers. The closest I’ve come to playing any of them was Rockman No Constancy, before Roll was put into it. There are lots of hacks that are difficult even to play, so curated lists of them are very useful!

Alex Zandra’s list of Mega Man Romhacks (cohost.org)

Note: As of this writing, Cohost, where the list is hosted, has announced they're shutting down soon, so this link will succumb to rot sooner than expected. So it goes.

Romhack Thursday: Ultima Underworld on Playstation, in English

The critical consensus on Ultima Underworld is that it was a high point of the Ultima franchise, a then-unique (and still fairly distinctive) kind of game, a 3D fantasy adventure released nine months before Doom, with a detailed dungeon and a high degree of player agency.

Ultima Underworld got a Playstation release, but only in Japan. It is not a straight upgrade from the DOS version, it’s got different cutscenes and anime character portraits, as well as interface differences. Still, it could well be worth playing for its own sake.

Often for these romhack posts I’ll try to apply the patch myself and take my own screenshots, but in this case the patch is over 120 megabytes, and itself to be applied to a CD game ISO, and a substantial game to learn and navigate in itself, so I’m going to pass this time and just use screenshots from the game’s romhacking.net entry.

Look at that anime-style character art. I guess this counts as the third JRPG post in a row.

English Fan Translation of Ultima Underworld for Playstation (romhacking.net)

Romhack Thursday: Snooplax Explains the History of Mario 64 Hacks

It’s another video! And it’s Nintendo related! I bet you’re just thrilled!

This is one, however, is far from something the Big N would approve of. Snooplax goes into great detail in explaining the history of hacking Super Mario 64, the first 3D game to really have a substantial hacking scene–I don’t count things like DOOM, since to a degree it was made to be extensible. Nintendo never dreamed that people would do the things to the Mario 64 engine that they have, which has included optimizing it to the extent that it can run at 60 fps on original hardware!

Seeing all these hacks together in one video is rather inspiring. There’s been not one, but at least three, major Super Mario 64 level editors, with different degrees of flexibility and detail. What enthusiasts have done with the engine over the years is surprising, and there’s no end in sight, so please enjoy this look back at this prolific scene.

History of SM64 Rom Hacks (Youtube, 37 minutes)

Strategy

People discussing how to play games well. as luck would have it, these are all arcade games this year.

Jordan Dorrington’s Galaga Strategy Tips

In this video from four years ago, top-level Galaga player Jordan Dorrington gives us advice for how to get far into the venerable arcade classic.

Some of the tips given:

- On the first level, enemies never shoot as they enter. Shoot as many of the bugs as you can as they enter the screen.

- Boss Galagas never try to capture your ship if there’s only one remaining.

- On the first two Challenging Stages, if a double ship is positioned exactly in the center of the screen, you can stay there to shoot the bugs fairly easily and get an easy Perfect.

- Starting from Stage 4, some extra will be among the ones that will swoop around entering formation, and will leave the attacking ranks to rush you.

- After the first three stages, the game settles into a pattern of four stages. The first three stages of each set have distinct patterns, followed by a Challenging Stage.

- The first stage in each set of four has the bugs entering in two mirrored processions from the sides of the screen. The second stage has them entering from one side in double rows. On the third stage they enter from the side in one long string.

- Galaga kill screens are difficulty dependent. There’s a game-ending screen on difficulty levels (or “ranks”) A and C. The other difficulty levels loop and continue indefinitely

- Basic strategy for cleaning up the remaining bugs is to start at one edge of the screen, and as they fly down at your ship, to move towards the other side a tiny bit at a time, to avoid the shots coming at you, and shooting to eliminate as many of the bugs as you can in the process.

- If you survive a long time on a single wave, there’s a well-documented bug in the code (explained elsewhere!) that causes the enemies to shoot less and less, and eventually cease firing completely. In casual play that’s great, but Twin Galaxies rules are that you cannot take advantage of this bug intentionally.

- If you get really good at Galaga, it’s best to play as Player 2, as the first player’s score rolls over after six digits, but the second player’s score records seven digits.

- The game’s difficulty stops increasing at Stage 31.

- If you’re playing on a difficulty without a kill screen, after Stage 255 you’ll progress to Stage 0. It throws many players off in that the bugs travel at the slowest speed, but their shots are extremely rapid.

- The hardest part of the game is recovering from losing a double ship. The game is much harder in single ship play.

Galaga Strategy Tips from Pro Player Jordan Dorrington (Youtube, 14 minutes, from Tim’s Tiny Arcade)

1 Credit Clear of Tower of Druaga, With Explanations

This one I find rather fascinating. There may be no arcade game ever made as purposely frustrating to play as Namco’s Japanese-only game The Tower of Druaga.

Hero Gilgamesh (often shortened to “Gil”) must pass through 60 maze levels, collecting a key from each then passing through the door to the next, while defeating enemies that get in his way, in order to rescue his love Ki from the villainous Druaga.

BUT almost all the levels have a secret trick to perform. If this trick is accomplished, then a chest will appear that, if collected, will grant Gil a special ability. Some of these abilities are helpful. Some, in fact, are necessary, and if they aren’t collected then on some future level Gil will be unable to advance! The tricks are explained nowhere in the game: it just expects you to know them, if not discovered personally then learned through word of mouth. (This was like a decade before most people had access to the internet.)

What is more, nothing in the game explains what the treasures are or what they do, or what you’ll find on each level if you do know the trick. And a few of the treasures are actually harmful! It means that, to win, you have to rely on a host of hidden information, obtained by both your own observation and from what you’ve heard from others. Which requires a ton of quarters to get, which suited manufacturer Namco just fine. Unfortunately (or, maybe, fortunately?), the game crash prevented Namco from trying its luck with this game in Western territories.

As a result, The Tower of Druaga is a game that’s probably experienced watching someone else play, rather than playing yourself. That’s what this video is, Youtube user sylvie playing through the whole game, not just advancing through, but explaining how it’s done along the way. It’s an hour and three minutes long:

Pac-Man in Three Patterns

PacStrats on Youtube has a video that gives three patterns that will take a casual player all the way to the kill screen at level 256.

I say casual because this doesn’t attempt to produce a “perfect” game, of 3,333,360 points. This is because it doesn’t attempt to eat all four ghosts on every Energizer while that is possible. It actually ignores the ghosts when they’re vulnerable. There are patterns for that on PacStrats too, but you’re not going to be able to do it by memorizing just three patterns. You can really push your personal limits, and that of your free time, trying to get better at video games, and most of us have a point where we have to say that’s enough, and then go and read a book/buy groceries/have sex/something else. The three patterns in the video below are a nice middle ground.

It isn’t easy to devise a Pac-Man patterns, and it’s much harder to come up with a small number of patterns that cover all the levels. Patterns work because the movement of the ghosts is completely deterministic, depending on how Pac-Man moves. If you can move Pac-Man with frame-perfect accuracy, then the ghosts will oblige you by always responding in the same ways. The frame-perfect requirement is eased up a lot by the nature of Pac-Man’s motion. So long as you don’t reverse directions or delay, Pac-Man can only change direction at intersections. So long as you have the joystick, or whatever ludicrous controller setup you’re using, pressed in the direction you want to go next three frames ahead of the turn, your gluttonous circle’s progress will be on track for that pattern.

So, if you try to perform a pattern and it doesn’t work, what went wrong? Most commonly it’s because you hesitated at some point, failing to make a turn at least three frames in advance. Sometimes that’ll be okay, but two of the ghosts, Pink (Speedy/Pinky) and Blue (Bashful/Inky) use the direction that Pac-Man is facing in their AI calculations, and that can change much more rapidly compared to his location in the maze. Even being a single frame off in your timing can produce a situation where Pac-Man will be facing a direction that will cause them to take a different path at a choice. Also, some of the motion of the ghosts is determined by the amount of time that’s elapsed in the current level, and if Pac-Man’s in a subtly wrong position then it can be disastrous later on.

The periods over which the patterns are good are the first four levels (Cherry to second Orange), levels 5 through 20 (first Apple through to 8th Key) and from 21 onward (9th Key to the kill screen). The actions of the ghosts are not the same throughout the run of each pattern. The second pattern, in particular, works over so many levels mostly because its creator, through trial and error, happened upon a pattern that’s good for so much of the game. Because the travels of the ghosts will be different on different levels, it’s important not to get spooked because they are moving differently than they did on previous levels. So long as you move Pac-Man through the patterns assuredly, without delay, and at least three frames in advance, then he’ll clear the boards in succession for as long as you care to keep going, until level 256, where Pac-Man’s All-You-Can-Eat buffet closes its doors.

If you want to see these patterns in action you’ll have to click through to the video’s Youtube page.

Beat Pac-Man Using 3 Simple Patterns (Youtube, 20 minutes)

720 Degrees Hints and Tips

Following on from the Defender tip video I linked, here’s a high-level tip video for a “radically” different game, Atari Games’ wonderful yet challenging arcade skateboard adventure 720°.

It’s really different, not just from space shooter games, but from just about everything else, even from other skateboarding games. In some ways it’s much like an early, 2D version of a Tony Hawk game, with an open world to explore between events called Skate City. But it also has a bit more going on than that: you have to earn points in Skate City doing tricks in order to earn Tickets, which allow you access to the four parks at the edges of the big isometric area, and you can earn money by doing well in the events to earn gear upgrades for your skater. Yes, there’s an equipment system in this 1986 arcade game!

Exploring Skate City isn’t a laid-back experience, however. It’s timed, and when that expires a now-iconic voice proclaims SKATE OR DIE, announcing the arrival of the killer skateboarder-hating bees, which get angrier, faster, and more Warner Bros. cartoon peril-like as further time elapses.

The only way to “die” in 720° is to be caught by the bees, all other defeats and injuries are harmless, but the bees still end lots of games: on default settings, you need 10,000 points to earn each Ticket, which is quite a lot! You are spotted a Ticket when you continue, but it’s not a gift or purchase, but a loan: the game will increase the points needed for the following Ticket by 10,000 when it happens, so you’ll have to score even more points to make it to the following Ticket. But lest you think this is a naked ploy by Atari to force players to credit-feed to see the later parks, you only get two of those continues! It’s best to think of continues as failsafes, in case you have a Ticket but get stung before you make it to a park.

720° is particularly interesting because of its unique joystick. It’s a standard 8-way stick, but its mechanism forces it to point in one direction at all times, so instead of pushing where you want to go, you spin it. The video contains a lot of that spinning. 720° is a very physical game because of it. In most games, arcade or otherwise, the controls could be considered just a way to communicate your intentions to the game, and missed inputs where you had intended to act feel like a betrayal by the hardware, but games like 720°, and Namco’s Alpine Racer, and Atari Game’s Marble Madness, the controls feel like an intrinsic part of the fun.

In the first class of these games, a brain interface might possibly be welcome for getting the controllers out of the way and removing any question of what your intent was, but 720° would be an entirely different experience that way. Physical execution is essential to the experience. It’s also a different game when played in emulation, because of it.

720° was designed by one of Atari Games’ most successful teams, John Salwitz and Dave Ralston, who also designed Paperboy, Cyberball, and my favorite of all of Atari’s output, probably my favorite arcade game of all: Rampart. Sadly, it looks like Rampart, while successful (at least judging by how many ports it got), was the title that marked their departure from Atari Games.

So relax for half an hour, or however much of it you can stand, and watch a 720° master demonstrate how to win over this uniquely challenging arcade game, on a physical cabinet no less. It’s a world where you earn 500 points from knocking over a bodybuilder, and isn’t that a place we’d all like to live in?

Atari 720 Degrees Play Through & Tips (Youtube, 30 minutes)

Dark Arts of Pinball: Bang Backs

An unalterable law of pinball is, when the ball slips between the flippers, or goes down an outlane, it is lost, too bad so sad, cue the bonus count, unless you tilted when you tried to save it, that is.

But this is not actually true.

There are a small number of what we might call “dark arts” in pinball, techniques to save balls that otherwise would not be saveable. This is one of the things that’s interesting about pinball. It’s not like video games where everything that happens is the result of processors moving bits around. There is room for things to happen on a pinball table that the game software has no control over.

One might even make a case, if they were feeling argumentative, that the scoring and the rules have an at-best incidental influence over the real game, which takes place purely in the physical realm. This isn’t completely true: the software awards extra balls, controls playfield toys, enforces tilts, and otherwise manipulates the game’s Newtonian world, but it is true that, if the machine is in working order, and the player never misses their shots, that they can play indefinitely, and even score popcorn points for hitting low-value targets. Pull that off long enough and you can earn arbitrarily high scores, but I hope you’re good enough to hit the same shot over and over thousands of times, though, not to mention have the spare time to do it in.

A consequence of this is, lost balls can be rescued, in a number of ways. One of them is the bang back.

When the ball goes down the left outlane, along the side and bottom of the playfield, if the left flipper is raised and the right flipper left down, a sudden forceful blow by the player’s hand against the lockdown bar at the right spot can impart enough force to the ball to cause it to leap up onto the right flipper, and back into play. Even though the machine “knows” the ball went down the outlane, due to triggering its switch, it generally won’t penalize the player for doing this. The ball-ending event is it coming to rest in the trough, the receptacle for out-of-play pinballs beneath the playfield. Until the ball reaches it, it’s live.

Bang backs are a dark art because they enable extra-long turns, and also the force required to execute them risks damaging both the machine and the player’s hand, and so are illegal in tournament play. But they can be pulled off pretty consistently, as this video from the PAPApinball channel (1 minute) demonstrates:

Another dark art of pinball is the deathsave, but let’s save that for later…

Dark Arts of Pinball: Deathsaves

So we covered bang backs back on Saturday. Let’s look at another tournament-illegal pinball maneuver, the deathsave. Here’s video from PAPA showing a couple being successfully performed (1 minute):

It’s another trick that involves the machine being bumped forcefully from the front in a specific way, this time to save balls going down the right outlane. I’ve never done one myself (even if I could muster the force, I don’t really want to). There are tables, including Rocky & Bullwinkle and The Last Action Hero, that are even set up to recognize when they’ve happened and reward it, or at least inform the player: I saw what you did there.

