Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
If you’ve been following Sundry Sunday for a while here, you might have caught on to a few trends. One, too many Nintendo characters. And two, I have a high resistance to schmaltz.
There’s fifty-pound bags full of unearned sentiment just laying around the Youtube platform, and most of it I will have no truck with. A lot of it depends on your past connection with characters, and despite surface appearances, I don’t have a lot of connection with game characters. And it feels like theft, to cloyingly play off of pre-existing characters in such cheap and easy ways.
But that’s not to say it can’t be done well, as in this short voice-acted slideshow that was released soon after the recent Super Mario Bros. Movie. The (newer) SMB movie definitely has its faults, but it also has some pretty deep cuts from throughout Mario’s history, and the best of those has to be Foreman Spike, semi-antagonist from Wrecking Crew, and Mario & Luigi’s boss in the mundane world of plumbing.
There are slight hints that, despite his abrasive personality, there is a tiny bit more to Spike than seems at first, and that’s what makes the slideshow, from GabaLeth, feel like it’s slightly more entitled to its emotion than your standard cartoon sugarjob. And it’s only a minute long. Here:
Final Fantasy games tend to have weird and crazy bugs, and VII was certainly no different. A bug beloved of speedrunners is called “Cloudsurfing,” where taking advantage of the way the game detects walkable overworld triangles and the way they’re cached to use Chocobos to walk over oceans and through mountains. Properly utilized, it can be used to skip a large portion of Disc 1.
Prior Final Fantasy games used a simple tilemap to represent terrain. Final Fantasy VII’s overworld switched over to a world made up of triangles, each of which with a terrain code that indicated which entities can traverse it.
The triangles, additionally, are divided into square chunks. No triangle extends outside its chunk. Additionally, in each chunk, the triangle vertices aren’t represented literally for each triangle. Instead, the triangle coordinates are indexes into a list of coordinates, all to save a bit more memory.
Now, while each chunk is much smaller than the entire overworld, each can have over 100 triangles, so the code does some additional optimization. It keeps track of the last six triangles Cloud has touched, and checks them first when moving. If a triangle in this list is touched, then the search is stopped without checking the 100+ other triangles in the chunk.
Now, chunks are loaded into memory dynamically as Cloud explores, both for interaction and for rendering. The game loads the 25 chunks immediately around him off the disk, and some more in the direction the camera is facing. These chunks are constantly going stale (going out of range) and being refreshed as Cloud moves and the camera changes direction. Chunks are stored in a linked list, so are usually located by pointers, which means the chunks don’t need to be actually moved in memory, but instead references to them are copied and moved around. Some older chunks stick around in memory, then, while new ones are loaded, and the new chunks get moved to the top of the list.
Now this is the hardest part for me to explain, as I don’t have the firmest grasp on it….
When Cloud boards most vehicles, his entity is despawned and the vehicle is created with an empty list of cached triangles. But when he gets on a Chocobo, his entity is not despawned. While the Chocobo has its own cached list of triangles, since Cloud is still being rendered on screen, his entity is preserved, and with it pointers to the last triangles he interacted with. These are kept, unused, while the Chocobo handles all of the collision and terrain checking.
When Cloud gets off Choccy, he still has a list of the last triangles he interacted with… but they refer to the data from the chunk he was last in. Now the game is smart enough that, if this is different from his original chunk, to refresh things, but if it’s the same chunk I think this doesn’t happen. But this doesn’t mean everything will work without problems. The chunks will probably be loaded in a different order, and that means the cached triangles will refer to different data.
And since the vertices themselves aren’t stored in the triangle list, but indexes* to another list of data, it’s possible for some of this data to come from outside of the expected area, and for there to be duplicated coordinates among them.
Due to the way FFVII figures out which triangle Cloud is in, if two of the points in a triangle are on the same location, the game becomes much less discerning about whether Cloud is inside it or not. And if all three of the triangle’s vertices are in the same spot, forming what’s called a point triangle, just a single dot, then the game can’t declare Cloud is outside of it at all! So long as that triangle gets checked first, then the game will think Cloud is inside that triangle, so long as he’s in the same chunk. This could potentially turn the whole thing walkable.
