While patiently waiting for Roguelike Celebration 2025 to start tomorrow, here’s something completely different, yet still somewhat random. The Youtube channel “Hidden Saves” points out two hard-to-reach item boxes in Mario Kart 64: the one hanging from the balloon in Luigi Raceway, and the one over the rock, only accessible from the huge ramp, in Koopa Troopa Beach. Along the way they break down the method the game uses to decide what item to give you from any box. Big surprise: it’s usually determined by what place you’re in.
Here’s the video (10 minutes) Or, since they spend over half of the video explaining the boxes and their methodology, you can click here to go right to the gist.
What did they find? Both of these boxes are rigged to give you a Blue Shell every time you hit it, even if you’re in first, where using it will cause it to circle the track and hit you who fired it. It’s not the result, due to the balloon’s weird timing, of naturally only getting the Raceway box while far behind, or of the spil you always take after getting the Koopa Troopa Beacn box knocking you back. That’s what they report anyway.
This year it’s happening between Saturday and Sunday, October 25-26. That’s the day after tomorrow! There’s an unusually good roster this year, and I don’t just say that because I helped find speakers for it this year.
We’ve already had a preview event with a couple of great talks, including a real star, Jon Perry, who created two of the best games in UFO 50, Mini & Max and Party House. While I spent a lot of time with Mini & Max uncovering its many secrets, it’s but a small fraction of the time I’ve played Party House. (If you want to hear Jon Perry’s talk, from September, you can find it here, as well as Ezra Stanton’s talk on Synergy Networks in roguelikes, and Alexei Pepers’ Designing for System Suspense.)
Mixing Hand-Crafted Content with Procgen to Achieve Quality
1:30 PM 10:30 AM 7:30 PM
Max Sahin
Stuff: The Behavioral Science of Inventory
1:45 PM 10:45 AM 7:45 PM
Florence Smith Nicholls
Roll for Reminiscence: Procedural Keepsake Games
2:30 PM 11:30 AM 8:30 PM
Alexander Birke and Sofie Kjær Schmidt
Hoist the Colours! Art Direction and Tech Art in Sea Of Rifts, A Naval Story Generation RPG
3 PM Noon 9 PM
bleeptrack
From Code to Craft: Procedural Generation for the Physical World
3:30 PM 12:30 PM 9:30 PM
Zeno Rogue
The Best Genre for a Non-Euclidean game
4:30 PM 1:30 PM 10:30 PM
Cole Wehrle
Play as Procedural Generation: Oath as a Roguelike Strategy Game
5 PM 2 PM 11 PM
Jeff Lait
Teaching Long Term Consequences in Games
6 PM 3 PM Midnight
Ray
A Mythopoetic Interface Reading of Caves of Qud
6:15 PM 3:15 PM 12:15 AM
Johnathan Pagnutti
Wait, No, Hear Me Out: Simulating Encounter AI in Slay the Spire with SQL
6:30 PM 3:30 PM 12:30 AM
Jamie Brew
Robot Karaoke Goes Electric
7:30 PM 4:30 PM 1:30 AM
Stephen G. Ware
Planning and Replanning Structured Adaptive Stories: 25 Years of History
8 PM 5 PM 2 AM
Tyriq Plummer
Scrubbin’ Trubble: The Journey to Multiplayer Roguelikery
8:15 PM 5:15 PM 2:15 AM
Andrew Doull
Roguelike Radio 2011-Present
Sunday, October 26th
Time
Speaker
Talk
12:45 PM 9:45 AM 6:45 PM
Ada Null
Dyke Sex and Ennui: Generating Unending Narrative in “Kiss Garden”
1 PM 10 AM 7 PM
Younès Rabii
We Are Maxwell’s Demons: The Thermodynamics of Procedural Generators
1:30 PM 10:30 AM 7:30 PM
Dennis Greger
The Procedurality of Reality TV Design – An Overview
4:15 PM 1:15 PM 10:15 PM
Paul Dean
Picking up the Pieces: Building Story in a Roguelike World
4:45 PM 1:45 PM 10:45 PM
Patrick Belanger and Jackson Wagner
Hand-Crafted Randomness: Storytelling in Wildermyth’s Proc-Gen World
5:15 PM 2:15 PM 11:15 PM
Nifflas
Music algorithm showcase
6:15 PM 3:15 PM 12:15 AM
Seth Cooper
Building a Roguelike with a Tile Rewrite Language
6:30 PM 3:30 PM 12:30 AM
Quinten Konyn
Anatomy of a Morgue File
