Category: niche

PC Gamer’s Article on a WoW Ultra Rare Mount

It’s December 31st and our offices are empty for the end of the year. We’re kind of slacking off, so let me link to something out intrepid and gelatinous news reporter linked before. It’s a really great longform article from PC Gamer and is worth a look if you didn’t see it then.

Someone’s looking grumpy!

In summary:

For a long long while, there have been ultrarare mounts in World of Warcraft. Most items, a 1% drop rate is as rare as they go, but a few mounts are generated much more rarely than that. People have spent years grinding for a specific mount and never gotten it. It was dropped by a world boss called “The Sha of Anger.” (Hey, I didn’t name it.)

One such ultrarare item is The Reins of the Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent, which allows the very lucky acquirer to summon a nifty glowing black-and-white flying dragon to ride. So popular, and rare, are these items that when they go up on auction they regularly go for the maximum supported price: 9,999,999 Gold.

Players had long rued the immensely high odds of acquiring this item, and others, but had put up with it because Blizzard was the kind of company to just rule things like that to happen, and what you gonna do? Go to City of Heroes?

Early in the item’s existence, however, players noticed that the item wasn’t just generating hardly ever, but in fact, entirely never. A bug in the game meant no one had gotten it. It was just so rare that everyone assumed they just hadn’t seen it yet. Oops!

Much more recently, however, due to another bug, the item became much more common to players of a certain race. The players who had discovered this faced conundrum: be responsible and report the bug to Blizzard, or hoard the knowledge to prevent Blizzard from knowing about it, keeping it off of forums as long as they could, which resulted in the greater player base not realizing it was possible, in order to allow the precious loophole to persist for as long as possible.

If this kind of thing is fascinating to you, and if it isn’t then I wonder why you’re reading this blog, it’s one of the best pieces of game reporting I’ve seen lately.

PC Gamer: How World of Warcraft’s new dragon race brought a 10-year-old loot system to its knees

The Digital Antiquarian on the Infocom Z-Machine

The Digital Antiquarian‘s website contains a wealth of information, but rather than let my works get too gummed up in describing it all right now, here’s is one page from 2012, on the creation of ZIL, the Zork Implementation Language, and the virtual machine that runs it, the Z-Machine.

When we left off last time, Marc Blank and Joel Berez were considering how to bring Zork to the microcomputer. Really, they were trying to solve three interrelated problems. At the risk of being pedantic, let me lay out them for you:

1. How to get Zork, a massive game that consumed 1 MB of memory on the PDP-10, onto their chosen minimum microcomputer system, an Apple II or TRS-80 with 32 K of RAM and a single floppy-disk drive.

2. How to do so in a portable way that would make it as painless as possible to move Zork not only to the Apple II and TRS-80 but also, if all went well, to many more current and future mutually incompatible platforms.

3. How to use the existing MDL source code to Zork as the basis for the new microcomputer version, rather than having to start all over again and implement the game from scratch in some new environment.

The Digital Antiquarian

The Digital Antiquarian: ZIL and the Z-Machine

Pretendo

Pretendo is a recreation of the Nintendo Network, Nintendo’s online networking infrastructure for 3DS and Wii U software. It’s still under development, but when it’s fully operational it may even be able to resurrect lost and lamented services like Miiverse and Wii U Chat.

To help avoid legal entanglements it’s a clean-room reimplementation that doesn’t use Nintendo confidential documentation, which does slow their work, and users will have to make new accounts since they don’t have access to Nintendo’s account information (and wouldn’t want it if they did have access).

Even when Pretendo is usable by normal users, unless you’re playing using an emulator (Cemu is the only one that supports it), you’ll have to hack your system to use Pretendo’s servers. Currently the servers for some 3DS and Wii U games are still operational, but it’s only a matter of time before Nintendo shuts them down, just like they did with the Wii, despite its popularity. It is nice to know that people are working for replacement infrastructure for that eventuality.

A similar service, Wiimmfi, is in operation to replace the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection that Wii and DS games used.

How Gravity Works in Super Mario Galaxy

Another Youtube video? Yeah I know. This one explains how gravity works in Super Mario Galaxy. It’s 29 minutes long. The basic gist is, there are eight kinds of invisible gravity field objects, based off of simple shapes, in the game, which are used in concert to create the various orientations that Mario switches to as he moves around: Parallel, Sphere, Cube, Disk, Torus, Cylinder, Wedge, Wire (basically an arbitrary path in space), and Cone, which is only used in two places.

An interesting fact from near the end of the video: gravity affects Mario’s shadow! Shadows point towards where Mario will fall, not according to how light strikes him, to give players a sense of where he is spatially in 3D space.

