It’s only about nine minutes long so you can guess that it doesn’t go into deep detail. Essentially the NES is split into two parts, the CPU and its memory, and the PPU graphics chip and its own memory. A lot of classic consoles and microcomputers had to take special measures to support their display, which often ended up being the most complex part of the unit. Think about it: you have what amounts to a deluxe broadcast character generator right there in a box on your desk, shelf or floor, with lots of extra bells and whistles besides. (In fact, home computers were often used to generate current events channels for local cable companies, and an Amiga was essentially the basis for the old Prevue Guide channel.) It’s like a tiny special-purpose, single-receiver TV station just for your own use.
Graphics hardware is extremely timing sensitive. It has to generate the signal for your TV to display according to standardized picture generation requirements, so special requirements are often necessary. In the Commodore 64, for instance, the VIC-II graphics chip has the power to actually put the 6510 CPU to sleep, so it can have unrestricted access to the computer’s memory, without fear of bus conflicts, when it’s needed. This reduces the overall speed of the processor by a bit, and it’s why C64s turn off the screen when loading programs from cassette tape, in order to keep the CPU timing consistent relative to the data being streamed in off the tape.
The NES gets around this by giving the PPU RAM and address bus for its own exclusive use, and to put stuff in it the CPU has to use the PPU as an intermediary. And what’s more the NES exposes both the CPU and PPU’s address busses through the cartridge connector (which is why it’s got so many pins), allowing carts to supply dedicated ROM and RAM to both chips.
Even though it’s just a high-level overview, I found it a worthwhile use of those nine minutes, and you may very well enjoy it too.
It’s another highly technical game glitch explanation, although from a source we don’t often follow here: even though it has to do with explaining glitch Pokemon from the first generation of that series, it was the ending presentation of RustCon 2020 given by Siân Griffin, despite having little to do with Rust, other than showing the possible results of not having strong memory safety in your programming language.
It’s 39 minutes long, and it might prove difficult to get through for some, but it’s good and interesting information:
I will give you an overview:
When the original Pokemon games generate a random encounter with wild Pokemon in the overworld, they refer to one of two lists in RAM memory, copied there from ROM. One list is for “grass” Pokemon, that are generated when walking through tall grass, and one is for “water” Pokemon, that are generated when in riding a Pokemon using Surf over water tiles. The lists are copied when entering a new region, with a differing enemy generation table.
Due to an oversight in the tile checking code, a different subtile is checked when generating a Pokemon from each list. This means it’s possible, on some shores, to generate a Pokemon from the grass list when actually on the water. If one of the lists has a Pokemon generation rate of 0% for its type, then its list doesn’t actually get copied. Some regions that are largely aquatic aren’t intended to ever generate grass Pokemon, and so have a 0% grass encounter rate, and so never copy a grass Pokemon encounter table. The Pokemon generated come from whatever was in memory before, which may be all zeros, or may be whatever used the memory in that area previously. Pokemon has little RAM to work with, so the Pokemon generation table memory has other things that use that memory, and one of those is data for the trainers you trade Pokemon with.
If you use Fly to fast travel to Cinnabar Island, you can reach a region where the grass encounter table won’t have been initialized, but you can still cause grass encounters to happen by Surfing on the shoreline. The contents of that table can be manipulated by doing something else that uses that memory beforehand. As a result, you can cause an encounter with an undefined Pokemon, which has the name MISSINGNO and has various glitch attributes.
Because the Pokemon has faulty definitions for some of its attributes, like appearance and cry, it’s possible to crash the game or wreck your save data from playing around with MISSINGNO. But if you run from it, this damage can be minimized. And when it tries to mark that you’ve seen MISSINGNO in the bit array that records which Pokemon you’ve seen, it overshoot that table and actually sets a bit in the memory that follows it, which usefully, is your inventory. Generate the right version of MISSINGNO and run from battle, and you may suddenly find yourself with over a hundred of an item in a specific slot in your inventory. If you put the Rare Candy there before, you now can give your Pokemon over a hundred experience levels, or you could create stat-gain items this way, or lots of Master Balls.
Glitches such as these seems like they’re rare, but really, there’s lots of games that have them. It’s one of the perils of coding your game in assembly, really.
Looygi Bros. obsessively plays various games and finds quirks, glitches and interesting facts about them. Their newest video tries out a bunch of known glitches in NES games and sees if they work in the new Nintendo World Championships speedrunning game. The result: in many, but not all, cases, Nintendo has put in code traps to make sure the games are operating as intended, and if they are set off, like if Mario goes through a wall or Link wraps around the screen, the emulator software declares Strategy Unavailable and resets the run. They tested 11 glitches in a ten-minute video, embedded here:
To summarize them:
Minus World: the trap occurs when Mario tries to slide through the wall at the end of World 1-2.
In Donkey Kong, it’s possible to climb down the first ladder, wrap around the screen, and end up on the girder right below the goal. They caught this one.
Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA) Fast Carpet: with two carpets spawned, you can travel extra fast. This one didn’t get caught, but the set-up time to use it makes its use in the challenge prohibitive.
