Month: May 2023

|tsr’s NES Archive

It’s been a long time… before Hardcore Gaming 101, before Kotaku or the Angry Video Game Nerd, before 1UP, Joystiq and a bunch of other sites still living and defunct, there was |tsr’s NES Archive. While it only lived for four years, hasn’t updated in 23 years, and all of the images are broken now (a huge shame for some of the features), it’s still online, still ready to give you their humorous take on old video games. Long may it continue beaming out its snarky message. Consider that the time between when the NES was released, 1985, and |tsr’s archive shut down, 2000, was only 15 years. And that time isn’t getting any longer, while the time since it shutdown is. I’ve said it a lot here lately, but: time is cruel.

A few notable features there:

The images, I note, are not broken so much as forbidden access. It’s possible that tsr’s web host, Atari HQ, still has them but has misconfigured the site. Atari HQ is still up, but now seems to only be an aggregator for other sites’ content. I wonder if an email to the right person might restore access to that entire swath of early web and videogaming history, or if they’re completely asleep at the switch?

Surviving the Early Game in Tears of the Kingdom

It’s rather harder to survive the early game, I found, in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that it was in Breath of the Wild. There are many more enemies, they’re stronger, your weapons are weaker, and there’s a lot more kinds of enemies. I got killed over and over in the early going, while I could engage small groups of Bokoblins pretty easily in BotW. And if you encounter a cluster of Gloom Hands while you still have only four hearts, you’ll probably want to teleport away from there if you can’t immediately climb up out of reach. (What are Gloom Hands? You’ll know them when you see them.)

I wrote up a list of tips for the early game in a MeFi thread, and I realized hey, that’s the kind of content I should be putting here! So here they are. There’s minor early gameplay spoilers here, necessarily.

There is probably little here you couldn’t get from the gaming bigsites, Kotaku and its ilk. But my belief is, if you get this information from someone small, it feels a lot more like a friend is passing along some advice they gained. And after all, the people who have the strategy guides and help articles on those sites probably had the advantage of having completed the game during the press embargo period. I assure you, I had no early access.

  • Shrines, each giving you a short puzzle to solve for an upgrade orb, are even more important here than in BotW, because the monsters are harder and you need those hearts. There’s a bunch of shrines around the new town in central Hyrule. Unlike the first game where people could dedicate their character all to stamina, I think you’ll find that hearts are more useful in the early game.
  • If you have full hearts, you will nearly always survive any hit with at least a quarter-heart left, but you have to have full hearts. If you get bodied by an unexpected attack and left with a quarter-heart, immediately eat something that brings you back up to full to regain that protection (not too hard when you only have four hearts), then get away from it.
  • BotW had an unexplained mechanic where you gained invisible “experience points” as you killed enemies, but they didn’t improve you, they improved the monsters. That’s why the easy, low-health red versions of monsters like Bokoblins and Moblins, and the slightly easier basic Lynels, became rare in BotW after awhile. As you defeated monsters, the world would upgrade foes to blue, black, and eventually silver versions (gold in the Master Mode DLC). I think it’s likely that TotK has a similar process, so by avoiding conflict while you’re weak, you also keep monsters manageable for a while longer.
  • On the other hand, the Fuse power lets you get stronger weapons a bit earlier. And bomb flowers, as attached to arrows, seem a bit stronger than the bombs from the Bomb Rune in BotW. (Certainly, it’s easier to kill yourself with them.) It’s satisfying to send a bomb flower into the middle of an enemy camp. Bomb Flowers are one of the most useful things you get out of caves (and, eventually, from exploring the Depths).
  • As I’ve noted, it’s possible to miss the Paraglider quest and make the early game much, much harder. Many shrines in particular expect you to have the Paraglider. To do the quest to get it, you have to head to Hyrule Castle at the beginning and talk to a certain NPC who’s at the end of the path after the gate.
  • To improve your armor, you have to get the Great Fairies out of their flower buds, which takes more than a cash payment in this game. It seems to be a lot easier to miss important subquests in this game. The quest you need to start upgrading your armor requires that you go to the Lucky Clover offices in north-western Hyrule, near the Rito village, and talk to Penn. (Penn is terrific, BTW.) That’ll start you getting a music group back together (it makes sense in the story), which involves some building with Ultrahand at each step, but just doing the first step opens up the first Great Fairy and lets you upgrade your armor a bit, which can be a huge aid. Note though, in addition to the ingredients, the G.F.s also charge you a bit of money for each upgrade.
  • Money is rather harder to come by. As in BotW, most of your cash comes from selling gemstones. And as in BotW, a lot of those rupees end up getting spent on meal ingredients and arrows. The problem with selling gems, though, is that you’ll eventually need them to upgrade some of your armor.
  • Getting your battery improved takes ages it seems! You need 100 crystal charges for each extra bar, not each extra battery. At first, the only way to get those is in chests of 20 in the Depths and bought 10 at a time for Zonaite in that one store in the tutorial sky area. If you want to improve your battery faster, there’s a place to exchange it faster in the Depths beneath Kakariko.
  • But I’d hold off on exploring the Depths until you’ve built your hearts and stamina up a bit. The rewards you get for exploring the Depths are (other than the Bomb Flowers you find) mostly different from those you get from exploring the overworld and sky. There don’t seem to be any shrines in the deep underground, so you won’t get hearts or stamina that way! Instead you mostly get Zonaite, which you won’t even have a use for at that stage, and some chest contents that have armor and 20x crystal charges. Also you’ll need a lot of brightbloom seeds to explore the Depths to any great degree, which you’ll find mostly in caves in the overworld. Be sure to hold onto that Zonaite though, you’ll be wanting a lot of it eventually….
  • In the Depths, you’ll find these strange frozen-in-time dark figures, each carrying a weapon. When you examine one, the figure vanishes, leaving the weapon behind. What isn’t obvious at first is these are undecayed weapons. Don’t just use them as-is though, fuse something to them to make them even stronger and more durable.
  • When you find the Abandoned Central Mine in the Depths, don’t leave it until you find the researchers had the (easy) boss fight. There’s something very important there.
  • The most useful, relative to both power and frequency with which you find them, item I’ve found to glue to your stuff is Bokoblin horns, especially those from black Bokoblins. I’ve got a ton of those, and they provide a nice strength bonus. Remember you can sort your materials by how much power they’ll give you if you fuse them to weapons, it’s a good way to see what you can use effectively without being in danger of running out of them quickly.

