Mac OS/X, or “macOS” as Apple would like me to stylize it but that ain’t happening, is based on a number of prior OSes: NwXTSTEP, OpenBSD, and a kind of intermediate step after OpenBSD called Darwin. When OS/X was new Apple made much hay out of Darwin being open source. Was it ever really, completely? Once it may have been, but it’s said that gradually that’s become less and less true. It’s certainly not been super viable as its own thing for a while, needing some important parts, particularly a bootloader, to be able to run it.
There is a project to make it viable though, called PureDarwin. It has a small but devoted cadre of people working on it. One of them, up until November of last year, was project leader Cliff Sekel, a.k.a. InsaneDarwin. Sadly he didn’t lay down the keyboard because of growing tired of it, but instead he passed away after an illness. Here’s an memorial from the PureDarwin website.
Memorial from the PureDarwin site.
Lots of projects would age into irrelevance after a key figure leaves it, but it seems there is yet some life in PureDarwin, with code running on x86_64 and ARM64. I can’t speak for how viable it is to run yourself, for the most part it seems to be terminal-only, but work is progressing towards giving it a GUI for the first time in almost 20 years.
You might be interested in a video that Clean Retro Tech recently made getting an old version of Darwin running on a Pentium III (17 minutes). It might be interesting for the kind of people who obsessively watch Action Retro, which regularly dusts off old hardware units and tries to get old OSes working on them. Hey, it’s a kind of computer entertainment! I am entertained by it at least, and you can’t say that it isn’t niche.
Skawo over on Youtube explains a lot of early 3D Zelda weirdnesses well, and they have a new video (8 minutes) explaining a great strangeness in Ocarina 3D on the 3DS. Here it is, a basic summary follows:
The scene: Lon Lon Range. The time: Adult Link’s period. The event: rescuing Epona from farm usurper Ingo. To do it, you have to beat Ingo in two races, each two laps, around the pasture.
The basic gise is that, in the 3DS version only, for some reason walking away from the race while it’s still going on can allow you to still win. Skawo demonstrates the phenomenon in their video.
So, how? In the N64 version, race progress is tracked by checking for Link and Ingo passing through three spheres in order, then a finish line. Both games contain a provision to prevent Ingo from despawning when far away, so Ingo does go around the track twice. In both versions a horse’s position is tracked by the center ground point of its model. In the 3DS version, however, for just the final finish line check, the game instead checks the draw position of each horse’s front-most hoof instead, to avoid cases where a horse’s front leg and its center point might disagree on which crossed the line first.
The issue is, if Ingo isn’t on screen, his horse isn’t drawn, and its legs’ position isn’t updated, so Ingo can’t win the race if he isn’t on camera. He can still win by default, if Link takes more than three minutes to finish.
The full details are in the video. It is interesting how unintended consequences like this can sabotage a programmer’s best intentions. I’m left wondering, now that terrible “AI” coding agents are being allowed to program things on their own, how many such bugs will creep into programming of all times? My own coding experience make me sure it’s going to be many.
I also wonder how many silly errors like this are going to sneak into the Switch 2 remake of Ocarina of Time, whether it’s coded by a human or a big pile of linear algebra?
There’s three events that I always hype (or try to, if I remember them), the charity speedrunning events AGDQ and SGDQ in January and July, and the two-day online conference Roguelike Celebration in October.
We already announced Roguelike Celebration’s preview event a couple of weeks ago, but the main event is Saturday the 171h and Sunday the 18th. They’ve posted their lineup for this year. Just to remind you, you’ll need a ticket to attend, which cost $30, but you can usually get a free ticket if you ask nicely. I encourage you to pay if you can however, since it allows them to pay for their human-provided text transcription, to pay their speakers, and to keep the server running.
A interesting thing about Roguelike Celebration is that while it’s mostly about roguelikes, naturally, they also have other interesting talks, and they always seem to find good subject. A few highlights this year, Andrew Plotkin is giving a talk about mazes in games, there’s a talk about randomness in a Fire Emblem game, and “stealing roguelike mechanics from Microsoft Word.” There’s one about recovering and modernizing one of the original Hack games (I suggested that one!) and one about cellular automation in roguelikes. Oh, and the Caves of Qud people are talking about localizing their procedurally generated texts.
