Switchaboo on Youtube had a look at video gamethings Nintendo made in the era before people habitually left the spaces out from between words. (14 minutes)
I didn’t know that Nintendo’s first foray into consoles was making a custom controller for the Odyssey (not the Odyssey 2, the Odyssey), and distributed it in Japan. But I do know that Nintendo’s history extends far back before video games, to making Hanafuda and traditional playing cards, and still makes them to this day, along with Mah Jong, Shogi and Go equipment.
The field of electronic entertainment, our self-selected area of exploration, is vast. On one end you have visceral creations that we don’t even bother with, games that are mostly about pointing at people in a virtual world and shooting them. On the other, we have esoteric creations of pure mathematics like Conway’s Game of Life.
How well-known would you consider Conway’s Life to be? By one measure it’s incredibly obscure, in that if you ask a random person on the street if they know about it they’ll probably at best think you’re talking about Hasbro’sGame of Life, a simple board game where players pilot colored pegs riding in a tiny plastic car down a winding road from birth to retirement, a buffet of unexamined assumptions with a long history which itself may be worthy of exploration here itself some day.
But by another yardstick, few games are more well-known than Conway’s Life. It was created 55 years ago, in 1970, by British mathematician John Horton Conway, meaning it’s Older than Pong. It’s not technically just a computer game, but its explorations have grown so huge that practically everyone who cares simulates it on a computer.
When I say it’s a creation of pure mathematics, please don’t be scared off, because it’s really simple to understand. It was a popular subject of Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Recreations columns in Scientific American.
Imagine an infinite grid, a pocket universe that’s like an Excel spreadsheet that goes on forever. Each cell can contain a counter, which is considered “alive,” or nothing, which is considered “dead,” or just empty. From there, you use a simple process to simulate this universe.
You don’t have to worry about physics or gravity or free will. Instead, every counter on the grid with less than two neighbors dies (is removed) due to loneliness; every counter with more than three dies due to overcrowding; and on every empty space with exactly three neighbors is birthed a new counter. By “neighbors,” I mean on one of the eight spaces around it. By “birthed,” I note that reproduction in the world of Life is genderless and trinary.
So that’s how to do it. But why would you? It’s because despite its simplicity, Life patterns grow by unexpected and interesting processes. It’s a case of emergent complexity; like how DNA molecules ultimately produce living creatures in our world, simple origins create hugely complex results. That similarity of complexity to our universe is why it’s called a “game of life.”
A better introduction can be found at this page at Cornell University. It’s a type of cellular automation, a wider field with many game design implications. You could consider classical roguelikes to be a type of cellular automation, although not nearly as simple, or as elegant. Within the world of Conway’s Life there are Gliders, Oscillators, Wicks, Puffers, Guns, Methuselahs, Spaceships and more. While there aren’t physics as we consider them, there is a “speed of light.”
The website ConwayLife.com, created probably some time in 2009, is one of those many websites out there that invisibly hosts active communities that big media sites routinely ignore, the kind of thing that Set Side B carries both a banner and a deep affection for. There was a time where sites like this were a major focus of the World Wide Web, and it still is, even if the wider world fails to notice it. ConwayLife.com hosts a simulator on its homepage, a wiki of concepts, an active forum, a well-populated list of links, and even a Discord.
Please, those of you who read this, try to move your interest in the direction of exploring this strange but fascinating phenomena. Maybe it’ll bounce off of you, but maybe it won’t.
If you know where to look, there are many arcade machine restoration videos on Youtube, whole channels devoted to them. This Halloween-themed video from Electric Starship Arcade is only one of them. It’s mostly about the process of fixing up the cabinet and has very little gameplay, but it does end with a fun sequence where they dress up someone as a vampire and, driven in a hearse, bring him out in a coffin to introduce it! (40 minutes) And if you watch it, it’ll haunt your view history, and influence Youtube into recommending more restoration videos to you, in a suitably spooky fashion. Ooooooo!