Sundry Sunday: Zelda Animation Roundup

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

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been out for a week now and the internet is still abuzz about it. (Can’t you hear it? The incessant buzzing?)

Recently I had the opportunity to do a roundup of a number of Zelda fan animation videos. A few of these may have been shown here before. (We’ve been at it for over a year, it’s possible!) I’m sure some haven’t.

Racing for Rupees (4 minutes) was made with Source Filmmaker and Sony Vegas, and is a standout. With 24 million views it’s hardly obscure, but it’s eight years old as of this writing:

Shield Bash (2 minutes) is a lot newer. What are either of these two doing stealing items off the wall of a library?

I’m sure I’ve linked Something About Zelda: Breath of the Wild Animated Speedrun (5 1/2 minutes) before, but it’s a highlight of the Something About series for how many of the seemingly random elements, this time, have actual antecedents in BotW speedrunning. But not the “Excuuuuuuuse me Princess” part. That’s from the old Zelda TV cartoon.

Terminal Montage’s How To Get To Goron City (1 1/2 minutes) is also BotW related, and is also hardly obscure at 14 million views.

Pringus McDingus’ Breath of the Lovers (3 minutes) is not really much related to the games, but is still funny and cute.

Chasing Rupees (2 1/2 minutes) has only a third of a million views, but was made in stop motion, and rather well animated for that.

Let’s finish for now with Anger Management (5 1/2), starring everyone’s favorite put-upon money-grubbing shopkeeper, Beedle:

There’s tons of Zelda animations on Youtube, so you can bet we’ll be returning to this well eventually….

Info on Unproduced Landstalker Sequel

Time Extension links to a Landstalker artbook found by VGDensetsu that has information on a planned sequel that never got made, laying out the futurer adventures of Link-ish adventurer Nigel and his devil-fairy (sorry, wood nymph) friend Friday.

Despite its visual similarities to Zelda (or rather they both were inspired by J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan) Landstalker had lots of differences, and despite its sometimes infuriating 3D isometric perspective is commonly regarded as one of the leading lights of the Sega Genesis. Despite its popularity though, the game never got a direct sequel, despite several references, cross-overs and inspired-bys ranging from the infortunately-named Ladystalker to Time Stalkers, and a couple other games without “stalker” in the title.

Friday was a waifu long before there was a term for it. Sorry about the frugly watermark, eesh.

Landstalker managed to become a hit rather despite its isometric perspective, in which characters didn’t cast shadows when jumping or floating in the air, making it very difficult to figure out where things were spatially. Since it was an isometric jumping game with lots of tiny moving platforms, that made it quite difficult. There was even an entire area, the infamous Greenmaze, that leaned into the perspective puzzles and pseudo-optical illusions to give the player a hard time. Yet the fun and light anime-styled story and winning characters won many players hearts.

VGDensetsu’s tweet links to a Google Drive folder with complete scans, although with a hideous translucent watermark plastered over every page.

