Sundry Sunday: Lore Sjöberg Rates Legend of Zelda Weapons

It’s Sunday! Time to slide another bead on the survival abacus over from the left side to the right. You don’t have a survival abacus? How do you know how many weeks you’ve lived?

As a reward for making it this far in life, I present a fourteen-year-old comedy video from internet funnyperson Lore Sjöberg, one of the two founders of earlyweb gigglesite Brunching Shuttlecocks and sole maintainer of currentday chuckleplace Bad Gods, in which he rates elfyhero actionguy Link’s various weapons in videogame adventurething The Legend of Zelda. Being 14 years old, the specific game in question is The Wind Waker, that one with the cartoon art style that most of us love now but hated back then, because most of us are bad.

This was during a short period after Brunching closed up, back in that ancient year 2008, during which he wrote and made occasional videos for WIRED Magazine, which is as surprised as anyone that it still exists.

Having to do with an old The Legend of Zelda game this fits easily within the site’s sphere of subject matter, but the secret reason I post this is I’ve been a great fan of Lore since Brunching Shuttlecocks, and more people need to see the things he’s done. Certainly a whole lot of my own allegedly-humorous writing style can be directly traced back to him.

Link Roundup 5/14/22

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

Ethan Gach from Kotaku reminds us that Nintendo still hasn’t publicly commented on allegations for their crappy workplace practices, especially their over-reliance on contractors. Stephen Tolito at Axios has more writing on this topic.

Mat Jones at IGN informs us there’s a fad going where concert-goers record the event with their 3DSes! Pshaw, back in my time we used Game Boy Cameras!

At Nintendo Life, Ollie Reynolds has noticed that Konami has had its most profitable year ever, which might seem strange to us considering how they seem to have left many of their properties to lie fallow. Two products are responsible it seems: Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel, and, in Japan, Momotaro Dentetsu: Showa, Heisei, Reiwa mo Teiban! It does mention the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection as an expected source of future profit.

That’ll be 250 points in your WH40K army.

Also from Ollie Reynolds comes word about Limited Run games asking users to destroy their DOOM cartridges! It comes down to a bug on some carts, and rather than shipping them back and getting a replacement, with all the effort and expense that entails, they’re just asking that they break their carts, and then to send proof, before getting a replacement. I mean, I understand why they’re doing that, but destruction offends me deep down in my protoplasmic soul? Some day I’m sure an economist will write a paper on this. Oh, in making my diatribe I almost forgot the point! The article is actually about them creating a little Doomguy diorama with the pieces of the cart.

Kazuma Hashimoto at SiliconEra has news of the next in an unending series of Final Fantasy VII sequels, Ever Crisis. In this one, Cloud Strife goes Hawaiian! That may not be true, but can you be sure? Can you??

Destructoid has a kusoge series going, and in the most recent installment Zoey Handley becomes the seventeenth person to talk about that abysmal Popeye game stinking up the Switch eShop.

Anne-Marie Ostler, another writer on Nintendo Life, tells us Hollow Knight has broken its player count record (on Steam) despite having been out for five years! The reason might have to do with a recent 60%-off sale.

Also from Nintendo Life, Roland Ingram explains how he wrecked his Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ island’s economy with haxx!

J. Trew of Engadget likes the Ayn Odin Android-based handleld!

And Callum Bains at TechRadar relates news that the Xbox Series S could be getting a way to play physical game releases, kind of, sort of? Microsoft is patenting a way to prove to the console that you’ve bought a physical disk, effectively turning it into a glorified access pass for the downloadable version.

Image from MobyGames.

We’re back at Nintendo Life again, with Alana Hauges’ article about Hitoshi Akamatsu, the creator of the NES Castlevania games and series as a whole, who left the company and now no one seems to know what happened to them. Some trash talking from a former co-worker is in there. Their star descended a bit at Konami when the third Castlevania game underperformed, which is a gigantic shame now that the game is widely recognized as one of the high points of the Famicom/NES. There’s no justice, either on Earth or in the icy reaches of outer space, I tell you. It seems more information can be found in Wireframe Issue #62, and in a 2019 article also in Nintendo Life.

Also from Alana Hauges at Nintendo Life (slow it down a bit please, my tentacles can only type so fast!), news that the 3DS had more games released in 2021 than in 2020!

Sean Hollister at The Verge sends word that the Steam Deck is getting customizable per-game performance settings.

