Month: November 2023

Little Runmo: The Game

Last year for Sundry Sunday we linked to Gooseworx’s video game-inspired cartoon Little Runmo. In summary: a platforming character discovers that the peril-filled world he’s tasked with traversing is part of a system designed to support the life of a grotesque ruler. They turn it off, but other circumstances happen, and in the end things don’t go too well. Here’s the video, again (16 minutes).

A little green person off on a dangerous journey.

Little Runmo was made four years ago and has amassed 30 million views. Much more recently, a month ago Gooseworx made a pilot for a show to be called The Amazing Digital Circus, which in that short time has gotten an incredible 147 million views. Presumably it’ll get a series, but who really can tell these days? We have one major media company that thinks it’s worthwhile to make complete expensive productions then purposely kill them before release for a tax writeoff, but these are not the pages to discuss that.

Pointy things: the bane of all runny jumpy people

Over on itch.io JuhoSprite has made a platformer game inspired by Little Runmo, constructed in Godot and (it seems) with Gooseworx’s permission. Here is the trailer (2 1/2 minutes):

You might think it’d be a simple recreation, in game form, of the original, but it’s got its own things going on! Its platforming is pretty sharp. In addition to basic running and jumping, pressing an action button in the air gives Runmo a forward dive that gives a slight bit of extra height and some forward distance. On the ground while ducking, this move turns into a forward dash that can get through low ceiling passages.

Even with all the thematic deconstruction happening in Little Runmo, we never find out why Runmo has to traverse dangerous worlds. Presumably the evil king their deaths supports has set up some social pressure to convince his people to traverse spiky obstacle courses. Maybe the local rulers are in cahoots with him. BTW, it’s fun to say “cahoots.” Cahoots!

The game is divided into levels, but they aren’t clearly announced, and to a limited extent you can explore the areas as you wish, in a different order than as presented in the cartoon. The game world isn’t exactly as the cartoon presents it either, with the areas much larger, and containing a decent number of secrets to find! It’s usually worth it to poke around out of the way places if you can figure out how to get to them.

There’s a section with Mario-style timed alternating blocks, although here, if you’re inside a block when it appears, you just die.

The game starts out fairly chill, but gets pretty difficult. It doesn’t seem like an unfair level of difficulty, although it may take you a few plays to build up the skills to conquer it. Here is some advice to playing it:

  • If you haven’t seen the cartoon, you should know that the above ground area is only a small part of the game. The wide pit, the first one with the alternative spike wall over it, is the entrance to the rest of the game. Pikit’s message hints that that’s the way to go (press up to listen to it).
  • Unlike as seen in the original cartoon, you have to use the midair dive move to get past the pit, it’s too wide to cross with wall jumps alone.
  • Get used to hugging walls on the way down, to slow your descent. This can be used to scout out pits for secrets, to see if the scrolling continues.
  • If you press towards most walls but keep jumping, you can climb them easily. Get used to doing this all the time.
  • If a ceiling has a one block overhang, you can get around it with a jump off the wall and a dive back towards it.
  • Watch the cartoon, and think about ways to explore regions that the animated Runmo doesn’t go to.
  • There is at least one place where there are extra lives hidden off the top of the screen.
  • While running out of lives doesn’t erase your metaprogress, it just sends you back to level 1, the game does not save its state when you exit it. If you quit out and reload, you’ll be at the very beginning.
The Meatball Man is one of the funniest parts of the cartoon. It is possible to complete his room, but it’s optional in any case.

If you don’t care to see the game yourself, this 100% completion speedrun shows off the locations, although of course it doesn’t waste time talking to Pikit or exploring unnecessary places. There don’t seem to be any unnarrated longplays around yet, so, best to sharpen those skills if you want to experience it all.

Little Runmo: The Game (itch.io, $0, Windows & Linux)

Here is a secret room. What is this place? A possible reference to The Amazing Digital Circus?

