I had a different post ready to go today, but it’s been delayed by a few days for unavoidable reasons, so let’s do another Nintendo obscurity video, this time for things that can be found “out of bounds.” There’s several interesting cases mentioned and shown off here in this video from Nintendo Unity. It’s 11 minutes long.
Some of cases shown:
In Punch-Out!! on the Wii, off-camera, Piston Hondo is reading a Sailor Moon manga in a between-round cutscene.
On the original Pikmin’s title menu, the name of the menu programmer is off-camera to the left.
There’s a cartoon drawing of a Goomba as a texture beneath Pinna Park in Super Mario Sunshine. This has been given the name “Kug,” and there’s more information on it on Supper Mario Broth and The Cutting Room Floor.
Noki Bay in Sunshine has a model of a book locked in an unreachable area. There’s more info on it on The Cutting Room Floor.
This one’s relatively well known: the trophy of Princess Daisy in Super Smash Bros. Melee has a texturing error that gives her a third eye, hidden beneath her hair on the back of her head. The trophy for Meta Ridley also has a hidden heart texture inside of it.
In Earthbound, if you can clip outside of the terrain in the upper-right corner of Onett, you can reach the ultimate upper-right corner of the whole map. (All of the areas in Earthbound are connected on a single huge map!) Interacting with the corner there can access a debug menu left in the game.
There’s a secret control room beneath the island in Donkey Kong 64.
Another well known glitch, the video mentions the glitch that lets Samus get inside the level terrain in Metroid by rolling into a ball and coming out of it repeatedly while a closed door surrounds her. This is the means by which people can get to the glitchy “secret worlds” mentioned in an early issue of the Nintendo Fun Club News.
At the end, the video reminds of the “Minus World” glitch in NES Super Mario Bros.
I know, lots of posts on this blog end up being about Nintendo in one way or other, but their corporate stance of toymakers, regardless of its truth, means they often do interesting things, and one category of those things is having special animations when you delete save files. But deleting save files is destructive, obviously, so many people never see them. Here’s a video compilation of some of them. Of particular note is the deletion process of Animal Crossing games (yes, them again!), and of all of those there’s the one for the original Gamecube version, which pretty much implies you’re killing your village’s inhabitants. A pretty heavy trip to lay on a kid! Here’s that video, from Nintendo Unity (9 minutes):
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!
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.
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.
I’m opening this post with a special message to any anthropomorphic animal video game characters who happen to be reading this. As we will see, they rate this special prologue quite highly, and so it will make us very popular to any Dottys or Apollos in our audience, being exactly the sort of thing they want to hear. In the secret, inner language of their minds, I’m sure it confirms all their biases and makes them feel good about themselves:
Nintendo’s Animal Crossing series has a lot of weird systems in them. Some games wear the grass down according to character walking patterns; all the games have the “Stalk Market,” a risky way to make a lot of money; most of the games have a lost-and-found; and so on.
A system that was in the first game, and I’m not sure was ever adapted for later games (but then it might have been) was letter-writing, not just to other players in the same village, but to the villagers. They’d save the letters you wrote them and show them off to other players if they moved to another town, and even write you back. Of course, parsing and intelligently responding to any text, no matter the language, was beyond computers of the time (and despite what AI enthusiasts will tell you, still isn’t), so the game has to fake it in some way. But, how?
Well, what is the purpose of writing letters to characters in the game? It gives villagers something interesting to show people when they move to their villages, and, it’s a roleplaying exercise for the writer, a way to pretend the animal denizens of your town are real people and not simulated game mechanics present to make the game seem less empty.
Both of these design goals work best if the person writing the letter actually writes real letters, and not random jumbles of characters, so Animal Crossing has a mechanism to reward players for writing what appear to be real letters, and not placeholder gibberish, and its system of ranking text to attempt to reward actual letter-like writing is quite complex. It looks for punctuation that looks generally appropriate, capital letters after sentence-ending punctuation, triples of characters that commonly appear in English, and sequences of characters followed by spaces that approximate the word lengths of English. Of special interest: these are elements that have to be tweaked by language, and so they pose a special challenge to localization.
Hunter R., popular Animal Crossing Youtuber, released a video that explains exactly how GC Animal Crossing scores letters written to villagers. As it turns out, the text that scores the very best looks a lot like that in the preamble to this post, up above. Go figure! Here is his description (10 minutes):
EDIT: My mistake! Originally the villager-friendly message near the beginning of this post was missing a trailing period, which would cost it some points when brought under the exacting animal eye. It has been corrected.
Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven games are still a bit obscure, but have a passionate fanbase. They share design sensibilities with the WarioWare series, which is because both share a character designer, Ko Takeuchi. They both have a distinctive clean-line look, and a similar sense of humor.
About four years ago, some of those fans made one of those reanimation compilations of the series, and the fruits of their labor is unusually keeping in spirit of the original, which itself samples many different art and musical styles. The reanimation feels like it could have been one of the remixes from the games itself.
Speaking of, the reanimation covers all of the remixes, of all of the games in the series, with the result that the full sequence is eighteen minutes long! It’s quite faithful to the originals, despite the vastly different animation styles, and it even scored an appreciative comment from Takeuchi himself! Here it is, but be warned: you’ll watch it for a while, then see one of the videos mention it’s only half over, and you’ll think to yourself, no way:
An aside, a different reanimation project near to my heart, but unrelated to video games, is the highly-memeable 2004 collaboration that animated They Might Be Giants’ Fingertips (6 minutes, original page). Note, in its original Flash incarnation, different elements would be selected on every play, an aspect that is unfortunately lost in these renderings.
