The Flipside of Gaming
Pretty light this time, but light doesn’t mean short. There’s a lot of good tunes in this, with Luigi’s Mansion both leading it up and being well-represented in the sequence. For fun, have this playing during the trick-and/or-treating hours!
Part of Youtube’s doomed-to-fail Playables series, so enjoy this before it gets heartlessly deleted by Google when they decide games on their video platform don’t make sense, isn’t worth it, or whenever Netflix gives up on games and they don’t feel they need to compete on that front anymore.
The game is basically Pac-Man, but with a Championship Edition-like speedup gimmick. As you eat dots, the game slowly increases the simulation rate. it never really gets up to CE’s white-hot speeds, but it does get pretty fast. You get a slight slowdown when you finish a board and lose a life. Since you start with five lives, earn an extra one every 5,000 points, and each of a rack’s three (instead of the arcade’s two) fruit are worth at least 1,000 points, and even more as you advance to later boards, you are unlikely to run out of lives. The game ends after 13 levels, so you have a decent chance of finishing this one!
My best score is right around 150,000 points, but I was only playing casually. See if you can do better!
(EDIT: I’m reminded that AOC is a representative, not a Senator. Which is like, lol, if you care about facts or something. Still I’ve corrected it.)
We don’t post about politics much here. This is entirely not because it might drive people away, but it is because much of the rest of the internet is full of it, and we’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all, and the terrible consequences if the wrong person (you know who he is) wins in the US in just a week. Anyway, many of our readers aren’t even in the US, and to all of you, I say, I envy you.
But a weird bit of news came out involving Kamala Harris’* VP** candidate Tim Walz that both edges into our lane and is an excuse to talk about something I’ve long been wanting to remark upon, about Sega’s classic arcade racing-game-but-not Crazy Taxi.
(* For non US-people: Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate for President in 2024. **”VP” stands for Vice President, a largely ceremonial role, but should something happen to the President, the Vice President becomes the new President.)
I’ve played a lot of Crazy Taxi. I played a lot of Crazy Taxi 2 as well. I had a Dreamcast, for the brief period it existed, and they were unquestionably great games for that system, with amazing (if Youtube-unfriendly) soundtracks. Well as it turns out Tim Walz has great taste in games, because back then he had a Dreamcast too, and he had Crazy Taxi for it. And he streamed a few minutes of it, with terrific Democratic*** House Representative**** Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
(***”Democratic” refers to the Democratic Party, the US’s left-ish party that currently serves as our feeble bulwark against the hooting forces of awfulness that beset our entire world. ****”House Representative” means a member of the House of Repesentatives, one of the US’s two Legislative Houses. That concludes the US civics portion of our post.)
Most of the stream was taken up with playing Madden, which isn’t in one of our more favored categories, but the five minutes of Crazy Taxi were posted to Walz’s Youtube channel:
I am conflicted about this video. Walz is one of the most personable people ever to be nominated for high office, a genuinely friendly individual. But he isn’t a great Crazy Taxi player. And it might be because he doesn’t know how to do a maneuver called a “Crazy Dash.”
(Let me say now: I don’t even appreciate making jokes that sound like “he’s bad at gaemz lol im voting for other guy,” the stakes are way too high for me to be able to laugh at that. Just, keep it in your hat/purse/gender neutral container, please.)
But this reminded me of something I’ve thought about for a long time, and was driven (heh) home to me over DragonCon this year. There was a Crazy Taxi machine there, at stand-up model, I think with a slightly flaky gas pedal, that made it unreliable to perform Crazy Dashes.
A Crazy Dash is simple to perform once you know how. From a halt, with the gear shift in Reverse, in quick succession shift to Drive and slam the gas pedal. If the timing is right, your car will lurch forward with a burst of speed. And if you do this while driving, shifting to Reverse with foot off the gas, then shifting to Drive and flooring it with the same timing as a Dash, it’s called a “Limiter Cut,” and you get an even greater burst of speed!
Crazy Dashes and Limiter Cuts are essential to even slightly good games of Crazy Taxi, which is why the sit down version of the game puts instructions for how to do them on the control panel, why the Dreamcast version’s manual explains precisely how to do them, and why at least one of the squares in the “Crazy Box” challenge mode is all about teaching you how to perform them. It’s what I’ve come to think of as gatekeeper knowledge: it guards the way to good scores and long games. If you don’t know it, you’re doomed to fail.
Crazy Taxi is an arcade game. Even on the Dreamcast, it’s just a direct port of the arcade version with added modes. Arcade games want your money, and they don’t want to give you very long games in exchange for it, so the next player can step up and put in their doomed quarters as well. But the catch is, if good players can’t have decently-playing games, then people won’t play. I heard it said that the average target game length was 90 seconds, and average means a substantial number of games will come in under that mark.
