Set Side B

Sundry Sunday: NES Blades of Steel, Sung A Cappella

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

On Youtube, Triforcefilms has made it their niche to sing music from various game and other media properties a cappella, that is, entirely with voice doing the music.

They have lots of videos, and are still going today, but the one I’m choosing to call out is from nine years ago, their rendition of music from one of the lesser-known NES efforts: Konami’s Blades of Steel, which despite the name isn’t a fantasy hack-and-slash game, but a hockey game, actually a conversion of an arcade game of the same name, both with unexpectedly atmospheric visuals and music.

Here’s a link to a playlist of the NES soundtrack. The highlight I think is the game setup menu. While a zamboni resurfaces the ice for the upcoming match, one of the better menu tracks in the NES library plays in the background. It’s the first of three pieces in Triforcefilms’ video (2 minutes), which are the menu theme, the match start theme, and the intermission. They don’t adapt the triumphant victory theme, but I’ll take what we get.

Note, if you’re confused by the unexpected appearance of Gradius towards the end, that’s from NES Blades of Steel! As a minigame, sometimes you get to shoot at the Big Core during intermission. Win or lose, it doesn’t affect the match, and you still get the advertisement for other Konami properties.

As a minor extra, here’s a stereo separation of the soundtrack made by 8BitStereo. It’s mostly the same as the straight NES version, but in stereo, and will a little more echo.

If I’m presenting Konami sports music that rocks unexpectedly hard, I have to also link the menu theme from NES Double Dribble, and that game’s victory theme. Why did they put so much musical effort into their sports games?

Blades of Steel – Acappella (Youtube, 2 minutes)

rodneylives

A Complete Playthrough of the Original Zork Games

Three videos of a Youtuber called SwimYBO going through all three of Infocom’s classic Zork games. Zork was originally made for the PDP-10 by a number of students at MIT as a larger and funnier version of Colossal Cave, and was made all as one game. When remade for a variety of home microcomputers at the time, it was written in a special language, ZIL, for a virtual machine called the Z Machine. So, the game writers wrote their games once for ZIL, which had a Z Machine written for each of the target platforms. This explains how they were able to relatively easily port for every platform under the sun, back when there were over a dozen, and also why most of their games looked like they were the output of a simple terminal emulator.

Infocom was bought by Activision, used as a brand for a number of weird titles like an NES game, and eventually the Zork name would be applied to a pair of Windows graphic adventures. The property currently lies dormant in the hands of an uncarring megacorp, along with many other old computer game settings, characters and properties from over the proliferating decades of time since Pong.

Anyway. SwimYBO’s playthroughs go through the entire game and reveal all the puzzles and solutions, but they do leave some of the descriptions and game lore unrevealed for a player who might come to them later.

Zork I (“The Great Underground Empire,” 29 minutes):

Zork II (“The Wizard of Frobozz,” 30 minutes):

And Zork III (“The Dungeon Master,” 34 minutes):

rodneylives

Two Silent Successful Indie Game Reviews

A double review of Cocoon and Worldless. Cocoon was played with a retail key and Worldless with a press key.

0:00 Intro
00:17 Cocoon
3:55 Worldless

Josh Bycer

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”

game-wisdom.com/

What’s So Random About Ms. Pac-Man

I’m not going to say that famously Ms. Pac-Man is a more random game than Pac-Man, because who really knows things like that who isn’t a hardcore gamenerd. But among hardcore game nerds, it’s common knowledge. (If you didn’t know, A. congrats on your coolness, and B. sorry to now destroy your coolness.) Here a video about how randomness works in that game, from Retro Game Mechanics Explained (21 minutes):

Pac-Man is a game that is vulnerable to patterns: if you do exactly the same thing each time on the same level, the same results will occur. There is one pseudo-random element in Pac-Man though: when vulnerable ghosts reach an intersection, the code picks an arbitrary address from a range of memory addresses, then uses that value to pick a direction to decide which route to take. Two implications of this: vulnerable ghosts are most likely to head left at intersections and least likely to go up, and if any byte in that range changes the behavior of the game slightly changes too, even if it’s not an executable byte. Patterns still work in Pac-Man, despite this pseudo-random function, because the seed is reset at the start of every level, so if you do exactly the same thing, vulnerable ghosts will still have the same information fed to their movement routines.

Ms. Pac-Man has other sources of randomness: the ghosts, in Scatter mode, use a different source of pseudo-randomness to decide where to go, one that isn’t so easy to manipulate; and which fruit appears and which of four predefined routes (three for one of the mazes) it’ll take through the board.

Ms. Pac-Man doesn’t have its ghosts scatter periodically through the level like they do in Pac-Man. They only scatter at the start of the board. It’s not much randomness, but it’s enough to upset rote pattern creation, since each ghost has the opportunity to make several decisions of which path to take during that period. The way the randomness is handled is interest itself. The ghosts pick one of the corners of the board, much like they would in original Pac-Man, but randomly, when making their choice of target to home in on.

So there! Now you can amaze your friends, if it were 40 years ago and your friends were then able to be impressed by your knowledge of Ms. Pac-Man! You’re retroactively welcome!

Random Elements of Ms. Pac-Man (Retro Game Mechanics Explained on youtube, 21 minutes)

rodneylives

Space Harrier Version Comparison

I’ve been visiting the Space Harrier series lately, mostly Planet Harriers, the 2000 arcade sequel that somehow escaped getting a Dreamcast port.

Google picked up on that (ugh) and pointed me to a 55 minute video comparison of home versions. I don’t think any of you will want to watch the whole thing, but I’ll embed it as a place to start from:

Space Harrier ports are interesting because of how impossible it was for home versions of the time to simulate it. It was a technical marvel in arcades, at a time when generally arcade hardware tended to be miles better than any ports. So, few of these versions have even a slight hope of matching up.

But that makes them interesting! Every one of them had to make a compromise between Space Harriers many different facets, and try to get as much of the arcade’s feeling through despite severe hardware limitations. The arcade beats most of them for quality, of course, with few exceptions.

rodneylives

Science Facts From No Man’s Sky

Hi-tech devices can easily be constructed right in your pants pocket, and out of common materials.

The secrets of space travel are contained within *this plant*.

You can make a warp fuel out of a Venus Fly Trap (Oxygen) and a really strong tree (Concentrated Carbon).
Venus Fly Traps are particularly dangerous, as their jaws are so powerful that they can harm beings sitting a good 50 feet out of their reach.
“Oxygen,” the element, is different than “oxygen,” the stuff you breathe under water.
Data is fungible: it doesn’t matter so much what it is, but that you have it. “Navigation data” works to bring your ship to you irrespective of where you got it or where you are, even if it’s the length of the galaxy away.
Planets are littered with junk and buildings that are useful to you personally. Drop pods are scattered among the wastes of a billion worlds, each broken in precisely the same way, each able, when fixed, to expand the capacity of the space suit of any visitor. When it is done, it’ll continue to sit there in place, repaired but useless, until the end of time, a mute monument to the fact that, at some point, a traveller needed their pocket expanded.
If a mission calls for culling a herd of creatures that are getting out hand, it doesn’t matter which creatures get culled, or which planet it happens on, or it could indeed be anywhere. They’ll be satisfied if you slaughter tiny helpless beasties, T-rexes, or any combination.
“Low atmosphere” means exactly the same thing as “low gravity.” They are synonyms.
The surface of a planet may be too hot, too cold, too toxic or too radioactive, but caves on it are room-temperature and cozy.
Don’t believe what Kerbal Space Program told you. Orbits are a fiction invented to tell people to keep them out of astrophysists’ business.

Also, this isn’t a science fact or anything, but the rarer planets types were all designed by Dr. Seuss: