Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Its from Dorkly, a gamer content channel on Youtube. I usually try to keep the finds we present here to one-person operations or similar. But the animation (2 ½ minutes) is entertaining, and it addresses the experience of those people standing to the side watching others beat the crap out of each other. I’m surprised they don’t take an accidental Hadoken from time to time. Doesn’t seem very safe to be at ringside for a Psycho Crusher.
I’ve brought upSimon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection here before. It was then, and still is now, one of the great wonders of the World Wide Web, a completely, utterly free, in both beer and libre, collection of randomly-generated puzzles of 40 different styles and counting, available for pretty much every platform. Not currently for Mac, because Simon’s Mac stopped working, but you’re free to compile it yourself if you can.
Let’s delineate the platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac (with the above caveat), Android, iOS, Java and even Javascript. You should be able to field one of those options, right? And which puzzles are provided? Black Box, Bridges, Cube, Dominosa, Fifteen, Filling, Flip, Flood, Galaxies, Guess (Mastermind without the trademarked name), Inertia, Keen, Light Up, Loopy, Magnets, Map, Mines(weeper), Mosaic, Net, Netslide, Palisade, Pattern (a.k.a. Nonograms, or Picross), Pearl, Pegs, Range, Rectangles, Same Game, Signpost, Singles, Sixteen, Slant, Solo (genericized Sokoban), Tents, Towers, Tracks, Twiddle, Undead, Unequal, Unruly and Untangle. Not only will the software generate an endless of stream of puzzles for you to solve, often with a user-selected difficulty, but some platforms will even print out books of these generated puzzles for you to solve, along with an answer key.
The puzzles I’ve boldfaced are what I call Nikoli-style puzzles. Nikoli is a popular Japanese puzzle magazine, the original home of Sudoku, and has a particular kind of logic puzzle that’s really satisfying to play. They usually have simple rules, but with profound implications, and with some thought you can deduce processes to help you solve them. Sudoku aficionados will immediately know what I’m talking about. The main subject of this post is about one of these Nikoli-style puzzles, Dominosa.
Nikoli specializes in human-created puzzles, and Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection creates its puzzles by computerized process. These kinds of puzzles really are better when set by hand. But that doesn’t mean the automatically-generated kind doesn’t have its place.
Also, Simon Tatham’s puzzles are completely free, don’t track you, and don’t have ads, making them a real rarity in this money-desperate age. If you need any proof that the app stores of Apple and Google are rigged against you, then consider that the Puzzles have been available on both their platforms for over a decade, but their discovery algorithms never seem to surface them. (Here’s some help in finding them: Google Play, Apple App Store.)
To give you idea of what kind of puzzles these are, and to get you on your way to solving one kind of them, here are my observations about Dominosa. The rest of this post is pretty long, so this is your chance to check out if you don’t want basic tips on how to solve it.
Dominosa, KDE version
Dominosa presents you with a grid of numbers, usually from 0 to 6 (you can choose to solve larger puzzles). The numbers represent the values on a field of dominoes, but the edges between them have been removed, leaving only the numbers of pips that would be on their two sides. Your job is to place dominoes on the field, over the numbers, to reconstruct where they were originally. The puzzle is solved when every number is accounted for, filling the board with exactly one domino of each pair of values, with no contradictions.
I’ll present a series of images representing working out one of these puzzles at a basic level of difficulty. Not all of them are as simple as this.
A Dominosa puzzle, from the Android version of Simon Tatham’s Puzzles.
The way I solve these, I first look through for pairs of numbers. If you’re on a version of the Puzzles with keyboard support, you can press a number to highlight all of its values throughout the board. If you don’t have a keyboard, there will usually be number buttons onscreen that fill the same purpose. There may also be Undo/Redo buttons; if there aren’t, you can use Ctrl-Z/Ctrl-R for that.
I start out by looking for all the zeroes. Here they are:
In a double-six puzzle like this one, there will always be eight of each digit. What I’m hoping to find is exactly one isolated pair of one of the numbers. There’s only one domino with each pair, from 0-0 through to 6-6, so a single pair means that a domino must be there.
No luck with Double-Zero, so I keep going, checking each number in turn. (You can only have up to two digits highlighted at once; pressing a number again turns off its highlighting.)
I have better luck with the 2s: there’s only one adjacent pair. So I click on the space between them to place a domino, as so:
In Nikoli-style puzzles, as you correctly fill out each little bit of the puzzle, it makes the rest of it slightly easier. When you make progress in solving it correctly, the puzzle seems almost to knit together, until the whole grid is complete.
It’s not just single pairs that are useful though. Sometimes you’ll find single triples, either in a straight line as here, or in an L-shape. So long as there aren’t any other adjacent digits of that value in the puzzle, then you know that one of the two possible pairs must be the correct one.
How is that useful? In the below case, there are borders between the digits that the two possible placements have in common. Since one or the other must be correct, the two domino edges that the possibilities share must be edges in the solution. We can mark edges in Dominosa with the right mouse button, or on mobile platforms with a long press:
Above I’ve placed the horizontal edges that the two possible Double-Three locations have in common.
Moving on. There’s a single pair of 4s, so I’ve marked that domino. And there’s an L-shaped arrangement of three 6s. It’s on the outside of the puzzle, so there’s really just one edge to place, like so:
I’ve also started on the second step of the puzzle, looking for non-identical domino pairs. This is where the ability to highlight two different numbers becomes useful.
Now we’re looking for each possible 0-1 combo. There’s three possibilities here, which isn’t helpful.
The process I use is to check for the dominoes with one zero: 0-1, 0-2, 0-3, 0-4, 0-5 and 0-6. After that, the remaining pairs beginning with 1: 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 1-5 and 1-6. When I move to the next digit, there’s fewer to check, because we’ve already done some: 2-3, 2-4, 2-5, 2-6; then 3-4, 3-5 and 3-6; then 4-5, 4-6, and finally 5-6.
Of the 1-2 domino, there’s only two places where it could be, so I can place edges alongside them. Also, there are two 1-6 pairs. But because we’ve ruled out one of them, when we tried the Double-Sixes, there’s only one pair left that could possibly be the domino.
Ah. Now we have one of the best things we can find: a dead-end. A place with a cul-de-sac, where a domino has to go regardless of its digits. Every digit in the puzzle must connect in one direction, and the 3 to the right of the 4-4 has only one way to go, so that must be where the 3-1 goes. And because of the two edges nearby, the 1-2 also has a location where it has to go.
The great thing about these placements is, they weren’t narrowed down from the lack of other pairs of digits. Since the 3-1 has to go there regardless, all the other 1s by 3s on the board can’t be options, so we can place edges between those numbers.
We’re lucky again; each of these edges produces mandatory domino placements, in the same way!
These, in turn, allow us to place another domino, a 1-4, and to block an edge between another 1 & 4. It results in an unfilled region of the puzzle with only one entrance. Dominoes have exactly two ends, so any region containing an odd number of digits is impossible. This lets us place a useful edge, between a 5 and a 6, because if the edge were below the 6 instead, the region would have 11 digits in it.
Continuing with checking for pairs, there’s a triple, a 1-5-1 with no alternatives around them. Since each puzzle must have exactly one 1-5, it has to be one of these two places, so all the other 1-5s in the puzzle must have edges between them.
And that means a mandatory placement for the 1-0.
Hah, I neglected the mandatory 6-2 at the right side of the puzzle! But I did find a single remaining instance of a 2-4, which I filled in.
And then I noticed the 6-2:
We’ve done about half the puzzle now, but really we don’t have much left to do. The 6-2 we place means we can place edges between the 2 and 6 at the bottom of the puzzle, as so:
We can hurry through the rest of the puzzle. There’s a single triple of 3-4-3, so we can place an edge above its 4:
There’s a single 3-6:
That creates two dead-ends, a Double-3 and 0-4, and then a 4-3:
From here, most of the rest of it can be worked out with the same principles. When we get to small areas like this, often figuring out where to place one domino, or even edge, makes the rest of its region obvious. There’s a small region with a single path into it, so the fact that regions can only have an even number of digits comes into play again.
This puzzle is almost solved, so let’s just jump straight to the solution:
As noted before, most puzzles aren’t this easy. Often after you’ve been through all the possible pairs of digits, you still have a significant amount of puzzle left to do. Usually, if you look carefully at the puzzle, you can figure out placements that, if made, will result in contradictions to the rules of the puzzle. If you find one of those, you can then place an edge between its numbers.
There’s a couple more tricks I know of, but they start getting harder to explain easily here. I’m by no means an expert: I’m sure that experienced Dominosa solvers know tricks I have yet to figure out. I also don’t want to explain too much about how to solve these puzzles, as I got a lot of entertainment in figuring out my solving process, and I’d hate to deny that to you. Most of the processes I’ve mentioned so far are pretty obvious implications of the rules. Revealing the less obvious tricks feels a bit like a spoiler.