Wrapping the screen in The Legend of Zelda. This is one of my least favorite glitches honestly. Nintendo caught it, you can’t glitch around the screen horizontally nor get Link into the top-of-screen status area. (I also dislike the term “HUD” for these areas. Dammit Jim, it’s a video game not a jet fighter.)
The “door jump” glitch in Metroid. This lets you use a door to get Samus inside the blocks that make up the edges of the screen, from there you can, depending on the situation, either wrap around the screen vertically or explore “secret worlds” created by interpreting random cartridge data as terrain. This one’s trapped.
Super Mario 2 double jump. I didn’t know about this one! In some circumstances when you’re near an enemy, characters can jump in mid air. This one is both not trapped, and actually useful in the challenge!
Super Mario 3 Fortress skip. In similar circumstances to passing through the wall in Super Mario Bros. to get to the Minus World, you can pass through a wall midway through the fortress to skip an area and go straight to the boss. This one’s trapped, probably checking for the same kind of situation as the Minus World trick.
Super Mario Bros. wall jump. Not trapped, and conceivably useful in the World 8-4 completion challenge to get into the elevated pipe.
Kid Icarus fortress 1 shortcut. There’s a way to glitch through a wall early in the route through the fortress that takes you almost to the end. This one is trapped, but it’s triggered, not when you get through the wall, but when you go through the room’s exit. It probably makes sure you go through all the essential rooms in order.
Super Mario Bros. 2 cave skip. It’s a way to glitch through a wall so you don’t have to wait for a bomb to explode. It’s tricky but possible, you end up taking damage to get through it though.
Super Mario Bros. 2 item attachment. A complex trick that lets you get items into areas where they aren’t intended to go. Technically this is untrapped and usable. In conjunction with the cave skip trick, it’s possible to kill Birdo with a Shy Guy, potentially with one throw instead of having to wait for three eggs to throw back at her. Looygi Bros was unable to get the whole trick to work in the World Championships software, but offers the possibility of it working to whoever can chain together all the necessary techniques.
I find it interesting that the tricks were disabled through traps instead of fixing their games, they seem to have enough technical know-how to know how the glitches work to check for them in the emulation layer, but maybe fixing them was deemed against the spirit of the game, or they didn’t want to risk changing the game’s essential behavior?
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
So despite the fact that you likely already know all of this, I still feel like I have to explain it all for people who might not have soaked their brains in US popular culture, yet still care enough about video games that you’re reading Set Side B. Let’s get it out of the way as quickly as feasible.
Premiering December 17, 1989, The Simpsons has been on the air for approaching 35 years. We in the United States are going to have to come to terms with the fact that it’ll probably be the reigning television fact of our lives. When it began, the NES was still the hot game system, and that was eons ago.
Premiering in the 7th season, during the time when most people still agreed The Simpsons was the best show on television, was the episode 22 Short Films About Springfield, in which the writers created a loosely-connected sequence of miscellaneous stories about the many side characters in The Simpsons. One of those stories was “Seymour and the Superintendent,” where Bart’s principal hosts his boss Superintendent Chalmers to a home-cooked meal, but due to a sequence of comical events serves him Krusty Burgers instead, covers it up in a variety of unlikely lies, and nearly burns down his house. Colloquially this has become known as “Steamed Hams,” after one of the lies Principal Skinner tells.
In 2017, a popular meme went around the internet in which people remade, remixes, or otherwise re-did that story, alone of all of them in the episode, the season, and among the long long run of the show.
In fact, those memes are still being made, and this post’s subject is one of them. It’s a video simulating what a Steamed Hams game would have been like if it were made in the style of the Bart vs the Space Mutants and Bart vs The World games on the NES. It was made by Penney Pixels, it’s four minutes long, and it’s here, and here:
There is an actual game version of the Steamed Hams, of which a playthrough is recorded here, and can be downloaded here. There’s another version of Steamed Hams too, and it can be played on GameJolt here. Both of those are adventure games.
I thought Steamed Hams had come up here before, but a quick search didn’t find anything, so I’ll just leave it at this. I’m sure in the next 35 years there will be hundreds more game versions of Steamed Hams. Maybe after all that time, I’ll be able to bring myself to mention it here again.
The end of Blaseball continues to leave a large squid-shaped hole in what I’m going to, for the sake of argument, call our hearts, but there are alternatives out there. One such alternative is Inty Sports, and the IBL: the Intellivision Baseball League.
Forget about hacking Tecmo Bowl or the like to include modern stats, this goes all the way back to arguably the first complete home console baseball simulation, back on the first console that made decent sports adaptations a reality.
Since 2014, each year, over the course of around three-and-a-half months, a league of ten teams with names based on Intellivision properties battle it out for the title of IBL Champions. I don’t know if human players back the teams or if they’re all computer-played, but it seems probable that it’s the latter. Intellivision’s Baseball (originally marketed with the Major League Baseball license) is a decent adaptation, although there are some rule changes as described on its Wikipedia page: no fly balls are simulated, home runs are declared based on “how and where” the ball is hit, and if a run is scored before the third out on a play, it counts.