It prioritizes players with sufficient strength to shove the machine hard enough, and risks damaging it, so it’s illegal in tournament play. Due to the nature of tilt sensors, which are typically plum bobs with a conductive ring around them, depending on the details of the table it need not even incur a tilt warning, although it could run afoul of the slam tilt sensor, a separate device. Tilt sensors exist to allow some nudging but punish excessive use, and tilting results in the loss of a ball and any bonus. Slam tilt sensors are designed to protect the hardware itself, and immediately end the current game, which forfeits even the chance to enter initials. Essentially it resets the game’s computer. So, be careful with that.

Defender Master Gives Tips

Have you ever played Defender? It’s amazingly difficult! It was described in Craig Kubey’s golden-era video game book The Winner’s Book of Video Games as like being locked in a closet with a swarm of killer bees, and the comparison is apt. It absolutely destroys inexperienced players, and the road to mastery is long. And yet, it can be mastered. People have flipped the score many times over, even if it’s difficult to see how.

This video (18 minutes) from Tim’s Tiny Arcade with Defender expert Joe Dearman explains some of the higher-level tactics of the game.

One thing it doesn’t explain, though, possibly because it’s a fairly basic piece of knowledge even if it’s not obvious at all, is the “International Date Line.” There is an invisible vertical line at a specific place in the game world where the internal coordinate system wraps around. When your ship is being chased by enemies, and you cross that line, pursuers suddenly drop their pursuit, because the x-coordinate comparison sends them all the way around the game world the other way. If you hang out around the IDL, you can immediately escape from chasing Swarmers and Mutants just by crossing it!

Defender Strategy Tips from Joe Dearman – Golden Age Defender Champion (Youtube, 18 minutes)

Wizardry

Matters concerning the classic CRPG Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.

Andrew Greenberg, RIP

I just got back from DragonCon, and I’m pretty amazed that I didn’t get the connection that the Andrew Greenberg there, who created the classic TTRPG Vampire: The Masquerade, shared a name with Andrew Greenberg, co-creator of Wizardry. And how much of a coincidence it is that the later Greenberg passed away during DragonCon this year, while the former one was there and presenting panels.

Of course this post is about the Wizardry Greenberg. His passing was reported by the other major Wizardry creator, Robert Woodhead, on his Facebook page. It is nice that Digital Eclipse’s wonderful remake of Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord made it out while he was still alive. The name of the evil wizard in that game, Werdna, is Andrew spelled backwards. (Spelling names backwards was a popular way to name fantasy characters in early CRPGs. Trebor, the Mad Overlord himself, is Robert, as in Robert Woodhead, reversed, and Yendor from Rogue is Rodney backwards.)

Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead. Image from Woodhead’s Facebook page

Youtube channel Tea Leaves has an obit video (6 minutes) that fills in some of the context:

WIZARDReplaY

Wizardry used to be the most popular computer game in the world.

It has fallen on hard times recently. Creators SirTech released the terrific Wizardry 8 but then almost immediately closed up. The name is currently owned by a Japanese developer, who make games in the classic style but they’re still quite different, chasing old ghosts instead of trying to adapt the idea for new generations.

A full examination of Wizardry will have to wait for another time, but until then there’s a repackaging of the original Apple II versions available from the Total Replay folks. It’s made to run off of a ProDOS-formatted hard drive, words that themselves form a fearsome incantation, but you can still play it emulated. And should!

It includes an update of the original Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, plus the successor scenarios Night of Diamonds and Legacy of Llylgamin, plus five fan-made scenarios. It also includes WizPlus, a character editor, but diehards won’t use that. It’s cheating!

To explain Wizardry in summary, it took the ideas of early Dungeons & Dragons and adapted them to a dungeon exploration simulation with the same kind of theoretical basis. In D&D, if a character dies and there’s no way to revive it, it’s gone: no backsies. And sometimes revivals fail, and the character is gone anyway. And the dungeon in a genuinely treacherous place. If your party wipes, to even try to revive them, you have to create a new party of adventures, take them in, find the deceased party’s corpses in the dungeon, and either use magic to revive them there or drag them back to town to have the Temple of Cant do it.

If this sounds forbidding to current sensibilities, it certainly is! But that’s the point. Because of it, it’s about as close as you can get to traditional RP-gaming as you can get on a computer, even more so that official D&D products. Roguelikes come close, but since you only play as a single character in most of them they still don’t quite fit that electronic bill.

Wizard Replay (Apple II, Internet Archive)

Which Version of Wizardry 1 to Play?

Let’s keep rolling with these Youtube finds. There’s millions of them, but most of them are obnoxious, with the emphasis on noxious, so I try only to repost here the best. And this one’s pretty informative.

Which version of the classic foundational CRPG Wizardry should you play? I’m going to emphasize that you should play one of them. Wizardry inspired so many people, but one ever quite duplicated its mixture of tabletop-inspired party-based play, permadeath, and overwhelming difficulty. Wizardry is a game that doesn’t want you to win it. That’s why characters cost a fortune to revive, cost an ever greater fortune to bring back if that process fails, and it becomes impossible to revive them if that fails too.

If characters die in the dungeon, their corpses aren’t even brought back to the surface for you! You have to take a different party of characters into the dungeon (assuming they’re strong enough to survive the journey!), move the dead members into empty slots in your group, then return to town, unload them into storage, and repeat until you’ve rescued them all. And woe to the characters who mistype a teleport spell and end up embedded in rock, because they’re utterly destroyed, vanished, obliterated, annihilated, eradicated, gone.

Wizardry hates players, and that’s why you should play it: to teach it a goddamn lesson.

Youtuber Tea Leaves played a lot of versions of Wizardry, including a very promising upcoming version by Digital Eclipse, which has modern quality of life features and modern graphics, while also having, at its foundation, the Apple II original, with all its hatred for organic life. In summary, he thinks that version is great, but also has positive things to say about other versions, especially the fan-patched translation of the Japanese Super Famicom version. But they don’t like the DOS version-it has a terrible bug which Tea Leaves emphasizes makes it unplayable. Noted!

Which Version of Wizardry Should I Play (Youtube, 27 minutes)

On the History of Wizardry

Once upon a time, there was Wizardry, and nothing else. Welllll-l-l… almost nothing else. Here’s a makeshift timeline of CRPGs and CRPG-like released leading up to the original Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.

Don’t be fooled by this chart, where Wizardry happens to appear at the end. Most of these games were not widely available. Anything for a PDP or PLATO would only have been playable by a select few. Apshai and Ultima I were more widely available than their predecessors, but Wizardry was substantially deeper than either of them, and wasn’t surpassed for a while. For a time, it was the benchmark in the field, and inspired its own substantial subgenre, which we’ve heard called blobbers in the past. (Set Side B on blobbers previously, including an extensive list of them.)

Blobbers get their name because a whole RPG adventuring party is considered to exist filling one space in a first-person view of a dungeon grid, but it’s not really a great name because the defining characteristic of this sort of game isn’t the unity of the party but the view of the maze. Creating a first person maze of this type was a popular early graphical trick, because it was easy to program, and could be drawn on a tile-based display or possibly even a terminal. Blobbers continued to rule the roost for first-person games until the foundation of the first person shooters with id Software’s Catacomb-3D and Wolfenstein 3D, and more atmospheric 3D CRPGs like Origin’s Ultima Underworld.

Video and computer games are a field terribly unkind to their legacy. You might point to Mario, Sonic, Pac-Man and such as examples of games where decades-old originals are still known and played, but numerically speaking they are greatly outnumbered by the lost and nearly-forgotten. Games that used to be well known among all game-playing computer users are now mere footnotes, due to their companies going under, or their IPs being owned by uncaring megacorps interested only in milking their very most profitable properties YES I’M TALKING ABOUT ELECTRONIC ARTS. Ahem.

Wizardry is one of the foremost examples of this. For a while it was the best-selling computer RPG around, and its sequels did well for a long while. Wizardry VII was released in 1992, but then its successor Wizardry 8, a landmark title that finally brought the series into true 3D, took nine years to finish, and was sadly released right around the time of the demise of publisher Sir-Tech, although their Canadian branch lasted until 2oo3.

After Sir-Tech Software shut its doors, the series’ torch was held aloft for a long while by a succession of Japanese developers, beginning with ASCII Entertainment. Many of these games are still extremely obscure to the Western world, which seems odd considering how connected we’ve all become. We don’t even know if Robert Woodhead had anything to do with the first of the Japanese games, Wizardry Gaiden. The Japanese Wizardly line is all over the place aesthetically, but in play sticks by the formula of the very earliest games: spell ranks, permadeath, and tricky mazes. Despite being made for systems as varied as the Super Famicom and the PlayStation II, in gameplay they’re all of the Apple II orchard with limited additions. Despite being much that we don’t know, we still know a fair bit, due to an amazing 2020 article on the blog of the CRPG Addict written by “Alex,” with a great comments thread, that all deserves to be etched in stone and set forever on a monument in the middle of the town square of Llylgamyn.

It is more than a mere shame that all of these games remain effectively locked off from the country of Wizardry’s origin. An aging legion of players from the days of the Apple II has no idea that, in a land half a world away, 35 more Wizardry games, with gameplay with a clear recognizable link to the originals, were made and enjoyed. Maybe some day those games will be made more accessible to English-speaking audiences, the ones that aren’t now lost forever, at least.

I’ve said all of this, and I haven’t even gotten to what I had originally intended to be the subject of the piece, the terrific remake of Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord made by Digital Eclipse. Perhaps it’s best to hold off on that for a couple of days. Soon!

P.S. If anyone knows of easy-to-learn open source timeline making software, I’d greatly like to know of it, or even if there’s a good Excel or (preferably) LibreOffice add-on for that purpose.

The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….

Snafaru’s Wizardry Fanpage is a lot newer than most of the sites that get featured here under the Oldweb heading (see left/above), the earliest viewable version of the site on the Wayback Machine is from 2011, practically a baby at 13 years old. Yet it has some renown: I mentioned that I was playing Digital Eclipse’s wonderful remake, and someone on Mastodon pointed the site out to me. I then forgot about it, but then found it again through web search. Lucky! And it’s still being updated! If you keep your website up and updated for 13 years you deserve a PRIZE.

In addition to information on the original games, Snafaru maintains a scenario editor for Wizardry, and hosts a number of fanmade scenarios on their site. Wizardry is much older than even the blog, it was first published in 1981, 43 years ago. A game that maintains a fandom that long is amazing, even more so when its publisher went under so long ago.

Blade & Bastard, the (recent) Wizardry Manga

One recent thing I learned is that Wizardry, the CRPG series began in 1981, that hasn’t seen a new version from its creators since 2001, not only has seen Japanese sequels that faithfully follow the original style, but starting in 2022 and continuing today is a manga faithfully set in Wizardry’s world, called Blade & Bastard. It’s so faithful that it bears the Wizardry logo on its cover, looking similar to how it did on the 1981 Apple II box. Some logos get updated over the years, but classic computer CRPGs tend to keep theirs for the long haul.

Reading it legally at the moment, in English, isn’t possible. There is a version that can be found on Amazon, but don’t be fooled: despite its relatively large file size, it turns out that’s just text, and each volume is pretty short, like, around 30 pages short. There are websites where you can find fan-made scanlations of the manga. I won’t link to them, but they’re not hard to find. My suggestion, if you’re interested in reading it, is to use them for now, and get the official translations of the manga when they arrive. Signs seem to indicate they may be coming in October.

I’ve not read enough to know where the story is heading, but currently it’s seemed to mostly cover the basics of dungeon exploration life. Iarumas was a corpse found sealed in a part of the dungeon that shouldn’t have had human visitors. Revived at the Temple of Cant, he (as seems common for fantasy anime and manga protagonists and JRPG heroes alike) has no memory of his past life. He makes a living bringing dead adventurers back to the temple and getting a portion of their revival fee, which is a nice nod to one of the unique aspects of classic Wizardry.

He soon picks up a couple of other party members. Most descriptions I’ve seen fixate on “Garbage,” a girl found being used as bait by dungeon monsters, who is a fierce and strong Fighter-type but talks and acts like a dog, but she mostly seems to be in it for comedy. The actual protagonist seems to be Raraja, a kid thief who had been paid to try to use a magic item to attack Iarumas in the dungeon, but the item in fact teleported both of them. The kid joins the party because, as a thief, he’s the only one who can meaningfully interact with treasure chests in the dungeon.

Garbage-chan enjoys meat

They also meet the “All-Stars,” the most popular adventuring group in town, a group of high-level characters who originally found Iarumas’ mummified body.

The connections to classic Wizardry are many:

- It faithfully uses the spell names from the games and their purposes, to the extent that it adds a bit extra to a couple of scenes if you know what the spells are.

- The Temple of Cant is in operation and just as money-grubbing as they are in the games.

- The MURMUR CHANT PRAY INVOKE messages are alluded to when a character is revived in the early pages.

- Dead bodies who aren’t revived turn into ash. The priest character says this means God has decided they’ve lived a good-enough life, but they take their fee all the same. In the manga story, being ashed is the end, but in the games recovery from ash is possible, but at double the cost, and if it fails too the character is gone entirely.

- Iarumas maps out the dungeon on graph paper!

He also uses the Jeweled Amulet here, which in the games can be used to cast DUMAPIC at will

- The characters mostly keep to their class abilities, but some are obviously multi-classed; Iarumas, for instance, seems to currently be a ninja, but he must have picked up some spells in a previous class.

- A bishop character identifies items, because if they have them identified at the trading post there’d be no profit, because the identification fee is the same as the sale price.

- The trading post is run by an elf named Catrob, which is a reversal of Boltac the dwarf, who owns the trading posts throughout the early Wizardry games.

- The Ninja is named “Hawkwind,” a reference to a character in Wizardry IV. (They may also be one of the pre-mades in Wizardry I, but I haven’t managed to get it running to check.)

- Being teleported into solid rock is mentioned at one point.

- Characters seem to be aware of alignment, and experience levels.

- Iarumas seems to be a character who’s a holdover from the Apple II era of Wizardry, because he sees the dungeon in wireframe!

This is a great visual joke for anyone who’s seen the originals

I hope an official translation of the manga comes out before long, because I’m rather looking forward to reading it!

