The Flipside of Gaming
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
A scene from the career of Phoenix Wright: an encounter with the brilliant, although linguistically-challenged, Franziska Von Karma. It’s from Mornal, and voiced, and Franziska animated, by Paula Peroff. One minute.
I haven’t posted much from Kirby and Smash Bros. creator’s prolific Youtube channel on game development. There’s a lot of good information in there. The channel is winding down now after a good run, but now, near the end, he’s posted at one of his final videos a remembrance of his old boss, and beloved Nintendo company president, the late Satoru Iwata. (10 minutes)
It’s now been nearly 10 years since Iwata’s passing, and the outpouring of respect, admiration, and even affection, for him over that time has been remarkable. There’s a sense that we lost an amazing figure. Sakurai is brilliant in many ways, but he calls Iwata the smartest man he’s ever known. He strove to be polite, not to take offense in conflict, and to always act with logic instead of emotion. He helped transition Nintendo from being under the sole control of the Yamaguchi family to the more varied and ingenious company they’re known for being today.
In addition to running the company, Mr. Iwata started out as a programmer a HAL Laboratory. Think of how rare that is for a multi-billion-dollar company. They didn’t hire your standard MBA out off a business school, but put their future in the hands of a former coder. I have no illusions that, in many cases, that could have been disastrous, because programming and management require different skill sets, but Mr. Iwata pulled it off.
Sakurai finishes the video with a story of the last time he saw Iwata alive. He calls Iwata the person in the world who understood him the most. When Iwata wanted to see him, he didn’t delegate it to an assistant but always emailed him directly. It seems that Iwata was a good person who many admired and respected, but to Masahiro Sakurai, he meant something more.
The video isn’t very long, and there’s a sense of finality to it, not just in Sakurai’s memories of Iwata, but of the ending of his Youtube channel. Masahirro Sakurai on Creating Games is such an unusual series: an important and brilliant working game creator telling the world personally of his views as a creator. Such an unusual move! But Iwata created both the Iwata Asks series, and the Nintendo Direct promotional videos, which may have inspired Sakurai’s own series. Both men understand the importance, often neglected I think, of clear communication, both between others and the world.
Thank you, Mr. Sakurai, for what you’ve told us. And thank you, Mr. Iwata, for all your hard work.
Another Nintendo post. The company’s tight-lippedness, which has intensified since the days of Iwata Asks, lends itself to fan speculation about nearly everything, and part of that everything is whatever happened to Peach’s minister, Toadsworth. In Japanese he’s キノじい, Kinojii, which I think implies he’s second in rank behind Peach in the Mushroom Kingdom hierarchy. Or was.
Toadsworth was introduced as a third in the vacation party, with Mario and Peach, in Super Mario Sunshine, likely as a kind of chaperone to make sure it wasn’t Peach and Mario taking a personal trip together, which I’m sure would have been a scandal in the fungal broadsheets, their ruler traveling alone with a swarthy Italian. The kooparazzi would be all over it.
Throughout the Gamecube era, Toadsworth was a prominent element of Mario lore, racking up appearances in many games. He was in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Mario Kart DoubleDash, several Mario sports, and especially in the Mario & Luigi games, which fleshed out the character more than any other source.
Piantapedia on Youtube made an 11-minute video exploring Toadsworth’s history. It contains the information that Toadsworth was explicitly removed from the Super Mario Bros. Movie, replaced with a character known as Toad General, which is as good a sign as any that Nintendo is purposely not providing the character any more exposure, except perhaps in remakes like the one of Thousand-Year Door.
Isn’t it odd? Nintendo, when given opportunities to expand upon Mario lore, whenever they take a strong stab at it, often walks it back to the baseline of the original Super Mario Bros. They seem reluctant to meaningfully develop the Mario universe. Sometimes this happens in immediately consecutive games: remember how Super Mario Galaxy 2 abandoned nearly everything from the first Super Mario Galaxy, pretending it didn’t exist, when presenting its story?