Yet, I can play Crazy Taxi for substantially longer than 90 seconds. I can go for 30 minutes. And it’s thanks in part to the Crazy Dash and the Limiter Cut, essential knowledge for the reckless cabbies of Faux San Francisco.
Because of the DragonCon Crazy Taxi machine’s flaky gas pedal, I didn’t have any 30 minute games there. But I did manage to make the scoreboard, barely, at 20th place, with a score of just over $5,000, getting (by the inflated metrics of its scoring system) a Class S license. Thing is, I must have watched a dozen other people play the game at DragonCon this year (the arcades there are always super packed), and none of them came close even to my meager score. Because none of them knew how to do a Crazy Dash. It was a stand-up cabinet, which didn’t have that sticker explaining how to do one.
That’s what I mean by gatekeeper information: it’s literally One Weird Trick to stellar Crazy Taxi scores and game times. Once you know how to do it your journey isn’t over, in fact I think that’s where the game starts to get really interesting, and my highest scores on the easiest difficulty are nearly $70K. But if you don’t know how to at least do a Crazy Dash, you will never get a good game of Crazy Taxi, you just have no chance. You’ll just waste too much time accelerating from a stop, and you’ll have to stop frequently to let off customers and pick up new ones. Its just how it’s designed.
What amazes me is that Crazy Taxi was a hit, it did very well in arcades and on Dreamcast, and yet still most players never learn this information. And in a way, and understand that I’m uncomfortable with this conclusion, that’s for the best? Like how a crane game set to reflex towards a target winning percentage will be more likely not to drop a piece of plush if a lot of players have recently lost, so too are all those players losing quickly at CT allowing the designers to guard half-hour games behind a simple maneuver that, still, few players will ever bother learning. The alternative is to make the trick harder, or even not to have one, dooming everyone, the casual and the dedicated, to those pitiful 90-second games. That’s capitalism for you.
Which shows, I guess, that the illusion of being able to do better is more important to arcade game success than reality? I don’t know, I’m uncomfortable talking about illusions in a post that started out mentioning politics. But hey, Tim Walz! If you read this and want some Crazy Taxi tips, reach out! And good luck in November, please help Kamala Harris to send That Other Person as far away from public office as possible.
Once you start thinking of it in terms of gatekeeper knowledge, you start seeing it everywhere. One-hit kill action games are full of it, since the first time you encounter any enemy, it’s likely to behave in some way that will kill you. The best action games will try to have an enemy demonstrate unexpected behavior at least once before it’s likely to be fatal. And any time a game kills your character out of basic unfairness, like from a sudden unavoidable death trap, that’s gatekeeper info.
UFO 50, for all its greatness, does this a lot. The very first game in the collection, Barbuta, has an instant death laughably close to the start. Some of its games feel like a sequence of deaths you have to experience, each at least once, before you’re allowed to win. But it’s far from unique in this, and in presenting itself as the history of a fictional 80s developer, it could be argued that it’s mirroring the development of game design at the time.
Kurt Kalata’s Hardcore Gaming 101 posted an article telling us about Mutsuheta, renamed Mahetta in the English localization for the NES. Mutsuheta is one of those figures who only appeared in the original game’s manual. Mutsuheta was the prophet who foretold that a descendant of the great Loto/Erdrick would arise and defeat the armies of the Dragonlord. Other than his mention in the manual, however, he doesn’t appear in any of the games of the Erdrick trilogy, and never appeared onscreen until the first Dragon Quest Builders, where he’s an NPC. He was renamed Myrlund in its English translation, but in Japanese he’s got the name of the character from the manual.
Reading this, I was reminded of https://zeldawiki.wiki/wiki/Impa, Zelda’s nursemaid/servant, who was a similar kind of manual-only backstory figure until Ocarina of Time, where Impa not only appeared as an important NPC, but was revealed to be of the secretive Sheikah tribe, and had ninja skills to boot. She looked a lot different from the aged figure in The Legend of Zelda’s manual.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
The maintainer of awesome Mario obscurity site Supper Mario Broth has had a hard time of things lately. Their mother died and send them into a spiral of emotional and economic uncertainty, which the community helped out by generously contributing to their Patreon.
