Sundry Sunday: Rhythm Heaven Reanimated

Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven games are still a bit obscure, but have a passionate fanbase. They share design sensibilities with the WarioWare series, which is because both share a character designer, Ko Takeuchi. They both have a distinctive clean-line look, and a similar sense of humor.

About four years ago, some of those fans made one of those reanimation compilations of the series, and the fruits of their labor is unusually keeping in spirit of the original, which itself samples many different art and musical styles. The reanimation feels like it could have been one of the remixes from the games itself.

Speaking of, the reanimation covers all of the remixes, of all of the games in the series, with the result that the full sequence is eighteen minutes long! It’s quite faithful to the originals, despite the vastly different animation styles, and it even scored an appreciative comment from Takeuchi himself! Here it is, but be warned: you’ll watch it for a while, then see one of the videos mention it’s only half over, and you’ll think to yourself, no way:


An aside, a different reanimation project near to my heart, but unrelated to video games, is the highly-memeable 2004 collaboration that animated They Might Be Giants’ Fingertips (6 minutes, original page). Note, in its original Flash incarnation, different elements would be selected on every play, an aspect that is unfortunately lost in these renderings.

Can You Block Yourself With Keys In Zelda 1?

The original Legend of Zelda, unique in the series, not only has keys that can be used in any dungeon, but you can even buy keys, for considerable expense, in shops, for either 80 or 100 rupees.

But, is the purchase of keys ever necessary? Usually Zelda 1 gives you many more keys than you need. Even in the Second Quest, which tightens the screws, you can usually get by if you just make sure to clear every room and bomb some walls.

But consider the worst-case scenario. What if you open just the wrong doors? Is it possible, if you waste keys on rooms that aren’t on the critical path to completing the game, to make it so you have to resort to buying keys in shops?

In an 11-minute video, “TheRetroDude,” as he styles himself, examines this question. tl;dw: not in the First Quest, but it’s technically possible to soft-lock yourself, unless you resort to commercially-provided keys, in the Second Quest, if you’re very injudicious about the doors you open. Here:

Trying to Get Stuck in Zelda 1 (Youtube, 11 minutes)

Best Demos of Next Fest Part 3

Part 3 of my coverage of Steam Next Fest 2024 October edition of indie game demos.

0:00 Intro
00:20 Somber Echoes
2:36 Diesel Dome Oil & Blood
4:31 Rift of the Necrodancer
5:34 System Purge: Hollow Point
6:59 Symphonia
8:34 To Kill a God
10:15 Carnival Massacre
12:08 Super Dash

Before Mario Visits the Nintendo Museum

Before Mario is a Blogspot blog (remember them?) devoted to Nintendo’s company history before they made video games. Well, their December 13th post doesn’t fit that bill entirely, since the museum is quite new, but they did focus on those aspects on display that don’t deal with their freakishly popular electronic products.

Nintendo got their start making playing cards (images from Before Mario)
Er, so we’re consuming Kirby’s plastic bottled regurgitation?

Nook (the music playing program)

I found out about this program that runs in the background and plays time- and season-appropriate Animal Crossing music. It’s free, there’s versions for Windows and Mac on the site, and I found a copy on the Arch depository so there’s obviously a version for Linux too. It even has a rain option.

Pretty simple today, but it’s free and fun and free. It’s freeee!

Nook ($0, Windows, Mac and Linux)

Team Fortress 2’s “Story” Has Been Concluded

How long has it been since you thought of TF2? I played it a bit, enjoyed it for a while, but in the end FPSes aren’t really my thing. Guns and shooting people, realistically, even in a heavily stylized and humorous way, not for me. But I can respect all the work that went into it, and it’s a landmark of both gaming and gaming culture.

Team Fortress 2 has an official comic that lays out the story of the game, such as it is. It had six issues, then it just trailed off in 2017. Well, they finally made one more, to wrap it up. The game’s not done yet no, people will probably be playing Team Fortress 2 until the world collapses, and the stories of those many games are the real saga of TF2. But there is a backstory to all those stories, and it’s told in those comics.

At the end it even has a holiday theme. Seven years later, Soldier breaks Merasmus out of prison, and then tells him the true story of why The Administrator has BLU and RED fight each other. Well, kind of. Then the Korean mafia gets involved. Merasmus dies, but comes right back as a ghost, because he’s Merasmus. Other things happen.

Then we go to Scout’s house for Smissmas. Find out what happens next yourself, but I will give you the panel near the end with all the mercs together. Because it’s Smissmas Eve, and a fitting coda to the entire Team Fortress 2 thing.

Look at all the Sandviches! But, uh… which one is Pyro? Is that a delicate question?

By the way, if you choose to download that CBR it’s a doozy, it’s over three-quarters of a gigabyte because the images are all saved as PNGs.

Classic Games Emulation Site (1999) at the Chaotic n-space Network

The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….

It’s another ancient gaming site that, despite domain names and hosting being persistent charges that must be paid month after month until the site goes down, and not even being updated since the turn of the century, is somehow still on-line, due to the good graces, sheer orneriness, or forgotten bank withdrawals of the owner.

This time it’s this gaming emulation site, a subsite of cnspace.net by Ben Martin. Of all the pages linked from the main site, the game one is the only one with a broken link. The game link is the only one of them that goes to a subdomain, which never got fixed when the site structure was changed on February 13, 1999. Since they never repaired the front page link the site’s reach may be reduced, but considering the main page proudly lists a last update of only a couple of months later, I presume whoever is keeping the lights on doesn’t care much of reach.

From their page on Atari 2600 games.

Why do I point sites like this out? For one thing, there’s still some good info there. There’s a short essay on emulation in general, although I note that practically every hyperlink in it is dead or to a parked domain. The main site has pages on fractals, and some bespoke software for folk still running Windows 95 or 98. The philosophy, math and books pages are nearly empty. There’s a page of tributes to old games, with a guide to the Commodore 64 version of California Games.

A portion of their review of Impossible Mission. They seem to have had a fondness for Epyx titles. Good taste!

Where has the time gone? Don’t answer, I already know. There used to be thousands of pages like this. Nowadays, who can even find the few survivors? Google will do everything in its power to direct you to Youtube or Reddit instead of this place. Speaking practically, it won’t be a huge informational loss when they finally stop paying the bills, but it will be one more victory for the forces of entropy that tear away at everything in our world.