It was brought up by ChurchHatesTucker on Mastodon that this isn’t even the first Wizardry manga, there was one in 2009 called, in the way of manga, Wizardry Zeo. It was considered a “shounen” manga, for a target audience of young teen boys. How many teenagers in Japan were playing Wizardry in 2009, I wonder?

And there were even one or two earlier that that, called Wizardry and/or Wizardry Gaiden. There were Wizardry Gaiden games in Japan, which were alternate scenarios using the same rules but with different mazes and story, and this/these may have been a spinoff of that/those.

Rampart

A rather self-indulgent section about Atari Game's unique 1989 arcade action puzzle game Rampart.

Rampart, Part 1: Introduction

The next week is going to be pretty busy for me, so I’m reusing a long long piece I originally wrote for the short-lived fanzine I made, Extended Play. It’s been seen before, but only by a very small audience.

Rampart has been an obsession to me since it came out around 1990. I still think it’s one of the finest arcade games ever made, actually one of the best video games period. People tend to describe it as either an early version of Tower Defense, or Missile Command meets Tetris, but neither description is very good. Simply, there had never been a game like Rampart before, and despite some attempts to clone it, there’s never been a game like it since, either.

We’re all as obsessed with weird old arcade games as I am, right? Right?? Most (but not all) of the next week of posts will all be about this wonderful, but extremely difficult, game, one of the best from Atari Games at their heights. Please bear with me, and please, try to understand why I’ve been so into this unique game for so long.

In the late 80s Atari Games was recovering from 1983’s Great Game Crash, which decimated the US arcade industry and resulted in a great dying out of companies. Atari Games, newly split away from the consumer electronics company that would make the Atari ST, weathered it better than most, primarily through developing ingenious kinds of games the likes of which were seen nowhere else.

This period, 1984-1990, is the age that began with Marble Madness and the System 1 hardware, followed by hits like Paperboy, 720 Degrees, Gauntlet, Toobin’, Cyberball and others. It lasted roughly to the release of Street Fighter II, which sparked the fighting game craze and made arcades inhospitable to most other genres for a while. At the tail end of this period came Rampart, designed by John Salwitz and Dave Ralston, who also created three of the games in the foregoing list.

It’s a bit obscure now, but it was quite a hit for Atari at the time. For home systems Rampart received no less than thirteen distinct ports, plus a few notable emulations. It got very good reviews from Nintendo Power (SNES version) and Videogames & Computer Entertainment (arcade). More recently, it was released emulated with network play for free for the PlayStation 3. And yet, still, no one talks about Rampart anymore.

Battle Phase

That is a weird thing about what I call Atari Games’ “Silver Age,” that time after the classic arcade boom of the late 70s/early 80s but before the rise of one-on-one fighting games, its games, while still fun and surprisingly ingenious, and widely ported, don’t have the star power, other than a couple of things like Gauntlet, that Japanese releases from the same time have garnered.

Part of the reason may be trademark-related. The name Atari still carries considerable nostalgic weight, but another company, the one formerly known as Infogrammes, bought the trademark and the classic Fuji logo, and still releases games under it. They own the rights to everything before Marble Madness. Games after that were owned by Midway for a while, but Midway then, in a crushing indignity, renamed them Midway Games West, before closing them outright in 2005, getting out of arcades altogether. Many of its assets were sold to Warner Bros. Entertainment, who presumably now owns the rights to Atari’s post-Marble Madness catalog.

I’ve written before that, at their peak, I think Atari Games was more ingenious and original than Nintendo themselves. They made some stinkers, sure (few remember Thunderjaws, or their arcade take on Tim Burton’s Batman movie) but their best games were, and still are, amazing. I think that Rampart, while little talked about now, is at the top of the gilded heap.

Rampart is great, but it’s difficult. For a game I’ve been obsessed with since its release in arcades in 1989, I can only complete it on default settings about a third of the time, and usually only after expending all the continues the game allows. This was common for Atari Games games, who tended to make arcade machines that mocked the idea of one credit runs, but even among those, Rampart is hard. You are not going to master this one overnight.

I view my purpose here usually to be a secondary source. That is, I prefer to summarize, encapsulate, explain and preserve information available elsewhere. But the thing about Rampart is, there is very little of this information to find. For a game that was popular at the time of its release and with so many ports, googling it will not turn up much to aid you. As far as I know, and I’ve searched for it many times throughout the years, Rampart has never had a good, comprehensive strategy guide written for it.

It is because of this, favored reader, that I have decided that this shall be that guide. Since most of it is self-discovered, I have no one to blame for errors but myself. I have made some efforts to make sure it’s correct, but, well, sometimes even well-considered assumptions turn out to be false. I’ve done what I can.

(More tomorrow!)

Arcade Mermaid: Rampart, Part 2: Overview

We continue our lengthy, obsessive coverage of Atari Games’ brilliant, but really difficult, arcade strategy game Rampart.

Overview

Building Phase

Rampart is really two separate but related games, the single-player game and multiplayer. Both are excellent. Even so, this article mostly concerns itself with single-player, but towards the end I will have a few things to say about its multiplayer mode.

Before we begin, you should know that Rampart is a highly abstract game, and as such it might not be easy to see how it all fits together from a text description. I have uploaded several complete playthroughs of the game to YouTube, the first such on that site of the arcade version. You might watch a bit of one of them, it should make it pretty obvious how the game works.

The Board

In both single-player and multiplayer, after selecting a home castle and placing initial cannons, the game repeats a sequence of rounds, each consisting of a Battle phase, Building phase and Cannon phase. In the Battle phase, players shoot at ships or the other players’ walls, while those ships or enemy cannons fire back at their own walls. In the Building phase, players place a variety of shaped pieces in an attempt to fix their wall and/or construct walls around at least one of the castles on their land within a time limit. Then in the Cannon phase, players get a number of new cannons to place within the territory they captured in the Building phase, adding to the number of shots they can get off in Battle.

Select Home Castle, then
Cannons -> Battle -> Building -> repeat

This cycle continues until the player wins or loses. Losing happens when a player fails to capture a castle in time in Building. Winning happens, in single-player, when the game decides the ships don’t have a reasonable chance of defeating the player, and advances to the next level, out of six in total. In multiplayer, it happens when all the other players have lost and don’t continue, or for a set number of battles. If the fight goes the full distance, the winner is the surviving player with the highest score.

A defeated player can put more money in the machine to continue the game “with more firepower.” This is allowed four times in single-player, so up to five credits in all, and losing after that results in a solid Game Over. The dynamics of continuing in Rampart are really more complex than this, and I’ll explain those later, but for the time being, you should know “with more firepower” signifies several important changes that are not all clear during play.
In multiplayer, losing players can choose to continue individually twice. That can make for a decently long game if all the players choose to buy all their continues. But eventually, the game will declare a round to be the “Final Battle,” after which no continues will be offered to losing players, and the game ends regardless. The number of rounds a game is allowed to go is operator-adjustable, and continued games usually add a few battles to the overall length.
There also exists one semi-secret game variation. If just two players play Rampart, and at least one of them is joining in again after a completed game, there is a map selection screen that offers the chance to play a composite game mode, featuring both two players and ships! In this, the ships belong to one or the other side, and are color-coded based on who they belong to. They function like extra cannons, generally firing where the player aims their cursor, but are more autonomous. This mode is an interesting variation, and is fairly obscure. Could there be other such secrets hidden in Rampart’s code?

Basics

For now, we’re most concerned with figuring out and defeating the very difficult single-player game. The basic play of both games is similar, but there is a lot of difference between attacking ships or walls, and the structure of single-player is quite different, so it’s worth treating each mode separately.
When you put a coin in and press Start, this appears:

This ornate lobby screen is accompanied by booming drums and realistic, although synthesized, trumpets and fifes. With the volume turned up (as all Rampart machines should rightfully have) the effect is startling and bound to attract some attention. The purpose of this screen is to give other players the opportunity to join the game, for unlike the Gauntlet-style, “join any time” play model Atari pioneered and most arcade games used, once underway a game of Rampart cannot be entered by others. Players can only leave a game, by failing and not continuing.

An interesting thing about Rampart is that, after a game concludes, it always returns to the lobby screen and adds the player’s score to a total across all their games in the session. This encourages players to play repeated games, to see their overall score climb higher and higher. I’ve seen the total go up to over 900,000 points, which takes around 18 full-length games. I know of no reason to go for a high total score other than vanity, but if someone else has information on this I’d certainly like to know!

Your Domain

Assuming a single-player game, the screen clears and shows an overview screen of an island. There are four possible maps that can be selected for play here. At the start of the game, two areas along the shore are boxed, one marked “RECRUIT,” the other “VETERAN +5000 points.” Most of Atari Games’ arcade releases had such a selection, for it was a major part of their house style to offer a basic and an advanced difficulty, with a score bonus for starting harder. With Rampart, this choice is mostly an illusion. All choosing Recruit does is start you off with a very easy first board (the Recruit map is always the “J” map), which usually takes two rounds to finish.

Each level pits the player against a larger and more dangerous enemy navy.

At first, only weak Single-Sailed Ships attack, which go down with two hits from basic cannonry. Here, I call these Gunships.

With level two comes Double-Sailed Ships, a.k.a. Landers, which take three hits, and if they manage to get close to a diagonal shoreline, they drop off a swarm of evil little Grunts.

Grunts are a huge danger! They are the only enemy that has the power to move around during the Building phase. I’ll have more to say about them later, but for now just know that a grunt beachhead, left unopposed, has more credit-ending power than anything else in the game.

Starting with level three, Red Ships join the battle. Although few in number at first, these take five shots to sink, and their red cannonballs leave fiery craters where they land. Craters block piece placement and persist for multiple rounds. Usually a Red Ship can get off two or three shots each Battle, and they add up.

Levels four through six feature the same kinds of ships, but they’re darker in color, which in game terms means they take one additional hit before sinking. Dark Gunships take three hits, Dark Landers require four hits, and Dark Red Ships only go down after six cannonballs have struck them.

Every time you complete a level, you’re returned to the island screen to pick a new map to play. After the first level, three remaining unplayed options are offered. If you chose a Recruit game you’ll eventually have to face all these boards, but if you picked Veteran and started on level two, you end up skipping one of them, an opportunity to avoid a disliked map.

The “C” Map

The “Hat” Map

The “J” Map

The “N” Map

The maps are not even in difficulty. Generally, easier maps have castles with land around them on all sides, and more straight horizontal or vertical coastline, giving Landers fewer places to land. My opinion is that the “Hat” map is the easiest, followed by the “J” map, then the “C” and “Lowercase N” maps. A good strategy is to try to get one of the harder two maps out of the way as first selection, so you can later play the J and Hat maps to offset the harshness of the third and fourth levels, but sometimes the Veteran selection level ends up being the Hat, and you’ll have to play them in a different order.

The “Slash” Map

The “Backslash” Map

Level five is selected from one of two unique maps, both peninsulas with water on both sides. Both are difficult, although I think the “Backslash” board is a little easier. As you progress, each level starts you out with fewer castles to capture. By this point you’re only getting three castles, and you’ll probably have to use all of them to survive.

The final, “Island” Map

The last level is an island to itself, with a lake on it and only two castles! Here, ships attack from both sides of the screen. This level is a trial; although you have to sink fewer ships here to win, it’s difficult to prevent landings and grunts from overwhelming you, and the craters from Red Ships can easily give you an inescapable situation unless you mitigate them.

If you finish the last level, you get special ending music, and an illustration that few arcade goers have seen, before being returned to the High Score and Lobby screens. It may seem anti-climatic, but final victory and safe shores are their own reward.

Arcade Mermaid: Rampart, Part 3: The Phases

Because I’m out of town for a few days, we’re continuing our week-long coverage of Atari Games’ brilliant, yet really hard classic arcade strategy game Rampart.

Each of Rampart’s phases has its own considerations, so let’s take them one at a time.

Battle Phase

Rampart’s most traditional mode is its Battle sequence, which plays a bit like Atari’s old hit Missile Command. For a limited amount of time, players use the trackball to move a crosshairs around the screen, and the Fire button launches a cannonball from one of their cannons aimed at that spot.
Cannonballs have a set speed that they travel as they move through the air; nearby shots go directly towards the destination, but distant targets travel in a high arc. Thus, more distant shots take much more time to reach their targets, due to the fact that they have to be angled upward.

The speed of your shots matters for two important reasons. First, in single-player mode, enemy ships don’t always sit still and let your projectiles sink them, but move around at different speeds, and sometimes even try to dodge your shots. One of the most annoying events in Rampart is when you launch a volley towards a ship, and it decides to pull anchor and float elsewhere just as your shots launch, wasting those precious missiles. Firing at close-up ships means you don’t have to lead your targets by nearly as much, and reduces the chance that a ship will just sail out from under your projectiles.

The other important thing is, each cannon can only have one shot in the air at a time. Firing at nearby targets means you can get more shots off during a Battle phase. The combination of the two, being more accurate when shooting moving targets and getting more shots off, means that, absent other issues, you should prioritize firing at ships near your guns.

You cannot entirely erase the chance that a ship will decide to start, or stop, moving after you launch shots towards it, but there is some finesse that can be applied. Ships always sail in a straight line in one of the eight cardinal/diagonal directions, and ships cannot move through other ships. If a moving ship runs into another one, it will stop. They cannot turn around while in motion, but must wait until their invisible captain picks a new direction, which could be immediately or never. They also stop if they reach the shoreline, which for a Lander could be very bad for you. Once in a while a moving ship will just stop for no reason. The only constant is, all ships stop moving at the very end of the Battle phase, once all cannonballs have landed.

The rules of cannon fire, the ones concerning shot speed and there only being one shot in play at a time per weapon, they also apply to the enemy ships. Nearby ships are able to launch more shots at closer walls than distant ones, another reason to prioritize shooting nearby ships. But this must be balanced against those times when you need to prevent a landing, or take out some Red Ships to make the Build phase more survivable.

The game continues no matter how many ships you sink in Battle, but to progress to the next level, and eventually win the game, it’s advantageous to sink ships. The exact qualification for finishing a level is unknown, but it seems to happen after you wipe out most of the ships on-screen.

There is a maximum of 16 ships that can be in play at any time. If that number is reached, but there are some weakened or Single-Sailed Ships on-screen, Rampart is known to remove some of them so stronger ships may enter the fray.

