The demoscene is a rich source of awesome, and at times ridiculous, imagery and sounds. Once in a while we sift through it to find things to entertain you with.
If you don’t know anything about the computer, it might not seem too interesting. A block-graphics wizard lifts his hat and out comes nine large digits in different colors that then float around the screen.
The more you know about the Commodore 64, though, the more interesting it is. The machine’s graphics chip, the VIC II, is can only display eight hardware sprites at once. Then the sprites cluster together on the same scanline, meaning ordinary multiplexing can’t be happening. Then they drift up into the upper boarder. It demonstrates complete mastery of the hardware, doing a lot of things that simply shouldn’t be possible.
It’s a good exploration of a number of weird C64 graphics tricks: sprite multiplexing of course, opening up the side and top boarders, and making productive use of mysterious graphics that appear off the top of the screen if the boarder is gone. While little code is shown, it’s definitely on the more technical end of things we present here. I’d give it a four out of five on Drebnar’s Geekiness Scale. But if you like learning about obscure tech details of a forty-year-old computer? And who doesn’t? There it is!
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.
Some of you may remember seeing, from a while ago, a clever hack that implemented a series of interactive puzzles on a website. If you didn’t see it, or don’t know much about how these things usually work, you might not think much of that, we’ve all been playing web games for two decades now, and an entire web platform for them (Flash) has arisen and died in that time. It now has an updated version, with new puzzles to figure out!
CSS Puzzle Box 2.0, starting state
Nowadays these things tend to be made using Javascript, or some language that renders down to Javascript. That’s what makes the CSS Puzzle Box amazing: it doesn’t use Javascript! It’s implemented entirely with HTML tags and CSS! See for yourself! Caveat: it doesn’t work on mobile platforms, some of the click or drag handles are a little hard to hit with your clumsy human finger. On desktop browsers, watching for the cursor to change when it’s over an interactive element is tremendously helpful.
It’s challenging, but far from impossible. It requires some close observation to get started, but after that you can probably get through it with enough time spent and effort expended. The hardest puzzle is one of the first, “Lights On,” one of those puzzles where clicking on a square inverts that light and those adjacent. You can follow these directions (swapping off lights for on ones) to solve it, or click on the O in the Lights On title a few times to skip it, or just muddle through—if you get stuck with just one or two lights on and can’t clear them, mess up the puzzle by clicking everywhere on it randomly and try again, and eventually you’ll happen on a pattern that resolves nicely.
So, about the technical underpinnings. Its creator blackle mori (Mastodon) wrote up a nice breakdown of how it manages to do what it does without scripting. Part of it includes the <details> tag and its accompanying <summary> tag, a way in pure HTML to have collapsing content. If you want to know the tricks there they are, but you don’t have to care about that to enjoy the puzzles. Good luck!
How do you reach an impossible score, so high that the counting system malfunctions and vomits up gibberish?
Everyone’s hooked on Balatro, the deck builder where the deck you build is made, not of nonsense cards with wizards on them, but basic types like Aces and Jacks. You start with a deck of 52 cards and try to make an increasingly valuable set of poker hands, but you can get Jokers that change the rules, Tarot cards that let you replace or remove cards from your deck, and can outright buy new cards to put in. Buy you can also mod your cards to be worth more, or multiply your score. You can advance your hands so they’re more valuable, and make secret hands like Five of a Kind.
The ultimate goal of Balatro is to reach 100,000 chips in one round, a goal that seems impossible when the first round sees you struggling to make 300. But 100,000 isn’t the end, it keeps scaling past that in its “Endless Mode” where Ante goal requirements can increase by a factor of 20 or more.
But Endless Mode has an end. Balatro uses Lua’s math routines to handle its goal and chip counters, and if either gets too high it loses track, throws up its hands and calls it “naneinf,” a value that always compares false, and so is useless to get and can’t be reached. This score is so big that written out entirely it’d have over 308 digits.
The channel Balatro University covers many aspects of the game, and they have a new 28-minute video where they explain what the word means (it’s “nan e inf,” or “Not a Number raised to the power of 10 times Infinity”) and the six specific ways to reach it. I’m afraid that people who aren’t already soaked in the details of the game might not get much out of it, it’s made for addicts and uses game terms without explaining them, but it might be interesting to visit that world for a bit, and let the weirdness wash over you.
I had been afraid something like this had happened. A friend found an announcement on Twitter, but it’s a cesspool these days and I never go there any more so it had escaped my notice. Here’s the obituary.
He had been ailing for some time, and had struggled with Crohn’s Disease his whole life. Then he was diagnosed with cancer, and fought it bravely. He had finished radiation treatment a couple of months before, and was hopeful for a recovery, but it was not to be.
