Author: rodneylives

Zelda Day 2025

“Zelda Day” is a random thing over at Metafilter. One day long ago, on December 26th, there was a day in which three Legend-Of-Zelda-themed posts were made in one day. Since then I’ve commemorated the event by making another Legend of Zelda post on the same day each following year.

Here is this year’s post, but you don’t have to follow it because I’ve included the links in this post too.

They’re all videos this year. These first links are to videos by Skawo:

In Minish Cap, there are certain names you can’t put on your save file due to a checksum bug. (11 minutes) The same bug can result in a valid save file being declared corrupted:

I think I mentioned this one before, but again, in Ocarina of Time, if you go back the way you came during the event in Kakariko Village, the world will become a glitchy mess (7 minutes):

In early versions of Ocarina, holding down R while talking to King Zora when he gives you the Blue Tunic causes him to give you a different item instead (14 minutes):

Also in Ocarina of Time, in some areas there’s a mysterious square in the upper-left corner of the screen (6 minutes):

When fighting pairs of Stalfos enemies, the game starts to lag heavily when you defeat one of the two, before the other one is beaten (9 minutes):

Capsyst Animations made three fake commercials for early Zelda games, in the style of the evocative illustrations from the manual. There’s the original Zelda, Zelda II and Link to the Past (all 1 minute long):

And, finally, here are two strange commercials for the Zelda 1 on NES, the Zelda Rap, and whatever this is supposed to be (both ½ minutes):

Sonic on the Amiga: Mega Drive Sprite Pushing

It’s Christmas Day! So naturally the best thing to do is to settle in for a deep dive on programming sprites on an Amiga (20 minutes), from the guy who recently ported Outrun to the Amiga, reassembler.

The Amiga has hardware sprites, but they’re fairly limited. Most programmers prefer to use its powerful blitter hardware to simulate sprites, drawing them to screen memory much more rapidly than non-blitter hardware can. For more information, I refer you to the video.

That’s it for today, but there be something more substantial tomorrow….

Multilink Monday: 12/22/25

Slowly making headway against a year’s worth of accumulated links. Please enjoy whatever takes your interest.

1. Sega’s One-Sided History, from The History of How We Play, about the tensions between Sega’s Japanese and American management.

2. From Mugen Gaming, working on a translation of Japanese TTRPG Sword World, with a crowdfunding campaign to begin in 2026. Included here because Sword World is soaked in video game influences. It really is a case of back-and-forth around the world: Wizardry and Ultima inspired Dragon Quest, Dragon Quest inspired other JRPGs, and then those JRPGs influenced Sword World. And to go with it, a nearly-complete fan translation of a Super Famicom Sword World game.

3. Martin Piper takes a look at the 3D wireframe driving game Stunt Car Racer for the Commodore 64. (45 minutes) From 1989, it did a number of things that you wouldn’t have thought possible on an unmodified C64, and he pieces through its programming.

4. At Retroevolve, Mandy Odoerfer describes the charm of bootleg Pokemon games, games like 2003 Pocket Monster Carbuncle and Pokemon Vietnamese Crystal.

Image from the article, up on Retroevolve

5. The Splatterhouse Homepage, an oldschool webshrine, is still updating, and has a new page on the recent dumping of an unreleased sequel to Splatterhouse Wanpaku Graffiti, called Splatterworld, although I notice that one of its downloads is actually dated to 1993. Hmm, curious!

6. Userlandia exhaustively explored everything at VCFMW this year! (1 hour) I agree: there was a right ton of stuff there to explore!

    Sundry Sunday: Videogame Christmas Radio

    Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

    I was going to use Pannenkoek’s Christmas video this week, but then realized that I used that one last week. Serves me right for doubling up!

    Instead have a listen to this collection of video game songs with a Christmas vibe. There’s no length notice because it’s a 24-hour-a-day livestream. Here!

    60 Animated Nintendo Commercials

    YES I KNOW, yet another Nintendo thing. Nintendo Adults are the video game version of Disney Adults, in so many ways. One more way now because there are actual Nintendo theme parks.

