Category: niche

Youtuber Reviews (Almost?) Every Game at the Nintendo Museum

The Youtuber is Jenna Stober, and she tells us right off that the problem with the games on display at the Nintendo Museum, many of which are rare or limited to playing at the museum itself, is that your ticket comes with ten “coins,” each game costs a number of them (up to four), there’s no way to get more except to get more tickets and visit more times, and there’s more cost in games than one ticket’s worth of coins. You can’t try everything, and if you pick games that aren’t fun, you’re just going to have a bad time, and that seems to be by design.

In her 11-minute video, the reviews, not all the games, but the ones most worthy of calling out as good, or meh, experiences, with enough detail to be able to figure out if your opinion just might differ. Given that tickets are limited, available mostly via drawing, and you can only even use cards that use a “3D Secure authentication service,” bleh, it’s really good to know what to focus on before you arrive at your date-and-time-limited ticket appointment.

The video’s title says it’s a review of “(almost)” every game there, but it doesn’t say which games she didn’t review. No explanation is given as to why.

The games she covers:

  • Shigureden, a card-matching game that hearkens back to Nintendo’s roots as a playing card company
  • Game & Watch games playable via your shadow, Manhole and Ball
  • Ultra Hand (an extendable arm toy originally designed by Gunpei Yokoi) demonstration and play, pretty cheap at one coin
  • Ultra Machine (a mechanical wiffle-ball batting pitcher also designed by Yokoi), another physical toy, allowing you to wreak playful havoc by allowing you to hit balls towards objects in a simulated living room, some of them would be breakable in real life; seems like Nintendo is poking fun at the destructiveness of their own past products; also cheap at two coins, and there’s even different rooms to play in
  • Big Controller is just playing emulations of various Nintendo games using a gigantic controller (she presumably makes an error by saying one of them is a Playstation controller, but I haven’t been so maybe she’s right), they require two people to operate and if you’re alone they may (or may not?) supply a staffer to play with you
  • Love Tester, a device to test your fake compatibility with another person, and another Yokoi invention, but this is more of a number of games designed around the idea of the thing
  • Retro Arcade’s review says you can play “NES, SNES or Playstation games,” which also seems like a fairly big error (maybe she meant to say N64?), but this is just playing Nintendo products, and via emulation too, which she points out
  • Zapper and Scope is a large-scale multiplayer co-op light gun game; unlike Ultra Machine you aim at a screen instead of physical objects; this is the most expensive game at four coins, but also short
  • Hanafuda, the classic Japanese card game, also a reference to Nintendo’s past; intrinsically two-player and best played if you brought a friend, though an employee will play if you’re sad and alone; BTW, if you want to try this without visiting the museum in Japan, the DS version of Clubhouse Games has Hanafuda included as one of its many traditional games, and will even tell you the rules, supply a computer opponent for you, and not tell you which card to play.

Great Mappy Strategy Video

Our retro arcade strategy week is over, but this is a related video that I’ve been sitting on for quite a while. The Disconnector made a very nice strategy video (20 minutes) for Namco’s cult favorite cat-and-mouse game Mappy. It works as both an introduction and a guide to the game as it develops.

Not only is the information good, but it’s really well put together! Looking through the rest of their channel, while the post about other games (most recently about Robotron [8 minutes]) it seems to be the only strategy video of its sort. I hope they make more, I think they have a talent for it!

The @!#?@! of Q*Bert

Fourth of five retro arcade strategy posts this week, how about we learn how to play the swearingist classic game: Q*bert.

Here’s a video that covers what each of Q*bert’s five levels is like (18 minutes):

You play Q*bert, and at first it seems simple. Level 1, you jump on each cube once. Slick and/0r Sam may change them back once in a while, but you can just jump on them again.

Level 2, you jump on each cube twice. That makes each level twice as long, but still not much of a problem. The rising difficulty here comes from more and faster enemies.

Then you reach Level 3, and Q*bert becomes a much different game. Now jumping on a solved cube unsolves it. If you don’t work out how to handle this, levels can drag on indefinitely. It’s a bit of a wall for players here, and Slick and Sam become much more annoying.

