Remember AsumSaus, and their stirring tale of aMSa (54 minutes), who took low-tier Yoshi to victory in multiple major Smash Melee tournaments? Such a great story, and video to go with it.
Well, here’s another such story, told by turndownforwait, of someone doing it with Luigi, played by a player who also had the audacity to be a… a teenager. (gasp! 19 minutes)
Although I’m not really that surprised it was effectively a kid who did it? They have sharper reflexes than us fogeys, and also haven’t been so inculcated by decades of Smash Melee orthodoxy, the playerbase groupthink that only exists to keep hard-working plumbers down!
So, who’s next? Will it be Ness? Samus somehow? Kirby? Ha ha ha no not really likely, Kirby was so good in N64 Smash that Sakurai felt he had to stuff his beloved creation with pure Nerf for Melee. But who really knows? It’s starting to feel like anything might be possible. Let a thousand unlikely victors bloom! Or a dozen maybe; Melee doesn’t have that many characters.
Let’s jump right to the subject. A “Jagen” is a type of character in Fire Emblem games, named after a character from the very first game. Here is ActualLizard’s video on the subject (19 minutes), which has a lot of interesting things to say about strategy.
Jagens are characters, often given to you in the early game, sometimes available even from the very first battle. They have high stats for the early game, and are often already promoted, of the advanced classes that your other troops will have to use a special item to obtain. Jagens often have little to fear from the enemy hordes, at least in the early game.
Jagens are very useful characters, but are kind of a trap. They’re already promoted so they get few experience points from battling lesser foes, and when they do gain a level, they tend to have very low growth rates in their stats. If you over-rely on Jagens, your other characters will be underleveled, and eventually a Jagen’s slow stat gains will cause it to be unable to keep up with the increasing power of the enemies in the advanced levels. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be used at all, but they’re best purpose is to take the edge off of the difficulty curve and supporting your other troops. Since the original Jagen was a mentor figure to Marth and his allies, it’s an excellent case of the game’s story mirroring its design: Jagen’s days of glory are past, his true purpose to help shield and guide the next generation into becoming the best fighters they can be.But! Each game is different, and not all early game powerhouses neatly fit into the Jagen archtype. Some such characters don’t actually stay competitive for long at all, while others (like the awesome Titania in Path of Radiance ) have a strong chance of being useful for the entire game.
You should know a few things about how Fire Emblem’s character growth works. Every character has a number of stats: HP, Strength, Speed, Defense, things like that. The Fire Emblem series is defined, in terms of combat design, by its slow character growth. Every time a character gains an experience level, it only has a chance of gaining a single point in each stat. This chance is preset for each character, and gives everyone a tendency towards certain destination stats, an average spread throughout its 40 potential experience levels. What its actual stats will become will be different each game, depending on what that character rolls upon growth. While many characters have a chance of really great stats, whether they’ll achieve them differs on every playthrough. Growth rates affect that likelihood.
Fire Emblem games tend to put characters right on the edge of survival. When you go up against a boss, you may only have a handful of characters who are capable of denting its high armor, or surviving its counterattack. (Remember, in classic Fire Emblem, is a character dies, it’s gone permanently. If you want to keep using the character, you’ll have to go back to the save before the battle!) This makes it possible to get into situations where all of your characters, even if they’re of decent level, aren’t strong enough to safely defeat a boss.
Characters who join at a high level, or pre-promoted, are a solution to this. The story will sometimes hand you a new recruit to help you keep going, in the event that your party’s been betrayed by the RNG. Whether you should keep using them is something that only experience (and multiple playthoughs, or, let’s be honest, FAQs and walkthroughs) will tell you.
It’s a good one today folks. Modern Vintage Gamer had a look into how the CPU opponents of two of the most popular and foundational fighting games, Mortal Kombat 2 and Street Fighter 2, cheat against players trying to progress far into the game on their meager financial resources.
