It won’t take you more than a few minutes to play Marlowe Dobbe‘s Dungeon of Hank, a short and free homebrew Game Boy game made with GB Studio, and it’s not challenging. But it does have a lot of cute cat pictures, and is funny, and that’s enough. It’d probably be enough even without the funny. Cat’s cute, just sayin’. The cat’s name, you should know, is Hank Stuart Bastard. It doesn’t sound like one that T.S. Elliot would bestow, but then, what the heck is a Rumpleteaser anyway?
We’re moving SetSideB to a different web server and there may be some downtime while that move happens and the DNS changes propagate. It should be a simple matter of an hour or less. See on you on the other side.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Chessete‘s video series Dumb Lawyer Quotes in Ace Attorney is a series of dumb statements made by lawyers animated in the style of the Ace Attorney Games. Many of them are even stupider than the statement I just made. Here are just the first two.
Few games have as iconic a soundtrack as does Crazy Taxi, which boasts a memorable collection of Offspring and Bad Religion tunes backing its trademark atrocities of municipal transportation.
Word is that Crazy Taxi plays on Youtube are susceptible to copyright strikes because of all those licensed tunes. One solution? Have a live band play what the game would have been playing! That’s what this player, and three supporting musicians, do in this submission for the next AGDQ (14 minutes). You could complain that you never get to hear the whole song, but you never could do that in Crazy Taxi anyway.
The mode shown off is called Crazy Box. It’s a collection of 16 driving challenges bundled with the home versions of Crazy Taxi, and they’re all pretty, well, crazy. The highlight, I think, is the last challenge, which is simply to do a lap around the arcade city as if it were a traditional driving game, although with traffic turned up, because it’s not Crazy Taxi without a ton of traffic.
Displaced Gamers’ series on investigating design and programming problems with NES games continues with a game that I’m surprised isn’t more notorious, Ikari Warriors. (21 minutes)
The biggest problem with Ikari Warriors is probably that it was ported by infamous anonymous NES developer Micronics, who even in their best efforts tended to produce buggy, janky messes. Some other games they made: Ghosts & Goblins, 1942, Tiger-Heli, Elevator Action, Super Pitfall and Athena. All the other problems have their root in that.
Ikari Warriors runs at 15 fps. One game frame for every four screen frames! It uses expensive multiply routines instead of look-up tables for movement! Everything is slow even accounting for that! And it tries to adapt the arcade game’s character rotation system, which supports 16 directions (even though there are only character graphics for 8 of them), and forces the player characters to rotate through them to move.
All of this overhead makes Ikari Warriors really slow and frustrating to play. Displaced Gamers not only diagnoses the problem, but even makes a game attempt to fix them. And they come to the conclusion that it has additional problems, beyond even these, and really needs a bit of a redesign to really make it playable. Ah well, it was a good attempt.
Starting this Saturday at noon US Eastern time (9 AM Pacific, 5 PM Greenwich, 7 PM CEST) is Roguelike Celebration 2024! I’m presenting half an hour on the Mystery Dungeon games this year, at 3:15 PM Pacific/6:15 Eastern/11:15 Greenwich/1:15 AM Sunday CEST. Whew, the roundness of the Earth makes it difficult to express times!
Roguelike Celebration is nominally about roguelikes and procedural generation, but I think it’s interesting from a wide variety of gaming perspectives, and every year I find several talks that are incredibly interesting. Past years have offered presentations from people who worked on games as diverse as Kingdom of Loathing and Blaseball. Here are the talks being offered this year:
Saturday
Harry Solomons: Trampling on Ghosts: Hauntology and Permadeath
Cezar Capacle: Enhancing Narrative Through Randomness and Complications
Max Bottega: Keeping Art Direction interesting in a procedurally generated world
Stanley W. Baxton: Bringing Real-World Occultism into Your Games Without Accidentally Being Racist
Jeff Emtman and Martin Austwick: Neutrinowatch – the podcast that plays itself
Nic: Braided Narratives: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Linear Stories
Pandamander: “Out of Book,” The Psychology of Why Roguelikes Keep Us Playing
Along the lines of our link to Chris Person’s Surviving Forums post on Aftermath, here’s another post that’s only tangentially related to gaming, but is very relevant to there being more things to post about later. It’s Blake Watson’s free web book about making your own web pages and sites! I also posted it to Metafilter, where people seem to like it very much!
I feel like it’s another instance of what ajroach42, the founder of New Ellijay TV, describes as planning for scalability resulting on making doing basic things too hard to do. Web site construction gets mired in a maze of components and frameworks, that purport to make it easier, but static sites are really easy enough to make without them. There’s really not a lot you have to learn to make a basic website, or even a complex one, if it doesn’t need a lot of interactivity. And that also makes your site much more future proof!
Websites made in 1991 are still as readable today as they were when they were first made. But sites made with Java, or Flash? Flash needs Ruffle, and the result is buggy, and Java is completely gone now. How will React.js fare in 30 years? What if you don’t keep your libraries updated to reflect changing Javascript execution engines?
