In response to Bowser’s “Peaches” song from the Super Mario Bros. Movie (the later one, not the 90s one), and a certain Smash Bros. announcement from a few years back, Alex Henderson Animation made a villain’s anthem for Donkey Kong’s (other) nemesis, King K. Rool, ruler of the Kremlings. My suggestion is to turn on subtitles; I’d never have understood all the lyrics without them. (10 minutes) The animation is pretty good for a small production.
I hope this isn’t spoiling anything by now, but just in case here’s a bit of space….
In Donkey Kong Bananza, King K. Rool is the secret final boss, and not only that but at the end of the game the Mario and Donkey Kong series kind of cross over, as the final level and boss fight are in New Donk City, which is attacked(briefly) by K. Rool, but saved by Donkey Kong and Pauline. I wonder if this explains why streets in NDC, in Mario Odyssey, bear the names of Donkey Kong characters?
Anyway, I guess the only real take away is Mario’s world has a long-standing problem with big reptilian megalomaniacs stirring up trouble. And big primates too, but sometimes they’re heroic. Come to think of it, Mario’s been a villain too, and in a Donkey Kong game….
Read the subject line, and say to yourself quietly, “No way. What’s the catch?”
There is a catch, of course. There is an art to these kinds of hacks though, and it lies in finding the right catch. The catch that makes the hack possible at all, but seems the least like a cheat.
You can technically “run” Doom on a C64, if you actually run it on a Raspberry Pi plugged into it, that only uses the machine’s video hardware for output. That’s an egregious cheat; Raspberry Pis didn’t exist back in 1983 when the C64 was new.
There are speed-up cartridges for the C64, and you could even implement a co-processor to do much of the hard work of rendering the display for you. That’s also a cheat, although a bit less of one.
One could approach the problem from the other direction, diminishing the scope of the hack until it fits more comfortably in the computer’s capabilities. There are 3D corridor games on the C64; when I was a kid, a tape of software that a co-worker gave to my dad had one, called LABYRINTH, that was written in BASIC. But if it was truly the equal of Wolfenstein 3D it’d have revolutionized the gaming world. It wasn’t, and it didn’t. It generated one of those Wizardry-style mazes, sometimes called “blobbers,” where your perspective is fixed in the center of a grid-based maze. It wasn’t a shooter, it didn’t animate smoothly, and it was a pretty simple algorithm, simple enough that lots of games used it, especially RPGs.
What makes smoothly rendered graphics slow on a C64, indeed on pretty much all home computers at the time? It’s the necessity of using a bitmapped graphics mode. The math of deciding where the corridor vertices and lines go is within the machine’s capability, even at 1 mHz, but writing all those bytes into the C64’s 8K bitmap screen takes a huge amount of time.
It’s why few action games on the Commie used the bitmapped modes. Even if you used a hand-tuned machine code loop to write a single value to every byte in the bitmap, it’d be slow enough that you could visibly watch the screen fill up. If you wanted to actually vary those bytes, such as by rendering walls, it’d take much longer. Even filling the text screen takes so long that it’s difficult to do it in a single video frame, which is why games that feature NES-style full-screen scrolling on the C64 are impressive. (There are tricks to doing it; some of them quite bizarre. Let’s discuss those some other time.)
But you could do what jimo9757 did, and use text characters to simulate the rendering. In fact they did it one better, and used the PETSCII graphics characters for the display. The result is pretty striking! See for yourself in this demo (8 minutes):
Reserving a port of the screen for a status display is itself a bit of a cheat, that cuts down on the number of bytes that must be changed for each screen update, but it’s one that Wolfenstein 3D used too so let’s give it a pass. The walls only have horizontal lines for textures, but it’s not like the original’s were that worthy either. It’s certainly not 60 fps, it’s maybe 15 or 12, but it’s certainly still impressive to see those walls glide by smoothly on a machine with a 1 mHz 6502-class chip.
Since the game uses PETSCII for the maze, this engine can even work on the Commodore’s first home computer, the PET, whose character set was fixed in unchangeable mask ROM. Here’s video of the first-person shooter they made for the PET (3 minutes). I think the graphics, while many would call them primitive, have a fun style to them:
Our own Josh Bycer isn’t the only source of indie recap videos out there. Nintendo themselves released a new Indie World video yesterday with a number of new games listed, as well as an upcoming free update to one of my favorites, Little Kitty Big City. (I interviewed its creators for Game Developer some months ago!) Here’s the video (15 minutes):
The biggest surprise is, at the end, the news that both Caves of Qud and UFO 50 are coming to the Switch platforms at last! UFO 50 is out now! Please forgive my breach of decorum when I say, yippie, and besides that, wahoo. Thank you. (sips tea)
It is as the title says. It’s been discovered that, in the original Animal Crossing on Gamecube, if you read the village Message Board 43 times, it’ll reset your axe’s durability. But there are more consequences than just that! It’s explained in HunterR’s 10-minute video.
