Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Last week I put off Sundry Sunday to let you know AGDQ was about to begin! So this week I’ve brought multiple videos, all with the theme of looking at a Legend of Zelda game from the point of view of the usual-rescuee, Z-girl herself. No, not the one in the green suit! What are you saying?
In Wind Waker, Zelda gets to take a fairly active role in the story, until you (and she!) find out that she’s actually Zelda, and then gets stuck in hidden secret sunken Hyrule Castle for the second half of the game, boo! What did she do down there? K_Grovyle gives us a look (2 1/2 minutes):
Of course the newest Zelda game as of this writing actually has Zelda as the protagonist for the first time, allowing her the kind of malicious gaming shenanigans usually reserved to Link (and to confirm, the one in the green suit is Link, not Zelda, honest). jjjj4rd presents an animation of her usual hobbies while wandering the fields and wilderness (3 minutes):
And some more (3 minutes)!
What’s that you say? Zelda is actually the main character of all the other games? Zelda’s a boy you’re telling me? Why that’s not true, how could you even think that, I thought it was obvious, I–
There’s been rather a lot of interesting Animal Crossing items to share lately, many of them from the Youtube account of Hunter R, who specializes in AC. He presents the video in today’s find, which is about an interesting relic from Nintendo’s Gamecube era: the e-Reader.
The e-Reader uses a variation of the technology used in QR codes. QR codes, surprisingly date back as far as 1994. Old-time internet layabouts like myself remember the CueCat, a special barcode scanner that was given out for free, under the assumption that they could make money off of them from advertisers using their tech to encode URLs to their sites in their print ads, then users could scan them with their CueCats to jump immediately to their sites. Yes, this was a business model that people once thought could work. Maybe it could have at one point: that’s the major use case for QR codes now.
The e-Reader was rather different. A Gameboy Advance peripheral released in Japan in 2001, and the US in 2002, it could scan tiny dot patterns printed on playing card size pieces of cardboard. Whereas QR codes are intended for small amounts of data like URLs, a single e-Reader card could hold 2,112 bytes of data. The hardware itself had a ROM built-in that contained an NES emulator, so one of the things that could be distributed, on small decks cards, were smaller NES games like the black box series. I had an e-Reader myself back then, and while it’s long since misplaced and probably lost for good, I still have an officially-released pack of cards somewhere with Balloon Fight on it, and also the weird e-Reader variant of Mario Party, which I think I’ve only ever had the chance to play once.
The e-Reader was one of Nintendo’s shorter-lived play experiments, and didn’t last long. But one of the most interesting releases for it was a large sequence of Animal Crossing cards. There were hundreds of these cards, and they were kind of like an early version of the current-day Animal Crossing amiibo cards. It’s amazing there were so many, because the hardware requirements were significant: you needed a Gamecube and GC Animal Crossing disk, of course, and the e-Reader, and a Gameboy Advance, and a GBA/GC link cable. And the cards themselves, of course.
The cards could be used to get all kinds of items in your Animal Crossing village, depending on the card. The amazing thing about the cards is that they seem like they’d be the kind of thing that would have been quickly cracked and turned into a way to obtain arbitrary objects, like the never-released Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda NES items in Animal Crossing, but were in fact only broken fairly recently.
The 11-minute video linked here explains how they worked and how they were cracked, and also links to a GitHub repository with program that can be used to generate your own cards. But Hunter R. has been on this beat for a while, and has two other videos on the subject you can peruse if you wish, on generating custom villagers with cards (12 minutes), and generating Super Mario and Zelda NES items (18 minutes). The villager one is interesting because you can make arbitrary villagers with it, with appearances and names not among the ones included on the disk, although only using the Japanese version of the e-Reader. Even you don’t have the magic combination of gadgets to make practical use of them, they’re interesting watches to understand how the e-Reader worked, and how it was, eventually, exploited.
Argh! This video from Press A! on Youtube promises big by promising to explain how speedrunners blast through the over 5 1/2 million Bells needed to fully upgrade their (pre-2.0) house in Animal Crossing New Horizons, but then in typical game Youtuber fashion they explain nearly everything else about the game, the debt, and all the other things speedrunners must do along the way! Here is the 12-minute video, but I’ll give you the gist below:
First: the glitch only works on version 1.2.1 or earlier, so nowadays it requires hacks to downgrade your Switch to do them. And the trick also means having at least two users on the same Switch, both with residents on the island.
