Category: niche

Sundry Sunday: Stop-Motion Promo for Metal Slug Awakening

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

I’ve always been a little ambivalent about Metal Slug. Not about its gameplay, which is excellent, but about its theme. It’s been said that it is impossible to depict warfare without glorifying it in some way. I think there is some truth to that, and there is no question that the Metal Slug games depict the hell out of it.

I think the Metal Slug makers recognize a bit of that, because of how humanely the enemy soldiers are depicted. They’re all trying to kill you, but they’re far from snarling villains. When not actively trying to bring about the end of Marco and Tarma (and Fio and Eri)’s lives, they’re chatting with each other, having a meal, sunning themselves on the deck of a ship, using the toilet or just hanging out. When they spot the invading players, they often react in terror. Sometimes you don’t want to shoot them, even when they’re climbing on your Slug and trying to throw a grenade in the hatch. Even their leader, General Morden, is not the typical villain. His backstory says that dissatisfaction with corruption in the Regular Army’s ranks, along with the loss of his wife and daughter due to an act of terrorism, was what caused him to launch his rebellion, and his solders admire his leadership.

It’s almost enough to make one want to overlook the questionable aspects of his army’s symbology, for which I can only thank my lucky frog the usual suspects haven’t latched onto. Morden is rehabilitated a bit in the endings of Metal Slugs 2 and 3, where he’s betrayed by the Martians he joined forces with, and helps the player’s commandos defeat, but its true that he’s always the antagonist at the start of each later game. Metal Slug, for all its sci-fi, zombie, magic and other trappings, is still a game about depicting conventional warfare, no matter how one-sided and improbable it may be.

Ah, as is often my habit, I used the subject of the post to write a short essay on some aspect of gaming. I hope you don’t mind. Here is the video, a stop-motion recreation of a typical Metal Slug scene, made by official entities to promote a mobile game. It seems appropriate to the subject.

Metal Slug: Awakening | Full Stop Motion Video (Youtube, 1 1/2 minutes)

Sublime Games: Stephen’s Sausage Roll

Stephen’s Sausage Roll (homepage, Steam $30, Humble $30 – Increpare gets the most money if you buy it here, plus you get a Steam key)

This is the beginning of a series of reviews of sublime games. The sublime is, as described on Wikipedia, the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation. That’s a lot to live up to for a videogaem!

I’m using that term to describe games that feel like they stretch out your brain just by playing them. Usually this doesn’t mean by difficulty, although Stephen’s Sausage Roll has plenty of that, but by there being some special aspect of it. I think what I mean by that will become more evident as this series continues, but Stephen’s Sausage Roll is rather foundational. Both Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) and Arvi Teikari (Baba Is You) have claimed it as inspirational. Sublime things tend to inspire people a lot.

It’s easy to miss the quality of Stephen’s Sausage Roll if you play it casually, because it’s not a game that really lends itself to casual play. SSR doesn’t ease you into its puzzles, right from the very start the game demands thorough knowledge of the consequences of its movement scheme, knowledge that can only come from failing at its puzzles many times. Stephen’s movement is reminiscent of the porter from Sokoban, but he’s got this dang fork sticking out of him, and every movement must take it into account. Steven can only move forward and backward without turning to the side, which rotates the fork around him.

Understanding how to move that fork around is essential to shoving around the sausages in each level. To solve a level, all of its two-tile-long sausages must be moved over grills exactly once in four locations: once on each tile of one side, and once on each tile of the other. Leaving a sausage on a space doesn’t overcook it, but you can’t move it so a cooked spot touches a grill again. One move for each sausage on each tile of each side! Burning a sausage, or dumping one in the water, immediately fails the level.

This playthrough of one early level demonstrates how it works:

This description is not all of Stephen’s Sausage Roll’s tricks, not by a metric mile, but it’ll stump most players for a good while. It starts out hard and gets harder.