There’s always a bunch of interesting talks each year, and although they go online after the conference, if you show up you can offer questions to the speakers, talk with them yourself in a MUD-based conversation space, and talk with the other attendees, who tend to be crazy intelligent types themselves. It’s all a lot of fun, and if you’re reading Set Side B, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy being there, so please consider giving it a try!
Once in a while we have something that one of us has done to promote, and so is the care today. It’s been a while in coming, but at last my second print book, a greatly expanded version of We Love Mystery Dungeon, is now out through Limited Run Press!
It’s just $25, but it’s packed with information, from the original Torneko through to Shiren 6: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island, with absolutely no generative “AI” (always use the scare quotes) used in its creation. This edition has stuff on Shiren 6 and a huge new section on the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games! Thanks to Jeremy Parish for helping edit this monster into existence!
And since it’s unofficial we don’t toe any company lines in making this. This does mean some idiosyncratic terminology, sure (I call monsters advancements “promotions,” which I think I got from the Nethack source code?), but it also means I’m not coy about which games I think are good and which aren’t. And I try to at least mention every game, including weird ones like Nightmare of Druaga and the Japan-only Etrian Odyssey II. There’s also Rainbow Labyrinth, a free-to-play mobile game which I only know about from a page from a Mystery Dungeon wiki, and which never left beta!
This is the kind of project where I’m split evenly between derision, admiration and respect. Someone is actually doing this thing, with as much accuracy to the 16-bit games (and DK64 too) as is merited, however much that may be. And they’re doing it, not as some D&D adjunct, but I would say as an accessory to an unproduced (as yet?) Donkey Kong RPG.
If you don’t know what that is, and I’d admit it’s meaning is sorta inside baseball…. A hexcrawl is a kind of RPG adventure that’s either partly or totally undirected. A large expanse of terrain is marked out on a hexagonal grid, secretly on a gamemaster’s sheet. The players of his game may have their own hexagonal grid, either completely unmarked or with only the most obvious features pre-inscribed upon it.
In the GM’s notes, some, many or possibly even all the hexes are keyed to a list of contents, waiting for an unsuspecting party of adventures to wander through/blunder into it. There might be deadly monsters, friendly allies, neutral NPCs, dungeons, lairs or treasures to find there, or some combination of these things. Just walking into a hex doesn’t guarantee finding what’s hiding there, if hiding something is, it may require a concerted search; or, the party might find it easily. It’s inherently a sandbox style of play, but the randomness of finding adventure, and the possibility that whatever might be there could be missed, multiplies the sense of possibility in the game world. A group might travel through a hex many times before a well-hidden encounter might get noticed.
This is the style of gameplay that the inspired creator seeks to bring to Donkey Kong Island, site of the 16-bit SNES classic Donkey Kong Country and its sequels. The inspiration is the same kind that craftsdwarfs in Dwarf Fortress get, referred there as a strange mood. Those moods can turn out well or badly, but if successful they produce wonders.
It’s an amazing idea, and a bit awe-inspiring, and at least a little bit ridiculous. But lots of things that I thought were ridiculous became immensely popular, Kingdom Hearts is proof enough of that. Actually, I still think Kingdom Hearts is ridiculous, and more ridiculous than this.
The nom de net of the creator of this is Farmer Gadda, and they have both a Neocities blog and a Bluesky presence, which is where I found out about this. A project like this, I’d have it pegged for a Mastodon announcement, but at least I found out about it somewhere.
There are two posts so far, an introduction and a page of system considerations. They’ve thought about it at least that hard, and I can respect that kind of maddened obsession, since after all have I not harbored a not-very-secret Rampart obsession for decades, since before Donkey Kong Country’s release even? (Checking facts: Rampart was 1990; DKC was 1994.)
Screenshot of the first post. Imagining having the task of what to hide in that giant bust’s nostrils?
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.
(EDIT: I put the wrong banner on this post on first publishing! It’s fixed now.)
Violarium is another of that prolific genre of puzzle game, the grid- and turn-based series of progressively-harder problems where you learn the rules as you go, and new complications turn up periodically, until suddenly they’re all done and you’re looking at the credits.