Nicole Express: Nintendo’s First Consoles

Long long before the Switch, Wii-U, Wii, 2DS, 3DS, Gameboy Advance, Gamecube, SNES, Super Famicom, Gameboy, NES or Famicom, there were Nintendo’s Color TV Game 6 and 15.

Nintendo’s second console – the Color TV Game 6, released a week earlier, was the first
(Image from Nicole Express)

These were what are now called dedicated game consoles, that can only play games that are built into it. It used to be that these were the only kinds of consoles there were. They’ve made something of a comeback recently, for this is essentially what units like the NES Mini and Atari Flashback are.

Nicole Express has the details. Some interesting facts from her post:

  • The Color TV Game 6 and Color TV Game 15 use the same system-on-a-chip design. As sometimes happened back then, the 6 is electrically capable of playing all the games the 15 can, but doesn’t make the 15’s extra game’s selectable.
  • The paddles don’t use potentiometers, like nearly every other paddle controller does. They’re switches, meaning no analog control. When your paddle moves up or down, it’s always at a constant speed, making the included Pong-style games play much than on practically every other system.
  • All of Nintendo’s game consoles have used a three letter designation. The Switch’s is HAC. The Wii was RVL (Revolution), the DS was NTR (Nitro), the Gamecube was DOL (Dolphin) and the Famicom was HVC. This system may have originated way back here with the Color TV Game: it’s code was CTG.

First is the Worst: Nintendo’s Color TV Game 6 & 15 (Nicole Express)

Jordan Dorrington’s Galaga Strategy Tips

In this video from four years ago, top-level Galaga player Jordan Dorrington gives us advice for how to get far into the venerable arcade classic.

Some of the tips given:

  • On the first level, enemies never shoot as they enter. Shoot as many of the bugs as you can as they enter the screen.
  • Boss Galagas never try to capture your ship if there’s only one remaining.
  • On the first two Challenging Stages, if a double ship is positioned exactly in the center of the screen, you can stay there to shoot the bugs fairly easily and get an easy Perfect.
  • Starting from Stage 4, some extra will be among the ones that will swoop around entering formation, and will leave the attacking ranks to rush you.
  • After the first three stages, the game settles into a pattern of four stages. The first three stages of each set have distinct patterns, followed by a Challenging Stage.
  • The first stage in each set of four has the bugs entering in two mirrored processions from the sides of the screen. The second stage has them entering from one side in double rows. On the third stage they enter from the side in one long string.
  • Galaga kill screens are difficulty dependent. There’s a game-ending screen on difficulty levels (or “ranks”) A and C. The other difficulty levels loop and continue indefinitely
  • Basic strategy for cleaning up the remaining bugs is to start at one edge of the screen, and as they fly down at your ship, to move towards the other side a tiny bit at a time, to avoid the shots coming at you, and shooting to eliminate as many of the bugs as you can in the process.
  • If you survive a long time on a single wave, there’s a well-documented bug in the code that causes the enemies to shoot less and less, and eventually cease firing completely. In casual play that’s great, but Twin Galaxies rules are that you cannot take advantage of this bug intentionally.
  • If you get really good at Galaga, it’s best to play as Player 2, as the first player’s score rolls over after six digits, but the second player’s score records seven digits.
  • The game’s difficulty stops increasing at Stage 31.
  • If you’re playing on a difficulty without a kill screen, after Stage 255 you’ll progress to Stage 0. It throws many players off in that the bugs travel at the slowest speed, but their shots are extremely rapid.
  • The hardest part of the game is recovering from losing a double ship. The game is much harder in single ship play.

Galaga Strategy Tips from Pro Player Jordan Dorrington (Youtube, 14 minutes, from Tim’s Tiny Arcade)

Decker

The history of computers is filled with great transformative ideas that never took off, or sometimes, were even actively sabotaged.

