Month: February 2025

Ancient Roguelike Lore: 50 Ways To Leave Your Game

Boudewijn Wayers was the creator of the very first Nethack Home Page. I have no idea where he is now, but he’s listed among the alumni of the Nethack Dev Team.

He wrote a spoiler for Nethack called To Die: 50 Ways to Leave Your Game, which was a cataloging of ways to die in that game. This used to be available in several locations on the World Wide Web, but now I can only find it in one place. To help preserve it for later generations, I paste it below in full.

I feel that first I should say a word about how Nethack pages have become scarce lately. The old Steelypips spoiler site is still active, but many of the other sites it links to have perished. (Some of them have academic URLs, and have probably fallen victim to the declining web investment of universities. To think in my lifetime I’ve seen the rise and subsequent abandonment of the internet as a tool of knowledge. I blame social media!)

I should see about preserving old spoiler documents on the living internet, but until I get something put together, here is Boudewijn Wayers’ list of ways to die in Nethack.

50 ways to leave your game
============================
by Boudewijn Wayers (kroisos@win.tue.nl).

There has been talk on the net lately about various ways to get killed.
Well, apart from being killed by a monster hitting you, there are lots
of other ways… Some of these other things you can be killed by are
mentioned here (I don’t claim to have noticed them all, but I think I
did):

a blast of acid
a blast of disintegration
a blast of fire
a blast of frost
a blast of lightning
a blast of missiles
a blast of poison gas
a blast of sleep gas
a bolt of cold
a bolt of fire
a bolt of lightning
a burst of flame
a carnivorous bag
a closing drawbridge
a cockatrice corpse
a collapsing drawbridge
a cone of cold
a contact-poisoned spellbook
a contaminated potion
a cursed throne
a death ray
a falling drawbridge
a falling object
a falling rock
a finger of death
a fireball
a genocide spell
a land mine
a magic missile
a magical explosion
a mildly contaminated potion
a potion of holy water
a potion of unholy water
a psychic blast
a residual undead turning effect
a scroll of fire
a scroll of genocide
a sleep ray
a system shock
a thrown potion
a touch of death
a tower of flame
a wand
acid
an alchemic blast
an electric chair
an electric shock
an exploding chest
an exploding crystal ball
an exploding drawbridge
an exploding item being destroyed
an exploding ring
an exploding rune
an exploding wand
an explosion
an iron ball collision
an object thrown at you
an unrefrigerated sip of juice
an unsuccessful polymorph
brainlessnes
bumping into a boulder
bumping into a door
colliding with the ceiling
contaminated water
drowning
eating a cadaver
eating a cockatrice corpse
eating a cockatrice egg
eating a poisonous corpse
eating a poisonous weapon
eating a rotten lump of royal jelly
eating an acidic corpse
eating the Medusa’s corpse
eating too rich a meal
exhaustion
falling downstairs
jumping out of a bear trap
kicking a ladder
kicking a rock
kicking a sink
kicking a throne
kicking a wall
kicking an altar
kicking something weird
kicking the drawbridge
kicking the stairs
leg damage from being pulled out of a bear trap
looking at the Medusa
molten lava
overexertion
sipping boiling water
sitting in lava
sitting on an iron spike
strangulation
swallowing a cockatrice whole
the wrath of
touching a cockatrice corpse
trying to tin a cockatrice without gloves

Other ways to die:

caught himself in his own tower of flame
committed suicide
crunched in the head by an iron ball
dragged downstairs by an iron ball
fell from a drawbridge
fell into a chasm
fell into a pit
fell into a pit of iron spikes
fell onto a sink
killed himself with his pick-axe
quit while already on Charon’s boat
shot himself with a death ray
squished under a boulder
starvation
teleported out of the dungeon and fell to his death
unwisely ate the body of Death/Hunger/Pestilence
using a magical horn on himself
went to heaven prematurely
zapped himself with a spell
zapped himself with a wand

That’s all of it. Thanks for reading it, and thanks Boudewijn, wherever you are.

All the Ways to Die in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue & Red Rescue Team

I remember the days when everyone marveled at how many ways to die there were in Nethack. Remember Nethack? Good old Nethack.

Multiple long ages of the internet ago, famed nethacker Boudewijn Wayers wrote a spoiler called To Die: 50 Ways to Leave Your Game. It was published on his long-gone Nethack Home Page, but copies of it remain scattered around the internet, although currently I can only find one copy on Google, from a page on tecfa.unige.ch. I’m quite sad that this venerable piece of hack lore is in danger of extinction, at least to people who don’t know the magic codes to enter on the Wayback Machine.

To Die is a wonderful bit of roguelike lore, so great that I’m posting it in full here soon to help preserve it. But today’s focus is on a more recent variation of it: a Youtube video from TheZZAZZGlitch listing every way to die in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue and Red Rescue Team. (21 minutes)

In the spirit of the communal spoiler files of old, I enter the list of death causes here, in easy-to-search-for text. For the details, I refer you to the video. Note that every source of damage in the game that has the potential to reduce the player’s HP to zero has a corresponding entry in this list, so it serves as a map to every cause of harm in the game’s Pokeverse.

