Year: 2024

Bringle’s Obscure Changes in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

I wish that these videos weren’t always videos. A lot of this information would be delivered just as effectively in text, but these days a lot of game researchers have abandoned good old text for flashy video, or otherwise locked-off Discord servers that don’t add to our common body of knowledge. I’ve complained about this before, and I am liable to keep complaining about it. Because I’m right about this, and yet it doesn’t change. Get to fixing this, world!

The video (21 minutes) has a lot of interesting changes though. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has sustained a huge amount of fan interest over the years, due to its story being actually really good for a Mario game, it’s terrific sense of humor, and its deep gameplay. It’s generally agreed to be the highlight of the whole Paper Mario series, building on the ideas of the first game.

This is a good opportunity to muse upon what the gameplay merits of TYD are. I identify these:

  • The combat system, which keeps most of your moves useful in different ways by giving them special properties that make intuitive sense. Jumps can’t hit spiked enemies or enemies on the ceiling, while hammer attacks only hit the first enemy in line and can’t hit enemies in the air. There are exceptions to these rules, but they’re more costly. Follower attacks also have their own limitations along these lines.
  • The action commands, and Guard and Superguard functions. Paper Mario wasn’t the first JRPG to add a timed minigame to combat (that may have been Super Mario RPG), but the design here is very good. Most moves have an action command minigame where good performance increases the move’s power. Guard reduces the damage taken from attacks by pressing a button in a brief time window, while Superguard negates damage if a different button is pressed in a briefer time window. The button you press changes both the difficulty and the reward. Both aren’t easy to perform consistently, as many enemy attacks have tricky timing, but the Superguard bonus is great enough that it’s really tempting to use it. All three of these functions largely replace the general randomness and variance in JRPG combat, making it a lot more skill-based. (Finding ways for players to demonstrate skill in RPG-style games is a long-standing design challenge. I should write something about that here in the future!)
  • And then there’s the joy of exploration, and the many secrets in the game world that reward it. Paper Mario had a bunch of them, but TYD really goes overboard. I can’t name a game with as much cool stuff thrown into its game world for players to just happen upon. The old line used in many Nintendo game manuals is to “try everything,” but how much of everything should the player really try? TYD is one of the few games that feels like it lives up to the true breadth of that word. There is a character in the game whose purpose is to give the player hints at finding obscure secrets. The Trouble Center offers further rewards and fleshes out the game world by giving Mario and friends the opportunity to perform helpful tasks for people. There’s so many things to do!

Super Paper Mario also had a lot of tricks, but it had a worse story (IMO), and it completely abandoned the classic Paper Mario battle system. Later Paper Mario games went in a completely different direction with unique battle systems for each. It was Thousand Year Door that got the most right in a single game.

So, um. The video! Yes, watch it, it’s interesting.

Obscure Changes in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (Youtube, 21 minutes)

On the History of Wizardry

Once upon a time, there was Wizardry, and nothing else. Welllll-l-l… almost nothing else. Here’s a makeshift timeline of CRPGs and CRPG-like released leading up to the original Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.

Don’t be fooled by this chart, where Wizardry happens to appear at the end. Most of these games were not widely available. Anything for a PDP or PLATO would only have been playable by a select few. Apshai and Ultima I were more widely available than their predecessors, but Wizardry was substantially deeper than either of them, and wasn’t surpassed for a while. For a time, it was the benchmark in the field, and inspired its own substantial subgenre, which we’ve heard called blobbers in the past. (Set Side B on blobbers previously, including an extensive list of them.)

Blobbers get their name because a whole RPG adventuring party is considered to exist filling one space in a first-person view of a dungeon grid, but it’s not really a great name because the defining characteristic of this sort of game isn’t the unity of the party but the view of the maze. Creating a first person maze of this type was a popular early graphical trick, because it was easy to program, and could be drawn on a tile-based display or possibly even a terminal. Blobbers continued to rule the roost for first-person games until the foundation of the first person shooters with id Software’s Catacomb-3D and Wolfenstein 3D, and more atmospheric 3D CRPGs like Origin’s Ultima Underworld.

Video and computer games are a field terribly unkind to their legacy. You might point to Mario, Sonic, Pac-Man and such as examples of games where decades-old originals are still known and played, but numerically speaking they are greatly outnumbered by the lost and nearly-forgotten. Games that used to be well known among all game-playing computer users are now mere footnotes, due to their companies going under, or their IPs being owned by uncaring megacorps interested only in milking their very most profitable properties YES I’M TALKING ABOUT ELECTRONIC ARTS. Ahem.

