Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Six years ago brentalfloss did a parody video of the infamous “DK Rap” from the opening of Donkey Kong 64, updated for the times. It’s hilarious, but also disturbing and sad. Summary: Donkey Kong became a gun nut, Diddy is a MRA incel jerk, because of Tiny bees are dying out, Lanky’s the reason this video is NSFW, and Chunky’s… well, you can find out for yourself.
It’s all pretty saddening, but truthfully in line with how game culture has gotten worse over the years too. Ah well, at least Parappa’s still good and pure!
It’s a grievous blow to the game editing community, but Nightcrawler, the maintainer of the 19-year-old hack repository and community site romhacking.net, is shutting its doors. The reasons why are the top news item on the site, probably the last new news item that will ever be posted there.
romhacking.net as it looked August 2, 2024, R.I.P.
They mention several reasons, but say a collection of users who had offered to take up the site for disingenuous reasons. The details were not mentioned, but they mentioned by way of comparison what happened to emulator author Near, creator of higan, and that can be easily taken as a bad sign.
However, Gideon Zhi on Bluesky offers a different take, that suggests comparison to Near is greatly inappropriate, and that Nightcrawler was severely burnt out and refused offers to help. I don’t know which is more accurate, but the details are offered suggest there may be something to his version of events. Gideon Zhi isn’t one, I think, to cover something like that up. Ah well, drama.
Maintaining a hugely popular website for 19 years is a huge drain on your time, energy and finances. It’s possible that ultimately Nightcrawler needed, or even just wanted, to retire, and that’s okay.
I’ve made frequent use of romhacking.net over the years, both in researching two romhack ebooks and the Romhack Thursday feature on this site. While what the maintainer of romhacking.net says in their news post, that there isn’t as much of a need of a centralized site for collecting and presenting romhacks as there was back in 2005, I still found their site extremely useful, and I think it served a vital role. I will greatly miss it, but I understand their wishing to move on. They took the step of uploading the whole site contents to the Internet Archive, which is a forward-thinking move that I applaud.
Will they ever return to updating the site? Anything is possible, but I expect not. Will another site arise to take its place? Who knows, there’s definitely demand for it. I wish Nightcrawler well in any event, and thank them for their service.
Game Informer’s site, as it looked August 2, 2024, R.I.P.
Since then, GameStop has kept the magazine going as a house publication, at times distributing issues for free to customers. It seems the announcement was sudden, with management sending out a tweet about the publication’s closure while staff was being notified of the ending of their positions.
There are older game magazines in Japan, of course, and US game magazines lately have had things pretty tough with competition from the internet. It’s surprising that they’ve managed to keep going for this long.
Usually it’s Josh Bycer who does these reviews of new games, but for a change I’m doing one this time! And in text no less! It’s World of Goo 2, which is available for purchase now on the Epic Store, Switch and the makers’ own website.
Title
The people from Tomorrow Corporation got in touch out of the blue, because then-Gamasutra helped spread the word about the original game long ago. Now-Game-Developer currently has a temporary hold on freelance Q&A work, but Kyle Gray was gracious enough to give me a press key anyway, and I figured a review here would be the least I could do. It’s true, it was a free key, but on the other hand I’ve always been a big fan of the original World of Goo. I’ve finished it at least twice, on PC and on Wii.
Does this make me biased? What does biased even mean? The principals of 2DBOY and Tomorrow Corporation have always been shining stars of indie gaming, and I’ve played nearly everything they’ve made since, including the DS title Henry Hatsworth and the Puzzling Adventure, directed by Kyle Gray. Was there a chance that this could have been a negative review? Not really, but then, if it was going to be negative, I probably wouldn’t be writing it. All I can do is assure you: we’re not in this for press keys.
–
There are games that feel like they’ve been with us always, and so it seems for the original World of Goo. It was published in 2008, but I’m so used to games being older than I expect that I half expected it to date from 2006, or earlier.
2DBOY’s World of Goo came out at the beginning of the indie gaming revolution, and one was of the biggest success stories of that heady time. It was one of the first non-Nintendo downloadable titles for the Wii, where it was a huge hit and helped to establish that console, and Nintendo’s consoles generally, as a hospitable, profitable home for small independently-made games.