There are no tutorials, not even instructions other than an early sign that tells to use the arrow keys to move, Z to Undo, and R to Restart a puzzle. (These hotkeys have become a bit traditional, and work in other games.) You can’t even read the sign until you realize you have to swing your fork around and walk alongside it. Stephen does have other moves, I have come to learn from reading pages about the game, but it’s impossible to activate them in early levels.

When I read writing about puzzle games, the writer often talks about how smart the game made them feel, sometimes in a paragraph that also mentions dopamine hits, like they were Skinner boxes that give players treats. I dislike game criticism that tries to reduce them to pop neurochemistry. Besides, these days dopamine is not in short supply. It’s available on every Steam corner, plus you could get it just as well from food, an interesting novel, a movie, or pornography for that matter. Difficult puzzle games make you work for it, and where is the fun in that?

The fact is, puzzle games are not interesting for being a dopamine administration mechanism. They are about improvement, about learning to overcome challenges on your own. Once you learn how to do Sokoban puzzles they lose their appeal, because solving puzzles isn’t as much fun as learning to solve them.

Stephen’s Sausage Roll does not make the player feel smart. It makes them feel perfectly stupid at first, but by the end of it they may feel smart. They may, because by completing it they may have become a little smarter. The improving aspects of playing video games is not often mentioned these days, but it is one of the main reasons that I enjoy them. Thinking through a difficult puzzle can help one learn to think a little better, and because of that these sausages are no mere empty calories.

But the difficulty, and the novel take on Sokoban rules, aren’t the only reasons I’m writing about this in a series about sublime games. Each of the game’s little puzzles is a small portion of a larger world. When you enter a level, most of the world sinks beneath the sea, leaving you with a tiny portion of it remaining. When you properly cook all of that level’s sausages, the world returns, but pink walls, where the sausages were, will be gone, allowing you progress. This means the very terrain of the overworld is made of the puzzles you’re solving, which is an unexpected elegance in a game about cooking sausages. And mirroring that fact, there is a deeper meaning to the sausages you’re cooking and eliminating from the world, one that is revealed slowly, as you solve each excruciating puzzle.

SSR is a game that makes a mockery of the very concept of review scores, as most sublime games do. The graphics are purposely done in a PS1 style, intentionally ugly by current standards, and the sounds are simple steps, swishes, and the occasional “ugh” that may have come from the game or the player. And it’s gameplay, while great, shows that play can be about subtracting, taking away all extraneous elements, rather than adding unnecessary new things. In what world does taking away things add points to a review score?

Stephen’s Sausage Roll is not an extremely popular game. While it inspired big hits like The Witness and Baba Is You, and is rated Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam, it hasn’t sold as well. But it hangs on, quietly enlightening new generations of players and designers. It may inspire you too, if you were to let it.

The End of Blaseball Blexplained

It has now been over seven months since the end of Blaseball, that shining star of lockdown that burned brightly but ended suddenly. Stories will be told of its brief reign, and memories zealously hoarded. I’m amazed that no one else has definitively moved in to take its place with their own take on splorts, it seems to be an opportunity waiting to be filled, but until such time as it happens, the concept, along with the game itself, continues to Rest in Violence.

The planets orbiting Blaseball’s many suns continue to orbit, their surfaces unwarmed but still hosting faint signs of life. The Blaseball Wiki remains online, explaining the absurdly twisty intricacies of a game that no longer exists, and The Society for Internet Blaseball Research still hosts statistics and information related to that dearly missed pastime.

One of those planets is Blaseball Blexplained, a Youtube series that doggedly and diligently presented season recaps of Blaseball’s many crazy seasons. Since Blaseball’s ending, they’ve slowly continued their recaps, and have now finally finished their last Expansion Era summary, of the Hellmouth Sunbeams. It is around 16 minutes long. It present the final recantation of the nearly un-understandable events that marked the final seasons as did all the others, throwing out references to Black Holes, Feedback and Fax Machines, counting on you to know what the hell all those things mean. You do, don’t you? ‘Course you do.

