Year: 2024

Weird Balatro Deck Peeking Trick Discovered

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 page
The 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):

Sundry Sunday: Crash Bandicoot Carnival Japan-only Cutscenes

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Crash Bash was Crash Bandicoot’s attempt to move into the Mario Party genre of minigame compilations. It was the first Crash game to be made by someone other than Naughty Dog, and the last to be released exclusively for Sony platforms. In Japan, the game was known as Crash Bandicoot Carnival. All of this comes from the Wikipedia page.

Japanese Crash, from “Bandipedia“

Now we venture into weirder waters. For Crash had a weird ad campaign in Japan. In Japan, Crash had a slightly different character design, with rounder eyes and five fingers on his hands. (The Japanese market has a weird thing about four fingered hands.) And also, he had an extremely catchy theme song and associated dance, which which the series seems to have became associated. We linked to that song here before, almost exactly two years ago!

The theme song music video seems to have been an unlockable in some version of Crash Bandicoot or its sequels. CBC had some other little videos included, including live-action bits with a lady and someone in a Crash mascot costume. It seems to be a retrospective of the previous Crash games, including kart racers and a little handheld device virtual pet that I don’t know the name of, but they were missing something if they didn’t call it a Crashigatchi. You also get to hear the lady say “Arabian Nigh-toooo!” free of context.

They total sixteen minutes in all, and they’re this week’s offering for Sundry Sunday. Enjoy them, won’t you? Thank you. Crash Bandicoooot, Crash Bandicoo-OOoot! Crashi-bandi-bandicoot!

Have an extra, hidden cutscenes from the Japanese version of Crash Bandicoot 3 (13 minutes)!

Annapurna Interactive’s Entire Staff Resigns

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

It’s been a while since I, your favorite amorphous neon-green alien, have presented my whimsical take on Earth gaming news. I’ve mostly settled into an editorial role, consuming, digesting and excreting the work of others in an un-credited and, I assure you, sanitary capacity. This, as opposed to doing so for the news posts of other websites, which was time consuming, space filling, and of dubious interest to readers. I’m a humble amoeboid and can admit when something isn’t working.

But this story, from PC Gamer but no doubt from plenty of others too, is huge! Everyone at popular and prolific publisher Annapurna Interactive walked out! They released tons of games! They published Kentucky Route Zero! They published Stray! And Donut County, Outer Wilds and Wattam! And a lot of other games too!

Annapurna Interactive publishes adorable and somewhat upsetting animal imperiling adventure game Stray.

The surface reason is dismay over abandoned plans by owner Megan Ellison to spin their company off from owners Annapurna Pictures. If there’s some deeper reason, I wouldn’t have any way to speculate. Annapurna Interactive was highly successful, president Nathan Gary was promoted from it to head their movie-making parent, and screenplays based on their games are in production, including an animated movie based on Stray.

I’m sure there’s some deep story there behind literally everyone leaving the company. I’d presume the Pictures parent not wanting to lose access to such a useful source of projects, but the employees feeling betrayed by that? I can only speculate, in a way that gets more irresponsible the further I go, so I’m going to stop. Annapurna Interactive had a good, consistent track record of hits, and didn’t seem to alienate the studios publishing through them. That counts for a lot, from a publisher.

Keita Takahashi’s current project To A T

The walkout leaves a number of games currently in production in a state of 𝙿𝚄𝙱𝙻𝙸𝚂𝙷𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙻𝙸𝙼𝙱𝙾, including always-delightful Keita Takahashi’s upcoming To A T. Let’s hope everything works out for all involved.

The Chances of Unlikely Layouts in Minesweeper

I’ve saved this one up for a while. For those of you who remember when Minesweeper was distributed — for free?? — with every copy of Microsoft Windows. What are the odds that unlikely layouts, like 8s, or neighboring 7s, are possible in that game? Alternatively, is it possible to get a game that can be completed in one move? Find out here (16 minutes):

Gamefinds: World of Goo Demake for Pico8

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.

It’s continually amazing what people manage to make within the modest resources of the Pico8 fantasy console virtual machine. This time it’s a decent demake of 2DBOY’s World of Goo, by VirtuaVirtue!

The objective is the same as the original: drag goo balls to build structures, to try to reach the pipe, which will then suck away all the excess goo balls on your construction. If you have enough left over, you win and get to move to the next level.

It’s quite challenging, it gets harder much faster than the original game. The physics of the goo constructions is much wobblier and bouncier than WoG, and goo balls don’t stick to walls here, so you’ll have to spend more goo balls on balances and counterweights. But it’s certainly not a bad thing to play around with for free!