Ollie Reynolds at Nintendo Life, again, relates the words of former employees of Retro Studios lauding Metroid Prime‘s camera.

We mentioned it in the roundup of Nintendo’s Indie World presentation, but Michael McWhertor at Polygon enthuses more about Another Crab’s Treasure!

Ian Evenden at Tom’s Hardware says Nvidia is finally going to open source their Linux drivers!

Home stretch! Robert Zak at PC gamer writes about a fangame in the works called Metroid 64. This will certainly go well and not be ceased-and-desisted by Nintendo the moment it attains any actual popularity!

Yahtzee Crowshaw, the Zero Punctuation guy (remember him?), still at The Escapist, talks about Rogue Legacy 2 in one of his video essays!

Lauren Aitken at PC Gamer tells us more about Disney Dreamlight Valley, their crossover self-insert lifesim game of Disney characters and you, their best friend.

Another thing from PC Gamer: Andy Chalk on a guy turning the tables on an annoying Elden Ring player.

Image from stardewvalley.net.

Andy Chalk also mentions the creator of Stardew Valley not being able to believe his game has sold 20 million copies.

Let’s see what else what else oh! Finally: Russell Adderson of PC Gamer tells us that EverQuest players playing on a legacy server wake up a fearsome boss and, in the process, forever denying later players from gaining special equipment. I’m kind of amazed that EverQuest still exists, but it seems like it has much more heart than World of Warcraft has. And don’t forget that, in a back corner of the internet, Ultima Online is still running!

That’s it from me, drebnar. I’m off to imbibe nutrient fluids, later earthpeeps!

Arcade Mermaid: Amidar

Arcade Mermaid is a recurring feature where we look at weird classic arcade games. The word weird has many meanings; sometimes it means bizarre or ludicrous, but sometimes it means of a really unusual design.

Our game this time easily fulfills multiple senses of the word. Konami’s Amidar was released in 1982, putting it near the end of the arcade boom in the US. It still came out early enough to get an Atari VCS/2600 port from Parker Bros., the source of many of the better arcade ports of the time that didn’t come from Atari or Coleco.

Odd Boards: Gorilla and Spearmen

Amidar‘s game world is both abstract and evocative. You’re a gorilla, tasked with collecting all the dots on a board made of lines, while evading hostile spearmen called “Amidar” (plural) and “Tracer.” Unlike as in Pac-Man, the playfield isn’t a maze as it is a bunch of adjoining boxes, with you and the enemies walking along their border lines.

People who have played a lot of Mario Party might find something oddly familiar about this layout. We’ll get to that.

When you collect all of the dots around one of those boxes, it fills in with a solid color. These boards you can play somewhat like Pac-Man. There are differences, though. The “turn the tables” mode that lets you attack your pursuers activates when you fill in the four squares in the corner of the screen. You only get one such period every level, and it takes a lot of effort and some foresight to achieve it. If the last box you fill in is one of those corners, you complete the level immediately and don’t get any bonus points for chasing down the enemies.

Even Boards: Paint Roller and Pigs

There is another kind of level in Amidar, however, that plays similarly, but with a significant difference. In these, for some reason, you’re not a gorilla but a paint roller, and you’re avoiding not natives but bipedal pigs. No reason is given for the change of graphics, although they’re still called “Amidar” and “Tracer.”

In these alternate boards, each of the rectangles has a number in the middle, which is a bonus score you earn for filling it in. On the gorilla boards, you only get points for collecting dots and capturing enemies during the attack period. Here, you get points for surrounding boxes and capturing them, so these score a lot better.

The trade-off, that makes these boards a lot harder to complete, is that you can’t just collect dots however and expect your progress to stick. There are no dots.

Instead, you have to extend the colored border away from already-colored lines, surrounding boxes one at a time. If you leave the border of the box you’re currently coloring, your progress will disappear! You’ll have to go back to one of your established lines and start over. Because you can’t just color them at any time but instead have to extend your territory out to them one box at a time, it’s a lot harder to take advantage of the attack phase granted by coloring the four corner boxes. It’s a lot harder in general. Most games end on Pig boards.

You have final aid to help you get through each level. Each board and each life, you get three uses of a “Jump” button that allows you to slip by the Amidar and Tracer. But, in keeping with a game where you alternate playing as a gorilla and a paint roller, the Jump button doesn’t allow you to jump over enemies. Instead, it causes the enemies to all jump, allowing you to pass beneath them.