The trick involves duplicating items, then selling the duplicates. The items are duplicated by putting an item that can have other objects put on top of it, like tables or the cardboard boxes in the Recycle Bin, down near the border of the town square area.
First, an expensive item is put on the table or box. The Switch promo item given to the first player upon starting the game is typically used by runners. Both players are brought in, then the second player spins the box while the first player picks the item up off of the box. If done on the same frame, Player One will pick up the item, but Player Two’s rotating of the box will mean it also remains on the box. Now there’s two copies of the item. This process can be repeated immediately, filling up Player One’s inventory with the item. They then sell the items for profit, and continue.
I miss the days when you could just find this out from a text file on GameFAQs, but then tricks like that are a lot harder to discover randomly these days without something like Youtube’s discovery algorithm to uncover them, although it too is random and scattershot, or else following a ton of Discords to seek out all of the little gaming communities where all this data is hoarded.
So that is how they do it, but since it’s specifically on an old version of the game that you can’t even play anymore it’s of limited use to normal players. New Horizons changed so much in that first year that this information is largely of use as a curiosity unless you’re involved in the frankly bizarre speedrunning community.
My own trick for paying off your house means breeding expensive roses, ideally blue but black will do, then growing tons of them in the fields of your island and selling them. If you have the DIY recipes to make wreathes or crown from them, then it doubles their sale price. It won’t pay off your house of in under two hours, but if you can get your starter roses from elsewhere, you can pay it off much faster that way, maybe in a couple of months. I’ve explained the details of that process before, and in multiple places, but hey at least I didn’t just post it in a Discord where non-obsessives will never see it.
There, that’s my annoyed internet oldbie rant for today. Come back tomorrow where I’ll shake my fist at something else, probably AI slop. Ta!
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Didja ever finish a satisfying round of Tetris, and then, basking in the glow of your high score, stop to wonder to yourself: why four?
Why did Alexey Pajitnov, revered creator of the game, decide to use tetrominoes, the possible combinations of four squares attached to each other, as the basis of his game, and not some other number? Two is obviously too simple, and three is also pretty easy. Four is the smallest number that makes for an interesting game, so that was probably why. But can Tetris work with larger pieces? Could it work with, say, pentominoes, five-square pieces?
Well, why not try it for yourself, with today’s romhack: Zohassadar’s Pentris.
Pentris is built from Bullet-Proof Software’s NES version of Tetris (which is different from the Famicom version). It’s a BPS file, but there’s multiple utilities that can apply those, for Windows, Mac and Linux. For Win, Flips works well. Linux users may be able to find Flips in their distro’s repositories. For Mac, try Multipatch. The big advantage of BPS is that it contains CRCs of the original patch file to ensure that it’s working on its expected file, a continual problem with working with roms. As for where to get an original of NES Tetris from, you’re on your own.
Notably, Pentris is quite a bit harder than Tetris. It’s not kaizo hard though, it seems like it may be possible to have a lengthy game, but it’ll probably take you longer to develop a good intuition for what moves are good ones than it did for Tetris.
There are more possible pentominos than there are tetrominoes, so the long-piece is less common, and pentrises require five lines of setup instead of four, making them much harder to make than tetrises. In my several test games, I never managed to make even one. But mere survival is more difficult too. Pentris’ bin is 14 blocks wide instead of 10, which is more room to make mistakes. And some of its pieces are much more unwieldly than the worst of Tetris. Tetris has Z and S, but Pentris has Texas:
What are you supposed to do with this?
Pentris doesn’t appear to monkey with NES Tetris’ piece generation. The NES game picks pieces almost entirely randomly, rerolling just once if two of the same piece in a row is selected. More recent versions use “bag” systems that guarantee that you get all the possible pieces in a reasonable amount of time, but neither NES Tetris nor Pentris hold your hand like that. If you’re depending on a 1×5 piece but the RNG doesn’t feel like giving you one, you’re left to lump it.
In addition to that Texas abomination, there are also “long L” and “long J” pieces, and identical versions but with the extra square moved one space up the bar part, a piece that’s like half of a picture frame, and, invading from Rampart, the dreaded U and Plus shapes. Where you choose to place them, as they relentlessly fall, is up to you.
If you focus on survival you can advance a few levels. A good beginner’s score of Pentris is about 5,000 points. My highest so far is about 6,800. I don’t know how many points a pentris is worth, but if it scales like the multi-line clear points from Tetris did it’s probably very valuable.
