Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It isn’t always easy finding things for this weekly feature. Sometimes it’s backed up a month, sometimes though something gets scheduled just a couple of days after it premieres, and I have to scrape the barrel a bit. But not this time. Oh no.
Back in 2021, developer House House considered making an animated series about the Goose and its village. Nothing came of it, but they did make a four-minute proof-of-concept animation, and it’s wonderful. Please allow your day to be brightened, and moistened, once again, by the Goose:
An internal Nintendo metaphor for the Wii’s UI was “more channels for the TV.” It’s a particularly Old Dad idea for the Wii really, as even at that time broadcast TV was beginning to decline in popularity, but it may have made more sense in Nintendo’s home territory.
The experiences of these channels, the Mii Channel, the News Channel, the Weather Channel, the Shop Channel and the like, are receding in memory, although there are fan efforts to revive them and connect them to new information sources. But at the other end of their development life, of their pre-release development very little has ever been known. Early Wiis had stubs in their place, that only directed the user to installing a launch-day update. (I experienced this myself! I drove 140 miles in order to wait in a line for a Wii on its launch day, November 19, 2006. I’m objectively insane.)
Those stubs weren’t the true original versions of the Wii Channels, they had been in development within Nintendo for some time. Those development versions of the Wii software have never been leaked outside the company, but there exists footage of them from various sources. Bjohn on Youtube has compiled what we know about the development Wii Channels into a 21-minute video. Here it is:
There’s a fair amount there, including early versions of the Internet Channel and early evidence of plans to include DVD support. (The Wii has a fully-operational DVD drive, but to avoid playing a license fee to the DVD Consortium it cannot play DVDs without hacks.)
Some years back, as a casual remark in a place that I don’t remember, I said that Nintendo has a problem with using ideas that they didn’t come up with in-house. “Not Invented Here Syndrome” I may have phrased it. I forget the context too. It may have had to do with their refusal to use rollback code in internet multiplayer gaming, but there are other time where it’s seemed that there are things that are solved problems everywhere else, that Nintendo still has trouble with.
One of these things has been Achievements, a platform-recognized system where a player’s accomplishments are registered and stored, that can be observed outside the game and shared with others. Achievements began with the Xbox 360, and were soon after implemented by Valve in Steam, as “Awards” by Sony in the Playstation ecosystem, and even by fans playing games and romhacks in emulators as RetroAchievements.
One company that’s always avoided using them, despite being the oldest major console publisher still in operation, is Nintendo. They’ve avoided any cross-game recognition of skill or accomplishment, even though they’ve come close multiple times. Several of their games offer in-game recognition of accomplishments, in the form of “Stamps” or “Trophies” or “Stickers.” Super Mario Galaxy would post images on the Wii message board when the game was completed. When Miiverse was a thing, players could share messages with earned stamps from some games. But none of these systems had sharing outside of their respective games or individual consoles. None promises any account-level recognition.
Why is this? Nintendo’s games are enormously popular, and many players have rued the absence of any support for an achievement system, and to this day show no signs of starting one. Why? It seems like such an obvious thing. Everyone else does it. It would probably heap more value upon Nintendo’s bottom line, so why not?
As it turns out, it goes back to their Not Invented Here Syndrome. The person at whose fee the blame trail ends is unknown, but the evidence is there, in an episode of the Kit and Krysta show, available as a podcast with excerpts on Youtube. Hosted by two former Ninendo employees, who ran a periodic show that was promoted for a time on the Switch’s News channel, they tell the story of what happened when another employee brought up the possibility of offering something like achievements at a meeting. The recounting is in this Youtube video (4 1/2 minutes), with the important bit starting around 2:07:
From the transcript (there are some minor errors):
“I remember I think you were in this meeting too this was like a pre E3 meeting somebody pretty high ranking got absolutely eviscerated in a meeting by another person who is very high ranking because they were they were suggesting doing something things in the style of micros why don’t why don’t we do like Xbox does this thing really well why don’t we do that and this was like a really like packed full meeting I’m and this person was like a senior director this person got eviscerated in that meeting of like we do things our way this is the Nintendo way we cannot simply follow the path of what Xbox like it was just like it went on and on I was like it was like a 20 minute lecture […]
so there you go yeah they definitely don’t want to do like copy their competitors but they also have that sense of like no everyone’s equal we’re equal opportunist gamers right I think they also see this as like this is not a pure way of experiencing a game like you rushing through it or like only focusing on this thing like that’s not how you should play a game I kind of agree with that cuz we did some dumb stuff get those achievements that’s true and then they also like want you to play that game in a very specific way so they don’t want you to use a different system to like do it your way because they want they’ve built this game specifically in the way that they think that you’ll enjoy it the most and they’re going to want you to do that[…]“
EDIT: It looks like this post might have originally gone up without content! Evidently I didn’t publish it with text before its publish date, or maybe my login cookie expired in the meantime. Hopefully it’s up now!