Wizardry is one of the foremost examples of this. For a while it was the best-selling computer RPG around, and its sequels did well for a long while. Wizardry VII was released in 1992, but then its successor Wizardry 8, a landmark title that finally brought the series into true 3D, took nine years to finish, and was sadly released right around the time of the demise of publisher Sir-Tech, although their Canadian branch lasted until 2oo3.

After Sir-Tech Software shut its doors, the series’ torch was held aloft for a long while by a succession of Japanese developers, beginning with ASCII Entertainment. Many of these games are still extremely obscure to the Western world, which seems odd considering how connected we’ve all become. We don’t even know if Robert Woodhead had anything to do with the first of the Japanese games, Wizardry Gaiden. The Japanese Wizardly line is all over the place aesthetically, but in play sticks by the formula of the very earliest games: spell ranks, permadeath, and tricky mazes. Despite being made for systems as varied as the Super Famicom and the PlayStation II, in gameplay they’re all of the Apple II orchard with limited additions. Despite being much that we don’t know, we still know a fair bit, due to an amazing 2020 article on the blog of the CRPG Addict written by “Alex,” with a great comments thread, that all deserves to be etched in stone and set forever on a monument in the middle of the town square of Llylgamyn.

It is more than a mere shame that all of these games remain effectively locked off from the country of Wizardry’s origin. An aging legion of players from the days of the Apple II has no idea that, in a land half a world away, 35 more Wizardry games, with gameplay with a clear recognizable link to the originals, were made and enjoyed. Maybe some day those games will be made more accessible to English-speaking audiences, the ones that aren’t now lost forever, at least.

I’ve said all of this, and I haven’t even gotten to what I had originally intended to be the subject of the piece, the terrific remake of Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord made by Digital Eclipse. Perhaps it’s best to hold off on that for a couple of days. Soon!

P.S. If anyone knows of easy-to-learn open source timeline making software, I’d greatly like to know of it, or even if there’s a good Excel or (preferably) LibreOffice add-on for that purpose.

GDQ Animations on GitHub

It turns out that the various animations that Games Done Quick uses are all in a repository on GitHub, where you can download them and run them yourself, and even make contributions if that is something you feel up for. The require Node.js, and a little command line use and tinkering to get started (it turns out you’re supposed to run npm install from within the repository folder, not from outside of it as implied by the instructions).

The repository can be obtained here. I got it working, and here are some of the displays running from my own machine. And don’t forget that SGDQ 2024 is still going!

GDQ Animation Repository (github.com)

Wolf Link’s Tears of the Kingdom Minimalist Playthrough

I’ve been waiting a while to post this one. Right now SGDQ 2024 is acclimating everyone to games being played very quickly, but this post is about a game being played over a long, long period, so by comparison, it should feel even looooonger. Longer than you’d expect maybe from the run being called minimalist.

Wolf Link has, for ten months, been trying to play The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in a minimalist fashion. By their definition, minimalist means getting a 100% map completion. That doesn’t seem too obvious, does it? But 100% map, which is the closest the game has to declaring you’ve finished 100% of the game. There is no 100% game completion counter. Filling out all of the map is as close as it gets.

That’s still a whole lot of things. It means unlocking all the towers, getting all the Korok seeds, and doing absolute everything need to get everything to appear on the map. What Wolf Link means by minimalist is going as little as possible beyond that, regarding to changes in world and game state.

For example. There’s a sword on the ground. You pick up the sword, and it makes the little item-discovered jingle for finding a type of item the first time, and putting its name up in a little description box. That’s not okay, because now Link knows about that kind of item, so go back to your last save.

Discovering a few types of items like this is unavoidable. Anything that has to be discovered in order to fill out all of the map, well, that can’t be helped, right? But what actually has to be done to get to that point? Are there sneaky ways around collecting essential items? And there are a lot of items that, the first time they’re collected, mark themselves on the run in an indelible way. Most items, in fact. Getting items out of chests that don’t respawn is also outlawed if there’s any way to get to 100% without it. Completing shines is also forbidden after the first four, so the whole game is played with four hearts and one stamina wheel, or later, possibly, three hearts and a little over one stamina wheel.

In Tears of the Kingdom, however, there’s still lots of things you can do. All of the powers you pick up in the first shrines, as it turns out, are essential to getting 100%, so all of those abilities are open. Meaning, especially, you get Ultrahand and the ability to glue things together. Getting Zonai items in capsules isn’t allowed, but using those that are found around Hyrule in the field is. The precise rules are laid out on the Rules tab of the document here.

Another interesting thing, it turns out, that you can do, that turns out to be essential in this challenge, is [spoilers]: unlocking Mineru, the Sage of the Spirit Temple that players aren’t even told about until finishing the other four temples, can be done first. She can be the first sage you get! And the useful thing about that is that Zonai devices can be attached to her, then she can be ridden to use those devices at will. Unlocking her early though by the rules of the Minimalist Run requires doing the Thunderhead Isles in the Sky without clearing the thunderstorm, which is no mean trick.

