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Mario 64’s Optimization Paradox

EDIT: It looks like this post might have originally gone up without content! Evidently I didn’t publish it with text before its publish date, or maybe my login cookie expired in the meantime. Hopefully it’s up now!

Kaze Emanuar, an expert on Super Mario 64’s code who I’ve linked multiple times before, tends to bang on this drum, but they’ve now done a 20-minute video that treats the issue with detail. They tell us that the Ninendo 64 is a rendering monster, and Nintendo’s use of it isn’t really optimal, especially in the subject of his fixation.

The problem, they say, isn’t triangle count, but cache misses. The N64, we’re told, can really motor (“vroom vroom” is the phrase they use), but fetching code and data tends to bog down the system while the data bus gets the necessary data. If that information is already in the cache, then access is much faster, as in, it directly affects the frame rate.

According to his data, unrolled loops, a traditional optimization measure, are actually bad, because all those extra instructions cause extra data fetches to read them. It’s better to use the loop instructions to run through the same code repeatedly, because it can run completely from the processor’s internal memory. Nintendo’s culling system actually hurts performance in most areas, because the extra data needed to implement their system results in more cache misses. And their culling system only considers data that’s out of sight horizontally, which is such a big problem on the vertical area Tick Tock Clock that there’s a kludge in the engine to reduce draw distance on that one level to make up for it.

I know! I link a lot of technical stuff here. It’s of interest to my diseased brain! But it’s got to be interesting to some of you, right? Well for those readers to whom it is of interest, here it is:

Gamefinds: World of Goo Demake for Pico8

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

It’s continually amazing what people manage to make within the modest resources of the Pico8 fantasy console virtual machine. This time it’s a decent demake of 2DBOY’s World of Goo, by VirtuaVirtue!

The objective is the same as the original: drag goo balls to build structures, to try to reach the pipe, which will then suck away all the excess goo balls on your construction. If you have enough left over, you win and get to move to the next level.

It’s quite challenging, it gets harder much faster than the original game. The physics of the goo constructions is much wobblier and bouncier than WoG, and goo balls don’t stick to walls here, so you’ll have to spend more goo balls on balances and counterweights. But it’s certainly not a bad thing to play around with for free!

World of Goo Demake for Pico8 (itch.io, $0)

Space Harrier Version Comparison

I’ve been visiting the Space Harrier series lately, mostly Planet Harriers, the 2000 arcade sequel that somehow escaped getting a Dreamcast port.

Google picked up on that (ugh) and pointed me to a 55 minute video comparison of home versions. I don’t think any of you will want to watch the whole thing, but I’ll embed it as a place to start from:

Space Harrier ports are interesting because of how impossible it was for home versions of the time to simulate it. It was a technical marvel in arcades, at a time when generally arcade hardware tended to be miles better than any ports. So, few of these versions have even a slight hope of matching up.

But that makes them interesting! Every one of them had to make a compromise between Space Harriers many different facets, and try to get as much of the arcade’s feeling through despite severe hardware limitations. The arcade beats most of them for quality, of course, with few exceptions.

Getting Started in Digital Eclipse’s Remake of Wizardry, Part 2: The First Level

It occurs to me that it might be a good idea to explain what playing Wizardry is like. There was once a time when this basically was what a CRPG was. JRPGs obscured that greatly and became the new default, but before Final Fantasy took over the world, there was a whole pile of what we might now call Wizardry-likes: The Bard’s Tale series, Dragon Wars, Might & Magic, Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder among them.

All of these party-based CRPGs have a lineup, a list of characters that are generally considered to be in order. Dungeon Master arranges them in more of a 2×2 grid, but there’s still a front line and a rear. Key in all of these games is that the front line is where you should put your melee fighters, who are in substantially more danger and need more HP and equipment protection (often directly using the D&D term Armor Class). The rear is where the characters who can’t take a licking go: the thief and your mages. Clerics/Priests generally can go in either area. By tradition they they can still still use most armor, but the problem is they’re usually the party healer, so being in the front line also means they’re more likely to get taken out by Paralysis or Petrification, leaving the rest of the group in the lurch.

