I was just thinking a few days ago, It’s been quite some time since we’ve heard from Retro Game Mechanics Explained. In fact, looking at their channel, it’s been eight months since their last deep dive into video game internals, their terrific (if somewhat dry) look into how Super Mario Bros. 2 stores and constructs its levels (1h40m!), drawing their tiles directly into a bank of work RAM specially included in the cartridge for that purpose.
Yesterday they broke their silence with an examination of the startup routines of arcade Galaxian, Teddy Boy, Joust 2, Pac-Man and Super Pac-Man. It’s “only” 41 minutes, but it’s hugely informative of the necessities of how and why arcades games go about arcading:
I will summarize. The main task an arcade machine must do upon startup is test as much of the hardware as it is able and confirm that it’s operational. The main part of this is testing the various memory types comprising the machine’s storage systems: audio, video and work RAM, and program and graphics ROM. Not just to test them, but to stop operation and alert the operator if something is awry. The garbage often shown on-screen on powerup is a direct result of writing and reading 0s and 1s to and fr0m every bit in the video RAM. The system must also check the contents of the ROM, which is usually done by adding all the values in each bank and comparing them to a known total, literally called a “checksum.”
It’s a fine explainer, even if they didn’t cover my personal favorite game startup, that of Twinbee and Gradius with the Bubble Memory system . The storage media of the game was unreliable unless it had physically warmed up, so when turned on it would play music while the game was making itself presentable, known fondly as the Morning Music. I posted about this way back in 2022! Here it is again. It would be an excellent tune to set a wake-up alarm on a cellphone. Just saying.
The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games we check out on the (Game Wisdom) channel. Please reach out if you would like to submit a game for a future one. All games shown are either press keys, demos, or games from my own collection.
Earthbound is, of course, the classic SNES JRPG, known in Japan as Mother 2, created by Shigesato Itoi. It has my vote for the greatest JRPG of all, for while it isn’t as popular as Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, it has a knockout story, full of wit and detail. Mother is one of the very few video game series that, I think, transcends its medium, and becomes something great, not great in the since of being better than good, but in the sense of profundity, and yet at the same time it isn’t pretentious at all, it’s light and funny and whimsical but also deep and dark and terrifying. It’s easy to play and lots of fun too. I’ve heard it described, I think it was by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, as Peanuts Fights the Cthulhu Mythos, and that begins to get to it.
Animation collaborations are, of course, a thing where a bunch of people get together to make an animation together, each taking one small part of the whole. Not only do they not attempt to maintain a consistent art style, that’s in fact the last thing they try to do. Each clip is wildly different from the others, and that’s the point, the clash of styles making the whole surreal and surprising.
Both of these come together, in this piece that animates a portion Earthbound where the player is accompanied by the Flying Men, and I guess I have to explain that too.
So in a place near the end of the game your protagonist Ness visits the realm of Magicant, a bizarre realm created from the depths of his own mind. It is full of dangerous monsters, culminating in an artifact called Ness’s Nightmare, a powerful enemy that can wipe Ness out if the dice don’t roll his way.
Ness is also alone for this segment, except for the aid of the Flying Men, who call themselves Ness’s courage, helpful bird people who tag along with Ness, providing both muscle and extra hit points. But while they are strong and useful, they are not invulnerable. There are five Flying Men, and they join Ness one at a time. If one of them runs out of HP it dies, and in the house where they live, one of them is replaced by a tombstone. If you go back and recruit another one, and he also dies, then another tombstone appears. The dialogue from the successive Flying Men becomes less happy and more desperate as their numbers decrease, until finally they’re all gone, and Ness is left to finish the area alone.
This is just one example of the many wonderful ideas in Earthbound, as a unique a video game as there ever has been.
The animation that’s this week’s subject is a collaboration between many people, set to the Flying Men’s theme song, which is never actually heard in its entirety within the game. The music heard comes from a soundtrack album.
