Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Who, among everyone on the internet, is just finding out about the release of Episode 4 of the breakout Youtube hit The Amazing Digital Circus here? It’s already up to 44 million views.
I’ll embed it here, but before we get to that it’s worth noting how it got to this place. Its creator Gooseworx made a number of items before it, including one linked to directly from these halls, Little Runmo. A few other representative Worx from the Goose are The Darly Boxman Show, The Ghost of the Year Award and Elain the Bounty Hunter.
Not too long ago Gooseworx joined up with Glitch Productions, a small outfit that hither-then had been known mostly for machinima based on Super Mario 64. Soon after they released the extremely popular show Murder Drones, but it was tADC that really caused them to blow up.
Now, tADC is released on Netflix around the same time it debuts on Youtube. I hope they didn’t have to sign some kind of demonic contract to do that; some folk have been treated badly by the Netflix regime. But the show is still on Youtube and can be watched there, if you can put up with their horrendous advertising scheme, that is.
Several characters show heretofore unseen sides of their personalities in this one. Up until now Gangle has only been a bit character; usually-helpful Ragatha spends most of the episode in a Stupid Sauce stupor; and Jax, under the prospect of punishment, doesn’t get to be nearly as entertainingly belligerent as in the past. It also sees the return of Gummigoo, but is it really the same person as Pomni remembers?
Gooseworx has a Tumblr, which is full of hints about the show and the direction it may take. One piece of information revealed there is that The Amazing Digital Circus is planned to be a limited series, with a total of nine episodes, although with some possible short detours along the way. The show has turned out to be popular in Japan, and there’s a manga adaptation of it being web-published. I’ll leave it to you to find links to that (there’s fan translations out there too), but one fun page from it, from the issue-end artist created content, is this festive/creepy Abstracted Kaufmo christmas tree!
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”
Kimimi the Game-Eating She-Monster recently covered Moero Twinbee, known in the US as Stinger in one of Konami’s few attempts to establish their cute-em-up series in foreign territories. I think Twinbee is a terrific name for a game of this type, so it puzzles me why they insist on renaming it. In addition to “Stinger,” in Europe they retitled the arcade game Detana! Twinbee to Bells & Whistles, where the bells may fit but the whistles sure don’t.
(A warning if you play this one and are sensitive to flashing images, there is a violently flashing effect right before the bosses that won’t treat you very well, I’m afraid.)
Here it is. The first NES game I ever beat.
Her article is ostensibly the subject of this post, and I’ll try not to repeat points that she makes. Stinger holds a place in my heart, if not a prominent one then still one at all, after all it has blood to pump. It was the first NES game I ever beat! If memory holds correctly the second one was The Legend of Zelda, which is kind of fitting: Stinger is easier than it looks, so it builds confidence, while Zelda is harder. (It took me months, mostly from being stuck finding the entrance to Level 7 in the Second Quest.)
Pay no mind to the glitch at the top of the screen, being in the NES’ “overscan area” it’s usually not visible when played on a real TV.
In Japan, Moero Twinbee was not only a Famicom Disk System game but one that supported up to three players (P3 used a controller plugged into the expansion port). The US ROM version only allows two players, which realistically probably makes for a better game anyway. Even with a single player, once you get the five-way shot powerup it’s easy to fill the screen with so many bullets that you don’t actually see many enemies.
Stinger has really fun bosses! The manual says this character is “Willie the Watermelon-Head,” but she’s obviously presenting as a girl, and the watermelon’s not her head, it’s her whole body!
Kimimi recounts much of what makes Moero Twinbee/Stinger different both from other shoot-em-ups and from other Twinbee games: the bell powerup system that’s Twinbee’s trademark, and the side-scrolling stages that are unique in its series. The side-view levels are particularly interesting, not only because the game both begins and ends with one, but because it completely changes the gameplay in a couple of significant ways.
You see Twinbee is a variation upon the theme of Namco’s Xevious, complete with its bomb button to attack ground-based installations, and that depends on its overhead perspective. But Moero’s side-scrolling levels ditch it completely: in those, and only those, the Bees fire arcing bombs along with their main shots, with the same button, and it’s those that can hit ground targets at the bottom of the screen. The bomb button is repurposed to fire hearts, a different special weapon that only works on bells.
One of the vertical-scroll, overhead-view stages, using the classic Xevious-style bombs. BTW, don’t pick up the L or R powerups, they give you a side-shot but, like the Double in many Gradius games, it comes at the expense of half of your forward shots. They’ll just get you killed, and other than by dying there’s no way to get rid of one if you pick it up!