Level 4 is similar, except you have to jump on each cube twice, and jumping on one after it’s complete changes it back to the intermediate color. But worst is Level 5, where jumping on a solved cube changes it back to the original color. This is a huge change, for it means the pyramid can actually become unsolvable without using a Disk, or waiting for Slick or Sam to come in and reset some of the cubes. For more details, I refer you to the video. You know, the one I embedded a few paragraphs up. Go! And if you think that’s nuts, check out what happens in the unreleased sequel Faster, Harder, More Challenging Q*bert (GameFAQs link).

Here’s another strategy video (10 minutes), with tips by Jody Martin, released to the Youtube channel of Starfighters Arcade. It more basic in focus, but is more interested in explaining enemy behavior and how to react to it.

Something I’ve thought is interesting about Q*bert, which is also true of Pac-Man, is that it’s like a turn-based game, but where you can play around with the timing of the moves. I’ll try to explain.

While both games let you decide when to make decisions, both encourage playing in a discrete, point-by-point way. When Q*bert lands on a cube, there’s a limited number of decisions they can make, other than waiting to make your move. In Pac-Man, your moves are constrained to the maze paths, but you can turn slightly early, you can pause when you hit a wall, and you can double back at any point. You usually don’t want to pause or double back in that game, because they introduce uncertainty in patterns (although a few patterns rely on them, which makes them much harder to perform). Q*bert is resistant to patterns, using pseudorandomness to affect the paths of the balls and most enemies, and the player’s ability to break out of the rigid temporal confines of that game’s movement is more helpful.

Contrast both games to Robotron and Defender. Those games have “free” movement, they’re not confined to a playfield with limited choices but let the player move around how they want. In actuality they’re games where the turns are taken in real time each frame. That adds a much greater role for player skill, but it also requires you to be much more precise.

Defender Strategy

Defender’s difficulty is legendary. Craig Kubey in The Winner’s Guide to Video Games said it was like being locked in a closet with a swarm of killer bees, and I actually think that’s not overstatement. And yet, people have flipped Defender’s score counter many times in a single game.

In an 18-minute strategy session, Joe Dearman explains the basics of playing Defender well, but I’m afraid if you don’t have a certain base facility it might be hopeless. Although I’m generally good at video games, I don’t seem to have it myself. Take a look and see if this looks like something you might be good at, but be warned, Defender’s controls themselves are complicated, with a lever and five buttons, although I dunno, game controllers these days tend to have many more than that. It is important, however, not to underestimate this game. It will rapidly annihilate you if you aren’t very good.

Both Defender and Robotron 2084, mentioned yesterday, were made by Williams, and designed by Eugene Jarvis, who still works in arcade game production today, or did last time I checked.

Another thing these games have in common is they’re very adjustable. Operators can choose starting difficulty, ending difficulty and on which wave it’s reached. This thread at arcade-museum.com breaks down the different romsets and differences between them. The earlier roms, “Blue” and “Green,” are generally harder, and increase in difficulty through 99 possible levels. The most common and latest set, “Red,” only has 30 effective levels.

At the higher numbers of Blue and Green, weird behavior can be seen. Defender has an enemy called the Baiter, which exists to harass the player if they take too long in clearing a wave of other enemies. At maximum difficulty Baiters become hilariously numerous, the game sending them in about once every two or three seconds. Watch a few minutes of this game with the wave difficulty settings cranked up to maximum from wave 1 (39 minutes). The extra ship level is set it easier than normal, needing just 5K to get an extra, and it’s set to restore all the Humanoids every wave, but that’s mostly to make the game possible, although there does exist video of someone surviving maximum difficulty with ships and Humanoids at normal settings, up to a score of 909K. (1 hour 7 minutes, somehow).

Here is the first of those two links, I’ll leave the other for you to click on if you’re interested. Both of them have the amazingly persistent Baiters, and in both of them the player manages to hold up under the pressure, for a while anyway.

Robotron 2084 Strategy from arcadeimpossible

It’s the third of this week’s classic arcade strategy find posts, and today’s dedicated to the original twin-stick shooter, Robotron 2084.