So, one last broadcast from Blaseball Explained, favorite fake sport summary channel, now broadcasting exclusively to the Hall of Flame.

Farewell, Blaseball. In your memory, I proclaim: hail Namerifeht.

The Monitor, friendly guardian of the Hall of Flame and concessions operations
(Image from blaseball.com)

P.S. The Society for Internet Blaseball Research (SIBR) has a page of information on how the fates of Blaseball, early on, intersected with that of the Pacific Salmon Treaty of 1985, and of a mysterious face named by fans Salmon Steve. Here is that page.

Dark Arts of Pinball: Deathsaves

So we covered bang backs back on Saturday. Let’s look at another tournament-illegal pinball maneuver, the deathsave. Here’s video from PAPA showing a couple being successfully performed (1 minute):

It’s another trick that involves the machine being bumped forcefully from the front in a specific way, this time to save balls going down the right outlane. I’ve never done one myself (even if I could muster the force, I don’t really want to). There are tables, including Rocky & Bullwinkle and The Last Action Hero, that are even set up to recognize when they’ve happened and reward it, or at least inform the player: I saw what you did there.

It prioritizes players with sufficient strength to shove the machine hard enough, and risks damaging it, so it’s illegal in tournament play. Due to the nature of tilt sensors, which are typically plum bobs with a conductive ring around them, depending on the details of the table it need not even incur a tilt warning, although it could run afoul of the slam tilt sensor, a separate device. Tilt sensors exist to allow some nudging but punish excessive use, and tilting results in the loss of a ball and any bonus. Slam tilt sensors are designed to protect the hardware itself, and immediately end the current game, which forfeits even the chance to enter initials. Essentially it resets the game’s computer. So, be careful with that.

Dark Arts of Pinball: Bang Backs

An unalterable law of pinball is, when the ball slips between the flippers, or goes down an outlane, it is lost, too bad so sad, cue the bonus count, unless you tilted when you tried to save it, that is.

But this is not actually true.

There are a small number of what we might call “dark arts” in pinball, techniques to save balls that otherwise would not be saveable. This is one of the things that’s interesting about pinball. It’s not like video games where everything that happens is the result of processors moving bits around. There is room for things to happen on a pinball table that the game software has no control over.

One might even make a case, if they were feeling argumentative, that the scoring and the rules have an at-best incidental influence over the real game, which takes place purely in the physical realm. This isn’t completely true: the software awards extra balls, controls playfield toys, enforces tilts, and otherwise manipulates the game’s Newtonian world, but it is true that, if the machine is in working order, and the player never misses their shots, that they can play indefinitely, and even score popcorn points for hitting low-value targets. Pull that off long enough and you can earn arbitrarily high scores, but I hope you’re good enough to hit the same shot over and over thousands of times, though, not to mention have the spare time to do it in.

A consequence of this is, lost balls can be rescued, in a number of ways. One of them is the bang back.

When the ball goes down the left outlane, along the side and bottom of the playfield, if the left flipper is raised and the right flipper left down, a sudden forceful blow by the player’s hand against the lockdown bar at the right spot can impart enough force to the ball to cause it to leap up onto the right flipper, and back into play. Even though the machine “knows” the ball went down the outlane, due to triggering its switch, it generally won’t penalize the player for doing this. The ball-ending event is it coming to rest in the trough, the receptacle for out-of-play pinballs beneath the playfield. Until the ball reaches it, it’s live.

Bang backs are a dark art because they enable extra-long turns, and also the force required to execute them risks damaging both the machine and the player’s hand, and so are illegal in tournament play. But they can be pulled off pretty consistently, as this video from the PAPApinball channel (1 minute) demonstrates:

Another dark art of pinball is the deathsave, but let’s save that for later….

AGDQ Starts Tomorrow!

AGDQ, one of GDQ’s two yearly life speedrunning events, begins tomorrow and runs to the 24th! Here’s the schedule!