Here’s A Glimpse Of The Landstalker Sequel We Never Got To Play (timeextension.com)

Youtube Dev’s Experiences Making New Dual-Stick Shooter Roguelite

Helper Wesley on Youtube is making a Binding Of Isaac-style randomized twin stick shooter called Spent Shells, and published it on Newgrounds. It’s on itch.io too. It got about 35,000 plays and an award from the site, which is nice. It also got ripped off and put on a bunch of other sites, which wasn’t. But things seem to be going well with it.

Wesley put up a video with his experiences with its popularity and his attempts to monetize it. It’s only ten minutes, and it’s got a lot of useful information for things to do that might help out your own project, if that’s the kind of thing you do, or just an interesting look at an experience most of us won’t even have.

I Published My Roguelike Game – Dealing With The Aftermath (Youtube, 10 minutes)

Pac-Man 99 to Sunset

Because we not only can’t have nice things, but even the nice things we used to have must be taken from us, Polygon reports that Pac-Man 99, Bandai-Namco’s brilliant battle royale take on the classic arcade game, is shutting down online play October 8th, and the paid DLC and modes will stop being sold even earlier than that.

Pac-Man 99 is part of a trilogy of games with similar concepts on the Switch. Of its siblings, Tetris 99 continues to be playable and its online DLC still available, and Super Mario Bros. 35, Nintendo’s free SMB-based version of the concept, shut down years ago now.

All these games are great, and SMB35’s loss is still keenly felt. I particularly rue it because I was freakishly good at it; I have a screenshot somewhere of the records screen showing a streak of 11 1st place wins.

Pac-Man 99 is really good, and its online mode is free to people with a Switch Online subscription, so please enjoy it while you can.

World of Goo-ews

Word from Tomorrow Corporation, which isn’t exactly the producers of World of Goo but is like half of them, maybe two-thirds? Anyway, they announced that a Remastered Edition of the game, with greater resolution, is out on Steam, GoG, the Epic Store, and even directly from its maker 2D Boy. For mobile platforms, it’s also coming to Netflix’s games plan. Why is Netflix into games again? No matter, they are, and they’re covered in Goo!

But along with that, the bigger news is that, for now at least, this is the only way to play the Remastered version on mobile. It’s a Netflix exclusive! Even bigger, and sadder, news: the original World of Goo has been delisted from the mobile app stores, on May 11th. If you want to play with Goo on your phone and you don’t already own it, and don’t have Netflix, you can’t get it there now. People who already purchased it on those stores will still have access to it.

I wish I had found this news before it was removed; the notice was posted on May 5th. It’s sad that World of Goo is becoming less available now, it was an important early indie hit from way back, fifteen years ago, in 2008. The Wiiware version was particularly great and made excellent use of the Wii Remote’s pointer. It’s not only an important piece of gaming history, but it’s still a terrific game. The Sign Painter lives!

The Remastered Edition of World of Goo is coming to iOS and Android via Netflix

Tears of the Kingdom: More From The Dopiest Hero

Rök continues his adventures through Hyrule, as well as Hyrule and, eventually, Hyrule.

Being an alien, various aspects of the Zelda series escape him, but they love triangles, and they eagerly await seeing the first. They may have a while to wait yet.

Let’s join them where they left off, still on the Sky Islands, a.k.a. Tutorialia.

There are some spoilers here, but only for fairly early things.

For decades, since Ocarina of Time, Zelda fans have wondered what the hell was up with that Rauru guy who gave you the first medallion, without even having to do a dungeon for it. Turns out he was named, not just for a town in Zelda II, but after a goat. Unless… he’s a llama? No that can’t be true! ¡Y llama est un quadrupedo!
Lies. The main purpose of the Tips and Tricks screen is to tell you “Yo! Maybe develop some skillz!” after you DIE.
I’m sure many of you already know this, but this tool is a deep reference to Nintendo history, bearing the name of their first toy, an extendable grasping gadget released in 1966 and designed by Gunpei Yokoi himself.
All the grimdarkness of BotW and TotK is leavened nicely by the design of the gadget dispensers.
They spent two billion rupees to convince the Olympic Committee bring The Games to Hyrule, but don’t have anything to do with the stadium afterward.
After the encounter with that bird a few days ago, Link forswore all interactions with animals, vowing only to commune with plants from then on. See how well that went.

No real joke here, I just wanted to point out that Purah and Robbie are two of my favorite characters from all of Zeldadom, right up there, for me, with memorable characters like Midna, Linebeck and Groose. Robbie built an ancient equipment vending machine that continually calls Link [InsertNameHere], and Purah is Impa’s sister, and over a hundred years old, but due to a freak self-inflicted accident was turned into an 8-year-old in BotW. There are people who would kill to have that kind of accident in our world. Oh also, both characters are clearly, absolutely insane. Purah here subjects Link to one of those experiences that lots of Links have suffered throughout the series: being blown out of a cannon-like contraption to humorous effect without warning him.

