Nerdly Pleasures on R.O.B.

Another image from Nerdly Pleasures, the Japanese box for “Robot,” their name for R.O.B.

We linked the blog Nerdly Pleasures back on Sunday when we used their image of R.O.B.’s gyro setup. The post it came from though is deep enough that I figured it’s worth its own spotlight!

The lengthy and detailed post came from 2015, and in addition to positioning R.O.B. in time and Nintendo’s history, also provides some technical information, such as the sequence of flashes that games use to communicate with the robot toy to make it perform various actions.

Nerdly Pleasures seems like a fine blog, and it’s still going with a post on King’s Quest IV that went up on the 17th, and I look forward to pointing out more of their work in the future.

What about R.O.B.? – The NES’s First Mascot (Nerdly Pleasures)

The End of Blaseball Blexplained

It has now been over seven months since the end of Blaseball, that shining star of lockdown that burned brightly but ended suddenly. Stories will be told of its brief reign, and memories zealously hoarded. I’m amazed that no one else has definitively moved in to take its place with their own take on splorts, it seems to be an opportunity waiting to be filled, but until such time as it happens, the concept, along with the game itself, continues to Rest in Violence.

The planets orbiting Blaseball’s many suns continue to orbit, their surfaces unwarmed but still hosting faint signs of life. The Blaseball Wiki remains online, explaining the absurdly twisty intricacies of a game that no longer exists, and The Society for Internet Blaseball Research still hosts statistics and information related to that dearly missed pastime.

One of those planets is Blaseball Blexplained, a Youtube series that doggedly and diligently presented season recaps of Blaseball’s many crazy seasons. Since Blaseball’s ending, they’ve slowly continued their recaps, and have now finally finished their last Expansion Era summary, of the Hellmouth Sunbeams. It is around 16 minutes long. It present the final recantation of the nearly un-understandable events that marked the final seasons as did all the others, throwing out references to Black Holes, Feedback and Fax Machines, counting on you to know what the hell all those things mean. You do, don’t you? ‘Course you do.

So, one last broadcast from Blaseball Explained, favorite fake sport summary channel, now broadcasting exclusively to the Hall of Flame.

Farewell, Blaseball. In your memory, I proclaim: hail Namerifeht.

The Monitor, friendly guardian of the Hall of Flame and concessions operations
(Image from blaseball.com)

P.S. The Society for Internet Blaseball Research (SIBR) has a page of information on how the fates of Blaseball, early on, intersected with that of the Pacific Salmon Treaty of 1985, and of a mysterious face named by fans Salmon Steve. Here is that page.

Sundry Sunday: From AGDQ, A Dog Replaces R.O.B. in Gyromite

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

This week’s fun video isn’t decades old, in fact it’s from just a few days ago, from AGDQ.

The NES title Gyromite, a.k.a. Robot Gyro, is a very interesting game from a design standpoint, possibly more interesting than it is to actually play (although I think its music is very catchy). It’s never been rereleased by Nintendo, for the probable reason that it relies on the accessory R.O.B. to play.

R.O.B: It’s not just that funky Smash Bros. character! (Image from Wikipedia, taken by Evan-Amos.)

R.O.B. was a motorized accessory that activated servos in its arms depending on light signals sent to it from the screen. No cords went from R.O.B. to the NES. It used photoreceptors in its “eyes” to detect the screen signals, which were ultimately caused by player input on the controller. A fairly roundabout means of control, honestly.

Only two official R.O.B. games were made, and Gyromite (Going by its Japanese name “Robot Gyro” according to the title screen) used the “gyro” accessory for play. A platform is placed in front of R.O.B., on which you place the controller for Player 2.

On the controller is a device that spins the “gyros,” colored weighted tops. By manipulating the arms with action on Player 1’s controller, making them swing around and opening and closing the claws at the right time, you can cause R.O.B. to lift the spinning gyros from their platform, then set them down on the NES controller’s buttons. In the game, this caused colored pillars to rise or fall according to the control signals.

R.O.B. with gyro setup. Image from the blog Nerdly Pleasures.

