This is a double review of Meatgrinder and Anglerfish played with a press key and retail key respectively.
- 0:00 Intro
- 00:16 Meatgrinder
- 2:55 Anglerfish
The Flipside of Gaming
This is a double review of Meatgrinder and Anglerfish played with a press key and retail key respectively.
Retro Game Mechanics Explained generally does interesting videos, I find. The details on how the ghosts (monsters) in Pac-Man behave when dangerous are fairly well understood now, thanks to the work of Jamey Pittman in writing The Pac-Man Dossier. RGMEx did a summary video of that work three years ago.
The question of how vulnerable ghosts move, after Pac-Man has eaten a Power Pellet (Energizer), isn’t covered in as much detail. It’s still as accurate as the rest of the information in the document, but its implications are left for the reader to explore. Well, RGMEx has explored it.
Vulnerable ghosts move pseudo-randomly, through an interesting process. The game has a RNG (random number generator) that’s reset at the start of every level, that cycles through a period of 8,192 values. Vulnerable ghost movement is the only thing in the game that it’s used for, but it isn’t applied directly. Instead, it’s used as a pointer into the game’s own code, and the value of the address it finds is used to determine how the ghost moves.
A result of this is that not all directions are chosen equally. But further, and more importantly, if the direction chosen isn’t available, the ghost tries the next direction in a clockwise order. If that one’s not possible, it tries the next, until it finds one that works.
These two facts combine to give a definite bias to the directions that frightened ghosts move. Retro Game Mechanics Explained then ran the numbers and figured out where scared ghosts tend to go. It’s interesting, even slightly useful, information.
News flash: there is one UmJammer Lammy Now arcade machine remaining in the world!
News flash: by the way, there used to be an UmJammer Lammy arcade machine!
The news of both comes to us from the account of Youtuber UnEricYockey (12 minutes), in the form of a short documentary on the game’s history and, due to poor performance on location test, what is probably its sole surviving unit:
We recently posted about Rodney Greenblat’s early obscure Playstation title Dazzeloids, made a year or two before his and Nana-On Sha’s breakout hit Parappa the Rapper. Parappa became something of a media franchise, spawning a much-overdue sequel on the Playstation 4 and an anime series. UmJammer Lammy was Parappa’s original sequel, that brought the same kind of call-and-response gameplay to guitars.
UmJammer Lammy starred Lammy, an insecure young lamb and front-woman for the band Milkcan, who becomes a rock goddess when a guitar is in her hands. Play structure is similar to Parappa, giving the player a series of increasingly unlikely situations that they have to escape somehow by playing music: a dream, putting out a fire, taking care of babies, flying an airplane, making a chainsaw sculpture, and escaping Hell itself (or, getting off an island, in overseas versions), before ending with the most dire situation of all: a public performance in front of a stadium full of people. Yikes! You can do it Lammy!
Production values were a bit less than Parappa, but Lammy and her friends were, indeed are, still engaging and wonderful, and the PS1 game is worth giving a try if you’re at all a fan of Parappa and his world. You can play as Parappa in an unlockable mode after you win, and all of the game’s tracks were mixed as funky remakes! Sadly I can tell you that Parappa’s lines had nowhere near as much flow as they did in his first game, but speaking as one of the few US players who bought a copy of UmJammer Lammy, jamming with her is a great time.
That should be enough information on Lammy’s game. But, how did UmJammerLammy Now come about? The video tells us that the Namco System 12 arcade board is pretty much an original Playstation in an arcade format, and Namco wanted to get some games in Japanese arcades quickly to compete with Konami’s rhythm game dominance.
While the gameplay of the arcade version is similar to the PS1 edition, there are some notable differences, including a surprising number of extra cutscenes featuring the various business ventures of Joe Chin, the antagonist of Parappa the Rapper. The arcade game has been dumped for preservation purposes, and all of its cutscenes are demonstrated in a Youtube video, also on UmEricYockey’s channel (23 minutes):
There’s so much weird Parappa lore in this weird and obscure arcade game! And Lammy’s crippling social anxiety truly makes her a heroine for our age.
Found the last Um Jammer Lammy NOW! (Youtube, 12 minutes)
Um Jammer Lammy NOW!- 4K Arcade Cutscenes & Attract Sequence (Youtube, 23 minutes)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
In memory of Blaseball, that awesome star that burned brightly for less than three years, it seems like so much longer. An animatic from the time of its height, about players seeing the future and choosing to get incinerated by the Rogue Umpires so they could come back to play against and beat The Shelled One’s Pods. If none of that makes sense to you I’m sorry, it’s too late to understand, all you can do now is enjoy.
I don’t see as many fan shrine sites as I used to. Old ones have died out or, in the best case, gone into archive mode, and new ones aren’t replacing them as quickly, or at least don’t seem to be. It could be I don’t search for them as often, or Google not surfacing them as much-not only has the quality of its search degraded markedly over the past decade, but for whatever reason its results seems much more focused on answering questions and selling things. Google also seems a lot more like to give you links from big sites, instead of small web sites made by individuals.
That’s why I was please to find 6th Division Den, a site focused on Metal Slug that the Wayback Machine suggests was founded as recently as 2018. I didn’t find it through Google, but as the host of the official site of the game from yesterday’s post, Aqua Ippan.
Much of the site’s content is devoted to creating pixel art and on getting the images out of the games, but it has a lot of examples to go by. And the site itself looks great! I don’t see many sites like this anymore, but I’m glad they can still be found from time to time.