Over ten months the series has gotten up to 34 videos, and there’s quite a ways to go. The journey already is a long one, but here it is as it stands:

Earthbound Battle Backgrounds Website

This interesting, and even slightly useful, website combines the various layers that the cult classic SNES JRPG Earthbound uses to construct its funky battle backgrounds. There are more combinations here than actually appear in the game. There is a GIF-making function, but it seems to be broken for the moment. You can still make them full-screen and save screenshots, that’s what I did, though unfortunately doing it that way means they aren’t animated.

Here are a few still examples.

Earthbound Battle Backgrounds (a bona-fide website!)

Baseball Bits on Barry Bonds

Here’s a really different post on something that only borrows the aesthetics from video games, but does so in an entertaining way. It’s the Youtube series Baseball Bits on the channel Foolish Baseball, which makes explainers about a lot of different topics related to baseball. Not video baseball; real, Major League Baseball. As such I normally wouldn’t be too interested, but they do a good job of their explanations, and it’s not difficult to follow along.

As an example, here is their recent 19-minute piece on controversial baseball superstar and incredible hulk Barry Bonds, that distills the essence of his long career into four plate appearances.

If this is of absolutely no interest to you, believe me, I understand. I don’t intend to turn this into a real-life sports blog any time soon. But I thought the use of 16-bit video game aesthetics to talk about something that has nothing direct to do with video games is interesting. It’s possible that this pixel-art kind of vibe has staying power, and people will still be referring to it, making it, enjoying it decades to come. Hey I can dream, right?

If you want to find out more about this “Barry Bonds” person, it’s even further afield, but Jon Bois at Secret Base did a great demonstration of the fear he projected upon the sport of baseball in his own video asking: what if Barry Bonds played baseball without a bat? (13 minutes)

Now that that’s done, I’m going to play video games for a while, and try to forget that there ever was such a thing as professional sports. Ta!

Sundry Sunday: Zelda and Link are Gremlins Actually

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

I thought the colloquialism was goblins? Gremlins fits pretty well for these videos though. Take a look. They’re all from Youtube animator RibbitSpell.

The first (1 1/2 minutes) is where the post title comes from, positing a time after all the adventure stuff is over and Link and Zelda are just hanging out and doing whatever. What did they get up to after Tears of the Kingdom? Why don’t we ever see them just hanging out? The games rarely tell us, so a lot of room is left for fans to fill in the gaps:

The title of the second (1 minute), “Zelda but you play as Zelda,” leaves out that you play as gremlin Zelda.

And one more, Ganon’s Rude Re-Awakening (30 seconds).

We get versions where Link is a cartoon character, where there’s four Links and where Link dies over and over and where he’s a train conductor, and now (at last) where we play as Zelda. Why don’t we get an official take where Link and Zelda canonically team up to cause random silly trouble all across Hyrule? Probably leaving Old Man Ganon to shake his fist at them as they run away, having left flaming sacks of dog crap on the doorstep of his big evil castle.

SGDQ 2024 Begins Tomorrow!

The past couple of years of Games Done Quick, the best-known speedrunning charity marathon out there, has seen contributions decline a bit, but it still brings in over two million dollars each year. Here’s wishing them well for their next major event, which begins tomorrow, June 30th!

Every time a GDQ happens I make a huge post about interesting games (to me) when they’re being run, and what’s interesting about them. This here is that post for SGDQ 2024. Times given are US Eastern time, so count three hours earlier for Pacific, four hours later to get to Greenwich Mean. Lettuce bee gin!

Sunday, June 30th

1 PM – Yoshi’s Story, All Melons: Yoshi’s Story, the N64 Yoshi game, was often derided when it came out as a kiddie game. You have to remeber, back then everyone was up in arms that there existed Barney the Dinosaur. But as often happens with Nintendo, there’s more going on with Yoshi’s Story than there seems at first. Not only is it the first Nintendo game to use the handmade arts & crafts appearance gimmick, but it’s really a score attack game, and the way to get the highest score is to collect melons. Every level is full of fruit, and eating 30 of any kind will finish the level. You can sometimes finish a level really quickly that way. But the best fruit is Melons, and there’s only 30 Melons in every level. Doing an all-melon run turns a quick and easy game into an ordeal, requiring you to actually play through all of each level, and that’s what this run is trying for.

3:50 PM – Mega Man 9: MM9 came out in 2008, 16 years ago. Can you believe it? I can, I’ve learned to stop being surprised at the passage of time. More time has passed since the release of MM9 than had passed between it and the release of the last NES Mega Man game, Mega Man 6. I don’t enjoy making you feel old, but I feel like, if I have to feel old, then you have to too.