It’s vitally important that the front line holds. Characters who get knocked out will get automatically shuffled to the back of the group, putting the squishies in range of the monsters’ unkind claws and teeth. It might be possible to hurriedly cast some AC-increasing spells, but it’s usually just as fast to cast strong attack magic and end the fight, then cure the downed fighters in camp. If you can’t do that… well, then it’s best to find your way back to town by the most expeditious route.

What route might that be? Well that’s why you’ve hopefully been working on a map! You might have played labyrinth games before, or think you can rely on a spatial sense build from playing first-person shooters, but those are not going to suffice here, you need a map. The Digital Eclipse remake of Wizardry maintains one for you, but as previously said it can be “tricked” by two particular types of maze phenomena: spinners and teleporters. Spinners change your facing randomly but leave you in place; suitably, they’re almost always placed in four-way intersections, so it’s not obvious which why you’re now going, or even if you’re going back the way you came. Teleporters usually leave your facing the same, but now in a different location.

Once you’re in the dungeon, then what?

I said last time that you should make your own characters, but that will also leave them at experience level 1, which is really weak. Until you reach level 2, every expedition into the dungeon should contain a single encounter. The starting quadrant of the first level has just three rooms. Enter one of them, fight or run from the inhabitants, then run to the stairs. If you used any spells or took any damage, have the affected characters stay at the Inn. It takes a lot of stays to lose even one point of Vim, so it’s nearly free.

If you’re playing with the original Inn, then stays will be more expensive unless you stay at the Stables, which gets you your spells back and nothing else. But that’s okay, because you can then dip into the maze and have your priest cast DIOS on your injured. You can repeat that cycle as many times as you like, and it won’t even age your characters. It almost feels like cheating, but you want to push every advantage you have as far as it will go.

Get used to training up level 1 characters, you’ll be doing it several times. You’ll want a B-team of characters to rescue your main group if need be, a Bishop of moderate level to identify found equipment without paying Boltac’s insane prices, maybe a separate Evil/Good team if you want to try out a Ninja/Lord, and maybe characters to replace failed resurrections from ash. The only time you’ll have to train up a character unaided, though, is the first time.

It is true, one of the modernizations in the Digital Eclipse remake is the ability to outright hire characters of levels approaching your highest experience level reached, but it’s not free, and could end up being really pricey. If you’re broke, then you can’t hire anyone over level 1, and if you have no characters you won’t be able to earn more money. Also, you should know that there’s a limit of 20 characters you can have among all those you have at one time. I don’t know what happens if all of your characters are dead and in the maze at once. Seems like they should have accounted for that possibility, though.

How to handle those first fights

Use every advantage you have! Mages begin with the sleep spell KATINO, and while it’s almost useless later in the game it’s the key to surviving the first floor, that and the priest’s Dispel Undead ability.

There aren’t many monsters that can appear randomly on the first level:

Bubbly Slimes: the weakest monsters in the entire dungeon. They never flee and are immune to sleep spells, but are almost never a danger.

Kobolds: easy to beat unless they outnumber you. KATINO, the sleep spell, works quite well.

Orcs: Like kobolds but a little beefier. Both kobolds and orcs are very prone to running away if you’re even slightly above their level. Use KATINO.

Level 1 Rogues: Also weak and prone to fleeing, and vulnerable to KATINO.

Undead Kobolds: one of the very few (possibly the only) monster in the game with a description of “Skeleton.” For first-level groups kobold skeletons are pretty dangerous, all the numbers of kobolds but without their tendency to run away or vulnerability to sleep. You might be tempted to fight them hand-to-hand for the experience points, but this is just the kind of thinking that gets first-level parties slaughtered. You have a priest; they should be trying to dispel them every turn. (If you don’t have a priest then go right back to town and make one!)

Bushwackers: the horrors of the first floor, they do around a d8 of damage, making them deadly. If a group of first level characters encounters a group of Bushwackers without any KATINOs available it’s best to try to run. Bushwackers can be a problem even for 2nd level parties, but against higher level groups they’re just as prone to fleeing as their lower level compatriots.

Zombies: about one time in five, a group of Bushwackers will be generated with an assisting team of Zombies. This is by far the most dangerous encounter possible on the first floor, pretty much impossible for a first-level group to defeat without a lot of luck on their side. I’d have the priest try to dispel the Zombies, and use your mage(s) to cast KATINO on the Bushwackers. If you can get all the Bushwackers asleep, maybe use any remaining extra spell slots on HALITO on the zombies, but there is no really good way to survive this. Fortunately Bushwackers+Zombies is a rare combination, I’ve only seen it happen once on the first floor.