Amidakuji

After you’ve played a couple of games of Amidar, you might catch on to an unusual property of the enemies. They don’t chase you. The have a specific route they follow through the board. Pac-Man may have patterns you can use to evade its ghosts, but Amidar makes the pattern followed by the enemies explicit, and the whole point of the game.

The motion of the normal enemies is entirely deterministic and uncaring of your location. Instead, they move in a specific, meandering pattern. They actually follow the routes of the Chinese “Ghost Leg,” or as it’s called in Japan, Amidakuji lottery. (You see? Amidakuji? Amidar?) They move down along vertical paths until they reach a horizontal intersection, which they will always take and then continue downward. When they reach the bottom of the board, they reverse their vertical progress, going up to reach the top again, still taking horizontal paths when they encounter them.

This is where Mario Party players might find this familiar. The Amidakuji lottery is simulated in the minigame Pipe Maze. In this, the four players are randomly arranged at the bottom of a network of pipes, and one of them must drop a treasure chest down one of the entrances at the top. The treasure travels down in the manner of the Amidar, and whichever player it reaches at the bottom gets the treasure.

The Amidakuji lottery has some interesting characteristics. It matches up each of the vertical paths at the top with exactly one path at the bottom. It doesn’t matter how many side connections there are, there will always be one way through for each path at the top.

To emphasize this, between each board of Amidar there is a bonus round that works more directly like the Amidakuji. You pick one of the routes for an Amidar to begin winding down, trying to guide it to a bunch of bananas at the bottom. Once you learn the knack of these stages it’s not hard to get the bananas most of the time. With your eyes, try to quickly trace the path in reverse, starting from the bananas.

The key to success at Amidar is focus and practice. With experience you’ll get better at figuring out where the Amidar will go in real time, and can avoid them more easily. Later levels increase the number of Amidar. Also, since a player can avoid the Amidar pretty consistently, there’s a failsafe timer in play. If you take too long to finish a level, the Tracer, which usually only moves along the outer boarder, will leave its patrol route and start following your prior movements through the level. This really starts to be a problem with Level 4. It’s good to save the corner blocks for when this happens.

Once you internalize the rules to Amidakuji, you may find yourself progressing deep into the game. I’ve been as far as Level 6! The game also has charming, melodic music in the style of Frogger. At the time of its release it was a minor hit for Stern, its licensee in the U.S., and now can be seen as a highlight of its genre.

Level 6! Notice how all the lanes at the top are blocked off. You have to squeeze by when they’re taking horizontal routes or use the Jump button to get by them.

A post-script. I searched for information on Parker Bros. Atari VCS port of Amidar, the only one made during the classic era of arcades, and found a page on the fandom.com wiki that gets many key facts wrong. It mentions coconuts: no version of Amidar has coconuts in it. It mentions the Jump button making enemies jump and not you: this is not at all evident in the VCS version. It mentions a bonus stage after every round: this doesn’t exist in the VCS version. This is one of the reasons I hate fandom.com!

The Weekly Indie Dev Showcase

The latest indie dev showcase, where I play developer submitted games and demos over on game-wisdom. If you would like to submit a game for a future piece, please get in touch.

Q*Bert Postmortem

No, Q*bert hasn’t died! Well except in the usual sense sometimes of being pounced upon by a big purple snake or plummeting from a pyramid with a characteristic @!#?@! Instead, their game’s designer and programmer Warren Davis did a talk about the game’s creation for GDC!

You can find out:

  • The origins of the cube graphics and the characters
  • The story behind the game’s name
  • What Warren Davis said aloud during the unveiling of Gottlieb’s new company name Mylstar!

Link Roundup 5/12/22

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

Greetings to all humans down there on planet Glorb-III, also known as Earth. Let’s get started, drebnar!

A lament from Reddit on how Streetpasses are impossible to get now. If only Nintendo had thought to include them on the Switch. Probably it’ll take another ten years before they realize what a good idea they had.

Chris Moyse from Destructoid tells us this week’s Arcade Archives release is Taito’s Fighting Hawk!

Kate Gray from Nintendo Life writes about the thing that all video game journalists are someday destined by fate to write about: Earthbound. It’ll happen here too someday, you can rely upon it. And Alana Hauges frpm Nintendo Life has some words to say about its sequel Mother 3!