It’s too late to inform you of preorders, those ended yesterday, but Jeremy Parish, whose Video Works series is, along with Chrontendo and Atari Archive, among the best and most informative video game history series on Youtube, and the whole internet, is preparing to sell The NES Era Vol. I, a book that’s as complete a picture of the early 3rd generation video game world in Japan as has ever written. If you’ve been following the channel you’ve seen reviews of strange and obscure games have hardly ever been heard off outside of jolly old Nippon.
This promo compilation presents a good selection of the games covered both on his channel and his upcoming book (2 1/2 minutes):
It is true that publisher Limited Run Games has a book in the works from me about Mystery Dungeon, but I’d be posing this here regardless. It’s an important work, and if it’s as fun as the video series then it’s an essential purchase when it comes out. It’s made of candy!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
A scene from the career of Phoenix Wright: an encounter with the brilliant, although linguistically-challenged, Franziska Von Karma. It’s from Mornal, and voiced, and Franziska animated, by Paula Peroff. One minute.
I haven’t posted much from Kirby and Smash Bros. creator’s prolific Youtube channel on game development. There’s a lot of good information in there. The channel is winding down now after a good run, but now, near the end, he’s posted at one of his final videos a remembrance of his old boss, and beloved Nintendo company president, the late Satoru Iwata. (10 minutes)
It’s now been nearly 10 years since Iwata’s passing, and the outpouring of respect, admiration, and even affection, for him over that time has been remarkable. There’s a sense that we lost an amazing figure. Sakurai is brilliant in many ways, but he calls Iwata the smartest man he’s ever known. He strove to be polite, not to take offense in conflict, and to always act with logic instead of emotion. He helped transition Nintendo from being under the sole control of the Yamaguchi family to the more varied and ingenious company they’re known for being today.
In addition to running the company, Mr. Iwata started out as a programmer a HAL Laboratory. Think of how rare that is for a multi-billion-dollar company. They didn’t hire your standard MBA out off a business school, but put their future in the hands of a former coder. I have no illusions that, in many cases, that could have been disastrous, because programming and management require different skill sets, but Mr. Iwata pulled it off.
Sakurai finishes the video with a story of the last time he saw Iwata alive. He calls Iwata the person in the world who understood him the most. When Iwata wanted to see him, he didn’t delegate it to an assistant but always emailed him directly. It seems that Iwata was a good person who many admired and respected, but to Masahiro Sakurai, he meant something more.
The video isn’t very long, and there’s a sense of finality to it, not just in Sakurai’s memories of Iwata, but of the ending of his Youtube channel. Masahirro Sakurai on Creating Games is such an unusual series: an important and brilliant working game creator telling the world personally of his views as a creator. Such an unusual move! But Iwata created both the Iwata Asks series, and the Nintendo Direct promotional videos, which may have inspired Sakurai’s own series. Both men understand the importance, often neglected I think, of clear communication, both between others and the world.
Thank you, Mr. Sakurai, for what you’ve told us. And thank you, Mr. Iwata, for all your hard work.
Another Nintendo post. The company’s tight-lippedness, which has intensified since the days of Iwata Asks, lends itself to fan speculation about nearly everything, and part of that everything is whatever happened to Peach’s minister, Toadsworth. In Japanese he’s キノじい, Kinojii, which I think implies he’s second in rank behind Peach in the Mushroom Kingdom hierarchy. Or was.
Toadsworth was introduced as a third in the vacation party, with Mario and Peach, in Super Mario Sunshine, likely as a kind of chaperone to make sure it wasn’t Peach and Mario taking a personal trip together, which I’m sure would have been a scandal in the fungal broadsheets, their ruler traveling alone with a swarthy Italian. The kooparazzi would be all over it.
Throughout the Gamecube era, Toadsworth was a prominent element of Mario lore, racking up appearances in many games. He was in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Mario Kart DoubleDash, several Mario sports, and especially in the Mario & Luigi games, which fleshed out the character more than any other source.
Piantapedia on Youtube made an 11-minute video exploring Toadsworth’s history. It contains the information that Toadsworth was explicitly removed from the Super Mario Bros. Movie, replaced with a character known as Toad General, which is as good a sign as any that Nintendo is purposely not providing the character any more exposure, except perhaps in remakes like the one of Thousand-Year Door.
Isn’t it odd? Nintendo, when given opportunities to expand upon Mario lore, whenever they take a strong stab at it, often walks it back to the baseline of the original Super Mario Bros. They seem reluctant to meaningfully develop the Mario universe. Sometimes this happens in immediately consecutive games: remember how Super Mario Galaxy 2 abandoned nearly everything from the first Super Mario Galaxy, pretending it didn’t exist, when presenting its story?
The fact that TYD wasn’t rewritten to remove Toadsworth indicates the character isn’t poisonous to Nintendo, necessarily, but neither do they seem interested in giving him any more exposure. For shame! Who knows what Peach and Mario might get up to behind closed doors without Kinojii to watch over things?