Building Phase

This is the meat of the game. While shooting ships eventually clears levels, you can’t do that without cannons, and cannons are awarded from skill at building. Also, if you fail to capture at least one castle in a round, you lose.

The way it works is, the game hands you an assortment of building pieces of various shapes, one at a time. The pieces you’re given first exist as just a flashing outline that you can maneuver freely over the land with the trackball or joystick. You can move it anywhere while you’re getting it into position, or rotate it clockwise with a press of the “Rotate” button. (If you start out your first building phase without using the button, the game’s voice will suddenly intone, “Use ROTATE for a better fit!” Rampart doesn’t have nearly as much digitized speech as Gauntlet, but it sure is memorable when it does speak.)

The difficult bit is, you cannot place pieces anywhere there is something per-existing. A piece cannot be placed if any part of it overlaps with another wall, the shore, a castle, a cannon, a crater, a grunt, or the edge of the screen. Everything visible beneath the piece’s outline must be the clean, green checkerboard of countryside.

You must place the current piece before you get the next one. Intermediate Rampart players ruefully observe that the game tends to hand out just the wrong piece they need at a given time. A lot of this is observation bias, you don’t tend to notice the times when the game hands you just the right piece, but it’s true that the pieces the game has to hand get larger and more complex as the game continues.

When a piece is plopped down it turns into wall. If the wall adjoins wall pieces already extant, they’ll join together pleasingly into a solid-looking structure. Your task is to connect wall pieces together like this until you have a complete loop all the way around and enclosing at least one castle. Usually you want this castle will be the one you start with, called your “Home Castle.” It’s worth extra points and cannons if you capture it, but any castle will allow you to survive.

There are two particular hassles in the Building phase that deserve special mention. The first are those grunts the Landers sometimes drop off if they reach the shore, and that have the power to move around during Building. They look like tiny tanks, or little battering rams.

Grunts move during Building, meaning they can actually block pieces just as you’re trying to place them. They not only move, but slowly multiply as they go, tending to form lines between the shore and your castles. Worst of all, grunts that make it to your castles have the power to destroy them during the following Battle phase, the only thing in the game that can harm a castle itself.

Grunts are so dangerous that landings must quickly be dealt with or else your game will soon be over. You can shoot them during the Battle phase, or you can surround the territory they’re on, destroying them instantly with a satisfying crunching noise.

Keep Landers away from diagonal shorelines, or you’ll have a bad time!

One important thing to note about grunts is that they can’t be dropped off just anywhere. Landers (here circled) can only leave grunts on diagonal shorelines. Highlighted above are the landing sites on the “Hat” map. Guard them at all costs.

The other problem you must worry about during Building is craters, flaming pits in the very ground left when the red cannonballs launched by Red Ships strike your wall. A crater is an implacable obstacle; there is no way to remove a crater from the board other than time. Near the end of the game, depending on the randomized ship generation, you may end up with rounds where you must face six or more Red Ships at once, which is horrifying.

Caused by too many craters left by Red Ships, this situation cannot be survived. Can you see why?

When a crater is formed, it’s a full-strength pit of fire. Every Battle phase, each crater diminishes a bit. They all do this in lockstep: all the craters formed in one round will advance to the next state at once.

How does the game decide how quickly to make craters disappear? It’s a function of how recently you’ve put in money and continued the game! If you’ve recently continued, then for a while the game makes craters disappear in two rounds instead of three.

Cannon Phase

The Cannon phase is much less tense than the others. You get ten seconds to place additional cannons for subsequent Battles. But placement of cannons is one of the most important decisions of all. In a sense, the reason you’re capturing castles, beyond mere survival, is to support your artillery.

For the first Cannon phase of the whole game, the game gives you three cannons to get you started. On the first Cannon phase after continuing, you get four, as part of the “and more firepower” the game promises. On the first round of other levels, you start with just two.

Beyond that, on each successive Cannon phase, you get two more cannons to place for having captured your home castle, and one more for each other castle. But this only happens if you have room to place them. When surrounding castles in the Building phase, you must not only survive, but try to leave extra room for placing cannons, that is, if you want more artillery.

The more cannons you have, the more shots you can get off in the Battle phase, and thus the more of a dent you can put into the enemy navy and/or other players’ walls. This, in turn, decreases the shots coming in towards your walls, lets you do something about Landers before they drop off Grunts, lets you shoot at Grunts directly, allows you to sink more Red Ships before they set your whole countryside ablaze, and ultimately depletes the opposing navy faster.

Lots of cannons mean lots of shots! Shots can stop landings, clear out Red Ships, and hasten the end of the level.

But cannons are also a big problem. Each cannon you place is a 2×2 square of ground that cannot be otherwise built upon, which restricts the shapes of pieces that can fit on the ground. Having lots of cannons progresses you through the level, but increases the area you have to surround to survive.
Practically, you must build at least some cannons directly adjacent to your castle, and other cannons adjacent to those, in a big sulfuric blob. Thus, to capture that castle, you’ll also have to capture all the cannons that adjoin it, a mass of guns that grows in size with each round. And in case you come up with the idea to build cannons away from castles to avoid this, you should know that cannons that aren’t “owned” during a battle phase sit idle, doing nothing.

A “summer home” is a secondary castle you turn to in order to survive, usually with cannons attached, when your home castle is too difficult to recover.

You must have cannons to survive through each level, to punch back against the enemy, to take care of threats and eventually to advance towards finishing it, but having them makes later Building phases harder. Once a cannon is placed, it cannot be removed except by losing and continuing the game. And not having any cannons is a counter to using the “summer home” strategy for every round: while you can often abandon your home castle and its armaments in favor of a small unadorned dwelling out in the sticks, unless you’ve built cannons there on previous rounds, you’ll have, at most, one gun to thwart landings. A lot of games have ended due to this.

One subtle aspect to Rampart strategy is the cannon firing order. Cannons fire in the order in which they were placed. Any uncaptured cannons, and also cannons with shots in the air, are ignored in the queue. The difference in lead time between a cannon near the shore, and one way back at the screen edge, is significant, and can result in a lot of missed shots. To thwart this, it helps to try to build cannons in one mass, instead of spread out, and to try to build in more centralized locations, but truthfully it’s difficult to consciously make use of this strategy during a game.

This is a danger spot, a location where, if a single Red Cannonball hits, it renders the whole castle and its cannons impossible to capture.

One thing that players cannot afford to ignore is the danger of building cannons too close to the water or the edge of the screen. This is a huge concern. Building cannons close to hard barriers like those greatly reduces the number of pieces that will fit between the gun and the obstacle, and increases the chance that a red cannonball will hit in a such a place as to create an impossible rescue. To the game’s credit, Red Ships do not appear to target these locations intentionally, but neither do they avoid them, so It’s important to try to leave at least two spaces between cannons and any hard barriers, and more if you can. Especially look out for one-space diagonal separation, because it isn’t as obviously dangerous as horizontal or vertical. The more free space around your installations, the easier it’ll be to build walls there later, and the better off you’ll be.

So what if you decide you have enough cannons and don’t want to place some or all this round, do you have to sit and wait out the clock? Why, no: if you make five consecutive illegal cannon placements in a row, the game will take that as a signal that you’re done placing them and end the Cannon phase immediately.

That’s three parts so far! Yes, there’s more to say about this diabolical game, but we’ll take a break for a couple of days, for other posts. See you soon!

Arcade Mermaid: Rampart, Part 4: Level Strategy

Yes! More Rampart! I’m still out of town at DragonCon so I’m repurposing an old strategy guide I wrote for Extended Play into a week of posts. Even I’m starting to get sick of Rampart by now, but please stick around. And if you’ve ever tried playing this infuriating game in the arcade, this might give you the advice you need to get through to levels you might not have thought possible! And this is even a fairly short post!

Level Strategies

Level One (“Recruit”)

Castles available: 6

It’s advised not to start on this level unless it’s your first game. You’ll not only miss out of 5,000 points by starting here, but it means the beginning of Level 2 will begin you with only two cannons instead of three, and you’ll face more ships.

This level is so easy that it barely rates mention. It has six castles, and only Gunships appear. Unless you’re purposely stalling, you’ll finish this map in two rounds. Even if you stall, the level auto-completes in three rounds, regardless of if you fire a single shot.

Another reason to avoid picking Beginner is that its selection is always the “J” map, which is one of the easier selections from the initial four boards. It’s better if you pick it later, when the opposition is harder, to balance out the difficulty.

Level Two (“Veteran”)

Castles available: 5

The Veteran level is randomly chosen from one of the other three basic maps, although it tends to be the “C” map most often. Ideally it won’t be the “Hat” map, it being the easiest, as you’ll want it to be your Level 4.

If you started on the board, the first round will always put you up against four ships, one of which may be a Lander. Later ships are frequently also Landers. As a result grunts may appear on this board, but even if some appear, so long as you focus on destroying enemy ships and don’t suffer major setbacks like losing your home castle, you’ll probably wipe out the attackers before they become a huge problem.

On a later round in this level you’ll probably encounter your first Red Ship. A Red Ship tends to get off two or three shots in a round, each producing flaming crater you must build around.

Level Three

Castles available: 5

You always get to pick this level yourself. I usually try to make it “C,” “J” or “Hat,” in that order. I usually avoid picking “N,” but it’s not really harder than “C,” so pick whatever is your preference.

Much of the fleet will be Landers here, so this is the first level where you must be diligent about thinning out their numbers. Especially try to take care of ships about to land; grunts are unwelcome visitors to deal with, and it’s best if they never show up at all. In the event of a landin, which is sometimes unavoidable, try to spare a few seconds to build a barrier to them, to wall them off from the rest of the board. If you can contain them in a small area around the landing, you can keep their numbers down that way and thus reduce the number of shots you must expend in cleaning them up. Don’t think you can just let them be! They will overwhelm you easily if you ignore them.

I try to pick a home castle that’s near another castle, so I can capture them both with one wall. If you can consistently get both each round, that’s three cannons each time. Use them to connect the space between the two castles, but try to keep that space as small as possible. Try to aim for the minimum-sized rectangle needed to save both of them, and then try to place all your cannons within that rectangle.

Level Four

Castles available: 4

Now the game starts to get serious. If you can get here on your first credit you’ve done very well, but your weak basic guns will become more and more of a liability for you. Dark ships start appearing on this level, and will continue to appear until the end of the game. They all take one extra hit to sink. That’s three hits for Gunships, four for Landers, and six for Red Ships.

Try to make Landers that have a chance of landing at a diagonal shore your top priority. If one makes it through, then at the start of the Building phase devote three seconds or so it blocking their progress with walls. If they get away from the shore and a significant number appear, then focus on surviving and shoot them with cannons during Battle. Red Ships start to be a significant threat here. Once all the potential landings are taken care of, try to pump six shots into a Red Ship.

Level Five (peninsula)

Castles available: 3

Regardless of how you got here, you have a choice between two new maps for this level, a diagonal peninsula going upper-right to lower-left, or one going from upper-left to lower-right. I call these the “slash” and “backslash” maps, respectively. I usually pick backslash, but both are about the same difficulty.

These maps have the property of having two seas, a small one at the top of the screen and a more typical larger one at the bottom. The small water region is both a blessing and a curse; the restricted movement makes it easier to destroy ships there, but landings are very likely unless you clear out the Landers arriving there. What is more, these maps are the only ones in the game that break the rule about landings only being possible on diagonal shores. Landers in the small sea are also counted as landed if they contact land at the very edge of the screen, even if there’s no diagonal shore nearby. This property doesn’t extend to screen-edge landings in the larger sea.

The worst thing about these levels is that the game takes off the limiter on the number of Red Ships that can be generated each round. Red Ships here are nearly as common as Double-Sailed ones! You’ll frequently see seven or more on-screen at a time. While you must remain vigilant to prevent and/or mitigate landings, you must also work towards reducing the number of Red Ships. The large number of flaming craters on these levels made adopting a “summer home” strategy imperative, where you switch off between castles when one gets too difficult, or even impossible, to save. It’s usually a good idea to try to capture two castles in the first round because of this; then you can station some or all of your cannons for that round at the other castle, so you’re not defenseless when you’re forced to turn to it for survival. From there, you can focus on getting cannons around the third castle for maximum safety.

This level is a strong test of your Rampart skills, and often is a barrier to progression until you’ve played many games. But it’s not invincible. On Easy difficulty, I’ve passed this level still on my first credit multiple times. The biggest thing you have to worry about is the high probability of impossible situations.

Consider: when any castle is adjacent to other objects, you must capture the whole collection as a set. Chains of objects like this increase the difficulty of getting the whole thing, and increases the odds of getting an impossible save. I’ve seen this happen after even the first round on a peninsula board, and I’ve seen it happen on all three castles on one of these maps at the same time.
The only substantive thing you can do, besides rotating between castles, is to shoot some of the dangerous walls yourself. Red Cannonballs don’t leave craters if the wall is already destroyed, but that takes time and often makes for a difficult repair.

So, what if you manage to clear this map? What happens next? The game scrolls the FINAL BATTLE banner, and you get a one-way ticket to:

Level Six (island)

Castles available: 2

It all comes down to this. This level is a special kind of hell, only slightly mitigated by the fact that it seems you can get away with sinking fewer ships here, and, because you’re surrounded on all sides, your shots often don’t have that far to travel to reach a ship. There are four prime landing areas, each in one corner of the map, so landings can only be delayed, not prevented. And you only get two castles. Enjoy!

When you start looking more closely at the map, some slight advantages become apparent. There’s a lake in the bottom-left of the board, which gets in the way, somewhat, of grunts approaching from the bottom. Both castles have a good amount of land around them, although there are so many Red Ships here that the “summer home” strategy is essential to survival.

The continue limit eases up a little bit here. If you were at the maximum of four continues upon starting Level Six, the game will grant you an extra continue when you get here. (You still have to pay your coins for it though.) And also, if you were at that final credit, the game will actually downgrade your cannons one step when you get here, so get used to expending two/three/five shots for Gunships/Landers/Red Ships again. If (ha ha, “if”) you do expend that last continue, you go back to only needing one/two/four shots to sink ships. (There is more information on the effects of continues on cannon power in the notes, later on.)