One of those ideas was Hypercard, a “multimedia authoring system” for Mac OS Classic. One way to describe it is like an individual website, contained within a file on your computer, that you could click around and explore. Unlike websites, instead of learning a special language to create documents in it, it has its own creation system that allowed users to wield the Macintosh’s powerful UI to make things.

Hypercard was an early version of several different things. Of course its concept of linking between different “cards” of information was influential to the design of the World Wide Web. Its method of placing controls onto cards and attaching code to them is reminiscent of RAD development environments like Delphi and Visual Basic. And its multimedia capabilities allowed for the creation of full games, the most prominent example of which, of course, is Cyan’s Myst. Hypercard also could be seen as the inspiration, with varying degrees of directness, of a swath of creations ranging from TWINE to alienmelon’s Electric Zine Maker.

But wait! Don’t we live in something rich people call the “free market?” Aren’t superior products supposed to make their creators (and, of course, investors) billions of dollars? Why aren’t we all making Hypercard stacks now, on our Macintosh System 29 computers? Of course: it’s because good things are not necessarily profitable, that corporate politics matter much more than the intrinsic worth of a technology, marketing is grotesquely powerful yet also somehow overvalued, and finally, the World Wide Web came out and essentially did it one better.

Yet Hypercard still has its fans even today. Decker (not Docker), the subject of this post, is a kind of homage to Hypercard made for current OSes. It looks, on purpose, like it’s a program for early versions of Classic Mac OS, with 1-bit graphics and copious use of dithering. Yet despite that it’s still reasonably powerful. So, rediscover the promise of computing circa the late 80s, with Decker.

Decker (itch.io, $0, for Windows, Mac and Linux)

Zork I and Planetfall With The Edge Taken Off

Infocom text adventures in the classic style have this interesting thing they do where you explore interesting locations and solve puzzles in the rooms, but there’s also some miscellaneous things you have to do to keep yourself alive. Resource management.

Later Infocom games tended to go much easier on this kind of puzzle, but they were, then and now, a source of frustration to players, and that kind of difficulty termed friction by some, isn’t currently in fashion and can be excluding to new players.

Zork I in particular had two such elements: the need to keep a light source going in the underground at all times or else stumble around in the dark and soon get eaten by grues, and its carrying limit, which forced players to ascend to the White House frequently to deposit their treasures in the Trophy Case.

Similarly Planetfall, that game what has Floyd the robot in it, requires your character keep themself fed to stay alive, which is something of a distraction from the game’s mysteries. It also removes some ways the player can block themselves from winning, and removes some of the ways to die, in the name of fairness.

There are a couple of Github projects that took the publicly-released source code and removed these portions of the game. All of the rooms are still there, but the lamp has so much energy that it probably won’t run out, the player can carry much more and won’t fumble with the items they’re carrying unless they carry a huge amount, probably more items than there is in the game.

Just to let you know, I’m not yet aware of any such project to make the Babel Fish puzzle in the game of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy less infuriating.

Zork I Modernized and Planetfall Modernized (github)

Next Fest Showcase 11/24/23

The Next Fest games keep on coming.

The games covered:

  • 00:18 El Paso Elsewhere
  • 2:09 Kingdoms Eighties
  • 3:34 Punch Club 2
  • 4:57 Defender’s Quest 2
  • 8:02 Rise of the Triad Ludicrous Edition
  • 9:48 Toxic Crusaders
  • 11:48 Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends
  • 13:29 Tales & Tactics
  • 15:28 Crux
  • 17:08 Death Must Die
  • 18:57 Station to Station

Identifying Luck in Mario Party 8

ZoomZike’s back with another epic-length exhaustive examination of the hidden mechanics and math behind a Mario Party title, this time the Wii game Mario Party 8. At three hours and 34 minutes it’s not as long as the nearly five-and-a-half hour video on Mario Party 7, but it’s not any less detailed.