At the beginning
Often this style of game takes the form of a block-pusher, but not this time. Each puzzle here is made of a number of dice blocks, their pips representing digits up to six. You must trigger each of the blocks in order: the 1, the 2, the 3 and then the 4 (and the 5 and 6 too, if they’re present). Each must be triggered once, and not more than once, or they all reset and you have to start it over.
You trigger a block partly by standing next to it, but that’s not the only requirement. Your facing matters too, but your character can only face left or right, and can’t turn in place unless you move into a wall. You can also trigger dice by moving next to them vertically, but the rules are subtly different. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how they’re different, but as you might expect, by the end you’ll have to have completely mastered the implications of this system, and some other devices too, before your purple pixel person can retire to his petite pixel pad.
Slightly later
Of note: I have noticed that the combination of Linux (and Wayland?), Vivaldi and this game is a bit unstable, I figure maybe due to the Unity browser runtime. That’s just a guess, but the game screen continually freezes up for me when running in that browser. I’ve not tried it in Chrome, but Firefox is okay, so try using that.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
When I put it like that in the title it sounds like it’s going to be salacious but it really isn’t, it’s just anthropomorphized representations of the various enemies in Wii Play Tanks.
Okay… you don’t know what that is…. I’ll explain.
Wii Play was a mini-game collection on the Wii natch, a burgeoning genre on that system. It was an excuse to release a bunch of Wiimote experiments as an inexpensive package. As often happens with Nintendo, some of them were better than you’d expect. Three of them had some real longevity to them. Table Tennis was like a faster version of Wii Sports Tennis; Billiards was an excellent pool simulation; and then there was Tanks.
Tanks put you through a series of 20 single-screen levels where you piloted a tiny tank around destroying various other enemy tanks set around each board. As you passed level after level the game would introduce new tanks with various personalities and powers, like laying land mines, firing rocks, aiming bank shots off of walls and, eventually, invisibility.
If you were playing along you had limited lives, but it also had a two-player co-op mode, where each player only had one life, but destroyed players got revived so long as the other player survived to finish the level.
After you finished the 20-level version you unlocked a 100-level version, which threw in a couple of new tank types. There’s some nice grace notes in the design, like how the background music adds different tracks depending on which kinds of enemies are in play. It was a lot of fun, and deserves to be remembered as more than just the best game in Wii Play. Here’s a marathon playthrough of the whole thing. It’s a surprising hour and 22 minutes long, but just a couple of minutes of it will suffice to give you the idea.
I don’t know if any game series has a higher ratio of difficulty to simplicity as the Monkey Ball titles. Just use the analog joystick to tilt a 3D landscape to use physics and gravity to steer a plastic ball containing a money into a goal tape. But within that simple premise is some of the most devilishly hard gaming of all.
Especially in the original game, Super Monkey Ball. (Okay, the original original was Monkey Ball, but that was only released in Japanese arcades, and is pretty similar to the arcade mode of Super anyway.) To truly beat S.M.B. you have to complete 50 stages of Expert, then the secret 10 stages of Expert Extra which only appear if you finish Expert without using a continue. This means doing it in three lives, plus whatever additionals you can scratch together by collecting 100 bananas, while completing levels like this:
It isn’t the focus of this post, but here’s a run through all of SMB1’s Expert, Expert Extra and Master stages. The thing about Super Monkey Ball is it’s very hard, but it looks even harder. Check out this utter insanity (34 minutes):
Being separated into discrete levels like this and being so exacting in execution, one might think that the incentive to cheat at this, by splicing together footage of different runs, would be high, but due to some interesting factors it’s not as easy to do this like one might
think. Goober13MD made a video (13 minutes) explaining why you can’t just edit together your best plays in Shotcut and present that as a world record run:
But that video is from eight years ago, and since then some people have, indeed, tried to cheat, and for quite some time succeeded at getting away with cheating at speedrunning this most ludicrous of games. Here’s GooberMD13’s exposé from four years ago at uncovering a cheater (48 minutes):
And two years ago they put together this epic 1 hour-6 minute video about ancient records revealed to be the probable work of cheaters:
The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
Microsoft pioneered a form of hypertext that came onto the scene around the same time that HTML, the format that web browsers read and display, did. As sometimes happens with Microsoft, they didn’t really understand what they had there, and relegated it to a format for help files, called WinHelp, which debuted on Windows 3.0.