Robotron’s what I’d call a very pure game. It’s simple in play, nowhere near as complex as Eugene Jarvis’ first game Defender, but deep despite it. The left joystick moves, the right joystick fires, and until you get used to that you’ll have short games. In fact, you’ll probably have short games regardless. It is ruthless.

These videos feature host “Greg” and star player “Darrin,” who is the one giving most of the advice. The first video covers the first nine waves (5½ minutes). They set the template for the game: there are theme levels that cycle every ten waves. There are Spheroid, Quark, Brain and, for levels ending in 9, Grunt waves that completely surround you with enemies right from the start, and each poses its own kind of challenge.

The second video covers intermediate-level play, and wave beginnings (7 minutes):

The videos mention three parts, but it appears that only two were ever uploaded. They mention a site in their descriptions, robotron2084guidebook.com. In the 12 years since the videos were posted that site’s gone dark, but being a text site it’s pretty well preserved on the Wayback Machine, and has lots of good information. They also mention video on the high score site scoreground.com, but sadly it’s also defunct, and the mentioned video that was hosted there is probably lost. If there’s one good thing about Google, I guess, it’s that they let Youtube videos persist on their site for decades without culling them too much.

Classic Arcade Tips: Phoenix & the Centipede Trap

Let’s have a week of tricks & tips for retro arcade games. Here’s one you don’t hear about too often, Phoenix, and one still popular, Centipede.

Phoenix is a standard old-school space shooter. Your spaceship is affixed to the bottom of the screen, where spaceships should be affixed as God and Kazunori Sawano (designer of Galaxian) intended. It’s got a bit more atmosphere than most of them from the time, and is particularly known for being one of the first video games to feature a boss battle, with a big flying saucer with shields to chip through.

One trick in Phoenix, the result of a bug: if you shoot three enemies in rapid succession as they ascend upwards onscreen, you get 200,000 points! This is a gigantic amount, in the video below (18 minutes), which is blurry so you can’t really tell.

The interesting thing about it (which is explained here) is, it’s not a bonus. The score is set to around 204,000 points. If you had a higher score (which is very unlikely in Phoenix) then you lose points because of it.

As for Centipede, there’s a clever trick that takes advantage of a number of converging aspects of the game. First, nothing affects the playfield mushrooms globally (this was corrected in its sequel Millipede, making it ineffective there); second, the Spiders that emerge and periodically clear out mushrooms from the bottom of the screen never touch the first two rows on the side they emerge from; third, centipedes that make it to the bottom of the screen and cycle up and down through the player’s area can get caught by carefully-placed mushrooms at the side of the screen; and fourth, a trapped centipede may halt game progression, but it doesn’t stop scoring, as Spiders, Fleas and Scorpions will continue to emerge into the board, which are worth significant points by themselves.

The result is: The Centipede Trap. Observe (video by “pat,” 12 minutes). If you want to skip right to the trap in action, you can jump to an appropriate place here.

I’ve known about the trap for a long while, it was reported in an issue of my favorite classic arcade magazine, Joystik, in a feature interview with early arcade champion Eric Ginner, where he laid out how to make it, and how it could be useful. It’s a pretty boring way to play, but it works. It doesn’t make the game completely boing, Spiders can still be a big threat, and if one makes it across the screen from the opposite side without being shot it still has a chance to eat the trap. But it does give the player an opportunity to clear the upper reaches of the screen of mushrooms while the centipede is pinned in.

If it’s done on the first wave of each set of twelve, the one where a whole centipede emerges at the start, then Fleas won’t ever appear to add mushrooms, and you can actually clean the entire board of mushrooms, excepting the ones that make the trap. Fleas emerge, on most boards, when the number of mushrooms near the bottom of the screen get too low, but are programmed never to appear on a full-centipede board.

I’ve got some interesting strategy video finds for other classic arcade games coming up over the next couple of days, I hope you’ll like them!