While manipulating all of this, you also have to watch out for the action of the game itself. Gyromite is a simple platformer, but one without a jump button. The difficulty comes from having to essentially play two games at once, the platforming on screen and manipulating R.O.B. to position pillars in the right places in space and time.

R.O.B.’s motions are not simple to command either. It takes time for the arms to pivot between their destinations, time that must be accounted for in the on-screen action, and while the tops spin for quite a while they will eventually have to be collected and set back on their pedestals so they can be spun back up to full speed, or else they’ll topple over on the button. This doesn’t produce a failure state in the game. It’s just left to you to pick the top up yourself and put it back on its stand to be spun again. R.O.B. isn’t capable of such feats of dexterity.

There’s a lot more to say about R.O.B., and how it was mostly distributed as part of the Nintendo Entertainment System’s “Deluxe Set” in the U.S., the more expensive version that didn’t come with Super Mario Bros. Instead of that, let’s talk about how, due to the fact that R.O.B. is just a fancy-shmancy way to press controller buttons, that you can replace it entirely with some other mechanism, or indeed, even animal.

That’s what happened Wednesday at AGDQ, where Peanut Butter the Dog, with coaching from JSR_, left R.O.B. gathering dust in the closet as they played through Gyromite Game B.

They didn’t make it all the way without running out of lives, but they picked back up and kept going. And that doesn’t detract at all from Peanut Butter’s skills, or amazing doggy focus. They are intent on reading those hand signals and getting those tasty treats. So while they didn’t earn a world record, for “Dog playing Gyromite Game B,” their accomplishment is of definite note.

There are around four minutes of introductions at the start of the video, so if you want to jump right in to the run, begin here.

Gyromite by Peanut Butter the Dog & JSR_ in 26:24 – Awesome Games Done Quick 2024 (Youtube, 33 minutes)

Best of Next Fest 2023 1/19/24

Editor’s Note: Our presentation of Josh Bycer’s NextFest finds continues. Tomorrow will be the last in this sequence, I think.

Best of Next Fest Showcase 1/18/24

More games from Next fest 2023 worth checking out.

Best of Next Fest 2023 1/17/24

Editor’s note: There’s a backlog of Josh Bycer’s Next Fest posts that I need to clear out, so the next few days will be devoted to them. Please enjoy!

Dark Arts of Pinball: Deathsaves

So we covered bang backs back on Saturday. Let’s look at another tournament-illegal pinball maneuver, the deathsave. Here’s video from PAPA showing a couple being successfully performed (1 minute):

It’s another trick that involves the machine being bumped forcefully from the front in a specific way, this time to save balls going down the right outlane. I’ve never done one myself (even if I could muster the force, I don’t really want to). There are tables, including Rocky & Bullwinkle and The Last Action Hero, that are even set up to recognize when they’ve happened and reward it, or at least inform the player: I saw what you did there.

It prioritizes players with sufficient strength to shove the machine hard enough, and risks damaging it, so it’s illegal in tournament play. Due to the nature of tilt sensors, which are typically plum bobs with a conductive ring around them, depending on the details of the table it need not even incur a tilt warning, although it could run afoul of the slam tilt sensor, a separate device. Tilt sensors exist to allow some nudging but punish excessive use, and tilting results in the loss of a ball and any bonus. Slam tilt sensors are designed to protect the hardware itself, and immediately end the current game, which forfeits even the chance to enter initials. Essentially it resets the game’s computer. So, be careful with that.

Dark Arts of Pinball: Bang Backs

An unalterable law of pinball is, when the ball slips between the flippers, or goes down an outlane, it is lost, too bad so sad, cue the bonus count, unless you tilted when you tried to save it, that is.

But this is not actually true.

There are a small number of what we might call “dark arts” in pinball, techniques to save balls that otherwise would not be saveable. This is one of the things that’s interesting about pinball. It’s not like video games where everything that happens is the result of processors moving bits around. There is room for things to happen on a pinball table that the game software has no control over.

