PKBeats examing every Assist Trophy in Smash Ultimate

In case you saw AsumSaus’ name atop yesterday’s post and assuming it was going to be some great bit of Smash Bros. nonsense, but then was disappointed when it turned out to be World of Warcraft and Dark Souls (phooey!), here’s the beginning of PKBeat’s series where they’re in the middle of giving you the lowdown on every one of Smash Bros. Ultimate’s many Assist Trophies.

Here’s their playlist of their many item trivia videos, which include the (so far) six videos on Assist Trophies (16 videos, total length, about 6 hours):

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6

Just some of interesting facts revealed about Assist Trophies:

  • Some Assist Trophy characters have their own HP, and if players deplete it with attacks they can even be KOed with a strong enough attack. This earns the defeating player a point, although it doesn’t cost the player who picked up the trophy a point.
  • Usually the owning player can’t attack their own trophys, but if the trophy has started glowing, a state they get into when very low on health, the trophy will actually become vulnerable to attacks even by the player who collected it. This is so they can earn the point before another player earns it.
  • The trophy with the highest health is Mother Brain, with a base health of 120 HP.
  • “Base health,” what’s that? Assist Trophys that have health get more health the more players are in the game! This goes up to twice their usual health if there’s eight players.
  • A good number of trophies have health, and can be attacked, than you’d might think. For example, in the trophy of Color TV Game 15, an early Pong-clone Nintendo made in 1977, the paddles are vulnerable to attack. Each has only 15 HP, but the trophy is defeated if either paddle is defeated.
  • The Starman trophy, if it’s defeated, displays the SMAAAAASH!! message from Earthbound!
  • Each Assist Trophy has a list of stages is can’t appear on. Very few trophies can appear on absolutely any stage. One of them is Lyn from Fire Emblem.
  • There are even trophies that get blocked by Omega or Battlefield versions of certain stages. Usually these are trophies that reside in the background in some way, like Midna or the Moon from Majora’s Mask.
  • Each Assist Trophy also has a list of items, and other Assist Trophies, that it disables, that can’t generate while it’s active, and alternatively, if that item or trophy currently exists in the world, that prevent it from appearing.
  • Referring to that last point, “existing” can mean many things. Like, an item held in Isabelle’s pocket still exists in the world, and so will block all the items that can’t generate while it’s instantiated almost indefinitely.

AsumSaus on Alternative Communication in Games

AsumSaus is probably best known for their Smash Bros. Melee videos, and it was they who made the terrific video (54 minutes) about aMSa, the Yoshi player who won major tournaments. And hey, we linked to that back in 2023.

They’ve been diversifying a bit since, and their most recent video is on alternative communication in games. (21 minutes) How so alternative? As in, ways to talk to players without talking to them, either via speech or direct text.

They give a few examples. The first is when Blizzard changed the /spit emote so that it couldn’t be used to specify someone to spit on, when players used that means to express disgust over people who bought a $70 paid mount. The second is the piecemeal phrase building system used to leave environment messages for people in Souls games, also known as template messages. And third, canned messages from Smash-style and modded Smash games.

One More Collection of Fantastic Demos from Next Fest

This is the final part of my look at steam next fest October 2025 and the great demos I (Josh Bycer) played.

00:00 Intro
00:23 House 2
2:27 Goblin Sushi
4:06 Saga of Yurina
4:58 Hermit and Pig
6:36 The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time
8:20 Idosra: The Electric Renaissance
10:49 Uncle Lee’s Cookbook: Five Recipes of Disaster
11:56 Obelus Manor
13:19 Requiem of Reuinis
16:29 Shadows of the Afterland
18:06 The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike
20:35 Humanica
22:16 Nighthawks

Computers Don’t Have To Be Electronic

1. Computers don’t have to be electronic (Archimedes’ Antikythera Mechanism, a way to chart the position of the planets dating back to the ancient Greeks; here’s a video telling what it is and showing a working model [7 minutes])

2. Computers don’t have to be electronic (Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace’s Difference Engines; here’s a video about it [5½ minutes], with some clips of one in operation)

3. Computers don’t have to be electronic (The Digi-Comp 1 kit from 1963, computing with rubber bands; here’s a video about it, 16 minutes)

4. Computers don’t have to be electronic (Turing Tumble, a kit and game you can get that does computations with the action of falling marbles; here’s their Getting Started video [5 minutes])

5. Computers don’t have to be electronic (The 8-Bit computer built of K’NEX parts called the MechaDigit-1, bits posted here twice before; here’s video of it [18 minutes]; and here’s an older project called the K’nuter [10 minutes])

Sundry Sunday: More Misted Pigmeat

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Three more entries from the long-lived Steamed Hams Simpsons meme that has charmed hearts and rotted brains for many years now.

