We’ve posted Strong Bad videos a few times before here, and for that I make no apologies. Left up to me we’d be a 24/7 Homestar Runner joint. But there already is a 24/7 joint of that nature, and it’s called homestarrunner.com, although we do have a more frequent update schedule than them these days.
This one’s special though in that it is a new Strong Bad video, one that went up late last Sunday evening. In it, the bulbous-headed wrestleman plays the short DOS text adventure Vampire’s Castle, which was written in less than 200 lines of BASIC code. It inspired the HSR Flash game series, previously linked, Thy Dungeonman, Nos 1, 2 and 3 (“Behold thy graphics!”), which you can still play (drumroll)… with Ruffle!
Vampire’s Castle is completely text, so the Baddest Strong enlisted the help of The Cheat to make illustrations of the rooms, which is where a lot of the entertainment value of this video derives.
rodneylives (John Harris): Still working on Live A Live (just started the last chapter), Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Pinball FX 3 (Party Zone, Funhouse, High Speed II: The Getaway), Party Zone pinball (grand champion on local machine, at Pinball Palace)
Josh Bycer: Shovel Knight Dig, trying to find time to start Death Loop.
philnelson: Cult of the Lamb, Splatoon 3, and Fallout: New Vegas.
If you’ve been playing or watching something you enjoy and want people to know, tell me on Twitter (I’m @rodneylives), preferably with a hashtag like #whatimplaying, which I’ll take as permission to relay here.
A raycaster engine is a simple 3D engine that just draws lines from the player’s position to the nearest terrain wall for each horizontal pixel on the screen. It was what was used in one of the foundational 3D action games, id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D.
For those with a coding bent (the word bent seems so suitable when it comes to people who enjoy programming), Youtube account 3D sage demonstrates how to implement a raycaster in a series of three videos. The first one is embedded below:
Here are links to the whole series: Part 1 (17 minutes), Part 2 (14 minutes), and Part 3 (22 minutes)
Later he did another series on implementing the kind of engine that’s in DOOM, but we’ll look at that at a later date.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Sometimes I feel that we lean on the Retro portion of our remit a little too heavily. Josh Bycer (Website! Twitter! Youtube! Discord!) helps by providing much of the Indie.
That leaves Niche. The romhack scene, which we’ve started covering regularly on Thursdays, fills out that in that area a bit, but there’s still a lot of subcultures out there that could use a better look.
Icon for Stockfish
One of them is that around internet board games, and the biggest of those is, of course, the game of chess. The basis of chess is subtly different from that of video games, or even most other board games. Chess is deep enough that there’s a sense of mathematical purity to it. Petty human considerations seem to be disregarded in favor of finding the objectively best moves to make given a situation.
This is the road that has led us to the phenomenon of the chess engine, a computer program that plays chess. For a few years now computers have been known to beat the best human players, but far from ruining the game, the best human grandmasters now use computer programs to train. And far from requiring a supercomputer like Deep Blue, now ultra-high-level computer chess is in the reach of the ordinary user (who happens to be handy with a command prompt), in the form of the open-source engine Stockfish.
Stockfish is only a chess engine; it has no UI. Instead, graphic chess playing programs include it, interfacing with it through the Universal Chess Interface.
By the way! Did you know there’s a such an object as a Universal Chess Interface? Truly, as my pal the King of All Cosmos says, Earth has a lot of things.
Stockfish is thought to be the strongest chess-playing engine in the world, and you can use it yourself on your own computer! Maybe it is the future after all.
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
It’s not been a great day on our distant planet. The glorps on the neighboring island are playing their brachiis again. It makes my audio-sensing apparatus quiver painfully. You humans are lucky to just have ears, drebnar. Anyway, down to bidness.
Andrew Liszewski, Gizmodo: The Analogue Pocket gains the ability to play Super Nintendo games. But how long will it be before it, too, goes obsolete? Aw, don’t mind me, I’m just feeling my ages. It cannot accommodate SNES carts, so it runs rom image files, and uses an unofficial core, although it doesn’t need any jailbreaking to do so.
Mobygames is a godsend for screenshots like this.
jeremy1456, Infinity Retro: a list of hidden gems for the Sega Saturn. On it: Darius Gaiden, Dark Wizard, Dark Savior, Enemy Zero, Galactic Attack, Golden Axe: The Duel, Highway 2000, Last Bronx, Legend of Oasis, Sky Target, Scorcher, SCUD: The Disposable Assassin, Shinobi Legions, Steep Slope Sliders, and Three Dirty Dwarves. I’ve always been tickled by the title of Last Bronx. I suppose it must be a sequel to a game called Penultimate Bronx. I think the writer overstates the Saturn’s 3D prowess, it came at that awkward time where 3D was just getting underway, but the Saturn was a sprite-pushing powerhouse, hence all the 2D games for it.
