It’s a fun idea, to determine if you, as a physical human being person, with all your physical human being person needs, could survive in the world of Super Mario 64, were you somehow to be transported there permanently.
The video embedded and linked below, from a Youtuber named Pretzel, is the projected beginning of a series about whether you could survive in different game worlds. Games are abstractions, and play life in them often leaves out details like drinking, eating, or (let’s face it) pooping. By ignoring that and trying to look at them as if they were actual places you are, by definition, engaging in pedantry, ignoring the essential nature of these places. But it’s fun to think about somewhat. At least we know this world has cake!
It’s been some time since we had one of these obsessive quirk videos. I’d been feeling a bit self-conscious about using them a lot I suppose, plus none of them struck my brain the right way. Well, here’s one that’s pretty good, from Youtuber Bringles (21 minutes):
I won’t like this will be mostly interesting to people who are familiar with the game, but I should explain a few things in case you aren’t but still want to watch.
A “superguard” is a special mechanic in TYD. After the concept was pioneered with Super Mario RPG, the first Paper Mario also included a timed reaction move, often a button press, you can do in response to enemy attacks to reduce damage. But singe the first two Paper Mario games purposely keep their battle numbers pretty low, with most attacks doing single digit damage, sometimes even just one or two points, any reduction to that ends up being significant.
Those moves are called guards. Thousand Year Door goes a step further, with superguards. If your reactive button press happens within a three frame window of the attack’s impact, your character will often take no damage. That’s really strong, which is why both the frame window is so slight and way some enemies play cagey timing games with their attacks to try to trick you into guarding early or late.
One of the things the video reveals is that, in Western releases of the game, nearly every non-item attack in the game can be superguarded. The Japanese version, which was released first, has a lot more attacks that can’t be superguarded, making this a mechanic that was un-nerfed.
Another interesting mechanic revealed by the game is how a lottery in the game works. Players draw a ticket and try to match a four-digit number. You might expect that to work randomly, but it’s much less random than you’d think. Instead it decides how many real-world game days (using the Gamecube’s real-time clock) it’ll be before each of the four tiers of prices will be won. The number of days is random, but only by a bit: it’ll still be a while before the wins happen, but within a limited range. The highest prize won’t be won until at least 335 days since the game was started. There is no chance of winning it before then! That might sound unfair, but since it’d be a 1-in-10,000 chance of winning it fairly, it’s more bending the odds in the player’s favor. Although honestly, who would even be playing the same game of PM:TYD nearly a year after beginning it?
One more thing you should know is that TYD has this stageplay aesthetic in its battle sequences, which take place on a wooden stage in front of an audience of Mario characters. Some enemies play around with the stage (like hanging from the ceiling), but the audience also can play a role in the fights. The video reveals that two particular kinds of audience members don’t trigger randomly as one might expect, but react to certain failures of the player’s behalf during combat. X-Nauts throw rocks if an attack hits but does zero damage (like if the target is invulnerable or guarding), and Hammer Bros. throw hammers at you if Mario misses with a Hammer attack, in something like a display of hammerer pride.
It’s an interesting video all in all, concerning a game that’s much deeper than it may seem at first.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
If you haven’t seen it before (it made a trip around the blogs and such back in 2001), you really aren’t prepared for Duelin’ Firemen. The version that people saw then was really low quality though; a few years back, as part of a documentary about its making that seems like it never really got off the ground, a somewhat better quality version appeared on Youtube. It is, um, really something.
Duelin’ Firemen was a cancelled FMV game, probably a music game, for the 3DO console. Right off the bat it shows you it means business: not one but two planes, one of them in fact the space shuttle Columbia, the other Air Force One, collide with the top of the Sears Tower. The trailer was made in 1996 so you can’t blame it for being inappropriate due to either of those things. You might still consider it inappropriate due to other things, but it’s not too much offensive, unless you consider its childish innuendo or gleeful appraisal of a city in flames offensive. It might just be waiting for a massive citywide conflagration to hit the media for people to tsk at it for that. Which, well, would probably be fair.
Let me not keep you waiting any longer! Here is Duelin’ Firemen, the video game intro trailer that got submitted to freaking Sundance in 1996. You won’t be the same person afterward that you were before. Because we’re all changed by our experiences, be they great or small. But it really is an experience. 7 1/2 minutes’ worth of one:
Recognizable people in it, behind all the poorly composited flames, include blacksploitation star Rudy Ray “Dolemite” Moore, DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh, Dr. Timothy Leary, Rev. Ivan Stang of the Church of the Subgenius, Steve Albini, David Yow, and no doubt others I’m leaving out or don’t myself recognize. I’ve never been great with pop culture figures, or music figures either. But you don’t have to know who any of them are to enjoy it, probably with the aid of the mind-altering substance of your choice.
When I say original headquarters it’s really original: the building they started out of in the late 1800s as a maker of playing cards! I like to mix up the content here and include some history when I can amidst all the gaming geekery. The building has been restored and is now a fairly small and cozy hotel! The stay is recorded on the blog beforemario, with many many photographs.
Nintendo has still been a playing card company for quite a while longer than it’s been a video game company, and while there are some artifacts contributed by the founding Yamauchi family recognizing their game products, mostly it’s a pretty chill hotel, haunted no doubt by friendly and playful ghosts. And they serve food! Have a look.
I’ve been playing a lot of Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island lately. Partly in preparation to add a chapter on it to my Mystery Dungeon book, partly because I like Mystery Dungeon games. I streamed my playthrough of finishing the main dungeon (on my first attempt!) here.
