Super Mario Bros. basically created an entire genre of video games, but it probably wouldn’t have happened without its exacting attention to how Mario moves, which is a large portion of the gameplay. A few of the details:
Mario’s position and velocity are stored in pages, pixels and subpixels, but acceleration is handled additionally using fractions of a subpixel.
When Mario is facing a direction other than he’s moving, his acceleration doubles! Speedrunners actually take advantage of this fact.
When Mario runs with the B button, he doesn’t slow immediately when it’s released, but waits for ten frames before he drops back to walking speed. This is why he doesn’t slow down when throwing fireballs when running, and also helps players who slide their finger to the A button to jump.
It’s been quite a while since GameHut, a Youtube channel run by Jon Burton, 29-year director of Traveler’s Tales and an old maven of Genesis/Mega Drive effects, posted a video. I’m not sure Burton himself worked on this game in this one, but he does a fine job of explaining (14 minutes) how the developers used the Genesis’ catalog of technical tricks to make one of the most visually striking games on that platform, The Adventures of Batman & Robin, pulling off realtime effects that might seem impossible on a system with no hardware scaling.
The primary trick used is the old raster interrupt on HBLANK, manipulating graphics registers while the beam is part of the way down the screen, abetted by the Genesis/Mega Drive’s speedy, for its time, Motorola 68000 processor and 7.87 mHz clock speed. Change horizontal scroll registers midway down and shear the background. Swap palettes on vertical stripes and create a checkerboard pattern. It’s not the only trick used, but its versatility sure made it impressive when it showed up.
MrEdders123 on Youtube went way way beyond the call of duty and made a video on nearly every aspect of SSI’s classic RPG Pool of Radiance, the first official D&D product to attempt to adapt the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons tools to computer play with any degree of completeness and the first in the legendary “Gold Box” series. It’s nearly ten hours long.
It’s true that the length is kind of ludicrous, but in its description there is a helpful directory of chapters to get you to jump around it to the places most appealing to you. And what a monumental task they’ve accomplished! Included you’ll find a history of unofficial attempts to adapt D&D (many games cribbed from its rules in the early days), the licensed Intellivision D&D games, TSR’s own computer products, SSI’s becoming the official D&D company for computer games, the history of the Gold Box line, the play of the game itself, the ports of Pool of Radiance (including the Famicom release) and three fan remakes in different engines.
The Battletoads second-player control lockout that happens near the end of the game.
The PRG0 version of NES Castlevania crashing hard when too many objects are on the screen. I’ve been bitten by this one several times, and it even happens in the US version of Castlevania in the recent console compilations.
Joe & Mac 2 crashing early in the game if you’re riding a dinosaur while unlocking a door with a key.
NES Rainbow Islands crashing during the ending cutscene.
Sonic the Hedgehog crashing if the control pad is held in the down direction after passing the sign at the end of Labyrinth Zone Acts 1 or 2.
it’s mentioned that in one player mode in the original Japanese version dying causes you to reset back to a checkpoint, Gradius-style,
that the game is known to increase the health of boss enemies if you have the blue Laser weapon,
that the game is generally easier if you play in the Player Two position,
that to begin the game with the lowest difficulty rank, it’s best to start the game when attract mode is showing Stage 7 (a space level),
and that the Player One position increases the game rank faster if you have the blue Laser weapon, while the Player Two position increases rank faster if you have the red Vulcan weapon.
A lot of sylvie’s strategy comes from rank management, and manipulating aspects of the game to make it more manageable, which is much more interesting to learn about than to just be told to “git gud.”
Have a look if you like, and if you don’t care about the commentary and just want to watch her deathless Raiden run without any of those pitiful human words, watch this video instead.
Just a quick one today, WumpaGem’s list of decomps that aren’t Clauded or anything, hosted on Backloggd. There’s a lot of them, of varying degrees of completeness: some are done, some are in alpha, some are only planned. Interesting, Twilight Princess and Majora’s Mask are playable, but Ocarina of Time is only planned, probably because Ship of Harkinian stole a lot of its energy but turned out to have been made with AI coding. Particularly, Mario 64 has five different recomps.
I’ve seen some of these weird little messages (34 minutes), edge cases that appear when you talk to someone or witness an event at an unexpected time in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask’s three-day cycle, or do it while one of the game’s many masks.
A few of the cases covered:
Tatl the fairy’s information on a couple of the bosses changes as you progress through their fights.
The guards blocking the exits to Clock Town usually use the presence of your sword to determine whether they will let you leave, but if your sword was stolen or is being forged they’ll notice and let you leave anyway. They also give you different hints on which dungeon to do next.
The Astronomer has special dialogue if you speak to him as a Goron or a Zora.
The residents of Clock Town each have their own little story of how they’re handling their impending destruction. The Swordsman especially has interesting reactions that change as the clock ticks down.
The Swordsman also, like the Happy Mask Salesman, has a reaction to every mask you can wear to his shop. The lady in the Treasure Chest game and the both the proprietor of the Trading Post and his employee have unique reactions to some of the masks.
If Deku Link can shoot bubbles they can play the archery game, not even needing a bow!
What’s great about all of these cases is none of them are necessary to win the game! It’s there for the players who try to experience Majora’s Mask’s story from every angle. Disable used a text dump to chart out all of the game’s dialogue on a web page here.
DidYouKnowGaming posted a video in 2021 with the provocative title “The Japan Only Metroid Game That Changed The Series,” (8½ minutes) and as is usually the case with clickbait titles like that, it’s leaving out important information: the game in question is a gamebook, not a video game at all.
I don’t often like rewarding clickbait, although doing it to some extent is largely unavoidable now. Here is the video embedded, if you want to see it for yourself.
The gamebook is called Metroid: Zebes Invasion Order, an example of gaming ephemera of the same stature as the Worlds of Power series of books. The video enthuses about how it foreshadowed elements that would appear in later games, although both the games and the book would have been inspired by the same pop cultural elements, the Alien movies, so it makes sense they would vibrate with a similar frequency.
Illustration of our hero, Samus Aran, from Twinetroid, ultimately from the gamebook
You can watch the video if you want to know more about it. Here are some salient facts.
The gamebook is roughly of a type with the Fighting Fantasy books from the UK, giving you various situations to overcome and a basic battle system for fighting enemies.
Also like Fighting Fantasy, it’s pretty difficult.
The battle system uses dice, and asks that you record your exploration with a hand-drawn map, and record your inventory on a sheet of paper.
Secret rooms were handled in a novel way. As a gamebook in the same ballpark as Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure, you would sometimes be given a choice and a page number to turn to. Secret rooms would tell you only part of the page number, leaving you to search through the book for the right page. Important items were hidden this way.
The book has ballooned in price, with copies selling, in 2021 when the video was made, for around $2,000.
Yet scans of the book can be found online, and Devin Monnens used them to assemble, using Twine, a kind of play-like of the book, called Twinetroid and hosted at Metroid Database. It changes a few things for the format, automating combat and changing the mechanics of the secret room search. The instruction page mentions hidden hyperlinks, which is an interesting solution.
Combat example from Twinetroid
One interesting aspect of the game is that it largely recreates the play structure of the original game: the game world is divided into three major sections, you find items that increase you exploration ability, and you backtrack into earlier rooms to use those items to access new paths. There is an automap, but it doesn’t record anything about what’s in each room. You’ll probably need to take notes.
If Samus “dies,” you can still restart from a checkpoint with all the items you’ve found. Once you defeat the Mother Brain the game isn’t over yet though, becoming more of a traditional text adventure from that point, with a variety of endings. Give it a try, and experience an obscure piece of Metroid history.
Twinetroid (Twine-based text adventure, from Metroid Database)
You wanna know something? I think everyone should learn to program. I don’t mean using some, the word I usually use is cockamamie, “AI,” that will produce brittle, inefficient, unmaintainable code if it doesn’t mess it up, but actually code. I think most of the difficulty with coding is actually in the languages. Woe betide the person trying to learn to program in C++ from scratch these days. C is much better, but still obtuse. Python is better, but also not great for systems or performance work.
The solution? Why, learn to code in assembly of course!
Aaaaand 90% of readers just clicked away. Hah.
But the funny thing is, for many languages, assembly is actually a little easier than them I’d say. When you’re working directly with the hardware, all the weird abstractions you have to learn fall away. It does mean you have to do everything, and I mean everything, yourself. But on the other hand, programming is largely the process of connecting building blocks together, tiny routines comprising larger ones. It takes longer to do it in assembly, and working with a lot of current-day hardware is trickier because you have to jump through more hoops to use it. But its difficulty, I think anyway, is a little overblown.
There’s a wealth of material to peruse, including videos walking you through coding a bunch of different architectures, including 6502, 8086, Z80, 6809, 68000, and even ARM, among others. Even if you have no interest in actually coding for these multifarious* chips, just knowing out they work may be very interesting to you, if not be actually useful someday.
Here, to get some idea of how understandable this will be to you, take a look at his series on assembly coding for the C64 (Youtube playlist, 13 videos, about 170 minutes in all), beginning here:
* That’s 17 points with no bonuses, but 67 if a bingo
It was brought to my attention by <b>scruss</b> over on Metafilter (Mastodon) that Peter Jennings, not the newscaster but an oldschool hardwre guy, has a long and great page on the creation of a standalone chess-playing computer for Commodore in its early days, we’re talking between the creation of the KIM-1 and the VIC-20.
It’s a terrific article that covers far more than just Jennings’ experience making the device, covering among other things a pitch to Mattel, meeting with 6502 designer Chuck Peddle, a story of Bobby Fisher, and the unfortunate news that Jack Tramiel, then the boss of Commodore, rarely paid vendors what they were due. Seems about normal for the man.
There’s even a long list of interesting links about the Chessmate at the end. I can’t recommend it enough!
Starflight is an amazing game. First for the PC, but then with ports for the C64 and, of all things, the Genesis/Mega Drive. It was the first game to really nail the sense of being a kind of Star Trek simulator, with its combination of open-ended exploration and alien interaction.
PC Starflight (image from the article)
It’s possible to think of Starflight as being a trilogy, with itself, its sequel, and the quite similar Star Control II. Greg Johnson, one of my favorite people working in games, was a major mover on all three. Johnson went on to be one of the people behind ToeJam & Earl and a number of other projects, including some terrific music, and is currently working on the eagerly-awaited Dancing With Ghosts.
Time Extension translated an interview with four of the people who made the original Starflight, including Greg Johnson, from a German podcast. The story of the game’s creation is a bit rocky, with some of the principals having to put in their own money or take out loans to live on during its creation. It’s also a tale of the final moments of the good days of Electronic Arts, right before they discovered there was a lot more money running series into the ground and tying up the rights to multiple big-league sports than their original mandate of nurturing independent creators and making possible unique software visions.
But don’t weep for what could have been; instead, rejoice that it happened at all. Remember that Tarn Adams, half of the duo who make the literally incredible Dwarf Fortress, credits Starflight as a major inspiration. The path to the future, and the long-delayed realization of video games as a transcendent art form, runs through many different people, but the thread holds firm. The coming decades will see great things, and Starflight is but one brick in their foundation.
There is a universe of Japanese home computer games that are largely unknown in Western territories, especially the US which never got a local MSX machine. Some of these games can be played officially with emulation via Project EGG, and some of those are even available on Switch as part of EGGCONSOLE.
But the problem remains, most of them are in Japanese, a difficult language to pick up if you didn’t grow up with it. Well the Youtube channel Beyond the Scanlines has selected a few of them that are playable without any Japanese language knowledge (14 minutes).
Guardic is a strategic exploratory shooter from Compile that’s both an interesting game in its own right and the predecessor of the NES classic The Guardian Legend (Guardic Gaiden on Famicom).
Hydlide is a game that’s available on NES and is pretty infamous there, but it does play a bit better in its original version.
Slipheed is a classic shooter with 3D graphics that still hold up pretty well today.
The Scheme is a platform that I honestly don’t know much about, except from this video!
And of course Zanac is another classic Compile shooter. I think the Famicom/NES version is mostly better, but don’t sell this version short.
Please consider enjoying, if that is something you are able to enjoy. That is to say, to you, it’s enjoyable. If it isn’t, if it’s enjoy-not-able, maybe tomorrow’s post will meet your inscrutable fancy. (That is to day, sour fancy is able to be inscruted.)
