It’s been a long time… before Hardcore Gaming 101, before Kotaku or the Angry Video Game Nerd, before 1UP, Joystiq and a bunch of other sites still living and defunct, there was |tsr’s NES Archive. While it only lived for four years, hasn’t updated in 23 years, and all of the images are broken now (a huge shame for some of the features), it’s still online, still ready to give you their humorous take on old video games. Long may it continue beaming out its snarky message. Consider that the time between when the NES was released, 1985, and |tsr’s archive shut down, 2000, was only 15 years. And that time isn’t getting any longer, while the time since it shutdown is. I’ve said it a lot here lately, but: time is cruel.
A few notable features there:
An interview with Ed Logg, identified as the developer of NES Tengen Tetris but also one of the great designers of Atari, programmer of Asteroids and Gauntlet.
A list of old gaming sites, useful mostly as a base for finding things on the Wayback Machine. It’s interesting to note where some sites redirect to. Domain guardianship of some old domains were handled by Classic Gaming (classicgaming.com), but because IGN didn’t care enough to keep it viable those sites just redirect to the IGN main page now. Poor form. Sites that you can still reach (sometimes through intermediary sites) through their links are eBay, the Howard & Nester comic archive and the Japanese site Classic Videogame Station Odyssey.
The images, I note, are not broken so much as forbidden access. It’s possible that tsr’s web host, Atari HQ, still has them but has misconfigured the site. Atari HQ is still up, but now seems to only be an aggregator for other sites’ content. I wonder if an email to the right person might restore access to that entire swath of early web and videogaming history, or if they’re completely asleep at the switch?
Time Extension links to a Landstalker artbook found by VGDensetsu that has information on a planned sequel that never got made, laying out the futurer adventures of Link-ish adventurer Nigel and his devil-fairy (sorry, wood nymph) friend Friday.
Despite its visual similarities to Zelda (or rather they both were inspired by J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan) Landstalker had lots of differences, and despite its sometimes infuriating 3D isometric perspective is commonly regarded as one of the leading lights of the Sega Genesis. Despite its popularity though, the game never got a direct sequel, despite several references, cross-overs and inspired-bys ranging from the infortunately-named Ladystalker to Time Stalkers, and a couple other games without “stalker” in the title.
Friday was a waifu long before there was a term for it. Sorry about the frugly watermark, eesh.
Landstalker managed to become a hit rather despite its isometric perspective, in which characters didn’t cast shadows when jumping or floating in the air, making it very difficult to figure out where things were spatially. Since it was an isometric jumping game with lots of tiny moving platforms, that made it quite difficult. There was even an entire area, the infamous Greenmaze, that leaned into the perspective puzzles and pseudo-optical illusions to give the player a hard time. Yet the fun and light anime-styled story and winning characters won many players hearts.
Pac-Man 99 is part of a trilogy of games with similar concepts on the Switch. Of its siblings, Tetris 99 continues to be playable and its online DLC still available, and Super Mario Bros. 35, Nintendo’s free SMB-based version of the concept, shut down years ago now.
All these games are great, and SMB35’s loss is still keenly felt. I particularly rue it because I was freakishly good at it; I have a screenshot somewhere of the records screen showing a streak of 11 1st place wins.
Pac-Man 99 is really good, and its online mode is free to people with a Switch Online subscription, so please enjoy it while you can.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Another of Mario 64 internals expert Maze Emanuar’s amazing hacks, this puts the geometry of all of the levels of Mario 64 into into huge world! It does offer gameplay in that you can collect some stars that are scattered around the huge area, but few of the original objectives remain. For more information and the download link to the hack, check the description of the video.
With Tears of the Kingdom released soon, some people have been speculating, based on leaks, that it and Breath of the Wild actually take place on the “downfall” timeline of Hyrule, the very first games to follow chronologically from the two NES Zelda games.
It’s a good time to revisit one of the weirder, and unexpectedly well-made, fangames out there, a FPS re-envisioning of Zelda II. This was originally release to the internet in 2010, but it turns out its creator Mike Johnston updated it back in 2019, to include some of the initial overworld areas of the original game. He included a couple of shops too, which are not in the NES Zelda II game, so the player can get a few aids to make the game easier. Have a look at some of these screenshots:
Sadly Johnston is a bit dismayed by Nintendo’s absurdly litigious defense of its oh-so-sacred properties, even if they are pushing 40 years old now, and has no plans to continue working on his project. I can’t blame him, and am glad for what he’s given us. Thanks Mike!
Zelda II FPS (browser playable, $0, requires Unity)
The narrator has a moderate case of Youtuberitis (symptoms evident: over-gesturing with hands, annoying shtick; absent: ending sentences in an undertone like they were John Cleese playing a TV presenter), but it’s still an interesting and even informative video about making software, and hardware, doing things they really weren’t designed to do.
One piece of the puzzle for getting this insane project working was Linux on Wii; another piece was the fact that the Wii and late versions of Mac OS Classic both use PowerPC processors. It doesn’t work perfectly, but as they say, it’s amazing that the Nintendog talks at all.
The Pico-8 is the most popular fantasy game console by a wide margin. We’ve already linked to Josh “cortex” Millard’s Ennuigi, which is notable enough to have its own Wikipedia entry.
Ennuigi was more of an extended joke than a game, though, while Pico-8 Moon Patrol is no joke; it’s substantially harder than the original arcade game, putting you up against harder obstacles earlier. Sometimes it doesn’t feel fair when a flying saucer drops a bomb at such an angle that neither speeding up nor slowing down could have avoided it in time, although it’s possible, in this version, to shoot down the bomb before it strikes you.
Give it a try! This video is my best run to date, getting through the first three sectors:
It’s 11 years old now but still as ringing and fun as when it was new. If you’ve never before encountered the video tale of the afterlife journey of the shirtless mayor of Metro City from Final Fight, here you go! If you have seen it before then why not have a second look?
Watching a lot of speedruns, as I’ve said before, can give you a distorted view of what video game difficulty is actually like. Speedrunning has been a going hobby for well over a decade now. New strategies are worked out and evolve. If they’re good ones, they become a part of everyone’s runs and are further refined. If they’re not good ones they’re discarded. What I’m saying is, the state-of-the-art advances. It doesn’t recede. People keep getting better. TASes are even more optimized than that, and are at this point really a completely different process, more scripting and exploring program function than playing a game in the traditional manner.
There may come a time, eventually, where, confident that runs have been perfected, speedrun becomes less focused-upon. Then after a period, people may come back and try to match the records of old. Or, maybe people will just stop speedrunning games, at least from the NES and SNES era. Many of these games are deep, but they aren’t an inexhaustible resource.
When you watch a speedrun, even one that’s three or four years old, you aren’t watching the effort of one person, but of a chain of people stretching back. Runners watch each other’s attempts and try to improve upon them. There aren’t many secrets.
Watching speedrunners who have played these games hundreds of times may cause you to think that the games are somehow easy. One way some challenge can still be preserved is in attempting challenge runs, like completing a game blindfolded. Like Punch-Out. Finishing Punch-Out blindfolded. That’s something that people do, but it’s still pretty challenging.
And it’s generally considered that Super Punch-Out!! for the SNES is the hardest Punch-Out game to do blindfolded. I’d think that that would be NES Punch-Out, since Tyson at the end is very random and can knock Little Mac down in a single punch throughout the first half of the first round, but the commentators on this video say it’s SNES Punch-Out, and I believe them. In this race, both players take a defeat at one point! That’s not something you often see at GDQ.
If you know what you’re doing Super Punch-Out is a fairly short game. This whole run (a race between two people) takes about 22 minutes from start to end. One nice thing about this race is that it doesn’t become a case, common in speedrun races, where one player jumps into the lead and stays there the entire rest of the race. The lead changes a couple of times, and is up in the air until the last fight.
If you’ve never encountered Super Punch-Out!! before, you might be surprised by how much it differs from the much better-known NES game. NES is very much a game of pattern recognition and exploitation. The SNES version brings back the two arcade games’ power meter, adds a dizzy mechanic that can affect every opponent, and just has a lot more randomness. Not blindfolded it may be a little easier than the NES game, it doesn’t have any opponents like Mike Tyson. But it still has its challenges, as much personality as the 8-bit game, and further, doesn’t lean nearly as hard on ethnic stereotypes, and those are all good things!
I turned fifty in February. No one believes me when I tell them my age, and for that reason I’m not too loud about it in person-one can very easily get tired of hearing “no way” in response to an admission like that. I don’t quite know what to make of my generally-youthful appearance. I know that things like that don’t last forever, so I’m trying to enjoy it without too much trepidation.
Anyway, fifty years in 2023 is a neat match for the history of commercial computer gaming. I was an early reader, so in the back of my brain I still remember hearing about the introduction of the Atari VCS, a.k.a. the 2600, in 1978, when I was but five. But there is a game system older than me: the Magnavox Odyssey.
The Odyssey was such a strange beast, in several ways. The first commercial TV-based home gaming computer, it didn’t have true interchangeable game cartridges; all of its games were hard-wired into the console. All of its cartridges came with the unit, and inserting a cart simply completed a circuit that told the internal electronics which game to run. The games had extremely simple graphics, we’re talking pre-Pong-level. Games cleverly used screen overlays, with translucent elements, to provide playfields and tracks. The computer didn’t even count score on-screen; it relied on players to keep track of that themselves.
The Magnavox was visible and remembered, moreso than really obscure machines like the Fairchild Channel-F and the Bally Astrocade, enough that it inspired a much more powerful (but still pretty weak) successor with true software called the Odyssey 2, or, as the machine’s trade dress stylized it, the Odyssey2. It’s funny: I have never once in my whole life ever heard anyone call it the Odyssey Squared.
Stories from the time tell us that the Magnavox Odyssey was stymied in the marketplace through an expectation, they say created by its advertising, that one could only use the Odyssey on a Magnavox TV. That wasn’t true, one didn’t need a Magnavox TV to use the Odyssey, but since a major component of each game had to be physically affixed to the screen, and its location and size had to match up with what the game’s design expected them to be, one did have to have the right size of TV to play properly.
The Odyssey was actually a little bit more of a success than commonly represented, surviving its first Christmas season without being discontinued, and even inspiring the production of some cheaper cut-down versions that only played some of the original’s games.
I love that the TV in this video has TOSHIBA prominently displayed across the bottom of its screen.
Infamously, the patent that Magnavox owned on the Odyssey was used to terrorize the game industry for a while. According to an NPR obituary on Odyssey team leader Ralph Baer in 2014, Magnavox eventually garnered over $100 million on infringement lawsuits, far more than it ever earned in sales, up until the patent expired in the early 90s. Consider: a patent issued on a machine invented before I was born was used to attack game makers into the SNES era. And this wasn’t even a software patent, which I would hope everyone recognizes sucks by now: the Odyssey was a physical machine, and its patent was of the ordinary kind.
(Yeah, it’s 2023 and I’m still banging on about patents. I know there are legitimate uses for them. In some industries, unpatented inventions are ruthlessly copied by others. I’m not here to argue about them in general.)
Ski’s overlay
To play Ski, the player uses the weird two-dial controller that came with the Odyssey, that worked kind of like the dials on an Etch-a-Sketch, to move a square on the screen. The square is the only visual element of the game: the whole rest of the screen is a black field. Over this, the player puts the Ski overlay, which depicts a simple course as a dashed line, winding around drawings of trees and mountains. The overlay is opaque except for the dashed line, so as the player moves the square with the controller, it lights up the line. The idea is to get the square from the start location to the end by one of several routes. The player is “penalized” for hitting obstacles only in the sense that they are left to apply their own penalties: participants are expected to be honest in this, maybe with the aid of a referee to do the time/score recording.
Magnavox developed a new version of Ski, called Ski Festival, that was planned to be released for a successor to the Odyssey, not the Odyssey 2 but a different successor that was cancelled. Little is known about it, other than an image in a sales brochure. People have zoomed in on the image and attempted to recreate the game from it. Video of this valiant attempt is here.
Both of the videos in this post come from the Odyssey Now project (Youtube) from the Vibrant Media Lab at the University of Pittsburgh, which seeks to preserve and provide information on this important console.
I had originally scheduled a post on this for a couple of weeks ago, but WordPress gained what I will euphemistically call a personality at that time, and the post developed a “critical error” whenever I tried to edit or view it. I kept pushing it back in the hopes of being able to figure out what was the trouble, but the trouble refused to be be figured out. So eventually I just remade the post.
Whether it’s intentional or not, if you ask Dall-E to depict a number of classic video game characters or elements, it’ll show itself to be surprisingly clueless. Here’s what I got from it:
“Mario” here is pretty good. His cultural ubiquity is inescapable.“Mario” again. Why the big M?That M again, and a medkit. That triangle in his teeth disturbs and dismays.Why is Mario always carrying things?“Pac-Man maze” is pretty bad. None of them even has the classic colors.The compugremlins siad, let’s just plaster Pac-Man on it and call it a day.“Pac-Man maze” More like pie-chart manPac-Man is either eating a pizza, or the planet Mars“Q*bert pyramid” is pretty bad in all its forms.At least it got right the idea it was supposed to be depicting geometric shapes.I have no idea where it got “ARETT”The worst “Q*bert pyramid.”This is supposed to be “Q*bert” himself.Also “Q*bert.” This has to be intentional, like they scrubbed all images of the ‘bert from its data.“Q*bert,” imagined I guess as an advertising mascot for a particularly unsatisfying brand of cracker.This “Q*bert” could be interpreted as a video game character, but it’s definitely not Q*bert.“Donkey Kong” consistently produced the worst results. All of them donkeys, none of them monkeys. This one’s an alcoholic.“Donkey Kong.” They could scrub their input of all DK images, but not Getty’s image collection?The least-chosen Warhammer 40K figure.Also, somehow, “Donkey Kong.”“Atari Centipede” is a centipede with a microchip theme, four times in a row.That’s kind of disturbing.Maybe slightly better?Centipede, or fish bones?“Pac-Man” here is pretty disturbing.“Pac-Man,” facing forwardThe worst “Pac-Man” result. How does it even?And “Pac-Man” once more, imagined as a beetle cyclops staring myopically at a pair of conjoined jellybeans.This is what I got for entering my description of that previous item. It’s not a cyclops, and the jellybeans aren’t conjoined, but it’s recognizably a beetle at least.
From 2016 comes Pac-Pac, a Pac-Man style arcade game for an unusual platform: the Commodore Plus/4!
The Commodore 64 was famously intended to be a family computer that could also play games. The Plus/4 was intended as more of a business machine, without hardware sprites or the 64’s capable sound chip. It still had 64K of RAM though, and some productivity software included built-into the system in ROM. It could also output more colors than the C64, was clocked at a higher speed, and had a simpler design with fewer chips.
Still though, the lack of hardware sprites was a big limiter for games, which remained a driving factor for microcomputer adoption. Having no sprites, in Pac-Pac, the player’s surrogate character and the ghosts are both drawn on-screen in software, which consumes a lot of processor time. The game still runs at a decent rate though, and is fairly fun to play.
It’s best not to play Pac-Pac like Pac-Man. Despite a superficial resemblance it’s much the different game. The ghosts don’t have different personalities, and don’t coast confidently through the maze, but jitter about uncertainly, and randomly. This makes them generally easier to avoid, but it also means they’re prone to camping in the vicinity of uneaten dots. You’ll find you’ll have to lure them away from the last dots in the maze to get to them safely. You’re more likely to lose a Pac from daring their presence a little too closely.
Unlike Pac-Man there are no energizers, so there’s no way to attack the monsters yourself. On later boards the ghosts slowly get more aggressive, and they move faster. There’s also a timer to force you to go after dots. Eating randomly-appearing fruit replenishes the timer by a bit. There are also Question Mark items that appear in the maze, that can produce good or bad effects. They’re usually good though. The only ways to earn extra lives are by earning 5,000 hard-won points or, occasionally, from a Question Mark.
To play it you’ll probably need an emulator, such as the one from WinVICE. RetroArch can play it with its xplus4 core, which comes from the VICE project.
I am informed that the author of Pac-Pac, Skoro, passed away earlier this year. He made a plethora of work for the Plus/4, as shown by his page on Commodore Plus/4 World, from 2019 to all the way back in 1988. 31 years is a good long while, and I hope that the fruits of his labor will be enjoyed for decades to come.
