Month: November 2022

U Can Beat Video Games: Super Mario Bros 3

We’re brought up U Can Beat Video Games before (here’s all of the videos they’ve done to date, and here is their home page with a merch store), but this time they’ve covered Super Mario Bros. 3 in their typically completionist style, covering every level and every secret in the entire game. Sometimes they split a long game into two or even three videos, but not this time, this one video goes through the whole game, and it’s three hours and 23 minutes long! The other reason to link them this time is it’s their 100th video!

They’ve done some other interesting games since the last time we linked them, which was when they covered A Link To The Past. Some particular games they’ve done in the meantime:

Even if you don’t have an interest in seeing these games taken apart so thoroughly, many people enjoy using their videos as background while doing other things. In a Youtube environment where video makers feel encouraged to go nuts with editing and fill their footage with distracting noises, UCBVG is a model for how to create interesting and informative videos. They are great! And they have a couple of adorable dogs who appear in every video, too!

Sundry Sunday: Little Runmo

Gooseworx’s Little Runmo has 24 million views on Youtube, but it’s amazing how many things with a ton of views are still obscure to most people. Here it is in the likely event you missed it.

Little Runmo is a platforming character in a video game world who begins to question the metaphysics of his existence. Who benefits from him running through this deadly obstacle course? And what happens if he doesn’t just run to the right, but actually explores his world? The answers are funny and disturbing! But mostly funny!

Indie Game Showcase 11/12/22

The indie showcases highlight the many developer-submitted games and indie demos we check out. If you would like to submit a game for a future video please reach out.

Roguelike Celebration: Common Pitfalls With Roguelike Traps

From Roguelike Celebration 2022, Reed Lockwood’s talk on trap design in roguelikes. Traps are an essential part of a D&D-style dungeon exploration sim, but are very easy to get wrong, either by making them too strong or, conversely, too weak. Some interesting ideas here!

Video: The Pikmin Series Explained in Nine Minutes

The Pikmin series consists of three games so far (plus Hey! Pikmin, which doesn’t fit in with the core play of the other games, and the Pikmin subgame in Nintendo Land, which is extremely non-canonical), and so like any story-driven game property that’s survived for awhile it’s accreted a shell of lore that new players may feel like they have to break through if they want to fully enjoy it.

There’s a whole genre of explainer videos on Youtube to help players crack into these nuts, of various degrees of quality and/or sarcastic intent. Many of them are hyper-edited and obnoxious, and so I’m reluctant to link to them, but the one embedded above, from Chase Kip, is relatively chill and entertaining. So if you want to know what the heck is up with these Pikmin games, please check it out. Despite the thumbnail, it really isn’t about Olimar and the Pikmin’s sculpted bodies, at least, not that much.

Thumbnail grid generated by extract-grid-overview

(As is Nintendo’s style, each game doesn’t really require past knowledge to understand, as they not only explain everything that needs to be explained within the game itself, but even contains a tutorial that previous players will have to get through to re-teach them everything they’ve learned before. But, this doesn’t stop some people from feeling like if they start playing in the middle of a series like they’ve missed out on something.)

Romhack Thursday: Kirby’s Dream Land in Color!

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Kirby’s first adventure was, famously, a Gameboy game. Since that system is black and white, it’s been heard that Shigeru Miyamoto didn’t know Kirby was supposed to be pink until his second major game, Kirby’s Adventure, was released as a swan song for the Famicom/NES. The last main world in Kirby’s Adventure, as a nod to its Gameboy roots, is monochrome.

Kirby games tend to have distinctive graphics, and Dream Land is no exception even if it is monochrome. But what would they look like if they were in color? Well we don’t have to wonder any longer, because of a romhack constructed by GreenAndACat. It ports the game to the Gameboy Color hardware, and it looks pretty darn great! They resisted the urge to make it too fancy, instead giving background elements broad swaths of primary color that look great when applied to the game’s simple yet iconic graphics. Have a look:

Green Greens is looking pretty sharp!
The water may look slightly glitchy, but its clarity is really appealing!
Nice color combinations inside Castle Lololo
No games do starry skies like Kirby does.