Their Mortal Kombat 2 video (11 minutes) is three years old now and has racked up 1.5 million views, but it’s well worth reviewing. While MK2’s source code is not known to the public, UK3 for the Playstation’s source is known, and is suspected to be similar to that of the earlier game, and uses a dynamic difficulty variable called diff. MVG uses this source to make an educated guess of how and when MK2 decides to cheat.
Lest you think it’s only us filthy Americans who would resort to such underhanded means to rob honest teenagers of their quarters, Street Fighter 2 does it too! Much more recent is MVG’s four month old video (9 minutes) on that game. (If you’d like to skip the video’s preamble, this link is queued up to the beginning of the cheat discussion.)
In brief, the games use input reading and the ability to perform complex moves lag-free to get an edge over human players. A player would have to enter moves on the joystick and with the buttons, while the CPU can just do them, without having to spend that time. And by reading the player’s inputs (like the Ironknuckles in Zelda II), they can react to player actions reliably, where a human opponent would have to judge based on vague visual indications, and then respond with a move to counter your action that was already in progress.
The N64 came out after the release of the Sony Playstation, which had already begun its meteoric rise. The Playstation used optical disc media, and had no on-console memory for saving like the Saturn did, so memory cards were a necessity for saving game state. While the N64 didn’t absolutely need them, since the biggest advantage of cartridges as a game storage medium was the ability to include hardware like flash storage in the cartridge (a feature used in Super Mario 64, the first system pack-in), an iconic feature of the N64 was the controller ports, which allowed the use of flash memory cards that could hold save data for multiple games.
As the video demonstrates, memory cards were plugged directly into the controllers, and controller paks allowed for some nice features. My favorite was how Gauntlet Legends allowed players to save characters to their own memory card, so you could maintain state between games played on different cartridges. (This feature would be retained in the Dreamcast version of Gauntlet Legends, which also had controller port memory cards.)
The Nintendo 64 didn’t have a BIOS or other internal boot time code. Like with the SNES, all of its executable code was contained withing the cartridges, or “Game Paks.” (Nintendo certainly loved to call hardware “Paks.” Pak Chooie Umf!) This meant that controller management features couldn’t be included in the console itself as with the Playstation, and any management would have to be done in the cartridge itself.
I don’t know if it was a Nintendo mandate that all games that used memory cards had to include their own menu to manipulate saved data, but in practice that’s what happened. All those games with their own controller data managers! And many games didn’t even expose them in the menus. I suspect that to this day many former and current Nintendo 64 owners don’t know, if they want to check what data is on a card or delete something, they have to insert a card-supporting game and hold Start while turning the system on.
Not all games! Just games that use memory cards! And the weirdest thing, which the video makes a deal out of, is that every game uses its own assets to implement the menu: graphics, backgrounds, fonts and sounds. Dozens of bespoke UI implementations, all to provide the same functionality. Some games add extra features, like exposing a little extra data or letting you switch between controllers. Some games have separate menus available after their normal startup; Rare did this, and sometimes those used completely different menus. But as far as I know, if a game used memory cards, you could hold Start at boot time to manage them.
It’s just another oddity with what, in retrospect, has become one of Nintendo’s oddest consoles. More information on N64 controller pak management menus can be found at consolemods.org. Information on N64 controller paks themselves is at ultra64.ca, which includes Nintendo’s policies on what cartridges should do to facilitate N64 memory cards.
Last night at our weekly movie watch group we saw Tilt (1979), one of those fad exploitation movies that Hollywood used to make, about pinball hustling, and with a surprisingly sweet ending, which felt earned because the first half of the movie is pretty sleezy, with an aspiring musician getting the money to make a demo tape by exploiting the pinball talents of a young girl, played by Brooke Shields, who’s got a crush on him. Tilt, BTW, has a prop pinball machine called Cosmic Venus as the centerpiece of the last third of the film, which judging by its art is set on a planet mostly dedicated to stripping.