One might even make a case, if they were feeling argumentative, that the scoring and the rules have an at-best incidental influence over the real game, which takes place purely in the physical realm. This isn’t completely true: the software awards extra balls, controls playfield toys, enforces tilts, and otherwise manipulates the game’s Newtonian world, but it is true that, if the machine is in working order, and the player never misses their shots, that they can play indefinitely, and even score popcorn points for hitting low-value targets. Pull that off long enough and you can earn arbitrarily high scores, but I hope you’re good enough to hit the same shot over and over thousands of times, though, not to mention have the spare time to do it in.

A consequence of this is, lost balls can be rescued, in a number of ways. One of them is the bang back.

When the ball goes down the left outlane, along the side and bottom of the playfield, if the left flipper is raised and the right flipper left down, a sudden forceful blow by the player’s hand against the lockdown bar at the right spot can impart enough force to the ball to cause it to leap up onto the right flipper, and back into play. Even though the machine “knows” the ball went down the outlane, due to triggering its switch, it generally won’t penalize the player for doing this. The ball-ending event is it coming to rest in the trough, the receptacle for out-of-play pinballs beneath the playfield. Until the ball reaches it, it’s live.

Bang backs are a dark art because they enable extra-long turns, and also the force required to execute them risks damaging both the machine and the player’s hand, and so are illegal in tournament play. But they can be pulled off pretty consistently, as this video from the PAPApinball channel (1 minute) demonstrates:

Another dark art of pinball is the deathsave, but let’s save that for later….

Sundry Sunday: Shinra’s New Boss

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

Newgrounds videos aren’t as easy to embed as with Youtube, but once in a while I find one that’s worthy enough to try. Plus, it’s a Final Fantasy VII animation, and that’s a type of fandom that we cover here extremely rarely. Rarely enough that… I’m not sure we’ve ever exhibited Final Fantasy fanwork here, other than the occasional romahck. Huh.

Well, here is a short Flash animation, rendered into video of course because of our cold and heartless age, from Newgrounds, of a bit of audio from Team FourStar’s Final Fantasy VII Machinabridged Episode 10.

<iframe width="800" height="450" src="https://www.newgrounds.com/content/embed.php?id=LFfBM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Shinra’s New Boss (Newgrounds, 47 seconds)

AGDQ Starts Tomorrow!

AGDQ, one of GDQ’s two yearly life speedrunning events, begins tomorrow and runs to the 24th! Here’s the schedule!

Here are some highlights, according to me. The times I give are US Eastern/Pacific, but the schedule page linked above can convert times to your own zone:

Sunday, January 14th

Noon/9 AM: Tunic – Everyone’s favorite fox-based Zelda-like.

12:40 PM/9:40 AM: Super Monkey Ball – Monkey Ball speedruns are always awesome to watch!

3:40 PM/12:40 AM: Tales’ Adventure – A glitchless run of a Game Gear game, and one of the less remarked-upon of the Sonic series.

4:49 PM/1:49 PM: Donkey Kong 64 – An infamous 3D platformer experienced the best possible way: watching someone else play it.

8:55 PM/5:55 PM: Ultimate Doom – One of several billion speedruns of Doom, I’d expect this to be heavily optimized.

9:43 PM/6:43 PM: Jet Set Radio Future – The underrated Xbox sequel to the Dreamcast original.

Monday, January 15th

3:13 AM/12:13 AM: The Typing of the Dead – Worth checking in for the funny word list!

5:13 AM/2:13 AM: Marble Madness II race – At last, over 30 years after the prototype sequel to Marble Madness was scrapped, it finally comes to GDQ. Mere days after the game was leaked to the public there were already extremely proficient runs of MM2 on Youtube, so don’t blink or it’ll be over before you open your eyes.

10:01 AM/7:01 AM: Manifold Garden, reverse tree order – This game is amazing.

11:38 AM/8:38 AM: 30XX – sequel to 20XX, a procedurally-generated platformer.

2:37 PM/11:37 AM: Metroid Prime 2: Echoes – A competent sequel to the original Metroid Prime that tends to be overshadowed by the original. This is a 100% run, scheduled for 2 1/2 hours.