As part of their thanks, they posted a Youtube video to answer the question, “What is Supper Mario Broth?” and it’s, well…
It’s great! And very, deeply weird! And it’s only 2 1/2 minutes long! Every image comes from some point in Supper Mario Broth’s rich and aromatic history, and it’s a masterpiece of meme imagery. It’s here:
Every rapid-fire clip in the video is worthy of pausing on and zooming into. It’s incredibly dense! Please enjoy, perhaps with the benefit of the mind-altering substance of your choice. And here’s only a few images from the video:
Chip Tanaka is the most recent pseudonym of one of the best, certainly one of the most influential, game composers of all time, Hirokazu Tanaka, a.k.a. Hip Tanaka, who made contributions to many NES-era games. His most distinctive soundtracks are probably Metroid and Kid Icarus, but he also worked on Dr. Mario, Super Mario Land, Tetris, Mother and Earthbound. After those he helmed Pokemon co-producer Creatures Inc. for 22 years, until just last year. His most recognizable contributions from an outside perspective, though, are probably still his musical works.
We’ve linked to at least one of his songs before, the Hammerhead Shark Song from his second album Domingo. Its video was animated by Toby Fox, the Undertale/Deltarune maker, and it does a good job of combining the charms both of Tanaka’s music and Fox’s art.
The new album Desatar combines chiptune waveforms with real-world instruments to produce a distinctive mixture. There’s a sampler up on Youtube (3 minutes, embedded below), and the whole thing can be heard on Spotify (though it requires making an account).
They haven’t broken the talks apart into individual videos yet, but in the meantime you can see my presentation overview of the 31, give or take a couple depending on precise definition, games in the Mystery Dungeon series here, queued up to the proper starting point in the 8+ hour video. The talk portion is about half an hour long (with a couple of interruptions due to the router I was on being a bit flaky).
Here’s an embed, but note that WordPress doesn’t seem to accept the link for embedding with the time code linking directly to my talk, so you’ll have to skip ahead yourself to 6:10:18 to get to it. Or you could watch some of the other very interesting talks on the way there! Either way!
Few games have as iconic a soundtrack as does Crazy Taxi, which boasts a memorable collection of Offspring and Bad Religion tunes backing its trademark atrocities of municipal transportation.
Word is that Crazy Taxi plays on Youtube are susceptible to copyright strikes because of all those licensed tunes. One solution? Have a live band play what the game would have been playing! That’s what this player, and three supporting musicians, do in this submission for the next AGDQ (14 minutes). You could complain that you never get to hear the whole song, but you never could do that in Crazy Taxi anyway.
The mode shown off is called Crazy Box. It’s a collection of 16 driving challenges bundled with the home versions of Crazy Taxi, and they’re all pretty, well, crazy. The highlight, I think, is the last challenge, which is simply to do a lap around the arcade city as if it were a traditional driving game, although with traffic turned up, because it’s not Crazy Taxi without a ton of traffic.
Starting this Saturday at noon US Eastern time (9 AM Pacific, 5 PM Greenwich, 7 PM CEST) is Roguelike Celebration 2024! I’m presenting half an hour on the Mystery Dungeon games this year, at 3:15 PM Pacific/6:15 Eastern/11:15 Greenwich/1:15 AM Sunday CEST. Whew, the roundness of the Earth makes it difficult to express times!
It’s being held entirely online again this year, and offers a fun social space to explore that’s kind of like a MUD! Roguelike Celebration’s schedule is here, and you can get tickets for $30 for the whole event here. They usually set aside some free tickets for people who can’t afford the fee, although you might have to check around to find them.
Roguelike Celebration is nominally about roguelikes and procedural generation, but I think it’s interesting from a wide variety of gaming perspectives, and every year I find several talks that are incredibly interesting. Past years have offered presentations from people who worked on games as diverse as Kingdom of Loathing and Blaseball. Here are the talks being offered this year:
I haven’t posted much from Kirby and Smash Bros. creator’s prolific Youtube channel on game development. There’s a lot of good information in there. The channel is winding down now after a good run, but now, near the end, he’s posted at one of his final videos a remembrance of his old boss, and beloved Nintendo company president, the late Satoru Iwata. (10 minutes)
It’s now been nearly 10 years since Iwata’s passing, and the outpouring of respect, admiration, and even affection, for him over that time has been remarkable. There’s a sense that we lost an amazing figure. Sakurai is brilliant in many ways, but he calls Iwata the smartest man he’s ever known. He strove to be polite, not to take offense in conflict, and to always act with logic instead of emotion. He helped transition Nintendo from being under the sole control of the Yamaguchi family to the more varied and ingenious company they’re known for being today.
In addition to running the company, Mr. Iwata started out as a programmer a HAL Laboratory. Think of how rare that is for a multi-billion-dollar company. They didn’t hire your standard MBA out off a business school, but put their future in the hands of a former coder. I have no illusions that, in many cases, that could have been disastrous, because programming and management require different skill sets, but Mr. Iwata pulled it off.
