Sundry Sunday: “They’re Not Like Us”

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

I have a bit of fondness for the Chaotix, the oddly-named Sonic side characters, just because they’re so bizarre. They’ve never headlined a game themselves, and actually haven’t been playable that often, but they keep turning up.

They started out as helpers in Knuckles Chaotix, that bizarre 32X game that kind of played like Sonic, except instead of Sonic you had Knuckles, instead of Tails you had one of a randomly-selected number of weirdos including Vector the Crocodile, Espio the Chameleion, Charmy the Bee, and also Mighty the Armadillo, and robotic challenge characters Heavy and Bomb. And also, you were connected by a chain, that made playing something like having your fingernails pried off.

The Chaotix Detective Agency. What idiot decided these loonies should have a private investigator’s license? Espio (purple) tries so hard to be cool, with his anime poses and his spiked wrist and ankle bands; Vector (green) looks tough but is really friendly; and Charmy (yellow) is a goofball.

The nebulous word “Chaotix” was declared in Sonic Heroes, the other major game where Vector, Espio and Charmy are playable, to be the “Chaotix Detective Agency,” where they presumably make their anthropomorphic animal living hunting down child support evaders and doing miscellaneous disreputable work. After that, they’ve stuck around as bit players in the Sonic saga, always on the sidelines but frequently present. After all, the Sega All-Stars Racing games need bunches of characters to match Mario’s populous cast, and the Chaotix help to do that.

So, there’s these two reptiles and an insect that hang out with Sonic and pals for some reason. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and i guess a third unspecified person) are a crocodile, chameleon and bee.

Early concept art of Sonic in a band, with a bunch of forgotten animal friends, and what may be Vector’s first appearance. Look out for that guitar-playing chicken Sonic, he wishes you ill!

Yet, I like them! They’re nuts! If your world is gonna have anthropomorphs in it, that no one questions the existence of, then there should be more than just the heroes. That’s who the Chaotix are: True Neutral hangers-on in the Sonicverse. If they make a Sonic 4 movie they rightfully should be in it, although I wouldn’t put any money on it in any way at all. Also, I like that, addition to wearing headphones constantly, when tall and thin Vector jumps and spins, he becomes a loop.

I don’t care what you say, that’s just cool.

So we move on to the videos. In this animatic (1½ minutes, by sideofmeggs, audio by Jehtt) they ponder their existence in a way they’re never allowed to do in the games.

In this one (also 1½ minutes, by Jehtt, they’re in some way responsible for all of these), they decide to forget about being detectives and try to make a Youtube video.

And (1 minute, yes by Jehtt) here Shadow the Edgehog (not a typo) tells them how to be popular on Twitter.

(EDIT: Forgot to embed the third video, also fixed a couple of textual problems.)

The @!#?@! of Q*Bert

Fourth of five retro arcade strategy posts this week, how about we learn how to play the swearingist classic game: Q*bert.

Here’s a video that covers what each of Q*bert’s five levels is like (18 minutes):

You play Q*bert, and at first it seems simple. Level 1, you jump on each cube once. Slick and/0r Sam may change them back once in a while, but you can just jump on them again.

Level 2, you jump on each cube twice. That makes each level twice as long, but still not much of a problem. The rising difficulty here comes from more and faster enemies.

Then you reach Level 3, and Q*bert becomes a much different game. Now jumping on a solved cube unsolves it. If you don’t work out how to handle this, levels can drag on indefinitely. It’s a bit of a wall for players here, and Slick and Sam become much more annoying.

Level 4 is similar, except you have to jump on each cube twice, and jumping on one after it’s complete changes it back to the intermediate color. But worst is Level 5, where jumping on a solved cube changes it back to the original color. This is a huge change, for it means the pyramid can actually become unsolvable without using a Disk, or waiting for Slick or Sam to come in and reset some of the cubes. For more details, I refer you to the video. You know, the one I embedded a few paragraphs up. Go! And if you think that’s nuts, check out what happens in the unreleased sequel Faster, Harder, More Challenging Q*bert (GameFAQs link).