World of Goo Demake for Pico8 (itch.io, $0)

Spelunky 64

The thing about Spelunky 64, a reimplementation of Spelunky on the Commodore 64, that gets me is how smooth the scrolling is. Smooth multi-directional scrolling isn’t easy to do on the C64 without hardware assistance, but here it handles it without apparent problem. Here is a 7-minute demonstration from Just Jamie:

It’s not the only obstacle Paul Koller (PaulKo64) had in making this surprisingly faithful recreation. It contents itself with the basic Atari-style joystick, with a single overloaded button. So up is used for jumping, tapping the button attacks, holding the button uses an item, down+button takes out a bomb, and up+button places a rope. It’s not perfect, and you have to be really careful in shops, but it doesn’t work badly.

BastichB 64K has an interview with its developer on Youtube (7 1/2 minutes):

Here is a complete playthrough (28 minutes):

Spelunky 64 is on itch.io for $3. To play it, you’ll need a Commodore 64 emulator, or a physical C64 and a way to get the game image onto a disk.

Balatro University’s Beginner’s Guide to Extremely High Scores

It’s a long one today folks. To mark the release of the mobile version of poker-based time sink Balatro, let’s sit back, for two hours and 42 minutes, and watch Balatro University plot their way through the first eight antes of a game:

The video says it’s part 1 of 2, and ends after the nominal win, but the game doesn’t end there. If you want to watch the rest of the game, it’ll take another two hours and 27 minutes of your time, to get to Ante 18.

Irrelevant note in passing: the Youtube ID for this video contains four consecutive lowercase ‘u’s.

High-level Balatro is a game of extremely big numbers, and Ante 18’s requirements are along the lines of 5.53130, which in regular notation is 5,531,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Be still my beating heart! If you just want to jump to where the game starts to get insane, try this link to a moment a little into that video.

So if you don’t want to watch five hours of video but still wan to know something of what’s going on? First off they use a lot of Purple Seals. Every time a Purple Seal card is discarded you receive a random consumable Tarot card. Tarot cards have a bunch of uses. Two of them give you money, but most of them give you some way to modify your deck. Particularly, Strength lets you increase the rank of two cards, Hanged Man lets you destroy two cards, and Death lets you turn one card into a copy of a different one.

With enough Tarot cards you can perform potent crimes against power, like turning your entire deck into a single type of card! That not only makes some poker hands, like Four of a Kind, or the secret hand Flush Five, really easy to make, but it lets you exploit certain Jokers that operate on a different card each round. These Jokers always pick one of the cards in your deck at random, but if you only have one type of card, they have to pick that one!

The most valuable kind of Joker for the long haul is one that gives you multiple Mult Multipliers, and to retrigger those multipliers. A Glass card multiplies your Mult by 2; a Glass card with a Red Seal multiplies it by 2 twice; other Jokers that retrigger cards multiply it by 2 more times.

It sounds fairly simple written out here, but setting up this system is where the skill lies. While I observe that the real game of Balatro isn’t merely in performing these ludicrous offenses to mathematics, but in figuring our how to do them, watching a really high-level player smash through its strictures and rules might give you some ideas for improving your own game, even if you don’t follow Balatro University’s techniques exactly.

Sundry Sunday: Eggpo, in Joyride

Here’s the fourth installment of the Eggpo sequence, made by Homestar Runner creators The Brothers Chaps for Disney. In this one, the goombesque duo try out one of the powerups that’s usually reserved for the good guy character. It’s 1 1/2 minutes:

Eggpo is part of their series Two More Eggs, which has a number of other chuckle-worthy bits that don’t so obviously fit in our purview. Two More Eggs was around for only a bit over a year, but in that time we got a number of fun new characters that, due to ownership by the Mouse, will probably never have new installments ever again. So, all of Dooble, Hector and Kovich, CG Pals, Panda Bractice, Hot Dip and others that exist now, will probably be all that will ever exist, unless the copyright regime were to suddenly become much less draconian. I’ve beaten this drum since the early days of the internet. I will never stop beating it, until I stop entirely.