WAYS TO KICK THE POKEBUCKET (33 possible causes)

was defeated by (attacker)’s (move) (this is the most common cause of adventure ending)
missed a Jump Kick and wiped out.
missed a Hi Jump Kick and wiped out.
fainted from the foe’s Destiny Bond. (an instadeath)
fainted, covered in sludge.
fainted from a move’s recoil damage.
fainted from damage it took bouncing.
was defeated by a foe’s pent-up energy.
fainted from stepping on spikes.
fainted from a bad burn.
fainted, unable to bear constriction.
fainted after the poison spread.
fainted while still being wrapped.
was felled by a curse.
was drained to nothing by Leech Seed.
fainted from hearing Perish Song. (another instadeath)
fainted while in a nightmare.
was felled by a thrown rock.
fainted from hunger.
disappeared in an explosion.
tripped a Chestnut Trap and fainted.
fell into a Pitfall Trap and fainted.
was defeated by a Blast Seed’s damage.
was transformed into an item. (instadeath)
fainted from being knocked flying.
was felled by a Pokemon sent flying.
gave up the exploration. (quitting the game, not explicitly a death, but serves the same purpose)
was blown out by an unseen force. (spent too long on a single floor and was expelled by the Winds of Kron)
returned with the fallen partner. (your sidekick fainted, so you left too, automatically)
fainted due to the weather.
failed to protect the client Pokemon. (FISSION MAILED)
fainted from a Wonder Orb.
fainted from an item.

Unattainable but still used in the code, waiting for a moment that can never come (7 causes):

was transformed into a friend. (what?)
left without being befriended. (hwat?)
was defeated by debug damage. (nooo not debug damage)
was felled by a thrown item.
was deleted for the sake of an event. (oh okay then)
went away. (so long)
was possessed. (spooky)

Three messages exist in the code but with no way to activate them, even theoretically:

fainted from a debug attack.
was defeated by a powerful move.
fainted due to a trap’s damage.

Displaced Gamers Reprograms Ghosts & Goblins to Overcome Jankiness

Displaced Gamers is one of the best NES gaming channels on Youtube. They do sterling work diving into the very code of the games, to figure out what they are like they are. We link to nearly every video they do. Here’s a recap:

Well here’s another, and it actually is a follow-up to a video that I don’t think we linked to before. So here’s that video first, on Micronics’ port of Ghosts n’ Goblins to NES. (32 minutes)

Pretty long already, exquisitely geeky! Well its successor is even more geeky, as they actually reprogrammed the game to have a more optimized sprite engine. Although it’s a shorter video, at 24 minutes!

Ghost n’ Goblins is designed around being a 20fps game, so no amount of optimization will change that, it requires more substantial modification. But the time visualizations they use indicate that it may be possible to change that to 30fps, and with other changes 60fps may be possible. Mind you, the logic for the player, enemies and weapons all assume 20fps, so unless they’re changed to account moving to 60 frames per second will triple the speed of the game, so that obviously would need to be changed as well. I look forward to seeing the next chapter in this retrocoding saga.

Sundry Sunday: Pizza Tower Music Played On Stepper Motors

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

Stepper motor music videos have been a staple of Youtube for, geez, many years now. A sampling: Africa, Piano Man, All Star, Ghostbusters and, um, that song. Closer to home, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Still Alive and Megalomania. That’s just scratching a very deep surface.

Well a newcomer to this crowded field is this rendition of Pizza Tower’s “Lap 2” music, The Death That I Deservioli. (3 minutes)

Kosmic Figures Out How To Defeat Donkey Kong’s Kill Screen

Kosmic is a speedrunner who usually focuses on Super Mario Bros., but he’s reached the kill screen in Donkey Kong before. With some help, he’s figured out a way to complete that game’s “kill screen,” the point where it’s usually impossible to continue.

At Level 22 of Donkey Kong, there is a bug that causes the game to only give Mario (nèe Jumpman) 400 bonus timer points to complete the level. (The screen displays 4000, but that’s caused by a different glitch.) Playing normally, that’s not enough time to reach higher than the second girder on-screen.

However. If the player has Mario climb the first broken latter, then hold down for four frames then up for one, Mario will climb up off the top of it by one pixel. Continuing to do this, Mario can continue to ascend the screen. When he reaches Pauline’s height, the game will declare the level completed and move on to the next screen.

As it turns out, the bonus count on the Barrels screen is tied to the barrels that Donkey Kong throws, and the timing on those is somewhat random. If DK is slow at emitting those rolling obstacles, rarely, that will give Mario just enough time to reach Pauline at the top, and advance to the next level.

Doing this physically is essentially impossible. The player would have to waggle the joystick extremely quickly (and loudly), yet with the precise timing to consistently raise Mario’s position, to get him up the screen in time, and even if that worked, he’d still have to be lucky enough that Donkey Kong was slow at rolling barrels. But in emulation, with tool assistance, Kosmic managed to get to the top and finish the level. Then using other tricks and glitches, he managed to finish the next three levels (Elevators, Barrels again and Cement Factory) too, before his luck ran out at the next Barrels screen and he was unable to continue.

Here’s his 29 minute video explaining his feat. Or, if you’d like to avoid the general description of what this means, you could start at this point 11 minutes in.