Author: rodneylives

The New Yorker: Mario at 40

In addition to the ZX Spectrum, Nintendo mascot Mario, née Jumpman, also turns 40 this year.

I’ve actually seen people claim that Mario is the perfect mascot, like he were destined towards super-stardom. He was nothing of the sort! Only a vaguely ethnic stereotype at first, although purposely a bit ugly in his original incarnation, he’s a working-class kind of guy. It seems prescient now, but it was the 80s at the time of his creation. Who picks a carpenter (his original occupation) to be their hero? Shigeru Miyamoto does. That’s really the secret of Mario’s success: he was created by one of the most successful game designers of all time, as part of his first project.

The New Yorker, which, it’s a fact, publishes humor other than cartoons, has a pretty funny bit of short fiction in tribute to Nintendo’s plumber and his advancing age by Simon Rich, even if it posits a version of Mario who’s a bit seemy, and worries that he’s-a gonna be cancelled. But it ends on a happy note, with Mario finally getting that back surgery he’s been needing for so long. Wait, what? Also he gets scammed by Wario.

The New Yorker is one of those publications that throws up a paywall at times, probably related to how many articles you’ve seen this month, so be warned.

And I know what you’re-a thinking: “How does Super Mario go broke? You collected entire rooms of coins! What happened?” And the answer is-a simple: I trusted a close personal friend to manage-a my money. And I can’t say too much about what happened, because the lawsuit is-a ongoing, but essentially, all those years I thought that I was riding Yoshi, it was the other way around.

Link Roundup 4/27/22

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Gavin Lane of Nintendo Life: Playnote gets a Flipnote Studio-style art app.

Jay Peters of The Verge, also on Playnote. Its makers wonder if its seasonal distribution model will be appreciated by purchasers of its becranked yellow joybox.

Ollie Reynolds of Nintendo Life: UbiSoft to shut down server support for a number of older titles.

Florence Ion (cool name!) of Gizmodo: Google Play is getting data safety settings.

Ollie Reynolds of Nintendo Life, again: Lego to release a huge new Super Mario set.

Thomas Whitehead of Nintendo Life (lot of items from them today): Game Freak to offer employees option of four-day workweek. Awesome!

Wes Finlon of PC Gamer: Moneyfarm Square-Enix unveils a new $11,600 statue of Terra from Final Fantasy VI riding Magitech armor that caused series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi to basically go WTF. Remember, back when he designed the first game in the series, Square was facing issues whether their little game development operation could survive.

“Master Blaster,” if that is their name, at Sora News 24, on Sega trying to bring eSports into Japanese high schools with a Puyo Puyo Boot Camp. “Listen up maggots, you’re going to spend the next hour setting up combos and fighting Draco Centauros until you get it right and I don’t want no backtalk or I’ll bust you down to facing Nohoho again!”

Rhys Wood of TechRadar: An Elden Ring demake for Game Boy is in the works.

Luke Plunkett of Kotaku: Super Mario movie delayed, Miyamoto promises it’ll be worth the wait. Aww, it’s just like that apocryphal quote often attributed to him. This reporter is overjoyed, the last one ended on that cliffhanger, Daisy was back from Dinohattan and needed Mario and Luigi’s help again, no doubt because of some scheme hatched by Koopa. I wonder how they’ll manage to bring Dennis Hopper back from the dead to reprise his role?

Alana Hauges, also from Nintendo Life: Sega plans to delist classic games from some platforms (but not Switch) in anticipation of the release of Sonic Origins.

And Ryan Dinsdale of IGN tells us Sony is creating a game preservation team, of which this reporter can only say, IT’S ABOUT FREAKING TIME.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe

It’s hard to believe that the original The Stanley Parable, one of the weirdest games in memory, is nine years old. It’s just gotten an expanded version with even more disturbingly hilarious narrative metatextuality. Or, if you wish, hilariously disturbing metatextuality narrative. Metatextually narrative disturbing hilarity?

Now there’s an Ultra Deluxe version, which is described as a “re-imagining.” It’s a third-off on Steam for the moment, putting its price close to that of the original, which is still listed on Steam, waiting to trick people into buying it who don’t know there’s an expanded version on the same store. This version also has ports to Switch, the two most recent PlayStations, and the current/past three Xboxes. I’d hate to be in charge of that build chain.

So once again prepare to pilot Stanley through an FPS without any combat or weapons, experiencing* a story, and a narrator, who reacts to your actions in entertaining ways. The original game had so many riffs on its subject that it might be worth picking up the new version just to see what further milk they can extract from its thematic teat.

(* “And the prize for the Most Generic Verb goes to….”)

SpelunkyRL

Well that certainly is a wholesome activity we all can approve of!