Here are some highlights, according to me. The times I give are US Eastern/Pacific, but the schedule page linked above can convert times to your own zone:

Sunday, January 14th

Noon/9 AM: Tunic – Everyone’s favorite fox-based Zelda-like.

12:40 PM/9:40 AM: Super Monkey Ball – Monkey Ball speedruns are always awesome to watch!

3:40 PM/12:40 AM: Tales’ Adventure – A glitchless run of a Game Gear game, and one of the less remarked-upon of the Sonic series.

4:49 PM/1:49 PM: Donkey Kong 64 – An infamous 3D platformer experienced the best possible way: watching someone else play it.

8:55 PM/5:55 PM: Ultimate Doom – One of several billion speedruns of Doom, I’d expect this to be heavily optimized.

9:43 PM/6:43 PM: Jet Set Radio Future – The underrated Xbox sequel to the Dreamcast original.

Monday, January 15th

3:13 AM/12:13 AM: The Typing of the Dead – Worth checking in for the funny word list!

5:13 AM/2:13 AM: Marble Madness II race – At last, over 30 years after the prototype sequel to Marble Madness was scrapped, it finally comes to GDQ. Mere days after the game was leaked to the public there were already extremely proficient runs of MM2 on Youtube, so don’t blink or it’ll be over before you open your eyes.

10:01 AM/7:01 AM: Manifold Garden, reverse tree order – This game is amazing.

11:38 AM/8:38 AM: 30XX – sequel to 20XX, a procedurally-generated platformer.

2:37 PM/11:37 AM: Metroid Prime 2: Echoes – A competent sequel to the original Metroid Prime that tends to be overshadowed by the original. This is a 100% run, scheduled for 2 1/2 hours.

7:30 PM/4:30 PM: Sonic Adventure 2 Battle – Another underrated game, this run seeks to get all A ranks.

10:55 PM/7:55 PM: Pikmin 4 – The Pikmin games seem to alternate, with the odd-numbered games having strong time limits, and the even-numbered ones being a lot more laid back. They’re all terrific though, and provide a kind of gameplay that few other games attempt.

Tuesday, January 16th

8:46 AM/5:46 AM: Arkanoid – I presume this is the NES version. Coming from the lineage of Breakout, this game is extremely hard. I hope they’re playing it on NES hardware, with the official paddle controller made for this game.

9:23 AM/6:23 AM: Gimmick! – The new schedule page doesn’t specify which platform the game is being played on, unfortunately. This could either be the NES prototype original or the official (and ludicrously expensive) exA-Arcadia remake.

11:34 AM/8 34 AM: The Legend of Zelda – This run is glitchless, which is an important consideration for Zelda 1 these days.

2:03 PM/11:03 AM: Gyromite (Game B, Dog Assistance) – 🐕🐕🐕？？？

8:00 PM/5:00 PM: Octopath Traveller II – Might be a good opportunity to see what this game is about, if you haven’t jumped at it yet?

10:52 PM/7:52 PM: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – IGA’s post-Konami Metroidvania, with an emphasis on the Vania.

Wednesday, January 17th

2:59 AM/11:59 PM[Tue]: Diablo (1996) – The original game, but played through as a Sorcerer at Level 1?

3:46 AM/12:46 AM: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door – News of the Switch remake has put this classic back in the spotlight. It’s still the best Paper Mario game, and one of the best damn JRPGs period, overloaded with humor but with a great story too. It demonstrated that the Mario universe has the power to tell actually interesting stories-but it may also have been the game that causes Nintendo to rein in Intelligent Systems’ use of the Mario property, as (I believe) it’s the last game with individualized Toads.

7:15 AM/4:15 AM: Ducktales Remastered – The final voice appearance of Alan Young, Wilbur from the long-ago talking horse sitcom Mr. Ed, as Scrooge McDuck before he passed away. It’s one of Wayforward’s technically excellent 2D platformers, so it’ll be interesting to see how they break it.

8:26 AM/5:26 AM: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (arcade) – A 1 credit clear no less. I love seeing arcade games at GDQ, especially if they aren’t rhythm games, or as I like to think of them, Super Simon.

10:24 AM/7:24 AM: Super Mario Bros. 2 USA – I find it sad that NES games tend to be underrepresented at GDQ in this era, although I can certainly see why, as this run is scheduled to be just 12 minutes long.

11:06 AM/8:06 AM: Monkey Island 1 vs Monkey Island 2 – I don’t know what this means. Are they playing them both?

12:25 PM/9:25 AM: Metroid Dread – 100% NMG (“No Major Glitches”)

2:40 PM/11:40 AM: Pokemon Crystal Item Randomizer – Additionally, this is played co-op, meaning (I think) two players are playing, but when one finds an item the other immediately gets it too.

7:05 PM/4:05 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – This run is marked “MST.” To explain, that stands for Medallians/Stones/Trials. For an explanation of the explanation, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

9:35 PM/6:35 PM: Super Mario 64 – “16 Star Drum%” Oh those abbreviations. Whatever that means, they expect it to take 24 minutes.

10:06 PM/7:06 PM: TASbot presents Super Metroid – Past TASbot performances have reprogrammed games to present full motion video on a Gameboy and a completely alternate ending to Ocarina of Time, so whatever they’re doing this year is anyone’s guess.

Thursday, January 18th

2:11 AM/11:11 PM[Wed] – 7:25 AM/4:25 AM: Short games – I don’t know if this counts as “Awful Block” since Ninja Gaiden is in there, but they are running a number of lesser-seen games, including NES Beetlejuice, the Xbox 360 promotion Burger King tie-in Sneak King and Virtual Hydlide.

11:42 AM/8:42 AM: Kirby and the Amazing Mirror – That odd Kirby game that was functionally a Metroidvania and gave him Smash Bros. powers as one of his copy abilities. Also, Kirby has three other Kirbies wandering around as helpers, and you can call them in a cell phone. Kind of a failed experiment, but it’s still interesting!

12:19 PM/9:19 AM: Castlevania III – A solid NES game, and one that hasn’t been broken to pieces as it still takes 40 minutes to finish.

2:35 PM/11:35 PM: Super Mario Sunshine – 120 Shines. That means getting all 240 Blue Coins too. AGDQ had a cursed run of Sunshine where the runner suffered a Game Over, but because the play eschewed saving to save time, all progress was completely lost, and they had to start from scratch! Hopefully this one will go better.

8:37 PM/5:37 PM: Super Mario Maker 2 Glitch Showcase – Nintendo seems to be neglecting this game-it didn’t get a bookmark website like the first one did, and now Wonder’s out with nary a remark about SMM2. It feels like they’ll bin this one before long, so please enjoy these glitches while you can.

9:22 PM/6:22 PM: Halo: Combat Evolved – Co-op on Easy. I understand that this extremely niche game was nevertheless popular in some circles. The 3? 4? of you who know of this game will enjoy it I’m sure.

Friday, January 19th

9:17 AM/6:17 AM: Undertale, True Pacifist Race – It’s hard to believe this game’s already eight years old! When will we start seeing Deltarune chapters at GDQ?

3:22 PM/12:22 PM: Risk of Rain Returns – This game is very new but already has speedruns!

4:40PM/1:40 PM: Super Mario Bros. Wonder

10:34 PM/7:34 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask – 100% No Major Glitches Relay

Saturday, January 20th

5:38 AM/2:38 AM: Star Fox 64 – 2k%, which means, in the style of speedrunners, a speedrun with a special requirement, here that the player finish a score of 2,000 or more. Back when I played Star Fox 64 a lot, my highest score ever I think was a bit over 1,700, and I worked hard for that score, so this requires some “skillz,” as they say.

8:46 AM/5:46 AM: Sonic Origins Plus – “Anniversary Mode” Relay

6:33 PM/3:33 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Any%, so, expect an unwise confrontation with Ganon with only four hearts.

