Let’s keep rolling with these Youtube finds. There’s millions of them, but most of them are obnoxious, with the emphasis on noxious, so I try only to repost here the best. And this one’s pretty informative.
Which version of the classic foundational CRPG Wizardry should you play? I’m going to emphasize that you should play one of them. Wizardry inspired so many people, but one ever quite duplicated its mixture of tabletop-inspired party-based play, permadeath, and overwhelming difficulty. Wizardry is a game that doesn’t want you to win it. That’s why characters cost a fortune to revive, cost an ever greater fortune to bring back if that process fails, and it becomes impossible to revive them if that fails too.
If characters die in the dungeon, their corpses aren’t even brought back to the surface for you! You have to take a different party of characters into the dungeon (assuming they’re strong enough to survive the journey!), move the dead members into empty slots in your group, then return to town, unload them into storage, and repeat until you’ve rescued them all. And woe to the characters who mistype a teleport spell and end up embedded in rock, because they’re utterly destroyed, vanished, obliterated, annihilated, eradicated, gone.
Wizardry hates players, and that’s why you should play it: to teach it a goddamn lesson.
Youtuber Tea Leaves played a lot of versions of Wizardry, including a very promising upcoming version by Digital Eclipse, which has modern quality of life features and modern graphics, while also having, at its foundation, the Apple II original, with all its hatred for organic life. In summary, he thinks that version is great, but also has positive things to say about other versions, especially the fan-patched translation of the Japanese Super Famicom version. But they don’t like the DOS version-it has a terrible bug which Tea Leaves emphasizes makes it unplayable. Noted!
Which Version of Wizardry Should I Play (Youtube, 27 minutes)
Another personal project post! I have done more work in making David Caruso II’s obscure Commodore 64 CRPG Dungeon, published in the issues of the disk magazine LOADSTAR more than once, presentable to current-day audiences. Although it certainly has its limits, there are some aspect to it that are unique, even forward-thinking. We posted about Dungeon here before. To remind everyone, we sell Dungeon on my (rodneylives’) itch.io page for $5, with the blessing of rights-holder and LOADSTAR owner Fender Tucker.
There are a few bugs in Dungeon, now basically impossible to fix, that I’m trying to track down and document, and I’m also working on improving the documentation, as well as provide some useful goodies with the system, like a disk of monsters, equipment and magic items. That’s useful because Dungeon has a special feature where it’ll take the monsters and items on a “Data Disk,” and scatter them around a dungeon map of its own creation. It calls these randomized adventures “Lost Worlds.”
Lost Worlds operate as a kind of quasi-roguelike. The Dungeon software creates a random map and places random items around it, but once created it becomes a Dungeon adventure that any created character can explore as many times as they like. While it doesn’t have roguelike tactical combat gameplay or random item identification, it does have a form of permadeath. Characters only get three lives to advance their level as far as they can go.
Lost Worlds are interesting places to explore, but there are some bugs in them. It is possible, in fact pretty easy, to get stuck in a part of the dungeon from which one can’t escape. Sometimes a one-way door leads into an area that can’t be escaped, and sometimes a passage-blocking trap will strand the player’s character in a dead-end. And once in a while a Lost World is downright unfinishable, its goal item disconnected from the parts of the dungeon the player can even reach.
While there are spells (Passwall and Teleport) that can release a trapped character, if they aren’t available the character is not completely lost. If you turn off the C64 (or close the emulator), then return to the Guild screen, the character will be marked as GONE. Over time, measured in loads of the Guild menu, the character will eventually find their way back on their own. It takes quite a while for this to happen though: I counted 15 loads, saving the game each time, before a GONE character returned.
This video (23 minutes) is is something I recorded myself as a demonstration of both Dungeon’s gameplay, and its Lost World adventure generation. It uses a set of 30 low-level monsters and items based on the stats of the old Basic edition of D&D, and a set of magic items I created for usefulness and to show off Dungeon’s spell set.
So, why would someone want to play this game, when there’s so many other newer CRPGs out there to play?
