Category: niche

50 Chao Garden Facts

Choa has 50 interesting facts about the Chao Garden minigame in Sonic Adventures 1 and 2 (14½ minutes).

The Chao Garden seems like such an odd inclusion in the Sonic Adventure games now. In fact, they seemed like an odd inclusion back then too, about 25 years ago.

It was created as the successor to the “A-Life” aspect of the Nightopians in NiGHTS into Dreams, itself not really a huge part of that game, but it encouraged repeat play to see what they would evolve into. The Chao Garden, for those unfamiliar, was a virtual pet sim included as a side game. Animals rescued in the levels of the main game could be collected, then brought to a number of small areas where they could be presented to one of a number of little blue creatures, the Chao, that they could raise and modify. The Chao didn’t eat the creatures, they instead kind of nuzzled them. Personally, I think they should have eaten them; it makes more thematic sense than whatever magical sparkly thing was going on.

Giving animals to Chao increased their stats, and could even give them new skills. Sonic and friends could then have them participate in various contests, load them up into a mini game on the Dreamcast’s “VMU” memory card, or “bred” with other Chao.

The original platform of the Sonic Adventure games was the Dreamcast, and while the Sonic Adventure servers were running, you could upload them to a babysitting service (or so I seem to remember), or visit the “black market” to obtain various items of benefit to your Chao. It was a really detailed and thought-out pointless minigame, and it came to be identified with the Sonic Adventure games, following the games of the series as it was ported to other, less-doomed platforms.

Choa’s video has more information than a non-fanatic could ever hope to fully understand, but it’s interesting to hear about. These kinds of virtual pet games aren’t made too often, and even less as part of headliners like the Sonic Adventure games were.

Wolf3D-Style Ray Casting on C64 and PET, For Real

Read the subject line, and say to yourself quietly, “No way. What’s the catch?”

There is a catch, of course. There is an art to these kinds of hacks though, and it lies in finding the right catch. The catch that makes the hack possible at all, but seems the least like a cheat.

You can technically “run” Doom on a C64, if you actually run it on a Raspberry Pi plugged into it, that only uses the machine’s video hardware for output. That’s an egregious cheat; Raspberry Pis didn’t exist back in 1983 when the C64 was new.

There are speed-up cartridges for the C64, and you could even implement a co-processor to do much of the hard work of rendering the display for you. That’s also a cheat, although a bit less of one.

One could approach the problem from the other direction, diminishing the scope of the hack until it fits more comfortably in the computer’s capabilities. There are 3D corridor games on the C64; when I was a kid, a tape of software that a co-worker gave to my dad had one, called LABYRINTH, that was written in BASIC. But if it was truly the equal of Wolfenstein 3D it’d have revolutionized the gaming world. It wasn’t, and it didn’t. It generated one of those Wizardry-style mazes, sometimes called “blobbers,” where your perspective is fixed in the center of a grid-based maze. It wasn’t a shooter, it didn’t animate smoothly, and it was a pretty simple algorithm, simple enough that lots of games used it, especially RPGs.

What makes smoothly rendered graphics slow on a C64, indeed on pretty much all home computers at the time? It’s the necessity of using a bitmapped graphics mode. The math of deciding where the corridor vertices and lines go is within the machine’s capability, even at 1 mHz, but writing all those bytes into the C64’s 8K bitmap screen takes a huge amount of time.

It’s why few action games on the Commie used the bitmapped modes. Even if you used a hand-tuned machine code loop to write a single value to every byte in the bitmap, it’d be slow enough that you could visibly watch the screen fill up. If you wanted to actually vary those bytes, such as by rendering walls, it’d take much longer. Even filling the text screen takes so long that it’s difficult to do it in a single video frame, which is why games that feature NES-style full-screen scrolling on the C64 are impressive. (There are tricks to doing it; some of them quite bizarre. Let’s discuss those some other time.)

But you could do what jimo9757 did, and use text characters to simulate the rendering. In fact they did it one better, and used the PETSCII graphics characters for the display. The result is pretty striking! See for yourself in this demo (8 minutes):

Reserving a port of the screen for a status display is itself a bit of a cheat, that cuts down on the number of bytes that must be changed for each screen update, but it’s one that Wolfenstein 3D used too so let’s give it a pass. The walls only have horizontal lines for textures, but it’s not like the original’s were that worthy either. It’s certainly not 60 fps, it’s maybe 15 or 12, but it’s certainly still impressive to see those walls glide by smoothly on a machine with a 1 mHz 6502-class chip.