Sakurai finishes the video with a story of the last time he saw Iwata alive. He calls Iwata the person in the world who understood him the most. When Iwata wanted to see him, he didn’t delegate it to an assistant but always emailed him directly. It seems that Iwata was a good person who many admired and respected, but to Masahiro Sakurai, he meant something more.
The video isn’t very long, and there’s a sense of finality to it, not just in Sakurai’s memories of Iwata, but of the ending of his Youtube channel. Masahirro Sakurai on Creating Games is such an unusual series: an important and brilliant working game creator telling the world personally of his views as a creator. Such an unusual move! But Iwata created both the Iwata Asks series, and the Nintendo Direct promotional videos, which may have inspired Sakurai’s own series. Both men understand the importance, often neglected I think, of clear communication, both between others and the world.
Thank you, Mr. Sakurai, for what you’ve told us. And thank you, Mr. Iwata, for all your hard work.
Another Nintendo post. The company’s tight-lippedness, which has intensified since the days of Iwata Asks, lends itself to fan speculation about nearly everything, and part of that everything is whatever happened to Peach’s minister, Toadsworth. In Japanese he’s キノじい, Kinojii, which I think implies he’s second in rank behind Peach in the Mushroom Kingdom hierarchy. Or was.
Toadsworth was introduced as a third in the vacation party, with Mario and Peach, in Super Mario Sunshine, likely as a kind of chaperone to make sure it wasn’t Peach and Mario taking a personal trip together, which I’m sure would have been a scandal in the fungal broadsheets, their ruler traveling alone with a swarthy Italian. The kooparazzi would be all over it.
Throughout the Gamecube era, Toadsworth was a prominent element of Mario lore, racking up appearances in many games. He was in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Mario Kart DoubleDash, several Mario sports, and especially in the Mario & Luigi games, which fleshed out the character more than any other source.
Piantapedia on Youtube made an 11-minute video exploring Toadsworth’s history. It contains the information that Toadsworth was explicitly removed from the Super Mario Bros. Movie, replaced with a character known as Toad General, which is as good a sign as any that Nintendo is purposely not providing the character any more exposure, except perhaps in remakes like the one of Thousand-Year Door.
Isn’t it odd? Nintendo, when given opportunities to expand upon Mario lore, whenever they take a strong stab at it, often walks it back to the baseline of the original Super Mario Bros. They seem reluctant to meaningfully develop the Mario universe. Sometimes this happens in immediately consecutive games: remember how Super Mario Galaxy 2 abandoned nearly everything from the first Super Mario Galaxy, pretending it didn’t exist, when presenting its story?
The fact that TYD wasn’t rewritten to remove Toadsworth indicates the character isn’t poisonous to Nintendo, necessarily, but neither do they seem interested in giving him any more exposure. For shame! Who knows what Peach and Mario might get up to behind closed doors without Kinojii to watch over things?
Super Mario 64 has 120 Stars to collect, 90 of them from individual named missions in the game’s 15 courses. Many players find that a fairly early one, Snowman’s Lost His Head in Course 4, Cool Cool Mountain, is among the most vexing. When I played it, I found it a illustrative example of what happens when the game gives you imprecise directions, and just asks you to try. I did try, time after time, until it just seemed to work, for some reason I couldn’t figure figure out, and by that point I was just happy to be done with it.
Cool Cool Mountain is a big area with sloped paths leading from the top leading to the bottom. For this Star, some ways up there’s a snowball that talks to you, asking if you could lead it to its body, a larger snowball, some ways down. As it rolls it grows in size. Ideally you stay ahead of it the whole way, and managed to get it to crash into its body. If this happens, it spawns a Star; if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t appear, leaving you to exit the course from the pause button or collect a different star before trying again.
The problem is, you can do exactly what I explained and the snowhead still won’t collide with the snowbody. Sometimes the head seems to aim at your position near the end of its route, but sometimes it doesn’t, and even when it does, you have to be standing in a narrow region in order for it to produce the necessary impact.
As it turns out there’s three requirements. Kaze Emanuar broke them down in a two-minute Youtube video last year. It’s pretty short as far as these videos go!
The requirements are:
The thing is, to a player, it looks like you’re only really needed at the end of the route. Why do you have to hit the sphere first? Even if you manage to stay ahead off the snowball the whole way, if you don’t touch the completely invisible sphere, the whole thing will break. And since it’s on a bridge, it looks like it should be fine to take a shortcut off onto the lower path.
Further, you have to be both within the cone and in a place where the snowball will collide with the body. There are many places you can stand that would direct the snowball to hit the body, but aren’t in the cone! The cone is also invisible, and the range off places you can stand to complete it is quite narrow.
Watch the video for the full details, it’s really short! Kaze does a good job of explaining it.