6:45 PM 3:45 PM 12:45 AM
Alexander King
Don’t Pick Just One: Set-Based Card Mechanics in Roguelike-Deckbuilders
7 PM 4 PM 1 AM
Brian Cronin
Playtesting Process for Ultra Small Teams
8 PM 5 PM 2 AM
Mark Gritter
Sol LeWitt, Combinatorial Enumeration, and Rogue
8:15 PM 5:15 PM 2:15 AM
Dan DiIorio
Luck be a Landlord – 10 Lessons Learned
8:45 PM 5:45 PM 2:45 AM
Liza Knipscher
The Form and Function of Weird Li’l Guys: Procedural Organism Generation in a Simulated Ecosystem
If some of these talks seem like they’re spaced closely together, some of them are “lightning talks,” very short. Those have their titles in italics in the above list.
If you follow indie gaming circles, there are a fair number of exciting speakers among the talks! Jeff Lait (homepage) has made twenty highly interesting roguelikes, many as 7DRLs. Nifflas of course is the creator of Within a Deep Forest, the Knytt games, Affordable Space Adventures and others. Dan DiIorio is the creator of the oft-mentioned (at least in my hearing) Luck be a Landlord, and Zeno Rogue makes the long-lived, and brain-bending, HyperRogue.
And make sure to have a look at the Redbubble and Steam links too! In this year’s Steam selection, MidBoss and Shattered Pixel Dungeon are already on sale.
It’s your annual reminder that adamgryu’s Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival is online and live again, through and a couple of weeks beyond Halloween.
Log in, carve up a gourd with the easy mouse-based controls, and submit your new orange child to reside on the shelves for people to gawk at and wonder over.
My contribution for 2025
And some of the pumpkins that were up when I logged in this year:
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
I was recently reminded of one of my favorite works of interactive fiction, the text adventure Lost Pig (And Place Under Ground), which can be played here.
It’s a comedy game where you play Grunk the Orc, a good-natured green person who works at a farm, but unfortunately let the pig out, and he’ll lose his job if he doesn’t bring it back. This rather minor quest is complicated by the fact that the pig isn’t so easily caught, and both Grunk and the pig fall into a small set of underground rooms at the start. The chambers are the home of a friendly gnome, who at the time was recognized as one of the most conversational characters in all of IF, capable of talking about dozens of topics. The game even has an optional feature that suggests things you can talk to the gnome about!
Example of play, from start
But the highlight of Lost Pig is Grunk himself, who talk caveman speak like this, no article and refer self in third person. As Grunk describe himself: Grunk orc. Big and green and wearing pants. You can have Grunk take his pants off, to the embarrassment of everyone but Grunk (that includes the pig). Grunk may seem a bit stupid at first, but Grunk’s smarter than he sounds. Unfortunately, your formidable adversary, the pig, is pretty smart too.
A lot of IF can be a bit imposing. Difficult puzzles! Lots of ways to die! Saving often! Long play times! While the puzzles in Lost Pig are challenging, there’s not many ways to actually lose (unless you do some obviously bad things, like burning down the forest at the start). You don’t have to worry about making the game unsolvable, which frees up brain space to focus on solving puzzles. It is a very pleasant little game that won multiple awards at XYZZY 2007. As it turns out, the game is a sequel to Grunk’s LiveJournal, which tells about his previous adventures in the army. (2002-2007)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
This week’s subject: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
The first LoZ didn’t have much ROM space for whimsy, but every Zelda game afterward made sure to spare some space, and time, for goofy characters.