Since the game uses PETSCII for the maze, this engine can even work on the Commodore’s first home computer, the PET, whose character set was fixed in unchangeable mask ROM. Here’s video of the first-person shooter they made for the PET (3 minutes). I think the graphics, while many would call them primitive, have a fun style to them:

Both the PET game, Escape From PETSCII Castle, and the tech demo of the work-in-progress C64 version can be downloaded from itch.io, to play around with in the emulator of your choice.

HunterR: Reading A Sign 43x Makes Your Axe Extra Durable In Animal Crossing

It is as the title says. It’s been discovered that, in the original Animal Crossing on Gamecube, if you read the village Message Board 43 times, it’ll reset your axe’s durability. But there are more consequences than just that! It’s explained in HunterR’s 10-minute video.

So, why does this happen? The precise details are in the video, but here’s a summary.

When you’re holding an axe, the game is not discriminating about which A button presses cause it to degrade—or, rather, its damage value will increase. If you hit objects other than trees, it’ll pick up three times as many damage points. But you can do other things that use the A button, and if an axe is in hand, its also take on damage.

There are actually eight different axe objects, that are switched between when eight points of damage is taken. (The more damaged versions have slightly different appearances.) The damage counter isn’t actually tied to the axe: it’s a separate count that’s counts for all axes. (Meaning, if you have multiple axes and try to spread out the wear between them, technically only the axe that you’re holding when you take the eighth damage point really gets harmed.) The value is also not saved when you save the game; if you hit trees seven times with an axe, then save and reload, the wear will be forgotten.

If you do something with the A button while the axe is in hand, but it doesn’t strike an object that might cause it to break, it’ll keep gaining damage. If you’re facing an object that isn’t a tree, like the Message Board sign, it’ll even gain three as much. But the check that switches to the next-most-damaged axe type only happens when the axe actually hits something. (It also happens if you open doors with an axe in hand!)

The counter to check if the axe should take wear is a single byte interpreted as a signed value, so, if you can get it to 128 or higher, the high bit is set, so the C library code used for the game’s comparisons will consider it to be a negative number. 43 x 3 is 129, or -126. You can then keep using the axe over and over until the number turns positive again, at 0, or until you save the game and reset the counter anyway.

By the way, to bring this to the realm of things I have personal knowledge of… Animal Crossing New Horizons doesn’t have a similar bug (as far as I know at least), but there is a different unexpected aspect of its tool-breaking. If a timer is running, like from hitting a rock for Bells or from participating in a round of a fishing or bug-catching tournament, tools won’t break until the timer expires, even if they exceed their durability limit. It’ll count the damage, but it won’t actually break the tool until the timer runs out. If you don’t use the tool in a way that might cause it to break, then it won’t, not until you next use it. If you’ve kept track of how much wear it’s taken, you can then sell it at Nooks and get some of the value for it.

Jesh & Zac’s 100 Facts About Gauntlet: Dark Legacy

Finding this one was a real treat for me. I’m so pleased that there are still people who care deeply about these weird arcade/console hack & slash games from a twice-defunct publisher. While in its final years it got renamed to “Midway Games West,” it’ll always be Atari Games in my mind, and that’s what it rightfully should be called, it having had a direct lineage to the first successful arcade video game manufacturer of all.

Gauntlet Dark Legacy is the last of the “real” Gauntlet games (it’s best not to talk about Seven Sorrows), and is especially notable to have received something of a redesign when it came out on consoles. I don’t think the changes were all for the better; the make work of collecting crystals and stuff does not substantively add to the game, but there are some nice additions, like extra class magic effects, poisonable food and destructable items (they’re nice in game design terms, that doesn’t have to mean nice to the player).

The Youtube account Jess & Zac arguably likes the Gauntlet games even more than I do. In a 27-minute video, they give 100 little-known facts about G:DL. Just knowing someone else cares so deeply about the games was enough for me; the information that fans have made updates for the game to fix bugs is even better. I should seek that patch out! I’m entitled, or should be: I own a copy of the game on Gamecube! Also, the N64 and Dreamcast versions of Legends! Me and friends in college played so much of N64 Gauntlet Legends….

That video’s pretty short. They also have a much longer video (1 hour 27 minutes) that rates all 60 maps of Gauntlet Dark Legacy. That one’s rather more obsessive, but it’s not like I’m any strange to video game obsession (Rampart), and it’s a game that isn’t talked about nearly enough these days, at least within my hearing. They’re in order from worst to best, so maybe skip through to the end? Up to you.