Kaze Emanuar, an expert on Super Mario 64’s code who I’ve linked multiple times before, tends to bang on this drum, but they’ve now done a 20-minute video that treats the issue with detail. They tell us that the Ninendo 64 is a rendering monster, and Nintendo’s use of it isn’t really optimal, especially in the subject of his fixation.
The problem, they say, isn’t triangle count, but cache misses. The N64, we’re told, can really motor (“vroom vroom” is the phrase they use), but fetching code and data tends to bog down the system while the data bus gets the necessary data. If that information is already in the cache, then access is much faster, as in, it directly affects the frame rate.
According to his data, unrolled loops, a traditional optimization measure, are actually bad, because all those extra instructions cause extra data fetches to read them. It’s better to use the loop instructions to run through the same code repeatedly, because it can run completely from the processor’s internal memory. Nintendo’s culling system actually hurts performance in most areas, because the extra data needed to implement their system results in more cache misses. And their culling system only considers data that’s out of sight horizontally, which is such a big problem on the vertical area Tick Tock Clock that there’s a kludge in the engine to reduce draw distance on that one level to make up for it.
I know! I link a lot of technical stuff here. It’s of interest to my diseased brain! But it’s got to be interesting to some of you, right? Well for those readers to whom it is of interest, here it is:
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.
The title is a little mysterious. What is a Klex, and why is it named Blob? Or is Blobbing something that one does to a Klex?
As it turns out, Klex is a kittycat! A black cat, that looks, a bit, like a black blob that moves around. Klex is the name, Blob is what it is. I can ignore the order of the nouns in the title for cuteness factor.
Cat games are springing up in greater numbers. All spiritual descendants of their great ancestor Neko, more lately you play as the cat. Maybe Stray was what kicked them off, but more recently there was the wonderful Little Kitty, Big City. (I interviewed its creators over on Game Developer!)
Blog the Klex is a demo for another cat game, currently being worked on by Sigma Unit. It’s free at itch.io. It’s being worked on by a much smaller team, and there isn’t a lot to do in the demo, but it shows a terrific sense of whimsy. Klex is adorable, and plays differently from the unnamed kitty in LKBC. LKBC is quite a vertical game, with a lot of climbing around, but Klex mostly runs on the ground with some jumping.
Klex’s animation is “procedural,” meaning in this case that the game figures out where their front paws go, and the rest of the cat follows from that. As Klex runs, there’s a jingling, like of a jingle ball rolling along, that perfectly follows their foorsteps. It’s a case where the sum is greater than the parts: the cat’s head, eyes huge, staying perfectly level, while their paws move in a flurry beneath them, jingling away. It’s very cute. Then you hold the Dash button down, and it gets cuter. You have to experience it to understand. You should. Also, Klex is more apt to squeeze themselves into narrow spaces than the cat in KLBC, and has a very cat-like ability to walk on narrow ledges. They also have an uncat-like ability to turn themself into a bouncy ball. Maybe Klex is part Samus.
The game itself, as it currently is, is brief, a sequence of areas where it’s left to you to figure out how to progress. Like LKBC there is nothing that can harm the cat. The worst that can happen is you fall off of a roof, and the game voids you out and puts you back on the rooftop. (I don’t know why you can even fall off; there’s a lot of invisible walls around to keep you on track. Maybe they have later plans for those street areas.)
Most of it is straightforward, but there are a couple of places where you might get stuck, until you realize you can grab some moving objects by holding down the Interact button. Once you know that you shouldn’t have much trouble. You’ll know the demo is over because you’ll get a screen of credits.