Kirby’s Dream Land DX, on romhacking.net.

News 11/9/22: Lego Zelda, AI Art, EA Software Patent

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Lego is banning new Ideas projects based on The Legend of Zelda, according to Chris Wharfe at Brick Fanatics. The reasoning given is a bit vague. It could either be because Lego is working on their own Zelda sets (and they already have a working relationship with Nintendo, making the popular Super Mario sets), or it could be that the rights to Zelda models were sold to someone else. Either way, it may mean we get Zelda models through some company eventually.

A pretty good Link model from Lego Ideas! From its project page.

PC Gamer, Andy Chalk: Final Fantasy XVI’s using excuses to not have Black characters. Specifically, by claiming the game’s world is based on medieval Europe, despite Black people existing there. Grumble, grumble!

Old school blogger Mark Frauenfelder of good ol’ Boing Boing mentions illustrator Hollie Mengert discovered her work was used without her permission to make AI-generated work, and the model that utilized her work released as open source by MysteryInc152. It links to an original article by Andy Baio at Waxy. Someone explain to me how AI-generated work isn’t legally a derivative work based on every work it’s trained on? That seems like it’s just obvious.

From Andy Baio’s article-the left is Hollie Mengert’s work, the right, the output of the AI model trained from it.

Rich Stanton at PC Gamer writes that EA’s been granted a patent on game controls that change based on how well the player does. Software patents are bad on principle, that is a horse that I will always flog despite this awful situation having existed for literally decades now, but getting past that, for now. This seems at first like just another version of adaptive difficulty, which is also something that seems like it’s kind of a problem when it happens without notifying the player or giving them a say in it. I know I know, “Kent Drebnar, get with the 21st Century.” Maybe I’ve been hanging out with the Gripe Monster too much lately. The article goes back into the history of these kinds of effort, going all the way back to Compile’s Zanac, although I would argue that’s not so much adaptive difficulty as a system that the player can strategize to manipulate. Zanac is terrific, by the way.

Bryan at Nintendo Everything mentions that Sega is hiring a Sonic “loremaster,” presumably someone who knows the history of the many forms of the character. Said role will assist in creating new content and characters in the Sonic universe. Sounds like a tall order given the many varied and contradictory versions of the property there’s been, but I’m sure there are people out there who are up to it. Good luck, whoever they pick!

Arcade Heroes Reviews Mario’s Arcade History

Image borrowed from Arcade Heroes-so that I can promote the post it came from!

It’s a great article! It starts out covering the classic-era games everyone remembers, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Mario Bros., and then slowly gets less and less well-known. It even mentions the two Gottlieb pinball games!

Breaking Madden: The 1,500 Point Super Bowl

I promised I’d explain the origin of the Football Fetus. It’s from the Breaking Madden Season 1 Super Bowl, which is still one of the funniest bits of game writing in memory. Jon Bois does good work.

Half Denver Bronco, half Seattle Seahawk, all madness. It was spontaneously generated by Madden 2013 when Jon Bois set up an experiment to engineer the biggest drubbing that the software could generate. The Broncos fought the Seahawks for the Super Bowl that year, so he set up a match between them, and decided randomly which team would be the Gods, and which would be the Worms. The Gods, the Seahawks, would all have maximum stats in every category. The Worms, the Broncos, would all have the minimum stats.

Image from SBNation

In particular, all the Broncos had the minimum stat in Awareness, which affects their AI, and which seems intended by the developers to create improvised video game comedy. A low Awareness saps a player of the ability to function on any competent level, for any football-related purpose. A low Awareness produces people who willingly walk into tackles. A low Awareness stat produces men who can only say huh.