I personally think Dark Legacy is a little too long. Gauntlet Legends, its predecessor, is thematically tighter, DL’s extra characters aren’t differentiated enough from the originals, and in the arcade it took many more quarters to get through DL. But I’ve played through both games, and I’d do it again. They’re a little mindless, but less mindless than they seem at first.

I wish Atari Games had stayed in business and allowed to keep iterating and improving on the Gauntlet games, and not closed by stupid corporate cost-cutting. The United States relies on corporations for so much of its creative presence, but regularly destroys huge portions of its culture due to being judged by clueless moneypeople who are way to sure of themselves. It’s a problem that other countries suffer from too, but no where else is it so bad. The US just decided that the skill and thought that all of Atari’s people, who had worked much of their lives making games, didn’t matter. It’s a damn crying shame, and it’s far from the only time it’s happened.

Loadstar Finds: 8-Bit Recipes

I like filling the posts on Set Side B with a wide-ranging field of material, but I realize this is pretty far out even for us. We’re about electronic entertainment, right? Cooking is entertaining, or can be! And websites of recipes are electronic!

I told you about Loadstar, the long-lived Commodore 64 disk magazine that I am involved in preserving. Well I was thinking about things I could draw out of the issues, that people to use. And I noticed the recipes.

Someone named James T. Jones submitted, and had published, over 280 recipes on Loadstar’s disks, over a period of nearly six years. I came to realize that I’ve written scripts to export and convert Commodore 64 text files from out of disk images. And everyone hates recipe sites on the internet, right? They’re all SEO-infected ad-soaked pages, and more and more AI slop is moving into that field. James Jones’ recipes don’t have any of that, and if I don’t care about improving their traffic or exploiting them for ad revenue I can make this resource available to everyone for free!

So I’ve added a subsite to my Neocities site, linking all the recipes that appeared in the disks of Loadstar 64. (I think there’s a few extras on Loadstar 128, I might add those later.)

Here is the intro page to the recipe site. Whether people will find it useful or not, who knows. These are the kinds of recipes that will casually use ingredients like Doritos, or ginger ale. I haven’t made any of these. A few of them look a bit suspect: the recipe for ice cream is surprisingly brief, one of the steps being to “follow the manufacturer’s instructions,” assuming you have an ice cream maker. But there seem to be a lot of other good recipes in there, if you explore a bit.

I’m still tinkering with the layout and text, but all of the content is there now. Bon Appétit!

Gaming Storybundle In Progress

This is kind of self-promotion, but it’s not just self-promotion as you can get tons of books by other people this way, including 10 volumes of Game Dev Stories from David Craddock, twelve books from Hardcore Gaming 101, four from Andrea Contato, and a couple from Dean Takahashi, as well as several other people, including, well, moi. It’s $35 for 66 books! I even threw in the two volumes of Someone Set Up Us The Rom as an extra, even though I don’t get anything out of it. I care that much about this bundle’s success.

No one gets rich from these bundles. The days when you could offer a ton of content at a steep discount and get thousands of purchases are long gone. But cash-strapped readers looking for a lot of info, if they can scrape up just $35, can get an amazing deal that will keep them occupied for a long time. I really think you’ll want to jump on this one, if you’re able.

I’ve been involved with these bundles for around a decade now. Some of the books I’ve contributed I’ve put up for sale on itch.io, but some I haven’t. The original version of We Love Mystery Dungeon is in it, which I’ve just taken down from itch.io due to its forthcoming expanded print edition through Limited Run, which is one of those sad but necessary things that has to be done when you sign a publishing contract, so this will probably be the last place you can buy the original version. By the way, I hope you’ll consider the new edition: it’s got added material on last year’s Shiren 6, a.k.a. The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island, and a whole lot on the whole Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series.

I know I’ve made a few of these self-promotional posts lately, mostly over the Loadstar collection and related topics. I’ve always been anxious about spreading the word about my projects, paid or otherwise. I’ve seen so many people who seem shameless about tooting their respective horns, but it’s kind of necessary, I guess, to be seen through the crowd.

Well there it is. There’s 15 days left in the bundle, so you have a bit of time left to make your decision. Please have a look.