6:07 PM – Splatoon 3: Side Order, New Game+: This is the recent DLC, so a lot of rapidly-evolving tech should be available to see.

7:00 PM – Pokemon Violet, Teal Mask: This is also DLC, for an endgame continuation of Violet’s story. Pokemon speedruns tend to be highlights of each GDQ.

9:o4 PM – Halo 2, Legendary Difficulty: Surprise, I’m calling out a non-Nintendo (Nontendo?) game! This is the PC version too.

10:49 PM – Tomb Raider I Remastered, Any% Glitched: The game is Tomb Raider I-III Remastered, but the run is just the remake of the first game. If you remember the original fondly and never checked in with the remakes, this is a good chance to see what you’ve been missing. (Apparently, what you’ve been missing is glitches!)

Monday, July 1st

12:16 AM (that’s 16 minutes after midnight) – Enter the Gungeon, Rainbow Turbo All Flows (No AWP) Race: Roguelite games and randomizers are always great spectacles, because you aren’t watching people who have practiced doing the same exactly thing for hundreds of hours. They’re playing the game in a more interactive way, reacting to the spicy mean the game serves them up. “Rainbow” mode means the game spawns a variety of items at the beginning of each floor, including two items guaranteed to be of high quality. The player can only take one of them though.

5:27 AM – Smart Ball: As GDQ events have evolved, 8-bit and 16-bit games have gotten less common.

7:50 AM – Live A Live, Twilight of Edo Japan, Present Day and Prehistory Eras: The remake of the Super Famicom JRPG classic that was released about a year ago. This is only covering three of the nine chapters of the game, but since they’re largely self-contained it works out. They picked three of the most interesting chapters. Twilight of Edo is a terrific branching scenario, reminiscent of the most complex TTRPG modules, with many ways to tackle it. Present Day by contrast is the shortest chapter, consisting of only a series of boss battles. And Prehistory is a fairly traditional JRPG story, with the caveat that it’s nearly wordless through.

8:45 AM – Ecco: The Tides of Time, and 9:27 AM – Puggsy: Two Genesis games, not often seen at GDQ, and both about half an hour long.

10:49 AM – Turnip Boy Robs A Bank: The sequel to the comedy indie title Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, which has appeared at GDQ events before.

1:41 PM – Sonic Project ’06; 2:21 PM – Sonic Robo Blast 2; 3:08 PM – Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles: A whole buncha Sonic, two of them fan creations. Sonic Project ’06 is a WIP remake of the infamous 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog game. Sonic Robo Blast 2 is a fangame, also in development, that uses the Doom engine. And S3&K is the “complete” version of Sonic 3 on the Genesis, the version that comes about by attaching its cartridge to Sonic & Knuckles with that game’s “lock-on technology.”

7:00 PM – Spelunky, All Journal Entries: Another roguelite. Winning the game, and through Hell, is necessary, but only the beginning.

8:05 – Bonus Game: Balatro, 3 Deck Random Seed, Skipless: Balatro is still teh hotenss at the moment. I’ve played lots of it, so naturally I’m going to point it out here. A “3 Deck” run seems to mean winning the game three times (finishing Ante 8), each with a different deck. Not being able to skip is a substantial drawback.

Tuesday, July 2nd

2:05 AM – Doom 64 (2020), “Watch Me Die Speed”: Watch Me Die seems to be like classic Doom’s Ultra-Violence difficulty. I don’t know what Watch Me Die Speed is.

4:52 AM – Castlevania Legends: A disliked Gameboy installment in the series.

5:32 AM – Haunted Castle: The much worse first Castlevania arcade game. The fact that it’s as GDQ yet says 1CC attempt should say everything that needs saying about its difficulty.

8:21 AM – Virtual Boy Wario Land: A rare chance to see a Virtual Boy game played live, and at 22 minutes, it may not even be long enough to get a headache.

10:07 AM – Little Samson: This game is hugely expensive on the collector’s market. Come see why? I jest, we know why: rarity. This game marks the beginning of several other interesting titles: Mega Man X5 for Playstation, Mega Man 4 for NES, Sunset Riders for SNES, then a Wii port of Chibi-Robo as a bingo race, and then…

2:14 PM – Katamari Forever: The music will be stuck in your head for days.

4:58 PM – Quake II Enhanced (2023), N64 Maps, 100% Kills & Secrets

10:22 PM – The Outer Wilds, 100% Base Game Shipless: This is the game with the time loop, not The Outer Worlds. I always get them mixed up.

11:52 PM – Undertale Yellow, True Pacifist: A fangame based on Undertale. Might be interesting.