Conduits
In the 16 years since, the game industry has changed drastically, although really it always has been. Indie titles have proliferated, to the degree that it has become difficult for a game to make itself seen amidst a flood of competitors. Some of the principals of 2DBOY split off into another company, Tomorrow Corporation, which produced the quasi-spinoff Little Inferno, a couple of brilliant visual programming games, Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans, and they published the comedy-adventure game The Captain. Except for The Captain, all of these Tomorrow-made titles, and World of Goo too, share a distinctive and unique visual style and soundscape, which are kind of like if Tim Burton and Danny Elfman decided to make video games.
But World of Goo was the game that started it all. It’s a clever physics game where players build constructions out of “Goo Balls” in order to erect towers, bridge gaps, and generally bring the remaining balls on the level to an exit pipe. Drag one goo ball near another to make a bond between them, which behaves like a thin, stiff spring. By joining them together, balls and bonds, you can make all kinds of physics constructions. More species of goo balls are introduced in later levels: goo balloons, reusable goo, goo that can bond to three other goo balls at once, goo that can only bond singly, goo that sticks to walls and more.
A Shooter
The aim of most levels is to reach that pipe somewhere in the level. If you can get a goo construction close enough to it, it activates, drawing goo balls into it. To win a level, you have to collect a minimum number of balls; getting more means getting a better score. Usually goo balls that have been used to build things can’t then be sucked down the pipe, so the more goo you use to reach it, the less you can save and the lower your score. Each level has an optional “OCD,” or “Obsessive Completion Distinction” target, that is reached is marked on the hub screen by a flag. Some levels it’s earned by saving a target number of goo balls, some by using under a certain number of moves (goo connections), and with some it’s just a time limit. All of this applies to its sequel, World of Goo 2, as well, just with more kinds of goo and with more puzzle elements. The OCD goals now have one of each type for each level, which are tracked separately.
World of Goo’s gameplay is not completely original. A variety of small games and web toys featuring physics systems of WoG’s type have existed at least as far back as the year 2000, going back to Soda’s defunct, yet fondly remembered Java toy Soda Constructor. World of Goo itself began life as a freeware toy called Tower of Goo, that emerged from its creators’ work at Carnegie University and the Expermental Gameplay Project. (Warning: link is ancient, although still works.)
–
World of Goo went far beyond those earlier versions of the idea, and World of Goo 2 goes beyond even that. The games stay fresh through by constantly introducing new wrinkles on the concept, and new kinds of goo balls with different properties, and it’s always a joy to get a new element to play with. The first game had 48 levels, and WoG2 has 61, but they go by in a flash, and the game never overstays its welcome. If anything they feel much too short, like there are gameplay possibilities left unexplored. I guess it’s true that you should always leave them wanting more.
Liquid Goo
World of Goo had a bizarre story involving the creation and machinations of an ominous company, called World of Goo Corporation, that may have been inspired by 2DBOY’s founders’ experiences working for Electronic Arts. It’s really less of a story as a collection of short stories, told in five chapters, with the highlight being a bizarre and self-referential Chapter 4 where the game’s concepts are flipped upside down.
World of Goo 2 also has a bizarre story that’s like a collection of short stories, about World of Goo Corporation’s ominous successor, World of Goo Organization. It all culminates in Chapter 4, where the game’s concepts aren’t so much flipped upside down but entirely stretched out of shape. I don’t want to spoil it, but Chapter 4 is amazing.
So yes, World of Goo 2 largely follows the same lines as the predecessor. It’s not just in story. It follows up on some of those possibilities hinted at during World of Goo, but it also adds many more new concepts, so by the end, which I reached in an obsessed 9 1/2 hours of play, I felt like there were at least as many gameplay loose ends as at the end of the first World of Goo.
A basin
All the old species of goo ball return, but now there’s new friends to learn about. There’s now liquids! And jelly creatures that you can split apart and grind up in satisfying ways! Goo conduits and launchers, and shooters and engines, and even more beyond that. The physics engine has received a substantial upgrade. Goo balls now leave damp blotches on the terrain they rest upon. The Time Bug undo feature can go back a bit further. You can drag the view around with the mouse, zoom in and out with the mouse wheel, and the goo balls are a bit better about getting out of your way when you’re trying to click on something important.
The only way that it’s really deficient, I’d say, is that it lacks the open-ended “Tower of Goo” mode of the original, where players could use their collected goo balls from the other levels in a high score challenge. Maybe in an update? World of Goo 2 has enough ideas in it that they could, if they chose, make a World of Goo 3. But what then? Could they keep riding this train for 100,000 years? Maybe not, but if they can keep up this level of ingenuity, then easily for another sequel.