The Greatest Hits Game Bundle 2 (storybundle.com)

Official Mario Paint Videotape

Nintendo’s announced that Mario Paint has been released on Switch Online, a movie that I modestly point out that I called some time ago, although I hoped they’d offer an export option that would let you make easy use of your creations, although one can use the Screenshot button to save your creation probably. It’s not the subject of today’s post, but their announcement’s pretty entertaining, so here it is (4 minutes):

The announcement mentions that one can use the restore states built into the emulator to save your work, which is at least better than the single save file available in the cartridge, or “saving” your work to VHS tape as the manual suggested. Another thing mentioned in the announcement is that, not only can people use the Switch 2’s Joycons as mice to replicate the function of the SNES Mouse that came with Mario Paint and required it, but in an uncharacteristic bit of generosity, it also supports USB mice when used on the original Switch models.

Mario Party is an interesting piece of gaming history. Without it, Homestar Runner probably would never have happened. Five years ago H*R posted bits of Mario Paint work to social media on Thursdays, which they compiled in this video (4 minutes, sadly not able to be embedded).

That’s two videos already and neither are the focus of this post, so what is? This digitization of an official Japanese Mario Paint tape was uploaded by Jeremy Parish, it’s 31 minutes, and shows off some frankly amazing creations that were made in the days where you had to actually use the mouse to make Mario Paint creations, without resorting to outside tools or memory manipulation. Surprisingly, it also bears the logo of APE Inc. Shigesato’s company that made Earthbound! Here here, it is this this:

One more note about the announcement video! It mentions that Mario Paint songs have been added to the Nintendo Music cellphone app. It also shows off “Title Theme 2,” which actually isn’t in the app, but is revealed to be Totaka’s Song! Maybe it’ll be added at a later date?

A Miscellany

I’ve had a number of ideas for big posts lately, but those all take substantial time to make and finish. But I want to post something, so here are the directions my explorations have taken me lately.

  • Loadstar has a number of interesting things in it, including a trove of Print Shop clip art and (surprisingly) over 200 recipes. It’s full of those kinds of thing.
  • Action Retro just posted a new video on using the Apple Lisa (15 minutes), including browsing the internet on one, although on a text-based browser. A text-based web browser, on the first commercially-sold GUI OS, how about that!
  • Been back playing the Pac-Man Championship Edition Famicom demake on Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 on the Switch 2. It’s not really what I’d call a demake though, because it’s really good, in fact it might secretly be the best Pac-Man CE game, which isn’t meant to slight the others. It occurs me that I’ve learned a huge amount about all the games in the series, and I should try to get that information out onto the internet. I’ve got a WIP document about that, and I’m sure I’ve got some previous attempts at writing one in the archives somewhere.
  • Continuing on that thread, I’ve also learned that “Shadow Labyrinth,” that Metroidvania Bandai-Namco’s made with a truckload of classic Namco references including a spherical robot character called Puck, has a mini-game in it that is heavily inspired by the Pac-Man CE games, down to using some of its music. It isn’t scored the same though, and doesn’t seem properly set up for score attack play. It seems to follow along with some of the ideas they used in Pac-Man CE 2+’s two player mode, which I thought didn’t work very well.
  • Been wanting to investigate some C64 BBSes, but to do it proper you need a terminal that supports PETSCII. I have one, but I really want to get it working through C64 emulation.
  • There’s also the matter of getting the custom version of Kirby Air Ride set up with their bespoke version of Dolphin for netplay. I’ve already posted multiple times about KAR lately so I’m reluctant to make a full post about it again until I’ve had a chance to try it for myself.
  • Jeff Gerstmann got sent a message that suggests something you’ve probably never considered, that Mr Do! is real:

People say that you should turn off notifications and live your life and all that, but if I did that I wouldn't occasionally get a buzz on my wrist and see that some maniac has sent the phrase MR. DO! IS REAL to me.

— Jeff Gerstmann (@jeffgerstmann.com) 2025-07-28T22:37:23.199Z

Romhack Thursday: You Are Just A Blue Switch

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

This is a mostly silly hack by Daizo Dee Von, a winner in SMW Central’s Questionable Level Design Contest for 2025, that replaces Mario in Super Mario World with a mobile version of one of the Switch Palace switches, but it does have some interesting gameplay.

The player can switch their switch themselves by pressing L and R, but only by pressing in, not out. Doing so both changes the state of all the switch blocks, and makes the switch itself much shorter. In play terms, this is equivalent of Super Mario shinking and becoming Regular Mario, and in fact getting hit by an enemy has the same effect, resulting in being switched prematurely, and all the blocks changing state too. To switch back, you collect a P Switch item, which is essentially a Super Mushroom, restoring both the player’s state and reswitching all the blocks.