It’s almost a tradition by this point, to take some preexisting game and give it the roguelike treatment. We’ve seen MetroidRL, CastlevaniaRL, MegamanRL, ZeldaRL and others. Those in this list were all made by Slashie, a prolific developer in this sphere.

Well, his most recent experiment in this mode is SpelunkyRL, taking concepts that Spelunkly itself borrowed from roguelikes and borrowing them right back. What the game gains is a strong emphasis on situations and using what’s at hand. You only have five health points, and they don’t heal naturally. Most enemies move only every other turn, but if you attack them they get a counter-attack. You have a gun with six bullets that does high damage, but it’s a good idea to save your shots for when they might be needed.

You can pick up pots, corpses and even stunned enemies, which don’t go into your inventory, but remain in hand and can be thrown at attackers. Instead of food, there’s a “DooM” counter to keep you moving. There are also altars for sacrificing enemies to Kali, which work in a NetHack/ADOM kind of style. And there’s even some atmospheric music and sound effects so you don’t have to smack bats and snakes in silence.

It is an interesting thing to play around with, and on subsequent games you can start with alternate character classes Rogue (extra health and bow) or Tourist (bad at fighting but has a camera and 2000-gold line of credit). It will be a reasonably entertaining use of your time, I’d say.

40th Anniversary of the ZX Spectrum

“What do you want from us? We’re evil! EVIL!”

Lee Reilly on The GitHub Blog offers a long post about the ZX Spectrum on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of its release. Wait, 40th anniversary? (does some math) That puts it in early 1982, the year of Donkey Kong!

To give to some incentive to click through, some of the projects linked are:

  • A Spectrum emulator written in Rust, and another one in JavaScript
  • A port of Spectrum game The Great Escape to C and current platforms
  • Tools for working with archives of Spectrum cassette tape images, including to convert one to mp3 to facilitate transferring to a tape for play on a physical ZX Spectrum
  • A Visual Studio Code extension for working with Z80 code
  • And small program to convert image files to the peculiar limitations of the Spectrum’s graphics hardware, to give your portraits some of that loading screen flair.

That last one I tested out a bit, here’s some results. I discovered it’s best if you resize the images to around the Speccy’s 256×192 resolution before processing.

Richard Speed of The Register also wrote a nice rundown on the ZX Spectrum’s history.

U Can Beat Video Games: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

U Can Beat Video Games (their YouTube channel) has only been around for a bit over a year, but they’ve already covered a lot of challenging games. It serves as a complete video playthrough, often revealing all the game’s secrets, and has remarkably restrained and helpful audio commentary by YouTube standards.

UCBVG videos cover the entire game, and can be long. The most recent, the covering A Link to the Past with a second part, is nearly two hours but it uses YouTube’s timeline annotations to mark any potential trouble spots you may have. Even if you’ve mastered the games he covers, I find it relaxing to watch anyway to refresh my memory on these decades-old amusements.

To date, UCBVG has covered 70 titles across the NES, SNES, Game Boy, and Mega Drive/Genesis. Some highlights include their videos on the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for NES (the first game on the channel), Mega Man I, II, and III, The Legend of Zelda, its second quest, and it’s sequel, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Legacy of the Wizard (a.k.a. Dragon Slayer IV), Castlevania and Simon’s Quest, Blaster Master, Punch-Out!!, Ninja Gaiden and its first sequel, Clash at Demonhead, Metal Gear, Crystalis, Wizards & Warriors and its sequel Ironsword, Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy (in two parts), Actraiser, The Guardian Legend, Kirby’s Dream Land (including Extra Mode!), the weird and unique The Magic of Scheherazade, Sonic the Hedgehog, and even the notorious Battletoads, among many other games.

They update weekly, so why not take a look!

Link Roundup 4/24/22

Patrick Klepek for Vice, about Melon Han-Tani releasing the player movement code for his game Sephone.

Sam Machkovech for for Ars Technica, reviewing geometry puzzle game Tandis.

Alana Hauges of NintendoLife on the forthcoming Zero Tolerance Collection, which includes an unreleased sequel to the original Mega Drive/Genesis game.

Alana Hauges also informs us of preorders for a vinyl release of Ace Attorney music.

Keema Waterfield for Wired writing about playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild with her five-year-old daughter.

Arto

Ryan McCaffrey on IGN tells us about an upcoming RPG, Arto, with a very interesting look to it.

Stephen Totilo, Axios, on the return of Ken and Rebecca Williams, founders of Sierra On-Line from years ago, and their attempt at a comeback.

Sundry Sunday: Neil Voss, and The New Tetris, Africa theme

“Dah da di da dah move to Canada!”

It’s Sunday again, so it’s time to let down our various hair and relax! So now, a little tidbit from the PS1 era.