    I maintain that I am not a Nintendo Adult. But they have had a long history of making inventive and interesting games. I thought they’d been failing a bit at that lately, but then comes Kirby Air Riders, as weird and distinctive game as they’ve ever published. (By the way, did you know that they’ve put up Christmas decorations on the Kirby Air Riders menu screen and paddock area?)

    Happy Christmas from a star-shaped planet

    The holidays tend to be a time of distraction for me, so let’s just gawk at some animated Nintendo commercials from across the years. (26 minutes)

    PC-88 Versions of Nintendo Games

    It was a weird time. Around the time as the Famicom was just getting started, Hudson Soft struck a deal with Nintendo to release some of their games for the PC-88 Japanese personal computer platform.

    Many of these games had weird differences from Nintendo’s originals. The best known of them is probably Super Mario Bros. Special, a very weird version with paged scrolling, which is to say, no scrolling at all, but just flipping forward one screen at a time. Super Mario Bros. Special isn’t on the subject page of this post, which is old enough that it’s only available on the Wayback Machine, but it is on the website World Of Stewart, and wonder of wonders that page is available on the living internet! Playthroughs of the whole game, in its clunky miscolored XOR-sprite glory, can also be seen on Youtube, here, for instance. (51 minutes)

    You can tell the page is old because it has a Digg social media button. (Wait, what’s that? They’re trying to revive Digg?) Please excuse the Wayback Machine banner stuck in the middle of the screenshot, it’s an artifact of Firefox’s screenshot tool.

    There was also Punch Ball Mario Bros., which took the basic premise of Mario Bros. and just, well threw it away, just tossed it right in the trash, and replaced it with punching a ball around to attack enemies. Gameplay of that is also on Youtube. (5½ minutes)

    Another version of Mario Bros., Mario Bros. Special (which isn’t Super Mario Bros. Special but something else) It’s harder to find Youtube video of that because Google assumes you must be looking for the Super version, but it can be found. (8½ minutes) If you recognize the title screen music from that then you are really a supergeek! (I did recognize it, so yes, that includes me.) And the game, wow… it really doesn’t look fun to play.

    Some other games listed include Excitebike (11 minute video), Ice Climber (7½ minute video), the (only slightly Nintendo and with janky music) HAL Hole-In-One Golf (15 minute video), and (the very non-Nintendo) Chack’n Pop (4 minute video). Hole-In-One is a predecessor of Nintendo’s Golf, if you’re looking for that Nintendo connection.

    One thing all of these games, except maybe Hole-In-One, have in common is they look like they’re excruciating to play now! They either have way too fast or slow controls, or ear-tearing scratchy music, or both. But they are interesting as curiosities, so here they are. Curious!

    Strange and Wonderful NEC PC-8801 Games (Wayback Machine)

    Action Retro Demonstrates PS2 Linux

    It’s a weird bit of console gaming lore than Sony was so proud of the PS2’s Cell processor that they actually officially ported Linux to it. All you had to do was buy the “Linux Kit,” which contained two DVDs, a module that added monitor-capable video out and Ethernet ports, and a “gigantic” 40GB hard drive.

    As it turns out, the PS2 was actually all that great a Linux machine, and it was soon outclassed by PCs. That hasn’t stopped there from being a Playstation Linux community, with a website that sadly announces that it most soon close down in a post dating to 2009. It feels a bit like one of those “Closing Liquidation” signs that sometimes stores that have no plans of shutting down put up, in the hopes of attracting some extra customers. Oh well, I’m sure it’ll perish eventually, such is the way of all things. I just hope they can hold out a few extra decades.

    Here is the video (20 minutes), although note that it contains a sponsored segment. This link skips past it. Michael MJD also tried it out a couple of years ago (27 minutes), if you’d like to see their reactions.