Did I get it sufficiently right? Watch the video, and decide for yourself!
* The English graduate in me demands I point out that I know I’m being inconsistent with the plurals of vertex and index. Properly, like how I’m not writing vertexes, I should be writing indices, not indexes. I think that index is used more in contemporary English, so I made an editorial decision to pluralize it in a more familiar way. There, explanation: given.
I had a bad fall from a bike a few days ago and my arm is still really weak, which has affected how much typing I can put into these posts. Still, I am getting better, and so here’s two videos of people installing Windows NT 4.0 to Nintendo consoles, using an ISO of the install CD and tools and information posted here, and in the Gamecube’s case some hardware mods.
This kind of hack isn’t of the type like people claiming to “install” Windows to a Nintendo DS, but in fact are using DOSbox running on the DS. They get a bit of credit for coming up with a clever solution, but it’s not running on the metal, in the parlance. This is about actually running literal Microsoft NT on the actual Nintendo Gamecube/Wii, with no emulation layers or similar shenanigan interposed between.
The first one is from “Spawn Wave,” who has the Bright Young Broadcaster style to his video, meaning, his records from a dark room of equipment, his camera close to his face, he speaks loudly and squeezes in that like and/or subscribe prompt early, and generally tries to impress personality into his video. Mind, I don’t think all of this has to be bad, and Spawn Wave is a lot less obnoxious than many other YouPotatoes I’ve seen. There’s a blessed lack of sound effects or swoopy editing. His video’s only nine minutes long, so if you’re pressed for time, this is the one to watch.
I tend to prefer videos more like Michael MJD’s overview, which is also much longer at 31 minutes. He’s installing on a Wii, which is more powerful and performs better, and doesn’t need hardware mods. His is of the Hands Intruding From Offscreen school of video, but he’s more laid-back, and with that much time can fit more information without having to squeeze it in. This is better for people wanting to positively luxuriate in the process of installing NT4 to systems not intended for it.
The question of why, oh why, someone would do this, must remain unanswered. Some people just like making computers do weird things. It’s an odd form of entertainment, but entirely valid. Now, when will someone get Linux running on CoreWar?
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”
The weekly showcases highlight the many indie games we play here on the channel. If you want me (Josh Bycer) to look at your game for a future one please reach out.
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”
“Dr4gonBlitz” on Youtube found and played though a Nokia port of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. It makes for a very interesting watch for people familiar with the original. (38m)
The player’s style is hyperbolic, in the common Youtuber style, but he knows the original. Dawn of Sorrow was made as a Nintendo DS game first and foremost, using many of its hardware features including its two screens and touchscreen, and I’m surprised any port was made, let alone one for pre-Apple smartphones
I always find it interesting to see how games get redesigned for lesser hardware, like the Tiger Game.Com port of Symphony of the Night. In Dawn of Sorrows’ case, most of the game’s souls, items and weapons were removed, the map was mostly kept the same but had some changes, several bosses didn’t make it, and “Aricado,” Alucard in disguise, isn’t even in the game. On the other hand, they added in a new item called a “Lost Soul” that serves as an auto-activating, one-time extra life.
The video is worth a look for IGA-style Castlevania fans!
It got by me this year, but the now 20-year-old 7 Day Roguelike Challenge, a gamejam where people try to construct a complete roguelike within a week’s time, finished up Saturday.
Not only has it been around a long time, but a number of games have come out of it that went on to greater things. Jupiter Hell got its start as a 7DRL project called DoomRL. The amazing Jeff Lait has made a ton of 7DRLs, and many of them have some awesome twist, like a game where you can make portals, but where the portals result in the world through them being rotated and possibly allowing you to get mixed up!
Jeff Lait’s Jacob’s Matrix
There’s regular several very interesting games in the challenge each year! Its itch.io page is here. This year’s theme was, simply, “roguelike,” and 819 people have joined it so far! I can’t wait to see what they’ve made!
