Mr. Goof on Youtube made a video with some cool and relatively unknown things that can be done in Super Mario Galaxy. Like the ground pound move in that game has a homing function, you can hold crouch to skate backwards on ice, and there is a secret button press that can give you a speed boost at the start of Cosmic Mario races. But none of those things are what they claim is the most obscure thing in the game.
The video is titled “Super Mario Galaxy’s Most Obscure Mechanic,” which is a bit wrong. It’s not a mechanic, or mechanism, it’s just a move with no real gameplay purpose. If you stand near water and jump, Mario will dive into the water with a special animation. That’s it. It’s cool, but pretty useless. Still, it’s nice to see it in action.
Here’s the video (7 minutes). Now, go forth and win Mario-related trivia contests, if they happen to ask a question about this extremely specific behavior.
I’ve been working a lot on compiling lists of programs that appeared in Loadstar, and it’s taking a lot of time. So here’s a quick item for today: a visit by the news team of CBS 8 in San Diego to Atari’s headquarters. 12 minutes from the company heyday in 1982, when they were riding high off the success of the Atari VCS/2600 and their many beloved arcade titles.
If you explore the internet long enough, you find wonders and horrors, but you also find very weird and obsessive things. One such thing is sm-json-data, a project to not only comprehensive catalog all of the tricks in Super Metroid and the situations they apply to and their uses, but to express it in a machine-readable fashion, so randomizers can use it.
I don’t even really know how to read it, but just the level of detail present here kind of makes me think it’s worthy of presentation here. It also sets off my allergies against obsession, it makes me itch like I’ve got hives, so I won’t be spending much time here. But maybe it’s the kind of thing you might find interesting?
And The Greatest Foe (a particular frog in the swamp, 2 minutes)—but Youtube’s awful policies think it’s made for kids, despite the frog getting murdered bloodily at the end, so they made it unembedable. YOUTUBE HAS DONE A STUPID THING, LET THIS ALLCAPS MESSAGE STAND IN TESTAMENT TO THIS RIDICULOUS FACT.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Why do people play romhacks in the first place? I’m setting aside joke hacks (most aren’t that funny), and hacks that seek to make something completely different from the original. I’m talking about the normal style of hack, the type that tries to deliver more of the original game. Especially for a game that’s beloved and well-made in the first place, like Super Metroid?
But you can’t go home again. Without substantial modification to the game’s code that even extensive hacks almost never pull off, the result is a remix of the original game. Making a game by itself is pretty hard, making an interesting modification that works as an extension of the original, while not going overboard in one of a half-dozen ways, is nearly impossible. Many hacks are unplayably hard. For some, like those invaders from the dark universe of kaizo hacks, that’s the point, but most players just aren’t into that scene. But if the game isn’t harder, then the people who are in the hack’s audience will probably just be bored.
I’m not quite sure that Hyper Metroid SUPER walks the line perfectly. I haven’t finished it (I have a deadline after all), and while I find it interesting there’s at least one sticking point I’ve noticed. But it does its job about as well as any other romhack I’ve seen, I haven’t spotted any bugs, and it’s fun to explore and work through the structure of Super Metroid once again, with a different map and items found in a different order.
The hyperbolic name is a result of it being a sequel to a sequel (to a sequel). Hyper Metroid was a previous hack from ten years ago, by creator RealRed, that’s pretty highly regarded by the Super Metroid hacking community, judging by its rating of 4.62 on Metroid Construction‘s user rating poll. Hyper Metroid won an award in the year of its release, and is at 19th place on its ranking of all Metroid hacks. While it’s only been out six days now, Hyper Metroid SUPER has a rating of 4.87, and is currently at the top of that same list.
Hyper Metroid did an excellent job of turning the Super Metroid engine to the exploration of a new world. Hyper Metroid SUPER is a great refinement in design, and shows what ten years of consideration and attention to design can bring to a game. The sudden deaths and hard stalls that are a problem with most romhacks are not here, but neither is it easy or simple. It’s still the work primarily of one person, and that presents limitations that are not easy to overcome when compared to an original game that was a strong team effort. But I haven’t rolled my eyes in the parts of the game that I’ve played so far, and that by itself is an accomplishment.
One aspect that’s deserving of mention is how, perhaps inspired by Metroid Zero Mission, Hyper Metroid SUPER guides the player along in their explorations in a manner similar to Nintendo’s own games, but also purposely allows for sequence breaking by an experienced player.