One great advantage you have in solving Nikoli-style puzzles on a computer is the Undo feature. Like doing Sudoku by hand, if you reach a point where tricks fail you and solving algorithms leave you stranded, you can progress by making assertions, basically guesses, then working them through until you reach a contradiction. There’s a whole strategy to this: you want to make a single binary, this-or-that guess, and to pick an unlikely guess, one that will prove itself incorrect quickly. Then you can erase the marks you made following your guess, and then mark its opposite.
On a computer, you can undo until the point where you made the guess, with Ctrl-Z. On paper, you’d not only have to remember all the marks you’d made since the guess, but you’d have to erase them all, which makes a huge mess. If you undo too far, you can press Ctrl-R to redo the removed moves. It’s really a tremendous aid!
Give Dominosa a try, and see what you can deduce. If you want to try some of the other Nikoli-style puzzles, that feel similar but have a different process, I recommend Loopy, Slant and Bridges.
It’s been a difficult time here for the moment, so I’m doing low-effort posts at the moment. I have ideas for several more long-form posts, but if the posts be long, so is the time to write them properly. So, in the meantime, here’s yet another Youtube video on a random piece of video game hyper-esoterica.
It’s a good one this time though! A 25-minute video on using all kinds of glitches and tricks to avoid beating bosses in a game where every level ends with a boss!
Super Mario 2, USA version, isn’t a game that I don’t think of when it comes to glitches, and I’d wager it doesn’t for many of you either, so it’s a bit reassuring to know that it’s got as many weird ways to bend the game’s rules as do games like Super Mario Bros. and Ocarina of Time. The video’s from Retro Game Mechanics Explained, which, along with Displaced Gamers, are among my favorite channels for digging deeply into the actually assembly code of games, and figuring out exactly why they do, or don’t do, what they could/should. Along the way you’ll get a basic understanding of how SMB2USA handles connections between areas.
If you’re as obsessed with understanding how these games were put together as I am, it’ll be like sugar candy to you! If you aren’t, well, maybe you’ll find it interesting anyway.
The (very most barest) basics are explained in this five-minute video from Game Facts Special:
The (impossibly detailed) specifics are on Sonic Retro. Warning: you have no idea.
Can I summarize them briefly? Not really, but here’s the basics. The tiles link to a list of heights for that tile. If Sonic is traveling vertically up a wall, then the heights count as widths. If upside-down, then the inverse of the tile’s heights are used.
Every frame, Sonic emits four or five “sensors,” basically raycasts, around his feet and head. Those indicate where he’s standing and where the ceiling is. If he’s traveling vertically the rays are rotated 90 degrees in the proper direction, and for an upside-down Sonic they’re rotated 180 degrees. Additionally, each tile has a record of what its angle is, and that’s used for things like how it affects speed and what angle Sonic should jump at.
When going around a loop, Sonic’s sensors remain as normal until up past 45 degrees up the first ramp. Then his sensors rotate, and he’s now going up. 135 degrees around the loop, it rotates again, and again at 225 degrees, and one more time at 315 degrees. The same height values get used for each slope, just used for different purposes. It’s surprising it works as well as it does, really.
This seems like it’s going a bit too far to me. That’s the very phrase, “going too far,” that video creator 100th Coin uses, when he finishes Super Mario Bros. by swapping cartridges in mid-play.
And it’s not even really swapping cartridges. This is a TAS, a tool-assisted speedrun, so instead of physically removing a cartridge and putting in another one within a single machine cycle, it just switches rom images into an emulated machine’s address space.
It’s pretty ludicrous, but at least the video maker is upfront about this. Correction: they’re up front about it within their 40-minute video, but not in the title. The title is pretty click-baity, but I guess creators get views however they can in the Youtube hellscape of 2025, if content makers can survive.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
If you’ve been following Sundry Sunday for a while here, you might have caught on to a few trends. One, too many Nintendo characters. And two, I have a high resistance to schmaltz.
There’s fifty-pound bags full of unearned sentiment just laying around the Youtube platform, and most of it I will have no truck with. A lot of it depends on your past connection with characters, and despite surface appearances, I don’t have a lot of connection with game characters. And it feels like theft, to cloyingly play off of pre-existing characters in such cheap and easy ways.