I never met Matthew in person, but we talked on Twitter, Mastodon and Bluesky a bit. He was an early Metafilter member, and had a smaller user number than I do. He was also an early user of the ancient proto-wiki site Everything2.com. He got a job writing for the gaming site Kombo.com, which closed in 2011. He kept a large following though and brought them over to his personal gaming site, Press The Buttons, and ran a long-lived podcast called Power Button. Both of these things are still online, for now at least. The internet is not forever, so enjoy them while they’re up. His About page at PTB has links to much of his writing, but also many dead links, that disappeared when Kombo went dark.
Matthew Green put a link to us in Press The Buttons’ sidebar, which we greatly appreciated. In addition to our own sidebar link, we’ve put up content found through Matt four times, which can be found via the pressthebuttons tag here. Most notable of these was fairly recent, where he helped spread the word about an amazing fan-made recreation of the tracks from the lost Satellaview version of F-Zero. They were recreated by a computer program run on VHS video of a play recording of the tracks, an amazing feat. He interviewed the creator of the hack for PTB. It’s still interesting to read, so again, go see it while you can.
I’m sure there’s many important things left to say, it’s impossible to summarize someone’s life without leaving out a great deal. This will have to do for now.
This is from the “Who is Matthew Green” text from Press The Buttons:
“Matthew Green, 43, is the owner and editor-in-chief of Press The Buttons and co-host of the the Power Button podcast along with his industry pal Blake Grundman. You may have seen Matthew’s work at places like PlayStation LifeStyle, GamesRadar, & The Industry magazine, and publications such as Kotaku and 1UP have asked him for quotes. He was also the the co-host of the short-lived Press The Buttons video show with Robert Alsbrook produced in conjunction with IzonOrlando.com. Previously he was the Assistant Director of Reviews for Kombo from 2004-2010 where he reviewed upcoming video games and worked with the Kombo Review Team to craft better reviews. He also previously served as a panelist for the Kombo Breaker podcast with Brad Hilderbrand, Joey Davidson, and Dan Johnson.
“Matthew has a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in Information Technology with a minor in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida. By day he is a Technology Coordinator, an enjoyable job involving preparing 3D renderings and 2D site plans of conceptual designs for future construction and some light data mining. These tasks seldom feature creative writing activities, however, so that must be why he spends so much time writing for various projects outside of the office. If you believe that Matthew’s unique point of view could enhance your gaming-related product or publication, feel free to e-mail him.”
Now it’s too late now to hire him, and we’re all the worse off for it. Farewell Matt! I wish I could have gotten to know you better.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Since Mario 64, Charles Martinet certainly recorded a lot of noises for Mario and Luigi. If you look far enough (specifically, to the Mario & Luigi games for GBA and DS) you can find some entertaining random Italian-like sounds. Mayo on Youtube combined some of these noises with comical animation, to produce these very short (1/2 minute) videos.
What do you know, I’ve made it almost a whole week without making a Youtube video the primary subject of a post! Josh Bycer’s post notwithstanding: not only did I not make the post, but the focus is a video he made himself!
The font for Atari Football. The popular “Press Start” font available in multiple places on the internet, and used in many classic arcade games from many companies, is derived from this one from Atari Inc.
Without further ado, today’s post is about a font collection made by thealmightyguru, and presented on a webpage here. Despite what the main page implies, the individual game pages do not seem to have their fonts for individual download. You’ll probably have to download the while collection, available here, for that. You won’t have to worry about long downloads though, for the whole archive is only 1.4 megabytes!
Here are some examples:
The Intellivision system font is very distinctive. It was used in many Intellivision games, because it was stored on a ROM chip in the console.This font comes from arcade Golden Axe. It’s reminiscent of several Sega arcade games from that time.This one’s from Exidy’s arcade game Circus. Before Atari’s font was copied by everyone, many arcade games used utilitarian fonts like this one.
The weekly showcases highlight the many games we check out on the channel. Games shown are either press keys, demos, or from my collection. Reach out if you would like me to look at your game.
One of the facts represented is that, while D&D has always borrowed heavily from myth and literature for its beasties, Hasbro considers certain specific monsters to be their property, because they were created out of whole cloth, or at least heavily-obfuscated cloth. Obfuscated enough cloth. They link to a post on the blog Prismatic Wasteland that lists them all out with commentary: Beholder, Gauth, Carrion Crawler, Tanar’ri, Baatezu, Displacer Beast, Githyanki, Githzerai, Mindflayer and its alternate name Illithid, Umber Hulk and Yuan-Ti. These are considered “product identity” monsters, and other products should not use them under penalty of lawsuit. “Tanar’ri” and “Baatezu” are hilarious as identity-monsters, because they were only named that so TSR could excise the words “devil” and “demon” from their game in deference to the 80s Satanic Panic.
I urge you to follow that link too, as it’s an informative read itself. I personally can add that a definition for a Beholder has been in the source code for Nethack since 3.2 (nethackwiki), but is set to never be generated in the game, possibly waiting for an age where its actualization would be less legally fraught. (I’ve included the game info for Beholder at the end of this post.)