Zelda II had Error and Bagu (a.k.a. “Bug”). Link to the Past had that bat that “cursed” you with a doubled magic meter. Link’s Awakening, basically, had everyone. And so forth.
One of the darkest Zeldas is Twilight Princess, the story of a lost race of Hyrule that was sealed away in a parallel dimension by its oh-so-helpful goddesses. But it’s also the game with Agatha the Insect Princess. And it’s the game with Malo.
After an unfortunate fate happens to Kakariko’s shopkeeper, the town’s shop stands empty. Around that time Link rescues three children from Moblins, and the youngest is the surly Malo, whose baby-like appearance and stern expression contrast hilariously with each other.
As it turns out, Malo has plans for that empty shop, for when Link visits at a later time, it has turned into… Malo Mart (31 seconds):
Malo Mart is where Link can buy the Hylian Shield, but also the Magic Armor, a hugely powerful piece of protective equipment that converts damage Link received into rupee costs. As long as your money holds out, even the final boss can’t scratch Link, and, somehow, it’s all thanks to Malo.
In the half-minute video above from Patrick Alfred, Malo himself doesn’t actually appear, although that is his face is plastered all over the outside. The shopkeeper is an employee; Malo himself can’t see over the counter. I assure you though, the music in the video is directly from the game, in all its dubious glory.
The Youtuber is Jenna Stober, and she tells us right off that the problem with the games on display at the Nintendo Museum, many of which are rare or limited to playing at the museum itself, is that your ticket comes with ten “coins,” each game costs a number of them (up to four), there’s no way to get more except to get more tickets and visit more times, and there’s more cost in games than one ticket’s worth of coins. You can’t try everything, and if you pick games that aren’t fun, you’re just going to have a bad time, and that seems to be by design.
In her 11-minute video, the reviews, not all the games, but the ones most worthy of calling out as good, or meh, experiences, with enough detail to be able to figure out if your opinion just might differ. Given that tickets are limited, available mostly via drawing, and you can only even use cards that use a “3D Secure authentication service,” bleh, it’s really good to know what to focus on before you arrive at your date-and-time-limited ticket appointment.
The video’s title says it’s a review of “(almost)” every game there, but it doesn’t say which games she didn’t review. No explanation is given as to why.
The games she covers:
Shigureden, a card-matching game that hearkens back to Nintendo’s roots as a playing card company
Game & Watch games playable via your shadow, Manhole and Ball
Ultra Hand (an extendable arm toy originally designed by Gunpei Yokoi) demonstration and play, pretty cheap at one coin
Ultra Machine (a mechanical wiffle-ball batting pitcher also designed by Yokoi), another physical toy, allowing you to wreak playful havoc by allowing you to hit balls towards objects in a simulated living room, some of them would be breakable in real life; seems like Nintendo is poking fun at the destructiveness of their own past products; also cheap at two coins, and there’s even different rooms to play in
Big Controller is just playing emulations of various Nintendo games using a gigantic controller (she presumably makes an error by saying one of them is a Playstation controller, but I haven’t been so maybe she’s right), they require two people to operate and if you’re alone they may (or may not?) supply a staffer to play with you
Love Tester, a device to test your fake compatibility with another person, and another Yokoi invention, but this is more of a number of games designed around the idea of the thing
Retro Arcade’s review says you can play “NES, SNES or Playstation games,” which also seems like a fairly big error (maybe she meant to say N64?), but this is just playing Nintendo products, and via emulation too, which she points out
Zapper and Scope is a large-scale multiplayer co-op light gun game; unlike Ultra Machine you aim at a screen instead of physical objects; this is the most expensive game at four coins, but also short
Hanafuda, the classic Japanese card game, also a reference to Nintendo’s past; intrinsically two-player and best played if you brought a friend, though an employee will play if you’re sad and alone; BTW, if you want to try this without visiting the museum in Japan, the DS version of Clubhouse Games has Hanafuda included as one of its many traditional games, and will even tell you the rules, supply a computer opponent for you, and not tell you which card to play.
I had thought about doing this as part of a Romhack Thursday, but I didn’t get it together in time for yesterday. And anyway, it’s not a hack of another game, but a homebrew title for the Genesis/Mega Drive. And it’s quite good!
While it has a recreation of the original Q*bert, the main attraction to Mega Q*bert is Mega Mode, which adds a lot of new elements to the game. It takes inspiration, not just from arcade Q*bert, but from Konami’s Q*bert for NES and the underrated Q*bert 3 for SNES. It even borrows bits of Q*bert creator Jeff Davis’ own unreleased arcade sequel, Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert: Q*bertha returns from that game, a chaser character that can change cube colors herself. Later on, as in FHMCQ, that are levels where Slick and Sam change cubes to an unsolvable color, and only Q*bertha can return them to play.
Some other new elements, joining the balls and baddies of the arcade games:
The Red Balls have tiny fast and huge slow versions, they behave the same but the difference in timing makes them tricky. Along with them are “Stop and Go” balls, which change speed.
There’s new purple octopus enemies that generally fall down the pyramid, but can meander unpredictably, including up and sideways.
A relative of Slick and Sam shows up later on, who in addition to wrecking your work can skip cubes on the way down, including jumping right over your head.
There’s also static disks that can be reused (a borrowing from Q*bert 3), disassociated playfields that disks must be used to travel between, cubes that can only be left in certain directions, one-hop cubes that disappear when landed on (and provide an alternate way of tricking Coily to its doom), and more. And there’s a two-player co-op mode too!
I won’t say it always has the best design. I’ve found at least one situation where the one-hop cubes can make a level unsolvable unless you lose a life, which resets them. And the way the balls move make some routes very difficult to ascend, due to their frequent tumbling down and blocking narrow paths. But these challenges, once you’re aware of them, can be overcome, and the game has passwords for every level anyway. If you like the original game, you’re sure to have a good time with Mega Q*bert.
Here is a full playthrough by its creator Jaklub. It’s pretty long (2 hours, 9 minutes)!
Mega Q*bert (rom for Genesis/Mega Drive by Jaklub, free download)
People familiar with MS-DOS should be right at home, although some commands are different. (That’s because MS-DOS changed them; it was originally made as a CP/M clone.) One major difference is the absence, in this version, of disk directories. Instead there were up to 16 numbered “user areas,” each its own individual region on the disk, kept separate from the others. CP/M was an amazingly compact system, a single floppy disk could host a half-dozen compilers and have room to spare.
#2: Speeding Up PETSCII
Commodore BASIC was notoriously slow, but also feature-poor. A version of the same Microsoft BASIC that was co-written by Bill Gates himself, and was later ported to MS-DOS as QuickBasic. This page is a collection of different ways to speed up printing PETSCII characters, covering several optimization techniques, one of them, avoiding IF statements, being non-obvious.
Our retro arcade strategy week is over, but this is a related video that I’ve been sitting on for quite a while. The Disconnector made a very nice strategy video (20 minutes) for Namco’s cult favorite cat-and-mouse game Mappy. It works as both an introduction and a guide to the game as it develops.
Not only is the information good, but it’s really well put together! Looking through the rest of their channel, while the post about other games (most recently about Robotron [8 minutes]) it seems to be the only strategy video of its sort. I hope they make more, I think they have a talent for it!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I have a bit of fondness for the Chaotix, the oddly-named Sonic side characters, just because they’re so bizarre. They’ve never headlined a game themselves, and actually haven’t been playable that often, but they keep turning up.
They started out as helpers in Knuckles Chaotix, that bizarre 32X game that kind of played like Sonic, except instead of Sonic you had Knuckles, instead of Tails you had one of a randomly-selected number of weirdos including Vector the Crocodile, Espio the Chameleion, Charmy the Bee, and also Mighty the Armadillo, and robotic challenge characters Heavy and Bomb. And also, you were connected by a chain, that made playing something like having your fingernails pried off.
The Chaotix Detective Agency. What idiot decided these loonies should have a private investigator’s license? Espio (purple) tries so hard to be cool, with his anime poses and his spiked wrist and ankle bands; Vector (green) looks tough but is really friendly; and Charmy (yellow) is a goofball.
The nebulous word “Chaotix” was declared in Sonic Heroes, the other major game where Vector, Espio and Charmy are playable, to be the “Chaotix Detective Agency,” where they presumably make their anthropomorphic animal living hunting down child support evaders and doing miscellaneous disreputable work. After that, they’ve stuck around as bit players in the Sonic saga, always on the sidelines but frequently present. After all, the Sega All-Stars Racing games need bunches of characters to match Mario’s populous cast, and the Chaotix help to do that.
So, there’s these two reptiles and an insect that hang out with Sonic and pals for some reason. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and i guess a third unspecified person) are a crocodile, chameleon and bee.
Early concept art of Sonic in a band, with a bunch of forgotten animal friends, and what may be Vector’s first appearance. Look out for that guitar-playing chicken Sonic, he wishes you ill!
Yet, I like them! They’re nuts! If your world is gonna have anthropomorphs in it, that no one questions the existence of, then there should be more than just the heroes. That’s who the Chaotix are: True Neutral hangers-on in the Sonicverse. If they make a Sonic 4 movie they rightfully should be in it, although I wouldn’t put any money on it in any way at all. Also, I like that, addition to wearing headphones constantly, when tall and thin Vector jumps and spins, he becomes a loop.
I don’t care what you say, that’s just cool.
So we move on to the videos. In this animatic (1½ minutes, by sideofmeggs, audio by Jehtt) they ponder their existence in a way they’re never allowed to do in the games.
You play Q*bert, and at first it seems simple. Level 1, you jump on each cube once. Slick and/0r Sam may change them back once in a while, but you can just jump on them again.
Level 2, you jump on each cube twice. That makes each level twice as long, but still not much of a problem. The rising difficulty here comes from more and faster enemies.
Then you reach Level 3, and Q*bert becomes a much different game. Now jumping on a solved cube unsolves it. If you don’t work out how to handle this, levels can drag on indefinitely. It’s a bit of a wall for players here, and Slick and Sam become much more annoying.
Level 4 is similar, except you have to jump on each cube twice, and jumping on one after it’s complete changes it back to the intermediate color. But worst is Level 5, where jumping on a solved cube changes it back to the original color. This is a huge change, for it means the pyramid can actually become unsolvable without using a Disk, or waiting for Slick or Sam to come in and reset some of the cubes. For more details, I refer you to the video. You know, the one I embedded a few paragraphs up. Go! And if you think that’s nuts, check out what happens in the unreleased sequel Faster, Harder, More Challenging Q*bert (GameFAQs link).
Something I’ve thought is interesting about Q*bert, which is also true of Pac-Man, is that it’s like a turn-based game, but where you can play around with the timing of the moves. I’ll try to explain.
While both games let you decide when to make decisions, both encourage playing in a discrete, point-by-point way. When Q*bert lands on a cube, there’s a limited number of decisions they can make, other than waiting to make your move. In Pac-Man, your moves are constrained to the maze paths, but you can turn slightly early, you can pause when you hit a wall, and you can double back at any point. You usually don’t want to pause or double back in that game, because they introduce uncertainty in patterns (although a few patterns rely on them, which makes them much harder to perform). Q*bert is resistant to patterns, using pseudorandomness to affect the paths of the balls and most enemies, and the player’s ability to break out of the rigid temporal confines of that game’s movement is more helpful.
Contrast both games to Robotron and Defender. Those games have “free” movement, they’re not confined to a playfield with limited choices but let the player move around how they want. In actuality they’re games where the turns are taken in real time each frame. That adds a much greater role for player skill, but it also requires you to be much more precise.