7:30 PM/4:30 PM: Sonic Adventure 2 Battle – Another underrated game, this run seeks to get all A ranks.

10:55 PM/7:55 PM: Pikmin 4 – The Pikmin games seem to alternate, with the odd-numbered games having strong time limits, and the even-numbered ones being a lot more laid back. They’re all terrific though, and provide a kind of gameplay that few other games attempt.

Tuesday, January 16th

8:46 AM/5:46 AM: Arkanoid – I presume this is the NES version. Coming from the lineage of Breakout, this game is extremely hard. I hope they’re playing it on NES hardware, with the official paddle controller made for this game.

9:23 AM/6:23 AM: Gimmick! – The new schedule page doesn’t specify which platform the game is being played on, unfortunately. This could either be the NES prototype original or the official (and ludicrously expensive) exA-Arcadia remake.

11:34 AM/8 34 AM: The Legend of Zelda – This run is glitchless, which is an important consideration for Zelda 1 these days.

2:03 PM/11:03 AM: Gyromite (Game B, Dog Assistance) – 🐕🐕🐕？？？

8:00 PM/5:00 PM: Octopath Traveller II – Might be a good opportunity to see what this game is about, if you haven’t jumped at it yet?

10:52 PM/7:52 PM: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – IGA’s post-Konami Metroidvania, with an emphasis on the Vania.

Wednesday, January 17th

2:59 AM/11:59 PM[Tue]: Diablo (1996) – The original game, but played through as a Sorcerer at Level 1?

3:46 AM/12:46 AM: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door – News of the Switch remake has put this classic back in the spotlight. It’s still the best Paper Mario game, and one of the best damn JRPGs period, overloaded with humor but with a great story too. It demonstrated that the Mario universe has the power to tell actually interesting stories-but it may also have been the game that causes Nintendo to rein in Intelligent Systems’ use of the Mario property, as (I believe) it’s the last game with individualized Toads.

7:15 AM/4:15 AM: Ducktales Remastered – The final voice appearance of Alan Young, Wilbur from the long-ago talking horse sitcom Mr. Ed, as Scrooge McDuck before he passed away. It’s one of Wayforward’s technically excellent 2D platformers, so it’ll be interesting to see how they break it.

8:26 AM/5:26 AM: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (arcade) – A 1 credit clear no less. I love seeing arcade games at GDQ, especially if they aren’t rhythm games, or as I like to think of them, Super Simon.

10:24 AM/7:24 AM: Super Mario Bros. 2 USA – I find it sad that NES games tend to be underrepresented at GDQ in this era, although I can certainly see why, as this run is scheduled to be just 12 minutes long.

11:06 AM/8:06 AM: Monkey Island 1 vs Monkey Island 2 – I don’t know what this means. Are they playing them both?

12:25 PM/9:25 AM: Metroid Dread – 100% NMG (“No Major Glitches”)

2:40 PM/11:40 AM: Pokemon Crystal Item Randomizer – Additionally, this is played co-op, meaning (I think) two players are playing, but when one finds an item the other immediately gets it too.

7:05 PM/4:05 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – This run is marked “MST.” To explain, that stands for Medallians/Stones/Trials. For an explanation of the explanation, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

9:35 PM/6:35 PM: Super Mario 64 – “16 Star Drum%” Oh those abbreviations. Whatever that means, they expect it to take 24 minutes.

10:06 PM/7:06 PM: TASbot presents Super Metroid – Past TASbot performances have reprogrammed games to present full motion video on a Gameboy and a completely alternate ending to Ocarina of Time, so whatever they’re doing this year is anyone’s guess.

Thursday, January 18th

2:11 AM/11:11 PM[Wed] – 7:25 AM/4:25 AM: Short games – I don’t know if this counts as “Awful Block” since Ninja Gaiden is in there, but they are running a number of lesser-seen games, including NES Beetlejuice, the Xbox 360 promotion Burger King tie-in Sneak King and Virtual Hydlide.