Soon after release hopes were high for Bubsy. Games like Sonic the Hedgehog and… well… Sonic the Hedgehog 2 had the world convinced that edgy animal mascot platformers were golden, and characters like Aero the Acrobat and Awesome Possum invested our consoles like wisecracking vermin. Bubsy was just one of them.
Robin from 8-Bit Show-And-Tell has mentioned Loadstar, the magazine that I am trying to help preserve with the itch.io version of Loadstar Compleat. I say that just to mention anything that might even be slightly considered to be conflict of interest. There, done. All of this said, this post has nothing to do with any of that!
Before Tiger’s line of cheap handheld mechanical electonic games in the 80s and 90s, there were cheap handheld mechanical wide-up games in the 70s and 80s! These are basically forgotten by most people today, but kids of that age might vaguely remember them, made by companies like Tomy.
There used to be more websites dedicated to uncovering and preserving them. One that remains to this day is the Handheld Museum, which has an extensive listing of Tomy’s titles.
Another place you might be able to learn about them, with demonstrations, is Robin’s video on them. (29 minutes)
Robin shows off a variety of them, including a variety of electric (as opposed to electronic) games. Some weren’t even battery powered, instead having to be wound up via a dial on the back, but all but the last of the games in this video run on batteries. One had to be repaired on camera. The first game is the earliest, a solitaire version of poker, dating to 1971; for context, Pong, the first commercially successful video game, was made in 1972.
It just goes to show that personal gaming was something that existed even before video games. It was something in the air at the time, and even if Pong hadn’t happened (or the earlier Computer Space, or the Odyssey, or even prior games made at universities and laboratories), it seems evident that it would have happened shortly anyway. It was an idea that was bound to happen eventually, and probably sooner rather than later.
This is everything that’s at least half-off in the eShop’s Black Friday promotion this year.
Black Friday has slowly been creeping out over the entirety of Thanksgiving Week, and in its stupidly-named “Cyber Monday” incarnation the week after too. Nintendo’s eShop has begun its Black Friday sale early. Here’s a recap of the items being sold that are at least 50% off. As always, no one is paying for this placement; it’s being offered as a service to our readers. Most of these discounts are set to last about four more days.
Many faces, many sizes
Persona 5 Royal $21 (65% off) https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/persona-5-royal-switch/
Star Wars Grand Collection Contains: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, Bounty Hunter, Knights of the Old Republic I & II, Episode I: Jedi Power Battles, Episode I Racer, Force Unleashed, Republic Commando $56 (60% off)
And here are a few more notable games at at least an 80% discount. These are not part of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotion and may expire sooner.
If it’s not the holidays, it certainly is a holiday, at least for those of us in the US. We’re preparing to load up on turkey, or maybe a vegetarian equivalent. We’re occupied with various other things, so please enjoy this report on some games we’ve been playing.
Of course, Kirby Air Riders has been the main thing for me. I just finished the “true ending” of its story mode, Road Trip, a few minutes ago. It’s bombastic and loud, true, but it was nice to see O², Nightmare and Marx as bosses again, and Galactic Nova, from way back in Kirby Super Star, make a return as part of Kirby’s weird lore. For a series originally about beating up a penguin with royal pretensions because he took everyone’s food, Kirby’s certainly killed a lot of Cthulhus.
Rakshasa from UFO 50, screenshot borrowed (because of laziness) from syltefar.com.
Now that my excuse to talk about that again is out of the way, I’ve been playing more of Party House and Rakshasa in UFO 50. I’ve already said enough about Party House, and I’m working on a revision of my strategy guide; Rakshasa is also something that should have some things said about it, a very short, very hard take on Ghosts & Goblins with a spicy Indian flavor. It’s a game that revels in randomness, and it’s easy to get overwhemed if you don’t stay on your toes at all times. I actually think its big gimmick, that you don’t have lives, but instead must complete a minigame when you perish, of escalating difficulty each time, to be one of the less interesting things about it.