Oh those bells, them and all their tintinnabulations. If you’ve never played Twinbee, but have played one of the Cotton games, you already know how they work. Some targets (usually clouds in the Twinbee games) release colored powerup objects. They rapidly fall down towards the bottom of the screen, but they can be kept in play by shooting them, bouncing them up. As you shoot them, every few hits it changes color, and different colored bells award different powerups. I like powerup systems like this and the Gradius system, and consider them superior to the standard icon-based setup from Salamander and practically every other shmup. You get to decide which powerups you want, possibly to activate them just when you need them, but you still have to use skill and judgement to get the ones you need when you need them, whereas games with set powerup locations force you to choose between what you have and what you’re given.
This is the boss of Stage 3. Believe it or don’t, this murderous spigot is called Fang.
Hearts get fired from your ship upward in the side-view stages. It’s a lot harder to hit bells when they’re falling vertically past your horizontally-moving shots, instead of when both bells and bullets move vertically, and the hearts are meant to make up for that, but they’re so useless that it’s a much better strategy, in practice, to just get up close and pepper them with shots up close. The best powerup is the force field, which grants you several free hits (and doesn’t summon the wave of shield-weakening egg enemies from the first game), but it’s also the one that takes the most bell hits to earn. Another thing to aim for is just collecting the default yellow bells, which award no powerups, but every one you collect without letting a bell fall off-screen rapidly earns you more points, up to 10,000 points each after collecting just four yellow bell in a row. It only requires 100,000 points for an extra life, then additionals every 200,000, up to about 900,000 or so. 10,000 points per bell is such a huge bonus that, once you’re good with your powerup state, gigantic scores aren’t too hard to reach, and there’s three extra lives right in the first stage anyway.
This is Stage 6, the next-to-last. The final level is entirely in space so it’s not that interesting to look at. Get that Star! It’s the only five-way shot in the game!
The Twinbee games have always had interesting bosses, which helps to distract from the fact that, up to Detana! (the fourth Twinbee game, and the second in the arcade) most of the other targets are just popcorn enemies. When you just get started playing Moero Twinbee, it’s not uncommon to rule through the game with 3- or 5-way shot, the best powerups you can get from the ground targets, then get demolished by a boss you don’t yet know how to beat and then, reduced to single shots, either have your game end right there, or barely get in the last few shots against the boss and then get inundated by the popcorn enemies in the next level.
The first bell powerup in the sequence, blue, is Speed-Up, and unlike Gradius where too much speed will kill you extra dead, it’s mostly beneficial in Stinger, because you can’t crash into the terrain and you’ll probably have a force field anyway. With at least 3-Way shot, a couple of Speedups and the force field, the only real danger is the harder bosses and your force field running out. The blue-white flashing force field bells don’t appear if you already have one, and you’ll probably run out in the middle of Stage 6, where the game finally rolls up its sleeves and gets to punching. If you can then somehow build up another blue-white bell (it takes exactly 25 hits on a bell to make one), you have a chance at finishing the game. Like many Konami games at the time, Stinger continues indefinitely, loop after loop, and it gets slightly harder each time.
I forget what this boss is called, but it’s especially notable for being a lite version of classic Salamander boss Tetran, a.k.a. Intruder
Konami made three Twinbee games for the NES; the first was a remake of the arcade original; this was the second; and the third, Poko Poko Daimaou, I think is inferior. They form a trilogy; then for the fourth game, Detana! Twinbee, it was rebooted, keeping the Bees’ creator Professor Cinnamon but bequeathing them to his grandnephew, grandson and granddaughter Light, Mint and Pastel, whose popularity would soon outstrip the originals, especially Pastel who became quite a phenomenon. Detana was followed up by Pop’n Twinbee and Rainbow Bell Adventures on Super Famicom, Twinbee Yahho in arcades, and a handful of anime OAVs.
Pastel: early crush of many a Japanese kid, and her ship Winbee. I emphasize, Pastel is not in this game, although Winbee is Player 2.
Ms. Pac-Man. Currently on the outs with Pac-Man rights-owner Bandai-Namco because its origins weren’t with them, and its developer GCC licensed the rights to another party than them, which has given us such travesties as “Pac-Mom.” Which is a shame, because in general Ms. Pac-Man is a better game than Pac-Man. Its four mazes don’t have the nuance that Pac-Man’s does (there’s no one-way routes, for instance), it doesn’t have scatter periods to give the player a breather during each board, and after board #7 its fruit, and the score award for chasing it down, is random, taking an important measure of skill and just throwing it up in the air and shrugging.