I feel like I should mention there is at least one other game called Pentris around, a web game that doesn’t seem to be maintained too well. It has some of the same ideas behind it, but it also has other sized shapes too, including single blocks. I don’t know much about it, but I do know it is substantially a different game from the romhack Pentris.
Nominally about Smash Bros., its name just goes to show that classic gaming webcomic Brawl in the Family has been around a long time now. It started in 2008, and while it hasn’t published new cartoons since 2014, its creator Matthew “BitFinity” Taranto keeps making new content, some of which we’ve linked before, like Megalixir.
BitFinity has a Kickstarter going for an “ultimate” version of all the Brawl in the Family comics, and a wealth of additional material. It’s already made its base target and is chasing stretch goals now with five days to go. The next goal is new Brawl in the Family comics, and plenty of people would like to see that I think! Here’s a promotional video for it.
Matthew doesn’t know who the hell I am, but I enjoy his work, and I think you’ll enjoy it too, so please consider it? And one of the levels is a King Dedede-ish plush toy, and won’t that be nice to have and to hug?
Aww, he’s adawable.
That’s it for today. The search for interesting things to link stretches ever onward. See you tomorrow!
Found by long-term MeFite Going To Maine, DOOM: The Gallery Experience is a DOOM mod that changes out all of its various elements for museum equivalents. Ammo becomes drinks from among Wine, Beer, Gin or “Watr”; Health has become Cash (which you can spend in the gift shop) and Armor becomes Cheese. (You still pick them up like powerups, though.) And there’s still secret passages to find. The map is generally the same as that as the first level from the shareware game, although the demons have been moved out and replaced with objets d’art, all of which can be examined for information on the work.
I’m putting aside Sundry Sunday for today, to let you know that the (relatively) long-lived week-long charity speedrunning marathon, AGDQ, or Awesome Games Done Quick, begins TODAY, just a couple of hours after this post goes up! It snuck up on me this year!
It’s one of two GDQ marathons every year. The other SGDQ, usually happens in the middle of the year. I usually do an overview for each marathon of runs that I find interesting, but I feel like that’s more for me than anything you’d find useful? Still, there’s some terrific runs lined up this year. The complete schedule is on their website.
Of course GDQ does other speedrunning events throughout the year, including Frame Fatales and Hotfix, but the ceremony and energy of doing it before a large audience, both in-house and online, builds the hype to mammoth levels. Every year they raise millions of dollars for their chosen charities.
Here’s an informal list of things that I find to be highlights. When I mention times, I’m generally speaking from the context of US Eastern time.
Sunday launches with a run of Pikmin, a game that’s intrinsically suited to speedrunning, and soon after there’s one of Kirby Air Ride City Trial “Any%.” I’m not sure what that means (City Trial games are by their nature time limited anyway), but I presume it’s clearing off the checkboard, a huge list of achievements to aim for. Then there’s a Wind Waker Any% run near the end of Sunday that finishes it in a bit over an hour, that probably takes advantage of the late-game skips that have been found in the treacherous final room before the Ganondorf fight.
Monday leads off with two Alan Wake II DLCs, then Lego The Hobbit, which I’m sure will have much more entertainment value than the trilogy, somehow, of Hobbit movies. Later there’s a PC port of Turok 2, Super Lucky’s Tale, and a selection of retro games including Ninja Gaiden II, Snake Rattle N Roll, Dick Tracy and then a 42 minute Final Fantasy Legend II, which I’m sure will be as bizarre as that game’s storyline, followed by a bit of UFO 50. Approaching 1 PM there’s a more substantial UFO 50 set, followed by Super Meat Boy, Mario Maker for the 3DS, Sonic Origins and a Metroid Prime race. Then as a bonus game (one for which there’s a donation incentive), there’s Breath of the Wild, played with two players on one controller. The day concludes with several substantial runs: Red Dead Redemption Undead Nightmare DLC, Horizon Forbidden West and Yakuza.
Right after midnight Tuesday morning there’s Shenmue and Beat Slayer, and at 8:43 is VA-11 Hall-A. Later Castevania: Portrait of Ruin, Unicorn Overlord, Ys VIII, Spyro Reignited, then the amazingly difficult F-Zero GX, then Super Mario Bros. “Any% STA.” I’m not sure what STA means in this context. The last run of the night is the recent Silent Hill remake.