#1: Chalmers is a Robot Running Classic Mac OS (3 minutes), by Dress Up Geek Out. The shortest of the three.

#2: The Graphic Adventure Game (7 minutes). It’s an actual game by neodement, in the classic Lucasarts SCUMM style, on GameJolt, which posting channel MS-DOS Friends credited but didn’t link to.

#3: As a Mobile Game Ad (30 seconds). By Tyrone Deise, it makes me twitch just watching it, so I’m glad it’s so short. I think you will be too.

#4: A last-minute addition, Recreated in Japan-Only N64DD Talent Maker (8 minutes). Prepare for an unforgettable bludgeon! And an unexpected few seconds of Totaka’s Song!

Extra: Another Steamed Hams Game, by MonsterJail on itch.io. No video that I could find for this one.

@Play: Musing on Classic Roguelikes, Directions to Explore

‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.

I’ve been thinking about classic roguelikes, by which I mean old games from the 80s and 90s. What usually calls themselves roguelikes these days is a debased currency. Some of these games are very good (Spelunky! Balatro!), but they aren’t things that would have been recognized as roguelikes in the age of the coinage of that term, which was probably the naming of the Usenet group rec.games.roguelike. This has resulted in such things as Punished Backlogs’s “Objectively Correct” Ratings of the best roguelikes having, as a requirement, being “stage-based” and to have “great music.” Whether it’s nice to have or not, a true jedi craves not these things.

Every so often I start musing over what the “main” roguelikes, the ones that are most fitting to bear the banner of the genre, should be. When I was writing @Play for GameSetWatch, the games I settled on were Rogue (1980), Moria (1983), Hack (1982), Angband (1990) and NetHack (1987). Soon after I added Dungeon Crawl (1997), Larn (1986), Omega (1988), ADOM (1994) and Brogue (2009). Nowadays I’d add Alphaman (1995), the adventurer mode of Dwarf Fortress (2004) and Caves of Qud (2010). (If you want to see some more recent things I’ve written on roguelikes here, look into the @Play tag.)

There are some more games that deserve inclusion probably. There are some “lost roguelikes,” lost because they were written for ancient Unixes (Unices?) and were hard to preserve or their implementation relied on those old OSes. There have been attempts at preserving these games, like the Roguelike Restoration Project (GitHub), although its last update is from 2011. UltraRogue, infamously, saved games by doing a memory dump of the process space, and loading it back off of disk when time to resume the game. Some other games it lists are Advanced Rogue, XRogue and Super-Rogue.

While clunky, buggy and sometimes glitchy, there is still a strong appeal for these old games, from a time when roguelikes were a hyper-obscure niche mostly of interest to current and former computer science students. In the early days of the web, the worthy Boudewyn Waiyers maintained the first major Roguelike Home Page on the internet (Wayback Machine links: first archived version, last version there, final home).

A few other games that it mentions are:

  • Crossfire (which is multiplayer)
  • Morgul, a variant of Moria
  • IMoria, another variant, the only copy I could find is on the voluminous ArchiveRL on the Internet Archive
  • PMoria, also in ArchiveRL and possibly nowhere else
  • Ragnarok, a DOS game (download from Wayback Machine but it’s available from abandonware sites)
  • Rogue’s Quest (1996, seems to be preserved on the Internet Archive)
  • Saladir (see ArchiveRL)
  • and URW, or “UnReal World,” which has an interesting story behind it. Unlike the other games in this list, it’s still in active development, and while it’s much changed its focus it still seems to be a roguelike. I think this should be a forthcoming @Play subject

Not mentioned on the dusty archives of the Roguelike Home Page is Elona, a roguelike from Japan. I’ve bounced hard off of this in the past (its got some objectionable content), but hell, I’ve survived the likes of Omega Labyrinth Life. There’s also Castle of the Winds, an early Windows roguelike which is slated to be republished on Steam soon.

