Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It isn’t always easy finding things for this weekly feature. Sometimes it’s backed up a month, sometimes though something gets scheduled just a couple of days after it premieres, and I have to scrape the barrel a bit. But not this time. Oh no.
Back in 2021, developer House House considered making an animated series about the Goose and its village. Nothing came of it, but they did make a four-minute proof-of-concept animation, and it’s wonderful. Please allow your day to be brightened, and moistened, once again, by the Goose:
An internal Nintendo metaphor for the Wii’s UI was “more channels for the TV.” It’s a particularly Old Dad idea for the Wii really, as even at that time broadcast TV was beginning to decline in popularity, but it may have made more sense in Nintendo’s home territory.
The experiences of these channels, the Mii Channel, the News Channel, the Weather Channel, the Shop Channel and the like, are receding in memory, although there are fan efforts to revive them and connect them to new information sources. But at the other end of their development life, of their pre-release development very little has ever been known. Early Wiis had stubs in their place, that only directed the user to installing a launch-day update. (I experienced this myself! I drove 140 miles in order to wait in a line for a Wii on its launch day, November 19, 2006. I’m objectively insane.)
Those stubs weren’t the true original versions of the Wii Channels, they had been in development within Nintendo for some time. Those development versions of the Wii software have never been leaked outside the company, but there exists footage of them from various sources. Bjohn on Youtube has compiled what we know about the development Wii Channels into a 21-minute video. Here it is:
There’s a fair amount there, including early versions of the Internet Channel and early evidence of plans to include DVD support. (The Wii has a fully-operational DVD drive, but to avoid playing a license fee to the DVD Consortium it cannot play DVDs without hacks.)
Some years back, as a casual remark in a place that I don’t remember, I said that Nintendo has a problem with using ideas that they didn’t come up with in-house. “Not Invented Here Syndrome” I may have phrased it. I forget the context too. It may have had to do with their refusal to use rollback code in internet multiplayer gaming, but there are other time where it’s seemed that there are things that are solved problems everywhere else, that Nintendo still has trouble with.
One of these things has been Achievements, a platform-recognized system where a player’s accomplishments are registered and stored, that can be observed outside the game and shared with others. Achievements began with the Xbox 360, and were soon after implemented by Valve in Steam, as “Awards” by Sony in the Playstation ecosystem, and even by fans playing games and romhacks in emulators as RetroAchievements.
One company that’s always avoided using them, despite being the oldest major console publisher still in operation, is Nintendo. They’ve avoided any cross-game recognition of skill or accomplishment, even though they’ve come close multiple times. Several of their games offer in-game recognition of accomplishments, in the form of “Stamps” or “Trophies” or “Stickers.” Super Mario Galaxy would post images on the Wii message board when the game was completed. When Miiverse was a thing, players could share messages with earned stamps from some games. But none of these systems had sharing outside of their respective games or individual consoles. None promises any account-level recognition.
Why is this? Nintendo’s games are enormously popular, and many players have rued the absence of any support for an achievement system, and to this day show no signs of starting one. Why? It seems like such an obvious thing. Everyone else does it. It would probably heap more value upon Nintendo’s bottom line, so why not?
As it turns out, it goes back to their Not Invented Here Syndrome. The person at whose fee the blame trail ends is unknown, but the evidence is there, in an episode of the Kit and Krysta show, available as a podcast with excerpts on Youtube. Hosted by two former Ninendo employees, who ran a periodic show that was promoted for a time on the Switch’s News channel, they tell the story of what happened when another employee brought up the possibility of offering something like achievements at a meeting. The recounting is in this Youtube video (4 1/2 minutes), with the important bit starting around 2:07:
From the transcript (there are some minor errors):
“I remember I think you were in this meeting too this was like a pre E3 meeting somebody pretty high ranking got absolutely eviscerated in a meeting by another person who is very high ranking because they were they were suggesting doing something things in the style of micros why don’t why don’t we do like Xbox does this thing really well why don’t we do that and this was like a really like packed full meeting I’m and this person was like a senior director this person got eviscerated in that meeting of like we do things our way this is the Nintendo way we cannot simply follow the path of what Xbox like it was just like it went on and on I was like it was like a 20 minute lecture […]
so there you go yeah they definitely don’t want to do like copy their competitors but they also have that sense of like no everyone’s equal we’re equal opportunist gamers right I think they also see this as like this is not a pure way of experiencing a game like you rushing through it or like only focusing on this thing like that’s not how you should play a game I kind of agree with that cuz we did some dumb stuff get those achievements that’s true and then they also like want you to play that game in a very specific way so they don’t want you to use a different system to like do it your way because they want they’ve built this game specifically in the way that they think that you’ll enjoy it the most and they’re going to want you to do that[…]“
EDIT: It looks like this post might have originally gone up without content! Evidently I didn’t publish it with text before its publish date, or maybe my login cookie expired in the meantime. Hopefully it’s up now!
Kaze Emanuar, an expert on Super Mario 64’s code who I’ve linked multiple times before, tends to bang on this drum, but they’ve now done a 20-minute video that treats the issue with detail. They tell us that the Ninendo 64 is a rendering monster, and Nintendo’s use of it isn’t really optimal, especially in the subject of his fixation.