Luke Plunkett: Stop closing forums for Discords

Image from Kotaku. It’s an old meme, granted.

The news section of the site is on hiatus for the time being, as I’m not sure if anyone reading this really cares about a weekly news roundup (if you’d like to see it return, let me know!), but a post on Kotaku from Luke Plunkett really struck a chord with me, about the awful trend of closing web forums in favor of Discords. I rarely agree with games writing so much.

The switching of game discussion, and even support, from publicly-visible, archivable, Googleable forums and bulletin boards to proprietary Discords is yet one more way that the internet is becoming objectively worse. Everything posted to a Discord will be locked off when the last active link to it dies. It’s a giant black hole to which future internet users won’t have access, and where the scroll rate rapidly makes past discussions into an impenetrable text wall that its search feature is not great at sifting through. It’s an information commode.

Not that there aren’t some advantages to the Discord format, but there are also advantages to Facebook and Twitter. As we’ve seen with both those sites, the disadvantages far outweigh them.

Truth be told, I’m a member of like 40 different Discords (I even started a couple of them), dedicated to a plethora of topics, by necessity, and it’s always a hassle to sort through them, seeing as the list isn’t even presented as a list of titles, just of at-times maddeningly obtuse icons. Discords have their place, ideally for small groups of members, maybe topping out at a couple dozen. If your group has hundreds of members, consider that there are probably better answers, ones that don’t require that a user install special software to their devices to communicate with you.

Stop. Closing. Forums. For. Discord. (Kotaku.)

Sundry Sunday: Super Mario Mayhem 64

Silly videogame fanvids are a rather more involved to construct than you might think. What may seem like a jumble of abrupt cuts, nonsensical references and silly sound effects takes a huge amount of time and effort to put together.

This video may be composed of silly images and animations, but beneath the hood there is real artistry in it. One of the first shots is a remake of the 3D flythrough from the beginning of Super Mario 64. See for yourself, the whole video’s about nine minutes long:

At the end, creator Spicevipe says it’s their last video game animation ever. We wish them well with their future efforts!

Super Mario Mayhem 64 (Youtube, 9 minutes)

Tears of the Wild, Breath of the Kingdom

Like most of the game-playing internet, I picked up Tears of the Kingdom and played a bit of it. It’s good! The opening tutorial seems to be slightly harder than Breath of the Wild’s (that cold water is instantly deadly to fall into now). That there’s a bunch of secret stuff to find even before you get out of the tutorial is awesome. I found a “Bottomless Cave” area that actually gave me a couple of real enemies to fight.

I’ll probably be obsessing over this game for a while, so I figured I’d make a special recurring feature for the blog about it, complete with its own pixel art character. May I introduce Röq, an inhabitant of Set Side B’s unnamed alien home planet who’s fixated on triangles, since they’re vaguely triangle-shaped themself. (They work out in order to sharpen their corners.) Please don’t mention they look like a Hershey’s Kiss, they’re very sensitive about that.

I know it looks like I’m trying to make an ostentatious point with pronoun use in this paragraph, but the fact is, no one on the Set Side B planet seems to have a gender! Except maybe The Gripe Monster, that one’s definitely male.

Here’s a few screenshots and videos from my first morning of play:

Just so you know who she is. BTW, how is she still a princess when her pop iced it a century ago? Coronate her already, she should be Queen Zelda, she’s not a My Little Pony or owned by Disney!

BTW, I bring this up only because strangely I’ve never heard anyone comment on it… why the hell is Zelda not an old woman?! Link was in stasis for a hundred years but Zelda was alive and fighting a psychic battle against a giant misty slime pig all that time. Impa became a prune! Zelda must moisturize.

Link, like many heroes that have the misfortune to be played by me, spent the first few minutes of his life tearing around the starting cave like a dog with too much energy.
Legwear? It’s obviously just a miniskirt.
This should be a moment of terror! If it weren’t for the music and the camera angle and Link’s carefree angle it’d be obvious he was about to be turned into a twink smear with pointy ears sticking out. He lands in a pond, but water hurts to fall onto!
Gargantuan lily pads should breed terrible frogs.
Oh hello birdie how’d you get up here? Do you want some seed, I think I–OOF

Stay tuned for our dubious hero’s continued badventures.

The Design of A Robot Named Fight

For this perceptive podcast, I sat down with Morningstar Game Studio’s Matt Bitner to talk about the development of A Robot Named Fight, and his next game Kop Killer 22xx. We discussed the challenges of creating the structure of Fight, from procgen to balance, and then talked about his plans for Kop Killer.