The backglass to Cosmic Venus (from pinside.com), with typical bikini-wearing pinball centerpiece woman . Stay classy, Koala.
Anyway, that got me thinking about something to show after it, something from the world of real pinball. And I happened upon a promo tape that Bally made to promote the then-upcoming release of The Addams Family, which would go on to become the best-selling pinball machine of all time, with over 20,000 thousand tables sold. Meaning, if you’re going to learn to play any pinball table, Addams Family is still the one you’re the most likely to find out in the wild (although newer machines like Godzilla or Batman ’66 are also good bets).
When that was made, they didn’t know that, after designer Pat Lawlor’s earlier hits Earthshaker, Whirlwind and Funhouse, that his next game would become the greatest of all time.
Addams Family is a little simple compared to the games that would follow it, and especially the games released now by companies like Stern and Jersey Jack, but I think that adds to its appeal. It’s the perfect middle ground between the games that came before it, which were mostly about trying to achieve multiball as many times as possible, and current tables that devalue multiball, and push players towards very long games and wizard modes to get good scores.
AF has a wizard mode, Tour The Mansion, which you get by earning all 12 mansion rooms, but it also has a very lucrative multiball, and it’s the player’s choice if they want to focus on one, the other, or a combination of both. The Youtube channel of tournament organization PAPA has an excellent tutorial and demonstration of high level strategy and gameplay. (21 minutes)
Via Kottke on Mastodon.* Alex Harri wrote an image-to-ASCII renderer that can translate generated 3D models in realtime, and on this page they explain how it works and some of the finer points of that conversion, specifically how not to make the rendered images seem blurry, instead giving edges clean outlines. It’s worth a look even if you’re not a programmer, and just want to see how the process is done. While it does descend into pretty heavy math later on, it starts out pretty approachable, and has interactive demonstrations throughout.
Render captured from the interactive toy on the linked site.
* Bluesky has a lot more users, but Mastodon is used by a good number of highly interested and knowledgeable people, especially people who care about the health of the web, although that’s also because I follow a lot of people like that on Mastodon. Overall I find it a good idea to read both.
The subject of this post is Elie D’s 13 minute video about one of the mascot characters in Nintendo’s Mario universe thing. Here:
I could launch immediately into a tirade that people shouldn’t invest self-worth into what amounts to, not just a cartoon character, but a corporate-owned cartoon character.
But I don’t really want to? Despite everything we still don’t have as much female representation in gaming than we should have. The Mario character lineup still skews about 90% male. These are characters that people embody within a game, there should be more girls. (Also, why are three of them princesses?)
Overall this is a pretty silly topic for a non-Sunday post, but I have something unexpectedly great for each of the next two upcoming Sundays, so I wanted to squeeze this in while the squeezing was hot.
I was just thinking a few days ago, It’s been quite some time since we’ve heard from Retro Game Mechanics Explained. In fact, looking at their channel, it’s been eight months since their last deep dive into video game internals, their terrific (if somewhat dry) look into how Super Mario Bros. 2 stores and constructs its levels (1h40m!), drawing their tiles directly into a bank of work RAM specially included in the cartridge for that purpose.
Yesterday they broke their silence with an examination of the startup routines of arcade Galaxian, Teddy Boy, Joust 2, Pac-Man and Super Pac-Man. It’s “only” 41 minutes, but it’s hugely informative of the necessities of how and why arcades games go about arcading:
I will summarize. The main task an arcade machine must do upon startup is test as much of the hardware as it is able and confirm that it’s operational. The main part of this is testing the various memory types comprising the machine’s storage systems: audio, video and work RAM, and program and graphics ROM. Not just to test them, but to stop operation and alert the operator if something is awry. The garbage often shown on-screen on powerup is a direct result of writing and reading 0s and 1s to and fr0m every bit in the video RAM. The system must also check the contents of the ROM, which is usually done by adding all the values in each bank and comparing them to a known total, literally called a “checksum.”