Hidden Flags in Earthbound, and the Mole Playing Rough

It’s a bit old, but Chaz on Youtube has a great video explaining some weird facts about Earthbound, including mysterious crashes, when the game registers the effects of statuses like Sunstroke, and why there’s a small number of places in the game where you can find an early enemy, the Mole Playing Rough, in regions where you usually find much stronger enemies. It’s ten minutes long:

Here’s the gist:

Earthbound maintains a flag that the video calls the Overworld Status Supression Flag. If this flag is on then your characters can’t get a number of statuses like Sunstroke, or take environmental damage. If this flag is on, though, and your party loses to a scripted (not random) battle, then a bug is triggered that’s popularly called the Game Over Glitch: the battle loss cutscene music plays, but the screen turns black and nothing appears to work. In fact, the game has not crashed: entering the Town Map screen, or feeling around for and entering a door, will display graphics again, although glitched out. The Game Over Glitch is best known for happening if the player loses to one of the Shattered Man fights in the Museum after the game has been won: during the ending, the Overworld Status Supression Flag is set on permanently, so getting into any scripted fight and losing will result in the glitch happening.

As it turns out, random encounters disable the flag. So there is a hard-to-avoid Mole Playing Rough at the entrances to areas with environmental damage, to make sure the flag is turned off. But the mole is just hard to avoid, not impossible, so if you can avoid it, and all other random enemies of course, and then reach a place with a scripted fight, then lose to it, the glitch will still happen.

Behind the Code on Why is Contra Force Slow?

Displaced Gamers’ Behind the Code series is one of the best explainers of the quirks of NES games on Youtube. It’s not afraid to dive into the assembly code itself if need be, but its videos can often be understood by people without deep technical backgrounds.

Here is their video on the coding problems with Konami’s Contra Force (24 minutes):

Watch the video for the full spiel, but here’s a summary.

Once upon a time, in the waning days of the Famicom, Konami planned to release a game called Arc Hound in Japan. It was going to be another of their trademark run-and-gun shooters, along the lines of Contra. It even received coverage in enthusiast magazines in Japan, and it probably would have used one of Konami’s bespoke mapper chips like the VRC6 that the Japanese version of Castlevania III used.

Arc Hound was likely far into development when the decision was made to not release it in the Japanese market. Producing a game cartridge requires a substantial investment in parts and marketing, of course, and they must have judged that they couldn’t make enough of a profit off of it in their home territory: the Super Famicom was already out, as well as Contra III on that platform. But the NES still had a little bit of life left in it in the US, so they decided to give the game a shot over here, as a title in the Contra series

A big problem there was Nintendo’s policies towards manufacturing NES games. Nintendo demanded the right to build all the licensed software for the NES, and further restricted most (although not all) publishers to using Nintendo’s own family of mappers. Konami had been forced to revise their games to use Nintendo’s mappers in other games: Castlevania III famously used a different mapper in Japan, one that offered greatly expanded sound capabilities that worked through the Famicom’s sound channel pass-through, but was incompatible with the NES.

Extra sound channels are nice, but the primary use for most mapper chips is bank switching, swapping different sections of a cartridge’s data into the Famicom/NES’s 6502-workalike’s 64K address space, and also potentially making different sections of the game’s graphics data visible to the PPU graphics chip.

Behind the Code’s examination of the game program reveals that a large portion of the time of each frame is spent in setting up bank switches. Whether it was coded poorly, or just that Konami didn’t want to pay to include a mapper with more a more efficient bank switching mechanism, the game wastes a lot of time just pulling in different banks of data to be visible to the NES’s hardware. So it is that Contra Force could have run a lot better, but Konami either didn’t want to expend the coding effort, or pay for the the mapping hardware, to allow it to do so.

Presumably, somewhere in Konami’s archives, there is a version of Arc Hound that uses a VRC chip to handle mapping, and that runs much more smoothly. Maybe someday it’ll come to light, although I wouldn’t lay any bets on it. More likely perhaps is that someone will hack up the code and make such a version themselves. Who knows?

Banjo-Kazooie Decompiled

Kaze Emanuar on Youtube passes along the info that Rare’s terrific N64 platformer, Banjo-Kazooie, has been decompiled (7 minutes):

What does that mean? It’s that they’ve created source code (up on GitLab) that, when put through the same C compiler that originally generated Banjo-Kazooie’s object code, produces an exact binary image of the game. They can now rebuild Banjo-Kazooie. They don’t know the original variable names or any comments that were in the code, so it doesn’t mean that the code is perfectly understandable, but it is a major breakthrough in using the game engine for other things, including game improvements, mods, repurposings, and even compiling it for other platforms.

One result of this is that we now have a complete list of the codes that can be entered into the infamous Sandcastle Room, which are obfuscated in the original binary. The Sandcastle Room is a board of letters on the ground in the second level that can be used to spell things out, and if the proper text is entered it can unlock things in the game, or even enable the items in the abandoned “STOP N SWOP” feature that had been planned to allow players to transfer data between cartridges. If you decide to take a look yourself, the codes are listed out in the file named code_3E30.c.