There is one more monster that can appear on the first floor….

Murphy’s Ghost

A beloved monster among Wizardry fans, and something of a legend in the annals of CRPGs, is Murphy’s Ghost. It’s a special encounter that can occur in one specific room on the first level of the dungeon. It’s in a region behind a secret door, so you might not find it until you learn the light spell MILWA, or possibly its longer-lasting version LOMILWA.

In the original, stepping onto its encounter spot was enough to make Murphy’s Ghost appear. Now you have to search to fight them. In both cases though the fight is easily repeatable.

On the first floor, Murphy’s Ghost can appear in groups of up to two. The fight isn’t that difficult, and even against low level characters it can’t do more than 4 hit points of damage every round. The main problem is that Murphy’s Ghost has a very low (that is, very good) Armor Class, at -3, and has many hit points. No attack magic works on the ghost, but spells that worsen its AC, or improve your characters’, work well. It takes around 40-50 melee attacks, on average, to fell a Murphy’s Ghost. One ghost earns 4,450 experience points, which split six ways it still over 700 XP apiece, and a pair of them can be enough to gain a whole level’s worth of experience at once. It is possible, rarely, to earn more experience from other groups on the first level, but Murphy’s Ghost has the advantage of only getting one attack per round, and of appearing every time its room is entered/it’s searched for, even if you just fought it a couple of moves before.

Murphy’s Ghost is slightly less useful in the Digital Eclipse version because the new unskippable battle animations take up a lot of extra time. It was always the combination of easy repetition, battle speed and relatively low difficulty that made fighting Murphy’s host appealing. After your group gets a couple of extra levels on their bones the first floor starts looking a lot less treacherous anyway.

SGDQ 2024 Begins Tomorrow!

The past couple of years of Games Done Quick, the best-known speedrunning charity marathon out there, has seen contributions decline a bit, but it still brings in over two million dollars each year. Here’s wishing them well for their next major event, which begins tomorrow, June 30th!

Every time a GDQ happens I make a huge post about interesting games (to me) when they’re being run, and what’s interesting about them. This here is that post for SGDQ 2024. Times given are US Eastern time, so count three hours earlier for Pacific, four hours later to get to Greenwich Mean. Lettuce bee gin!

Sunday, June 30th

1 PM – Yoshi’s Story, All Melons: Yoshi’s Story, the N64 Yoshi game, was often derided when it came out as a kiddie game. You have to remeber, back then everyone was up in arms that there existed Barney the Dinosaur. But as often happens with Nintendo, there’s more going on with Yoshi’s Story than there seems at first. Not only is it the first Nintendo game to use the handmade arts & crafts appearance gimmick, but it’s really a score attack game, and the way to get the highest score is to collect melons. Every level is full of fruit, and eating 30 of any kind will finish the level. You can sometimes finish a level really quickly that way. But the best fruit is Melons, and there’s only 30 Melons in every level. Doing an all-melon run turns a quick and easy game into an ordeal, requiring you to actually play through all of each level, and that’s what this run is trying for.

3:50 PM – Mega Man 9: MM9 came out in 2008, 16 years ago. Can you believe it? I can, I’ve learned to stop being surprised at the passage of time. More time has passed since the release of MM9 than had passed between it and the release of the last NES Mega Man game, Mega Man 6. I don’t enjoy making you feel old, but I feel like, if I have to feel old, then you have to too.

6:07 PM – Splatoon 3: Side Order, New Game+: This is the recent DLC, so a lot of rapidly-evolving tech should be available to see.

7:00 PM – Pokemon Violet, Teal Mask: This is also DLC, for an endgame continuation of Violet’s story. Pokemon speedruns tend to be highlights of each GDQ.

9:o4 PM – Halo 2, Legendary Difficulty: Surprise, I’m calling out a non-Nintendo (Nontendo?) game! This is the PC version too.