The problem, they say, isn’t triangle count, but cache misses. The N64, we’re told, can really motor (“vroom vroom” is the phrase they use), but fetching code and data tends to bog down the system while the data bus gets the necessary data. If that information is already in the cache, then access is much faster, as in, it directly affects the frame rate.
According to his data, unrolled loops, a traditional optimization measure, are actually bad, because all those extra instructions cause extra data fetches to read them. It’s better to use the loop instructions to run through the same code repeatedly, because it can run completely from the processor’s internal memory. Nintendo’s culling system actually hurts performance in most areas, because the extra data needed to implement their system results in more cache misses. And their culling system only considers data that’s out of sight horizontally, which is such a big problem on the vertical area Tick Tock Clock that there’s a kludge in the engine to reduce draw distance on that one level to make up for it.
I know! I link a lot of technical stuff here. It’s of interest to my diseased brain! But it’s got to be interesting to some of you, right? Well for those readers to whom it is of interest, here it is:
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
The title is a little mysterious. What is a Klex, and why is it named Blob? Or is Blobbing something that one does to a Klex?
As it turns out, Klex is a kittycat! A black cat, that looks, a bit, like a black blob that moves around. Klex is the name, Blob is what it is. I can ignore the order of the nouns in the title for cuteness factor.
Cat games are springing up in greater numbers. All spiritual descendants of their great ancestor Neko, more lately you play as the cat. Maybe Stray was what kicked them off, but more recently there was the wonderful Little Kitty, Big City. (I interviewed its creators over on Game Developer!)
Blog the Klex is a demo for another cat game, currently being worked on by Sigma Unit. It’s free at itch.io. It’s being worked on by a much smaller team, and there isn’t a lot to do in the demo, but it shows a terrific sense of whimsy. Klex is adorable, and plays differently from the unnamed kitty in LKBC. LKBC is quite a vertical game, with a lot of climbing around, but Klex mostly runs on the ground with some jumping.
Klex’s animation is “procedural,” meaning in this case that the game figures out where their front paws go, and the rest of the cat follows from that. As Klex runs, there’s a jingling, like of a jingle ball rolling along, that perfectly follows their foorsteps. It’s a case where the sum is greater than the parts: the cat’s head, eyes huge, staying perfectly level, while their paws move in a flurry beneath them, jingling away. It’s very cute. Then you hold the Dash button down, and it gets cuter. You have to experience it to understand. You should. Also, Klex is more apt to squeeze themselves into narrow spaces than the cat in KLBC, and has a very cat-like ability to walk on narrow ledges. They also have an uncat-like ability to turn themself into a bouncy ball. Maybe Klex is part Samus.
The game itself, as it currently is, is brief, a sequence of areas where it’s left to you to figure out how to progress. Like LKBC there is nothing that can harm the cat. The worst that can happen is you fall off of a roof, and the game voids you out and puts you back on the rooftop. (I don’t know why you can even fall off; there’s a lot of invisible walls around to keep you on track. Maybe they have later plans for those street areas.)
Most of it is straightforward, but there are a couple of places where you might get stuck, until you realize you can grab some moving objects by holding down the Interact button. Once you know that you shouldn’t have much trouble. You’ll know the demo is over because you’ll get a screen of credits.
Please give Blob the Klex a try! And enjoy a few screenshots:
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A trick was discovered a scant few days ago in Balatro that will outright tell you what the top card on your deck is, it’s been in the game since the original demo release, and its an intentional inclusion by the game’s creator.
One of the many Jokers you can obtain in the game is Misprint. (See right) Misprint’s function is to add a random number from 0 to 23 to the hand’s “Mult,” the chip value it’ll earn. It displays this, amusingly, as glitched description text that changes, and occasionally displays random, apparently garbled text.
Well as it turns out, it’s not random text at all. It’s a code that tells you what the card on top of your deck is! It’s the rank of the card (2-14 for its rank) and its suit (H for Hearts, etc.)!
Misprint on the Collection pageThe trick in action — the next card is a 10 of Hearts!
Balatro is unusually devoid of other deck-peeking abilities. While there’s abilities that affect chips, Mult, Mult-multipliers, money, Tarot cards, Spectral cards and lots more, and you can at any time review what possible cards might be waiting in your deck, nothing will absolutely tell you what’s waiting for your next hand. And you don’t even have to have this Joker in play to use it, which is good, because it’s not great in many circumstances. If you go to the card’s spot in the Collection (provided it’s been gained at least once) and look at its description there, it still works! It’s been noted that it’ll even reveal the hidden identity of Stone Cards, which have their original values obscured by a layer of rock.
How does this affect the game? Well I’m going to go out on a limb and say, not as much as you’d think? It only reveals one card, and doesn’t say anything about its Enhancement, Edition or Seal. If you have more than one of a card, it’ll just tell you its rank and suit. That can still be used to deduce other properties of a card (if your only Red-Sealed Glass card is a 7 of Hearts, it’s a giveaway if Misprint reports a 7H) but it’ll require some setup, which is like nearly every other aspect of the game. It does slightly help you make specific hands, but even the best games of Balatro eventually run afoul of its ruthless ante scaling.
Every Set Side B post needs a link to a Youtube video, right? Here’s a breathless two minute one from BelenosBear explaining the trick:
Of particular note, Balatro University says they’ve known about this all along (18 seconds):