Please give Blob the Klex a try! And enjoy a few screenshots:
A trick was discovered a scant few days ago in Balatro that will outright tell you what the top card on your deck is, it’s been in the game since the original demo release, and its an intentional inclusion by the game’s creator.
One of the many Jokers you can obtain in the game is Misprint. (See right) Misprint’s function is to add a random number from 0 to 23 to the hand’s “Mult,” the chip value it’ll earn. It displays this, amusingly, as glitched description text that changes, and occasionally displays random, apparently garbled text.
Well as it turns out, it’s not random text at all. It’s a code that tells you what the card on top of your deck is! It’s the rank of the card (2-14 for its rank) and its suit (H for Hearts, etc.)!
Misprint on the Collection pageThe trick in action — the next card is a 10 of Hearts!
Balatro is unusually devoid of other deck-peeking abilities. While there’s abilities that affect chips, Mult, Mult-multipliers, money, Tarot cards, Spectral cards and lots more, and you can at any time review what possible cards might be waiting in your deck, nothing will absolutely tell you what’s waiting for your next hand. And you don’t even have to have this Joker in play to use it, which is good, because it’s not great in many circumstances. If you go to the card’s spot in the Collection (provided it’s been gained at least once) and look at its description there, it still works! It’s been noted that it’ll even reveal the hidden identity of Stone Cards, which have their original values obscured by a layer of rock.
How does this affect the game? Well I’m going to go out on a limb and say, not as much as you’d think? It only reveals one card, and doesn’t say anything about its Enhancement, Edition or Seal. If you have more than one of a card, it’ll just tell you its rank and suit. That can still be used to deduce other properties of a card (if your only Red-Sealed Glass card is a 7 of Hearts, it’s a giveaway if Misprint reports a 7H) but it’ll require some setup, which is like nearly every other aspect of the game. It does slightly help you make specific hands, but even the best games of Balatro eventually run afoul of its ruthless ante scaling.
Every Set Side B post needs a link to a Youtube video, right? Here’s a breathless two minute one from BelenosBear explaining the trick:
Of particular note, Balatro University says they’ve known about this all along (18 seconds):
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Crash Bash was Crash Bandicoot’s attempt to move into the Mario Party genre of minigame compilations. It was the first Crash game to be made by someone other than Naughty Dog, and the last to be released exclusively for Sony platforms. In Japan, the game was known as Crash Bandicoot Carnival. All of this comes from the Wikipedia page.
The theme song music video seems to have been an unlockable in some version of Crash Bandicoot or its sequels. CBC had some other little videos included, including live-action bits with a lady and someone in a Crash mascot costume. It seems to be a retrospective of the previous Crash games, including kart racers and a little handheld device virtual pet that I don’t know the name of, but they were missing something if they didn’t call it a Crashigatchi. You also get to hear the lady say “Arabian Nigh-toooo!” free of context.
They total sixteen minutes in all, and they’re this week’s offering for Sundry Sunday. Enjoy them, won’t you? Thank you. Crash Bandicoooot, Crash Bandicoo-OOoot! Crashi-bandi-bandicoot!
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
It’s been a while since I, your favorite amorphous neon-green alien, have presented my whimsical take on Earth gaming news. I’ve mostly settled into an editorial role, consuming, digesting and excreting the work of others in an un-credited and, I assure you, sanitary capacity. This, as opposed to doing so for the news posts of other websites, which was time consuming, space filling, and of dubious interest to readers. I’m a humble amoeboid and can admit when something isn’t working.
But this story, from PC Gamer but no doubt from plenty of others too, is huge! Everyone at popular and prolific publisher Annapurna Interactive walked out! They released tons of games! They published Kentucky Route Zero! They published Stray! And Donut County, Outer Wilds and Wattam! And a lot of other games too!
Annapurna Interactive publishes adorable and somewhat upsetting animal imperiling adventure game Stray.
The surface reason is dismay over abandoned plans by owner Megan Ellison to spin their company off from owners Annapurna Pictures. If there’s some deeper reason, I wouldn’t have any way to speculate. Annapurna Interactive was highly successful, president Nathan Gary was promoted from it to head their movie-making parent, and screenplays based on their games are in production, including an animated movie based on Stray.