11:42 AM/8:42 AM: Kirby and the Amazing Mirror – That odd Kirby game that was functionally a Metroidvania and gave him Smash Bros. powers as one of his copy abilities. Also, Kirby has three other Kirbies wandering around as helpers, and you can call them in a cell phone. Kind of a failed experiment, but it’s still interesting!

12:19 PM/9:19 AM: Castlevania III – A solid NES game, and one that hasn’t been broken to pieces as it still takes 40 minutes to finish.

2:35 PM/11:35 PM: Super Mario Sunshine – 120 Shines. That means getting all 240 Blue Coins too. AGDQ had a cursed run of Sunshine where the runner suffered a Game Over, but because the play eschewed saving to save time, all progress was completely lost, and they had to start from scratch! Hopefully this one will go better.

8:37 PM/5:37 PM: Super Mario Maker 2 Glitch Showcase – Nintendo seems to be neglecting this game-it didn’t get a bookmark website like the first one did, and now Wonder’s out with nary a remark about SMM2. It feels like they’ll bin this one before long, so please enjoy these glitches while you can.

9:22 PM/6:22 PM: Halo: Combat Evolved – Co-op on Easy. I understand that this extremely niche game was nevertheless popular in some circles. The 3? 4? of you who know of this game will enjoy it I’m sure.

Friday, January 19th

9:17 AM/6:17 AM: Undertale, True Pacifist Race – It’s hard to believe this game’s already eight years old! When will we start seeing Deltarune chapters at GDQ?

3:22 PM/12:22 PM: Risk of Rain Returns – This game is very new but already has speedruns!

4:40PM/1:40 PM: Super Mario Bros. Wonder

10:34 PM/7:34 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask – 100% No Major Glitches Relay

Saturday, January 20th

5:38 AM/2:38 AM: Star Fox 64 – 2k%, which means, in the style of speedrunners, a speedrun with a special requirement, here that the player finish a score of 2,000 or more. Back when I played Star Fox 64 a lot, my highest score ever I think was a bit over 1,700, and I worked hard for that score, so this requires some “skillz,” as they say.

8:46 AM/5:46 AM: Sonic Origins Plus – “Anniversary Mode” Relay

6:33 PM/3:33 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Any%, so, expect an unwise confrontation with Ganon with only four hearts.

7:51 PM/4:51 PM: Baldur’s Gate 3 – Last year’s other megahit, this goes through all acts but is only scheduled for 35 minutes. A friend of mine has, over a week, started this game completely over from scratch three times without finishing, so it’s safe to assume he’s falling way behind the curve.

9:04 PM/6:04 PM: Final Fantasy V Pixel Remaster – The last game of the show, with “Cutscene Remover.” Even without them, scheduled for 2 1/2 hours.

Hempuli’s itch.io Collection

I recently made a Metafilter post with the title Exploring the BABA IS YOUNIVERSE. Having used that pun here already I can’t well put it up again, but the links in the article are good ones, so I figured I’d present them here too, with a few extras. All of these, plus more, are on Hempuli’s (Arvi Teikari’s) itch.io page. Everything here is free and for Windows, unless otherwise noted.

Once in Space 2022
Stumblehill
  • The “gravity-changing platformer” Once In Space 2022, which gets pretty tricky pretty quickly.
  • Stumblehill is a platformer, with striking graphics, where the controls are purposely a little harder to master than your basic example of the form.
Baba Friend
  • Baba Friend is a little desktop buddy/toy who wanders around your computer’s screen while you do other things. It’s much like the classic computer amusement Neko!
  • Rude Chess is another Sokoban variant: some of the pieces you have to move are chess pieces, which shift according to their movement rules when pushed. The rude part applies because, if a piece has a choice of squares to move to, it always tries to pick one that doesn’t lead towards a destination square!
Rude Chess

There’s more too, that I only fail to list here because of time-related reasons, including some physical games and a screensaver. Go on and explore their itch page, it’s brilliant!

Hempuli’s itch.io software (mostly free, most for Windows)