From Polygon, Michael McWhertor enthuses about how great is the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, Shredder’s Revenge.

Chris Friberg of Den of Geek tells us his picks for the 15 best NES RPGs. #1 is Dragon Quest III! (What do you mean, don’t spoil it? I’m an alien, I spoil everything drebnar!) He also ranks Wizardry pretty high, he has great taste!

Over on Hackaday, Robin Kearey tell us about a reimplementation of the classic Tamagotchi using modern hardware!

Blake Johnson of CBR.com asks if a collection of the DS Castlevania games could ever be released? While the fan favorite remains Symphony of the Night, the DS games are excellent and retain many of its greatest elements.

The image in question, from History of Hyrule’s Twitter feed. Hi Melora!

Go Nintendo’s rawmeatcowboy points to the discovered female Link art from Japanese guidebooks that History of Hyrule uncovered! Hey, that image looks familiar! Meanwhile, comicbook.com’s Connor Casey tells us that professional wrestlers Steve Austin and Cody Rhodes disagree as to which is the best Legend of Zelda game, respectively, Breath of the Wild or Ocarina of Time. This may be the only time in my entire life that I’ve agreed with the opinion of earthling Steve Austin, although admittedly I’m a unicellular organism filled with an iridescent goo.

And Jules Wang at Android Police tells us that Chromebooks should be getting better Android support later, improving their game-playing experience. Between that and Steam Support, who needs a Steam Deck? (Answer: ME I DO YES I WANT ONE PLEASE SEND IT TO MEEEEEE)

Rodney Greenblat Posts Obscure UmJammer Lammy & Parappa Videos

Um, thanks for the input Chop Chop Master Onion

Rodney Greenblat, famously the creator of the video style behind Parappa the Rapper and the criminally underrated UmJammer Lammy, has a new YouTube account, on which he’s been posting various interesting and fun things, including short interviews with the characters from around when UmJammer Lammy was new, as well as pre-production cutscenes with a completely different design for Lammy! Whaaa?? Have a look!

Nintendo Indie World Announced Games

In the style of huge corporations in the year 2022, Nintendo has announced a slate of upcoming indie games in the form of a video instead of a sensible text page. It fell to The Escapist to give us a nice text-form rundown of their impending offerings.

In the spirit of reducing things even further, the games on tap, with each game’s segment cued up for easy perusal, are:

  • Ooblets, from Glumberland, aggressively cute farming/monster sim.
  • Batora: Lost Haven, from Team17 and Stormind Games, sci-fi narrative action-RPG.
  • ElecHead, from Nama Takahashi, pixel-art puzzle/platformer that he started working on as a student, and started life as a game jam project.
  • Soundfall, from Drastic Games and Noodlecake, co-op rhythm action combat game. (Released today!)
  • Wildfrost, from Chucklefish and Deadpan Games, a “tactical roguelike deckbuilder.” (We have our own opinions as to what roguelike means.)
  • Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, from Landfall Games, a humorous physics-based combat simulation sandbox that first made waves on Steam.
  • Gunbrella, from doinksoft and Devolver Digital, a Wild West-themed “noir-pink” pixel-art Metroidvania. Not available until next year, though.
  • We Are OFK, from Team OFK, a episodic “indiepop music biopic” game (a lot of scare quotes this post, I admit) based on a band.
  • Silt, from Fireshine and Spiral Circus Games, an aquatic puzzle/exploration game with a monochrome silhouette aesthetic.
  • Mini Motorways, from Dinosaur Polo Club! A sequel to Mini Metro, I did a Q&A with its developers over at Game Developer! (For some reason it’s attributed to “staff,” but I assure you I wrote the questions for it.) It’s a strategy simulation game about laying out roads. (Released today!)
  • Wayward Strand, from ghost pattern, a narrative adventure game set in 1970s Australia with a time management element.
  • Cult of the Lamb, from Devolver Digital and Massive Monster, a cute procedurally-generated town-building game with action elements and dungeon exploration.
  • Another Crab’s Treasure, from Aggro Crab, which actively calls itself a “Souls-like” in its trailer, an action combat game about a hermit crab out on a quest. Hermit crabs find shells and other objects to serve as their home in real life, and this game incorporates that fact into the gameplay. Not out until next year, though.