Here’s another strategy video (10 minutes), with tips by Jody Martin, released to the Youtube channel of Starfighters Arcade. It more basic in focus, but is more interested in explaining enemy behavior and how to react to it.

Something I’ve thought is interesting about Q*bert, which is also true of Pac-Man, is that it’s like a turn-based game, but where you can play around with the timing of the moves. I’ll try to explain.

While both games let you decide when to make decisions, both encourage playing in a discrete, point-by-point way. When Q*bert lands on a cube, there’s a limited number of decisions they can make, other than waiting to make your move. In Pac-Man, your moves are constrained to the maze paths, but you can turn slightly early, you can pause when you hit a wall, and you can double back at any point. You usually don’t want to pause or double back in that game, because they introduce uncertainty in patterns (although a few patterns rely on them, which makes them much harder to perform). Q*bert is resistant to patterns, using pseudorandomness to affect the paths of the balls and most enemies, and the player’s ability to break out of the rigid temporal confines of that game’s movement is more helpful.

Contrast both games to Robotron and Defender. Those games have “free” movement, they’re not confined to a playfield with limited choices but let the player move around how they want. In actuality they’re games where the turns are taken in real time each frame. That adds a much greater role for player skill, but it also requires you to be much more precise.

Defender Strategy

Defender’s difficulty is legendary. Craig Kubey in The Winner’s Guide to Video Games said it was like being locked in a closet with a swarm of killer bees, and I actually think that’s not overstatement. And yet, people have flipped Defender’s score counter many times in a single game.

In an 18-minute strategy session, Joe Dearman explains the basics of playing Defender well, but I’m afraid if you don’t have a certain base facility it might be hopeless. Although I’m generally good at video games, I don’t seem to have it myself. Take a look and see if this looks like something you might be good at, but be warned, Defender’s controls themselves are complicated, with a lever and five buttons, although I dunno, game controllers these days tend to have many more than that. It is important, however, not to underestimate this game. It will rapidly annihilate you if you aren’t very good.

Both Defender and Robotron 2084, mentioned yesterday, were made by Williams, and designed by Eugene Jarvis, who still works in arcade game production today, or did last time I checked.

Another thing these games have in common is they’re very adjustable. Operators can choose starting difficulty, ending difficulty and on which wave it’s reached. This thread at arcade-museum.com breaks down the different romsets and differences between them. The earlier roms, “Blue” and “Green,” are generally harder, and increase in difficulty through 99 possible levels. The most common and latest set, “Red,” only has 30 effective levels.

At the higher numbers of Blue and Green, weird behavior can be seen. Defender has an enemy called the Baiter, which exists to harass the player if they take too long in clearing a wave of other enemies. At maximum difficulty Baiters become hilariously numerous, the game sending them in about once every two or three seconds. Watch a few minutes of this game with the wave difficulty settings cranked up to maximum from wave 1 (39 minutes). The extra ship level is set it easier than normal, needing just 5K to get an extra, and it’s set to restore all the Humanoids every wave, but that’s mostly to make the game possible, although there does exist video of someone surviving maximum difficulty with ships and Humanoids at normal settings, up to a score of 909K. (1 hour 7 minutes, somehow).

Here is the first of those two links, I’ll leave the other for you to click on if you’re interested. Both of them have the amazingly persistent Baiters, and in both of them the player manages to hold up under the pressure, for a while anyway.

Robotron 2084 Strategy from arcadeimpossible

It’s the third of this week’s classic arcade strategy find posts, and today’s dedicated to the original twin-stick shooter, Robotron 2084.

Robotron’s what I’d call a very pure game. It’s simple in play, nowhere near as complex as Eugene Jarvis’ first game Defender, but deep despite it. The left joystick moves, the right joystick fires, and until you get used to that you’ll have short games. In fact, you’ll probably have short games regardless. It is ruthless.