Here is the title screen (which is a spoiler for after finishing the main dungeon, although that is really only a short way into the game):
After you finish every other task in the game, including finishing the final 99 Floor “megadungeon” where most items are unidentified, the title screen changes to add a nice rainbow:
I forgot to get a picture with the title in place. I can’t go back and get it now because of what followed….
There is one more thing to do at that point though. That is to play through the megadungeon again, but finding 12 “Celestial Stones” that severely restrict your inventory by the end.
Well, I’m not sure if they really counted on anyone doing that? There doesn’t seem to be much reward for it. It doesn’t go remarked upon by anyone in the game. But it does change one thing: the title screen. Here it is:
I like the red “IN SPACE” stamp! Sadly, all the graphics in the actual game still show an island floating in the atmosphere, and not in orbit. I wonder if they plan on doing something with this in an update? That seems like a lot of extra work for the benefit of not a lot of people.
Looking through my screenshots, I found this illustration that can be unlocked for behind the main menu, showing Shiren stumbling upon a Monster House:
There’s a lot more to say about Shiren 6, after I gather up my thoughts about it….
I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed lately, but one thing I can post about today is Lexaloffle’s Picotron, kind of a successor to their Pico8, except instead of a fantasy console, it’s a fantasy workstation, with tools for making games that run under it. It’s currently about $12. Here’s Lazy Devs’ introductory video (one hour long):
That should be good enough for now. Maybe by tomorrow my brain will have unpacked enough to say more of interest!
In the early days of Microsoft they really looked down on gaming, fueled by an antipathy towards entertainment by many higher-ups in the company. The Digital Antiquarian recounts the story of the game that got Microsoft started on computer gaming, ultimately leading to the rise of Xbox, and from there, Halo. It’s a longer piece, and mostly text, but the DA knows their stuff. Myself, I’ve never played Age of Empires! Maybe I should try it….
He’s been at this since the days of GameSetWatch’s run of @Play, but the CRPG Addict has finally reached Nethack 3.1, the game where Nethack reaches most of its final form. It’s true that it has gained features since then (especially weapon skills and splitting apart race and role from each other), but it was the version that introduced the current-day structure of the dungeon, added the many role-specific Quests, made the Wizard’s Tower a three level stronghold instead of just a little place in the mazes of Gehennom, put in the Bell, Book and Candle subquest, handed the Amulet of Yendor to the High Priest of Moloch, and put in the Elemental Planes and the current form of the Astral Plane.
Nethack [3.1]: Nothing Lasts Forever – from killing the Wizard for the first time to getting the Amulet up to escaping the main dungeon for the Elemental Planes
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
From the excellent D&D-focused animation channel Dungeon Soup. I won’t say anything more except it has to do with Baldur’s Gate 3 (as it says in the title), and that it’s NSFW in theme if not technically in visuals.
Here’s another image, from the main Supper Mario Broth site. Several spinoff Mario titles have promotional images for fake Mario universe companies used as background art elements. Most of the time these are used in the Mario Kart games. There were a few made for the original Mario Strikers, that went unused in the final game. This one appears to be for some kind of Bowser Support Hotline. Original post.
Dragon’s Lair was the original laserdisc arcade game, and a big hit at the time. It immediately caused a large part of the ailing arcade sector to swing around to doing laserdisc games, a trend that will seem very familiar to people who have been following NFTs, overwhelming the market and ultimately further contributing to the downfall of the golden era of U.S. arcades instead of saving it. Dragon’s Lair, and its sequel Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp and spinoff Space Ace, were by many accounts among the best of the era, with excellent cel-drawn animation provided by the studio of former Disney animator Don Bluth.
Now that I have properly introduced the concept to those who might not have known, I can now introduce this video (14 minutes), put together by the Youtube channel Broken Arcade, which demonstrates how to complete Dragon’s Lair. It’s not a perfect playthrough, but it is done on one credit, and while it plays the player explains what movements he’s doing on the joystick and button, along with notes on timing and tips for getting each scene right. The directions and button presses needed to finish each scene (which are presented randomly in the game) are also listed in the description to the video.
Even if you’ve never heard of Dragon’s Lair before, it’s worth it to watch the lush animation! Here it is embedded:
The demoscene is a rich source of awesome, and at times ridiculous, imagery and sounds. Once in a while we sift through it to find things to entertain you with.
Demos aren’t necessarily out to wow you by pushing a computer’s hardware to its absolute limits. Sometimes one will just present something that was obviously (to people who understand the platform) challenging to do, but is fun for its own sake.
La Linea is a series of short films made for television created by Italian animator Osvaldo Cavandoli. They may be familiar to 80s kids who watched a show called The Great Space Coaster, as they were in regular rotation as segments on that show. They feature an expressive and excitable character, known as “Mr. Linea,” who speaks gibberish and has a variety of adventures, despite the fact that he and his world are represented (with some cheating) as contortions of a single horizontal line. The character often speaks to the off-screen animator, asking for various items, devices and, occasionally, other characters to interact with. Every cartoon ends with the main character falling off or through the line in some way. Some of them are collected on Youtube. Here is an example (2 1/2 minutes):
In 2002, the demogroup Breeze made a tribute to Cavandoli’s work in the form of a full-length La Linea cartoon running on a Commodore 64. It doesn’t have the distinctive music or the gibberish, and there’s no photorealistic hand that reaches in to draw parts of the scene, but the style is otherwise faithful to the original. It is a remake of La Linea #10. Please, enjoy (3 1/2 minutes)!
