This one I find rather fascinating. There may be no arcade game ever made as purposely frustrating to play as Namco’s Japanese-only game The Tower of Druaga.
Hero Gilgamesh (often shortened to “Gil”) must pass through 60 maze levels, collecting a key from each then passing through the door to the next, while defeating enemies that get in his way, in order to rescue his love Ki from the villainous Druaga.
BUT almost all the levels have a secret trick to perform. If this trick is accomplished, then a chest will appear that, if collected, will grant Gil a special ability. Some of these abilities are helpful. Some, in fact, are necessary, and if they aren’t collected then on some future level Gil will be unable to advance! The tricks are explained nowhere in the game: it just expects you to know them, if not discovered personally then learned through word of mouth. (This was like a decade before most people had access to the internet.)
What is more, nothing in the game explains what the treasures are or what they do, or what you’ll find on each level if you do know the trick. And a few of the treasures are actually harmful! It means that, to win, you have to rely on a host of hidden information, obtained by both your own observation and from what you’ve heard from others. Which requires a ton of quarters to get, which suited manufacturer Namco just fine. Unfortunately (or, maybe, fortunately?), the game crash prevented Namco from trying its luck with this game in Western territories.
As a result, The Tower of Druaga is a game that’s probably experienced watching someone else play, rather than playing yourself. That’s what this video is, Youtube user sylvie playing through the whole game, not just advancing through, but explaining how it’s done along the way. It’s an hour and three minutes long:
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.
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.)
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.
For this Perceptive Podcast, I’m talking with Christopher Bischke from Daylight Basement Studio to discuss their game Rightfully, Beary Arms that just released on early access. We spoke about making their first rogue-lite and the challenges of balancing the elements there.
It’s a fun idea, to determine if you, as a physical human being person, with all your physical human being person needs, could survive in the world of Super Mario 64, were you somehow to be transported there permanently.
The video embedded and linked below, from a Youtuber named Pretzel, is the projected beginning of a series about whether you could survive in different game worlds. Games are abstractions, and play life in them often leaves out details like drinking, eating, or (let’s face it) pooping. By ignoring that and trying to look at them as if they were actual places you are, by definition, engaging in pedantry, ignoring the essential nature of these places. But it’s fun to think about somewhat. At least we know this world has cake!
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.
The indie showcases highlight the many indie games we play here on stream, all games shown are either press key submissions or demos. Please reach out if you would like me to look at your game.
It’s been some time since we had one of these obsessive quirk videos. I’d been feeling a bit self-conscious about using them a lot I suppose, plus none of them struck my brain the right way. Well, here’s one that’s pretty good, from Youtuber Bringles (21 minutes):
I won’t like this will be mostly interesting to people who are familiar with the game, but I should explain a few things in case you aren’t but still want to watch.
A “superguard” is a special mechanic in TYD. After the concept was pioneered with Super Mario RPG, the first Paper Mario also included a timed reaction move, often a button press, you can do in response to enemy attacks to reduce damage. But singe the first two Paper Mario games purposely keep their battle numbers pretty low, with most attacks doing single digit damage, sometimes even just one or two points, any reduction to that ends up being significant.
Those moves are called guards. Thousand Year Door goes a step further, with superguards. If your reactive button press happens within a three frame window of the attack’s impact, your character will often take no damage. That’s really strong, which is why both the frame window is so slight and way some enemies play cagey timing games with their attacks to try to trick you into guarding early or late.
One of the things the video reveals is that, in Western releases of the game, nearly every non-item attack in the game can be superguarded. The Japanese version, which was released first, has a lot more attacks that can’t be superguarded, making this a mechanic that was un-nerfed.
Another interesting mechanic revealed by the game is how a lottery in the game works. Players draw a ticket and try to match a four-digit number. You might expect that to work randomly, but it’s much less random than you’d think. Instead it decides how many real-world game days (using the Gamecube’s real-time clock) it’ll be before each of the four tiers of prices will be won. The number of days is random, but only by a bit: it’ll still be a while before the wins happen, but within a limited range. The highest prize won’t be won until at least 335 days since the game was started. There is no chance of winning it before then! That might sound unfair, but since it’d be a 1-in-10,000 chance of winning it fairly, it’s more bending the odds in the player’s favor. Although honestly, who would even be playing the same game of PM:TYD nearly a year after beginning it?
One more thing you should know is that TYD has this stageplay aesthetic in its battle sequences, which take place on a wooden stage in front of an audience of Mario characters. Some enemies play around with the stage (like hanging from the ceiling), but the audience also can play a role in the fights. The video reveals that two particular kinds of audience members don’t trigger randomly as one might expect, but react to certain failures of the player’s behalf during combat. X-Nauts throw rocks if an attack hits but does zero damage (like if the target is invulnerable or guarding), and Hammer Bros. throw hammers at you if Mario misses with a Hammer attack, in something like a display of hammerer pride.
It’s an interesting video all in all, concerning a game that’s much deeper than it may seem at first.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
If you haven’t seen it before (it made a trip around the blogs and such back in 2001), you really aren’t prepared for Duelin’ Firemen. The version that people saw then was really low quality though; a few years back, as part of a documentary about its making that seems like it never really got off the ground, a somewhat better quality version appeared on Youtube. It is, um, really something.
Duelin’ Firemen was a cancelled FMV game, probably a music game, for the 3DO console. Right off the bat it shows you it means business: not one but two planes, one of them in fact the space shuttle Columbia, the other Air Force One, collide with the top of the Sears Tower. The trailer was made in 1996 so you can’t blame it for being inappropriate due to either of those things. You might still consider it inappropriate due to other things, but it’s not too much offensive, unless you consider its childish innuendo or gleeful appraisal of a city in flames offensive. It might just be waiting for a massive citywide conflagration to hit the media for people to tsk at it for that. Which, well, would probably be fair.
Let me not keep you waiting any longer! Here is Duelin’ Firemen, the video game intro trailer that got submitted to freaking Sundance in 1996. You won’t be the same person afterward that you were before. Because we’re all changed by our experiences, be they great or small. But it really is an experience. 7 1/2 minutes’ worth of one:
Recognizable people in it, behind all the poorly composited flames, include blacksploitation star Rudy Ray “Dolemite” Moore, DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh, Dr. Timothy Leary, Rev. Ivan Stang of the Church of the Subgenius, Steve Albini, David Yow, and no doubt others I’m leaving out or don’t myself recognize. I’ve never been great with pop culture figures, or music figures either. But you don’t have to know who any of them are to enjoy it, probably with the aid of the mind-altering substance of your choice.
Hardcore Gaming 101 is one of the most important game history sites on the internet, and site creator Kurt Kalata writes on a wide variety of games for consoles and computers alike. Recently they’ve been on a Metal Gear kick, and that means covering the black sheep of the series, Snake’s Revenge.
Snake’s Revenge is the forgotten Metal Gear game, an NES sequel made without Hideo Kojima input, to the NES port of Metal Gear that he also had nothing to do with. It has a reputation for being terrible, but that’s really unmerited. As Kurt Kalata notes, while it has its flaws, is ignored by later Metal Gear games, and it has a story based on the manual scenario for Metal Gear written by Konami’s crazy American writing staff*, it’s technically proficient and has good music.
* The American manual for NES Life Force says that the evil planet-eating monster Zelos was the proud progeny of “Ma and Pa Deltoid.” In the description of Dracula’s Heart in the manual for Castlevania II, it warns: “Careful! The heart attacks.” These were not means isolated occurrences from Konami’s US staff.