The idea of rolling up a character and taking them through scenarios made by other people, to try to get their level up as high as they can get before they die three times, is great. My hope, perhaps misplaced, is this release will inspire other people to make dungeons for others to play, and I look forward to seeing them myself.
The magic system of Dungeon, while it doesn’t allow for characters to learn spells themselves, is unique in that most of the spells are utility spells! There are spells for passing through walls, for teleporting anywhere on the map, for revealing terrain, for seeing in darkness, for giving oneself a damage shield, for locating the goal item, for disarming traps, and more. There is only one direct damage attack spell! Spells are more like tools than something you use to pound through the enemies.
The dungeon model allows for dark areas, traps that block exits, two-way and one-way teleporters, secret doors, one-way doors, and decorating dungeon maps with PETSCII graphics. The simplicity of the dungeons, all of them fitting on one screen, works in Dungeon’s favor. No dungeon can be too large since they must all fit within the bounds of the map grid.
There are unique design considerations for making Lost Worlds too. Even though the computer creates the maps unaided, since it populates them from the monsters, items and traps that are on the Data Disk, the difficulty of the resulting dungeon is affected. The various doodads are distributed without apparent heed for what they are; I wonder if the generator actually cares for their identities or if it just checks how many of each type are on the disk, so as not to exceed that number.
If there are more easy monsters, more powerful items, and more weak traps on the disk then the dungeon will be easier due to their corresponding numbers being greater, and vice versa. It occurs to me that one of the flaws in the dungeon generation I mentioned could be alleviated, by not giving it one of the wall creating traps that could trap a player in a dead-end, but that also makes the dungeon a bit less interesting, so I’ve left it in the mix I use.
I recognize that, if I let myself, this might become a Dungeon blog. Rest assured, I’m not going to take it that far. But I really hope that some people give Dungeon a chance. While sure it has its inspirations (one person on Mastodon said it reminds them of Phantasie, a somewhat less obscure early CRPG), I think it’s pretty unique, and deserves for more people to have a look at it. I’m particularly pleased how well the sample monsters and items I made work in the Lost World framework, and I’m trying to think of ways that it might be improved. More on this later… but, not immediately, I think.
After a long day in the data mines, it’s certainly nice to come home, walk over to the movie shelf, select a movie to watch, then put it into my movie player of choice: an Atari 2600. A demonstration (40 seconds):
Moviecart’s actually been around, judging by the date on that video demonstration, for at least three years now, but is currently accepting preorders for $25. The video only uses half the screen, and has glitches and distracting horizontal and vertical lines running through it, but at they say, it’s amazing that the dog talks at all. Or in this case, that the dog can display roughly arbitrary video and sound, two things the Atari usually finds it impossible to pull off.
How is it done? With custom hardware, certainly, but even granting that there’s only so much that can be done with the VCS/2600’s display chip, the restrictive funnel through which the cart’s video must be squeezed.
After that, getting all that data to the screen is done through presenting it to the VCS/2600’s address space at the absolute limit of the system’s ability to use it. The real work is done by a processor on the Moviecart’s board, which handles reading a specially-encoded video file on a Micro SD card and doing all of the work in getting it ready for the screen, so the VCS’s 6507 processor has to do as little as possible itself.
This is a 52-minute talk from 2010, from the 27th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, Germany (the talk is in English), presented by Michael Steil of Visual 6502, which successfully reverse engineered the venerable 6502 microprocessor, a chip used, in one capacity or another, in one form, or another, in all the Apple, Commodore and Atari microcomputers, the BBC Micro, the Atari 5200, in a modified from the Atari 2600 the NES, and countless arcade games, as well as in other places.
The talk is intended for a technical audience… literally. When the speaker asks who in the audience has coded in assembly before, practically everyone raises their hands. It’s recognized that we at Set Side B veer wildly between the most surface-level populist material and in-depth treatments for those with gigantic capacities for technical discussion and the attention span of a Galapagos Giant Tortoise. We like to think this is charming, and will listen eagerly if you tell us that you agree.
Anyway, here is that talk. I already mentioned that it’s 53 minutes. If that’s too long, there’s a speed-up function on Youtube. If that’s too technical, well, I don’t know how to help there. Maybe a read through pagetable.com’s documentation on the 6502. Oops! I’ve made it worse, haven’t I. Well, if you like, you might console yourself that the 6502 is really a simple processor to learn to code in. I’ve done it myself! There’s no memory management, there’s only three general-purpose registers, the stack is fixed in place, and all opcodes are one byte. It’s so simple that an extremely motivated child could learn it. Guess how I know?
It’s been months now since I announced my plans to release some project involving LOADSTAR, a 17-year computer magazine on disk, either here or on itch.io, or both. I’m still working on them.
In the meantime, I present this, a packaged-up release of Dungeon on itch.io, a complete old-school RPG gaming system for the Commdore 64, as it was released on the disk magazine LOADSTAR back in 1990.
Written by David Caruso II, Dungeon is a way of creating adventures for others to play, and a system of creating, maintaining and playing characters in those adventures. It was kind of a throwback even in 1990 (the SNES was released that year), but it definitely has charm, and an old-school kind of appeal.
You start out on the Guild screen, where you create a character from one of five fantasy races, then venture out on adventures stored on floppy disks, which in this release are provided as C64 1541 disk images. Fight monsters to earn experience points, find the object of the quest and then return to the Guild by the exit to have the chance to advance in experience level. If your character dies they’ll be revived, but only up to two times! If something happens and you don’t make it back, but don’t die either, your character will be marked as “GONE,” meaning they’re stuck in limbo until they make it back to the Guild on their own!
Your character advances in level between adventures, but they don’t get to keep any items they found on their journey. If they advance in level however, they get to permanently improve two of their stats. Getting to the maximum score of 25 grants them a special ability, but it’s really hard to get there!
This presentation of Dungeon is being made with the permission of Fender Tucker, owner and former Managing Editor of LOADSTAR. It isn’t free, but for $5 you get the Dungeon system and five pre-made adventures for it, culled from the 240+ issues of LOADSTAR. I include a stock copy of the open-source Commodore 64 emulator VICE, configured for playing Dungeon. (If $5 is too much for you, rumor has it Loadstar issues can be found online elsewhere. Dungeon was first published on issue #74.)
If you want to know more about it, I have constructed this 40-page PDF of documentation on Dungeon, from the disks of LOADSTAR in 1990, along with the instructions for the adventures and further notes on playing it from me. Here:
The document refers to an itch.io release, that’s what I’m currently working on. Late in the document there are some spoilers for a particularly difficult adventure using the system.
Dungeon was created by someone named David Caruso II. Neither I nor long-time LOADSTAR managing editor Fender Tucker knows what became of him. I have what is almost certainly an old address for him. It’s been 33 years, and I suspect that Dungeon itself is a couple of years older than that, so it’s possible that Caruso has passed away by now. If he hasn’t, though, I’d like to talk with him. I think (hope?) he’d appreciate that people are still thinking about his creation even now.
The article notes how few games in Nintendo’s many series star Peach. There’s really only been one headline game for her before, 2006’s Super Princess Peach, which was really easy. Showtime isn’t bad, but the article notes it’s more like a collection of minigames than a cohesive whole. I mean yes, it does feel a bit like nitpicking, but Peach has been playable in a good number of platformers before, going back all the way to Super Mario Bros 2., but never in the starring role. (She’s arguably the best character in Mario 2, too.)
Please excuse the “Demo Available,” this image came from Nintendo’s site.
The article notes how much Peach’s sidekick resembles Lisa Simpson, and is that ever apt.
Is this a low-effort post? Maaaybe. But the article is a good overview of Peach’s history as a playable character, I agree with their plea that she needs more time in the spotlight.
There is no one who hates a thing more than someone who formerly loved it. As a kid I rather enjoyed Monopoly, until I came to realize its many flaws (as I like to say, it’s over long before it ends). This means I know a lot about the game, even though I find it pretty annoying to play.
One of the things about Monopoly I know is that its artwork has changed a fair bit over the years. The board mostly looks the same, but the characters are different. The character that Hasbro now calls by the generic “Mr. Monopoly,” and used to be called Rich Uncle Pennybags, was not the original mascot for the game, which was a character with a big 50s ad art-styled head. I don’t have pictures of it, just vague memories from seeing it back during the Monopoly anniversary that happened decades ago now. Google is of no help. The search continues.
Another thing that I know about Monopoly, as the rest of the developed world by now, is that Hasbro was, for a while, extremely active in pimping out the Monopoly property for making custom versions. There are several hundred of then, probably thousands by now, and they keep making more.
There have been multiple Nintendo Monopoly boards. Mario obscurites site Supper Mario Broth found one, and in one of the few examples of something I’ve found interesting about one of those damn Monopoly variants, there are drawings of Mario and Luigi on the cards done in the style of Rich Uncle Pennybags!
Most of them are pretty sad attempts to wallpaper over Monopoly game elements with a Mario pattern. In the game, houses are “power-ups,” and a hotel is an “invincibility.” But the artwork shows much more care in melding the two properties than do the rules!
Mario Parties require you pay at the door. They’re probably BYOB too.
You may remember PannenKoek as that person who has been trying to figure out how to complete Super Mario 64 in as few A button presses as possible, an odd, but no less noble, quest. They’ve been at it for quite a long time now, 13 years, but they’re still going. They have two loaded Youtube channels containing the pixelated fruits of their labors, PannenKoek2012 and UncommentatedPannen. Whenever you see a random Youtube video that uses the File Select music from Super Mario 64 as background music, they’re paying homage to PannenKoek, god of the game explainers.
While explaining aspects of Mario 64, that foundational, primordial 3D platformer, sometimes they ably explain complex and niche topics in computer science along the way. We’ve covered their videos before, more than once probably, and marveled at how by explaining some unexpected behavior in Nintendo’s N64 launch title, they have managed to make something important about how computers do things comprehensible. Inthreevideos, they explained how Mario 64 handles terrain well enough that one feels (somewhat misguidedly) that they could implement their own 3D platformer. They made a bizarrely interesting video about how characters blink their eyes that shows various ways that games implement timers and randomness. They have a whole video on pseudorandom number generation, and another on floats, that computer number representation system that has deeply weird implications.
Their most recent video is a three hour, 45 minute epic that explains why sometimes, when Mario jumps, he seems to strike something invisible in his way. It’s a consequence of several unusual decisions Nintendo made in constructing the physics of Mario’s world, which includes the fact that level edge walls in Mario 64 aren’t implemented as geometry, but as a consequence of the lack of geometry: if there is no floor over a space, then the game rules it as Out Of Bounds. It won’t let Mario enter this completely invisible unspace under normal conditions, and will instantly kill him if he somehow enters into it. It is like antimatter. And that’s not even getting into how ceilings operate.
Here, then, it is. It is a lot, and I wouldn’t blame you if you can’t get through it all, but for a certain intersection of game obsession and brain chemistry, it is engrossing, and that’s before they even get to the periodic table of invisible walls:
This one I find rather fascinating. There may be no arcade game ever made as purposely frustrating to play as Namco’s Japanese-only game The Tower of Druaga.
Hero Gilgamesh (often shortened to “Gil”) must pass through 60 maze levels, collecting a key from each then passing through the door to the next, while defeating enemies that get in his way, in order to rescue his love Ki from the villainous Druaga.
BUT almost all the levels have a secret trick to perform. If this trick is accomplished, then a chest will appear that, if collected, will grant Gil a special ability. Some of these abilities are helpful. Some, in fact, are necessary, and if they aren’t collected then on some future level Gil will be unable to advance! The tricks are explained nowhere in the game: it just expects you to know them, if not discovered personally then learned through word of mouth. (This was like a decade before most people had access to the internet.)
What is more, nothing in the game explains what the treasures are or what they do, or what you’ll find on each level if you do know the trick. And a few of the treasures are actually harmful! It means that, to win, you have to rely on a host of hidden information, obtained by both your own observation and from what you’ve heard from others. Which requires a ton of quarters to get, which suited manufacturer Namco just fine. Unfortunately (or, maybe, fortunately?), the game crash prevented Namco from trying its luck with this game in Western territories.
As a result, The Tower of Druaga is a game that’s probably experienced watching someone else play, rather than playing yourself. That’s what this video is, Youtube user sylvie playing through the whole game, not just advancing through, but explaining how it’s done along the way. It’s an hour and three minutes long:
The New York Times, long a hold-out against comic strips, nevertheless makes a concession to play and whimsy in the form of their Games page. A lot has been made about their purchase of Wordle (and their recent crackdown on imitators, boo), and it should not be construed that we appreciate that.
But we find that one of the more positive aspects of their gaming products lately has been their Connections puzzle, which right now is not even a year old. (I don’t know if you’ll need a subscription to get through to that link. Paywalls suck, but are a necessary suckage.)
Each puzzle is a 4×4 grid of words. Rarely it may contain phrases; on April 1st, it had emoji, but it’s usually pretty good about staying in its lingual lane. The positions of the words in the puzzle are not relevant to solving it, but they’re sometimes placed with an eye to theme, or in such a way to suggest connections that don’t actually exist, in order to obfuscate the solution a bit. Usually, they hardly need to bother; the puzzle is usually fairly difficult.
Each puzzle contains exactly four categories of four terms, no more and no less. The categories and words in the puzzle are always chosen to punish imprecise and vague associations.
A solver (I won’t presume that that solver will necessarily be you at this stage) will want to find four words that have the same relationship with their category. One will never have a subordinate relationship with another word in its category, exclamation point! I emphasize this because you’ll often find a puzzle has a word that seems to have a superior-inferior relationship with another word, but this is a trap! Categories are egalitarian! Down with hierarchy!
Words are also chosen so that sometimes you’ll only find three words in a prospective category, which is a sign that you’re on the wrong track. Sometimes you’ll find five, which could mean you’re on the wrong track, or that one of the words is slightly outside the category. Sometimes your only real clue is because another category relies on one of those words to complete it, instead: categories never overlap, so if a word is in one category it isn’t in another.
Because the categories are exclusive like this, if you find one category, all the other categories become a bit easier to figure out. There are always four, and they’re ranked, by the puzzle setter, in color by trickiness, from least to most crafty: yellow, green, blue and purple. If it helps you remember (let’s drop the pretense that you are not involved in this), those are in spectrum-order. Even so, often you’ll find you’ve gotten the blue or even purple category early.
You only get four failures, and the nature of the puzzle is that sometimes you’ll make a mistake or two. There is no penalty for running out of mistakes other than getting told the answers, which by that point is occasion to curse the perfidy of the puzzle maker. (“Brit-pop bands? How was I supposed to get that?”)
By way of aid, I can tell you that categories tend to follow certain themes. Sometimes they’re literal; sometimes ridiculously so. My (least) favorite example of this was CONDO – LOO – HAW – HERO. Go ahead. Guess what the hell those have to do with each other. You’ll hate it. (Answer at end of post.) But because, once you’ve gotten three categories, all that remains must be the fourth, you have some leeway, which is good for when you have a category like that one.
Another very common category is the phrase that’s completed by all the words in the category, or titles that are all completed by those words. If you’re stuck (yeah I’ve given in to just using second-person by this point), it’s often because there’s a category of this type.
Being well read is always useful for this kind of puzzle, but rarely is it necessary. Like the Crossword, a basic facility with language will be of inestimable aid. None of the connections will be too obscure; nor, likely, will you have to deal with absurd words like inestimable.
Unlike the Crossword, the New York Times doesn’t maintain a public archive of Connections puzzles for you to try, but multiple other sites do, at least until the NYT gets as litigiously jealous of them as they became of Wordle clones. Here is one. There is an official Companion blog that offers hints. Other sites, including Rock Paper Shotgun (really?), offer their own daily hints.
Here are some example categories, all taken from recent puzzles. What do these words have in common? I’ve hidden the answer with an abbr tag, on desktop devices you can hover the mouse over the words to reveal the category.
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.