Besides that, I’ve been working my way through Dragon Quest III 2D-HD, which has some quite major design differences from the Famicom/NES game from 1988. Lots to say about that too—just, later. (BTW, if you think using em dashes means something is written by an “AI,” well, I won’t have much kind to say to you about that belief. Please read better writers.)
And then there’s Blippo+. (trailer above, 1¾ minutes) Published by Panic, who also published Untitled Goose Game and Thank Goodness You’re Here!, and first released for Panic’s little portable system that could, the Playdate, Blippo is simply a pitch-perfect rememberance of 90s TV, although as experienced on another planet. It has weird indulgent kids TV (“The Boredome”), classic MTV-style news programming (“The Rubber Report”), D&D-themed fantasy gameshows like from the UK (“Quizzard”) and even a scrambled porn channel, not real porn, but with a sexy lady’s hand caressing mice and monitors (“Tantric Computing”). It’s wrapped up in presentation that kind of looks like adjusting a satellite receiver, and all the shows are like one minute long. It’s weird, unexpected and fun, like everything else Panic makes.
Statue’s most recent focus has been Mechabellum, because as they told me, “I like games that trick me into doing math.” I think one could say that all turn-based strategy games are doing math in one form or another. Math is weird that way.
In addition to all the games they play to review on their Youtube channel Game Wisdom, GWBycer has been playing strategy game Phoenix Point, and its mod Terror From the Void. I didn’t know anything about it until I saw his message about it. Lot of strategy floating around in the air, with Air Riders thrown in to cut it with pure chaos.
File this under blasphemous acts of hackery, reported on by Video Game Esoterica (Youtube, 10 minutes) and Time Extension, a super-deluxe techno-nuts person going by malucard is trying to port Super Mario 64 to the original Playstation. They have a GitHub repo containing their efforts so far.
The growing number of fan-made decompilations of classic games is what make these hilarious affronts to the very idea of console exclusivity possible. But while ports of such games to PC platforms allow for much greater visual clarity and the resolution of long-standing deficiencies, this is almost a celebration of the idea of technical limitations—and I, for one, am all in favor. But you have to understand, I’ve given serious thought to the idea of picking up an old CP/M machine and coding on it in assembly. I’m crazy pants, is what I’m saying, and on things of this nature you probably shouldn’t be listening to me.
Just look at the footage in that video, and how it’s more glitch than game. It seems impossible that it’ll ever run like the N64 original, but we can dream, can’t we?
The Plush Girls Dozen is a collection of fantasy console games; that’s games for fantasy consoles, not fantasy games for consoles. 10 are for PICO-8, two for TIC-80.
I linked yesterday about an instance of the Gigantes legendary machine battle in Kirby Air Riders City Trial. Here’s a full game of it, from Gigantes’ point of view. (8 minutes) I hope this doesn’t become a frequent thing, it might be fun once in a while but not if every other game turns into a huge boss battle.
This video seems to imply the two versions of pretentious penguin King Dedede have different designs, but honestly all I see is one of them has bigger irises than the other? (2 minutes)
Thirteen seconds about the dangers of being a pedestrian in Sky City Place Location Zone:
Finally, this isn’t an animation, but something that can actually happen in game. This is a major spoiler, so some space….
For the solid of mind and stout of body who has braved this far down….
There’s a new legendary machine that relates to events near the end of Road Trip, KARs’ story mode, called Gigantes, with stress on the middle syllable: Gigántes. Imagine saying it like SoulCalibur’s narrator says Cervantes. It’s an incredibly huge thing that takes up almost half the city! Immediately the remaining time becomes about defeating it, sort of how like, in Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, certain games get randomly chosen to be Mission Games, where in addition to turning a profit you have to save the universe.
If Gigantes is still active when time expires, then the Stadium automatically becomes Vs. Gigantes, the Gigantes player against all the others in a big dire battle. Like this (3 minutes):