Wednesday, July 3rd

2:11 AM – Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, Any% No Major Glitches or Manipulation: An underrated JRPG from the SNES days. The first game was all JRPG, but the second added interesting Zelda-like puzzles, and is considered to be the highlight of the series.

7:57 AM – Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, and Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, both Episode 1

2:46 PM – PowerWash Simulator, SpongeBob DLC with 6 players: How much do you want to bet someone will pull out a Squidward impression?

4:50 PM – Super “Sonic Saves the World” World, Abridged%: This is a romhack with a humorous angle. Since it’s a kaizo hack, it may be one of your few chances to see the gags outside of Youtube playthroughs.

5:50 PM – Kaizo Mario Galaxy: Oh sure let’s keep going with the brain-killing difficulty hacks. At least they’ll be playing it, and not me.

7:30 PM – Old School Runescape, Chambers of Xeric Solo: I know at least one person who’ll be excited to hear about this. Maybe you’ll be excited about it too?

Thursday, July 4th

3:07 AM – Monster Party: Why not kick off US Independence Day with this Japanese-made platformer parody of horror movie tropes?

10:53 AM – Pokemon White 2: Another of those crazy Pokemon runs, this one 3 1/2 hours long.

5:03 PM – Tetris: The Grand Master, Master Mode: Only fifteen minutes long, so set an alarm. This isn’t like the Gameboy or NES versions, the TGM games get fast quickly and only get faster. Soon they’ll be at “20G” and the pieces will effectively spawn in the bin, and the player will have to rely on lockdown delay to survive.

7:00 PM – Halo 3, 4 player Co-op on Legendary Difficulty: I include these as a nod to all the FPS fans out there.

8:43 PM – Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball: A sports game from the nearly-forgotten time before Electronic Arts locked down the rights to most professional sports under what seems to be a perpetual license. One of those seated at the couch for this one is Peanut Butter the Dog. An actual dog of course, not the Bojack Horseman character. It’d be hard for a cartoon character to sit on a physical couch.

10:07 PM – Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Reverse Boss Order: “Reverse Boss Order” means using various tricks to find and fight the bosses in the opposite order than as the developers intended. I don’t know how that works in a game where the second half is gated behind a mandatory boss fight. Maybe there’s a glitchy skip. We can find out what they mean by this together.

11:32 PM – Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix: There are people in this world who adore the KH games. Personally I find it fun to make up titles. Kingdom Hearts: Unfortunate Destiny Eternal! Kingdom Hearts: Thirty-two Squared Ultra Power! Kingdom Hears: The Wrath of Michael Eisner! Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days! Oops, that one’s real. Note this run is over 2 1/2 hours.3;

Friday, July 5th

2:32 AM – System Shock (Remake)

4:42 AM – Mr. Run and Jump: Hey, I did a Q&A with the creators last year! I wonder if they’ll call in during the run with a donation?

5:29 AM – The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, All Main Quests: We all must know by now that Morrowind can be completed in less than three minutes, right? This one pads it out to almost half an hour by requiring all the main quests to be finished.

6:07 AM – Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, Ephraim Route: There’s nothing in the description saying there won’t be RNG manipulation, so expect this one to be exploitastic.

7:39 AM – Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2, New Game+ Campaign Character Bid War: Except the memes to fly by faster than you can notice.

9:28 AM – Stardew Valley, Skull Caverns 100 Glitchless 4 Player: The Skull Caves are randomly generated, so this is like another roguelite hidden in the schedule.

10:48 – The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, All Dungeons (Swordless): One of those runs where you just want to see how they do it.

12:37 PM – The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Co-op Randomizer: Randomizers often make for interesting runs. The way co-op randomizers usually work is, there’s software running that watches both players playing a rom each randomized with the same seed, and when one of them finds an item, the other player is also awarded it.

3:37 PM – Super Mario Bros., Any%: Just six minutes are allocated for this one.

7:00 PM – Super Mario World, Kaizo Relay Race: Well frizz my hair and call me a toilet brush, it’s another kaizo Mario World hack. The two teams are the Groovy Goombas and the Funky Fuzzies. Expect much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

9:15 PM – Bonus Game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Defeat Ganon No SRM: SRM stands for “Stale Reference Manipulation.” It means that player frozenflygone won’t use a particularly glichy way to make the game, speaking technically, babble and foam at the mouth. They might use other gimmicks, but not that one.

9:55 PM – WACCA Reverse: Lately GDQ marathons have reserved a period of time for showing off someone utterly ruling at a Japanese arcade rhythm game, and that’s what this is this time.

11:36 PM – Grand Poo World 3: Another Mario World kaizo hack, made by a popular runner.

Saturday, July 6th

1:31 AM – Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Extreme NG+: Which one was this again?