This level is an ordeal, but it can be finished surprisingly quickly. I’ve seen it cleared in three rounds, although that was after several continues (it had been a pretty great game up to that point). This level is the big obstacle to one-credit clears, I’ve managed to finish everything up to it on one credit only to bang my head against it repeatedly. Using save states, I’ve managed to finish it with a single continue, so it is possible to finish it relatively cheaply, but making do with such weak cannons is a real challenge.

Sundry Sunday

Every week we find another new fan-made piece of entertainment about games and gaming culture. This year's are collected here.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder Halloween Music

In the new Mario game, but there are a number of what we might call "music levels," and a couple in particular fit in with the spirit of the day. Here they are: Pumpkin Party and A Night At Boo’s Opera (length: 3 minutes). This is an edited-down version of a 28-minute compilation of all of the game’s music sequences, on Youtube.

Sundry Sunday: Eggpo, “Mini-Boss”

Here is the third of the Eggpo cartoons that The Brothers Chaps, creators of Homestar Runner, made for Disney XD, as part of their “Two More Eggs” series.

This one’s only 1 1/2 minutes (none of them are very long). Eggpos are Goomba-class enemy conscripts in a platformer starring Dooble (who features, in non pixel-form, in other Two More Eggs cartoons). None of the Eggpo get any respect. The cartoons focus on two particular Eggpos (is that the right plural?), one who misguidedly believes in the system, the other willing to buck it a bit if it means he doesn’t get stomped on or set aflame. Here, they are set to meet a higher-level member of the whimsical military they’re a part of.

The Eggpo series contains seven videos in all. This is #3, so we’re about halfway through them. See you again at number four.

Sundry Sunday: Snailchan Adventure

Under the category of lushly-produced silly game-related things, from four years ago, there’s Snailchan’s Adventure. It’s not very serious at all, but it’s a fun use of four minutes of your time. The comments mention that there was an actual game based on this animation planned, but I’m not aware of anything having ever come of it. Still, this is nice in and of and by and through itself. I don’t know if it actually was on Newgrounds at some point, but it seems like exactly the kind of thing that would have been featured there at some point, and it was right after a bit of exploration there that Youtube’s recommendation algorithm decided to show it to me, so it probably had been there, in the past-past.

Sundry Sunday: Very Short Pizza Tower Cartoon

This is a very short animation with a couple of Pizza Tower characters. It’s a mere trifle, and the joke’s pretty silly,but it’s spot on, of the game’s style, and in the appearance of an early 90s cartoon show, of the type that the game’s animation itself seeks to emulate. It’s gotten an absurd number of views, like nearly half a million, in six days. Now, maybe it will get a few more.

“Four feet! Get it? Get it??”

Pizza Tower Cartoon (Youtube, 25 seconds)

Sundry Sunday: There’s Something About The Typing of the Dead

I’m going to be honest, I vary in my appreciation for TerminalMontage’s gaming-related Youtube animations. Sometimes I think they’re brilliant, other times I think they really try too hard to be edgy. At their best they use the purposely-janky animation to make a point about the subject. Previously I’ve linked to their Breath of the Wild “speedrun” animation, where some of the things that would ordinarily be kind of lolrandom inclusions were actually, amazingly, references to things players do in actual speedruns.

I think the pinnacle of their output has to be their depiction of the events of The Typing of the Dead, Sega’s side-sequel to The House of the Dead 2, which took that lightgun zombie-shooting arcade game and grafted a typing trainer onto it. It was one of the most memorable game experiences I’ve ever seen, not just for the crazy premise that entirely works, not for the ludicrous power of its word list, but because the boss fights were each reworked to fit into the style, and forced players to answer questions with the keyboard, or type ludicrous sentences to try to mess them up.

There’s Something About The Typing of the Dead takes the game’s premise and reworks it as if villain Goldman was a 4chan-style vomiter of memes, right down to having an Anonymous mask, and as such makes for a more effective villain than the actual game had. The computer-synthesized voices for the characters are on a par with the terrible voice acting in the game. Most of all, I’m pleased for the unexpected use of Whomst’d’ve at the end.

Now that I’ve finally managed to squeeze this video into Sundry Sunday, I look forward to never mentioning memes here ever ever again.

Something About the Typing of the Dead [Loud Sound Warning] (Youtube, 4 1/2 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: Eggpo, Waiting

It’s been a while since we checked in with Eggpo, from “Two More Eggs,” that series the Brothers Chaps (creators of Homestar Runner) made for Disney XD or sommin like that. In case you forgot, Eggpo is the species of these eggplant people, whose job it is to attack the “good guy,” a.k.a. Dooble, who features in other TME videos.

Here, two Eggpos engage in the basic repetitive patterns entailed by their employment, without much success.

Eggpo: Waiting (Youtube, one minute)

Sundry Sunday: Wolf Reacts to Team Star Fox’s Halloween Costumes

We haven’t covered anything of the exquisitely-made Youtube animation series A Fox In Space yet. Probably someday. But as it was just released and it’s really timely, here is Wolf O’Donnell reacting to Fox and crew’s costumes. CW: bleeped profanity.

Peppy is Beetlejuice? What?

A Fox In Space: Are You Guys Trick or Treating? (Youtube, 36 seconds)

Sundry Sunday: Pirhana Plants On Parade With Fan-Made Lyrics

We linked a couple of weeks back to the Pirhana Plants on Parade music in an early level of Super Mario Wonder. Here are well-written and executed fan-made lyrics for the song, presented along with the level. It reads and sounds like something Nintendo’s own localizers might have made! Please enjoy:

Pirhana Plants on Parade With Lyrics (Youtube, one minute)

Sundry Sunday: Cooking With Louie #2

A few weeks back we posted a fun stop-motion animation of Louie, the hunger-driven sidekick and alternate leader character from the game Pikmin 2, hosting a cooking show in which he tried to prepare a Bulbear for eating. It didn’t go well, because Bulbears in Pikmin 2 spontaneously come back to life if not harvested quickly. Oops!

Well sponsors Hocotate Freight didn’t learn their lesson, and there’s now a second episode of Cooking With Louie. Word of advice: it’s best not to use live alien lifeforms as your method of roasting the dish.

Sundry Sunday: Pest Protector from Rhythm Heaven

Usually Sundry Sunday is for things related to games, not games themselves, but this is fun and random so why not?

The WarioWare people have made some weird games. Nowadays they seem to be focused on realizing the software products of Mario’s moneygrubbing alter ego and his disreputable gang of sorta-friends, but they have another series, Rhythm Tengoku, known in (some) English speaking territories as Rhythm Heaven.

Every single Rhythm Heaven game is a joy, from Karate Man to the Final Remix, but my favorite is probably Packing Pests, a.k.a. Pest Protectors.

Your onscreen surrogate is Employee 333-4-591032, working for the suspiciously-named Spider-Free Candy Company. And, well, see for yourself (three minutes):

Your nemesis

No Rhythm Heaven mini game is much explained beyond its directions, but all of them tell a story by their details. Your character is a new hire. We know he works for Spider-Free Candy by the poster on his wall when the Wii version is played in widescreen. We know he’s creeped out by spiders by what happens if you accidentally clutch one or let one by your guard. And going by their faces we know the spiders try to leap into the box out of a manic kind of joy. They aren’t hostile! They just live to give you a hug, and to leap into boxes so as to give random other people hugs! Sadly, the demands of capitalism, and by that those of your paycheck, are to deny them in their life’s purpose.

Sundry Sunday: Kirb

Pringus McDingus’ recent video “Kirb” makes me hope he’s okay. It’s a more realistic take on Kirby, but not in the sense of showing us their skeleton, figuring out their digestive system works or giving them human feet. You’ll see.

Kirb (Youtube, 1 minute) – On Newgrounds

Sundry Sunday: Breaking Bad as a 16-Bit RPG

Did I post this one before? An archives search doesn’t turn it up. It’s been in my topic list for a long time, but it seems I never actually post it it. Here it is! It was created by Doctor Octoroc, who still has a website, for CollegeHumor, which doesn’t!

The video is 11 years old, and doesn’t present all of the events of the series, I think because it hadn’t concluded at that point. Still, it may be entertaining.

Breaking Bad 16-Bit RPG (Youtube, 4 1/2 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: Floating and Spinning

For a supposedly mature art form with (as we’re often reminded) revenue exceeding television and movies, and legions of fans ready to defend its honor in the gladiator pits of social media and discussion forums, it’s surprising how unexamined some video game tropes are.

Like, how so many games have decided that floating in the air and slowly rotating is a universal signal that an object can be collected? It’s ubiquitous! See for yourself:

What I especially like is how esoteric are a few of the games in this compilation of miscellaneous game collectables. I recognize both Ribbit King and ToeJam & Earl III (the often forgotten Xbox one) within this montage-like object!

Floating and Spinning (Youtube, four minutes)

Waluigi Sings “Baby It’s Cold Outside”

Another light post, usually I’d put this on Sunday but we’re so close to C-Day that it’d end up going up on the 24th. It’s the creator of Brawl in the Family, Matthew “BitFinity” Taranto, recorded Waluigi singing a duet with himself (who else?) of Baby It’s Cold Outside. “I like when you’re uncomfortably creepy!”

Waluigi Sings: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (Youtube, 2 1/2 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: A Christmas Warol

A Christmas Warol, from GabaLeth, is an entertaining remix of A Christmas Carol, starting Nintendo’s charmingly notorious money-grubbing libertarian.

It’s interesting to muse on how Wario has escaped popular condemnation for his capitalist ways, or at least aspirations? I think it’s partly because he’s an object of fun and not presented as a positive figure, the wa of warui, Japanese for bad, is right in his name. He’s also rarely successful, and sometimes implied (very vaguely) to have a good heart under there somewhere.

Anyway, here’s Wario as Ebenezer Scrooge. There’s four installments so far, and they’re all surprising short (although it never was a very long story); presumably there’ll be a fifth by the time you see this.

Episode 1 (3 minutes):

Episode 2 (2 1/2 minutes, with Wagooigi):

Episode 3 (1 1/2 minutes):

Episode 4 (1 1/2 minutes):

A Christmas Warol, Episode 1 – Episode 2 – Episode 3 – Episode 4 (Youtube)

Sundry Sunday: Onett, Titanic Ant and Captain Strong from Duane and BrandO

The Adventures of Duane and BrandO were a nerdcore rap group that focused on doing video game parody songs. It’s an oft-told tale, old as time. They had some drama and broke up a few years ago, but not before making some nice tracks.

Honestly, that isn’t my scene musically, but they did some tracks based on Earthbound, and that entirely is my scene. The whole thing’s on Bandcamp, but here’s a sequence of three bits early in the game: a fairly straight rendition of part of the music for the first town, a diss track (is that what they call them?) from the first “Your Sanctuary” boss, and then the highlight, I think, in which the Onett police force get their heads handed to them by a 12-year-old kid. “I’m out of here that looks like it smarts/Check out my Super-Ultra-Mambo-Tango-Foxtrot Martial Arts!” (SUMTF?)

Onett – Titanic Ant – Captain Strong: Youtube – Bandcamp (2 1/2 minutes)

Sunday Sunday: Shiftylook’s Mappy Cartoon

Shiftylook was a great site with comics and animation based on Namco characters, with official permission. It’s been gone for several years now, but it was nice while we had it.

Some of its cartoons have managed to survive, transferred to other sites, and the entire run of their Mappy cartoon, 13 episodes at nearly two hours in total, is on Youtube, uploaded by Nicky. We’re highly cognizant here of the demands of maintaining a daily blog, and I probably should be spreading these out one a week, but eh, I’m sure we won’t run out of material any time soon…. Of everything Shiftylook put out, Mappy has an unusually high number of people fondly remembering it. I haven’t seen much of it, so there’s always a chance there’s something unfortunate in there. If there is, I’m sorry, but I doubt it could be that bad.

Mappy the Complete Series (Episodes 1-13) (1 hour, 55 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: Shinra’s New Boss

Newgrounds videos aren’t as easy to embed as with Youtube, but once in a while I find one that’s worthy enough to try. Plus, it’s a Final Fantasy VII animation, and that’s a type of fandom that we cover here extremely rarely. Rarely enough that… I’m not sure we’ve ever exhibited Final Fantasy fanwork here, other than the occasional romhack. Huh.

Well, here is a short Flash animation, rendered into video of course because of our cold and heartless age, from Newgrounds, of a bit of audio from Team FourStar’s Final Fantasy VII Machinabridged Episode 10.

Shinra’s New Boss (Newgrounds, 47 seconds)

Sundry Sunday: From AGDQ, A Dog Replaces R.O.B. in Gyromite

This week’s fun video isn’t decades old, in fact it’s from just a few days ago, from AGDQ.

The NES title Gyromite, a.k.a. Robot Gyro, is a very interesting game from a design standpoint, possibly more interesting than it is to actually play (although I think its music is very catchy). It’s never been rereleased by Nintendo, for the probable reason that it relies on the accessory R.O.B. to play.

R.O.B: It’s not just that funky Smash Bros. character! (Image from Wikipedia, taken by Evan-Amos.)

R.O.B. was a motorized accessory that activated servos in its arms depending on light signals sent to it from the screen. No cords went from R.O.B. to the NES. It used photoreceptors in its “eyes” to detect the screen signals, which were ultimately caused by player input on the controller. A fairly roundabout means of control, honestly.

Only two official R.O.B. games were made, and Gyromite (Going by its Japanese name “Robot Gyro” according to the title screen) used the “gyro” accessory for play. A platform is placed in front of R.O.B., on which you place the controller for Player 2.

On the controller is a device that spins the “gyros,” colored weighted tops. By manipulating the arms with action on Player 1’s controller, making them swing around and opening and closing the claws at the right time, you can cause R.O.B. to lift the spinning gyros from their platform, then set them down on the NES controller’s buttons. In the game, this caused colored pillars to rise or fall according to the control signals.

R.O.B. with gyro setup. Image from the blog Nerdly Pleasures.

While manipulating all of this, you also have to watch out for the action of the game itself. Gyromite is a simple platformer, but one without a jump button. The difficulty comes from having to essentially play two games at once, the platforming on screen and manipulating R.O.B. to position pillars in the right places in space and time.