I won’t pretend it’s very comprehensible to those who’ve never played the game. Sometimes Earthbound fanwork, unlike the game, gets obtuse and navel-gazey, and difficult to understand to those not drenched in the lore. This one’s a bit like that. But maybe it’ll spark something in you, anyway. The music’s nice at least!
That’s what I have for you today. See you tomorrow!
1. Every row and column must contain the same number of red and blue spaces.
2. Every numbered space must have the same number of spaces touching it (in the eight spaces around it) as its color.
3. No two adjacent rows or columns can have the same sequence of colors. In practice this is the most subtle rule. It doesn’t always come into play, but if it does it’ll probably be the breakthrough you’ll need to pull off a solve.
The starting position of one of the more difficult puzzles.
Every puzzle has a unique solution. It is similar in style to another web puzzle called 0h h1, but a major difference in presentation is that Urjo is watching as you try to solve it, and won’t let you make incorrect moves. Instead, it counts up all your mistakes and scores you on how well you did. You have an overall rating that goes up as you both complete puzzles with fewer errors and faster times than other solvers. This can be annoying (it’s easy to click the wrong size of a circle on accident), and it pushes you to try to solve them faster than you may feel comfortable, which may also cause inadvertent mistakes.
The software will try to give you puzzles just past your skill level, and I can verify that they get very difficult. If you make mistakes it’ll offer to give you some pointers. Myself I ignore those tips; but I can see how some people might find them useful.
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
words.zip is a fun word search kind of game. It’s an infinite field of random letters. You try to find words snaking through the array. Words can twist and turn, and can also go backwards, but can’t go diagonally, cross themselves, or intersect with any other word that someone else has ever found.
Here I’ve found the word ROUGH in this relatively uncluttered area of the board. Apparently I’m the first person to ever find it! This is the fourth such word I’ve found since I started playing, and the shortest.
There is no scoring, but there is a newly-added list of challenges, various categories to try to find words in. If you decide to play, I think you should start out immediately dragging the field in one direction until you find an area almost devoid of other players’ words, and start from there. Of course as time passes it’ll get harder to find unique words. I read somewhere that there are plans to implement private games, with new fields to search through uncluttered by people entering ASS or POOT. If the well-hoed field is too much to tiptoe through, maybe come back in a week or two and see if that feature has gone live.
A quick one today, busyman demonstrates six ways to crash Scribblenauts games. To remind: Scribblenauts is a game where you have a magic notebook that creates things you write in it, if you just know the word for it. It’s one of a very small number of games that attempt to be exhaustive over some domain: if you know the word for it, then there’s likely to be an object in Scribblenauts if you try to create it. This required a great deal of work to realize, but worked well enough that they even could include some memes in its huge database. “Loituma Girl” is demonstrated in the below video (4½ minutes).
Starting with its sequel Super Scribblenauts, they’re also adjectives in the game. This video seems to be from a version with adjectives: one of the objects is “resurrective dark matter,” although attempts to find resurrective in a dictionary will probably fail.
Because Scribblenauts games contain thousands of items, some with unique properties, finding all the ways that they adversely interact would be very difficult. The above video demonstrates six ways that they can be brought together in order to crash the game.
The gameplay of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is famously limited to three days. After three days the moon crashes into the town, destroying it. You have to go back in time before then (which also saves the game) and continue completing subquests in a non-linear, atemporal kind of way.
But as it turns out, there is a way around it, which puts the game into a sort of limbo. People who would ordinarily be moving around on their schedules are completely missing. Entering into some buildings crashes the game. In any event you’re stuck until you finally play the Song of Time and reset the world, getting events back on track.
But how does this happen? And how is the time system implemented internally? It turns out to be quite the interesting breakdown. Skawo (I imagine it said like the Daleks’ home world pronounced by Elmer Fudd or Homestar Runner), who is starting to seem almost like the PannenKoek of the Ocarina of Time engine games explains it in 15 minutes, here:
What I remember doing is working hard on a post proclaiming to the world the existence of a weird offshoot of the Pac-Man universe called Packri Monster. I wrote it, and I saved it (I believe) so it would be posted on the morning of January 16th.