HTML unquestionably won out over it, but the WinHelp format, extension .htp, and its successor Compiled HTML Help or CHM, has some advantages. Both are self-contained, bundling all of the individual pages of the help system into a single file, and didn’t need network access to read them. That ease of transport meant in the early days of the World Wide Web you could sometimes find downloadable Windows Help files, and that’s the format that the “Roadmap to the Information Superhighway” was released in.
The Roadmap, from Spring 1995. Just take a moment to bask in that green-on-bright-cyan text.
In the early years of the Web it quickly became obvious that there was a great need to enhance findability, that the greatest website in the world was useless if no one knows it exists. The Roadmap, and the previous year’s upstart Yahoo (later called Yahoo Directory) were two attempts to combat the obscurity problem. I insist that this problem has always been with us, that the creation and rapid adoption of Google just made it less obvious for a while, and now that the Goog’s enshittified its bed, entering its dotage and embracing “AI,” it’s become more visible how difficult it is to find interesting things online. (It’s why I’m still a devoted Metafilter member and poster even now, 27 years after its creation.)
The Roadmap to the Information Superhighway (it calls itself the Official Roadmap) is mostly a list of tutorials and links. It is so old that it refers to “the Mosaic,” Mosaic being the first popular web browser. Yet even back then enshittification was still present in online spaces, and this edition of the Roadmap was deep into it, so some of the links you click on will open up, in its own window, an ad for its “Internet Yellow Pages.” They were double-dipping: the Roadmap itself cost money, $39 for a subscription, which is probably why it was supplanted by Yahoo, and even print listings of websites.
A portion of the Roadmap’s section on Gopher
In 1995 the Web had only been around for five years or so, and substantial portions of it were still accessible only through protocols like News, Gopher, Telnet and even web BBSes, so a portion of its text went to explaining how to use these services. There’s even a page on how to use Finger, which being a very Unixy thing, was something a lot of people just didn’t use even then.
I’d like to someday go through all its links and find out what percentage of them, but even then there were a lot of websites, and yet I fear the proportion of them that are still active is depressingly low. I’ve complained here before how some people still seem to think the internet is forever, when it is really really not, we’ve lost countless pages and sites, and the Internet Archive’s collection of them is spotty. It’s a miracle that it exists at all, and they are well-deserving of your donation dollars, if you can spare a few. It’s a miracle that they host the copy of the Roadmap that I link above.
A hint to browsing the roadmap from WINE, at least one of its links, the one reading What Is the Internet Superhighway?, crashes its Help reader when I open it.
To return to the phenomenon of WinHelp, the original Windows Help stopped being bundled with Windows Vista, and Windows 10 completely dropped support for it. You can still load Help files, like the Roadmap, on Linux systems using WINE, and that’s where my screenshots come from. Isn’t it just like Microsoft to invent a technology that other people now support far better than they do?
I usually wait to Sunday to post something like this, but Bill Wurtz is a frog-slam internet treasure, and I want to crow about his return to making thoughtful and incredibly songs and glitch-art videos attached to them, after a three year break, that I want to crow about it from the highest, well not mountaintop. Skyscrapers also seem too high. From the highest molehill maybe? It’s still a really high molehill.
Wurtz has made lots of songs-and-videos like this, but perhaps his masterpieces only contain songs as components. There’s his history of japan (9 minutes) and history of the entire world I guess (19 minutes), and both are incredible, in the sense that I don’t believe anyone actually made them. No, it’s impossible, I shant accept it, I shant! They were found in a field some day and Bill Wurtz adopted them, raised and nurtured them as his own. But they existed before then, I’m sure of it, and he may have aided and abetted them but they arose from some weird natural process that’s entirely inhuman, and entirely non-AI either. See for yourself:
If you’re old enough to remember Usenet, then I don’t have to tell you buddy, you are old. Google’s given up on archiving it (Google’s given up on lots of things), but Tedium remembers it, and reminds us all about the promise and wonder it once held.