R.O.B.’s motions are not simple to command either. It takes time for the arms to pivot between their destinations, time that must be accounted for in the on-screen action, and while the tops spin for quite a while they will eventually have to be collected and set back on their pedestals so they can be spun back up to full speed, or else they’ll topple over on the button. This doesn’t produce a failure state in the game. It’s just left to you to pick the top up yourself and put it back on its stand to be spun again. R.O.B. isn’t capable of such feats of dexterity.

There’s a lot more to say about R.O.B., and how it was mostly distributed as part of the Nintendo Entertainment System’s “Deluxe Set” in the U.S., the more expensive version that didn’t come with Super Mario Bros. Instead of that, let’s talk about how, due to the fact that R.O.B. is just a fancy-shmancy way to press controller buttons, that you can replace it entirely with some other mechanism, or indeed, even animal.

That’s what happened Wednesday at AGDQ, where Peanut Butter the Dog, with coaching from JSR_, left R.O.B. gathering dust in the closet as they played through Gyromite Game B.

They didn’t make it all the way without running out of lives, but they picked back up and kept going. And that doesn’t detract at all from Peanut Butter’s skills, or amazing doggy focus. They are intent on reading those hand signals and getting those tasty treats. So while they didn’t earn a world record, for “Dog playing Gyromite Game B,” their accomplishment is of definite note.

There are around four minutes of introductions at the start of the video, so if you want to jump right in to the run, begin here.

Gyromite by Peanut Butter the Dog & JSR_ in 26:24 – Awesome Games Done Quick 2024 (Youtube, 33 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: Stop-Motion Kirby Dance

The Youtube channel Animist did a stop-motion recreation of the famous Kirby victory dance a couple of years ago. (Well, one version of it, there’s many.) Most of the 9 1/2-minute video depicts the making of, including showing off the toys that were used, so if you just want to get to the finished version use this link. Here it is in full:

Making Kirby’s Victory Dance in Stop Motion (Youtube, 9 1/2 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: Stop-Motion Promo for Metal Slug Awakening

I’ve always been a little ambivalent about Metal Slug. Not about its gameplay, which is excellent, but about its theme. It’s been said that it is impossible to depict warfare without glorifying it in some way. I think there is some truth to that, and there is no question that the Metal Slug games depict the hell out of it.

I think the Metal Slug makers recognize a bit of that, because of how humanely the enemy soldiers are depicted. They’re all trying to kill you, but they’re far from snarling villains. When not actively trying to bring about the end of Marco and Tarma (and Fio and Eri)’s lives, they’re chatting with each other, having a meal, sunning themselves on the deck of a ship, using the toilet or just hanging out. When they spot the invading players, they often react in terror. Sometimes you don’t want to shoot them, even when they’re climbing on your Slug and trying to throw a grenade in the hatch. Even their leader, General Morden, is not the typical villain. His backstory says that dissatisfaction with corruption in the Regular Army’s ranks, along with the loss of his wife and daughter due to an act of terrorism, was what caused him to launch his rebellion, and his solders admire his leadership.

It’s almost enough to make one want to overlook the questionable aspects of his army’s symbology, for which I can only thank my lucky frog the usual suspects haven’t latched onto. Morden is rehabilitated a bit in the endings of Metal Slugs 2 and 3, where he’s betrayed by the Martians he joined forces with, and helps the player’s commandos defeat, but its true that he’s always the antagonist at the start of each later game. Metal Slug, for all its sci-fi, zombie, magic and other trappings, is still a game about depicting conventional warfare, no matter how one-sided and improbable it may be.

Ah, as is often my habit, I used the subject of the post to write a short essay on some aspect of gaming. I hope you don’t mind. Here is the video, a stop-motion recreation of a typical Metal Slug scene, made by official entities to promote a mobile game. It seems appropriate to the subject.

Metal Slug: Awakening | Full Stop Motion Video (Youtube, 1 1/2 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: Megalixir

A really recent one this time! BitFinity, a.k.a. Matthew Taranto, who made Brawl in the Family and a fair amount of Waluigi music, animated and wrote this terrific little song about item hording in Final Fantasy VI, sung by Taylor Robinson.

Sundry Sunday: Dig Dug Explained Stupidly

It’s pretty short, at a minute and a half, but here is a brief and silly explanation of the classic arcade game Dig Dug. That’s all!

Sundry Sunday: Gyruss Themes

While there are examples of excellent music from the classic era of arcades (Frogger comes immediately to mind), I don’t think there is much that can equal that of Gyruss’ arrangement of Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor. Here it is, isolated from the rest of the game’s soundtrack, from Youtube uploader StyleK226 (1 1/2 minutes):

Wikipedia tells us that the arcade arrangement is reminiscent of a version of the song from the British band Sky, titled just “Toccata” (4 1/2 minutes):

If you only know Gyruss from the NES port, you might be surprised that it’s an almost entirely different arrangement from the arcade version! Maybe it was changed because of the similarity to Sky’s version. Some people prefer that one, it’s got a bit more variety, although I think the arcade’s is a bit better. Judge for yourself (3 minutes):

The Toccata is only used for the intro and the first warp on each planet, which is a bit of a shame, the rest of the music isn’t bad, but it’s not Bach. In Japan, Gyruss was a Famicom Disk System game. The FDS had extra sound hardware, and the result is an upgraded version of the NES soundtrack (14 minutes in all):

There’s been a number of fan versions of the Gyruss soundtrack, although most of them seem to be inspired by the NES port rather than the arcade original. Here’s a metal medley of that particular musical mutation (3 minutes):

As commenter @Fordi says, “What I love is that Intro / Stage 1 is a genre cover (metal) of a game’s adaptation (Gyruss) of a genre cover (Sky – Toccata) of classical music (Toccata and Fugue in Dm).”

Sundry Sunday: The President’s Story

Youtube animator Wooden Turtle has done Pikmin animations before, and we’ve linked some of them here: The Groovy Long Legs Experience, and Cooking With Louie #1 and #2. They’re fun riffs on Pikmin’s lore and backstory, and this week’s video is another of those.

In Pikmin, the game’s backstory was communicated mostly through Olimar’s Log, which was a situational message given at the end of each game day that reminded and expanded on its events. Pikmin 2 kept the idea but changed the messages to emails from Olimar’s employer, called Sacho. In the opening, it’s revealed that the freight company that he owned and Olimar works for undertook a gigantic debt due to the loss of a cargo of highly-expensive Pikpik carrots that he was responsible for. (To find out what happened to them, you have to finish Pikmin 2 to 100% completion.)

In Pikmin, you have a strict 30 day time limit to get enough parts of your ship to return home. Pikmin 2 has no time limit. You can take as many days as you want to collect treasures, and the number of days it requires is more like a score. To keep the pressure on the player, as the days reel off, you receive a series of increasingly frantic email messages from Sacho, who as it turns out unwisely covered the debt with an organization called “All-Consuming Black Hole Loan Sharks.” Their means to insure repayment are ruthless, but in fairness to them, you should know what you’re getting into from their name.

Sacho is forced to go on the lam to escape their wrath, and for a time lives beneath a bridge and befriends the animals there. But you don’t need me to tell you of those events: they’re animated in Wooden Turtle’s latest production! It’s eight minutes long:

Sundry Sunday: Professor Item Explains How To Care For Peepy

This one comes from a fairly deep subculture that I can’t completely explain here, partly because I don’t understand it all myself. I feel like there is something in the origin of creator/website/video maker/memester/online shop itemLabel, some necessary context, that I don’t yet know. But they make fun videos, one of them intrudes upon our territory, and I need something for today’s post. Full steam ahead!

Here is what I can tell you. Peepy is a heavily memeable plush toy, that its makers insist, probably for safety and legal reasons, is a piece of art not a plush toy. It looks kind of like a fluffy peanut with googly eyes and a round beak. Like this:

There are a variety of style of Peepys (Peepies?). Peepy is one of a number of character toys artworks sold by itemLabel that are kind of friends to each other? Or not? The videos seem to indicate that they are part of a shared universe, but don’t actually create much of a shared lore. Explanations I’ve seen say that they’re written to suggest a shared lore without there actually being one, in a sense that people familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos will immediately understand: any solid connections are left for the viewer to invent.

Peepy and acquaintances are the subject of posts on itemLabel’s Youtube account, TikTok account, Instagram account, and Twitter account (link purposely omitted). The only two solid things we know about Peepy’s place, within the greater Peepiverse, are that Peepy loves to eat peanuts (makes sense, they are what they eat) and to commit crimes (wait what?). Its description on the characters page of itemLabel’s website reads: “A peepy thrives in the shadows, using its wit to stun enemies. Its ability to steal may surprise you. It loves peanuts and will commit any heinous act to get them.” This description belongs to a creature that, I remind you, looks like this:

But let’s set all of this aside and concern ourselves with the burning question: how does one care for a Peepy? To our rescue comes Professor Item! Professor Item tells us about Peepy’s habits and feeding through a video where he lives in what seems to be a portable gaming system like a Nintendo DS. In fact, he looks a fair bit like a 3D version of the Professor from the cult classic game Contact by Grasshopper Interactive, and has a similar kind of personality.

Without further ado, here is Professor Item to explain how Peepies are to be provided for:

Don’t have enough Peepy in your life? It’s not game-related, but let’s relax the rules slightly this once. Here is their theme song, written and sung by Japanese musician Emamouse:

And here is the incredibly trippy animation Peepy’s Secret, which features several other of itemLabel’s characters. If you can understand the words you have better ears than me.

Sundry Sunday: The “Ending” to 7 Grand Dad

How surprising is it that nothing related to Silvagunner has yet appeared in these electric pages? Their reaction to “7 Grand Dad,” a Chinese bootleg of The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino and Hoppy that replaces Fred Flintstone’s face with that of Mario brought the fanbase a lot of joy that, truthfully, I cannot say much about, because I am not a regular follower of Silvagunner.

But a number of people did collaborate to create this “ending” to the game, which is amazingly full of references.

Sundry Sunday: Baldur’s Gate 3 Goes Too Far

From the excellent D&D-focused animation channel Dungeon Soup. I won’t say anything more except it has to do with Baldur’s Gate 3 (as it says in the title), and that it’s NSFW in theme if not technically in visuals.

Sundry Sunday: Medieval Cover of Super Mario Bros.

It’s a cover of the theme to Super Mario Bros. played in a medieval style (1 1/2 minutes). That’s all for today. This video has lurked in my files for months, I figured I’d go ahead and get it posted. Remixes of the SMB music are one of the oldest genres of internet meme music there is, so here it is in a really old mode. The channel it’s from does medieval covers of a variety of music, so if that sounds entertaining, please ambulate towards that vestibule.

Sundry Sunday: Duelin’ Firemen Trailer

If you haven’t seen it before (it made a trip around the blogs and such back in 2001), you really aren’t prepared for Duelin’ Firemen. The version that people saw then was really low quality though; a few years back, as part of a documentary about its making that seems like it never really got off the ground, a somewhat better quality version appeared on Youtube. It is, um, really something.

Duelin’ Firemen was a cancelled FMV game, probably a music game, for the 3DO console. Right off the bat it shows you it means business: not one but two planes, one of them in fact the space shuttle Columbia, the other Air Force One, collide with the top of the Sears Tower. The trailer was made in 1996 so you can’t blame it for being inappropriate due to either of those things. You might still consider it inappropriate due to other things, but it’s not too much offensive, unless you consider its childish innuendo or gleeful appraisal of a city in flames offensive. It might just be waiting for a massive citywide conflagration to hit the media for people to tsk at it for that. Which, well, would probably be fair.

Let me not keep you waiting any longer! Here is Duelin’ Firemen, the video game intro trailer that got submitted to freaking Sundance in 1996. You won’t be the same person afterward that you were before. Because we’re all changed by our experiences, be they great or small. But it really is an experience. 7 1/2 minutes’ worth of one:

Recognizable people in it, behind all the poorly composited flames, include blacksploitation star Rudy Ray “Dolemite” Moore, DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh, Dr. Timothy Leary, Rev. Ivan Stang of the Church of the Subgenius, Steve Albini, David Yow, and no doubt others I’m leaving out or don’t myself recognize. I’ve never been great with pop culture figures, or music figures either. But you don’t have to know who any of them are to enjoy it, probably with the aid of the mind-altering substance of your choice.

If you want to find out more, there’s this promotional interview (4 1/2 minutes) from around the time, and other clips on the documentary’s Youtube page. Or you could leave yourself blissfully unaware. That’s fine too.

And hey! The website duelinfiremen.com has recently been revived, and promises an upcoming interactive comic!

DUELIN’ FIREMEN!

Sundry Sunday: Doctor Who 16-Bit RPG

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Among other accomplishments (most of them recently have been musical), years ago DoctorOctoroc made a number of 16-bit Square-styled videos based on a number of media properties. We linked to their humorous take on Breaking Bad a while ago. This is another, from around the time of 11th Doctor Doctor Who. You might say that DoctorOctoroc doctored 11th Doctor Doctor Who. Gimmie the news, I got a bad case of loving you!

Here is that take, which will take four minutes of your time, and is suitable to watch during your stay in some kind of medical waiting room.

Sundry Sunday: Umi the Cat in Super Mario Galaxy

Someone edited some footage of Super Mario Galaxy, but superimposed their cat into it, and it turned out really well, and here it is. It’s like only a minute long. You’ll enjoy it. I mean why wouldn’t you? It’s a kittycat!

Sundry Sunday: Lego Breakfast with Super Mario
tomoseen is a gifted stop-motion animator from Japan, who’s made over 40 videos on Youtube. They make animations with tiny figurines of cats and ducks, food, dice and Lego pieces. All of them are a ray of sunlight, but very few of them are relevant to our subject. In fact, really only one is: a Lego video of breakfast made from Mario enemies. It’s five minutes long, and amazing:

Wait, there is one other tomosteen video that’s slightly game-related: Steak Dinner with Dice has a special guest appearance by Tetris, but it’s not really enough to merit its own post here. Consider it a bonus:

Sundry Sunday: Waluigi Sings “Rainbow Connection”

It’s Waluigi, and he’s singing “Rainbow Connection.” You need more? Are you not entertained?