Wednesday morning there’s the Batman Forever arcade game and Gauntlet IV for the Genesis, which hews very closely to the arcade original, but in “quest mode,” a special console-only scenario. Other interesting games include two Sonic titles, a bonus inventive of all the romances in Fallout: New Vegas, a Super Mario 64 A Button Challenge TAS showcase and Rocket League workshop maps. Starting late at night and rolling into Thursday is what I presume to be “Awful Block,” since it leads off with the notoriously awful Superman 64.
Thursday has a surprisingly long run of Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, an all-dungeons run of Tears of the Kingdom, and Sega’s “Chunithm Luminous Plus” arcade rhythm game. There’s a number of longer runs in the later half of the day.
Friday has a sequence with Castlevania: Dracula X, Gimmick 2, Froggun Encore and No One Can Stop Mr. Domino, and later on FFVII Rebirth and GTA Vice City. Afterward look out for Nintendo World Championships (not the cart from the 90s, the recent Switch release), Tetris: The Grand Master and a PS1 “Mystery Vs. Tournament.” There’s Kaizo Mario World 3 as a bonus incentive, and a standard Mario World race late at night, and another arcade rhythm game.
Saturday is the last day, starting with Peggle Extreme, Metal Gear Solid, Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble and Mega Man 10. Around 10 AM is the traditional super long Pokemon run, this time a race of Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. (Are the runners playing different versions?) Then there’s two Elden Ring runs, then one I posted about before, the eagerly awaited Crazy Taxi with live backing band. (Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!)
The last three games are Ocarina of Time with a no logic randomizer, that is, the game mixes things up without regard to how finishable that makes the game, leaving it to the player to use glitches to overcome any blocks, then Echoes of Wisdom Any%, and finally a Super Metroid randomizer race.
RollingCutter over on Youtube has compiled two videos, so far, of unusual and unexpected facts about classic Mega Man titles. First I link the videos (here’s the first, and the second), then some of the more interesting facts from them:
#1 (10 minutes)
#2 (15 minutes)
So, some (but by no means all) of the interesting facts they revealed:
In Mega Man 2, most of the Robot Masters get healed if you use their own weapons against them (with the exception of Metal Man, who dies in two hits to his weapon).
With the exception of Mega Man 3, the paths drawn on the map screen between levels of the multi-part Dr. Wily stages roughly match the routes you take through them.
In Mega Man 10, there are three boss fight rooms between drone enemies that match the weapons and behavior of past bosses from throughout the series. The lit boxes in the background of the fight generally correspond to the numbers of those bosses. For example, the drone that matches the behavior of Elecman, DLN #8, lights up the 8th of those background tiles, counting left-to-right from the top of the screen. Watch the first video for details.
Mega Man 6 has two instances (one described in each video) where two elements in a stage are linked. In Flame Man’s stage there are oil pools that light up and become deadly if struck by fire from enemies. But one pool late in the level is sometimes already on fire when you reach it. It’s because its state matches that of another oil pool earlier in the level: if that oil pool gets set aflame, then it’ll be on fire too. And in one of the Mr X stages later on, there are balance platforms in the level that match the state you left the same kind of platforms in in the room before.
In Mega Man 7, the cloud platforms can be frozen or electrified by your weapons. If electrified, they’ll do damage to you for a short time.
Hitting Heat Man with the Crash Bomber (MM2) heals him and speeds him up. Hitting Spring Man with thunderbolts repeatedly eventually causes him to glitch out and make the level impossible to finish. (You have to use around three full weapon tanks of energy to do it.)
In Mega Man 3, you usually can’t pause the game while a weapon’s bullets are onscreen, either your default Mega Buster’s shots or those of a special weapon, but they didn’t implement this check when firing shots when Rush is onscreen. If while Rush is onscreen you fire shots, then switch to another weapon, the Buster’s shots will have the properties of the weapon you switched to. In certain places (depicted in the second video) this makes certain enemies must easier to defeat.
In the Copy Mega Man fight in MM3, where there’s one true boss and two fakes, the first time they appear the top one is always the real one; when the bosses teleport out and back in, the real one always appears one frame before the others.
In Mega Man 2, if you pause the game while Wood Man’s in the middle of a jump, the boss will immediately jump again in mid-air.
