Chip Tanaka’s Fourth Album: Desatar

Chip Tanaka is the most recent pseudonym of one of the best, certainly one of the most influential, game composers of all time, Hirokazu Tanaka, a.k.a. Hip Tanaka, who made contributions to many NES-era games. His most distinctive soundtracks are probably Metroid and Kid Icarus, but he also worked on Dr. Mario, Super Mario Land, Tetris, Mother and Earthbound. After those he helmed Pokemon co-producer Creatures Inc. for 22 years, until just last year. His most recognizable contributions from an outside perspective, though, are probably still his musical works.

We’ve linked to at least one of his songs before, the Hammerhead Shark Song from his second album Domingo. Its video was animated by Toby Fox, the Undertale/Deltarune maker, and it does a good job of combining the charms both of Tanaka’s music and Fox’s art.

The new album Desatar combines chiptune waveforms with real-world instruments to produce a distinctive mixture. There’s a sampler up on Youtube (3 minutes, embedded below), and the whole thing can be heard on Spotify (though it requires making an account).

The End of Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games

He mentions that it’s possible that he might dust off the channel from time to time, but that he feels it has accomplished its mission. Here it is (46 minutes):

To remind everyone: Sakurai is the famed creator of Kirby, Meteos and Smash Bros. In the video, he relates the surprising fact that no only did he write out nearly every script, 256 in all, before the first episode even aired, but he also filmed them all in advance too! That’s why he looks older in this video: it’s the first time he’s been before the camera, with just three exceptions, since it started. The video, in fact, is mostly about how the series itself was made, which as it turns out was done without a camera crew, and in a residence of his too, outside of a recording studio and without soundproofing, so production had to pause if am ambulance drove by outside, and couldn’t happen at all if it was raining.

I have no doubt that these videos will be an important document in the coming years, not just as a guide to making video games, but also preserving the processes of current-day game development, and the words and thoughts off one of the foremost game designers of our age. BTW, note the split second of Rogue at 18:58!

The video has always had a feel like maybe Nintendo was helping out with it, but as it turns out, other than approving the use of their game footage, they weren’t greatly involved. The similar feel may be due to the use to HIKE, a.k.a. QBIST, a production company that Nintendo also uses for some of their videos.

To close this out, I’ll link a short bit from earlier on, at a mere 2 1/2 minutes, the video about Sakurai’s cat, Fukurashi. Meow, or perhaps, nya!

Video Games 101

We’ve linked the Youtube channel U Can Beat Video Games a number of times here previously. Their posting rate has fallen off a bit lately, likely because they’ve been tackling longer fare. It isn’t a simple matter to construct comprehensive video strategy guides and walkthroughs to lengthy JRPGs like Final Fantasy IV or Dragon Quest II.

While we wait for their next effort-intensive guide, we can watch episodes off Video Games 101, courtesy of Brigands and his other channel Let’s Play With Brigands. It’s been going for a couple of years now, and has tackled some formidable games, including The Adventures of Bayou Billy, Castlevania III and the infamous Battletoads. A particular one to check out is the bizarre Dr. Chaos (1h,7m), a game that’s half janky platforming, half haunted house exploration.

VG101 has a very different vibe from UCBVG. It doesn’t try to be nearly as comprehensive, mostly showing a typical playthough. It doesn’t provide maps or many secrets. But it does have some strategy callouts, mostly provided by their whimsical “TAs,” three side characters who wear silly costumes. The best of these is undoubtedly Fluff, a fairly realistic cat puppet, who lives in a lavish study and smokes a bubble pipe, and who provides interesting trivia about the games being played. It’s worth checking into if you have the time and inclination!

Fluff could hold down a channel all by themself!

My Talk on Mystery Dungeon for Roguelike Celebration

They haven’t broken the talks apart into individual videos yet, but in the meantime you can see my presentation overview of the 31, give or take a couple depending on precise definition, games in the Mystery Dungeon series here, queued up to the proper starting point in the 8+ hour video. The talk portion is about half an hour long (with a couple of interruptions due to the router I was on being a bit flaky).

Here’s an embed, but note that WordPress doesn’t seem to accept the link for embedding with the time code linking directly to my talk, so you’ll have to skip ahead yourself to 6:10:18 to get to it. Or you could watch some of the other very interesting talks on the way there! Either way!

Gamefinds: Dungeon of Hank

It won’t take you more than a few minutes to play Marlowe Dobbe‘s Dungeon of Hank, a short and free homebrew Game Boy game made with GB Studio, and it’s not challenging. But it does have a lot of cute cat pictures, and is funny, and that’s enough. It’d probably be enough even without the funny. Cat’s cute, just sayin’. The cat’s name, you should know, is Hank Stuart Bastard. It doesn’t sound like one that T.S. Elliot would bestow, but then, what the heck is a Rumpleteaser anyway?

Who indeed!

Dungeon of Hank (itch.io, free)

Sundry Sunday: Dumb Lawyer Quotes in Ace Attorney

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

Chessete‘s video series Dumb Lawyer Quotes in Ace Attorney is a series of dumb statements made by lawyers animated in the style of the Ace Attorney Games. Many of them are even stupider than the statement I just made. Here are just the first two.

The first (3 1/2 minutes):

The second (4 minutes):

The rest can be found in this playlist (9 videos)!

4 in 2010: Crazy Taxi’s Crazy Box Mode With Live Band

Few games have as iconic a soundtrack as does Crazy Taxi, which boasts a memorable collection of Offspring and Bad Religion tunes backing its trademark atrocities of municipal transportation.