Rockstar Games is disappointed
John Walker, Kotaku: Rockstar responds to the GTA6 leak. The leak is only of video footage, not of the game itself, but Take-Two is already attempting to use the DMCA (which you’ve certainly heard me rant about before) to scrub it from the internet. Grand Theft Auto 6 is not Retro, Indie, nor Niche, so we are not inclined to say much about it, except to say that intellectual property laws are a labyrinth of awfulness, and I will not stop railing against them so long as there remains goo in these cell walls of mine.
Bill Toulas, Bleeping Computer: Hackers compromise Steam accounts using a “browser-in-browser” phishing attack. They trick people using fake login forms to get them to reveal their account information. Particularly targeted are the accounts of professional gamers, who are tricked into signing up for a fake tournament. The accounts are then ransomed for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ah, this age we live in.
Edit the Frog would like you to know that he has no relationship with that meme frog going around.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting items from the world of game modifications.
We’re starting another weekly feature on Set Side B, where we try to regularly bring you news on new romhacks and romhack-related items. Big websites sometimes seem like they try to appease publishers, whose good graces they rely upon for news and review copies, by not mentioning hacks too prominently, at least if they’re of console games. Whether this happens, or if it merely seems like it may happen, we don’t ask big publishers for review copies so we don’t have to avoid talking about them, and are free to tell you about the most interesting of these game edits that we can find.
To start us out though, something you’ll find you’ll need if you make heavy use of hacks, are good rom patchers. To shield themselves from legal liability, hack authors usually distribute their modifications through the use of patches, which are in essence lists of modifications that can be applied in an automated way to a source rom file, which you’ll have to source by some other means.
Two good such utilities are Floating IPS, which can apply IPS patches, and (the sadly departed) Near’s beat, which can apply BPS patch files. IPS is the most commonly-used utility, and functions mostly as a kind of binary diff, but it’s limited to source files of a maximum size of 16 megabytes, and doesn’t offer any error detection features, so if the file you’re patching isn’t exactly what the patch expects (which happens frequently, as bad dumps or headerless roms often turn up), not only will you end up with a corrupted file, but you won’t even have any indication something has gone wrong-in most cases, you’ll still be told the file patched successfully. BPS is a more intelligently-designed system, and has some error detection built-in.
A new utility that can be of use is “Advanced NES Rom Utility,” a program that can not only apply both IPS and BPS patches but several other types as well, and can also fix many common problems with NES dumps in particular, including fixing checksums and metadata. But patches are usually source platform agnostic, so you might get some use out of it even if NES romhacks are not interesting to you.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Live A Live is currently the toast of the Switch, with over 500,000 in sales since it was released. Not bad at all for a remake of a Super Famicom game from Square’s classic era that had never made it out of Japan until now.
AustinSV on Youtube presents a video that goes into some detail about what was changed between the versions. If you’ve played the original (I’ve played a fair bit of it through the popular fan translation from Aeon Genesis), you’ll know a few things were definitely tweaked. I remember the Prehistory, by far the funniest chapter, being rather more risque in its humor, although the fart jokes and poop flinging were left mostly intact. Some of the changes are really interesting; they translated the whole Middle Ages chapter in iambic pentameter!
\An awesome fansite about this history of classic hardcore NeoGeo run-n-gun series Metal Slug, there’s lots of information and screenshots scavenged from Japanese gaming magazines about its development!
Early screenshot of a development version of Metal Slug, scavenged from Gamest. All images in this post from Metal Slug M.I.A., which has many more of them!
Early in development, you spent the entire game in the Metal Slug tank. You could rescue soldiers who would then help you in battle, such as the one in the white uniform in this image riding on the Slug.
Beta screenshot of the final boss fight with General Morden.
For each episode of Indie Inquiries, we review the steam store pages requested by developers to help them improve how they market their games. If you would like to submit your game, please reach out.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
While we’re on the topic of 16-bit Sonic, revealed last year by Lapper on Twitter, and recently boosted by Classic Sonic Deconstructed, it turns out that, because of a misplaced hitbox, you’re completely immune to the bomb attacks of the boss of Chemical Plant in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 if you’re crouching.
This is the boss’s only attack. If you’re standing on the middle platform and just duck when he’s attacking, you’re completely safe.