As stated, I haven’t finished Hyper Metroid SUPER yet, and it’s the kind of game where all it takes is one badly-designed element to wreck the whole experience. But so far, like the users of Metroid Construction, I rate it highly.
Nintendo has a habit of, with each new console, throwing a bunch of features at the wall to see what’ll stick. Most things, let’s be frank, don’t.
Top of my head? The DS’s second screen? It worked for a while, but now seems pretty well an abandoned idea. The 3D features of the 3DS. StreetPass. AR games. Their brief experiments with free-to-play on the 3DS. The whole darn Virtual Boy. Need I go on?
One of these features was the idea of system-supported services that software could use to interact with the player outside of borders of their channel. Miis were the finest example of this, of course, and amazingly Nintendo hasn’t abandoned them yet, although ideas like Miis that could travel between systems on their own have been conveniently forgotten.
But on the Wii, there were a few less publicized things that games could do. Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel were known to send you messages on the system bulletin board to congratulate you on winning, or to give you hints of Stars to find.
About a year ago GVG did a recounting of Wii games that used, of all things, data from the Weather Forecast Channel. They pinned down nine pieces of software that did this. It’s a feature that Peter Molyneux notably abandoned when he directed Black & White (after announcing it), but Nintendo actually did it. Here is the video, which is a fairly padded 9½ minutes:
The title says nine games used it, but the channel only lists seven, and not all of them are even games! The software named:
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games (could be enabled in Options)
Nights: Journey Into Dreams (in the Nightopian garden)
Quick! Name a level in Sonic Adventure 2 that isn’t City Escape (the first level)!
You probably couldn’t think of one. Maybe Pumpkin Hill, from remembering its rap-based theme song? But one very distinctive level in that game is the last one on the Hero Side: Final Rush.
Wait, what do I mean by Hero Side? None of this paragraph really matters, but…. There’s two scenarios in it, the Hero story with Sonic, Knuckles and Tails, and the Dark story (the game shies away from the term Evil) with series debut characters Shadow and Rouge, and Dr. Robotnik, a.k.a. Eggman, playable. The story scenes from Sonic Adventure 1 were ditched in favor of a level select map, and the varied gameplay of the first game narrowed down to running stages (Sonic/Shadow), searching stages (Knuckles/Rouge) and shooting stages (Tails/Eggman). Gone were Amy and Big the Cat’s playstyles, and Omega’s were given over to Tails and Eggman.
Of course, everyone most loved the running stages. The game’s named after Sonic, after all, even though they had some issues. The issues, they were what many people who played the game remembered. Although the game is arguably an improvement on SA1, gave us more insight into Eggman’s history and motivations than we’ve ever had before or since, and even its lore plays a big part in the Sonic 3 movie, it’s still a 3D Sonic, and so it’s still seen as inferior to the Genesis originals. The 3D Sonic game released after Sonic Adventure 2 was Sonic Heroes, which was mostly about running; the searching and shooting gameplay seen in SA2 hasn’t to my knowledge returned since.
But as ZoomZike reminds us, there are interesting ideas in Sonic Adventure 2! He examines the last of the running levels (if you don’t count the very hard to unlock Green Hill level), in fact the last Hero Side level in the game.
Final Rush takes place in space (there’s still gravity though), and is themed around Sonic Adventure’s 2 new gimmick, rail grinding. You’ve shredded on rails throughout the game up to this point, but most of Final Rush takes place sliding around on rails improbably placed in Earth orbit. The level is rife with opportunities to send your pitiful blue garden mammal through a fiery reentry. My own memories of the level, like most of the game, involve camera struggles and fighting glitches, but I remember Final Rush being entertaining at least.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It’s been ten years since a little line drawning animation called URappinBad! shows up on Newgrounds. Now its creator Kevin Fagaragan has gone back and not only made it into a full color animation, but shows it side by side with the original.
Be on the lookout for cameos by Parappa’s friends PJ Berri and Katy Kat, Cheap Cheap the Cooking Chicken, and UmJammer Lammy. Both videos of course feature music taken directly from the Playstation classic Parappa the Rapper, which still has one of the best soundtracks in gaming. They got the music stuck in my head all over again. “When I say boom boom boom you say bam bam bam, no pause in between! C’mon let’s jam!
This is something I’ve been trying to make happen for some time. But then some work I put into it hit an unexpected snag (the maker of a library I had been depending on decided he wanted to be paid a subscription fee to use it or else he was going to put a nag screen on people’s projects), then other things came up, and so the project languished for months.
