Year: 2023

Sundry Sunday: The “Music” of Crazy Bus

Remember Crazy Taxi? How they got licensed punk music from Bad Religion and The Offspring for it? Remember how awesome that was? I’m not even a music person mostly, but I could still recognize that the soundtrack of those games was special. (I’m talking about the arcade and Dreamcast versions-other versions may or may not have that soundtrack, probably due to licensing issues.)

You want to know what game doesn’t have a great sound track? Crazy Bus.

Crazy Bus is a homebrew Sega Genesis/Mega Drive game that was created as a test for the programmer’s BASIC compiler. It wasn’t meant to be a real game. As a result, its soundtrack is almost a masterpiece in cacaphony. Listen for yourself… but you’re going to want to turn the volume down for this one.

It’s awe-ful-some. I encourage you to play it for for friends, family, co-workers, prospective employers, random strangers and household pets. I’m certain nothing bad will come of it!

An Open Discussion on Open World Design

For this Perceptive Podcast, I sat down with Konstantinos Dimopoulos for another chat about open-world design and creating meaningful spaces for the player to explore in a game. We spoke about how open-world gameplay has evolved and the push and pull between environmental and level design.

The Gripe Monster Quibbles Over Terms

The Gripe Monster occasionally demands that we give him time to vent his three spleens our our website, or else he’ll shed fur all over the break room. That stuff will clog up a vacuum cleaner like a whole herd of angora cats, so here he is.

Grar! I am the Gripe Monster! The world is in a state of constant decay! People used to know important things, but now they have forgotten! I alone remember the proper way! Every time someone gets it wrong, the center lobe of my monsterly brain throbs painfully! It is like fingernails on a blackboard, or someone slacking off during a raid boss fight!

To save myself from constant migraines I must inform you of the difference between the words “invincible” and “invulnerable!” It is essential that you get this right! So many times it has been misused, that people foolishly get them mixed up constantly now! If you wish to avoid my wrath, you will not be one of them! I bet you misuse “begs the question” too!

Invulnerable is the state of being immune to damage! No harm may come to your character while they are invulnerable! It is a proper state for a game to apply when your character has taken damage, so that they do not get hurt again immediately!

To be invincible is to not be able to be conquered! By game convention, it means that your character defeats enemies on contact! By its nature, it implies invulnerability, but it is a state greater than that!

When Super Mario is attacked by a Little Goomba, as I am sure happens to him all the time when you are playing, while he is flickering, he is invulnerable. Enemies pass through him, but are not touched by him while this state exists! When he collects a Starman (make sure to use the correct name for this power-up!) he is invincible. No foe can stop him! Instead, it is he who stops them! He defeats them on contact, kicking them off the thin plane that his world consisted of until the Nintendo 64 era brought hated depth to his reality!

When speedrunners talk about invincibility frames, they are committing a sin against language! They are properly called invulnerability frames! Because of this, when they are abbreviated to “i-frames,” they may seem to be correct, but they are still woefully mistaken–in their heads! I know what they really mean, and it fills up my copious gall bladder in rage!

Be sure to get it right in the future, and you will not have to suffer my terrible gaze, as do the clerks at the coffee establishment that I go to, when they forget to give me the cream and three sugars that I require! Such terrible service! I will only tip them two dollars!

Geez, how petty can you get? Now that he’s used up our site’s whole inventory of exclamation points for the month, that’s got to be all from Gripey this time. I’m not at all surprised to learn that he plays MMORPGs.

Kimimi on Korokoro Puzzle: Happy Panechu!

Kikimi the Game Eating She-Monster’s blog is on the short list of blogs we watch for interesting stuff, and she’s found a winner this time! Korokoro Puzzle: Happy Panechu! is a Japan-only GBA puzzle game that uses a similar kind of tilt sensor as found in Kirby Tilt N Tumble.

It’s a game that involves moving colored blog creatures around to connect them in groups of four or more to clear them out, which sounds pretty typical at first. But doing this also creates bombs that you can also connect, to make them into bigger bombs, and clear out larger fields of clutter as you do so, as voices proclaim things like “So happy!” and “Mega happy!”

