Year: 2023

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.

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)