Intellivision Baseball is from an era before consoles tracked stats, named players, or even offered selectable teams, so any strengths and weaknesses on a given team are merely the result of statistical variance. If you can allow yourself to forget about that detail, though, you might allow yourself to be amused, for a period of time ranging from minutes to multiple years.
Each game progresses rapidly, and is over in a brisk 9 to 11 minutes, which is much better than real-life baseball. Inty Sports has a website with the records of past seasons, and a page of greatest moments. Their 2024 season wrapped up just a few weeks ago, and can be viewed on their Youtube channel. Here is the final game of the 2024 season, Spartans vs Bombers (11 minutes):
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.
They keep using terms from Chunsoft’s Mystery Dungeon games, especially Torneko no Daibouken from the Super Famicom, but seem to have a good sense of how those items connect to and were inspired by Rogue.
Your armor weakens, oh my! “All the F words in the world were about to come out.”
They also die a lot. Because Rogue doesn’t want you to win. It was made for a community of players who would play it over and over, and were competing on shared scoreboards on university machines, and indefinite play makes for a poor measure of player skill. Standing and trading blows with every monster is a bad strategy in Rogue in the long run. Instead, it helps to run from strong enemies, to build up more hit points so as to defeat them, and sometimes in order to escape them to the next floor. Rogue’s monsters grow in strength as you descend fairly quickly, and the player is usually not far ahead of them in the power curve. Then around the time Trolls show up they’re roughly an even match, and they keep getting tougher. The point where the monsters become stronger than the player is different every game, and depends a lot on which items the player has found and has identified, but it always comes eventually. They eventually get pretty far, dying on their fifth attempt to a Griffin on Level 18.
* “Water supply texture: Say goodbye to the smell of raw oysters.” “The Dora doll’s twisty honey positive is getting warmer.” “I miss the days when I used to go Hee Hee in Centauros.” “Let’s quickly wash and throw away the rotten plastic bottles we drank from.” Tell me more, auto translate bot!
(Did you know there is a website that will convert whatever you enter into an approximation of the text from Mr. Saturn from Earthbound and Mother 3? It doesn’t look exactly like it does in the games, but it is certainly reminiscent of it. Dakota! Dakota?)
It turns out there is a TrueType Mr. Saturn font as well, as presented in this Reddit post. Note that this link should not be construed to mean that I in any way approve of Reddit, or of how much internet content that it’s concentrated under its fetid profit-seeking embrace. That’s where this is, so that’s where I linked. It is a vectorized version of a pixel font recreation of Saturn-speak, which is available here. Message over boing!
I remember seeing this game for sale back then. It looked, on store shelves, a whole lot like a Pokemon clone. It’s not like we had any lack for them at the time.
Reading the back of the case made it clear something else was going on. Amazing Island was actually an early form of creativity game, like Drawn to Life, or Spore for that matter. Instead of collecting pre-made monsters, you made your own! Starting from one of a number of skeleton types, you used the Gamecube controller to draw shapes around it, that the game would then animate to bring your creation to life. Not a bad concept!
Worse was the execution, what you’d actually do with your creatures after they were made. Ideally the game would somehow use the contours and colors you attached to your newborn monstrosity to give it statistics, and then you could command it into full-animated battle against other monsters. Instead, you were given a variety of minigames to use your monster in, which didn’t have the same appeal. Rather than having Pokemon-style moves, they played a number of variations on volleyball, or racing, or some such.
Youtuber Camobot put the game through its paces in a 14-minute review. Here it is:
I think the video has its faults, but it mostly serves its purpose of presenting a noble experiment that never got a rerelease, and might earn a cult following today if it were. I wonder especially, if the Dreamcast hadn’t failed, if Amazing Island might have seen release on it, or on its successor if one had happened. It didn’t seem to sell too well on the Gamecube, and it probably would have done even worse on the PS2 or Xbox.
The failure of games like Amazing Island at market is why most games are largely similar by-the-numbers products nowadays, that don’t take risks but are made to ensure a modest yet predictable profit. This is why, when you see a game that you might like that looks like it might really try something different, you should take the plunge, if you are able, and check it out. Until developers are better incentivized for taking chances making novel and unique games, they’ll have to stick to churning out the bland gruel that still moves copies, and no one really likes that, not the players, and not even the devs.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
They’re strange ones this week friends. This person on Youtube has made a handful of short videos depicting moments from the classic Super Nintendo JRPG Earthbound in real life.
Go out into a field and hold up a sign that reads “For Sale.” Someone will soon come running up and offer to buy practically anything you’re carrying. Advertising works!
That guy, standing in the middle of that desert. He’s got what you need, if what you need is extremely dangerous. Seems pretty sketchy.
Earthbound is full to bursting with weird situations like these. Brendoon could keep making videos for some time. Maybe concerning the Insignificant Item? Or having pizza delivered to you in the dungeon? Or beating up fire hydrants? Or running from dinosaurs? Or automatically putting ketchup on food items you eat? Or being spoken to by cups of coffee? Or the world being threatened by an 11-year-old boy? Or anything having to do with ᨓꭱ. یƌ⍭⊔ꭱη? The list is nearly endless!