The tilt sensor comes into play in that it allows you to determine from which side of the screen new objects enter from.

Korokoro Puzzle only got the one entry, but we have it from Kimimi’s that it hides a whole lot of gameplay within its little rectangular case.

Kimimi the Game-Eating She-Monster: Happy! So happy! Mega happy!

Romhack Thursday: Gradius AC 2000 for NES

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Gradius for Famicom and NES is a well above-average port of a game for very different hardware than the arcade original. It was good enough that it was converted right back into arcade game, released for Nintendo’s Unisystem arcade hardware as Vs. Gradius. Graphically and aurally, it is quite similar to the arcade game.

It’s similar, but not identical. Now this hack doesn’t change the major downgrades from arcade Gradius. There is no vertical scroll in levels two or three, and you still can only have two Options at once. But in a variety of subtle ways, the game looks a bit nicer. In particular, the game’s text fonts being changed from the boring old font used on the NES back to the arcade’s snazzy line-drawing affair is a nice change.

The original version of this is quite an old hack, created back in 2000, but it has been periodically updated over the years, most recently changed in 2018. That’s a long period of support for a romhack!

Gradius AC 2000, by Kaison (romhacking.net)

The Arcade Blogger on the Development of Xevious

December 30th of last year, The Arcade Blogger did a piece on the creation of Namco’s classic vertical shooter Xevious.

Xevious was modestly successful in the US, where it was produced by Atari, but it Japan it did amazing numbers. Jeremy Parish (in his NES Works and related series) has mentioned several times that it was a vastly influential game in Japan, inspiring a whole generation of designers, and a whole bunch of clones and similar games. Its US release was around the time of the arcade crash, which was mostly an American thing. If it hadn’t had happened, maybe now we’d think about Xevious the way we consider Pac-Man.

The team behind Xevious

Xevious basically invented the vertical scrolling shooter where your ship has free movement of the screen. It also included a Bomb button to attack objects on the ground, displayed on the game’s background layer. It was a concept that would later be iterated upon in Konami’s Twinbee games.

Revealed in the article is an interesting fact. The scrolling background is stored in ROM as a huge 1024×2048 bitmapped image. That’s much wider than the screen is though. What the game does is send the player into a vertical portion of it 224 pixels wide.

When the player reaches the top, they wrap around to the bottom of another vertical stripe of the game world. In a complete loop, the player will travel from the bottom to the top 16 times. You can tell when you’re about to start another loop because the background will reach a place with trees all the way across!

You always start off a life in a tree-filled area because it begins you at the bottom of a stripe; each vertical pass over the map functions as a checkpoint. The stripes overlap somewhat, so you sometimes pass over an area you’ve seen before but offset by a bit.

For more facts on Xevious and its development, be sure to click through to the article!

The Arcade Blogger: The Development of Xevious

Arcade Attack Podcast: Ed Rotberg Interview

The podcast Arcade Attack interviews former Atari designer and programmer Ed Rotberg, creator of Battlezone! His introduction identifies him as the creator of the first FPS. Is he? I do not know for sure, but it seems awfully plausible. I think it’s a little distasteful identifying him by his connection to a genre that, when he created Battlezone in 1980, wouldn’t even exist for a decade yet. Rotberg’s accomplishment feels more profound than that, but Battlezone is definitely foundational!

Arcade Attack: Ed Rotberg interview (an hour 16 minutes)

Classic Game Dev Andrew Braybook On Computer Conversions

Andred Braybrook is a legendary computer game dev from the Commodore 64 age, and before and after. In addition to the classic C64 games Uridium and Paradroid, which perform feats of scrolling that machine are really not designed for, he went on to many several other games, including the excellent computer ports of Taito’s sequel to Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands.

(Although Braybrook mentions that Taito hadn’t told him about the three secret islands that can appear at the end, so they got left out. They didn’t know about them either!)

Image from Braybrook’s blog

He has a blog post that details many aspects of he and his co-workers’ process back then that is fascinating to anyone with knowledge of these platforms, and even someone who doesn’t. Thanks to @acb@mastodon.social for the link!

Andrew Braybrook: How We Made Computer Game Conversions, from his blog