But that’s not to say it can’t be done well, as in this short voice-acted slideshow that was released soon after the recent Super Mario Bros. Movie. The (newer) SMB movie definitely has its faults, but it also has some pretty deep cuts from throughout Mario’s history, and the best of those has to be Foreman Spike, semi-antagonist from Wrecking Crew, and Mario & Luigi’s boss in the mundane world of plumbing.
There are slight hints that, despite his abrasive personality, there is a tiny bit more to Spike than seems at first, and that’s what makes the slideshow, from GabaLeth, feel like it’s slightly more entitled to its emotion than your standard cartoon sugarjob. And it’s only a minute long. Here:
Final Fantasy games tend to have weird and crazy bugs, and VII was certainly no different. A bug beloved of speedrunners is called “Cloudsurfing,” where taking advantage of the way the game detects walkable overworld triangles and the way they’re cached to use Chocobos to walk over oceans and through mountains. Properly utilized, it can be used to skip a large portion of Disc 1.
Prior Final Fantasy games used a simple tilemap to represent terrain. Final Fantasy VII’s overworld switched over to a world made up of triangles, each of which with a terrain code that indicated which entities can traverse it.
The triangles, additionally, are divided into square chunks. No triangle extends outside its chunk. Additionally, in each chunk, the triangle vertices aren’t represented literally for each triangle. Instead, the triangle coordinates are indexes into a list of coordinates, all to save a bit more memory.
Now, while each chunk is much smaller than the entire overworld, each can have over 100 triangles, so the code does some additional optimization. It keeps track of the last six triangles Cloud has touched, and checks them first when moving. If a triangle in this list is touched, then the search is stopped without checking the 100+ other triangles in the chunk.
Now, chunks are loaded into memory dynamically as Cloud explores, both for interaction and for rendering. The game loads the 25 chunks immediately around him off the disk, and some more in the direction the camera is facing. These chunks are constantly going stale (going out of range) and being refreshed as Cloud moves and the camera changes direction. Chunks are stored in a linked list, so are usually located by pointers, which means the chunks don’t need to be actually moved in memory, but instead references to them are copied and moved around. Some older chunks stick around in memory, then, while new ones are loaded, and the new chunks get moved to the top of the list.
Now this is the hardest part for me to explain, as I don’t have the firmest grasp on it….
When Cloud boards most vehicles, his entity is despawned and the vehicle is created with an empty list of cached triangles. But when he gets on a Chocobo, his entity is not despawned. While the Chocobo has its own cached list of triangles, since Cloud is still being rendered on screen, his entity is preserved, and with it pointers to the last triangles he interacted with. These are kept, unused, while the Chocobo handles all of the collision and terrain checking.
When Cloud gets off Choccy, he still has a list of the last triangles he interacted with… but they refer to the data from the chunk he was last in. Now the game is smart enough that, if this is different from his original chunk, to refresh things, but if it’s the same chunk I think this doesn’t happen. But this doesn’t mean everything will work without problems. The chunks will probably be loaded in a different order, and that means the cached triangles will refer to different data.
And since the vertices themselves aren’t stored in the triangle list, but indexes* to another list of data, it’s possible for some of this data to come from outside of the expected area, and for there to be duplicated coordinates among them.
Due to the way FFVII figures out which triangle Cloud is in, if two of the points in a triangle are on the same location, the game becomes much less discerning about whether Cloud is inside it or not. And if all three of the triangle’s vertices are in the same spot, forming what’s called a point triangle, just a single dot, then the game can’t declare Cloud is outside of it at all! So long as that triangle gets checked first, then the game will think Cloud is inside that triangle, so long as he’s in the same chunk. This could potentially turn the whole thing walkable.
Did I get it sufficiently right? Watch the video, and decide for yourself!
* The English graduate in me demands I point out that I know I’m being inconsistent with the plurals of vertex and index. Properly, like how I’m not writing vertexes, I should be writing indices, not indexes. I think that index is used more in contemporary English, so I made an editorial decision to pluralize it in a more familiar way. There, explanation: given.
I had a bad fall from a bike a few days ago and my arm is still really weak, which has affected how much typing I can put into these posts. Still, I am getting better, and so here’s two videos of people installing Windows NT 4.0 to Nintendo consoles, using an ISO of the install CD and tools and information posted here, and in the Gamecube’s case some hardware mods.
This kind of hack isn’t of the type like people claiming to “install” Windows to a Nintendo DS, but in fact are using DOSbox running on the DS. They get a bit of credit for coming up with a clever solution, but it’s not running on the metal, in the parlance. This is about actually running literal Microsoft NT on the actual Nintendo Gamecube/Wii, with no emulation layers or similar shenanigan interposed between.