But it does have multiple mazes. And its Red and Pink ghosts behave randomly for the first bit of each board (here’s a prior post about that), eliminating the major design flaw of Pac-Man: its vulnerability to patterns. Pac-Man is certainly not the only game to lack substantive randomness, but the nature of its maze-based play is that it’s relatively easy to perform them. So long as you hold in the direction you need to go at least five frames before you reach an intersection, you can be sure that you’re performing a pattern perfectly, making Pac-Man into an endurance game more than anything. Ms. Pac-Man doesn’t have that problem.
But that doesn’t mean that Ms. Pac-Man can’t be mastered, and the basis of that is through a technique called grouping. Grouping can be done in Pac-Man too, but if you know some good patterns it isn’t necessary. But in Ms. Pac-Man it’s a key skill, both to make sure you eat as many ghosts as possible in the early and mid boards, and for general survival, for a bunch of ghosts in one lump is much easier to avoid than a scattered mess of four separate ghosts.
The basic idea is to understand the ways to move in the maze so that pursuing ghosts take slightly different routes to reach you, so that leading ghosts are delayed just a bit, or trailing ghosts approach you slightly faster.
This time I’m going to leave the explanation to the video, but it’s interesting to think about, and to see if you can apply this information yourself.
In Mario Party games, the most dreaded spaces tend to be the Bowser Spaces, where the King of the Koopa himself intervenes to ruin your, or even all the players, day(s). It’s pretty consistent overall: prepare to lose a number of coins, or even one of your Stars, those game-winning MacGuffins.
But what you might not know is that, usually, if you land on one of his spaces and you don’t have any coins or Stars, Bowser usually gives you a small number of coins instead! It’s one of the series’ many catch-up mechanisms, designed to keep trailing players in the game.
In this video (9 minutes), Nintendo Unity shows us the result of a destitute player landing on a Bowser space throughout many of the games in the series. You see? He’s not so bad after all! Now if we could only do something about his kidnapping habit, it’s hard to put a friendly face on that one.
Despite the words’ lack in the title, the two videos linked here, both made by Some Body, are all about roguelike behavior, and likely have implications for Chunsoft’s Mystery Dungeon engine generally, from which the Rescue Games derive.
In terms of depth, this post is rated 4 out of 5: highly detailed information for obsessed fans and game designers.
And, the second (44m), it goes further into the weeds and is longer:
So, here’s a tl;dw overview of the first video. Despite the length, this is really only a brief summary! Some Body got their information by reverse engineering the games’ code, so it should be considered authoritative.
PMD has three times of actions, moving, attacking and using items. First they try to use an item–if there is no item to use, or the situation isn’t appropriate, or there’s a random component and they choose not to, they fall through to attacking. If there’s no one appropriate to attack, they fall through to moving or wandering. If they’re not pursuing a target and aren’t wandering, they wait in place.
Awake Pokemon try to reach a target: team members try to reach the leader (you)*, enemies try to reach a party member of yours. If they are following someone, they try to reach the target by default moving diagonally before moving orthogonally. This is good to know, and an effective strategy, since it’s harder to escape a cardinal-adjacent Pokemon than a diagonal-adjacent one. If a Pokemon has a target in sight but can’t move towards towards it, it doesn’t move.
(* Note: for teammates, this assumes the “Let’s Go Together” tactic is in effect. Generally, tactics settings are covered in the second video.)
No Pokemon can move towards a target they can’t see. Sight in Blue & Red Rescue Team is two spaces around them, or throughout a lit room they are in plus one space into corridors. Of course, invisible targets can’t be seen, even if they’re nearby. Note, a quirk of the Mystery Dungeon series generally: when standing in the first space of a corridor, you can only see slightly into the room, but everyone in the room can see you. While your default sight range in darkness is two spaces in the PMD1 games, instead of MD’s standard 1 space, you’re still a bit blind when moving into rooms. Notably, that two space distance around you is a square, so in corridors with bends in them you get a bit extra sight distance.
Now comes the interesting part (to people who are as obsessed with roguelikes as I am): what happens if a Pokemon loses sight of its target? In PMD1, it considers the last four locations the Pokemon was in, and tries to go to the one it was visible in most recently. Note in bent corridors, it becomes harder for a character to lose its target.
If the target is four turns outside of the follower’s sight, it has lost track of it, and the follower begins wandering randomly. This can happen if the Pokemon has never had a target (none has come into sight), or the target or follower teleports, the target moves over terrain the follower cannot cross, or the target moves away when the follower is occupied, or, due to the variety of events that can happen in the Mystery Dungeons, other ways.