10:49 PM – Tomb Raider I Remastered, Any% Glitched: The game is Tomb Raider I-III Remastered, but the run is just the remake of the first game. If you remember the original fondly and never checked in with the remakes, this is a good chance to see what you’ve been missing. (Apparently, what you’ve been missing is glitches!)

Monday, July 1st

12:16 AM (that’s 16 minutes after midnight) – Enter the Gungeon, Rainbow Turbo All Flows (No AWP) Race: Roguelite games and randomizers are always great spectacles, because you aren’t watching people who have practiced doing the same exactly thing for hundreds of hours. They’re playing the game in a more interactive way, reacting to the spicy mean the game serves them up. “Rainbow” mode means the game spawns a variety of items at the beginning of each floor, including two items guaranteed to be of high quality. The player can only take one of them though.

5:27 AM – Smart Ball: As GDQ events have evolved, 8-bit and 16-bit games have gotten less common.

7:50 AM – Live A Live, Twilight of Edo Japan, Present Day and Prehistory Eras: The remake of the Super Famicom JRPG classic that was released about a year ago. This is only covering three of the nine chapters of the game, but since they’re largely self-contained it works out. They picked three of the most interesting chapters. Twilight of Edo is a terrific branching scenario, reminiscent of the most complex TTRPG modules, with many ways to tackle it. Present Day by contrast is the shortest chapter, consisting of only a series of boss battles. And Prehistory is a fairly traditional JRPG story, with the caveat that it’s nearly wordless through.

8:45 AM – Ecco: The Tides of Time, and 9:27 AM – Puggsy: Two Genesis games, not often seen at GDQ, and both about half an hour long.

10:49 AM – Turnip Boy Robs A Bank: The sequel to the comedy indie title Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, which has appeared at GDQ events before.

1:41 PM – Sonic Project ’06; 2:21 PM – Sonic Robo Blast 2; 3:08 PM – Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles: A whole buncha Sonic, two of them fan creations. Sonic Project ’06 is a WIP remake of the infamous 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog game. Sonic Robo Blast 2 is a fangame, also in development, that uses the Doom engine. And S3&K is the “complete” version of Sonic 3 on the Genesis, the version that comes about by attaching its cartridge to Sonic & Knuckles with that game’s “lock-on technology.”

7:00 PM – Spelunky, All Journal Entries: Another roguelite. Winning the game, and through Hell, is necessary, but only the beginning.

8:05 – Bonus Game: Balatro, 3 Deck Random Seed, Skipless: Balatro is still teh hotenss at the moment. I’ve played lots of it, so naturally I’m going to point it out here. A “3 Deck” run seems to mean winning the game three times (finishing Ante 8), each with a different deck. Not being able to skip is a substantial drawback.

Tuesday, July 2nd

2:05 AM – Doom 64 (2020), “Watch Me Die Speed”: Watch Me Die seems to be like classic Doom’s Ultra-Violence difficulty. I don’t know what Watch Me Die Speed is.

4:52 AM – Castlevania Legends: A disliked Gameboy installment in the series.

5:32 AM – Haunted Castle: The much worse first Castlevania arcade game. The fact that it’s as GDQ yet says 1CC attempt should say everything that needs saying about its difficulty.

8:21 AM – Virtual Boy Wario Land: A rare chance to see a Virtual Boy game played live, and at 22 minutes, it may not even be long enough to get a headache.

10:07 AM – Little Samson: This game is hugely expensive on the collector’s market. Come see why? I jest, we know why: rarity. This game marks the beginning of several other interesting titles: Mega Man X5 for Playstation, Mega Man 4 for NES, Sunset Riders for SNES, then a Wii port of Chibi-Robo as a bingo race, and then…

2:14 PM – Katamari Forever: The music will be stuck in your head for days.

4:58 PM – Quake II Enhanced (2023), N64 Maps, 100% Kills & Secrets

10:22 PM – The Outer Wilds, 100% Base Game Shipless: This is the game with the time loop, not The Outer Worlds. I always get them mixed up.

11:52 PM – Undertale Yellow, True Pacifist: A fangame based on Undertale. Might be interesting.

Wednesday, July 3rd

2:11 AM – Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, Any% No Major Glitches or Manipulation: An underrated JRPG from the SNES days. The first game was all JRPG, but the second added interesting Zelda-like puzzles, and is considered to be the highlight of the series.