Further, durability stats were all minimized for the Broncos, so they kept getting injured, but they ran out of replacement players they could field, so they kept on playing, getting more and more hurt. Infinitely hurt. People don’t die in Madden. It would have been a kindness if they could. Oh also, all the penalties were turned off.

Just to make the obliteration complete, Jon took control of the Seahawks. He began to rack up points. Before the first quarter was over, he discovered that Madden 2013, a game for the Xbox 360, still tracked scores with a single byte. The Seahawks’ score froze at 255, although some places listed it as 256. I suppose we should be thankful it had bounds checking, and didn’t wrap back around to zero.

So Jon took a cursory count of score himself. Somewhere around 1,500 points, the game called a penalty even though they had been disabled. Viewing the footage on the play presented, not video, but a single frame, locked in time, of the Football Fetus, resting in the center of the field. A creature of chaos. A mandala of nonsense. Procedural generation at its finest.

While entertaining, still, things like this shouldn’t happen. Jon Bois is generally careful not to tear too hard into EA’s programmers, and truthfully I don’t want to either, they only have jobs to do. But EA Sports is the only source for sports games for multiple fields. If you want to play with pro players, if it’s the NFL, you can only get it from EA Sports, and it’s been that way since 2005. It’s a monopoly, and it’s inevitable that craftsmanship would decline. 2K Sports, these days, is the same with the NBA.

How sports games have been ruined by monopolies is a story for another time. There’s an article from a student newspaper from 2021, by Blake Malick, decrying their sorry state. Presumably I’ll weigh in in more detail myself someday, but that would require caring about sports games, which is something I am not prepared at this time to do. I will leave that to Jon Bois and the other inhabitants of the Fumble Dimension.

Anyway, still, bad craftsmanship in a game can be hilarious, and so it is in Breaking Madden. Please, enjoy. And here’s the rest of Breaking Madden, which includes the saga of Clarence BEEFTANK. Ah, BEEFTANK. We should look back on his storied career at a later time too.

Balancing Education and Entertainment With So to Speak

For this perceptive podcast, I spoke with Erik Andersen about his upcoming game So to Speak. We discussed designing a game about learning Japanese and still providing entertainment as well as education.

Fabian Sanglard on Sprite Creation on the Capcom CPS-1

Street Fighter II has some really complex spritework! Its characters don’t actually use traditional sprites, but more what amounts to custom tile layers for each one. This helped unlock characters from being mostly rectangular, and allow them to have poses with radically different shapes.

Fabian Sanglard has a great article about how character art was created for that system that’s well worth your time to have a look at. Well, maybe it’s worth it? I don’t know you. For all I know you’re looking for sewing advice. This is probably the wrong site for that. No offense to all you clothes-makers out there.

ROMs were expensive, and Street Fighter II required a lot of them, so it was important to make the most out of each one. A big rectangular shape around Edmond Honda would contain a lot of empty, wasted space. Imagine how much space they would have wasted with Dhalsim’s long stretchy legs! With this system, they only had to include the graphics data that would actually contain pixels.

This was in 1991, mind you. More recent development practices would probably have the data be compressed in storage, which would take care of all those empty pixels, or at least they could make a tool to handle figuring out which tiles should contain data. What the Street Fighter II artists had to do was create physical representations of each character on a physical board, chop that up into squares, and figure out what each tile had to contain, a laborious process.

Fabian reckons this system was used for other CPS-1 games, going back to at least Forgotten Worlds. Looking at the tile layouts of CPS-2 titles, it seems a lot more evident that they used a packing tool to handle fitting their characters into the memory space. For more info, please go check out the article!

Sundry Sunday: Super Brothers by Guitar Vader

Every song on the soundtrack of Jet Grind Radio (a.k.a. Jet Set Radio) is out of sight. One of the most memorable (they’re all memorable, but even among this group) is Super Brothers by Guitar Vader, a cheeky riff (in lyrics) on Super Mario Bros., in a Sega game.

That’s all. That’s enough.