World of Goo 2 has an engaging art style, so here, have some of the many hundreds of screenshots I took. There aren’t any big spoilers in them, but they do illustrate some of the later goos and gimmicks.
A Jelly CreatureGrowth Goo (no giggling!)Lava, and goo bonds that deform to terrainAlbino Goo (now heatproof)Cheese(?)
I had an amazing amount of fun with World of Goo 2. I binged it and finished it in 9 1/2 hours. You might finish it a bit faster, since I took something of the scenic route, but I also still remember many tricks from the first game, which I had completely OCD’d on Wii, and didn’t get stuck anywhere. It gets started a bit faster than World of Goo did. If you haven’t played it, you might want to go through it first. Luckily World of Goo has never gone out of print, and is available for nearly all desktop and mobile platforms, in addition to Nintendo consoles. You can’t get the Wii or Wii-U versions any more, but it can be obtained readily for the Switch.
It’s true, I’m on Tomorrow Corporation’s side. They’re good people and deserve to do well, but I’d be obsessing over World of Goo 2 even if I’d never heard of them before. It’s a real jewel, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.
If you found this review useful, please pass it around. And let us know; maybe I’ll do more text reviews in the future.
It’s only about nine minutes long so you can guess that it doesn’t go into deep detail. Essentially the NES is split into two parts, the CPU and its memory, and the PPU graphics chip and its own memory. A lot of classic consoles and microcomputers had to take special measures to support their display, which often ended up being the most complex part of the unit. Think about it: you have what amounts to a deluxe broadcast character generator right there in a box on your desk, shelf or floor, with lots of extra bells and whistles besides. (In fact, home computers were often used to generate current events channels for local cable companies, and an Amiga was essentially the basis for the old Prevue Guide channel.) It’s like a tiny special-purpose, single-receiver TV station just for your own use.
Graphics hardware is extremely timing sensitive. It has to generate the signal for your TV to display according to standardized picture generation requirements, so special requirements are often necessary. In the Commodore 64, for instance, the VIC-II graphics chip has the power to actually put the 6510 CPU to sleep, so it can have unrestricted access to the computer’s memory, without fear of bus conflicts, when it’s needed. This reduces the overall speed of the processor by a bit, and it’s why C64s turn off the screen when loading programs from cassette tape, in order to keep the CPU timing consistent relative to the data being streamed in off the tape.
The NES gets around this by giving the PPU RAM and address bus for its own exclusive use, and to put stuff in it the CPU has to use the PPU as an intermediary. And what’s more the NES exposes both the CPU and PPU’s address busses through the cartridge connector (which is why it’s got so many pins), allowing carts to supply dedicated ROM and RAM to both chips.
Even though it’s just a high-level overview, I found it a worthwhile use of those nine minutes, and you may very well enjoy it too.
It’s another highly technical game glitch explanation, although from a source we don’t often follow here: even though it has to do with explaining glitch Pokemon from the first generation of that series, it was the ending presentation of RustCon 2020 given by Siân Griffin, despite having little to do with Rust, other than showing the possible results of not having strong memory safety in your programming language.
It’s 39 minutes long, and it might prove difficult to get through for some, but it’s good and interesting information:
I will give you an overview:
When the original Pokemon games generate a random encounter with wild Pokemon in the overworld, they refer to one of two lists in RAM memory, copied there from ROM. One list is for “grass” Pokemon, that are generated when walking through tall grass, and one is for “water” Pokemon, that are generated when in riding a Pokemon using Surf over water tiles. The lists are copied when entering a new region, with a differing enemy generation table.
Due to an oversight in the tile checking code, a different subtile is checked when generating a Pokemon from each list. This means it’s possible, on some shores, to generate a Pokemon from the grass list when actually on the water. If one of the lists has a Pokemon generation rate of 0% for its type, then its list doesn’t actually get copied. Some regions that are largely aquatic aren’t intended to ever generate grass Pokemon, and so have a 0% grass encounter rate, and so never copy a grass Pokemon encounter table. The Pokemon generated come from whatever was in memory before, which may be all zeros, or may be whatever used the memory in that area previously. Pokemon has little RAM to work with, so the Pokemon generation table memory has other things that use that memory, and one of those is data for the trainers you trade Pokemon with.