6:47 AM – Hyperbolica: Another game where I interviewed its creator. I was hoping that their second game, the brilliant and mindwarping 4D Golf, would show up this time. Hyperbolica is brilliant and mindwarping too though. If you don’t know what it is yet, it’s an exploratory game set in a first-person perspective where you explore worlds that exist on a hyperbolic plane, a kind of non-Euclidian geometry. Parallel lines diverge at a distance! Regular pentagons have right-angled corners! Utter madness!

10:22 AM – Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire: Ah, a classic Sierra adventure game! I’m surprised that there are so few DOS games at GDQ overall.

12:01 PM – Kirby’s Adventure, No Major Glitches: There’s more NES games in the lineup than at past events, and this is a pretty terrific one.

2:07 PM – Pizza Tower, Any%, Noise, No Major Glitches: Pizza Tower is a recent indie success story, a rollicking game with art that looks like it came from a 90s cartoon like Rocko’s Modern Life, and with gameplay heavily inspired by Wario Land 4. “Noise” replaces main character Peppino with a different character with a different moveset, that makes traversing the same levels a different experience.

4:31 PM – Super Mario 64 Randomizer, 10 Star Blindfolded: Blindfolded runs have been highlighs of GDQ for several years now, but what will that mean to a randomized game?

5:26 PM – Baldur’s Gate 3, Honour Mode, Glitchless: Honour Mode means high difficulty and, if your party wipes, the game ends without recourse to saves (although games can still be continued outside of Honour Mode). Baldur’s Gate 3, along with Balatro, are the games of the hour, so a lot of you will want to tune in for it.

7:10 PM – Super Metroid, Race: Super Metroid race runs are a GDQ tradition. Whenever a donation says “kill the animals,” they aren’t expressing actual murderous intent, and when they say to save them it isn’t an additional expression of kindness. At the end of Super Metroid, during the escape sequence, there is a room that players can visit slightly off the main track that can allow them to let some creatures that aided them during the game to escape the decaying planet Zebes. There’s no game benefit to it, and skipping the room enables a player to finish the game maybe 30 seconds faster, but it’s a popular choice to save them anyway. In a race between two skilled players though, 30 seconds can easily cost them the victory, so they ask the viewers whether to save them or not, so both will be on equal footing in that regard.

8:10 PM – Bonus Game: Super Mario Maker 2: Nintendo seems to have abandoned the Mario Maker series, but it’s still a popular fixture at GDQ. I have qualms with how so many makers, and players, focus their efforts in constructing and completing hellishly difficult levels, but it’s true, they are popular. Bonus Games in the schedule are donation incentives, and are only played if targets are met, so this may not occur. Usually incentive targets are made in time, but not always.

9:15 PM – Elden Ring, Glitchless: Come see the popular soulslike get dissected like a frog on a workbench.

…and, at the end…

11:20 PM – Super Mario RPG Remake: this is listed as an RTA, or “Real Time Attack,” which I think is just their way of saying, they’re playing it through? But isn’t that just Any%? Anyway, it’s a new game that looks a lot like an old and popular one, you can see how far they’ve come along in destroying it since its release. I’m supposing that the remake of Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door will be in this slot come January.

Mattel’s Handheld Dungeons & Dragons LCD Game

This little pocket-sized unit was released in 1981, three years after the VCS/2600, but as the Gameboy proved years after, pocket-sized gaming can get away with less complex hardware than consoles. They called this their D&D “Computer Fantasy Game.”

Mattel made pretty good use of the D&D license. They also released the “Computer Labyrinth Game,” which was a mixture of physical and electronic components. This version is wholly electronic, and has the same kind of feel as a Game & Watch title. It has the old-style of LCD components, black shapes that are faintly visible at all times, but can be made much darker to “display” images.

This 13-minute unboxing and demonstration video is by Youtuber Nerd Mimic. If their gameplay description sounds a bit familiar, it seems that this game is mostly a handheld port of the older (yes, even from that time) computer game Hunt The Wumpus, which is played on what the math people call a graph of nodes. The idea is to use clues given by the game to deduce the location of a monster and to kill it by firing an arrow at it from an adjacent space. Stumbling into the space of the monster or a bottomless pit is lethal, and there are bats wandering around that can drop you into a random space. It’s a classic of early gaming, and a pretty good choice for a pocket-sized version.

Mattel made two console D&D games for the Intellivision, both of them interesting and thought of well today: Cloudy Mountain and Treasure of Tarmin. None of these games made use of the true AD&D ruleset, as it would have been called at the time. They’re original game designs with a vague sort of fantasy theme, but they’re still interesting to play.

Displaced Gamers on Mega Man 3 Glitches

A bit of scanline flickering is a fairly common problem on the NES. Even Super Mario Bros. 3 had it, and that game was made by Nintendo themselves.