It’s a short hack, but it has secret areas and endings! They’re all shown off in Flook611’s playthrough and exploration of You Are Just A Blue Switch, here (18 minutes):

Or, you could just watch Daizo Dee Von’s own trailer for the hack (30 seconds):

PannenKoek on Reducing Whomp’s Fortress’ Tower to 0 A Presses

PannenKoek, Youtube’s foremost expert on Super Mario 64 esoterica, has made another video (35 minutes). This one’s about how they managed to get all the way up the tower in Whomp’s Fortress without pressing the A button at all.

To remind: not pressing the A is troublesome to build a challenge around (that being what makes it interesting) because it’s Mario’s most fundamental verb: the jump button. On the Gamecube, it was physically the biggest button! I loved that about its controller: these days I always get the buttons mixed up, as a result of some games making the left button the main one, and some making the bottom one. On the Gamecube, there was no question. But the A Button Challenge asks that you use it as little as possible.

The issue with Whomp’s Tower is that it’s a tower, a vertical structure itself atop a mountain. To find out how they did it, I refer you back to the video.

Sundry Sunday: Metal Gear Nonsense

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

othatsraspberry is a hilarious maker of comics and has a Bluesky account. One of the things they’ve made comics about is the Metal Gear games, a surpassingly fertile ground for visual weirdness, because the games themselves are often very weird. (FISSION MAILED)

That’s right, no video today! We can do other things on Sundays than linking to video! And not Nintendo either! Let us rejoice in a world without Mario, for 24 hours at least!

Here is one comic, to give you a taste. For more, hie the away to that Bluesky feed or comic page!

Source: othatsraspberry’s comic archive page

An extra for you. We’ve had two items on Kirby Air Ride lately so I figured I wouldn’t devote a whole post to this, but if you still have room for more (Kirby always has room for more), the first game in this tournament match between Awsm_599 and heynoww has to be seen to be believed. The full video is 23 minutes, the relevant section is the first 7½ minutes, but if you stick around it also ends in an unexpected way. It’s a demonstration of why it’s important not to be too careless when playing City Trial. (I notice that I had linked to the end of that first round in the last KAR post, but the whole game is a nailbiter.)

Possibly

As it turns out, I linked a video today after all. It’s a hard habit to break.

The Girl From Gunma Kai

Some days I write explanations of Kirby Air Ride City Trial netplay. Some days I write guides to new web media sites. And some days, I found a silly shooter on Youtube that I feel you have to know about. Guess which today is, boing!

I honestly never got into Touhou-style games, even though I know they’re popular and influential. Maybe I’d like them if I gave them a shot, but there’s so many other things to explore out there, I just haven’t found the time.

That Touhou style, and their tremendous Japaneseness is part of what The Girl From Gunma Kai has going for it. According to its instruction screens, it’s a spinoff from a light novel from 2014, and a sequel to a short tie-in game to that novel. It’s on Steam for $10, which may seem a bit much for a relatively short game that purposely chases the MSX aesthetic, with backgrounds that don’t move smoothly but lurch along character block grid, and with large characters that overwrite the background they appear in front of. But that’s just the kind of thing it is.

It’s certainly got tons of personality. While you control a flying anime girl who blasts animals, daruma and steam locomotives(?), a large distracting version of that girl resides in the border, dancing to the music. The “dancing” mostly means being horizontally mirrored to the beat, meaning the feathers in her hair swap sides every frame. In the upper-right corner appear descriptions (and English translations) of the various enemies the girl attacks, giving you helpful information on them, like that this one is made of two different-colored sprites, and that one happens to be delicious to eat.

It’s still an entertaining game to watch. Here’s a one-credit playthrough, although it doesn’t earn all the letters in NEPTUNE (a reference to the Neptunia games) so doesn’t get to go on to the secret end stages. It’s 31 minutes long, but if you don’t have an affection for this kind of fare you probably won’t watch it all. A few minutes will give you the idea. (I did watch the whole thing, mind you.)

At the end of the instructions, it says: The game includes a strong homage to the MSX which (creator) HUGA dearly loves, particularly aiming for the cheap rough-around-the-edges vibe of CASIO-made games. Back in the day, there were tons of these unpolished games, and we think there’s room for at least one today. We hope this game sparks a wave of cheap, carefree and delightfully crude games flooding the world—games you can play without overthinking it.

HUGA, you and me both. I love both your style and your affection for that era. May The Girl From Gunma Kai take over the world!