The fact that TYD wasn’t rewritten to remove Toadsworth indicates the character isn’t poisonous to Nintendo, necessarily, but neither do they seem interested in giving him any more exposure. For shame! Who knows what Peach and Mario might get up to behind closed doors without Kinojii to watch over things?
The MSX standard was something devised by Microsoft, a specification for a Z80-powered 8-bit microcomputer for the home market. In the style of CP/M machines, and later PC compatibles, any company could make their own MSX machine, and in Japan over 20 different companies did, along with succeeding standards like the MSX2 and MSX+. It made a bit of headway in Europe too, though not nearly as much. The US space had already been taken up by the Apple II line, the Atari 8-bit machines, and especially the Commodore 64. It causes me to wonder, if Jack Tramiel hadn’t made the C64 so inexpensive, selling for around $200 for most of its life, then the MSX could have easily come over here and become a thing.
Information on the MSX and the wealth of games for it has become better known in the West in more recent years. Konami, especially, backed MSX machines heavily, and a number of games like Castlevania, Gradius and The Goonies had MSX versions, which often had substantial differences from their Famicom cousins.
Today’s find is a 54-minute video on the MSX’s history and legacy by re:enthused. It isn’t on Youtube this time though! This time it’s hosted on the Peertube instance fedi.video. So you won’t have to worry about ads this time. Still though, nearly an hour. There’s a lot of interesting information in there!
Peertube embedding doesn’t seem very viable in WordPress, so I’m going to scrreenshot the thumbnail and link it to the page. Here:
Chris Person on Aftermath (a site that, to warn you, sometimes blocks articles behind paywalls) gives us a big list of web forums that still exist, and are even popular, today. There’s many categories there, but indeed gaming is one of them. We have a vested interest in the survival of as many non-social-media sites as possible, so here is the whole list of gaming boards from the article:
That’s a lot! There’s a lo more links there too, including a big list of technology and compute forums. By all means, click through, to the article, for more!
Super Mario 64 has 120 Stars to collect, 90 of them from individual named missions in the game’s 15 courses. Many players find that a fairly early one, Snowman’s Lost His Head in Course 4, Cool Cool Mountain, is among the most vexing. When I played it, I found it a illustrative example of what happens when the game gives you imprecise directions, and just asks you to try. I did try, time after time, until it just seemed to work, for some reason I couldn’t figure figure out, and by that point I was just happy to be done with it.
Cool Cool Mountain is a big area with sloped paths leading from the top leading to the bottom. For this Star, some ways up there’s a snowball that talks to you, asking if you could lead it to its body, a larger snowball, some ways down. As it rolls it grows in size. Ideally you stay ahead of it the whole way, and managed to get it to crash into its body. If this happens, it spawns a Star; if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t appear, leaving you to exit the course from the pause button or collect a different star before trying again.
The problem is, you can do exactly what I explained and the snowhead still won’t collide with the snowbody. Sometimes the head seems to aim at your position near the end of its route, but sometimes it doesn’t, and even when it does, you have to be standing in a narrow region in order for it to produce the necessary impact.
As it turns out there’s three requirements. Kaze Emanuar broke them down in a two-minute Youtube video last year. It’s pretty short as far as these videos go!
The requirements are:
The thing is, to a player, it looks like you’re only really needed at the end of the route. Why do you have to hit the sphere first? Even if you manage to stay ahead off the snowball the whole way, if you don’t touch the completely invisible sphere, the whole thing will break. And since it’s on a bridge, it looks like it should be fine to take a shortcut off onto the lower path.
Further, you have to be both within the cone and in a place where the snowball will collide with the body. There are many places you can stand that would direct the snowball to hit the body, but aren’t in the cone! The cone is also invisible, and the range off places you can stand to complete it is quite narrow.
Watch the video for the full details, it’s really short! Kaze does a good job of explaining it.
My latest game review is for Xanadu Next, a bit of an old school ARPG that was solid throughout.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