It’s a fine explainer, even if they didn’t cover my personal favorite game startup, that of Twinbee and Gradius with the Bubble Memory system . The storage media of the game was unreliable unless it had physically warmed up, so when turned on it would play music while the game was making itself presentable, known fondly as the Morning Music. I posted about this way back in 2022! Here it is again. It would be an excellent tune to set a wake-up alarm on a cellphone. Just saying.
1. Every row and column must contain the same number of red and blue spaces.
2. Every numbered space must have the same number of spaces touching it (in the eight spaces around it) as its color.
3. No two adjacent rows or columns can have the same sequence of colors. In practice this is the most subtle rule. It doesn’t always come into play, but if it does it’ll probably be the breakthrough you’ll need to pull off a solve.
The starting position of one of the more difficult puzzles.
Every puzzle has a unique solution. It is similar in style to another web puzzle called 0h h1, but a major difference in presentation is that Urjo is watching as you try to solve it, and won’t let you make incorrect moves. Instead, it counts up all your mistakes and scores you on how well you did. You have an overall rating that goes up as you both complete puzzles with fewer errors and faster times than other solvers. This can be annoying (it’s easy to click the wrong size of a circle on accident), and it pushes you to try to solve them faster than you may feel comfortable, which may also cause inadvertent mistakes.
The software will try to give you puzzles just past your skill level, and I can verify that they get very difficult. If you make mistakes it’ll offer to give you some pointers. Myself I ignore those tips; but I can see how some people might find them useful.
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.
words.zip is a fun word search kind of game. It’s an infinite field of random letters. You try to find words snaking through the array. Words can twist and turn, and can also go backwards, but can’t go diagonally, cross themselves, or intersect with any other word that someone else has ever found.
Here I’ve found the word ROUGH in this relatively uncluttered area of the board. Apparently I’m the first person to ever find it! This is the fourth such word I’ve found since I started playing, and the shortest.
There is no scoring, but there is a newly-added list of challenges, various categories to try to find words in. If you decide to play, I think you should start out immediately dragging the field in one direction until you find an area almost devoid of other players’ words, and start from there. Of course as time passes it’ll get harder to find unique words. I read somewhere that there are plans to implement private games, with new fields to search through uncluttered by people entering ASS or POOT. If the well-hoed field is too much to tiptoe through, maybe come back in a week or two and see if that feature has gone live.
A quick one today, busyman demonstrates six ways to crash Scribblenauts games. To remind: Scribblenauts is a game where you have a magic notebook that creates things you write in it, if you just know the word for it. It’s one of a very small number of games that attempt to be exhaustive over some domain: if you know the word for it, then there’s likely to be an object in Scribblenauts if you try to create it. This required a great deal of work to realize, but worked well enough that they even could include some memes in its huge database. “Loituma Girl” is demonstrated in the below video (4½ minutes).
Starting with its sequel Super Scribblenauts, they’re also adjectives in the game. This video seems to be from a version with adjectives: one of the objects is “resurrective dark matter,” although attempts to find resurrective in a dictionary will probably fail.
Because Scribblenauts games contain thousands of items, some with unique properties, finding all the ways that they adversely interact would be very difficult. The above video demonstrates six ways that they can be brought together in order to crash the game.
The gameplay of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is famously limited to three days. After three days the moon crashes into the town, destroying it. You have to go back in time before then (which also saves the game) and continue completing subquests in a non-linear, atemporal kind of way.
But as it turns out, there is a way around it, which puts the game into a sort of limbo. People who would ordinarily be moving around on their schedules are completely missing. Entering into some buildings crashes the game. In any event you’re stuck until you finally play the Song of Time and reset the world, getting events back on track.
But how does this happen? And how is the time system implemented internally? It turns out to be quite the interesting breakdown. Skawo (I imagine it said like the Daleks’ home world pronounced by Elmer Fudd or Homestar Runner), who is starting to seem almost like the PannenKoek of the Ocarina of Time engine games explains it in 15 minutes, here:
