Year: 2023

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.

Impending Zelda

As you read this, Tears of the Kingdom, the ludicrously anticipated latest sequel to The Legend of Zelda and direct followup to the most popular Zelda game ever made, Breath of the Wild, is just being released. Yes, I pre-ordered my copy.

I say Breath of the Wild is the most popular Zelda because of sales figures. At over 29 million sales it far outstrips the previous best-selling Zelda, Ocarina of Time, at 14 million. The third best-selling is actually Link’s Awakening, but only because of the Switch remake. The original Legend of Zelda is down in 7th place.

Given that the game was leaked early and hackers are already combing through it and seeking to repurpose its assets for their own use (and godspeed to them in their efforts), I thought we might do a link (heh) roundup of a category of Zelda fanwork that would be impossible without their efforts: randomizers!

Zelda Randomizer and Zelda II Randomizer were two of the earliest randomizers to achieve high popularity, and they’re still probably my favorites. Zelda II Randomizer will even remake the overworld, a scrambling of the original game that few randomizers will dare try. Infinite Hyrule will redesign the overworld of the original game, and it’s compatible with the main Zelda Randomizer so you can remake that version as well. (I’ve linked to ZR and IH in the past.) Together, they’re as a long-time NES fan can get to the experience of playing the original game, before all of the secrets were discovered.

There’s two especially notable Link to the Past Randomizers, both implemented as web applications. A standard one, and a really fancy one that combines it with Super Metroid into one glorious trainwreck of a game.

There are also randomizers for Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask (especially interesting given that game’s unusual structure), a version that combines both Ocarina and Majora into a single game and randomizes their fusion, a couple for Link’s Awakening, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, and for both the Switch and Wii U versions of Breath of the Wild.

There, that oughta hold you for long enough for me to play a bit of TotK. See you tomorrow! Probably.

Romhack Thursday: All Mario 64 Levels Combined Into One Huge Map

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

Another of Mario 64 internals expert Maze Emanuar’s amazing hacks, this puts the geometry of all of the levels of Mario 64 into into huge world! It does offer gameplay in that you can collect some stars that are scattered around the huge area, but few of the original objectives remain. For more information and the download link to the hack, check the description of the video.

Super Mario “All Levels In One” Hack (Youtube, 13 minutes, download link to hack in video description)

3D Zelda II Revisited

With Tears of the Kingdom released soon, some people have been speculating, based on leaks, that it and Breath of the Wild actually take place on the “downfall” timeline of Hyrule, the very first games to follow chronologically from the two NES Zelda games.

It’s a good time to revisit one of the weirder, and unexpectedly well-made, fangames out there, a FPS re-envisioning of Zelda II. This was originally release to the internet in 2010, but it turns out its creator Mike Johnston updated it back in 2019, to include some of the initial overworld areas of the original game. He included a couple of shops too, which are not in the NES Zelda II game, so the player can get a few aids to make the game easier. Have a look at some of these screenshots:

Sadly Johnston is a bit dismayed by Nintendo’s absurdly litigious defense of its oh-so-sacred properties, even if they are pushing 40 years old now, and has no plans to continue working on his project. I can’t blame him, and am glad for what he’s given us. Thanks Mike!

Zelda II FPS (browser playable, $0, requires Unity)

A Double Indie Review of Planet Cube: Edge and Sorry We’re Open

A double review of the games Planet Cube: Edge and Sorry We’re Open played with press keys provided by the developer.

0:00 Intro
00:18 Planet Cube: Edge
3:42 Sorry We’re Open

1986 Interview with Shigeru Miyamoto and Masanobu Endo

One year after the release of Super Mario Bros., and just five after Donkey Kong. SMB was the game that showed the world that Miyamoto was a game design superstar. Endo designed Tower of Druaga and Xevious for Namco, two games that are still fairly unknown in the U.S. but were extraordinarily influential in Japan.

Endo: Also Wrecking Crew, that game feels great. The graphics are so pretty. And who knew Mario was so strong. I love Mario.

Miyamoto: When we made Donkey Kong, I dubbed Mario “Mister Video”, and I told everyone how I want him to be used in Nintendo games for many, many years to come. You know, I struggled a bit with his design. In order to show his nose better I gave him a mustache, and to make his running animation easier to understand, I gave him those overalls…

from an interview from Famimaga magazine, Feb 1986, translated by Shmuplations

The full interview was translated by the (looks at thesarus) always magnificent Shmuplations, and is up on their site.

Masanobu Endo x Shigeru Miyamoto – 1986 Developer Interview (shmuplations.com)

Someone Runs Mac OS 9 on a Nintendo Wii

The narrator has a moderate case of Youtuberitis (symptoms evident: over-gesturing with hands, annoying shtick; absent: ending sentences in an undertone like they were John Cleese playing a TV presenter), but it’s still an interesting and even informative video about making software, and hardware, doing things they really weren’t designed to do.

One piece of the puzzle for getting this insane project working was Linux on Wii; another piece was the fact that the Wii and late versions of Mac OS Classic both use PowerPC processors. It doesn’t work perfectly, but as they say, it’s amazing that the Nintendog talks at all.