This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned LOADSTAR in these pages. The magazine’s name came from the commonly-entered command on Commodore 64 computers LOAD”*”,8,1, to load the first program on disk into memory, and sometimes also to run it. LOAD”(star)”, you see. I packaged one of its programs, Dungeon, for sale on itch.io for $5 some months back and mentioned it here. This is an opportunity to get the collection it was drawn from. I recognize this is a bit self-serving, but I don’t do it very often, and there’s so much on LOADSTAR that the world deserves to know about. The price of $15 is because that’s what Fender has always sold it for. The issues can also be gotten for free elsewhere, yes. This is mostly an opportunity to get them all at once, and with the Fender’s approval: the person most responsible for all of it, the driving force behind it, the one who always believed the most in LOADSTAR, its very heart and soul.
I had been working for an explorer program for getting the contents of issues and searching through them without having to load each issue individually, but it had been stymied by the issue I mentioned in the first paragraph. Something else I’d like to do is supply an emulator that will run the issues directly, with sensible defaults. The version that’s up has an absolutely ancient copy of VICE for Windows with it. It’s so old that I’m not sure if there might be security issues with it; I should probably just remove it. In any case, current versions of VICE are available for many platforms and are free and open source.
To start an issue, you first start up your copy of VICE. The Commodore 64 emulator included is x64, or else x64sc; the Commodore 128 emulator is x128. Under the File menu, choose “Smart Attach…,” then pick the issue from within the LS64 folder for Commodore 64 issues, or LSQ128 for Commodore 128 issues. Make sure to click the Autostart button: it’ll load the Presenter program and run it automatically! You’ll find both 1541 (*.d64) and 1581 (*.d81) disk images. 90% of the time you’ll want to load the 1581 version, because those disks were much larger and a whole issue could fit on one of them! The 1541 versions (which while growing up I had to put up with) are split up into four disk sides, and are a hassle. By the way: the 1541 disk drive was excruciatingly slow. If you press Alt-W, you can toggle “Warp Mode,” which will speed up loading greatly! Just be sure to toggle it back off once your program has loaded!
And something the collection really needs is a list of highlights of interesting things on each issue, and also a directory of the people who made this unbelievable wealth of software. Here’s a few names to watch for: Jeff Jones (Assistant Editor), Barbara Schulak (Puzzle Maven), Ian Adams (Mathematician), Maurice Jones (Card Game Implementor of Great Skill), Jim Weiler (Third in Command), J.C. Hilty (BASIC Game Programmer who never let it get him down), Nick Peck (Creator of A Couple Of Awesome Games), Jon Mattson (General Gamesperson) and Walt Harned (Pixel Artist Extraordinaire). If I could affix all their names in the stars for the world to see forever, I absolutely would.
To construct the itch.io page I needed some screenshots, so I dipped into a few issues to make them, and got the names of their makers along the way. Here you go, but understand this is only a tiny fraction of what’s included.
Zorphon by Nick Peck, from LOADSTAR issue 39. A rather polished space shooter! The aliens are drawn using character mode. I like the classic Astrocade-like font for the text.Pipe’s Peak by Bob Blackmer, from LOADSTAR issue 73. It looks like an action game, but I think it’s more of a timed puzzle?Outpost by Thomas Czarneki, from LOADSTAR issue 60. A fairly blatant Missile Command clone, but it’s well polished. The opening menu asks if you want to play to lose, or play to win. I think the difference is, playing to lose starts you on Wave 7.King’s Ransom by Scott Elder, from LOADSTAR issue 68. An interesting little game, you control a greedy king trying to scoop up coins before they fall into the lava. When a coin falls off the bottom, a gush of lava shoots up! There’s also skulls to avoid. In one of those little touches that you sometimes find in LOADSTAR software, if you wait on the title screen you get to see a hi-res illustration of the gameplay.Quadrilation by Dave Johannsen, from LOADSTAR issue 68. A two-player game, playable against a computer opponent with four difficulty levels. Take turns placing your pieces so they overlap with as many squares of the same color as possible.Stream, hi-res art by prolific Commodore 64 artist Walt Harned and included as part of The Compleat Walt.