So let’s RTS (“ReTurn from Subroutine“) and get back to today’s subject, the Thrilling Tales post. A lot of the monsters mentions got revisions in later Final Fantasy games, and even in remakes of FF1. Even in the NES version if Final Fantasy, the Beholder became the Evil Eye, which is a legally-distinct giant oculus-monster.
FF1J’s Beholder, compared to the Evil Eye from one of the English ports. While it should be recognized that the Evil Eye here has much greater color depth, since it came from a remake, I think the design is generally better. The Beholder’s wide toothy smile isn’t as becoming for an alien eye-creature. (Images are from [ugh] the Fandom Final Fantasy wiki.)
Rather than interrogate their whole post, I think you should just go read it yourself. Go, go! I’ll be here when you get back, just, tomorrow.
Indie studio Polygon Treehouse (which doesn’t seem related to the news site Polygon) has created a seal for indie devs to use to indicate that no AI-generated assets were used in the construction of their game. This is it:
Polygon Treehouse’s NO GEN AI seal.
Generative AI is a blight upon all the creative industries, but few are affected as keenly as small team game development, which is under constant pressure to produce, and as easily and cheaply as possible.
There is an animus among the clueless game-buying public against “asset flips,” games that use premade resources made by others and obtained in packs or bundles. If I might speak directly to people who do this, ahem:
While you can find egregious examples, sure, generally this attitude harms a lot of indie devs, who often don’t have the personpower or energy to create large amounts of assets themselves. If you’re going to be upset at people who use cheaply-acquired material, then aim your ire toward people who use generative AI, which isn’t sustainable, and cribs off the websites of literally millions of internet users who didn’t consent to their use in its training.
And if, deep in your musty heart, you’re mumbling to yourself that they’re doing this for publicity: sure! I’m glad! Why not? What else can they do to make people aware of this issue, other than not using generative AI themselves? The real power to change things is in the hands of the people who use gen AI (which, if they are, have already indicated they don’t care about the issues involved) and those of consumers who have the option to buy games from them. Which is you. So, don’t do that!
Eschew the generative AI trend! Help prevent a future full of content slop! Don’t roll over and accept it! Tell the awful moneymen of the field this is wrong! (Not all, but so many of them are men.) And don’t forget about your stance the moment a game in a series you really like uses it for assets. This is about something bigger than games-yes, such things exist. Open your damned eyes. Things are moving around you, and they’re making the world worse, for artists, for you, for everyone. You don’t have to accept it.
And tell others! You don’t have to become loud and annoying about it. (Unless you really want to, join our team!) A quiet word of support, a positive comment on a thread, in the aggregate it can make a difference, but only if lots of people do it.
There, that’s said. Don’t forget now! I don’t bring up these issues often here, there are so many other fun and interesting things to show you. We’ll move on, for now….
Lots of arcade machines have boring manuals, full of schematics, operator settings and assembly instructions, and nothing else. The manual for Bally/Midway’s Wizard of Wor machine has some other information, including a fairly complete play description including inner details of how the monsters are generated and how levels get harder, and a listing of all the phrases the game’s voice synth uses during play.
“When you have reached dungeons eight and above, you have become a Worlord. Now you have the honor of testing your skill in the Worlord dungeons. These dungeons are much tougher, there are fewer walls and more open spaces. If even one shot misses, and travels the long distance down to the opposite wall, a monster wiii very likely come up and gobble you down. Finding and establishing yourself in solid strategic positions is very difficult. It is easy to have several worriors chomped up in a row. Sometimes the monsters will line up along one edge of the maze — a lovely parade. However, if just one monster starts approaching from the top, watch out!” (page 11)
“The Wizard of Wor loves to hear the patter of little feet running through his dungeons. So he created some lovely beasties, known as Worlings. Burwor is beautiful, bouncing blue. Six of them exist on each dungeon level. They always remain visible. This is because the Wizards favorite color is blue. As each Burwor is shot, a Garwor may come to take his place. Garwor is kind of overfed, and waddles a bit, but he has yellow scales that are just delicate. As Garwors are shot, Thorwors are teleported in to take their place. Thorwor is sleek and dangerous red.” (page 11)
“The Wizard of Wor: Even at a young age, the Wizard showed promise in the mystic arts. But it took many dangerous encounters and many years of research and study to sharpen his skills to his current high level. Over the centuries, the Wizard has retained his chaotic sense of humor, much to the chagrin of worriors entering his dungeons (see the list of phrases).” (page 12)
And some of the phrases spoken by the Wizard during the game, spoken by the synth:
“Hey! Insert Coin!”
“Another coin for my treasure chest.”
“Ah good! My pets were getting hungry. Ha ha ha ha!”
“You’re off to see the Wizard, the magical Wizard of Wor.”
“Remember, I’m the wizard, not you.”
“If you can’t beat the rest, then you’ll never get the best! Ha ha ha ha!” (The Wizard laughs a lot.)
“If you destroy my babies, l’ll pop you in the oven! На һа һа һа!”
“Wasn’t that lightning bolt delicious? Ha ha ha ha!”