These videos feature host “Greg” and star player “Darrin,” who is the one giving most of the advice. The first video covers the first nine waves (5½ minutes). They set the template for the game: there are theme levels that cycle every ten waves. There are Spheroid, Quark, Brain and, for levels ending in 9, Grunt waves that completely surround you with enemies right from the start, and each poses its own kind of challenge.

The second video covers intermediate-level play, and wave beginnings (7 minutes):

The videos mention three parts, but it appears that only two were ever uploaded. They mention a site in their descriptions, robotron2084guidebook.com. In the 12 years since the videos were posted that site’s gone dark, but being a text site it’s pretty well preserved on the Wayback Machine, and has lots of good information. They also mention video on the high score site scoreground.com, but sadly it’s also defunct, and the mentioned video that was hosted there is probably lost. If there’s one good thing about Google, I guess, it’s that they let Youtube videos persist on their site for decades without culling them too much.

Donkey Kong High-Level Basics

Continuing with this week’s theme of classic arcade strategy videos, these Donkey Kong videos are from a variety of Youtube sources.

Rob O’Hara on basic strategy (9½ minutes). Note that he’s playing on one of those multi-machine emulators so the sounds are a little off.

arcadeimpossible talks with former world record holder Hank Chen (22 minutes):

Getting deeper into the weeds now. Here’s a high-level strategy video on just the Barrel (a.k.a. Girders) boards (41 minutes!). All the following videos are from Chambers_N Gaming:

Was that a lot to say on this one subject? Well hold on, that was just part 1! Here’s part 2, which is another 42 minutes!

And here’s detailed strategy on the Rivets (a.k.a. Ziggurat) boards, although it’s “only” 19 minutes:

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.

Classic Arcade Tips: Phoenix & the Centipede Trap

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.

The result is: The Centipede Trap. Observe (video by “pat,” 12 minutes). If you want to skip right to the trap in action, you can jump to an appropriate place here.

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!

Sundry Sunday: Sonic Gump

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

There’s a lot of game parody videos out there. Here in the Sundry Sunday department, we realize we could just throw anything up onto the page, and fill the requirement of the form. But we don’t want to do that.

A parody should ideally be something more than just, here’s a thing, floating around the culture, and we put game characters in it. The DragonCon T-shirt school of parody: “What if Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but Aliens?” A quote from The Office, but in the Star Wars title font. We are a never-ending font of contempt for that kind of crap.

This video, “Sonic Gump,” escapes that lowly category by the shared theme of its two characters: running. It starts with that, and then builds on it, casting the other Sonic regulars into expected (and unexpected) roles from the movie, and by the end it’s pretty effective. It’s on Newgrounds, but the embed here is to the Youtube version (1¾ minutes).

Webdepths: Three More Old Final Fantasy VI Sites

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.

Game Design Legend Rebecca Heineman’s Medical Issues

Not to repeat the title unnecessarily, but Time Extension reports that Rebecca Heineman has been diagnosed with cancer. This is a huge deal, her history in gaming goes back to the days of Electronic Games magazine! She was one of the founders of Interplay, programmed London Blitz for Avalon Hill’s nearly-forgotten computer game division, also programmed Wasteland and The Bard’s Tale (the original version), designed The Bard’s Tale III and (the greatly underrated) Dragon Wars, and a bevy of other accomplishments.

Time is awful, and the end comes for all of us eventually, but it’d be nice if this could be pushed back as far as it can be. Because she lives in the United States, and this bullshit excuse for a country believes that people should just die who can’t afford care, she’s setting up a GoFundMe for contributions. That’s what my recently-deceased brother did to try to pay for the medical care that could have saved his life. I think he got one contribution. Hopefully Rebecca Heineman will get a lot more than that. Please consider it if you can afford it.

Adrian’s Digital Basement Uncovers Famicom Galaxian Cheat

Let’s get the link out of the way right off (27 minutes).

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 on McDonald’s Treasure Island, Treasure’s First Game

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.

Kid Fenris on McDonald’s Treasure Island