Well, I just had a look and instead of the post I thought I had scheduled, there was just an empty shell, a title to an empty page. Even the name “Packri Monster” was misspelled. How embarrassing!
But what’s even more embarrassing is that I found out what I had written before had a notable factual inaccuracy, so I’m kind of glad it didn’t get out in that form.
Let’s remedy all of these things right now.
The Backstory & Coleco Pac-Man
Namco made the original Puck-Man, in Japan. Bally-Midway licensed it, changed the name to Pac-Man to avoid people messing with the P in the title, and that was when Pac-Man became a worldwide mega-hit. At the time game rights tended to get portioned off separately to consoles, home computers and dedicated handhelds. While (in)famously Atari locked up the console and (through Atarisoft) home computer rights to Pac-Man, the handheld rights went out to a variety of places.
Notably Coleco made (relatively speaking) a respectable tabletop version of Pac-Man, doing the best they could with its discrete graphic elements. You can play a recreation of that here. (Note: use WASD to control the game, the arrow keys are for Player 2.)
Coleco Pac-Man is interesting as a game in itself. Its box confidently asserts that it “sounds and scores” like the arcade game, of which I assure you neither is true. Its background noise is an annoying drone; while it usually takes two boards to reach 10,000 points in the arcade and earn the sole extra life, it took me five on my test play of Coleco Pac-Man. Even so, it’s the best handheld or tabletop version of Pac-Man from the time.
Because all of the LED graphic elements of Coleco Pac-Man’s are discrete, pre-made images, they had to take certain liberties with the in-game art. Pac-Man is drawn permanently facing left; alternate spaces on the board depict him with mouth open and closed. The dot image is repurposed as one of the ghosts’ eyes. Energizers are red, so when a ghost passes by one of those spaces one of its eyes, too, turns red. Ghosts don’t show up in different colors to identify their personalities. Each contains a Pac-Man graphic themselves, which isn’t illuminated when they are vulnerable. All of these elements are repeated throughout the board, visible dimly when inactive, and lit brightly when intended to be used as a game element.
I maintain that Coleco tabletop Pac-Man is playable. The simulation linked above has a flaw, you can’t hold down a direction to take a corner early like you could in the arcade, you have to press a key at the moment you sail past an intersection if you want to take it. But even in this form, it’s arguably a better game, in playability, than Atari 2600 Pac-Man. It sold 1.5 million units after all, despite coming out after.
It was a time when it wasn’t uncommon for companies to make ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) that could play one or more games, which they would license to other companies. General Instruments made a number of these for dedicated consoles (here’s a catalog of their products), playing a number of games, including Pong and Tank clones.
One such ASIC was made by Bandai, the same company that decades later would merge with Pac-Man creator Namco itself. It was made for a handheld that Bandai themselves would produce called Packri Monster.
Packri Monster as a Game
It’s an interesting little machine. Like Coleco Pac-Man, it uses discrete images for its graphics, which have to be mixed together in various ways to satisfy all of its play requirements.
Note the yellow letters on the package: PACK MAN. It’s obviously intended to be a fly-by-night knockoff, from the very company that would later merge with Pac-Man’s creator!
Differences are many. The maze is much smaller, the ghosts (“Bogeys”) are limited in number to three, and there’s only two “power foods,” in the upper corners of the maze.
The lack of one entire ghost makes sense, given the smaller size of the game. But it turns out there’s another knockoff of Pac-Man, with an even smaller maze, and a bizarre limitation. It’s the game I had originally mistaken for Packri Monster, and I wish I knew more about this variant, because it’s fairly widespread.
Mystery Handheld Pac-Man Variant #3
This version is probably best known as the basis of Tomy’s handheld Pac-Man game, in the appealing yellow case.