How Spherical Planets Bent the Rules in Super Mario Galaxy (Youtube, 30 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: SIMPSONS PIXELS

It’s Sunday again! This time we have for you a seven-year-old fan-made pixel art version of the Simpsons opening. It’s gotten 27 million views since it was uploaded, but some of you must have missed it, right?

It’s loaded with jokes and in-jokes, and is so pitch-perfect that it got used on an actual episode of The Simpsons! It really needs to be paused frequently to catch every reference.

SIMPSONS PIXELS (Youtube, 1:52)

Roguelike Celebration 2022: Procedural Music of Tea Garden

We’ve been recapping some of the talks of Roguelike Celebration 2022 for a couple of months now, and it’s probably about time to let it rest until next year. Still, there is one more talk I’d like to draw attention to, on procedural music generation.

The other talks presented this year use music generated by this system for bumper and intermission ambiance. It really became the distinctive sound for this year’s conference.

There were plenty of other interesting talks this year! You can see them all at Roguelike Celebration’s YouTube channel. Here are 2022’s talks all in one playlist. And if you wish to attend next year, be sure to watch their homepage and follow them on Twitter (I have heard no word yet on other media accounts).

Sundry Sunday: Mortal Kombat 11’s Friendship Moves

You remember Mortal Kombat from the 90s, right? The dark grim grimdarkness, the gore, the Congress-dismaying Fatality moves. Maybe you’re too young for that, but I’m sure you had to have absorbed it from (airy gesture) the culture. Midway may be long gone but they’re still making Mortal Kombat games, after all.

A lesser known aspect to the series is, starting with MK2, in addition to the gory over-the-top Fatality moves, they included alternate forms of them. There were Animality (where the character turns into an animal), Babality (where the opponent is turned into an infant) and, most entertainingly, Friendship moves, where the victorious character does something endearingly silly for the player’s amusement.

Because Friendship moves are humorous and whimsical, many thought they didn’t fit in with all the, you know, grimness of the Mortal Kombat series. But the Friendship moves are back in Mortal Kombat 11’s “Aftermath” expansion! deathmule posted a compilation video of all of them, and every one of them is terrific. See for yourself!

Roguelike Celebration: Hypercard and Trans Joy

We’re continuing with our weekly presentation of talks I found interesting from Roguelike Celebration 2022! They regularly have one or two talks that go some ways outside the roguelike remit, and this year one of them was an interesting talk by Cara Hurtle about using both Telnet and Hypercard, an old multimedia system created for classic Macintosh computers, to discuss queer and trans experience. The talk itself is SWF, although following content outside the video might lead somewhere NSFW.

It’s a short talk, only about 15 minutes, and covers some interesting topics!

Dwarf Fortress on Steam, Polygon’s Coverage

Dwarf Fortress has arrived on Steam, and me and blogmate Phil Nelson are so enthused! I bought it at full price nearly immediately, even though it’s $30 (there is no game in the world that’s a better value proposition for the money!) and played through the tutorial, and was pleasantly surprised that the interface learning curve is much better! The gameplay curve is just as high as it ever was, but that is all part of the game whose tagline is “Losing is fun!”

Longtime Urists will have a little adjusting to do, as some of the keypresses have been changed, some options moved around, there are no Kennels now, and it’s not obvious how to de-designate areas like tunnels to be dug. But compared to how it was before it’s an unquestionable improvement!

There’s also excellent pixel-art graphics, zoom support (hold Ctrl down while rolling the mouse wheel) and even a lot of new music! I wish there was an option to return to the ASCII-ish graphics, but with Steam support for mods I’m sure if they don’t provide it themselves, a fan will make it before long. And if you don’t have $30 rolling around in your pocket or purse, the game is still free on the official website, just as it ever was.

Polygon has not rested on this release, and immediately posted several useful articles for enthusiasts and prospective fortress chiefs, most of them written by Jeffery Parkin!

Dwarf Fortress on Steam ($30) – Dwarf Fortress at Bay 12 Games

Sundry Sunday: “Everything You Need To Know” About Five Nights At Freddy’s

Oy. There are few lorebombs of niche gaming more intricate, and as utterly impenetrable to the uninitiated, as the Five Nights At Freddy’s superseries. What started mostly as a jumpscare delivery mechanism turned out to have backstory, and sequels, and prequels, and novels, and side games, and more.

The “Everything You Need To Know” series takes properties with sizable amounts of lore and tries to condense them to make them generally understandable. By no means do they cover all of the details, choosing to get the gist across simply rather than to explain everything that’s going on. It’s a bit humorous, but the point here isn’t a comedy and/or snarky retelling, as with the So This Is Basically series, but to give you a good rundown with some leavening humor along the way.

So, what will you do with your newfound knowledge? Impress kids? Write fanfiction? Perform exorcisms? Seek to create knockoffs?