It’s from Matthew Tarando, aka. Bitfinity, the one who made the Brawl in the Family webcomic. It’s not the first of their works to make it to this site, and it probably won’t be the last.

The Muppet-like version of Waluigi is a highlight. He looks like Dr. Don from Point Blank, a.k.a. Gun Bullet! It feels like it’s come full circle, since Point Blank is essentially WarioWare with light guns!

Dr. Dan and Dr. Don, oft-imperiled protagonists of countless rapidly-shifting scenarios.

Sundry Sunday: The Soundtrack to Black Knight 2000 and Sword of Rage

There are three Black Knight pinball tables: Black Knight, Black Knight 2000 and the recent Black Knight: Sword of Rage. The first came from before music was regularly featured in pinball, but the latter two have amazing music. My favorite is the music in the second, by Dan Forden & Brian Schmidt, possibly the most epic metal sound track in electronic gaming history. That is not thoughtless hyperbole! Listen to it below! “You can do it you can do it!” There’s something about FM synthesis that lends itself to simulating electric guitar really really well!

This is a playlist of the 17 tracks from the game. If the voice of the Black Knight sounds familiar, I think he’s also the voice of the Mutoid Man from Smash T.V (“NO WAY! HUH-HA-HA!”) and designer of all three Black Knight tables, Steve Ritchie.

There is something about pinball that lends itself so very well to metal, and to characters like the Black Knight. Video games can be defeated and mastered in ways that pinball, real pinball, cannot, and that recognition mixes with, enhances, the Knight’s character.

Here’s a game on an actual table that demonstrates how the music comes together in play (12 minutes):

Black Knight: Sword of Rage also has an epic soundtrack, performed by Scott Ian of Anthrax and Brendan Small of Metalocalypse/Deathklok (oh, and Home Movies):

I think 2000 has the edge over it though? What do you think? This is not intended as a comment prompt (I hate those), but it’d be nice to get people’s thoughts!

Sundry Sunday: The Incredible Shrinking Hedgehog

Mashed has a fun animation up on Youtube starring Sonic, his pals, and his enemies, where they’ve been, um, ensmallerd to itty bitty size. It’s a standard Saturday Morning kind of plot, but the voices are good, the writing is funny, and the animation, by Painter Seap, is sharp. It’s 5 1/2 minutes long, and it’s embedded below. Just so you’re properly warned, it ends on a cliffhanger, but it’s a fairly minor one.

Sundry Sunday: Bowser Explains Why He Turns His Castles Into Race Tracks

Why does Bowser set up race track courses in his castles? Does he have that many to spare? It’s a question with a simple answer, that he answers in 50 seconds. It’s also pretty good animation on Bowser, done in Blender by GleanieBOI!

Sundry Sunday: Animation of a Splatoon 3 Song

The Splatoon series has a lot of great music, usually composed along the lines of squishy voices shouting gibberish, which makes sense due to the singers being squid, or other forms of aquatic life.

One of the songs in Splatoon 3’s single-player campaign is Seep and Destroy, which has gotten the fan name of Bang Bing due to a specific frequently-heard vocalization within it.

nathors made an animation (2:46) that has no sea life at all, but fits really well. It imagines the song as backing a civilization of Easter Island heads, who get abducted by a planet of robots, and then they fight their way onto a spaceship and back home. It’s fun! It’s here:

Sundry Sunday: Ken Woodman’s Mexican Flyer and Space Channel 5

I find myself looking back upon the Dreamcast’s library, which was outrageously experimental. Sega tried so many things to see what would stick, but sadly few of them did, even though they’re really cool games.

There’s probably no better example of this than Space Channel 5, which I sometimes like to call “How Many Ways Can We Remix Mexican Flyer?”

Mexican Flyer is a real song, that existed long before Space Channel 5 and the Dreamcast. It was first published by Ken Woodman and His Piccadilly Brass in 1966 on their album That’s Nice. Here’s audio from Youtube (2 1/2 minutes):

Space Channel 5 remixes it several ways. Here’s the beginning, which is a fairly straight rendition. (That link was made with Youtube’s Clips feature, which doesn’t embed too well in WordPress.) Here’s the start of the second level (5 minutes):

Space Channel 5 isn’t a very long game, with only four levels, and although there’s alternate sections of a couple of levels that unlock after finishing the game and a subgoal of rescuing all the hostages, it doesn’t have a lot of replayability. It’s an enjoyable trip while it lasts, though.

It ends with a (mostly) a cappella version, about ten minutes long:

And here’s the music isolated without the gameplay sounds overtop it (3 minutes):

Ken Woodman passed away in 2000, only a few years before Mexican Flyer began its video game afterlife. He also did music for a couple of British radio productions, and arranged music for Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones and Sandie Shaw.

Sundry Sunday: The Sounds of Wario
nathorz on Youtube made this great little video that put animation to an assortment of Wario voice lines. It’s just great!

It’s great, and it’s here (1 minute):

Sundry Sunday: Zelda and Link are Gremlins Actually

I thought the colloquialism was goblins? Gremlins fits pretty well for these videos though. Take a look. They’re all from Youtube animator RibbitSpell.

The first (1 1/2 minutes) is where the post title comes from, positing a time after all the adventure stuff is over and Link and Zelda are just hanging out and doing whatever. What did they get up to after Tears of the Kingdom? Why don’t we ever see them just hanging out? The games rarely tell us, so a lot of room is left for fans to fill in the gaps:

The title of the second (1 minute), “Zelda but you play as Zelda,” leaves out that you play as gremlin Zelda.

And one more, Ganon’s Rude Re-Awakening (30 seconds).

We get versions where Link is a cartoon character, where there’s four Links and where Link dies over and over and where he’s a train conductor, and now (at last) where we play as Zelda. Why don’t we get an official take where Link and Zelda canonically team up to cause random silly trouble all across Hyrule? Probably leaving Old Man Ganon to shake his fist at them as they run away, having left flaming sacks of dog crap on the doorstep of his big evil castle.

Sundry Sunday: Ending Animation for The Mystery of the Druids

I forget exactly where I saw it, but I observed, in pieces, a playthrough of the 2001 adventure game The Mystery of the Druids. It may have been during Awful Block at an earlier GDQ, or on some other stream. it was something. Actually, a thing. One thing. Just one.

(Amazingly, you can buy the game on Steam, and as I write this it’s like a dollar. One dollar. Just one. But the reviews indicate it has really serious bugs, so even that is probably too much.)

Besides constantly pronouncing the word druid as drood, the game’s notable for starring a police detective, Halligan, who frequently does things one might think unworthy of law enforcement. Not a great pillar of virtue, that Halligan.

The game itself doesn’t have a great ending, so someone on Youtube made their own version. It’s two minutes long, and it follows below. It is much more enjoyable than the actual game.

Sundry Sunday: Cooking With Vibri

Vib Ribbon is a semi-obscure rhythm game made for the Playstation by NanaOn-Sha, who also produced Parappa the Rapper.

Vibri is the vector-graphics rabbit protagonist.

Cooking with Vibri (not to be confused with Cooking with Louie) is (currently) a couple of whimsical fast-moving shorts starring that rabbit, made by P. Carredo, in which various things explode, or fail to, depending on the circumstances. They move fast: together, they’re less than two minutes long! They get to the point, such as it is, and get it over with, and so won’t clog up your day with intros or sponsorships or ads or subscription prompts or long narrations or intruding, gesticulating hands, or sanity for that matter.

Episode 1:

Nothing exploded?

Episode 2:

A couple of things do explode this time.
Features vector-graphic mafia (with photo-realistic cat) and IRS agent

Yesterday there appeared a third episode, which is three minutes long. It’s basically just an extended homage to a scene from Yakuza 0. I don’t like it as much (there’s no cooking!), but you may disagree? Here it is:

Sundry Sunday: Brendoon’s Live-Action Earthbound Videos

They’re strange ones this week friends. This person on Youtube has made a handful of short videos depicting moments from the classic Super Nintendo JRPG Earthbound in real life.

The best ones are “For Sale” Sign (37 seconds) and Arms Dealer (49s).

Go out into a field and hold up a sign that reads “For Sale.” Someone will soon come running up and offer to buy practically anything you’re carrying. Advertising works!

That guy, standing in the middle of that desert. He’s got what you need, if what you need is extremely dangerous. Seems pretty sketchy.

Earthbound is full to bursting with weird situations like these. Brendoon could keep making videos for some time. Maybe concerning the Insignificant Item? Or having pizza delivered to you in the dungeon? Or beating up fire hydrants? Or running from dinosaurs? Or automatically putting ketchup on food items you eat? Or being spoken to by cups of coffee? Or the world being threatened by an 11-year-old boy? Or anything having to do with ᨓꭱ. یƌ⍭⊔ꭱη? The list is nearly endless!

Sundry Sunday: Steamed Hams, But It’s An NES Game

So despite the fact that you likely already know all of this, I still feel like I have to explain it all for people who might not have soaked their brains in US popular culture, yet still care enough about video games that you’re reading Set Side B. Let’s get it out of the way as quickly as feasible.

Premiering December 17, 1989, The Simpsons has been on the air for approaching 35 years. We in the United States are going to have to come to terms with the fact that it’ll probably be the reigning television fact of our lives. When it began, the NES was still the hot game system, and that was eons ago.

Premiering in the 7th season, during the time when most people still agreed The Simpsons was the best show on television, was the episode 22 Short Films About Springfield, in which the writers created a loosely-connected sequence of miscellaneous stories about the many side characters in The Simpsons. One of those stories was “Seymour and the Superintendent,” where Bart’s principal hosts his boss Superintendent Chalmers to a home-cooked meal, but due to a sequence of comical events serves him Krusty Burgers instead, covers it up in a variety of unlikely lies, and nearly burns down his house. Colloquially this has become known as “Steamed Hams,” after one of the lies Principal Skinner tells.

In 2017, a popular meme went around the internet in which people remade, remixes, or otherwise re-did that story, alone of all of them in the episode, the season, and among the long long run of the show.

In fact, those memes are still being made, and this post’s subject is one of them. It’s a video simulating what a Steamed Hams game would have been like if it were made in the style of the Bart vs the Space Mutants and Bart vs The World games on the NES. It was made by Penney Pixels, it’s four minutes long, and it’s here, and here:

There is an actual game version of the Steamed Hams, of which a playthrough is recorded here, and can be downloaded here. There’s another version of Steamed Hams too, and it can be played on GameJolt here. Both of those are adventure games.

I thought Steamed Hams had come up here before, but a quick search didn’t find anything, so I’ll just leave it at this. I’m sure in the next 35 years there will be hundreds more game versions of Steamed Hams. Maybe after all that time, I’ll be able to bring myself to mention it here again.

Sundry Sunday: brentalfloss’ DK Rap 2018 (NSFW)

Six years ago brentalfloss did a parody video of the infamous “DK Rap” from the opening of Donkey Kong 64, updated for the times. It’s hilarious, but also disturbing and sad. Summary: Donkey Kong became a gun nut, Diddy is a MRA incel jerk, because of Tiny bees are dying out, Lanky’s the reason this video is NSFW, and Chunky’s… well, you can find out for yourself.

It’s all pretty saddening, but truthfully in line with how game culture has gotten worse over the years too. Ah well, at least Parappa’s still good and pure!

DK Rap 2018, “Where are they now” (brentalfloss on Youtube, 4 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: Link Breakdances in Gerudo Outfit

It’s not always easy to find these kinds of videos? Youtube’s hated algorithm is heavily influenced by the last things you watched, so if you get in a mood to watch restorations of old arcade games, it doesn’t take many of those until your homepage is loaded with them, to the exclusion of other things.

And honestly, who beside me is going to link to videos like this, an animation of Link in Breath of the Wild, in the much appreciated by fans Gerudo Outfit, breakdancing out in the desert, with unexpected accompaniment? That’s what Sundays here are for folks. Showing you the things that Youtube doesn’t want you to see, if only by accident (30 seconds).

When you’re attacking Vah Naboris but the music is really good (Youtube, animated, 30 seconds)

Sundry Sunday: NES Blades of Steel, Sung A Cappella

On Youtube, Triforcefilms has made it their niche to sing music from various game and other media properties a cappella, that is, entirely with voice doing the music.

They have lots of videos, and are still going today, but the one I’m choosing to call out is from nine years ago, their rendition of music from one of the lesser-known NES efforts: Konami’s Blades of Steel, which despite the name isn’t a fantasy hack-and-slash game, but a hockey game, actually a conversion of an arcade game of the same name, both with unexpectedly atmospheric visuals and music.

Here’s a link to a playlist of the NES soundtrack. The highlight I think is the game setup menu. While a zamboni resurfaces the ice for the upcoming match, one of the better menu tracks in the NES library plays in the background. It’s the first of three pieces in Triforcefilms’ video (2 minutes), which are the menu theme, the match start theme, and the intermission. They don’t adapt the triumphant victory theme, but I’ll take what we get.

Note, if you’re confused by the unexpected appearance of Gradius towards the end, that’s from NES Blades of Steel! As a minigame, sometimes you get to shoot at the Big Core during intermission. Win or lose, it doesn’t affect the match, and you still get the advertisement for other Konami properties.

As a minor extra, here’s a stereo separation of the soundtrack made by 8BitStereo. It’s mostly the same as the straight NES version, but in stereo, and will a little more echo.

If I’m presenting Konami sports music that rocks unexpectedly hard, I have to also link the menu theme from NES Double Dribble, and that game’s victory theme. Why did they put so much musical effort into their sports games?

Blades of Steel – A cappella (Youtube, 2 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: NCHProductions’ Eevee Cartoons

If you’re familiar with Pokemon creatures, you might understand this sequence of four short animations from NCHProductions a little better, but really, it won’t be that helpful. They’re weird, but fun, but weird. They relate a sequence of events, which I say because I can’t bring myself to call it a story.

#1: Eevee Tries a Lemon (1 minute)

#2: Eevee Disassembles a Magnemite (2 minutes)

#3: Magmemites (who are also bodybuilders for some reason) evolves into Magneton, and also Umbreon’s there (1 1/2 minutes)

#4: Eevee eats fried chicken (1 1/2 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: Proving Grounds of the Bard Fox

Here is a fun, short animation, by Only Jerry, set to the battle theme of the Japan-only PC Engine version of Wizardry. It’s only a minute or so, so please enjoy!