Tomy Puckman, using the original Japanese name and character art! Image from The Old Robots Web Site.
A simulation of Tomy Pac-Man is playable in MAME, and additionally can be found on the Internet Archive in playable form. It’s a simpler game than the Coleco version, and like Packri Monster tops out at three ghosts, starting at level four.
Especially notable about this version is its extraordinary difficulty, and dare I say, unfairness. There’s only 34 discrete places in the maze that Pac-Man can even be at, and two, later on three, of those places are going to contain ghosts at a time. From two to four locations can be threatened (“in check”) by the ghosts at any moment, for unlike arcade Pac-Man, these ghosts are more prone to reversing direction whenever they want. At the start of a board ghosts are prone to behaving randomly, so you can’t even devise patterns to ensure your safety. The Energizers become essential tools for survival, and expire rapidly, so you’re unlikely to ever eat more than two ghosts with one.
This is the only version of 80s handheld Pac-Man that I know of that has fruit. Graphic limitations mean that it’s always going to be cherries, but the points advance to 400 pts. per fruit on level four, where it becomes an essential component of your score. One extra life is awarded at 2,000 points.
But the weirdest thing about this version… since, like in all these versions, Pac-Man is stuck permanently facing left, and the dots are set between Pac-Man locations in this version, the unknown designer of Tomy Pac-Man decided that the player can only eat dots and Energizers when traveling left. The game isn’t about visiting every location in the maze, but visiting every dot when traveling in the right, that is left direction!
So if you’re fleeing from left-to-right, you’ll never eat any dots. It influences your travel significantly, and you’ll unavoidably often have to double back over dots to satisfy Pac-Man’s directional digestion.
When you pass level five, you get told: “good“. I don’t know if any later four-letter message await you. There aren’t enough elements for “wow”.
Like Packri Monster, Tomy version of Pac-Man’s got licensed out, but in an unusual format: at the basis for an LCD watch Pac-Man game from Nelsonic. Sum Square Stories shows off this version here. (8 minutes). There’s some substantial differences: it seems easier, scores much lower, and starts you out against only one ghost. But it retains Tomy Pac-Man’s most distinctive quirk, that eating can only be done when going west.
Why does this version of Pac-Man do that? To make the game harder? I have no clue at all. Can anyone enlighten me as to the reason?
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Along the same lines as videogamedunkey’s Explanation of Kingdom Hearts (previously) is this gloriously insane video that untangles all the non-linearity and heedless added backstory of the various Sonic the Hedgehog games and presents them temporally untwisted (9 minutes). Prepare to have your shameful ignorance of the ridiculously meandering basis of a video game cartoon character’s backstory shattered!
There was an All ? Panels in Mario Kart World run at AGDQ this year, and it was great, but that’s not what this is. No, this world record was recorded (geez that phrasing annoys me) in the practice room at the event. (28 minutes, don’t bother following both link BTW they go to the same place, I just didn’t want to link the parenthetical)
So what is this? As I think everyone knows by now, Mario Kart World is an open world game, and has an expansive free run mode. There’s a few things to do in free run: search out and complete P Switch Missions, collect Peach Medallions, and find and activate ? Panels.
The Panels look and act like the ? Panels in the SNES game: just roll over one to activate it. It doesn’t earn you an item like they did way back then, but the game does remember you did it, and it earns you a new decal for your vehicles.
There are 150 panels in MKW’s sprawling environment, and some of them are in some really tricky places! Please enjoy Helix13_ collecting them all in less than half an hour, showing off the game’s vehicle-parkour movement system as it runs, and demonstrating all kinds of tricks, like using the Rewind feature to get back from activating out-of-the-way panels. Or taking advantage of the fact that MKW will give you credit for a panel that you’re about to hit if you pause and change regions. And you get to enjoy MKW’s great soundtrack along the way, consisting of dozens of great songs from throughout Mario’s history.