7:57 AM – Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, and Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, both Episode 1

2:46 PM – PowerWash Simulator, SpongeBob DLC with 6 players: How much do you want to bet someone will pull out a Squidward impression?

4:50 PM – Super “Sonic Saves the World” World, Abridged%: This is a romhack with a humorous angle. Since it’s a kaizo hack, it may be one of your few chances to see the gags outside of Youtube playthroughs.

5:50 PM – Kaizo Mario Galaxy: Oh sure let’s keep going with the brain-killing difficulty hacks. At least they’ll be playing it, and not me.

7:30 PM – Old School Runescape, Chambers of Xeric Solo: I know at least one person who’ll be excited to hear about this. Maybe you’ll be excited about it too?

Thursday, July 4th

3:07 AM – Monster Party: Why not kick off US Independence Day with this Japanese-made platformer parody of horror movie tropes?

10:53 AM – Pokemon White 2: Another of those crazy Pokemon runs, this one 3 1/2 hours long.

5:03 PM – Tetris: The Grand Master, Master Mode: Only fifteen minutes long, so set an alarm. This isn’t like the Gameboy or NES versions, the TGM games get fast quickly and only get faster. Soon they’ll be at “20G” and the pieces will effectively spawn in the bin, and the player will have to rely on lockdown delay to survive.

7:00 PM – Halo 3, 4 player Co-op on Legendary Difficulty: I include these as a nod to all the FPS fans out there.

8:43 PM – Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball: A sports game from the nearly-forgotten time before Electronic Arts locked down the rights to most professional sports under what seems to be a perpetual license. One of those seated at the couch for this one is Peanut Butter the Dog. An actual dog of course, not the Bojack Horseman character. It’d be hard for a cartoon character to sit on a physical couch.

10:07 PM – Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Reverse Boss Order: “Reverse Boss Order” means using various tricks to find and fight the bosses in the opposite order than as the developers intended. I don’t know how that works in a game where the second half is gated behind a mandatory boss fight. Maybe there’s a glitchy skip. We can find out what they mean by this together.

11:32 PM – Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix: There are people in this world who adore the KH games. Personally I find it fun to make up titles. Kingdom Hearts: Unfortunate Destiny Eternal! Kingdom Hearts: Thirty-two Squared Ultra Power! Kingdom Hears: The Wrath of Michael Eisner! Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days! Oops, that one’s real. Note this run is over 2 1/2 hours.3;

Friday, July 5th

2:32 AM – System Shock (Remake)

4:42 AM – Mr. Run and Jump: Hey, I did a Q&A with the creators last year! I wonder if they’ll call in during the run with a donation?

5:29 AM – The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, All Main Quests: We all must know by now that Morrowind can be completed in less than three minutes, right? This one pads it out to almost half an hour by requiring all the main quests to be finished.

6:07 AM – Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, Ephraim Route: There’s nothing in the description saying there won’t be RNG manipulation, so expect this one to be exploitastic.

7:39 AM – Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2, New Game+ Campaign Character Bid War: Except the memes to fly by faster than you can notice.

9:28 AM – Stardew Valley, Skull Caverns 100 Glitchless 4 Player: The Skull Caves are randomly generated, so this is like another roguelite hidden in the schedule.

10:48 – The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, All Dungeons (Swordless): One of those runs where you just want to see how they do it.

12:37 PM – The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Co-op Randomizer: Randomizers often make for interesting runs. The way co-op randomizers usually work is, there’s software running that watches both players playing a rom each randomized with the same seed, and when one of them finds an item, the other player is also awarded it.

3:37 PM – Super Mario Bros., Any%: Just six minutes are allocated for this one.

7:00 PM – Super Mario World, Kaizo Relay Race: Well frizz my hair and call me a toilet brush, it’s another kaizo Mario World hack. The two teams are the Groovy Goombas and the Funky Fuzzies. Expect much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

9:15 PM – Bonus Game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Defeat Ganon No SRM: SRM stands for “Stale Reference Manipulation.” It means that player frozenflygone won’t use a particularly glichy way to make the game, speaking technically, babble and foam at the mouth. They might use other gimmicks, but not that one.