Followers without targets wander randomly. When they spot a target, they cease moving randomly and pursue it. But if still wandering, in rooms, they pick a random exit, go to it and go down the corridor. In a corridor, they follow it until they reach a room (then entering it), or they reach an intersection. At an intersection, we see an interesting behavior: PMD1 occured before Chunsoft switched over to making wanderering monsters pick random directions at corridor intersections! In later Mystery Dungeon games, including later Pokemon Mystery Dungeons, wandering monsters go straight in intersections if they can. This is behavior that can be relied upon, but not in PMD1.
Outmatched Pokemon can decide to flee, essentially, moving away from their targets instead of towards. In rooms, they pick the exit furthermost from their pursuer, unless they moves them towards that pursuer; then they just try to get away as best they can, likely remaining in the room. A quirk of this: sometimes a fleeing monster breaks for an an exit that is more distant from the target, but not away from at attacker, giving it a free hit. The circumstances around this are complicated: the explanation begins at 7:16 in the first video.
For attacking, Pokemon have up to four moves, and a normal “attack.” This generic attack is not part of the main Pokemon game series. It was present in the first two PMD games, but after that became less effective. In the fourth and fifth PMD games, the normal attack only does five points of damage, and in the Switch remake of Rescue Team, it does no damage at all; it’s only a tool for passing time. But we’re still in the realm of PMD1, where “normal attacks” are not only useful but frequently used, because they don’t consume any PP.
Attacks are chosen based on a weighted average of all the usable moves. Each move has its own weight value; the normal attack weight’s varies according to the number of other moves available.
Ranged attacks are an interesting case. If a Pokemon has a ranged attack, and an enemy that can be attacked at a distance, it triggers the attack routine, where it picks a move from those available, but then only actually performs the move if the attack can reach its target. This can result in an attacker passing up opportunities to attack while an opponent approaches it. Out of fairness, room-range attack moves are only used by the AI when adjacent to an enemy.
Items have a bunch of minutiae associated with their use by the AI, but a lot of it is pretty ordinary. A few highlights: teammates can throw held negative status equipment at enemies, wild Pokemon start using items at Level 16, and there is only one Orb that wild Pokemon can use, and teammates can’t use it: the Rollcall Orb, for them, summons a number of other wild Pokemon into adjacency with them.
Over on Bluesky there’s an extremely interesting thread by Max Nichols, that reveals a number of groups that are often thought of as divisions of Nintendo are, in fact, separate companies!
A LOT of the companies that we think of as "Nintendo companies" were actually external studios that happened to work closely with Nintendo.SRD, despite programming basically all of Nintendo's flagship games and being physically located inside Nintendo's offices, was independent until 2022.
It’s a good idea to click through and read the whole thread, and there’s a number of people among the respondents, as well as Max Nichols himself, who are likely worth following if you’re on that platform. One of them, Hyrule Interviews, has this quote from old Nintendo of America employee, and idol of millions of preteen NES addicts, Howard Phillips:
SRD is such a strange case. When Phillips talks about working with external programming teams to develop arcade games, they’re talking about companies like Ikegami Tsushinki, who programmed Donkey Kong for them based off of Shigeru Miyamoto’s design. Brought into context with Nintendo’s “independent subsidiaries,” it becomes evident that they never really stopped doing that, but became more careful that they had the rights over whatever was produced.
It’s also interesting to put this into context with:
Rare, who came to work very closely with Nintendo for Donkey Kong Country and all during the N64 era, but then parted ways and was bought out entire by Microsoft. Rare still made games for other platforms during the 16-bit era, releasing Championship Pro-Am for the Genesis and versions of Battletoads for SNES, Genesis, and even for arcades.
Argonaut Software, who worked with Nintendo to make the 1st party release Star Fox and then-unreleased Star Fox 2.
Intelligent Systems, developers of Advance Wars, Fire Emblem and Paper Mario, among other games.
HAL and Game Freak, which are other companies Nintendo has close relationships with but are technically separate. HAL has released mobile games like Part-Time UFO; Game Freak made Drill Dozer and Pocket Card Jockey.
And as pointed out in the thread, Masahiro Sakurai, creator of Nintendo’s megahit series Kirby and Super Smash Bros., has never been a Nintendo employee! He created both series while working for HAL, then broke away and worked as a freelance game director.
It causes one to wonder: is Nintendo’s reluctance to staff up on the people who actually construct their games old-fashioned, very modern, or just idiosyncratic of them?