Game graphics in the 8- and 16-bit ages often came down to tricky hardware manipulation. The art of doing raster effects, changing the registers in the video hardware so as to divide the screen into different sections, ultimately comes down to timing. On the Atari VCS/2600, nearly all the graphics had to be done that way, but it was still a useful technique for over a decade after that.

A lot depends on the specifics of the video chip, a custom-built piece of silicon developed for the express purpose of taking graphics defined in memory and folding it, like electronic origami, into a shape that the TV would perceive as a broadcast signal. At that time, while it might still have been possible with clever coding, CPUs weren’t nearly fast enough to do that job themselves and still produce acceptable graphic quality and run game logic. (If you want to see what it would be like, I refer readers interested in doing it the very hard way to the amazing Freespin demo, which runs on a 1541 disk drive, and no video hardware at all.)

Older NES games used a supported bit of hackery called the “Sprite 0 Hit,” a signal the PPU would send at the moment the first of the system’s 64 sprites began to be drawn. By watching for it, games could do rudimentary raster effects on a system not designed for them. The issue there was processor time: the Sprite 0 Hit feature wasn’t hooked up to an interrupt line, so the program had to continually watch for it, checking a memory location repetitively over and over until it changed. Some games spent large portions of their runtime in a tight loop checking for the Sprite 0 Hit. Since, from the program’s perspective, the signal might come at any time, the loop needed to be tight, meaning the game couldn’t spend that time doing other work or else it might be delayed in responding to the extremely time-sensitive signal.

The MMC3 mapper had a special function though that could time out when a programmable scanline was reached, and send the processor an interrupt request at that time, greatly freeing up the processor for doing other things with that time. But not all programmers understood the best way to use it, which is why Mega Man 3 has some scanline glitching in a couple of very visible places, in the pause window and on the level select screen.

Displaced Gamers’ Behind the Code series, which we’ve linked to multiple times in the past, has done an exposé looking into how Mega Man III’s glitches happen (28 minutes), and even wrote some code that erases all trace of them. As usual for Behind the Code, the explanation is fairly technical, especially of the fix, but the first half of it is fairly comprehensible. No one says you have to watch the whole thing. Or, indeed, any of it, but I always enjoy them!

Computing Pi on a NES

Today’s link is to a madperson who explains how to compute digits of pi on a NES’s 6502 to an arbitrary length. As you do. Along the way it explains how to multiply and divide in binary on a processor without hardware support. It’s around nine minutes long, but if you want a machine to get to the end of pi it’ll probably take a tad bit longer.

We link to such a variety of things here. Sometimes we post light videos where someone has Kirby do funny things. Sometimes we show explainers that explain how to do arithmetic on old processors. I presume that you’ll take from these what you want, and leave the rest to the crazy people, by definition the people who are not you. I understand.

What I’m Working On: Dungeon DX

A few weeks back I mentioned Dungeon, a Commodore 64 CRPG system created by David Caruso II and published in 1990 on the disk magazine Loadstar. We’ve made it available through emulation on itch.io for $5. It’s here, and it’s awesome. It’s not just a way to play CRPG adventures but to make them yourself, and it even contains a random dungeon creation feature.

Dungeon’s map editor

I make it available with some trepidation. Dungeon has a few significant bugs. For example, it supports two disk drives throughout, but if you use its Dungeon Maker then you need to set it for single drive mode, or else you’ll encounter a Disk Error just at the worst possible time: when saving your project. Its randomized “Lost Worlds” often create dungeons that strand your character in impossible situations, and while there is a way out of them, it involves loading the Guild menu 15 times.

But I’ve played a lot of these random dungeons, and I think overall David Caruso II made a clever little game system, and I think his ideas are worth building upon. That’s why I’m working on a remake/update of Dungeon, that I’m calling Dungeon DX.

I’m making it in Python using the Pygame library. I’ve tried making a game with Pygame before and had some problems with it (I may bring myself to talk about that experience someday), but using it now I’m pleased to see Pygame 2 has become a lot more performant, and that’s even before trying to compile it into a faster form. I’ve built for Dungeon DX a kind of bespoke terminal emulator, but one with support for loads of cool graphics effects. I’ve made dungeon art and monster images for it using the website Fontstruct, which gives the images a low-tech, but distinctive look.

A collection of monsters, in font form, still being worked on. They’re reminiscent of the monster silhouettes from early editions of Call of Cthulhu!

I’ve been working very hard on it, to the extent that I can feel myself getting my hopes up that a substantial number of people may actually play and enjoy it. Most of the times in the past that I’ve done that I’ve had those hopes get crushed, but hey, maybe the nth+1 time’s the charm?