Word is that Crazy Taxi plays on Youtube are susceptible to copyright strikes because of all those licensed tunes. One solution? Have a live band play what the game would have been playing! That’s what this player, and three supporting musicians, do in this submission for the next AGDQ (14 minutes). You could complain that you never get to hear the whole song, but you never could do that in Crazy Taxi anyway.

The mode shown off is called Crazy Box. It’s a collection of 16 driving challenges bundled with the home versions of Crazy Taxi, and they’re all pretty, well, crazy. The highlight, I think, is the last challenge, which is simply to do a lap around the arcade city as if it were a traditional driving game, although with traffic turned up, because it’s not Crazy Taxi without a ton of traffic.

Why is NES Ikari Warriors So Terrible?

Displaced Gamers’ series on investigating design and programming problems with NES games continues with a game that I’m surprised isn’t more notorious, Ikari Warriors. (21 minutes)

The biggest problem with Ikari Warriors is probably that it was ported by infamous anonymous NES developer Micronics, who even in their best efforts tended to produce buggy, janky messes. Some other games they made: Ghosts & Goblins, 1942, Tiger-Heli, Elevator Action, Super Pitfall and Athena. All the other problems have their root in that.

Ikari Warriors runs at 15 fps. One game frame for every four screen frames! It uses expensive multiply routines instead of look-up tables for movement! Everything is slow even accounting for that! And it tries to adapt the arcade game’s character rotation system, which supports 16 directions (even though there are only character graphics for 8 of them), and forces the player characters to rotate through them to move.

All of this overhead makes Ikari Warriors really slow and frustrating to play. Displaced Gamers not only diagnoses the problem, but even makes a game attempt to fix them. And they come to the conclusion that it has additional problems, beyond even these, and really needs a bit of a redesign to really make it playable. Ah well, it was a good attempt.

Roguelike Celebration 2024

Starting this Saturday at noon US Eastern time (9 AM Pacific, 5 PM Greenwich, 7 PM CEST) is Roguelike Celebration 2024! I’m presenting half an hour on the Mystery Dungeon games this year, at 3:15 PM Pacific/6:15 Eastern/11:15 Greenwich/1:15 AM Sunday CEST. Whew, the roundness of the Earth makes it difficult to express times!

It’s being held entirely online again this year, and offers a fun social space to explore that’s kind of like a MUD! Roguelike Celebration’s schedule is here, and you can get tickets for $30 for the whole event here. They usually set aside some free tickets for people who can’t afford the fee, although you might have to check around to find them.

Roguelike Celebration is nominally about roguelikes and procedural generation, but I think it’s interesting from a wide variety of gaming perspectives, and every year I find several talks that are incredibly interesting. Past years have offered presentations from people who worked on games as diverse as Kingdom of Loathing and Blaseball. Here are the talks being offered this year:

Saturday

  • Harry Solomons: Trampling on Ghosts: Hauntology and Permadeath
  • Cezar Capacle: Enhancing Narrative Through Randomness and Complications
  • Max Bottega: Keeping Art Direction interesting in a procedurally generated world
  • Stanley W. Baxton: Bringing Real-World Occultism into Your Games Without Accidentally Being Racist
  • Jeff Emtman and Martin Austwick: Neutrinowatch – the podcast that plays itself
  • Nic: Braided Narratives: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Linear Stories
  • Pandamander: “Out of Book,” The Psychology of Why Roguelikes Keep Us Playing
  • ?: Inverse Terrain Solver
  • Adrian: Probably Impossible – NecroDancer’s network code
  • John Harris: A Trip Through The Mystery Dungeons (psst: this is mine)
  • Marlowe Dobbe: A Swarm of Monsters is Hard To Build: Generating Visual Concepts for Enemies in Roguelikes
  • John Bond: Doors or no Doors: How Roguelike games take you places
  • Dan Norder: Chase, The BASIC Language Proto-Roguelike

Sunday

  • Yong Zhen Zhou: Who Controls the Controller? Thinking about physical player interactions outside a digital game
  • Tabea Iseli: Animal Crossing meets Roguelite Dungeon Crawler – The surprising genre mixture behind Grimoire Groves
  • Philomena Schwab: 100,000 wishlists in 3 months – Weird roguelikes are taking over the world
  • Kaysa Konopljak: Going legit with DotA: How to transform a thousand authors into four
  • Alexander Birke: Practical procedural world and story generation in Sea Of Rifts, a naval roguelike RPG
  • Robin Mendoza: The Use of Knowledge in the Labyrinth: The price mechanism as a storytelling device
  • Ollie: The Right Variety – Understanding and Visualising the Output Diversity of Your Generators
  • Eiríkr: Uxn – Permacomputing & Roguelikes
  • Brian Cronin: Black Box Sim for Roguelikes
  • Isaac Io Schankler: Orb Pondering Simulator LIVE!
  • ?: 7 Layer Dip, Multi-Layered Narratives For Roguelikes
  • Emily Halina: New Levels from a Single Example via Tree-based Reconstructive Partitioning (TRP)
  • Courtney: Cheating the System (By Design!) for Epic Combos
  • Joe: Magic in Game Design: (Mis)Directing the Player’s Attention
  • Tyler Coleman: Finding your 80/20 Rule with Proc-Gen
  • Nat: Procedurality and the Primes