I can’t think of any more detailed descriptions of the hidden mechanics of such a complex game as these. The time and effort it takes to make them suggests mania on the part of the creator, but I’m still glad they do! It’s fascinating the care that these apparently-chaotic games were made with, and how their secrets were discovered by attentive players. I suggest not watching it all in one sitting, but in segments over several days. If you care about the subject at all, that is. But as should be evident, I do care, and I think you might as well if you’re interested in game design and give it a chance.

Identifying Luck in Mario Party 8 (Youtube, 3h 34m)

Something About Youtube Ads

This is only incidentally about video games, but games are frequently advertised on Youtube.

You might have noticed a particular Youtube ad that, for whatever reason, you might want to make a record of. Or you want to watch it again to get details; maybe you want to save a local copy with youtube-dl or yt-dlp for some purposes, maybe to remix. Or maybe for some reason even vote on it, or leave a comment on it.

A secret fact about Youtube ads is that they’re all secretly just normal Youtube videos that have been registered with the ad system to put them into rotation. Every video you see on Youtube has its own 11-character ID, and ads are among them. If you know an ad’s ID, you can load it like any other video by putting it after the string:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=

in the URL.

How can you get an ad’s ID? When it’s playing, pause it (one of the few things you can do in the player when an ad is being shown), then right-click the video and select Stats For Nerds.

That will get you various bits of troubleshooting information about the video currently being played:

Where it says Video ID/ sCPN, that code after it, that’s the ad’s ID! That’s the code you paste at the end of the URL line to get to the video’s landing page. You can select it right out of the info box with the mouse and copy it to the clipboard with CTRL-C:

Notice, the ad video itself is unlisted. It isn’t always, but it’s rare for an ad to appear in Youtube’s discover interface anyway. Also, this video doesn’t have voting disabled. It’s off the bottom of the screen here, but its comments are even open. An amusing aspect of this is, before I got to watch this ad as a normal video, Youtube served me a different ad immediately before it.

Because of this, if you find a silly, ridiculous or awful ad, you can find its page on Youtube and watch it again, tell others about it, sometimes even leave comments that probably no one will ever read.

For example. Here’s an infamous video that made the rounds some months ago. “Give this man seven seven draws!” (The caption says 777 draws.)

“Is that not enough? Give him some legendary Heroes at well!” I’m confused as to what a “draw” is, or why I’d want 777 of them, but a random lady in a business suit told it to me so it must be important!

It’s been labeled as unlisted and comments are turned off, but they didn’t bother to mark the video as non-embeddable. The ad campaign is over I think, but the video is still on Youtube, where it could possibly stay until the sun grows dim. The page says it’s currently been seen 3.6M times but it has no vote score, so it seems that getting served as an ad increases its view count.

This video, with the descriptive name “MLV109 EN 1920×1080 PC,” promoting the game “Grand Mafia” showcases the adventures of a poor Level 1 Crook, who’s constantly being turned down in his sudden marriage proposals to Hot Babes and Ex-Girlfriends because his level is low compared to the high level types that he’s surrounded by.

Hero Wars has been a heavily advertised game for months, sometimes with pretty gross ads. Badly animated blue hero guy is constantly injured by all the monsters and gods in his dumb generic fantasy world because he never went to school and learned about the important math concept of greater than. Because of that, his girlfriend got turned into a toilet and smashed to pieces. Stay in school, kids!

F-Zero 99 User Names, Good and Bad

I’m trying to ease up on Youtube links, which I’ve come to realize take up a lot of the content of this blog by weight. I probably won’t be too successful at this, as it’s become a lot harder to find interesting written content on the internet, though it was never really easy.

I’ve been playing a lot of F-Zero 99 lately. I’ve been working on posts introducing the game, which is really great I think, but that kind of content (ugh the C word) takes time to write and check.

So in the meantime, enjoy/cringe at this collection of fun, and bad, handles spotted in the game. Of course, such a determination of quality is inherently subjective. But I think you’ll find that its lack is easier to adjudicate.