I mentioned these a few days ago, but my favorite part of Mario Kart games these days is the in-universe ads for various Mario-themed automotive products. Whatever world these games are set in, it obviously doesn’t have to worry about global warming, because not only are there plenty of vehicular support companies there, but they’re all either themed or named after some aspect of Marioness. We’re not told literally anything about these companies other than what we can glean their promotional imagery plastered all over the place, but I presume that the Mario characters aren’t just spokespeople/things, but actually own and run them.
In Mario Kart 8, Super Bell Subway was an extravaganza of environmental world building, implying far more about the Mushroom Kingdom than we ever hoped to get, and Mario Kart World is like an extended version of that. As with most Mario games, the only elements that will carry over between games are the ones Nintendo thinks are sufficiently marketable, and even then they’re known to throw out characters that fall out of favor (R.I.P. Toadsworth). But we might consider these glimpses as one version of what every day life in the Super Mario World might be like.
Check out the Mario Wiki page for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe: Super Bell Subway, which has a complete list of the signage used in that track. It also mentions that most of that game’s tracks are mentioned on the route maps in that course, as if you could hop a train and go there. Maybe it gave Nintendo’s designers the idea to make Mario Kart World a single cohesive map?
Anyway, here’s some more track signage from this heavily car-dependent version of the Mushroom Kingdom.
“Put it down Donkey Kong. No. Don’t eat the car! Bad ape!”
A sign seen on a high building in Crown City. Maybe this refers to Rainbow Road?
A movie poster seen outside of Boo Cinema in Crown City. I guess Peach isn’t just royalty in Marioland, but a movie star too. Boo Cinema seems to be a chain. They’re open all day and all year, in case you want to watch a movie at four in the morning on Christmas Eve. It’s all good, the ghost staff doesn’t need to sleep.This seems like it might be a direct reference to the poster of some real-world movie, but I don’t know which it is.Large poster on what I think is the Koopa Construction building. The big tire refers to the big tire looming over Crown City, I think.The Dash company uses a standard Mushroom item as its logo.“We Build Your Homes. We Build Your Towns. We Build Your Dreams. Koopa Construction.” Is it just me, or does that sound a bit sinister?
Why would penguins, who don’t need to sled, start a sled company?
Sorry for the poor quality, these are snipped from the Nintendo Direct video, and blown up really far too. Is that Peach’s crown?
Foo? Foo?? A Smokey Stover reference in this day, age and country of origin? I also don’t know what a Batadon is, but from the logo I think it’s a flying Easter Island head.I’m sure there’s a good explanation for why the cosmic princess who travels the stars started a Greyhound competitor.
They added these signs to Toad’s Factory after the incident last month. That poor toad, maimed for life.
And, unrelated, under characters there’s this person:
Um, who in the name of the Question Block of Doom is that supposed to be?
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
This week’s find isn’t a romhack specifically, but a way of playing them, both in patching and running them in an emulator, in a fairly automated way, at least if the hack you seek to play is for an N64 game, and especially if that game is Super Mario 64. It’s Parallel Launcher.
Parallel Launcher is an all-in-one solution to running N64 hacks. When you first run it, it’ll install a small Retroarch binary for its own use and set it up for exclusively for a couple of N64 emulators. You can supply the path to a folder of N64 roms and BPS patches, and it’ll try to apply patches to the roms on the fly when you try to play them.
It also has integration with the website romhacking.com, which is not connected with the hack news site romhacking.net or its follow-up romhack.ing. I’m not sure what the full extent of this integration entails, but if you have Parallel Launcher and a properly set up SM64 rom, and click on a Play Now link on a hack’s page on romhacking.com, it’ll mostly-automatically download the patch, patch the rom, and run it for you, without you having to do anything else other than allow the link to be passed from your browser to Parallel Launcher. There’s even some integration to track what stars you’ve found.
Once set up, Parallel Launcher works well! One of the biggest obstacle to playing romhacks, after sourcing the rom images themselves, is the effort and focus needed to generate them. You obtain the rom, then the patch, then the utility to do the patching. Then you run the utility, supply the location of the rom and the patch, and then roughly half the time the patching fails. If you’re using a format like BPS you’ll be told, and will then have to get the right version of the rom file or figure out how to repair yours. If you’re not using BPS or a similar kind of patch, you won’t find out until you try to run the game.
None of these steps is very hard to understand, but it’s a big hassle. While Parallel Launcher won’t help you find versions of roms, it’ll do just about everything else for you. In the way of emulators and emulation tools, it’s available for most current and popular desktop platforms. It’s a useful tool for a hack player’s box.