The indie showcases highlight the many games we play here on the channel. If you would like me to play your game for a future one please reach out. All games shown are either demos or press key submissions.
0:00 Ultra Age
2:04 Sonority
3:43 Songs of Conquest
6:08 Get a Grip Chip and the Body Bugs
8:23 Haak
11:23 Brotato
Indie Retro News reported recently on this cool run-and-gun game made by Division 六 the style of Metal Slug. Here’s a promotional video. Note that some of the sound effects are taken directly from Metal Slug, but are intended as placeholders. The final version should have no outside assets.
Aqua Ippan demo (itch.io, $0) – Official Site
We’ve brought up a couple of examples of Commodore PET software lately, which as I keep saying, is interesting because the PET has no way of doing bitmapped graphics, sprites, or even definable characters. Its characters are locked in ROM and cannot be changed. So, it includes a set of multi-purpose characters that was used throughout all the Commodore 8-bit line, even as late as the C64 and C128, which having definable graphics didn’t need these kinds of generic graphics characters, but they were still useful for people who didn’t want to create their own graphics.
Back on my Commodore coding days I became very familiar with these characters. I think they’re much more universally-applicable for graphic use than the IBM equivalent, the famous Code Page 437, although that’s mostly because PETSCII doesn’t bother defining supporting so many languages. Code Page 437 also uses a lot of its space for single and double-line versions of box-drawing characters, although on the other hand it doesn’t waste characters defining reverse-video versions of every glyph.
PETSCII has:
There are resources that let you use PETSCII to create old-school computer art, like this PETSCII editor, Petmate and Playscii, and for a bunch of examples of what you can do with it you can browse through the Twitter account PETSCIIBots. And this blog post from 2016 both makes the case for PETSCII as a medium for art and provides some great examples of it.
We love games made for unlikely hardware, and PETSCII Bros. fits that bill like a duck’s dentures. Like we explained in the post about that PET demo from a while ago, the PET didn’t have changeable graphics characters and no bitmap mode at all, and so it wasn’t what we’d consider a games machine. But it did come with a set of interesting graphics characters that, among other things, had a set of 16 characters that let programmers use the screen as a super-low-res 80×50 pixel display.
PETSCII Bros is a PET action game that uses those characters (long called “PETSCII” as a cheeky reference to ASCII) for an actual game, that plays similarly to Nintendo’s classic Mario Bros. arcade game. Of course you’ll need a PET, or an emulator (such as the one that comes with VICE) to play it. Or if you’re just passing interested, you could watch this video to see how it works:
PETSCII Bros. (for the Commodore PET, itch.io, $0)
This is a double review of Terra Nil and The Last Spell. Both games were played with press keys.
0:00 Intro
00:19 Terra Nil
4:20 The Last Spell
Röq is continuing their explorations of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. They’re getting concerned that there aren’t as many triangles in this one as they were hoping for. There are these stone things that look like the number 9 (“Number 9… number 9…”) but they aren’t the same at all. It seems like it’s a bad idea to eat one, especially. (Spoilers?) Not that Röq is considering eating triangles. Although pizza slices might be considered kind of like triangles. Mmm… triangles.
Speaking of spoilers, there are some minor ones in this post, but nothing huge.
The Yiga are pretty hapless in this game. I kind of love them? They definitely know how to have a good time, doing donuts in their underground bases in devices with ridiculous designs, and names like Flamecrusher and Doommachine. They aren’t any more effective than in the first game, and in fact may actually be weaker.
Link can say so much with a wave and a shrug. He must have taken mime classes or something.
And now, the musical stylings of Marot the Zora:
I don’t know why I fixate on fish lady’s song, but I do. I’m glad it’s the same between games.
Rauru, our benefactor from the ancient past, has, uh, a questionable sense of humor:
What purpose does this serve? And this is a bit of a spoiler, but….
Why do we even have to do shrine puzzles this time? In Breath of the Wild there was the sense that the Sheikah monks were training Link up to face the Calamity, but these shrines, that suddenly appeared right on cue, we know that Rauru made them, and that he knows who they’re for. Link’s already a hero. Rauru knows it, Zelda went back in time and told him. “Seals the darkness” my Hylian ass, the shrines exist to give Link the orbs he needs to heal up from Ganondorf’s mummy attacking him at the start of the game, and he’s still the only person who can enter them. If you know already he’s the Chosen One, there’s no reason to make him jump though hoops. Just hand over the round sparkly, he has a realm to save.
Don’t get me started on why Link have to give them to the goddess statues to get healed. What do they get out of it? Why does Link have to serve as middle-elf? This magical economy, it makes no sense.
The title is no joke, a couple of crazy people RetroGL and JoneGG, are actually doing it, and while they’re close to a final release you can also download a current alpha for free, with manual, from links in the description on their Youtube demonstration video:
It’s a great example of playing to a system’s strengths (surprisingly large sprites and a legendary sound chip) while downplaying its limitations (only eight sprites, low multicolor resolution, 16 colors, a controller with only one button). It’s much better than the arcade porters of the system’s heyday would have accomplished. I mean, just look at it! On the Commodore 128, they even plan to implement stage scrolling!
I’m not sure how it works internally, but given that it’s being distributed as a CRT file and not a disk image, my guess is on physical hardware it’d rely on a physical cartridge for expanded, bank-switched ROM space. It’s a trick that’s being used more often, like how Champ Games uses it for their Atari 2600 ports of classic arcade games.
SNK vs CAPCOM for Commodore 64 Demonstration (Youtube, 4 minutes)