  • Ganondoof,
  • ◆El Guapo◆ (I like to think it’s a Cat Town reference)
  • Hootcifer (Owl House)
  • Valnar (Grandia II)
  • Ghost Cake
  • POWBlock
  • GimmieFife
  • ManChild30 (ah, honesty)
  • Snautilus
  • Gaudimann
  • SmileyBone (a Bone fan I see)
  • adorabunny
  • Mamasaurus
  • GIANTROBOT (there’s something to be said for pure enthusiasm)
  • Damitbobby
  • SnickerRoo
  • AAAAAAAAAH (I counted the As to make sure I wrote it right)
  • MissHeart (speaking for all the fem names in this list, takes a lot of guts to express girliness in this environment even if there’s no voice chat)
  • Moi
  • Cheesemage
  • Flarky (it’s fun to say!)
  • Chibi-Nini
  • LordFeh
  • Espurrator
  • GudNameGuy
  • Goooose
  • PixieVolt
  • Malo (taking time off from his shop)
  • Need4Sneed
  • Boisterous
  • Apostrophe
  • fax-kun
  • koppa (I hope this was intended as a Shiren reference)
  • HALLOWEEN! (I assume they only play one day a year)
  • Frizbeee
  • Bubbline
  • Orcustra
  • Lonk (a fellow GDQ viewer)
  • PeterMeh
  • lovemykids (I assume this is a pure statement of affection and not a demand)
  • TheKraggle (Lego Movie references are welcome)
  • DadMode7
  • SisterDoom
“Waddle DIO always comes first!”

Obnoxious names, much less in number thankfully:

  • Hugh Jass
  • BON9ERMan
  • Gotenks (what is this, 2002?)
  • Jeb Bush (what is this, 2016? and terrible?)
  • Wet Shart (I am opposed to this word and all that it stands for)
  • MAGA KING (Please go jump in a hole until your brain develops, if it ever will)

F-Zero 99 is not a fitting stage for such lusers. Get out of here with that sub-Sephiroth378 crap.

Don’t be like MAGA KING. If you’re going to be ignorant, at least have the decency to be quiet about it–also, less importantly, maybe try not sucking at F-Zero 99 so bad lol.

Note: while Nintendo continues to gamely update their blocklists to prevent newly-discovered ways to express slurs, they aren’t perfect, and I’ve seen a couple of outright offensive names. Those don’t even get the dignity of being present in my list of bad handles.

Next Fest Indie Showcase 11/20/23

I tend to play a lot of games from each next fest, and there are going to be a lot of indie games to look at.

Sundry Sunday: Pest Protector from Rhythm Heaven

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

Usually Sundry Sunday is for things related to games, not games themselves, but this is fun and random so why not?

The WarioWare people have made some weird games. Nowadays they seem to be focused on realizing the software products of Mario’s moneygrubbing alter ego and his disreputable gang of sorta-friends, but they have another series, Rhythm Tengoku, known in (some) English speaking territories as Rhythm Heaven.

Every single Rhythm Heaven game is a joy, from Karate Man to the Final Remix, but my favorite is probably Packing Pests, a.k.a. Pest Protectors.

Your onscreen surrogate is Employee 333-4-591032, working for the suspiciously-named Spider-Free Candy Company. And, well, see for yourself (three minutes):

Your nemesis

No Rhythm Heaven mini game is much explained beyond its directions, but all of them tell a story by their details. Your character is a new hire. We know he works for Spider-Free Candy by the poster on his wall when the Wii version is played in widescreen. We know he’s creeped out by spiders by what happens if you accidentally clutch one or let one by your guard. And going by their faces we know the spiders try to leap into the box out of a manic kind of joy. They aren’t hostile! They just live to give you a hug, and to leap into boxes so as to give random other people hugs! Sadly, the demands of capitalism, and by that those of your paycheck, are to deny them in their life’s purpose.