Even though it’s older than the World Wide Web that many people mistakenly see as the whole internet, Usenet has many lessons for us today. Like email and the Fediverse, no one owned or owns Usenet, it’s an ad hoc assemblage of many newsservers. And also like email, Usenet at one point was drowning in spam. In fact, one could argue that it drowned in spam, that rampant unsolicited commercial messages are why few use it today, even if it technically still exists. Sure, as some wrinkled ancient netheads will insist, Usenet had ways to stop spam, but if they didn’t get used, consistently and comprehensively, then their existence didn’t matter.
The big advantage that Fediverse services like Mastodon have over what Usenet used to be is a solution to spam. As was demonstrated a few years ago, Mastodon servers that start spewing potted meat product rapidly get defederated, or will be ideally, giving server maintainers an incentive to stamp down on them quickly. With megaservers like mastodon.social out there serving as the Fediverse home of a large portion of its users, who knows if maintainers will prove willing to defederate that whole bloc should it become a spam generator. But then the internet is primarily a mechanism for generating difficulties. Let’s hope for the best.
I’ve represented this game before as Taloon’s Great Adventure, and it’s long had a fan translation. Now it has an official way to play it, though it seems like Spike Chunsoft had nothing to do with this recreation. The play seems mechanically very similar to the original, just with much sharper graphics. The characters and monsters are still represented using the original 2D pixel art, just presented in 3D dungeons.
Title screen
There are a few modern Mystery Dungeon niceties, like a bar showing progress towards the next experience level and an on-screen display for fullness, but other than that, and the graphics, and the names localized according to current Dragon Quest sensibilities (lots of onomatopoeia and puns), it’s presented as it was originally released back on the Super Famicom, only now there’s an option for English. (Japanese is still offered as a language option.)
Early monster den
While a surprising amount of Torneko 1 persists even into the most recent Mystery Dungeon game, Shiren 6, there were some minor rule changes that will catch players who haven’t played the earliest game:
Equipping arrows uses a turn, even though it’s mostly a user interface help, for there is no play difference between using L to fire one or going into the menu to launch it.
In more recent Mystery Dungeon games it is impossible for traps or pregenerated sleeping monsters to block the ways into rooms, but I’ve seen it happen three times here.
Torneko 1 is the only Mystery Dungeon game to use Rogue’s idea that, you’re going down into the dungeon to get an item, and once you get it you have to come back out again, through all the levels, the monsters getting easier as you go but no items generating on the way back up. All the later games just have you progress through the dungeon to the goal.
On changes I approve of, monsters are more likely to choose directions other than straight ahead in dark intersections, and character healing is much more in line with Rogue than in recent Shirens: it starts slow and increases as you gain levels, instead of starting fast, but decreasing in effect relative to your maximum HP as that goes up.
I always say that the first Torneko Mystery Dungeon game is a lot like Rogue, and the first Shiren is quite a bit like Hack. Well, Torneko is more like Rogue than Shiren’s like Hack. Many monsters have direct analogues. Drackys are much like Rogue’s Bats, Muddy Hands are like Venus Fly Traps, Mimics are similar in both games (some versions of Rogue call them Xerocs), Funghouls are similar to Rattlesnakes and Walking Corpses degrade shields similarly to Aquators degrading armor. And of course Torneko’s Green Dragons are like Rogue’s ordinary Dragons.
Fell into a pit trap
Torneko 1 is most interesting to play if you’re entirely new to the Mystery Dungeon series. Lots of great monsters and items would come in later games, but they’re all absent here. There are no dungeon shops, no pots/jars at all, no monster promotions (though they can gain levels), and no allies, dungeon NPCs or bosses.
The intended progression of Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon is to complete a “Minor Mystery Dungeon,” which teaches the basics. It can be pretty difficult for newbies, even though it’s just 10 levels.
After that’s over, you’re expected to play the normal Mystery Dungeon many times, dying often, but the money you earn going to increasing the size of your shop and the town around it, which adds more amenities to them and more conversations with NPCs there, who go on about their whimsical JRPG lives, engaging in their own petty adventures and dropping more hints to playing the dungeon.
