That a single game can inspire so much discussion so long after its release speaks volumes about the quality of its design. A lot of it has to do with how much randomness is in the game. Even the best players die sometimes! Donkey Kong is heavily resistant to rote patterns, although there’s still things the player can do to subtly affect each board, and make it more manageable. On the Barrels boards, on higher levels, you can affect when barrels decide to come down ladders by steering towards them as they reach their decision point.
Let’s have a week of tricks & tips for retro arcade games. Here’s one you don’t hear about too often, Phoenix, and one still popular, Centipede.
Phoenix is a standard old-school space shooter. Your spaceship is affixed to the bottom of the screen, where spaceships should be affixed as God and Kazunori Sawano (designer of Galaxian) intended. It’s got a bit more atmosphere than most of them from the time, and is particularly known for being one of the first video games to feature a boss battle, with a big flying saucer with shields to chip through.
One trick in Phoenix, the result of a bug: if you shoot three enemies in rapid succession as they ascend upwards onscreen, you get 200,000 points! This is a gigantic amount, in the video below (18 minutes), which is blurry so you can’t really tell.
The interesting thing about it (which is explained here) is, it’s not a bonus. The score is set to around 204,000 points. If you had a higher score (which is very unlikely in Phoenix) then you lose points because of it.
As for Centipede, there’s a clever trick that takes advantage of a number of converging aspects of the game. First, nothing affects the playfield mushrooms globally (this was corrected in its sequel Millipede, making it ineffective there); second, the Spiders that emerge and periodically clear out mushrooms from the bottom of the screen never touch the first two rows on the side they emerge from; third, centipedes that make it to the bottom of the screen and cycle up and down through the player’s area can get caught by carefully-placed mushrooms at the side of the screen; and fourth, a trapped centipede may halt game progression, but it doesn’t stop scoring, as Spiders, Fleas and Scorpions will continue to emerge into the board, which are worth significant points by themselves.
I’ve known about the trap for a long while, it was reported in an issue of my favorite classic arcade magazine, Joystik, in a feature interview with early arcade champion Eric Ginner, where he laid out how to make it, and how it could be useful. It’s a pretty boring way to play, but it works. It doesn’t make the game completely boing, Spiders can still be a big threat, and if one makes it across the screen from the opposite side without being shot it still has a chance to eat the trap. But it does give the player an opportunity to clear the upper reaches of the screen of mushrooms while the centipede is pinned in.
If it’s done on the first wave of each set of twelve, the one where a whole centipede emerges at the start, then Fleas won’t ever appear to add mushrooms, and you can actually clean the entire board of mushrooms, excepting the ones that make the trap. Fleas emerge, on most boards, when the number of mushrooms near the bottom of the screen get too low, but are programmed never to appear on a full-centipede board.
I’ve got some interesting strategy video finds for other classic arcade games coming up over the next couple of days, I hope you’ll like them!
The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
We posted to the long-lived FFVI site (which a handful of old people may still think of as Final Fantasy III) Caves of Narshe a few days ago. In looking up stuff about it I ran across a few other sites too that I figured I might call out. Because while humans may read this site, Google reads it too, and if I can help those other sites somehow rank above the evil and exploitive Fandom sites, then I think I can devote a day’s post to that cause.
I am being hyperbolic when I say that video game sites used to be 10% of the internet by weight, but it doesn’t feel like it. And that used to be a good thing. Nowadays it seems like many of the people who were enthusiastic about both games and the internet also have strong opinions about Ethics In Game Journalism and 8chan. I don’t know if that’s true about the people I’m linking to now; I can only hope that it isn’t.
There’s Imzogelmo’s Final Fantasy III, who wrote game patches for the ROM, tools for examining it and investigations of how it works.
Hey, did you know you can BUILD A FREE WEBSITE OF YOUR OWN ON ANGELFIRE? Did you know thqt Angelfire still exists, and still uses 90s-era Geocities-style boxes on member sites to advertise their service?
Djibriel’s page Collapse of Heaven and Earth is hosted by Caves of Narshe, and bears information on FFVI, FFV and a couple of other games.
Also hosted on CoN is Master ZED’s list of FFVI (III) patches. These patches are useless to people playing the remakes of course: the ones for Playstation, Gameboy Advance, mobile (which I hear are gone now, good job SquareEnix), Steam, Switch and probably other platforms. There are some guides here too. One entertaining one, if you are entertained by the kinds of things that I’m entertained by, is SharkESP’s Low Level FAQ, a monument to breaking the game.
Famicom Galaxian, never released in the US until Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1, is a tiny program, even by Famicom/NES standards. It may be the smallest Famicom game; the ROM is only 16K large, taking up just half of the addressable cartridge space.
But even such a little program can hide secrets. Adrian found a multicart with an alternate version of Famicom Galaxian with rapid autofire, and that he preferred to play that than the official one.
And I don’t blame him! Galaxian nowadays, whether a port of the arcade original, is a slow and clunky thing to suffer through, but even back then there were some people who scratched their heads at its popularity. One of them was Craig Kubey, author of the classic-era arcade book The Winner’s Guide to Video Games, who called it the Worst Popular Game. But these problems evaporate if you can just hold down the button and annihilate the aliens, like you were playing Centipede.
Namco must have realized how much better the game would play with more shots, as they made your ship in Galaxian’s successor Galaga fire faster, and can have two shots on-screen at once. four with the double ship. Maybe as a result, Galaga is a lot more fun to play, even today.
Adrian got to wondering about that alternate version, called “Galaxians” in the pirate cart’s menu. He found a ROM image of it online and had a look at its code in Mesen’s code analysis tools and found the first thing the “classic” version of the game on the cart does is write a zero to a specific address in zero page. This, as it turns out, is to ensure a secret cheat is disabled. If a one is written there instead, it produces behavior exactly like the rapid-fire version, which in addition to being able to fire much more quickly recolors the logo on the title screen red.
Is this a disabled cheat function on the original cartridge? Maybe, but maybe not. Adrian found another version of the Galaxian ROM online that doesn’t have the cheat function, disabled or no. It’s unknown if this is an alternate official release, or the only official release. Maybe the version on the pirate cart was hacked to put the code in, or maybe it’s an obscure unreleased version, or else maybe it’s the Famicom Disk System version?
Geez, the mysteries abound concerning this sucky little game! Find out about it yourself here:
Kid Fenris is an underrated little classic game review blog. Many of their posts deserve to be linked to, but we try to keep up a variety of sources, so I try to pick out when they have particularly interesting subject matter. So it is when they posted about McDonald’s Treasure Island for the Genesis/MegaDrive, which also turns out to be the first game Treasure developed as a company.
Image from the linked article. It may be a licensed game, but it looks so vibrant!
As the article reminds us, it wasn’t the first Treasure game released, that would be the game that in many ways announced to the world that they meant business: Gunstar Heroes, as brimming with ideas as it was.
Treasure seems largely to be in preservation mode these days, and their last title was released 11 years ago. Not all of their games have been as critically acclaimed as Gunstar Heroes, but they all have something interesting about them, and McDonald’s Treasure (heh) Island has it too.
We love oldschool websites around here, and unlike Final Fantasy Kingdom, whose images are all broken and likely isn’t long for this world, Caves of Narshe has been kept up-to-date, its images and links all work, it’s got a good design, and is full of interesting info on Final Fantasies 1, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 9, plus Final Fantasy Tactics and Chrono Trigger. It’s loaded with good information, and best of all, it isn’t Fandom.com! I can’t even rightly give it the oldweb tag, because it’s modernized! May it last a thousand years.
What kind of focus image does a normal standard regular website get? Well how about a screenshot?
Between U Can Beat Video Games, Video Games 101 and other channels like that of the late SaikyoMog, there are _<i>lots</i>_ of video guides to classic games. If I linked to all of them here they’d overrun the channel. I’m considering making those links a weekly thing, like Sundry Sunday and (sporadically, these days) romhacks, to keep their numbers under control. We’ll see.
Of course Super Mario World is a game that’s been destroyed by speedrunning. If you set aside scripted, tool-assisted speedruns (TASes), which I usually do nowadays, there are people who have still taken advantage of glitches to warp directly to the credits from gameplay, and perform much weirder tricks besides. This video doesn’t rely on those: it’s just the most direct route from start to finish through its levels, as God and Tezuka intended.
After yesterday’s exploration of a huge collection of antique electro-mechanical amusement machines, it seemed meet to drag out a little video I’ve been aware of for a while, a demonstration of a Piccadilly Circus-style redemption machine made by Konami, amusingly named Piccadilly Gradius (2 minutes).
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of this strange entry in the Gradius series on the internet, just a stub on a couple of wikis. Piccadilly Circus itself seems to be a Konami series, only a little older than Gradius really. Most of them seem to be simple roulette-style machines where you stop a light on a number to win a prize. The Gradius one makes it into a journey to get a spaceship to the end of a course.
It’s hard to believe, but an “arcade” didn’t used to mean video games. Across “the pond,” to trade in ludicrous understatement, in “old blighty,” there is an amazing collection of old-style mechanical machines. Northern Introvert has an ‘alf-hour video exploration of them that makes for fascinating viewing!
Pretty hard to read. Is that supposed to be AAIMAIS?
Raimais is a sci-fi-focused maze game from Taito in 1988. Ryan Oliver, writing over at Hardcore Gaming 101, has written an excellent description of the game, including why you might be interested in it. Not only is it like a kind of Arkanoid-style revision of a pre-existing genre but with powerups, in this case maze games, it reminds me a lot of the early arcade and Atari 2600 game Dodge ‘Em. It’s got multiple routes and lots of secrets, including secret endings. It pulls some Druaga-style dirty tricks on the player: without a secret item, you’re doomed to get a bad ending. Even with it, you have to complete a sequence of Quick Time Events during the ending or your character gets zapped by a laser gun and just dies, no do-overs, no continues.
Furthermore, the hardest-to-reach ending was actually impossible to get! The game’s included on Taito Legends 2 from 2006, but there’s a more-recent Arcade Archives version (Switch, Playstation Store), that gives you the option of making the impossible ending possible.
This Arcade Archives trailer gives a good sense of the play without giving too much away (3 minutes):
Here’s a recap of links at the end of the HG101 article:
Sudden Desu, where the impossible-to-reach ending was first revealed
I’ve known about Raimais for some time, and in a reversal of the usual turn of events I had already read the gaming.moe and Sudden Desu pages before HG101 covered it. This is an excellent excuse to link to them though.
I’m a bit late in announcing this, but a lot’s been going on here lately, and it’s a worthy announcement, so here’s the release video for Mega Man Maker 1.10 (2 minutes). This isn’t the last time we linked to a MMM release, and its coders don’t seem to be slowing down any time soon.
A free program, it’s got the usual array of new enemies (including favorites Guts Man and Snake Man), items and music typical of MMM. A big new feature is ability capsules, which can grant new powers if found in a level, or at the creator’s option even disable them. This can let you pull off dirty tricks like making a chamber that requires the slide to enter, but that gives you a capsule that disables the slide, making it inescapable. But you wouldn’t do that, would you?
It’s a really strange game even without the context that your protagonist, a fan-waving Japanese guy running around from sunglasses-wearing agents, and occasionally celebrities like Michael Jackson (probably his first role in a Sega game) and a barrel chasing him around mazes, is based on a real person, Kakuei Tanaka, a prime minister in Japan in the early 70s who was taken down by a bribery scandal. When he gets caught by the suits, they put on S&M garb and Tanaka gets whipped by them! Here’s Kim Justice’s report on it (19 minutes). Here’s about five minutes of gameplay.
I can vouch that it’s playable in MAME, and it’s not even that bad a game, certainly better than Abscam, a pretty terrible Pac-Man bootleg that’s probably our closest version of it.