    Some observations:

    • Buying a complete unopened PS2 Linux box nowadays can cost you well over $1,000.
    • It was released in 2002; Linux itself was first created in 1991.
    • It’s based on the Japanese distribution Kondara, which itself was based off of Red Hat, and it shows due to it using RPM for its package format.
    • It runs WindowMaker for its GUI, which is based off of NeXTSTEP, the predecessor of the GUI used in current-day macOS.
    • In 2025 this is very much a Stupid Computer Trick, or perhaps a Stupid Console Trick, but ActionRetro has so much fun running OSes on various unexpected hardware that it’s difficult to fault him for it.

    Leaving Kakariko Village At The Wrong Moment Makes Hyrule Go Crazy

    Wow, Ocarina of Time has some bizarre glitches. There is one where if you talk to a character with a specific object in hand, you get absolutely the wrong item in return. I need to pin down the details so I’ll talk about that one later.

    In the meantime, here’s another ridiculous glitch, explained by Skawo. (7 minutes) Skawo’s style is to use onscreen text to do the talking, which I can appreciate since I usually have subtitles on anyway.

    In brief, due to the way the game handles weather, if you enter Kakariko Village during a certain story event, then leave it immediately, it starts raining heavily, then doesn’t have the chance to stop. The game handles lighting separately for each time of day and each kind of weather. Kakariko has a table for the specific kind of weather for that event, HEAVY_RAIN, but most places don’t, so the game refers to a table of garbage data to provide lighting for places. That causes Hyrule Field to take on a bright purple hue, among other places. Have a look!

    Multilink Monday 12/15/25

    Another session of links from my huge For-SSB browser tab group, presented here with minimal comment in the hopes of clawing back a bit of RAM.

    1. Fan patches English into Wizardry VI for Saturn.

    2. The unreleased web browser for the Gamecube. (8 minutes)

      3. Read Only Memo on a recompilation of Dinosaur Planet, Rare’s N64 game that got reconfigured into Star Fox Adventures on Gamecube, their last game made for Nintendo before Microsoft bought them. (They did make some portable games after that, like It’s Mr Pants for Gameboy Advance and a port of Diddy Kong Racing for the DS.)

      4. Max Fog on Interactive Fiction blog The Rosebush writing on the history of Infocom and the Z-Machine.

      5. A Sonic the Hedgehog romhacking tutorial. (15½ minutes)

      6. Pictochat Online.

      Sundry Sunday: The Amazing Circus, and Christmas in Mario Land

      Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

      Two new items. The short one first, a brief holiday video from pannenkoek, the Mario 64 expert. It isn’t about beating the game without pressing the A button, nor is it a deep dive into the game’s internals in such a way that you could use it in a computer science course. It’s just Christmas as it’s celebrated on Cold Cold Mountain, with festive decorations and multicolored penguins. It’s only a minute and a half:

      You want something longer? The Amazing Digital Circus just released episode 7, and it’s much darker than past episodes. What’s that, you think it’s been plenty dark already? Well, now it’s even more so, despite the fact it’s titled Beach Episode and features the return of the Sun. (33 minutes)

      Not long ago the creators mentioned that Amazing Digital Circus was never envisioned as a long-term series, that just keeps running on and on, and I think I remember them saying the plan was for about nine or ten episodes? Not many of those left. I wonder if afterwards Gooseworx will get back to continuing her personal series, like the adventures of Elaine or Darly Boxman, or maybe something else like Little Runmo?

      Super Monkey Ball All Glitch Breakdown

      This one is incredible. The Monkey Ball games are as hardcore as they come, and, for the most part, have reasonably accurate physics that’s consistent under normal circumstances. But normal circumstances do not apply at extremely high speeds, where weird edge cases in the engine become much more likely to affect the ball’s travel.

      Nambo created a video that showcases every Super Monkey Ball glitch, for the first two games at least. The video title calls them techniques, but I think glitches more accurately describes what’s being explicated here.

      The video is amazingly complete and is 42 minutes long. It takes some kind of ridiculous ultrageek to watch the whole thing. Yes, I did that, why do you ask? Are you going to do it too? If you don’t it’s no skin off of your nose, maybe just watch enough of it to get some idea of how deep the Super Monkey Hole goes?