I must say, ArchiveRL on the Internet Archive is amazing, a 25-gigabyte collection of hundreds of roguelikes, many of them defunct and otherwise forgotten. If you’re looking for something ancient, esoteric and probably terminal-based, you’ll find lots of things in its murky depths.

I’ve played a fair bit of Caves of Qud recently and I have quite a few notes on it. I think my next subjects should be that, UnReal World and Elona. Are there any suggestions for directions to explore? I mean besides down, deeper into the earth, of course.

Commodore History on How C64 BASIC Works

The title refers to an ongoing series with two videos so far. Part 1 (28 minutes) is about how the tokenizer works and how programs are stored in memory, and Part 2 (19 minutes) is on what the BASIC interpreter does to execute the program as it’s running. These are pretty detailed and a bit technical, but interesting of these kinds of shapes can fit into your brain. More below.

Part 1: Before a program is run
Part 2: How a program is run

Some extra links from the videos, a disassembly of the C64 BASIC ROM from pagetable.com, and the open-sourced by Microsoft code of their generalized BASIC interpreter. It should be noted that the original version of Microsoft BASIC were written for the Altair 8800 kit computer by Bill Gates and Paul Allen themselves.

I’ll distill the basics of the videos for you. Commodore BASIC is a dialect of Microsoft BASIC. It puts the loaded program at the bottom of memory, starting at 2049, or $0801 in hex. (The custom on the C64 is to denote hex numbers with a dollar sign.) When lines are written, the C64’s screen editor start from the beginning looking for a line number, and if it’s found tries to tokenize the rest of the line. Unrecognized keywords are still stored as PETSCII characters (which will cause a syntax error when run).

Commands are matched against a list of keywords stored in ROM. All the keywords are stored as “tokens,” single bytes, to conserve program space and to help with execution speed. At runtime, the tokens are detected by their high bit being set, then run through a lookup table. It pushes the high and low bytes of the command’s address in memory then does an RTS, which then jumps to the routine by acting like it’s returning from a JSR. Notably, the short routine that gets the next byte of BASIC text to act upon, CHRGET, is actually copied into zero page RAM to run, to take advantage of faster zero page versions of some instructions, but also because it’s self-modifying.

Bluesky User Lists Practically Every IP, To Track Which Are On Nintendo Music

I could link the things that everyone already knows about, that people in that wretched hive they call Reddit have already linked five times, that have blown up on social media, that there’s already a Youtuber or two making snide comments about. I mean, I’ve linked stuff like that before, pretty often really. They aren’t hard to find.

But I’d much rather link something interesting that’s basically unknown. Help spread the word about it! The only problem there is, how do you find that stuff in the first place? It’s a bit of a chicken-or-David-Egger. I think that’s what you’d call it, sure.

So when I saw someone I follow on Bluesky wrote out nearly every Nintendo video game property, including those that appeared on niche platforms like Virtual Boy and Satellaview, primarily so they could boldface the ones that have arrived on Nintendo Music, I had to run directly here to link to it.

The beginning of a long list

I don’t vouch for its total accuracy, but it still could be a useful resource. In fact I know there are some things that are missing, like their early arcade games Sheriff or Radar Scope, just for starters. But if the idea is to present things that realistically could present soundtracks included in Nintendo Music, it’s a pretty good list.

More from Skawo: Demonstrating a NES’s Failing PPU

We linked to a Skawo video yesterday, the one about flash card rumble motors activating when playing Link’s Awakening DX. Well I happened to have this one open, so here’s another: the last gasps of a failing PPU chip, shown off in several games. (5½ minutes)

It starts out seeming to work okay, but it isn’t long before it becomes obvious that something very wrong is happening. If you ever wondered what a failing graphics chip looks like, well, this will show you one example of it happening. Chips can fail in any number of ways, and there’s no guarantee that another PPU in the process of expiring will expire in the same way, but this is the kind of thing that can happen.