There’s many of these shop upgrades you can earn, but if you know what you’re doing, if you’re experienced at playing Roguelikes in general and Torneko in particular, you can complete the main Mystery Dungeon quest quickly, even on your first try. The ending was written expecting you to have fully developed your shop by this point, so if you win before that point, when Torneko returns to town it’ll be instantly advanced to nearly its ultimate state, and characters you’ve never met will congratulate you on finishing the quest as if they were your oldest friends. All this was true of the original game too, and it was just as jarring there.
It’s best not to wake Legerdemen until you far outlevel them, unless you have the means to safely handle them.
As a typical with Mystery Dungeon games, the main quest is not the biggest challenge. There awaits a bigger task, with more kinds of items and full item identification and that disallows taking items in with you, called the Major Mystery Dungeon. And both the normal and Major dungeons have 99 levels, so if you choose you can explore down to the bottom of both of them.
I should warn you about a problem that has caused great frustration in my experiences with this remake. Mystery Dungeon games let you hold the R button to constrain movement to diagonals. This is necessary because it is really difficult to press two directions on the control pad at once in a single frame. This Torneko remake has this feature, but by default it takes a half-second to kick in. This version plays more slowly than most MD titles, with enforced pauses after actions to make sure the player sees that the monsters don’t act simultaneously with you, that they take their turns after yours. This will make experienced players, like me, try to rush through, and that will result in them making unintended moves when the R button doesn’t kick in instantly, as it does in every other Mystery Dungeon game. This has directly caused me to lose at least two runs, and I hate it.
Another early monster den.
On top of that, probably the worst thing about this game, is its price: $25 for a glowed-up Super Famicom game. You can get its great-great-great-plus-several-more-greats-grandchild Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate (Switch, Steam), for five dollars less, before any discounts, and at this moment on Steam it’s only four dollars! All the Shiren games are much deeper games, loaded with extra content and bonus dungeons. The recently-made Shiren 6 for $36/$40 (Steam currently half off, Switch) is a pretty good version.
I note that the credits to this game have a section for AI content. I don’t think that necessarily means it was used to make this game. On one hand, it would explain that concerning problem with the R button, and a couple of other UI problems. But on the other hand the credits are very long, and seem like they must list every employee at Square Enix. So I don’t know if they used it, but if they do then that’s despicable, and if they did it in order to avoid hiring Spike Chunsoft to port the game they made then that would be extra despicable, and then to charge so much for it on top of that. But I don’t know if is true at this point, so I won’t pass judgement… yet. It might explain the R button problem, and a couple of other weird sloppy bits I’ve noticed.
There is a charm to Torneko, and there are some changes in the later Chunsoft Mystery Dungeons that I don’t approve of, but it’s obvious that Square Enix made it mostly for the nostalgia money. It still makes for a good introduction, but you might want to wait until it goes on sale unless you’re desperate to have it.
But yeah, I was desperate.
What follows is my obsessive notes on this version, largely unedited, in case you’re desperate too.
Some differences from the original:
The game plays more slowly, with an enforced pause between player and monster turns
Torneko doesn’t automatically turn to face attackers when struck
The ‘R’ button doesn’t immediately constrain diagonals, it takes about a half second for it to activate, longer if there’s a message box on the screen (changing the setting “Lock Movement to Diagonal” to Either in Game Settings corrects this, but is annoying in other ways)
You can change game balance options to customize your runs, although it might make run ineligible for high scores and achievements
Items don’t have descriptions in their item menu like basically every other Mystery Dungeon game, including, I notice, the original. Instead, to find out an items function (provided that it’s identified), you press ZL while selecting it.
In addition to the classic B+A button combination to pass turns in place, ZR also does it
The game lets you retry a dungeon immediately after failing it, with a Large Loaf in your inventory
Land mines destroy nearby items, which I don’t think happened until later Shiren games
The options for naming items include a “guess” option that lets you pick from items discovered in all past runs, although it doesn’t seem to actually name the item, it just checks it off of a list
In the Play Records menu in the dungeon, there are a number of interesting lists, including all the items and monsters you’ve found among all your runs.