So, why does this happen? The precise details are in the video, but here’s a summary.
When you’re holding an axe, the game is not discriminating about which A button presses cause it to degrade—or, rather, its damage value will increase. If you hit objects other than trees, it’ll pick up three times as many damage points. But you can do other things that use the A button, and if an axe is in hand, its also take on damage.
There are actually eight different axe objects, that are switched between when eight points of damage is taken. (The more damaged versions have slightly different appearances.) The damage counter isn’t actually tied to the axe: it’s a separate count that’s counts for all axes. (Meaning, if you have multiple axes and try to spread out the wear between them, technically only the axe that you’re holding when you take the eighth damage point really gets harmed.) The value is also not saved when you save the game; if you hit trees seven times with an axe, then save and reload, the wear will be forgotten.
If you do something with the A button while the axe is in hand, but it doesn’t strike an object that might cause it to break, it’ll keep gaining damage. If you’re facing an object that isn’t a tree, like the Message Board sign, it’ll even gain three as much. But the check that switches to the next-most-damaged axe type only happens when the axe actually hits something. (It also happens if you open doors with an axe in hand!)
The counter to check if the axe should take wear is a single byte interpreted as a signed value, so, if you can get it to 128 or higher, the high bit is set, so the C library code used for the game’s comparisons will consider it to be a negative number. 43 x 3 is 129, or -126. You can then keep using the axe over and over until the number turns positive again, at 0, or until you save the game and reset the counter anyway.
By the way, to bring this to the realm of things I have personal knowledge of… Animal Crossing New Horizons doesn’t have a similar bug (as far as I know at least), but there is a different unexpected aspect of its tool-breaking. If a timer is running, like from hitting a rock for Bells or from participating in a round of a fishing or bug-catching tournament, tools won’t break until the timer expires, even if they exceed their durability limit. It’ll count the damage, but it won’t actually break the tool until the timer runs out. If you don’t use the tool in a way that might cause it to break, then it won’t, not until you next use it. If you’ve kept track of how much wear it’s taken, you can then sell it at Nooks and get some of the value for it.
Founder of Digital Eel and friend of the blog Rich Carlson sent word that they’ve released a number of albums collecting their music on Bandcamp! I’m not much of a music-knower, admittedly, but the songs on their games always stuck in my ear, and I think there’s a good chance they’ll stick in yours too!
The Midway Sessions: I’m fondly recalling MIDI, the dawn of digital audio, the Macintosh, Windows for Workgroups, the Pentium, DAT, Mark of the Unicorn, Windows 95, the Proteus, Sound Canvas, Cakewalk, the Roland D-50, the Kurzweil K2000, the Roland RAP-10…. It was an astonishing, revved-up and magical era in music; we were spoiled with innovations. And this was when, at a modest studio in an industrial park in Midway near St. Paul, Minnesota, the music-making period that I call the Midway Sessions occurred.
The Midway Sessions: Short Stack EP: These three tunes were recorded at the same time and place, and were rescued, last minute, just after the Midway Sessions compilation was released. Note that most of the music on the Midway Sessions album as well this EP was created for commercial purposes but, for one reason or another, were never used.
Hidden Cookies: This final installment of the “Midway Sessions” features a mix of newly uncovered tracks and original versions, rescued from the vault, dusted off and revived using old tyme tools and methods.
Sea of Stars: The Symphonic Score (Evelyn Sykes): In 2015, indie game makers Digital Eel (including yours truly) decided they (we) wanted fancy theme music, like the Star Trek TOS theme, for their (our) third space game, Infinite Space III: Sea of Stars. Enter UK composer, Evelyn Sykes, an instrumentalist, recordist and creator of music for radio dramas, videos, films, and live performances.
The Weird Musical World of Digital Eel: This compilation offers a wholly unique and eclectic mix of musical and music-like material from nearly 15 years of Digital Eel games. […] These “suites” feature a diverse collection of sounds and mayhem from Plasmaworm, Dr. Blob’s Organism, Big Box of Blox, Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, Brainpipe: A Plunge to Unhumanity, Data Jammers: FastForward, and Infinite Space III: Sea of Stars.
Plasmaworm: This album contains the level music from the 2001 Cheapass Games/Digital Eel computer game, Plasmaworm. […] Out of context (and in, for that matter) many of these pieces–extended loops really–are rather hypnotic and trancy, so get comfy and enjoy!
By the “first LowSpec” processor it means the 6502. This video is a retrospective on its origins (27 minutes). With its manga-styled illustrations of key players interspersed by stock footage and the occasional meme, It’s not my favorite style for a YouTube doc (those would be the Dan Olson/Folding Ideas style), but it’s not a bad introduction?
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”