9:55 PM – WACCA Reverse: Lately GDQ marathons have reserved a period of time for showing off someone utterly ruling at a Japanese arcade rhythm game, and that’s what this is this time.

11:36 PM – Grand Poo World 3: Another Mario World kaizo hack, made by a popular runner.

Saturday, July 6th

1:31 AM – Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Extreme NG+: Which one was this again?

6:47 AM – Hyperbolica: Another game where I interviewed its creator. I was hoping that their second game, the brilliant and mindwarping 4D Golf, would show up this time. Hyperbolica is brilliant and mindwarping too though. If you don’t know what it is yet, it’s an exploratory game set in a first-person perspective where you explore worlds that exist on a hyperbolic plane, a kind of non-Euclidian geometry. Parallel lines diverge at a distance! Regular pentagons have right-angled corners! Utter madness!

10:22 AM – Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire: Ah, a classic Sierra adventure game! I’m surprised that there are so few DOS games at GDQ overall.

12:01 PM – Kirby’s Adventure, No Major Glitches: There’s more NES games in the lineup than at past events, and this is a pretty terrific one.

2:07 PM – Pizza Tower, Any%, Noise, No Major Glitches: Pizza Tower is a recent indie success story, a rollicking game with art that looks like it came from a 90s cartoon like Rocko’s Modern Life, and with gameplay heavily inspired by Wario Land 4. “Noise” replaces main character Peppino with a different character with a different moveset, that makes traversing the same levels a different experience.

4:31 PM – Super Mario 64 Randomizer, 10 Star Blindfolded: Blindfolded runs have been highlighs of GDQ for several years now, but what will that mean to a randomized game?

5:26 PM – Baldur’s Gate 3, Honour Mode, Glitchless: Honour Mode means high difficulty and, if your party wipes, the game ends without recourse to saves (although games can still be continued outside of Honour Mode). Baldur’s Gate 3, along with Balatro, are the games of the hour, so a lot of you will want to tune in for it.

7:10 PM – Super Metroid, Race: Super Metroid race runs are a GDQ tradition. Whenever a donation says “kill the animals,” they aren’t expressing actual murderous intent, and when they say to save them it isn’t an additional expression of kindness. At the end of Super Metroid, during the escape sequence, there is a room that players can visit slightly off the main track that can allow them to let some creatures that aided them during the game to escape the decaying planet Zebes. There’s no game benefit to it, and skipping the room enables a player to finish the game maybe 30 seconds faster, but it’s a popular choice to save them anyway. In a race between two skilled players though, 30 seconds can easily cost them the victory, so they ask the viewers whether to save them or not, so both will be on equal footing in that regard.

8:10 PM – Bonus Game: Super Mario Maker 2: Nintendo seems to have abandoned the Mario Maker series, but it’s still a popular fixture at GDQ. I have qualms with how so many makers, and players, focus their efforts in constructing and completing hellishly difficult levels, but it’s true, they are popular. Bonus Games in the schedule are donation incentives, and are only played if targets are met, so this may not occur. Usually incentive targets are made in time, but not always.

9:15 PM – Elden Ring, Glitchless: Come see the popular soulslike get dissected like a frog on a workbench.

…and, at the end…

11:20 PM – Super Mario RPG Remake: this is listed as an RTA, or “Real Time Attack,” which I think is just their way of saying, they’re playing it through? But isn’t that just Any%? Anyway, it’s a new game that looks a lot like an old and popular one, you can see how far they’ve come along in destroying it since its release. I’m supposing that the remake of Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door will be in this slot come January.

HG 101 Forum Thread on Obscure Arcade Secrets

Today’s find somehow doesn’t involve a Youtube video! On the forums for Hardcore Gaming 101 there’s a thread, inspired by the lengths players must go through to reach the true ending of Bubble Bobble, about arcade games with super obscure secrets. I don’t even think I know what they’re talking about with the Rainbow Islands secret, involving playing through the game seven times doing a minor thing different each time. It sounds like a bit of a money sink to me, but this was the era of Tower of Druaga after all. The thread is here.

If you don’t know about the absurd secrets in Bubble Bobble, the best guide I know of to those is still the Bubble Bubble Info Pages, last changed in 1998 but still on the web after all these years!