If you use Fly to fast travel to Cinnabar Island, you can reach a region where the grass encounter table won’t have been initialized, but you can still cause grass encounters to happen by Surfing on the shoreline. The contents of that table can be manipulated by doing something else that uses that memory beforehand. As a result, you can cause an encounter with an undefined Pokemon, which has the name MISSINGNO and has various glitch attributes.
Because the Pokemon has faulty definitions for some of its attributes, like appearance and cry, it’s possible to crash the game or wreck your save data from playing around with MISSINGNO. But if you run from it, this damage can be minimized. And when it tries to mark that you’ve seen MISSINGNO in the bit array that records which Pokemon you’ve seen, it overshoot that table and actually sets a bit in the memory that follows it, which usefully, is your inventory. Generate the right version of MISSINGNO and run from battle, and you may suddenly find yourself with over a hundred of an item in a specific slot in your inventory. If you put the Rare Candy there before, you now can give your Pokemon over a hundred experience levels, or you could create stat-gain items this way, or lots of Master Balls.
Glitches such as these seems like they’re rare, but really, there’s lots of games that have them. It’s one of the perils of coding your game in assembly, really.
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”
Looygi Bros. obsessively plays various games and finds quirks, glitches and interesting facts about them. Their newest video tries out a bunch of known glitches in NES games and sees if they work in the new Nintendo World Championships speedrunning game. The result: in many, but not all, cases, Nintendo has put in code traps to make sure the games are operating as intended, and if they are set off, like if Mario goes through a wall or Link wraps around the screen, the emulator software declares Strategy Unavailable and resets the run. They tested 11 glitches in a ten-minute video, embedded here:
To summarize them:
Minus World: the trap occurs when Mario tries to slide through the wall at the end of World 1-2.
In Donkey Kong, it’s possible to climb down the first ladder, wrap around the screen, and end up on the girder right below the goal. They caught this one.
Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA) Fast Carpet: with two carpets spawned, you can travel extra fast. This one didn’t get caught, but the set-up time to use it makes its use in the challenge prohibitive.
Wrapping the screen in The Legend of Zelda. This is one of my least favorite glitches honestly. Nintendo caught it, you can’t glitch around the screen horizontally nor get Link into the top-of-screen status area. (I also dislike the term “HUD” for these areas. Dammit Jim, it’s a video game not a jet fighter.)
The “door jump” glitch in Metroid. This lets you use a door to get Samus inside the blocks that make up the edges of the screen, from there you can, depending on the situation, either wrap around the screen vertically or explore “secret worlds” created by interpreting random cartridge data as terrain. This one’s trapped.
Super Mario 2 double jump. I didn’t know about this one! In some circumstances when you’re near an enemy, characters can jump in mid air. This one is both not trapped, and actually useful in the challenge!
Super Mario 3 Fortress skip. In similar circumstances to passing through the wall in Super Mario Bros. to get to the Minus World, you can pass through a wall midway through the fortress to skip an area and go straight to the boss. This one’s trapped, probably checking for the same kind of situation as the Minus World trick.
Super Mario Bros. wall jump. Not trapped, and conceivably useful in the World 8-4 completion challenge to get into the elevated pipe.
Kid Icarus fortress 1 shortcut. There’s a way to glitch through a wall early in the route through the fortress that takes you almost to the end. This one is trapped, but it’s triggered, not when you get through the wall, but when you go through the room’s exit. It probably makes sure you go through all the essential rooms in order.
Super Mario Bros. 2 cave skip. It’s a way to glitch through a wall so you don’t have to wait for a bomb to explode. It’s tricky but possible, you end up taking damage to get through it though.
Super Mario Bros. 2 item attachment. A complex trick that lets you get items into areas where they aren’t intended to go. Technically this is untrapped and usable. In conjunction with the cave skip trick, it’s possible to kill Birdo with a Shy Guy, potentially with one throw instead of having to wait for three eggs to throw back at her. Looygi Bros was unable to get the whole trick to work in the World Championships software, but offers the possibility of it working to whoever can chain together all the necessary techniques.
I find it interesting that the tricks were disabled through traps instead of fixing their games, they seem to have enough technical know-how to know how the glitches work to check for them in the emulation layer, but maybe fixing them was deemed against the spirit of the game, or they didn’t want to risk changing the game’s essential behavior?