The Website Caves of Narshe

We love oldschool websites around here, and unlike Final Fantasy Kingdom, whose images are all broken and likely isn’t long for this world, Caves of Narshe has been kept up-to-date, its images and links all work, it’s got a good design, and is full of interesting info on Final Fantasies 1, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 9, plus Final Fantasy Tactics and Chrono Trigger. It’s loaded with good information, and best of all, it isn’t Fandom.com! I can’t even rightly give it the oldweb tag, because it’s modernized! May it last a thousand years.

What kind of focus image does a normal standard regular website get? Well how about a screenshot?

Piccadilly Gradius

After yesterday’s exploration of a huge collection of antique electro-mechanical amusement machines, it seemed meet to drag out a little video I’ve been aware of for a while, a demonstration of a Piccadilly Circus-style redemption machine made by Konami, amusingly named Piccadilly Gradius (2 minutes).

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of this strange entry in the Gradius series on the internet, just a stub on a couple of wikis. Piccadilly Circus itself seems to be a Konami series, only a little older than Gradius really. Most of them seem to be simple roulette-style machines where you stop a light on a number to win a prize. The Gradius one makes it into a journey to get a spaceship to the end of a course.

Here’s a demonstration, I think, of one of the more-usual Piccadilly Circus games (3 minutes). It’s got charming anime-style art!

A huge old-timey penny arcade in Yorkshire

It’s hard to believe, but an “arcade” didn’t used to mean video games. Across “the pond,” to trade in ludicrous understatement, in “old blighty,” there is an amazing collection of old-style mechanical machines. Northern Introvert has an ‘alf-hour video exploration of them that makes for fascinating viewing!

50 Sonic Adventure Facts

This Youtube video is a follow-up to Choa’s 40 Sonic Adventure 2 Facts, which we posted about recently. Unlike the standard lists of this nature that litter the internet, most of the ones in these two videos are genuinely interesting, and paint a picture of a team trying a lot of things to make their take on the Sonic series work, while pressed for time.

Here is the video, all 29 minutes of it:

For those not acquainted, Sonic Adventure had a weird structure, with free-exploration Adventure Fields, with permanent powerups to find, NPCs to talk to, and even a few subquests; and more demanding Action Stages. Each action stage had an entrance somewhere in an Adventure Field. Sonic Adventure had six playable characters, each with an entirely different style of gameplay! Sonic running, Tails racing with Sonic, Knuckles treasure hunting, Amy being chased by robots, Omega (itself one of Eggman’s robots!) blowing things up, and Big the Cat… fishing.

What a weird game. And you can tell just from playing it, the weirdness extended to its development. Characters can enter parts of courses intended for other characters. There are secret areas that seem like a holdover from early development, that sometimes can still be entered. Voice lines and animations that are very obscure, or even impossible to trigger without mods, remain in the game. Choa’s video is not a complete listing of these oddments, but it’s certainly a good introduction to them.

The Minecraft Server Written in bash

Here is the page, just to get the link out of the way. It was written by sdomi back in 2023. They were also one of the people who presented the talk from a couple of days ago about turning Chromebooks into more-useable laptops.

Part of the page describing the wholly-questionable project.

People who know what both Minecraft and bash are are right now exclaiming WTF. People who just know what Minecraft, of which there are very many, might be wondering why writing a server in bash is such a big deal. People who only know what bash is… well, you should remember to take your medication, and remember your gerontologist appointment on Thursday.

bash is the primary scripting language over in the Linux Dimension. Think of it as the old DOS command prompt, but much more powerful. How powerful is it? Well evidently you can write a Minecraft server in it, of course. It can do lots of other, less ludicrous things too. I use it to help get the data into shape for my Loadstar Compleat project. It is not made, to put it lightly, for things like this.

These days “bash” is sometimes used as a synonym for a range of command shells, like zsh, ksh and the like. This is a mistake of course, but to an untutored eye they all look broadly similar, and work in a similar way.

This shouldn’t be mistaken as producing a useable Minecraft server, suitable for hanging out with your friends, building blocky castles and fleeing from creepers in. As much as I can gather, it produces the bare minimum needed to connect to the game. And it cheats slightly by using awk to handle loops and some numbers. But much of the point of bash is to connect other tools together into a data flow, so I’ma allow it.