Back in the days of the Nintendo 64, two competing versions of Tetris were being developed, one for the N64, the other for the Sony PlayStation*. Even through (or, perhaps, because) they were published by different companies, they were given confusingly similar names. PlayStation got “The Next Tetris,” while the N64 got “The New Tetris.” I still have to check to make sure I haven’t confused them.

The internet was a much younger place then, and a lot of Nintendo fandom at the time was centered on IGN’s N64 site. So, the things their writers and editors liked tended to get outside representation, resulting in some weird early memes like “Eye Tat boy.” (“A GoldenEye is an eye tat is golden.”) Wow, I’m really dating myself with that one.

Well, one of the things that IGN liked was the musical work of Neil Voss, who composed the excellent soundtrack to early N64 puzzler Tetrisphere, from H2O Entertainment. The success of Tetrisphere got H2O the license to make The New Tetris, and Neil Voss the job of composing its excellent music. IGN did a two-part interview with Voss way back then: Part 1 – Part 2.

The above title is a particularly memorable tune from The New Tetris. Me and my roommates back in college would play TNT for hours (generally it’s a good rendition), and every time the Africa theme came up, we couldn’t resist, when the music reached the refrain, singing along with our best English approximation: “Move to Canada!” No actual moving to Canada was intended or implied, it’s just what it sounded like, to us.

* To this day, I rebel every time I’m asked to capitalize the S in PlayStation. I also twitch every time I’m asked to write Xbox instead of X-box. I have an English degree, dammit.

Video: Chrontendo and related

The third and last of the chronological platform cataloguing efforts is the longest-lived and most complete, Dr. Sparkle’s wonderful Chrontendo, going through the entire library of the Famicom and NES, along with sister projects Chronsega (Mark III/Master System and Mega Drive/Genesis) and Chronturbo (PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16).

Each of the projects I’ve presented have had a different style. Atari Archive does one game at a time, devoting from 8 to 20 minutes to it. Video Works tends to cover two or three times per video. Well, the various Chrons go for the omnibus approach: each entry shows from a dozen to 20 or more games. It also emphasizes gameplay footage, and also sometimes some side bits amidst the many games.

Chrontendo has been going since a while before 2010, and so there is a whole lot of material to catch up on. It also has the slowest rate of updating, with sometimes whole years between episodes. But each episode is its own little wonder, containing a solid mass of retro gaming information, including many games you probably won’t ever hear about anywhere else.

Video: Jeremy Parish’s Video Works

I figured I’d post all three of the major platform compilation projects I’ve been following. The second is Jeremy Parish’s Video Works, which is a collection of a number of mostly-ongoing subprojects: NES Works (1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, “Gaiden”), Game Boy Works (1989, 1990, Color 1998, Advance 2001, and Gaiden), SEGAiden, SNES Works (1991, Extra and Gaiden), and Virtual Boy Works (which is complete). The first link up there has everything; the others are in various states of completion.

What I appreciate most about Jeremy’s many series is how they’re informative without being dry (he knows his stuff!), interesting without being pedantic, and lively and entertaining without being obnoxious, obnoxiousness being a sin that I charge against many many gaming YouTube channels. If your videos whisk cut-out elements around the screen, their passage marked by swooping sound effects, then you are not going to get a link from me if I can in any way help it, so states the doom of rodneylives, and of Set Side B too if I have something to say.

Link Roundup 4/21/22

Slope’s Game Room has a video about the history of Golden Axe.

The Verge’s Ash Parrish writes about a revival of Lucasfilm’s 8-bit virtual world (which is not quite the same thing as a MMORPG) Habitat, something I know a little about I suppose.

Marcus Richert writing for Techradar has a provocative article suggesting that Nintendo might be either slightly younger than the company claims, by a few years, or alternatively might be much older.

Shmuplations translates three interviews from magazines with various people connected with quirky Sega action-puzzle game Chu Chu Rocket.

And Marc Normandin for Paste Magazine has an article suggesting 10 retro games that should be revived, and you know what, it’s actually a pretty great list! It’s got For The Frog The Bell Tolls, Dragon Slayer, and Terranigma on it, so it’s definitely got JRPG cred!

Video: Atari Archive

Atari Archive is one of those projects that seeks to document every game released for some platform. In this case, it’s for the Atari VCS. That’s the original one, the real one, CX2600, not the one made by the company that currently wears the skin of the old Atari like a gruesome shroud.

The Atari VCS/2600 wasn’t the first programmable video game console, but it was certainly the most popular early console. (I had my own look at a few interesting examples of its software in a book of my own.)

Atari Archive is currently up to Episode 57, on Kaboom! Episodes tend to be in the 10-15 minute range, making it easy to find out about specific games in a timely fashion. Here are a few popular games to get you started:

#56: Warlords – #54: Missile Command – #33: Adventure – #32: Space Invaders – and, of course, #1: Combat