Table of Contents

Introduction

Original Writing

- Science Facts From No Man’s Sky

- Review: World of Goo 2

- Coleco’s Tarzan for the Atari VCS/2600 Found After 40 Years

- Apple’s Untaken Path

- Home Computer Graphic Character Sets Compared

- Apple
- PETSCII
- ATASCII
- TRS-80
- Sinclair ZX-81
- DOS Code Page 437

- A 30+ Year Old RPG System for the Commodore 64

- C64 Dungeon Play and Lost World Demonstration

- NYT’s Connections Puzzles
- How To Play Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On
- Cosmic Collapse Level After Sun
- Sublime Games: Stephen’s Sausage Roll
- The 10th-Key NES Pac-Man Scatter Bug
- The Original Neverwinter Nights
- On The Red Obelisk
- THE RED OBELISK
- Something About Youtube Ads
- F-Zero 99 User Names, Good and Bad

- Getting Started in DE’s Remake of Wizardry I

- Wizardry hates you
- Wizardry doesn’t hate you that much
- Make backup saves of your game

- Use Old-School Creation and Advancement Rules

- Creating characters
- Party composition
- About VIM, a.k.a. AGE

- Getting Started in Digital Eclipse’s Remake of Wizardry, Part 2: The First Level

- Once you’re in the dungeon, then what?
- How to handle those first fights
- Murphy’s Ghost

- @Play: Glorious Adventure in the Mystery Dungeon

- The Worst Possible Day to Play Nethack

- @Play: Which Is Better, Ring Mail or Splint Mail?

- Shiren 6: What Happens When You Finish The Final Dungeon

Game Finds

- Gamefinds: The Silly Knight Prologue
- Gamefinds: Frogfall
- Hempuli is still at it
- Game Finds: Mobile Suit Baba
- Hempuli’s itch.io Collection
- Homebrew Atari 7800 Arcade Ports
- Gamefinds: Nip For Speed
- Gamefinds: POOM
- Game Finds: Cosmic Collapse

- Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

- Game Finds: Pacman’s Sky
- Game Finds: Ghost Hunter
- Little Runmo: The Game
- Underlevel
- Time-Limited Pumpkin Carving Game
- Game Finds: Feydome
- Mappy on Pico8
- Candy Box
- Candy Box 2
- itch.io: Folder Dungeon
- Decker
- Sudo Sweep

Websites

- The Flicky Blog
- The Mr. Saturn Text Generator
- Earthbound Battle Backgrounds Website
- The Blog at perfectpacman.com
- GifCities
- Bobbins’ Olde Tomb of Videogames
- Oldweb: Remembering ionpool.net
- Brainscraps.net
- Oldweb: Flying Omelette Lives
- Cam’s Pac-Man Fun Page
- Doom Text Generator
- Advance Wars By Web

Retrocomputing

- Glory Be to Frog in Heaven, it’s Fan-Made Character-Mode Gradius

- Mission: Impossible for CP/M

- A Complete Playthrough of the Original Zork Games

- 100 Commodore Plus/4 Games

- The MAD Magazine Type-In Program

- Mattel’s Handheld Dungeons & Dragons LCD Game

- Hare Basic for the Commodore 64

- Commodore Free Magazine

- Old Vintage Computing Research: The Web-@nywhere Watch

- Randy Glover, Creator of Jumpman
- An Ad From Compute Magazine #001
- Inform 7
- Demoscene: La Linea
- Demoscene: Batman Rises
- Grey: A FPS on a Commodore 64

Reviewers

- Jeremy Parish Covers NES Friday the 13th
- Jeremy Parish Covers SMS Shinobi
- Chrontendo 63!
- Chrontendo 64

Events

- Tombstones: Romhacking.net Calls It Quits, Game Informer Shuts Down

- The 30th Anniversary Edition of the Game of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

- 5th Anniversary Video by The Makers of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

- Wheeler Dealers Has Been Preserved

- Episode 3 of BS Shiren the Wanderer Recovered

- Nintendo to Shut Down 3DS and WiiU Online Play in April

- MobyGames Offering “Pro” Membership

- Nintendo Direct 2/21/24 Quick Takes

- Project To Completely Finish Super Mario Maker 1 Enters Home Stretch

- The End of Blaseball Blexplained
- Godot 4.2 Released
- Escapist Collapse and Aftermath
- Second Wind and Fully Ramblomatic
- Nintendo vs. Smash Bros. Tournaments

General Topics

- Sunsoft Hebereke Cartoons
- Legends of Wario
- Wii Shop Theme Played on a 1-Bit Speaker

- Possibly the First US Commercial For a Nintendo Product

- Shmuplations Translates An Interview With An Arcade Donkey Kong Programmer

- Inty Sports and the IBL
- AsumSaus on Smash Melee
- Baseball Bits on Barry Bonds
- Dan Olson Discusses James Rolfe

- Twinbeard Completes Bowser’s Fury One Shine At A Time

- How Many Super Mario Games Are There NOW?
- JRPG Junkie’s Review of Skies of Arcadia
- Pixel Memories Dioramas

- U Can Beat Video Games Covers Final Fantasy IV

- U Can Beat Video Games Video Directory

- The History of Kid Pix

- Monopoly Mario Illustrations in the Style of Rich Uncle Pennybags

- 4D Golf Releases on Steam

- Completing Arcade Dragon’s Lair

- The Digital Antiquarian on the Rise of Age of Empires

- From Supper Mario Broth: Luigi Concept Art & Mario Strikers Banners

- Nerdly Pleasures on R.O.B.
- The Dreamcast Junkyard on Shenmue-likes
- The Many Revivals of Toontown Online
- NES and Commodore 64 Games Compared
- What is a Game Dad?

- Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games, on Princess Peach Showtime

- Hardcore Gaming 101 Covers Snake’s Revenge

- Retro365: Apple Galaxian, Star Craft and the Beginnings of Brøderbund

- Basement Brothers Xanatalks About Xanadu

- Super Play Magazine’s Top 100 SNES Games

- Wolf Link’s Tears of the Kingdom Minimalist Playthrough

- How Super Mario 64 Was Beaten Without The A Button

- Playing Fortnite As A Pacifist & As A Friend

Esoterica

- A Japanese Youtuber Plays Rogue

- The CRPG Addict Reaches Nethack 3.1

- The Marquee and Instruction Card For Vs. Super Mario Bros.

- Sega’s Amazing Island for Gamecube
- Farming Simulator eSports
- Food Fight Frenzy

- Popular Science(?!): Getting Classic WordArt Back In MS Word

- HG 101 Forum Thread on Obscure Arcade Secrets

- Kimimi the Game-Eating She Monster: Brandish

- Nicole Express: Nintendo’s First Consoles
- /dev/scream
- Hidden Dialogue in Earthbound
- Space Harrier Version Comparison
- Frank Herbert’s Book on Computers
- GDQ Animations on GitHub
- Doing Weird Things To A Sega 32X

- Excellent Breakdown of Wii Music Capabilities

- Bringle’s Obscure Changes in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

- Vivian in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is Trans

- Moviecart

- PannenKoek’s Epic 3 3/4-Hour Explanation Of Mysterious Mario 64 Invisible Walls

- Could You Realistically Survive in Super Mario 64?

- Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door Obscurities
- How Speedrunners Get N64 Control Sticks
- Super Mario Sunshine’s Substitution Cipher

- Technology Connections Examines Pinball Machines

- Mario Paint Data Overflow Error

- TrueType Unicode versions of the Amiga System Fonts

- Space Harrier Theme on Japanese Master System Hardware

- Dan Fixes Coin-Ops Repairs a Baby Pac-Man
- Pac-Store Animations with “Pac-Marie”
- Names For Bootleg Pac-Man Ghosts

- A Forum Post About the Dithering in Return of the Obra Dinn

- Figuring Out Kakariko Village’s Unemployment Rate

- Identifying Luck in Mario Party 8
- Pixelfont
- SpriteCell’s JRPG Magazine Review Archive

- The Complete Script of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

- New Super Mario Bros. Wii’s Exception Handler Code

- JRPG Junkie Describes Lost Sega Arcade RPGs

Glitches

- Looygi Bros. Tests Glitches in Nintendo World Championships

- More NES Glitches Tested in Nintendo World Championships

- Wherefore MISSINGNO?

- Noneuclidean Doom

- Wherefore Pac-Man’s Split Screen?

- Ocarina of Time-r Bug

- RGME: Glitching Mario World by Stomping Wigglers

- Behind the Code: Why Does Nintendo’s Tetris Crash At Extremely High Levels?

- The “No Fire” Trick in Galaga

Internals

- What’s So Random About Ms. Pac-Man

- Behind the Code: Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

- More From Displaced Gamers on Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde

- Behind the Code on Why is Contra Force Slow?

- Displaced Gamers on Mega Man 3 Glitches

- Retro Game Mechanics Explains Mario 3’s Minigames

- Banjo-Kazooie Decompiled
- NESHacker’s Guide to the NES Hardware
- Computing Pi on a NES
- .NET on NES
- Youtube Series: Inside the Famicom
- Reverse Engineering the 6502
- Sharopolis Looks Into NES Technical Feats
- A Guided Tour of the NES
- On Super Mario World’s Score Display
- Mega Man’s Score System

- Figuring Out Yars’ Revenge Code From Its Graphics

- Details of Mario Kart 64’s Catchup AI

Romhacks

- Phred’s Cool Punch-Out!!
- Romhack Thursday: DKAFE
- Garfield+
- Romhack Thursday: BS F-Zero Tracks Revived
- desreveR 46 oiraM repuS

- Romhack Thursday: Doom on a Commodore 64, kinda-sorta

- Zork I and Planetfall With The Edge Taken Off

- zandravandra’s List Of Mega Man Romhacks

- Romhack Thursday: Ultima Underworld on Playstation, in English

- Romhack Thursday: Snooplax Explains the History of Mario 64 Hacks

Strategy

- Jordan Dorrington’s Galaga Strategy Tips

- 1 Credit Clear of Tower of Druaga, With Explanations

- Pac-Man in Three Patterns
- 720 Degrees Hints and Tips
- Dark Arts of Pinball: Bang Backs
- Dark Arts of Pinball: Deathsaves
- Defender Master Gives Tips

Wizardry

- Andrew Greenberg, RIP
- WIZARDReplaY
- Which Version of Wizardry 1 to Play?
- On the History of Wizardry

- Blade & Bastard, the (recent) Wizardry Manga

Rampart

- Rampart, Part 1: Introduction
- Arcade Mermaid: Rampart, Part 2: Overview
- Overview
- The Board
- Basics
- Your Domain
- Arcade Mermaid: Rampart, Part 3: The Phases
- Battle Phase
- Building Phase
- Cannon Phase

Arcade Mermaid: Rampart, Part 4: Level Strategy

- Level Strategies

- Sundry Sunday

- Super Mario Bros. Wonder Halloween Music
- Sundry Sunday: Eggpo, “Mini-Boss”
- Sundry Sunday: Snailchan Adventure

- Sundry Sunday: Very Short Pizza Tower Cartoon

- Sundry Sunday: There’s Something About The Typing of the Dead

- Sundry Sunday: Eggpo, Waiting

- Sundry Sunday: Wolf Reacts to Team Star Fox’s Halloween Costumes

- Sundry Sunday: Pirhana Plants On Parade With Fan-Made Lyrics

- Sundry Sunday: Cooking With Louie #2

- Sundry Sunday: Pest Protector from Rhythm Heaven

- Sundry Sunday: Kirb
- Sundry Sunday: Breaking Bad as a 16-Bit RPG
- Sundry Sunday: Floating and Spinning
- Waluigi Sings “Baby It’s Cold Outside”
- Sundry Sunday: A Christmas Warol

- Sundry Sunday: Onett, Titanic Ant and Captain Strong from Duane and BrandO

- Sunday Sunday: Shiftylook’s Mappy Cartoon

- Sundry Sunday: Shinra’s New Boss

- Sundry Sunday: From AGDQ, A Dog Replaces R.O.B. in Gyromite

- Sundry Sunday: Stop-Motion Kirby Dance

- Sundry Sunday: Stop-Motion Promo for Metal Slug Awakening

- Sundry Sunday: Megalixir
- Sundry Sunday: Dig Dug Explained Stupidly
- Sundry Sunday: Gyruss Themes
- Sundry Sunday: The President’s Story

- Sundry Sunday: Professor Item Explains How To Care For Peepy

- Sundry Sunday: The “Ending” to 7 Grand Dad

- Sundry Sunday: Baldur’s Gate 3 Goes Too Far

- Sundry Sunday: Medieval Cover of Super Mario Bros.

- Sundry Sunday: Duelin’ Firemen Trailer

- Sundry Sunday: Doctor Who 16-Bit RPG

- Sundry Sunday: Umi the Cat in Super Mario Galaxy

- Sundry Sunday: Lego Breakfast with Super Mario

- Sundry Sunday: Waluigi Sings “Rainbow Connection”

- Sundry Sunday: The Soundtrack to Black Knight 2000 and Sword of Rage

- Sundry Sunday: The Incredible Shrinking Hedgehog

- Sundry Sunday: Bowser Explains Why He Turns His Castles Into Race Tracks

- Sundry Sunday: Animation of a Splatoon 3 Song

- Sundry Sunday: Ken Woodman’s Mexican Flyer and Space Channel 5

- Sundry Sunday: The Sounds of Wario

- Sundry Sunday: Zelda and Link are Gremlins Actually

- Sundry Sunday: Ending Animation for The Mystery of the Druids

- Sundry Sunday: Cooking With Vibri

- Sundry Sunday: Brendoon’s Live-Action Earthbound Videos

- Sundry Sunday: Steamed Hams, But It’s An NES Game

- Sundry Sunday: brentalfloss’ DK Rap 2018 (NSFW)

- Sundry Sunday: Link Breakdances in Gerudo Outfit

- Sundry Sunday: NES Blades of Steel, Sung A Cappella

- Sundry Sunday: NCHProductions’ Eevee Cartoons

- Sundry Sunday: Proving Grounds of the Bard Fox