Sundry Sunday: Doctor Who 16-Bit RPG

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

Among other accomplishments (most of them recently have been musical), years ago DoctorOctoroc made a number of 16-bit Square-styled videos based on a number of media properties. We linked to their humorous take on Breaking Bad a while ago. This is another, from around the time of 11th Doctor Doctor Who. You might say that DoctorOctoroc doctored 11th Doctor Doctor Who. Gimmie the news, I got a bad case of loving you!

Here is that take, which will take four minutes of your time, and is suitable to watch during your stay in some kind of medical waiting room.

NYT’s Connections Puzzles

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.)

Today’s puzzle. It’s here today, it’ll be here tomorrow.

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.

Star – Feather – Flower – Mushroom

Brain – Courage – Heart – Home

Jack – Love – Squat – Zip

Getting harder now:

Cradle – Eye – Meow – Pajamas

Dogs – Brown – Unchained – Fiction

Clown – King – Colonel – Mermaid

Bowl – Buzz – Crew – Pixie

Cigarette – Pencil – Ticket – Toe

And finally, that example I gave earlier:

Condo – Loo – Haw – Hero

U Can Beat Video Games Covers Final Fantasy IV

I’ve posted about the great Youtube walkthrough channel U Can Beat Video Games several times in the past, so I try not to report on every video they do. And lately, as they’ve been tackling bigger projects that take a lot more time to finish, there haven’t been as many to post about.

But now they’ve completed their four-part series, each at three-plus hours, on one of the most iconic JRPGs from the era, Final Fantasy IV, which of course got released in Western markets as Final Fantasy II. It goes over everything in the game, every secret, every step of the story, a lot of cool tricks and strategies, and more.

I understand some people use this as background for doing other things, or as their adult replacement for Saturday morning cartoons (look them up). In any case, it makes for a lot of viewing, so block off a fair amount of time for this.

Here are the direct links and embeds:

Part 1: Beginning to Cecil’s promotion to Paladin (3h44m)

Part 2: To Dr. Lugae in the Tower of Bab-Il (4h8m)

Part 3: The Underworld and up to the Bahamut optional fight on the Moon (4h17m)

And finally:

Part 4: The remainder of the game, and the ending (3h38m)

If you think this is huge, it’s only going to get huge-r when they reach Final Fantasy VI (er, III)!

Sundry Sunday: Medieval Cover of Super Mario Bros.

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

It’s a cover of the theme to Super Mario Bros. played in a medieval style (1 1/2 minutes). That’s all for today. This video has lurked in my files for months, I figured I’d go ahead and get it posted. Remixes of the SMB music are one of the oldest genres of internet meme music there is, so here it is in a really old mode. The channel it’s from does medieval covers of a variety of music, so if that sounds entertaining, please ambulate towards that vestibule.

Old Vintage Computing Research: The Web-@nywhere Watch

Back in January, the wonderful blog Old Vintage Computing Research, which covers all kinds of old machines and devices, presented this bizarre “smart” watch from the early days of the World Wide Web. It didn’t connect to the internet itself; it sat in a cradle and had up to 93K (who could need more?) of precious plain-text data sent to it from a Windows 9X or 2000 machine, that you could then read “on the go,” “on the road,” “in transit,” “while sitting on a subway car sadly isolated from a web browser,” etc. This essential device would have cost you $85 at the time.

Image from the linked blog post.

Imagine trying to read approximately 20 print pages’ worth of internet text on that tiny display! For more, please click through for the device’s history and loving paens to its gross unusability.

I couldn’t let this promotional image from the device’s long-dead website go without comment though, offering “Free download from WEB”:

Image from the blog, originally from the device’s website. This bikini-wearing computer graphics lady likes her Web-@nywhere so much she got a dorky tattoo of its logo. It’ll either take an expensive operation or a simple retexturing to remove that! No one tell her she’s wearing the watch upside-down.

Old Vintage Computing Research: The Web-@nywhere Watch

7DRL 2024 Is Underway

Slipped my mind, but as I mentioned last month, the 7DRL game jam for 2024 is underway! There’s still time to get in a whole week of work!

They made a promo video for it (2 minutes), which shows some popular games from the jam over the years, and reminds us that this is the 20th year the jam has been running, making it nearly an internet institution by this point! And the video also reveals the theme-which is “roguelike,” hah.