Skawo on Link’s Awakening DX’s Rumble Support

The Game Boy doesn’t have a Rumble Pak. Of course it doesn’t; where would you slot it? But a few games were released for the Game Boy Color (and Game Boy Advance too) that have built-in rumble motors. Because of this, it’s impossible, with unmodified physical hardware, to separate the Rumble from the Pak. If the game supports rumble, it has the motor included; if it doesn’t support rumble, it won’t have the motor. Pretty simple.

Except. Some people discovered, if you put Link’s Awakening DX onto some flash carts with a rumble motor included, there is a point during the game where the rumble will activate. Skawo on Youtube looked at the game’s code and sought an answer as to why. (10 minutes)

The tl;dw: GBC rumble motors are controlled via a MBC5 chip, a chip not dissimilar to the now-famous MMC line of chips on the NES/Famicom. Writes to ROM space are caught by the chip and used to activate functions. The main purpose for these chips is to switch between memory banks, but one bit in the written byte activates or deactivates the motor. Link’s Awakening DX uses a MBC5 and a miscoded write that activates any included motor. The MBC5 usually ignores these writes because it checks the cartridge header to see if it includes rumble support, a check that fails for this game, but GBA flash carts run will use an emulator to run GBC games, and if the emulator is inaccurate it might trigger rumble motor regardless of any header.

So why is the value written anyway? I’ll leave that for the video to explain, but it has to do with the additional save information added for the Color Dungeon, and an issue in the game when it saves puzzle completion data for areas that aren’t in dungeons.

Increasing the Framerate of SNES Star Fox

It’s been possible for quite a while to increase the framerate of SNES Star Fox. Even during the SNES’ hardware release period, an updated version of the SuperFX chip that made it’s then-amazing 3D visuals possible was used that doubled its performance, and was used in other games like Yoshi’s Island. And now overclocking and emulation can increase SuperFX performance by much more.

But there’s a problem with speeding up Star Fox this way. The game wasn’t designed that the frame rate can be separated from the gameplay or animations. If you speed up the chip, you’ll speed up everything else in the game too, rapidly making it unplayable.

Some progress has been made recently towards improving the framerate without making it a twitchy stuttery mess. Tyler Loch made a video of his efforts (3½ minutes), and to people used playing Star Fox’s at its original 15fps it’s a wonder to behold:

Because the code has to be adjusted in many different places, there are parts of the game that are obviously incorrect. Falling pillars, you’ll notice, tilt over much faster, bosses move and fire much more rapidly and are more dangerous as a result, and the engine of the player’s Arwing spaceship flashes at a rate that some people may not appreciate. And the video shows off only the first level, because the full game isn’t finishable yet. But much progress has been made! Let us hope Tyler’s momentum holds up through the rest of the project.

Sundry Sunday: Wapeach Wastuff

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Wario and Waluigi should need no introduction. (Wario shouldn’t anyway; Waluigi has not gotten most attention since the early 2000s.) After establishing them as the Nintendo-flavored version of “Bizarro,” we are informed by Michael McWhertor of Polygon that Camelot, the originator of Waluigi, had brainstormed up a wa-version of Peach too, which was rejected by Nintendo because they hate awesomeness.

Concept art of Wapeach, from Camelot originally, image from the Polygon article linked above.

It’s been two years since that article came out, and soon after fan material regarding this quasi-evil apparition began to appear. On DeviantArt (that place), user Niko–Neko has made to date 95 images of the princeless-waif, some just artwork, some comics, often involving her partners-in-wa, Wario and Waluigi. (Note: some images slightly NSFW, nothing explicit, but there’s at least one image where she’s wearing her cape and little else.)

One of Niko–Neko’s Wapeach panels, original here.

I’ll leave you to explore Niko–Neko’s renditions of her hapless adventures on your own, as they’re not the actual point of this post, not directly at least. Instead, I invite you to partake in gawking at GabaLeth’s playlist of eight of those comics with voice-acting. (Total length about 4½ minutes)

I now leave you to dream about lovably incompetent dark princesses and the things they might do to you if they got you in their clutches. “Yow, it hurts so good! How may I serve you, oh Mistress of Darkness….”

Um… forget you read that.