The first one is from “Spawn Wave,” who has the Bright Young Broadcaster style to his video, meaning, his records from a dark room of equipment, his camera close to his face, he speaks loudly and squeezes in that like and/or subscribe prompt early, and generally tries to impress personality into his video. Mind, I don’t think all of this has to be bad, and Spawn Wave is a lot less obnoxious than many other YouPotatoes I’ve seen. There’s a blessed lack of sound effects or swoopy editing. His video’s only nine minutes long, so if you’re pressed for time, this is the one to watch.
I tend to prefer videos more like Michael MJD’s overview, which is also much longer at 31 minutes. He’s installing on a Wii, which is more powerful and performs better, and doesn’t need hardware mods. His is of the Hands Intruding From Offscreen school of video, but he’s more laid-back, and with that much time can fit more information without having to squeeze it in. This is better for people wanting to positively luxuriate in the process of installing NT4 to systems not intended for it.
The question of why, oh why, someone would do this, must remain unanswered. Some people just like making computers do weird things. It’s an odd form of entertainment, but entirely valid. Now, when will someone get Linux running on CoreWar?
“Dr4gonBlitz” on Youtube found and played though a Nokia port of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. It makes for a very interesting watch for people familiar with the original. (38m)
The player’s style is hyperbolic, in the common Youtuber style, but he knows the original. Dawn of Sorrow was made as a Nintendo DS game first and foremost, using many of its hardware features including its two screens and touchscreen, and I’m surprised any port was made, let alone one for pre-Apple smartphones
I always find it interesting to see how games get redesigned for lesser hardware, like the Tiger Game.Com port of Symphony of the Night. In Dawn of Sorrows’ case, most of the game’s souls, items and weapons were removed, the map was mostly kept the same but had some changes, several bosses didn’t make it, and “Aricado,” Alucard in disguise, isn’t even in the game. On the other hand, they added in a new item called a “Lost Soul” that serves as an auto-activating, one-time extra life.
The video is worth a look for IGA-style Castlevania fans!
It got by me this year, but the now 20-year-old 7 Day Roguelike Challenge, a gamejam where people try to construct a complete roguelike within a week’s time, finished up Saturday.
Not only has it been around a long time, but a number of games have come out of it that went on to greater things. Jupiter Hell got its start as a 7DRL project called DoomRL. The amazing Jeff Lait has made a ton of 7DRLs, and many of them have some awesome twist, like a game where you can make portals, but where the portals result in the world through them being rotated and possibly allowing you to get mixed up!
Jeff Lait’s Jacob’s Matrix
There’s regular several very interesting games in the challenge each year! Its itch.io page is here. This year’s theme was, simply, “roguelike,” and 819 people have joined it so far! I can’t wait to see what they’ve made!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Vibri is from NaNaOn-Sha’s classic bring-your-own-CD rhythm game Vib-Ribbon. P. Carredo is a Youtube content maker who’s done a lot of videos starring the angular rabbit. And Roll Along is the last of the six playable songs in that game, notable for being difficult due to its fluctuating beat, which speeds up and slows down in a way that’s tricky to match.
Mix them all up and we have this music video. The second pink Vibri is her version from Vib-Ribbon’s sequel Vib-Ripple, which came out on the Playstation 2 and so has better graphic effects. (2 ½ minutes)
A couple of beloved Western game companies that use to exist but don’t any more include Atari Games and Bally/Midway. One that wasn’t quite so beloved, at least in my well-annotated book, was Acclaim, makers of Vexx, BMX XXX, and other games that, surprisingly, don’t involve the letter X. So naturally that’s the one that’s gotten revived, oh joy.
The Old Acclaim got started on the NES, and lasted until the Playstation 2 years. Mind you, like the current day Atari, there is no continuity of staff between the new and old Acclaims, just ownership of name, logo and possibly properities, so whatever will happen with this new Acclaim is so far unknown. The old Acclaim was noted for soul-killing PR moves like buying ad space on tombstones in order to promote Shadow Man 2. Note to the new company: don’t do things like that.
Just look at that edgy mascot warrior person. Would you be surprised to learn that it plays a lot like Mario 64?
Take a look at Vexx. It tries to be so dark and edgy, yet stars that moppet from the box art above. It’s almost adorable!
BMX XXX made news for having topless female nudity on some platforms, exactly what a bike racing game needed sure.
So the best advice I can give to The New Acclaim is, please, please, please, don’t be like the old Acclaim!