At the end, there were a few short clips of other upcoming games: One Shot: World Machine Edition, Gibbon: Beyond the Trees (releases today), Idol Manager, Card Shark, Cursed to Golf, A Guidebook of Babel, and OPUS: Echo of Starsong: Full Bloom Edition.

Last-minute addition, here are Kyle and Krista, formerly of the Nintendo Minute and now with their own thang going on, reacting to the games:

Video: Unintentional Game Passwords

TheZZAZZGlitch over on YouTube found some entertaining passwords for 8-bit games that put you in interesting places. It also explains a bit about the nature of passwords as a makeshift data storage system, and why sometimes you can make them spell funny things that still work. They even offer some advice on constructing your own silly/glitchy passwords.

Via Vincent Kinian

Link Roundup 5/10/2022

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

Greetings, humans! Here is the gaming news I could glean from decrypting your internet broadcasts from my flying saucer floating above your atmosphere!

Jordan Devore, Destructoid: Rogue Legacy 2 Drops Vertigo From Its Traits List. You see, each character you play in that game is part of a lineage of characters, and they have semi-random traits. One of those traits flipped the screen upside-down during play. Or it did. Now it’s not in the game anymore!

Oisin Kunhke, Gamebyte tells us about a word-in-progress Breath of the Wild Randomizer mod!

Brad Linder of Liliputing notes of a new version of a three-key keyboard made by Stack Overflow.

Wololo (?) of Wololo (??) tells us that homebrew fans are reviving Playstation Home!

Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica lets us know that Nvidia is facing scrutiny from the FCC for inaccurately representing how cryptocurrency mining boosted the sales of their graphics hardware.

Sam Medley of NotebookCheck tells of AltStore, a sneaky way around Apple’s App Store for distributing software they’d rather you not use. I hesitate to speculate on how long this loophole will last, but I’m no fan of hardware lockouts and use limitations, so it’s nice while it lasts!

More news from the orchard. MacRumors talks with Feral about porting games to Apple’s new M1 hardware and the difficulties it has faced with their graphics.

Always awesome Kyle Orland at Ars Technica has an article with a headline too fun to paraphrase: Eve Online fans literally cheer Microsoft Excel features at annual Fanfest.

Ian Evenden at Tom’s Hardware talks about HoloISO, a port of SteamOS 3 that fans have gotten to run on devices other than the Steam Deck. Valve hasn’t released it officially for other hardware yet!

Jay Fingas at Engadget tells us about an auction for a gold-played Wii originally intended for the Queen of England. Seems she was denied the shiny unit due to rules against gifts.

Trent Cannon of Nintendo Life reviews Prinny Presents: NIS Classics Volume 2 for Switch.

Alex Donaldson at VG247 warns us that Sonic Origins probably won’t have Sonic 3‘s original soundtrack, due to rights issues related to Michael Jackson’s involvement with the project. Sega has been hampered with music rights across several games, including the soundtrack for some ports of Crazy Taxi.

More from Ars Technica, Sam Machkovech tells us about Rifftrax: The Game!

Zoey Handley at Destructoid on Famicom Wars, the game of which the upcoming Advance Wars Reboot Camp is a distant sequel!

Rebecca Stone at Twinfinite tells us about the 10 highest-priced used Gamecube games going! Sadly none of those I still own are up there, drebnar, not even Kirby Air Ride!

Mike Wilson writing at Bloody Disgusting celebrates the 30th anniversary of Wolfenstein 3D!

Back around to Engadget, J. Trew tells us about the lengths to which players are pushing NES Tetris.

And Zoe Sottile at CNN (swanky!) notes that Ms. Pac-Man and The Legend of Zelda are being inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.

Kimimi: Bounty Sword and Wild Card

Kimimi the Game-Eating She Monster (great handle!) has a knack for finding awesome Japanese games that Western shores missed 0ut on, and one such game is Bounty Sword, a Super Famicom JRPG with real-time combat, muted colors, and let’s not forget a fairy playing the role of player cursor. It’s worth your time to read, and maybe to contribute to her Ko-Fi!

Since I wrote that, she’s posted a review of another extremely interesting Squaresoft game, for the WonderSwan, Wild Card!

A Talk With Studio Centurion on Line War

For this interview, I spoke with Christian and Stefan of Studio Centurion to discuss their game Line War, and how they’re trying to build a new kind of RTS game that focuses on strategy as opposed to micro. We spoke about how the game came about, thoughts on RTS gameplay, and more.