7:51 PM/4:51 PM: Baldur’s Gate 3 – Last year’s other megahit, this goes through all acts but is only scheduled for 35 minutes. A friend of mine has, over a week, started this game completely over from scratch three times without finishing, so it’s safe to assume he’s falling way behind the curve.

9:04 PM/6:04 PM: Final Fantasy V Pixel Remaster – The last game of the show, with “Cutscene Remover.” Even without them, scheduled for 2 1/2 hours.

The Dreamcast Junkyard on Shenmue-likes

The Dreamcast Junkyard is an underrated blog, and when it’s not telling us about good old Dreamcast games, it’s telling us about games that are like good old Dreamcast games. While Shenmue never got past the second game, despite plans for an epic multi-game story, its spirit lives on in a multitude of other games, from various studios. The specific ingredients of a Shenmue-like, I would say, are a real-time lifesim with a large variety of sidequests. But that technically applies to farming games like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, which are not quite the same thing.

Six are listed in this article, and they are the Yakuza series (of course), the Persona series, Bully, Mizzurna Falls, Lake, and The Good Life; I’ll leave it to the post to explain the whys of each. The Good Life, specifically was entirely off my radar, but it sounds like it might be worth looking into!

6 Games That Scratch the Shenmue Itch (Dreamcast Junkyard)

Waluigi Sings “Baby It’s Cold Outside”

Another light post, usually I’d put this on Sunday but we’re so close to C-Day that it’d end up going up on the 24th. It’s the creator of Brawl in the Family, Matthew “BitFinity” Taranto, recorded Waluigi singing a duet with himself (who else?) of Baby It’s Cold Outside. “I like when you’re uncomfortably creepy!”

Waluigi Sings: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (Youtube, 2 1/2 minutes)

Inform 7

Still December, still in low-impact posting mode. I figured I’d tell you all about interactive fiction authoring system Inform 7, which still feels new in my mind despite coming out 17 years ago.

I say “Inform 7” to distinguish it from previous versions, which were a very different system. Inform 6 was a cryptic C-style programming language; Inform 7 source code reads like English. Radically so:

A bit of Zork implemented in Inform 7.

I’ve long wanted to learn Inform 7 and create something interesting with it, but every time I do I run into a thick wall of error messages. I feel it’s important to emphasize, from my own experiences trying to code with Inform 7, that this apparent ease-of-use is completely fake. It reads like English, and does what it appears to say. But in fact it’s written in extremely fiddly and precise English. It’s still all programming language, with a precise syntax, it’s just a syntax that makes it readable to both humans and the computer. In this way, it’s like Ultra COBOL.

And yet, reading it is useful to understanding it in an intuitive sense that’s untrue of many programming languages. It eschews the usage of punctuation for random coder things, in the abhorrent C style. Yeah, I said it, I’ve wrestled with C syntax more than once, I even generally understand it, but I really don’t like it.

Inform 7 used to have a great website, at inform7.com, where it could both be obtained and had great examples. That site is gone now, replaced with a GitHub page that is also pretty great, but since it, like all GitHub sites, is relying on the largess of Microsoft, and subject to the eventual enshittification that inevitably affects all corporate-owned hosting, it feels like less than the original. Ah well.

That site contains the Inform 7 documentation, which has a wealth of examples for learning how to use it. Alex Proudfoot runs another GitHub site, Inform 7 Examples, which contains that after which it is named.

This post risks defeating the entire purpose of making low-effort content during a busy time of year, suffice to say this is an unusually-deep rabbit hole of which much more deserves to be said. Later.

The Current Inform 7 Website (GitHub)

SjASMplus

No image this time. There’s nothing to take a screenshot of! SjASMplus is, simply, a cross-platform assembler targeting the Z80 platform, the processor that runs many classic arcade games. (I refuse to say “powers,” that’s not what that word means!) If you have interest in writing new games for old arcade platforms, it’s something you’ll need.

It’s the holidays still, and I’m trying to unwind a bit. I’m failing, but at least the effort is there: the effort to reduce effort. Maybe someday.