Besides not having all of its bugs, why do I think this project is worth working on? These are the things I find appealing about the original Dungeon, the reasons that I played so much of it myself, things that I don’t generally see in CRPGs these days:

  • It’s not a game but a game system. It isn’t a single huge campaign that you play and finish, and it isn’t a single story. Your characters can keep going so long as there are adventures to be had.
  • In structure it isn’t like a novel, but it’s more like a series of short stories. Each dungeon is a single screen, that fills out as your character explores it. That may sound a bit like a classic roguelike, and there are some elements of that, but the feel is subtly different. Each single-screen dungeon usually has more adventure packed into it than in a single roguelike dungeon level.
  • It’s like a collection of short stories, but that stars your character as they progress through it. The focus is more on the development of that character as they continue their adventuring career. Like how the Conan the Barbarian novellas are each an episode in the life of a single adventurer.
  • It features what’s known in some circles as slow character growth. D&D has rapid growth, and it’s gotten even faster as the system has changed through the years. 5th Edition characters advance to second level absurdly quickly, after earning only 300 XP, and that advancement practically doubles their power! 0th-level Dungeon characters (it starts counting at 0) have a lot more durability, but it takes them more time to advance to Level 1, and when they gain it their power only increases a little. In this, a lot more of a Dungeon character’s life is decided at character creation. But it also means, as they increase in power, you know it’s due to your own efforts.
  • It’s more simulationist that CRPGs have become as of late. A lot of CRPGs have crept towards gamishness, which generally is okay, I mean they are games after all. But I think RPGs work the best when you can imagine them as being the adventures of real people, so as their power has crept up, and their abilities have gotten more abstract and arbitrary, they have come to feel more and more like playing pieces than living people.
  • While there’s a random dungeon maker, you can also make your own adventures for it, and give them to other people! That’s potentially a very great thing. It reminds me of EAMON, an 80s CRPG game system that people could create their own adventures for. (There are still websites devoted to EAMON! It’s a rabbit hole worth exploring, but that’s something more suited for its own post.)
  • And finally, it’s hard. Characters die frequently. You can revive them up to three times, and if you don’t mind reloading the guild menu 15 times you can turn the game off to preserve their life, but defeat is frequent without very careful play. You often have to play like a scavenger: take what easy-to-find rewards and successes you can, build your power over time, seek out easy adventures, and don’t take unnecessary risks. Dungeon characters are not heroes, not at first anyway, and if they’re ever to become heroes you’ll have to watch their steps.
The current appearance of the new Dungeon Maker module

Because these are the aspects of Dungeon that I like, they’re the elements that I’m focusing on in making Dungeon DX. My plans aren’t to make it quite as hard, but to still emphasize that these people are not demigods, not yet. A character’s career may be the story of the creation of a demigod, like how Conan, through countless trials, eventually became king of a great nation. It’s kind of a lie that people who rise to greatness frequently do so because of their own efforts, but it’s a pleasing lie, and it makes for a fun saga if you don’t take it too seriously.

My other plans for Dungeon DX, which may change, for while progress has been rapid (because Python is awesome), I’m still iterating over lots of things:

  • A retro look, kind of akin to how Dungeon looks on a C64, but still with enhancements. It doesn’t use pixel art, instead using vector graphics created in Fontstruct.
  • Dungeon was all one-on-one fights. Dungeon DX should have parties of three characters, fighting enemy groups that can be larger than that.
  • Dungeon doesn’t let characters keep items between adventures. For the most part, characters only advance through gaining experience. DX should let characters have a persistent inventory.
  • Dungeon doesn’t have any money system at all! DX should both have money and a shop where basic necessities and equipment can be obtained.
  • Dungeon doesn’t simulate much of the basis of exploration. My ideas for DX let characters rest in the dungeon, for example, but they must consume food to do so.
  • Dungeon has very little graphical splendor. Dungeons themselves are just blocks of green, with black tunnels dug through it, and once in a while a graphic character. That has to change.
  • Dungeon’s encounter model isn’t scriptable at all, which limits what can be done. It’s a lot more flexible than you might think it would be, given the C64’s memory limitations, but the edges of what’s possible are still easily reached. I want to change that.
  • Dungeon’s magic system is very interesting for its own sake, a collection of 16 spells that are more useful outside of battle than in it. Only one of those spells that does direct damage to enemies! Magic is much more of general utility. While my design has more damage-doing magic than that, I want to keep that feeling that magic is not primarily for harming monsters.
  • Dungeon doesn’t let characters learn spells themselves: all magic comes from items that contain it, and depletes with use. There’s interesting things about that system, but it kind of means that high-Intelligence characters aren’t very viable if the dungeon constructor doesn’t give them any magic to use early on.