Things it’s useful to know:
Equipping arrows uses a turn, which is not common in Mystery Dungeon games
High score tables return, a fun but largely unnecessary feature
Misses are much more common, from both you and monsters, than in recent Shiren games, don’t be surprised if you miss four times in a row once in a while
Herbs don’t give you any fullness (EDIT: this was incorrect; they do give 5 fullness, but it’s added immediately, right when you use the item, not along with the other effects of the herb)
Enemies gain experience and can gain levels, but don’t promote into new species as in Shiren
Some general advice: Ledgerdemen (a.k.a. Magicians) can easily end your adventure at DL2.
Some other points of interest:
This remake borrows the minus-charges convention from recent Sirens, for use of unidentified wands; if you use an unknown wand, it’ll say it’s “-1,” or minus-one, but this is just to remind you how often it’s been used
It also displays Fullness on the display, and an experience progress bar
The game makes you escape the dungeon after collecting a goal item; carrying the goal item turns off hunger, as it did in Rogue when you found the Amulet of Yendor (and were wearing no rings)
No pots or dungeon shops in this game
Food items eaten at full do not increase maximum fullness
Traps can be generated in room doorways, unlike more recent MD games.
A list of enemy properties:
SLIME: weak
DRACKY: weak, may move randomly
MAULUSC: weak
GHOST: moves fast
PLATYPUNK: average
DROOLING GHOUL: divides sometimes when attacked
FUNGHOUL: may caused poisoning
BODKIN ARCHER: fires arrows
LEGERDEMAN: can put you to sleep, always generates asleep, hard to awaken
MUMMY BOY: strong
BAG O’ LAUGHS: steals money, leaves money if defeated, may warp away when attacked
IMP: Steals an item
RESTLESS ARMOUR: high defense
WALKING CORPSE: rusts shield
LUMP SHAMAN: may teleport player away
POWIE WOWIE: generates in groups of four, moves and attacks fast, whole group wakes up when one does
LIVING STATUE: looks like dungeon feature statues, remains inert until you approach it, strong
ROCKBOMB: stops moving and attacking when low on HP, may explode if then reduced in health without killing it (10 HP left), reducing a nearby player to 1 HP (explosion range 2 spaces in all directions)
MUD MANNEQUIN: may perform a weird dance that drains a level
MUDDY HAND: may grab Torneko and prevent escaping
GOLEM: strong
MIMIC: looks like an item until awakened
GIGANTES: strong
FLOAT-O-COPIER: weak, looks like another kind of enemy but doesn’t have its properties or strength
POCUS POPPET: can reduce player maximum strength by 1, or maximum HP by 5
SILVAPITHICUS: fast to move and act
WINKY: can mess with player controls, can affect from anywhere in sight
ARCHDEMON: strong
SHADOW: invisible, may move randomly; if you try to move into a space but can’t for some reason, it’s because a Shadow is in the way
GREEN DRAGON: strongest monster, may breathe fire, worth 3,000 XP
A few items:
PEEP SCROLL: this game’s name for the famous Scroll of Identify
SUSTAINING RING: Torneko doesn’t get hungry!
MOD ROD: Transforms target into another monster
PROFITIER RING: sells for a lot, that’s all, no other effect
SANCTUARY SCROLL: prevents adjacent monsters from attacking in melee
SNOOZE WAND: puts target to sleep
EVAC SCROLL: escapes the dungeon
CHEST OF CHEER: Your objective
Some items that appear, unidentified at first, in the Major Mystery Dungeon:
SANDS OF TIME SCROLL: resets the dungeon level (including your stats, inventory and level) to the state it was in when you first entered it
WANDERFUL SCROLL: asks you to pick an item like the Peep Scroll does, but charges a wand
BREAD SCROLL: asks you to pick an item like the Peep and Wanderful Scrolls do, but turns the selected item into a Large Loaf
COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO RING: doesn’t keep you awake as you may expect it to do, instead monsters wake up when you enter or leave a room.
GOBSTOPPIBG SCROLL: player cannot use their mouth, meaning, no eating food or herbs or reading scrolls