I’m sure there’s some deep story there behind literally everyone leaving the company. I’d presume the Pictures parent not wanting to lose access to such a useful source of projects, but the employees feeling betrayed by that? I can only speculate, in a way that gets more irresponsible the further I go, so I’m going to stop. Annapurna Interactive had a good, consistent track record of hits, and didn’t seem to alienate the studios publishing through them. That counts for a lot, from a publisher.
Keita Takahashi’s current project To A T
The walkout leaves a number of games currently in production in a state of 𝙿𝚄𝙱𝙻𝙸𝚂𝙷𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙻𝙸𝙼𝙱𝙾, including always-delightful Keita Takahashi’s upcoming To A T. Let’s hope everything works out for all involved.
I’ve saved this one up for a while. For those of you who remember when Minesweeper was distributed — for free?? — with every copy of Microsoft Windows. What are the odds that unlikely layouts, like 8s, or neighboring 7s, are possible in that game? Alternatively, is it possible to get a game that can be completed in one move? Find out here (16 minutes):
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.
It’s continually amazing what people manage to make within the modest resources of the Pico8 fantasy console virtual machine. This time it’s a decent demake of 2DBOY’s World of Goo, by VirtuaVirtue!
The objective is the same as the original: drag goo balls to build structures, to try to reach the pipe, which will then suck away all the excess goo balls on your construction. If you have enough left over, you win and get to move to the next level.
It’s quite challenging, it gets harder much faster than the original game. The physics of the goo constructions is much wobblier and bouncier than WoG, and goo balls don’t stick to walls here, so you’ll have to spend more goo balls on balances and counterweights. But it’s certainly not a bad thing to play around with for free!
The thing about Spelunky 64, a reimplementation of Spelunky on the Commodore 64, that gets me is how smooth the scrolling is. Smooth multi-directional scrolling isn’t easy to do on the C64 without hardware assistance, but here it handles it without apparent problem. Here is a 7-minute demonstration from Just Jamie:
It’s not the only obstacle Paul Koller (PaulKo64) had in making this surprisingly faithful recreation. It contents itself with the basic Atari-style joystick, with a single overloaded button. So up is used for jumping, tapping the button attacks, holding the button uses an item, down+button takes out a bomb, and up+button places a rope. It’s not perfect, and you have to be really careful in shops, but it doesn’t work badly.
It’s a long one today folks. To mark the release of the mobile version of poker-based time sink Balatro, let’s sit back, for two hours and 42 minutes, and watch Balatro University plot their way through the first eight antes of a game:
The video says it’s part 1 of 2, and ends after the nominal win, but the game doesn’t end there. If you want to watch the rest of the game, it’ll take another two hours and 27 minutes of your time, to get to Ante 18.
Irrelevant note in passing: the Youtube ID for this video contains four consecutive lowercase ‘u’s.
High-level Balatro is a game of extremely big numbers, and Ante 18’s requirements are along the lines of 5.53130, which in regular notation is 5,531,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Be still my beating heart! If you just want to jump to where the game starts to get insane, try this link to a moment a little into that video.
So if you don’t want to watch five hours of video but still wan to know something of what’s going on? First off they use a lot of Purple Seals. Every time a Purple Seal card is discarded you receive a random consumable Tarot card. Tarot cards have a bunch of uses. Two of them give you money, but most of them give you some way to modify your deck. Particularly, Strength lets you increase the rank of two cards, Hanged Man lets you destroy two cards, and Death lets you turn one card into a copy of a different one.
With enough Tarot cards you can perform potent crimes against power, like turning your entire deck into a single type of card! That not only makes some poker hands, like Four of a Kind, or the secret hand Flush Five, really easy to make, but it lets you exploit certain Jokers that operate on a different card each round. These Jokers always pick one of the cards in your deck at random, but if you only have one type of card, they have to pick that one!
The most valuable kind of Joker for the long haul is one that gives you multiple Mult Multipliers, and to retrigger those multipliers. A Glass card multiplies your Mult by 2; a Glass card with a Red Seal multiplies it by 2 twice; other Jokers that retrigger cards multiply it by 2 more times.
It sounds fairly simple written out here, but setting up this system is where the skill lies. While I observe that the real game of Balatro isn’t merely in performing these ludicrous offenses to mathematics, but in figuring our how to do them, watching a really high-level player smash through its strictures and rules might give you some ideas for improving your own game, even if you don’t follow Balatro University’s techniques exactly.