In my opinion the highlights of the series so far. Mega Man 3 has debug features left enabled in the game, that can be operated using the second controller. This is the reason for the generally-known trick (from Nintendo Power) where you can make Mega Man jump super high, even in the air, using the second controller. And in Mega Man 1, if you’re very high up on the screen in a specific place in Ice Man’s stage (above the score), and jump and quickly move back and forth at the top of your jump, the game can glitch out in surprising ways. The second video has several examples, such as the game resetting or crashing, messing up the palette or graphics, or even immediately starting the Yellow Devil boss fight with incorrect graphics.
There are certain bosses throughout the series where it’s possible to land a hit on them while their energy bars are filling at the start of the fight. In some cases this results in weird behavior, but in Mega Man 7, you can destroy Spring Man and Turbo Man before the fight starts this way. (Cloud Man can also be damaged this way, but it might cause the game to glitch out.)
As it turns out, as explained by the below video (here’s a direct link, 10 minutes long), the NES and SNES have very similar control setups. Both controller ports have seven lines, and both read them using a shift register that can be used to read arbitrary numbers of buttons. The SNES basically just has more buttons to read.
Due to this, there’s homebrew NES software that’s made to use the SNES mouse, and even emulators that will convert your PC’s mouse into simulated SNES mouse signals, which will be fed into the emulated NES and the software running thereon. (It isn’t all buttons, but it sends the displacement as a binary number.)
The video comes to us from the account of CutterCross, who’s making CrossPaint, an NES art program that uses the SNES mouse. A demo can be gotten from itch.io.
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 a new year, and probably going to be an exceedingly crappy one, so let’s at least start it out with something amazing and wonderful. For while it’s a world where millions of people make extremely stupid decisions, it’s also one where some people work diligently to make bafflingly detailed works of art like Lumpy Touch‘s GAR-TYPE, the R-Type/Saturday Morning cartoon crossover you didn’t know you’d love. CW: pixelated cartoon gore, but that sounds worse than it is.
To reuse my Metafilter description: Help ace fighter JON STARBUCKLE, stationed on the USS ACRES, pilot the GAR-TYPE D to destroy GORESTAR, a planet-eating threat, with your choice of three different weapons: Ravioli, Macaroni or Spaghetti.
There’s so many genius touches in this, like the signs for Italian restaurants in the first level, or the name of the Lasagna Base, or the unexpected boss of the second level. It vividly realizes the aesthetic of the anime-influenced Japanese shooter. Even if it’s too difficult for you (and it might be too difficult for me), you can enjoy the trailer and playthrough video below for a tour of its ridiculous action.
We used to do monthly summary posts, but they ended up being a lot of work to keep up, and often there would be something interesting I’d want to post about that would preempt them. So in their place, and in recognition of Set Side B’s new Bluesky feed (which supplements, but doesn’t replace, our Mastodon feed), here’s a recap of what I consider to be just some of the more-interesting blog posts we published in 2024.
If you’re just coming in from social media and wondering what we’re about, Set Side B is a daily blog that covers what we call “the Flipside of Gaming” (notice the tasteful use of our tagline), specifically in the Retro, Niche and Indie fields. All of that basically gives us license to chase after whatever gaming information we enjoy, which is usually the antithesis of AAA gaming. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we do cover games sometimes that might be called Triple-A, the Legend of Zelda series comes up a lot and they’re often considered headliners, but Nintendo generally tends to have rather a different approach to gamedev than other companies. I’m not going to say they’re perfect, frog knows they have their faults, but they still manage to surprise us from time to time.
So, let’s get on to that recap. Posts marked Sundry Sunday are finds from gaming culture, usually funny Youtube videos. Posts that largely include original content by me are marked Original. I might have misapplied that signifier in places, because I often include extra commentary on posts, and even after spending two hours constructing this behemoth of a list, I have gone mostly by memory and not reviewed every post here. I’m certain that you’ll find something interesting, if you have a look. Set Side B’s archives are unusually rich with wonders, mostly found but sometimes made, and I’m sure if you take a spelunk through our mines, you will be rewarded.
APR 27 & JUN 25: Original — On Dungeon, a 30-year-old CRPG system for the Commodore 64, and my own attempts to rerelease it. The original and efforts to revise it.
AUG 28, 29 & SEP 2, 4 & NOV 19: Original — How to play Atari Games’ Rampart, and also someone other than me talking about Rampart, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, someone else
